Just thinking about it, how long does it take to track down a photo of a celebrity on Flickr and ask the photographer for him to relicence one or two images under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA licences on Flickr ? I'd imagine, about the same amount of time it takes to upload a non free image, write a fair use rationale and add all the necessary information. There's no benefit in taking a short cut and sticking up a random photo from Google Image search when the same amount of time and effort could see a good quality free image nobody will annoy you about ever again. Ditto for sending an e-mail to a publicist or publishing house.
I've also found lots of free images on other Wikipedias, if something doesn't have an image, check the interwiki links and see if the image you want is on Commons or is free on another project. That's how we got our Pavarotti image.
On 24/09/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/09/2007, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
William Pietri wrote
That's an intriguing argument. It's not hard to find almost any bit of information on Wikipedia, so by that reasoning we wouldn't be hurting anybody by shutting down entirely. All Wikipedia does is make existing information better available.
That's an intriguing fallacy. Actually WP is constantly adding
information that is not at all easy to find, unless you already know where to look, and how to formulate your query. For example, it comes out of a book. On the other hand, it genuinely is easy to find images (which are not generally used to add information to articles, by the way, as maps and diagrams and graphs would) online, in the kinds of cases under discussion.
Yes. If it wasn't easy to find images not under a free content licence, we wouldn't have this problem.
People have no problem finding images of people; there is no problem for Wikipedia to solve by expressly permitting nonfree images.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l