Fastfission wrote:
On 11/29/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Personal file server ?
You seem to be saying that the images were not used in articles for quite some time, were labeled as being used without a license (fair use), but because they were images personally important to you, they should be kept on Wikipedia servers forever. To me, that sounds like a "personal file server" -- a place to keep images for yourself, with no substantive relation to the Wikipedia project.
A long time ago (3 and a half years ago perhaps ?), I started a wikiproject called the ecoregions, both in english and french. The idea was to describe what some authors have been calling ecoregions, ie, regions ecologically homogeneous, as opposed to "regions" defined by political borders. In starting that project, I was aware it would go very very slowly. There are more than 800 classicaly defined ecoregions on Earth. On the french wikipedia, at that time, I was the only one with remotedly a biology/ecology/geology/pedology background, so it was unlikely the project could interest anyone. While I was quite involved in it in english, we were only 3-4 editors taking care of it. In particular Tom Radulovitch. Still, over the years, a few ecoregions were drafted, some in french, others in english.
The project was inspired by a project started by the WWF, with funding by the National Geographic, with a decent presence on the net and particular a real neat GIS. I contacted the National Geographic two years ago now, for a grant. It unfortunately did not succeeded.
I thought that if I could get a grant for this, I would stop working and take care of this full time, because for me, it made more sense than the real life job I was doing.
On the world map, work has been quite extensively done for some continents, or rather political areas. In particular Canada and Europe, and of course, quite a bit in the USA as well. Now, other areas are practically undone. And amongst those, Africa. I had the opportunity to go several time in Africa in the past years, and other times my husband as well. I, as an agronom and soil scientist, he, as a geologist and mineralogist, were typically people who had great opportunities to bring back real neat pictures of these areas, in particular areas which are not reachable unless you accept to sleep on the rocks several nights in a row.
When I decided to take care of that project, I had a long long long time perspective. Not thinking in days or weeks as many contributors, nor in months; but rather in years. So, little by little, I built up a frame for that project, and on the 3 computers I have owned since I started participating, I stored images. I put some on Wikipedia. The ecoregion project was definitly in substantive relation to the Wikipedia project and I would find a bit hurting that my storing a few images in the perspective of some of the articles I would write later would be interpretated as "personal storing" area.
As it happened, I was diverted from my original project, and chose instead to offer much of my free time to the community good.
These weeks, I sometimes regret it. I must confess it. In the past few weeks, I have spent possibly 15 hours taking care of trying to remove mails from the english mailing list and english help desk per request of a person. I have found it deeply UN-satisfying experience.
And I am now facing the question : is it really more worth to the project that I answer jerks on OTRS, for the good of the community, while I get no satisfaction of this activity, while it brings me so appreciation from my peers and while it will *never* help me find a job again in the future ?
Or is it best for the project that I go back taking care of the ecoregions, and maybe at least get some academic recognition for my work as well as the satisfaction of seeing the project grow ?
My mistake might be to have a long-term vision of Wikipedia. In keeping these images under my user name, I go on believing that one day, I will go back to doing something "constructive" as an editor, rather than loosing my time on OTRS and other administrative tasks.
For me, deleting these images is a bit like abandonning the idea of that project.
Again, maybe you may not really realised, but when I uploaded these images, Commons did not existed. So, it was perfectly understandable that an editor with a bunch of images that could be useful for the encyclopedia would upload them where it was possible to upload them.
The images in question, I thought, were tagged as "fair use". Which would not be allowed on Commons anyway. Nobody is deleting PD images which are unused, to my knowledge. The entire discussion is about the deletion of images labeled as "fair use" which are unused. If that's *not* what you are talking about then I suppose I (and others) have been confused about what you are complaining about from the beginning.
Maybe there is a language barrier here, because I'm not quite following you.
FF
I already explained the "fair use" issue around these images. What I wrote above is an attempt to explain why these images are not used. Possibly, for the topics which interest you, Wikipedia is roughly done. For the topic which interest me, Wikipedia is still in infancy. It is still a work ongoing :-)
In case you wonder, here is a link to one biome page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_and_xeric_shrublands
Here is an example of one : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Deccan_dry_evergreen_forests
No pictures are available...
Still a lot to do :-)
Ant