Rob wrote:
On 7/31/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article where one of my photos has been replaced by a nonfree image. On the contrary, I see my pics showing up unexpectedly in additional articles. That's not to say replacement doesn't happen, no mechanism to notify if it did, but when I spot-check, I don't see anything going on. So where exactly is all this replacement with nonfree happening?
Unfortunately this is common on some articles, especially the pop culture stuff. In some articles the lead pic is different every week with fans switching it out for their new favorite, in others I've seen clear public domain pics replaced with fuzzy screenshots.
I suppose if I were a more dutiful Wikipedian, I'd go take pictures of all the celebrities passing through Vegas, but truthfully, vegetables still seem more interesting! :-)
In a way, what we want is some mechanism for the very existence of a free picture to somehow prevent uploads of nonfree equivalents. Although we can't necessarily stop the editing, we could perhaps have a bot that knows which free pictures go with which articles (for instance, a template in the image page), then auto-reverts replaces of free with nonfree, and marks nonfree for deletion. The process needs to run faster than human editing in any case.
Stan