[Wikipedia-l] please support offsite imags

[The Cunctator]

On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 19:47, Hunter Peress wrote:
> Over these last few months, it has been frustrating when GFDL 
> righteous wikipedians nix each others images because of fear of
> copyright violation. This respect for the GFDL which is extremely
> vigorous, but I feel it is also very harmful to wikipedia.
> 
What you don't seem to understand is that adherence to the GFDL is
intrinsic to the existence of Wikipedia. To be more specific, the
principles of Wikipedia aren't tied to the GFDL per se, but to the idea
of a permanently free resource defended by copyright, rather than
threatened by it. 

It is not fear of copyright violation that propels us to shun using
unprotected (in the Wikipedia sense) resources, but the principled stand
that Wikipedia will be freely usable, undegraded, by all--and that
includes not just people who go to wikipedia.org to view entries, but to
people who may have some idea about how to reuse or refactor the
content, and to the future generations of people who will benefit from
this resource.

It is this long view that puts into relief the unnecessary folly of
using external images.

Another way to put it: Wikipedia is an experiment, with the premise that
a world-class resource can be created without relying on proprietary
resources and methods. Relying on external, copyrighted images signals a
failure of that experiment.