Copyright laws are complicated; there are too many possible cases for it to be possible to write a short and simple text for new users that would cover all cases; furthermore, people typically have no intuition about how copyright law works, and do not read our documentation anyway (one reason for that might be that it is not always trivial to find).
I do not think that the above can be fixed easily. What could do on the short term, however, would be altering the "Image deletion" template to inform people that it is not necessarily the end of the world if an image of their is questioned. Some of my images get to Deletion Request from time to time, and I do not find this insulting ; there are so many image, so many problems, etc. that it is inevitable that some images get requested for deletion, or indeed deleted. The points to underline would be: - it is the *image* that is questioned, not the user - the point of the request is for the image to have its documentation fixed - corollary: since there is no shame to have a few images deleted from time to time, people should not hysterically defend images which constitute copyright problems. I mean they should feel that it is not necessary to go ballistic about it. - maybe something should be done to encourage multilingual support further and possibly bring people on the IRC or some instant messaging where they can receive personal attention.
-- Rama
On 07/12/2008, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
Sounds workable in theory, can it be carried out in practice?
From: Platonides Platonides@gmail.com To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 5:10:26 PM Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish newcomers can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other way around. Even though this would require software development, this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community on Commons.
So, what about this: *User uploads from Swedish wikipedia using Special:GlobalUpload (only for SUL accounts). *The image is uploaded on commons, where it gets an additional tag with 'uploaded from Swedish wikipedia'. *Blocked status of both local and commons is taken into account. *The upload log is created on both commons and wikipedia. *Once a wrong image is uploaded, there's a race condition between commons ans Swedish admins to detect it. As commons get much more images, they're likely to lose it. *Image can be deleted both by commons admins and local sysops. Local sysops can't delete it if it's older than a month (or another reasonable time). *Upload policies are still those of commons. *Commons templates are shown at wikipedia on the local language if available (interesting on its own, but hard). *Talk page links on uploader should point to Swedish talk (or give links to both talks).
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