On 9/2/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Regression? This is the status quo, as far as I can see.
I just wanted to expand on this somewhat pissy little ending line.
I think this will continue to be the status quo until we have some more elaboration about what exactly our fair use policy is supposed to facilitate.
There are a few tugging interests and I'm not ever really sure which of them are more important than the others. One is illustrating the encyclopedia (and I mean "illustrating" in a broad sense -- quotations are fair use too). One is protecting Wikipedia's own liability. One is protecting the hypothetical liability of hypothetical re-users.
At the moment our policies don't really differentiate between these interests or encourage people to even be aware of them and how they sometimes conflict with one another. I think there are ways in which the policies could be made which would try to balance these out a bit, but at the moment I'm honestly not always sure what the priorities are supposed to be. I have some vague notions but usually feel like I'm blue-skying it, making up most of it as I go along based on somewhat-related comments by Jimbo.
In my view of it, if we want our policy to be centered around re-users, then we need to define a target re-user, and work backwards from there. But if the bar we set there is significantly higher than Wikipedia's own situation, then we're going to need a lot of very clear guidelines (probably from on-high) because it is going to lead to a lot of irritated users.
If we are only really caring about our own rear, then our fair use policy becomes an easy loophole for the non-commercial/educational-use-only/with-permissions images.
FF