On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson
<oskarsigvardsson(a)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