Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
Uh... if it just says "these images have been tagged GFDL/PD/whatever, do you want to transfer them to the Commons?" I would have to say no. Transferring images is a good opportunity to re-examine the licenses and sources provided for many images on local projects, which are often quite suspect! Transferrers should be quite stringent in requiring a source (that if online, is actually *checked*) and a license justification - for non "(PD/GFDL/whatever)-self" items. For self created items, some common sense is needed... low res items should generally be treated with a great deal of suspicion.
I agree very strongly with Brianna on this. Commons should be extremely hardcore about sourcing and license checking... this is a great point in the overall workflow to do a rigorous second check on anything being brought from individual projects.
As someone also working on de.wikipedia, which is quite strict on license issues itself, I totally agree. The decision about an image being suitable for the commons has to be made on a case-by-case basis.
However, in the light of hundreds of thousands (didn't count them all) of suitable images "trapped" on local wikipedias, I merely strive to provide a means to easily assess the states of images, then take appropriate action. The tool in question can be used to identify images without suitable information for the given wikipedia, something which does not involve commons at all.
On the other hand, an image tagged with "{{GFDL-self}}", a text like "made this myself", and a good-but-non-professionally looking image - who would go back to the user and say "Well, I want to upload this on commons, but you have convince me you took this yourself first!"? At most, one would check for consumer-type camera EXIF data, and then copy it to commons in good faith, right?
Try [1] (will take a minute or so to load fully), and you will see that there are some cases clearly *not* destined for the commons, some doubtful cases, and some that are (maybe with a little additional checking) clearly suited to be copied to the commons.
With the demands for making commons the default upload site, the tendency is clear: put all multimedia content that is suitable for commons there, so all wikimedia projects (and others) can benefit from them. I merely try to ease that effort.
Magnus
[1] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/pushforcommons.php?language=en&max=20