On 9/26/07, Thatcher131 Wikipedia thatcher131@gmail.com wrote:
James Hansen, NASA's chief global warming scientist, has recently come under press and blog criticism for supposedly warning about global cooling in a 1971 Washington Post article. Yesterday I uploaded a scan of the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hansen_Wash_Post.pdf) so the actual facts could be discussed on the article talk page. (I believe the recent coverage misrepresented Hansen's role as explained in the article.) Even though I uploaded it with a Fair Use rationale, the image police tagged it for deletion as a copyright violation.
I think this use of a copyrighted source, to inform discussion of the topic on the article talk page, is closer to the spirit and intent of the fair use doctrine than decorating articles with screenshots and album covers. One purpose of the Fair Use exemption is to allow the free exchange of ideas and information in scholarly discussion, and to insist, in this case, that each editor interested in this article must individually pay the Post for a copy, or find a library with the right back issue, in order to participate, seems harmful to the project. (When the Washington Times has a current article saying one thing, the only way to show what the original article said is to either post it or transcribe it, which is the same thing for copyright purposes.) I have done this several times before, to allow informed discussion of a disputed source on the talk page or on an AfD discussion. However, there is no mention of this form of Fair Use on [[Wikipedia:Non-free content]]. I'm curious about your reaction to this, and whether some discussion of acceptable use of non-free content on talk pages should be included.
Well if you want to split hairs on it, you'll notice that PDFs can't be displayed ("inline") on any page in any namespace. So on one hand it's not being "used" to "decorate" the talk page as only a link to the description page is provided. On the other hand, since it can't be "used" to "decorate" anything, anywhere, it's technically and perpetually an "orphaned fair-use" "image".
Judging by the deletion comment I'd guess that there was some degree of misunderstanding.
Also I can almost guarantee that if you pasted the full text of the Washington Post article on Mr. Hansen's talk page (for the purposes you described above), nobody would think anything of it, regardless of whether policy actually allows you to do this, which it probably doesn't.
On a practical note, I'd say the average person would be more likely to read the text in question if they don't have to fuck around with adobe acrobat or whatever.
—C.W.