On 9/14/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
It is still perfectly reasonable for a person to naturally want to show an image of themselves or other Wikipedias at say a WikiMeet without having to release those images under a license that would allow for extensive reuse. Out of respect to users, who contribute without pay and just for the fun of it, we have always been a bit lax on what users do with their user pages.
It's completely reasonable, but it's not necessarily a smart idea nor one our licensing scheme accomodates for. As it is, even User pages are included in our GFDL licensing. They can be reused accordingly and often are. I think we should either formally carve out a specialized niche for them as something distinct from the article namespace or not. Having them be an unspecified informal zone seems like bad policy for me, because it encourages an idea about "personal space" which is not currently covered by any of our official or legal policies.
I wholly support any approach that would keep User pages either out of the GFDL or out of our database ports, to be honest, though I'm not completely aware of what that would entail in terms of licensing requirements or technical ones.
Forbidding such images for no practical reason smacks of fascism to me. So once the technical issue I mentioned is fixed, I see no valid reason for us to not be more permissive on image licensing in the user namespace (within the limits of WP:NOT a personal web page provider)
Well I assure you there is no attempt at fascism here and I'm not quite sure I see the correlation with what I've asked and the political systems of Mussolini, Franco, or Hitler, except for the whole making the trains run on time bit, which I guess I'm somewhat inclined towards in my mannerisms. ;-)
FF