On Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:16:18 +0100, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 10:09 AM, cohesion cohesion@sleepyhead.org wrote:
Thousands of bad images get uploaded every week, there is simply no way to give each one 20 minutes of editor time to review.
The flaw in this reasoning is that it was not a recently uploaded image - it's been on the site for almost two years.
Well two years ago the Non-free (then title "fair use") policy stated (among other things):
"(...)For each article for which fair use is claimed, the name of the article and a "fair use rationale" as explained in Wikipedia:Image description page. The rationale must be presented in a manner that can be clearly understood and which is relevant to the article in question." - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Non-free_content_criteria&oldid=43474222
And yes it was official policy at that point. One might argue that it was not very well known (or enforced) back then, but requieiring a link to the article is hardly some recent retroactive addition, it's been in there for a very long time (see below).
This one was deleted because it claimed to be fair use, but didn't link to any article. That may seem extreme, but when we are dealing with thousands of images the work really has to rely on the uploader.
Linking to the article has only recently been required. Imposing new rules and then expecting someone who uploaded an image 2 years ago to still be on the site to make that change is rather ludicrous.
Depends on your definition of recently. True it's only been "hard" policy for a couple of years, but even the earliest precursor to the current policy I know off http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Image_description_page&oldid=1431693 (4 September 2003), states:
"Remember there is no "general rule" about fair use, each "fair use" must be explained and a rationale must be established for that specific use (i.e. every page that uses the image will have a distinct rationale for using the image on that page even though fair use is claimed on the image page)."
While it doesn't explicitly state that each article name must be typed out it's hard to have a distinct rationale for each use without mentioning wich use is wich. Also later versions (2004 an on) also include a link to the article in all the example rationales given.
Ok so it wasn't tagged as official policy at the time, but then again neither contemporary versions of things like WP:NOR http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:No_original_research&oldid=5884338 or WP:NPOV http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&oldid=1471194...