On 7/12/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
You could learn to pick your battles a little better. When a militant uses a bot to flag one of my old uploads for deletion in seven days, because my fair use rationale isn't at least 3,000 words long and written in grammatically elegant Latin or whatever the goalpost happens to be that day, I lose interest in helping out. I've fixed up thousands of fair-use images in the past, I don't need to be lectured about the concept by some noob.
This is so true. I agree with virtually everything Durin has said, and I've wasted a lot of my life arguing with people who just don't get our non-free content policies, but the Taylorised hordes (albeit small ones compared to the hordes of crazed editors who insist images which only identify something are perfectly fine) of taggers who insist that your rationale is insufficient are particularly annoying.
My understanding of rationales has always been that they are meant to show that the editor in question has understood our policies concerning non-free content and is capable of applying them. Rationales are now used more for the sake of themselves than anything else, though - I understand a lot of editors see them as just another hoop to jump through. If you ask me, as Kirill said, a fair use rationale is quite ridiculously irrelevant to the free encyclopaedia. It's an admirable attempt to get our policies enforced, but if you ask me, it's not working.
Johnleemk