Erik Moeller wrote:
On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that important.
Fair use is an extremely important exemption to copyright law. There are good reasons to prohibit it e.g. in the User: space, and to require users to upload their own works as free content. But there is no single good reason why a photo that is important to Wikipedia's history, and that cannot easily be obtained as free content, wouldn't qualify as fair use in the Wikipedia: namespace.
It's dogmatic thinking about these issues that is dangerous. But "quietly ignoring" doesn't solve the problem -- it only means that sooner or later it will come up again, either in this case or in another similar one. Not quietly ignoring it, but talking about it, to me demonstrates a greater sense of responsibility and empathy.
With that said: I think that our memorial page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADeceased_Wikipedians demonstrates that there are a lot of people who do care about how we preserve the memory of Wikipedians who have passed on. Caring about knowledge, ultimately, is always caring about people. Because knowledge is nothing without the human beings who collect, derive, and use it -- and who, in doing so, always build upon the works of the generations who came before them. To honor the members of our own community therefore is a natural expression of the love of knowledge, and the love of humanity.
I share these sentiments. Sometimes obeying the rules as they are written simply does not make sense. The text of the law may be in black and white, but it should not be read so as to prop up the illusion of certainty.
It's difficult to estimate how many deceased Wikipedians there really are, but I suspect there are far more than are represented on the cited page. We profit a lot from the imminently dying Wikipedians, the ones with long degenerative and terminal illnesses who at some point quietly stop editing for no apparent reason. Perhaps they are undergoing gruelling courses of chemotherapy or feeling the ravages of AIDS. To complain publicly would be a blow to their pride. Their health will not allow them a "real job". Maybe, for a while, they have one good hour each day and they want to feel useful rather than to spend that hour watching yet another mindless rerun on TV. So they edit a Wiki, and for doing that the reward is the feeling that they have done something useful. Conveniently, I just read this morning in Kenzaburo Oe's novel "Somersault": "When a person thinks about death or is actually facing death,if he's convinced that his life and death are fine the way they are, isn't he saved?"
When there are those for whom editing a Wiki is such a profoundly personal act, aren't we being a little too disrespectful when we start whining about the copyright minutiae that they overlooked when they were editing.
Ec