On 7/12/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/10/07, WikipediaEditor Durin wikidurin@gmail.com wrote:
<snip/> Please help us.
Respectfully, -Durin
Consider that you may have put yourself (and the project) in a "helpless" position toward fair use abuse when you resigned as an admin. I'd love to help in that area too but I doubt I could "gain the community's trust" as they say.
Whether I am an administrator or not has absolutely no bearing on this. One (one) of the reasons I resigned as an administrator was the constant, unending threats leveled against me to have my adminship removed. I wanted to remove that tool from the people who continually fight against attempting to bring the project into compliance with our fair use policies.
Bottom line here; the Foundation has mandated that we come into compliance by Spring of '08. I'm telling you this is flat our impossible under the current situation where little in the way of clear demarcation has been given.
To give an example, in the Foundation resolution, it clearly shows that replaceable fair use images of living people should be deleted (item #3 on the resolution). We've got people who fight against this anyway, but at least with the resolution we have a bright line defense that we can cite; the person is alive, thus it's replaceable. Point to the resolution, end of debate. This very thing is happening with a user right now on Wikipedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mosquera). With the resolution, there's no question this fellow is in the wrong.
With broad ranges of other images, we are left almost defenseless against unending debate about why x,y,z image should be allowed. As an example, observe the featured article request for Steven Colbert. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Stephen_C...) The article has a number of fair use images which contributed little or nothing more than illustrating a given show that Steven Colbert was on. Compare against the "Truthiness" image located near the bottom of the article, which does directly contribute to the inline text. The images in use here are very much decorative. Despite this, we have people arguing against their removal or modification of the text such that the text needs the image to complete itself. Observe in the FA request that 17Drew says "Since when does a copyrighted image have to illustrate a specific scene?" I.e., decorative is ok. This is not an inexperienced user; he's been here a year, with thousands upon thousand of edits, 10k in the mainspace alone, and an administrator.
The point here is there is virtually nothing to definitively point to among policy and resolutions to say that decorative use or use to merely identify something is wrong. Our *general* attitude on en.wikipedia is that we tolerate fair use when that image is specifically of the thing the article is the subject of, for example a book cover is acceptable for an article on that book. But, every time..and I mean every time... we discuss usage beyond this context, we run into endless debates.
We've got people endlessly arguing over the meaning of "minimal" in item #3 of the resolution. In one debate, we had people actively arguing that the use of 133 fair use images on the article constituted minimal use, because in each case one image was used to identify a single subject, therefore it was in essence 1 image per use, not 133. I kid you not.
We've got people endlessly arguing over the term "significance" from our non-free content criteria item #8, with a very broad range of interpretations on what that means. There's plenty of people that feel pure identification is "significant".
How many times do we have to debate these issues? How much energy do we have to exert? How often do we have to end up in RfCs, mediations and RfRs (all of these have happened, some of them multiple times) over this issue?
This has to stop. We need a bright line defense, a clear line of delineation to end this nightmare. If the Foundation expects en.wikipedia to come into compliance by Spring of '08 it must take action to give us the tools necessary to accomplish this. We're working on 200,000 images used in tens of thousands of ways. We have virtually no direction, no bright line to point people to and say "This is policy. This is resolution. Period."
We need a considerably clearer delineation and we need it now.
-Durin