On 12/6/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I should have said, the current attitude of a significant number of active admins is that we accept nothing but free images. See for example some of the arguments at [[Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fair_use]]. See also [[Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Chowbok]], and especially the outside view by Jimbo Wales.
As someone who participated in that RfC, I have no idea how you got the idea that anyone there was advocating the removal of all unfree images--and the same goes for the recent discussion on the pages of the Wikproject talk page. The recent debates at both locations are specifically about replaceable fair use images--images of subjects for which a free image could reasonably be created. We do accept fair use images of dead people, historic events, copyrighted fictional characters, and a number of other subjects, and a move to change that at this moment would find very little traction. On that specific RfC, even Jimbo (who has advocated a more restrictive fair use policy in the past) isn't arguing for anything more than that.
(Most of these arguments are nominally about fair-use images, but they're being interpreted to apply to other kinds of nonfree content, such as promotional photos.)
In general, people on those pages are using the term "fair use" to mean "stuff covered by Wikipedia's fair use policy", some of which would be best described as by different legal terms. Thus, "replaceable fair use" actually means "replaceable unfree images". (See why we need to rename our policy?) From the perspective of the immediate legal concerns of Wikipedia, the various types of unfree images are different; from the perspective of the project's goals with regard to free content (which is the basis of the policy being discussed on those pages) they are the same (i.e. not fully reusable).