On 12/10/06, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
Let's paraphrase into parable language:
"The explicit goal of the project is to acquire a collection of apples. Therefore, every time someone gives us an orange, this is harmful to our project."
Except that we have people who argue that the project is really to
acquire a collection of fruit, and see no reason to acquire apples because "we already have the oranges, and they taste better anyway".
There is currently very little community acknowledgement or support for any largescale effort for people to go take and donate free images to the project.
I'm all for changing that, but I have zero bandwidth to try to drive such a thing right now.
I have spent several dozens of hours taking photos, making graphics, and working with some museums trying to get specific images created or get permission to come take specific images (the latter mostly frustratingly not succeeding), when I had more time available to help. I've contacted dozens of companies trying to get them to free-release images, mostly unsuccessfully.
Pictures aren't just worth a thousand words; you can write those thousand words in the time it takes to accomplish getting the picture done, on the average.
A number of people on the fair use policy pages have explicitly declared
that they consider the free content goal to be secondary at most. I suppose it's fortunate that they haven't started lifting text from other websites en masse...
Wikipedia stripped of all the fair use images at the moment would suck rather badly.
Making Wikipedia worse, in order to try and convince people to put more time in and eventually make it better, seems like a bad tradeoff to me.