[WikiEN-l] Why are images deleted in such a hurry?

[Sherool]

On Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:16:18 +0100, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 10:09 AM, cohesion <cohesion at sleepyhead.org>  
> wrote:
>> Thousands of bad images get  uploaded every week, there is simply
>>  no way to give each one 20 minutes of editor time to review.
>
> The flaw in this reasoning is that it was not a recently uploaded
> image - it's been on the site for almost two  years.

Well two years ago the Non-free (then title "fair use") policy stated  
(among other things):

"(...)For each article for which fair use is claimed, the name of the  
article and a "fair use rationale" as explained in Wikipedia:Image  
description page. The rationale must be presented in a manner that can be  
clearly understood and which is relevant to the article in question."
  -  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Non-free_content_criteria&oldid=43474222>

And yes it was official policy at that point. One might argue that it was  
not very well known (or enforced) back then, but requieiring a link to the  
article is hardly some recent retroactive addition, it's been in there for  
a very long time (see below).

>> This one was deleted because it claimed to be fair use, but didn't link
>>  to any article. That may seem extreme, but when we are dealing with
>>  thousands of images the work really has to rely on the uploader.
>
> Linking to the article has only recently been required.  Imposing new
> rules and then expecting someone who uploaded an image 2 years ago to
> still be on the site to make that change is rather ludicrous.

Depends on your definition of recently. True it's only been "hard" policy  
for a couple of years, but even the earliest precursor to the current  
policy I know off  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Image_description_page&oldid=1431693>  
(4 September 2003), states:

"Remember there is no "general rule" about fair use, each "fair use" must  
be explained and a rationale must be established for that specific use  
(i.e. every page that uses the image will have a distinct rationale for  
using the image on that page even though fair use is claimed on the image  
page)."

While it doesn't explicitly state that each article name must be typed out  
it's hard to have a distinct rationale for each use without mentioning  
wich use is wich. Also later versions (2004 an on) also include a link to  
the article in all the example rationales given.

Ok so it wasn't tagged as official policy at the time, but then again  
neither contemporary versions of things like  WP:NOR  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:No_original_research&oldid=5884338>  
or WP:NPOV  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&oldid=1471194>...

-- 
[[:en:User:Sherool]]