On Nov 6, 2007 12:46 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/11/2007, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/11/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Because of some rather legalistic interpretations of the policy, the template you applied to the image which has *all appearances of a rationale* and which probably says exactly what you would say for a rationale if you spent a long time thinking about it .... isn't actually considered a rationale.
I sometimes wonder if this is an elaborate trick to put people off using non-free images, simply by making it such a hassle that it's not worth their time...
There's probably a bit of that. The problem is that we have a firehose of nonfree stuff being uploaded under the hitherto-unknown "I wanna!" clause of US fair use law. So cleaning it up is getting a bit harsher. I'm a big fan of fair use when encyclopedically useful (and we could get away with *FAR* more than we do), but the floods of crap and the whinier flooders are really quite, um, annoying.
David really hit on the primary reason here: It's the firehose of "I wanna!"s.
It's a lot easier for people to clean up rubbish if they can avoid waisting their lives with never ending arguments by relying on simple bright line bureaucratic rules. "Oh you used blue ink. The form clearly says black ink. I'm going to rip this up and you're going to have to start over".
Invested parties don't want to lose the tools that make their lives easier. ... and if you don't stand back and look at the bigger picture it doesn't sound too unreasonable. And then there is the fear... "what if this requirement is the only thing holding back a tidal wave?!".
I'd actually feel better if Andrew's suspicion were true, at least that would imply that someone thought through the effects. I don't think thats the case.
The process has been minting a whole generation of highly invested '"I wanna" attornies' who are now actively working to change the English Wikipedia project policy to permit anything they can get away with ('free' as in we haven't been caught yet). :(
Of course, this is also relevant to commons... both in terms of the risks of following in English's footsteps, and that fact that we catch no small amount of fallout from their actions.