Well, maybe you are a very good example of the mentality of people who should stay out of Commons. That mixture of - "I don't understand why Commons admins apply different laws for different countries ! They should just ignore them all !" - "I don't understand something, so NEITHER SHOULD YOU" - "I don't understand what the law in France and Germany limits our uploads so much, can't Commons admins change them ?"
I do understand the difficulties of being a newcomer on Commons. But I think that some people do not understand the difficulties of being an admin on Commons. Commons admins are at least as useful as the clueless newcomers who upload copyvios could possibly become, so why should they be treated like servants? I have spent hours interacting with a stroke patient about copyright law, have you?
Commons has to respect the law of the USA (where the servers are), the law of the country in which the images are uploaded, and the law of the country where they were made. I have photographed swastikas in Switzerland and uploaded them without breaking any law.
Commons, just like Wikipedia, is a private projet on which contribution is a privilege. Your point about "a service they don't want and didn't ask for" could apply just as much to the NPOV policy on Wikipedia, so I suggest you keep it for British ISPs.
Commons is first and foremost a repository of Free media. If that makes it useless for you, too bad but so be it.
Debatable and a half indeed. That is typically what produces outputs which look incoherent from the outside.
Commons admins are more than willing to buy the magic remedy that will make everybody understand what we do. But I am not convinced that this "hollier than thou" attitude towards admins is said magic remedy.
-- Rama
On 09/12/2008, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/12/8 Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com:
Another thing that might be worth looking into is whether the Stanton Grant [1] is only for Wikipedia (as is stated in the press release) or whether Commons enters into that overhaul. Because if it does, we might have a chance to make Commons the cool project it deserves to be.
The focus of the Stanton project is Wikipedia, but due to the fact that uploading media to Commons is an integral part of editing a Wikipedia article, we hope that we can at least name some of the key challenges and make some improvements in that area as part of the project. We're also working on a separate grant proposal focused specifically on building an optimized workflow for media uploads.
I am noting with some interest the idea to use local projects essentially as a first contact point for all media. My primary concern about such an approach would be the risk of diluting an already difficult commitment to free content. That said, I don't want to deny the problems that Lars pointed out, and I think serious technical and social efforts will be required to address them, one way or another. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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