On 7/20/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
John Lee wrote:
What I think concerns people like Durin and definitely myself is that
our
culture is definitely becoming more pro-non-free - i.e. "What's wrong
with
non-free content?" Four years ago, I think, more editors understood what
it
meant to be a free encyclopaedia.
Really? Not my impression. Remember that there had to be a big push several years ago just to differentiate between free and nonfree images, there being a significant percentage of images that were used, but had no identifying information whatsoever, and many of those added by "respected editors". Those editors then later fumed and expostulated when they were asked for sources and licenses.
Yeah, guess I should have said two or three years ago instead then. My impression then was that even if not everyone appreciated the need to tag images appropriately (I still think the same holds true; people are now fetishising rationales without understanding why they are necessary), at least our usage of non-free content was not as blatant and flagrant as it is today - I feel the proportion of fair use images I saw that were generally justified was more then than it is today. I fully recognise that my impressions are hardly scientific. ;-)
The main thing I see over time is that as the editor base grows, there
are more and more individuals who are far out on all ends of the ideological spectra, and by virtue of being outliers, they get more than their usual share of attention. My usual experience with random articles I haven't looked at in a long time is to be pleasantly surprised that they have free illustrations now, when they were unillustrated or depending on fair use before.
Yeah, I get that a lot too. But I see a lot of fetishisation about our image licensing processes without understanding what they are for, which I think is bad, considering my impression that most of us pushing for better usage of these processes at least understood them, back in the day.
Johnleemk