On 24/09/2007, Nick heligolandwp@googlemail.com wrote:
We've not banned anybody for contributing images to Wikipedia, be they freely licence or copyrighted and used under our fair use provisions, and I don't think we've blocked any users for uploading fair use material roughly in accordance with policy (copyright, source, rationale etc). People who are getting blocked are people who are claiming copyright on work that is not theirs, and we're not talking about the misguided souls who think because they've made a screenshot, they own the copyright, we're talking about people who continually claim ownership of stuff they're finding on the internet in a deliberate attempt to circumvent fair use and deletion policies.
I don't know, the image stuff is a total balls-up IMO. As an example I found an image of a Skylon tower on the internet. The image was *not* free, but I contacted the guy that owned copyright and he relicensed it, but to non commercial only. I had no choice, that was what he chose.
So I uploaded it on wikimedia.
An admin guy removed it on the grounds that it was not allowed to be sold commercially. The guy that did it also accused me of lying about having gone to the trouble of relicensing it; even when I had included the email permitting its use in the text when I uploaded it as well.
I have mixed feelings to say the least about deletions on the grounds of being non commercial, the article was left without any images at all, and there was and is no free replacement anywhere (in the end I uploaded a god-awful sketch I made). It would be much better just to strip out the non commercial images when appropriate.
Did anyone gain from the deletion? No; the wikipedia site itself lost an image, and we had a legitimate license to use it for non commercial reasons.
And the upload pages UI is a complete disaster, even when I'm uploading stuff that's completely legitimate half the time it gets put up for deletion on purely bureaucratic reasons; it's not at all obvious (or it wasn't I haven't uploaded recently) what the heck you were supposed to do?
All in all, I'm not surprised we don't have more pictures, the system is so very bad in loads of ways, unless the image is public domain, there's almost no chance in practice that you can use it.
Nick