Maury Markowitz wrote:
More recently I went back to the article and found all
the images
deleted. The deleter added a note, but as far as I can tell did so
AFTER deleting them ( I can't get history on the image itself, of
course).. He stated I should have tagged them differently. Yes, well,
thanks for that, maybe someone should have told me that in the month
between me uploading them and them being deleted so I could have
actually DONE that.
As the person who deleted these images, I'll explain that I did so based
on the policy that newer images tagged with the {{copyrighted}} template
(i.e., Wikipedia-only permission) should be deleted on sight. The reason
I added the note to the image talk page after deleting is because I did
not even discover it had a talk page until Maury complained about the
deletion (use of talk pages for images is exceptionally rare). I am
sorry that I missed that fact, as I would not have deleted the images
based on the information there.
The template involved is the one that Maury used himself, and it warned
about this potential deletion at the time that he used it. Arguments
against images of this kind have been brought up for quite some time,
and various announcements have been made and advertised in many places
to discourage their use. I think it's worth noting that the talk page
for the template has this note from Jimbo: "We should keep this message
around, so that people will use it. This will ensure that we can find
these images and promptly delete them." This statement was written on 18
Feb *2004*.
What's particularily baffling is that the deleter
suggested I simply
re-tag them to PermissionAndFairUse. This strikes me as absolutely
rediculous. First of all, why are these OK and not ones used with
permission?
I was trying to be helpful and provide some information that would allow
Maury to restore the images, which I hope he still has access to. So
long as we allow fair use images (not everyone agrees that we should),
the fact that we have permission bolsters our claim to fair use. Thus
even when the permission by itself is too limited for our needs, it is
very useful to note that we have permission.
And if these are OK, why didn't it say so in the
warning on the
Permission tag?
As has been noted, many people who really want some particular image on
Wikipedia are quick to claim fair use when they really don't have a
basis for it. So I think this is not done in the interests of not
advertising this dubious escape hatch too widely.
--Michael Snow