G'day Mike,
I was going to enrich Wikipedia with a whole bunch of my images, but quite frankly, i dont want someone getting rich off my work. As such, I was intending to add creative commons no commercial use tags.
Then I come across this note from you:
"All images which are for non-commercial only use and by permission only
are not acceptable for Wikipedia and _will be deleted_. We have tolerated them for some time..."
Well fear not; you wont have to tolerate any of my images.
I'm going to have to re-evaluate contributing to wikipedia if its based on providing source material for commercial companies.
That's *not* what it's based on. Please take more care before jumping to conclusions in the future; that's a real good way to twist an ankle or something. See below.
Feel free to explain WHY you have this policy; but I have to say your
Very well, then. I shall! Well, I'll have a bash at it, anyway; IANAL.
It's rather simple, but took me quite a while to work out as well. All Wikipedia content is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). Now, the GFDL is a hellish and byzantine pile of legalistic nonsense that enjoys rather a lot of support amongst the geek community, such as those who form the core of Wikipedia's contributors.
The GFDL, essentially, means the following: a) GFDL-licenced works may be reused by anyone, for any purpose (even commercial) b) Reusers must allow that portion of their work that relies on your image (I think) to be reused similarly. c) They must set aside fifteen gazillobytes of space to store the GFDL text.
Anything under an explicitly different licence (e.g. Creative Commons, or even under Public Domain) is actually /multi-licenced/, meaning that reusers can pick and choose what licence they want to follow. As such, non-commercial-use only images can be used as either a) the non-com licence, or b) the GFDL. I imagine people who want to licence their images as non-commercial-use-only would be rather upset to discover this after the fact, so it's best not to allow the images in the first place.
I don't know why the GFDL always allows commercial use. Presumably it's part of the whole ideological "copyleft is beautiful" bizzo. I've taken great pains to avoid understanding how the Free Software Movement people think, and I cherish my ignorance in this regard. However, it does, and Wikipedia is much better off as a result. There are a number of Wikipedia "mirrors" who display regular database dumps (?) of our content, licenced under the GFDL. For instance, answers.com pulls together content legally licenced from a number of different sources, and collects it all together and displays it with ads. It donates a sizable proportion of its revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation, and helps keep us afloat.
explanation above wasnt very tactful or conducive to goodwill on my part.
Perhaps there's someone with a better way with fancy words than I who can rewrite the template.