I'm completely stunned by this thread:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notice...
Looking at the whole situation I'm not too concerned about Martinp23's block, which would have been reasonable if the information leading to it had been true (but it wasn't). The anonymous User:84.211.71.5 was not running a bot and was not removing legitimately "fair use" images either. The images he was removing failed the first fair use criterion "no free image could serve the same purpose" and thus were copyvios, mostly pictures of Japanese pop musicians.
I logged onto freenode and spoke to some administrators about this, but nobody really seemed to care. One of them said I should take it to the mailing list, so here I am.
That we have users who are clueless or apathetic about copyright is not a nothing new, I realize, but it concerns me how many of them are administrators.
(ec) Should we rollback their changes? Looks like (almost) all those Fair Use images are legit right now - Alisonâș 23:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
They are? All these people are alive and still performing. The only ones I didn't tag for deletion (out of roughly 75 images removed by 84.211.71.5) were one or two photos of bands which have broken up, as the certainty that they can be replaced is less absolute.
Yeah, I'm going to roll them back. Veinor (talk to me) 23:31, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
"Oh noes, vandalbot that is removing all our pretty pictures"
Looking through the edits, it seems that he was iterating through various categories (or some other system) of Japanese musicians and bands, filling in the infobox with the "no image" placeholder (see [1]), seemingly regardless of whether something was there already or not. Mass rollback is probably appropriate here, as long as the images are checked after restoration (those that I've looked at seem to be valid uses). Thanks, Martinp23 23:34, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
But if you'd checked any ten of them, you would have found at least eight copyvios.
I've been advised to stop commenting at WP:AN/I lest I be labeled a troll, but I would like some idea of how to address a community that handles image policy issues like this so poorly.
And what can be done about this fork of Template:Promophoto? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:HelloProject-Photo If you read the fine print you'll see it implies that WP:NFCC#1 is being waived for J-Pop, which can't possibly be true... I think.
Charlotte