Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
I missed part of the discussion, but PD-XYZ tags should only be used if XYZ is the author. We don't want any PD-NARA disasters again.
Just a little remark: I lately had discussions with content providers who could perhaps release their content under a free licence, and I needed statistics on Commons. Templates and categories are really helpful there, because one can extract statistics from them through SQL queries.
For instance, after some SQL work, I was able to count the ratio of articles on astronautics on Wikipedia in French that have PD-USGov illustrations.
In contrast, textual explanations and other things that should be reviewed by a human do not help.