On 24/09/2007, Omegatron omegatron+wikienl@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I know the reason(s), of course, but viewing Wikipedia as a user (as I was this morning), this really significantly decreases its quality and usefulness. I'm afraid I know the answer, but would there be any way of reversing the various death-to-all-but-the- most-rampantly-free-images trends?
Yes. We should repeal the prohibition against "with permission only" and "non-commercial use only" images.
Both of those have legal issues within wikimedia never mind re users.
On 9/24/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
[[Image:Replace this image1.svg|right]] [[Image:Replace this image female.svg|right]] [[Image:Replace this image male.svg|right]]
Make the gap look more like a fillable thing.
Look through the links for those image description pages. That's not even all of them. How many of our biographies don't have images? How many of those are directly attributable to our licensing policies?
Hard to say. Raw deletion numbers would be a few 100K but we have no idea how many extra free images have turned up since.
This policy is not benefiting our readers,
It tends to produce novel content. Tends to produce bigger images. Compare
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Edna_Parker.JPG
With the average stolen AP image.
it's not benefiting our users, and it's not benefiting our downstream users.
That various produces of static CD versions would beg to differ,
It degrades the quality, coverage, and usefulness of our encyclopedia.
Given that conventional encyclopedia tended not to be too pic heavy I'm not so worried.
A minority of ideologues are forcing their personal beliefs on the rest of the community without consensus or popular support.
"Personal beliefs" not so much the positions of those that deal with copyright are complex and tend to disagree with one another.. Wikipedia and board policy? Yes.
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia; not a free image repository.
Free encyclopedia means free images.
The criteria for inclusion of media files in articles should be based not on prohibiting certain "non-free" licenses, but on *preferring* certain licenses over others.
That is already the case as far is allowed within US law.
We should produce a list of licenses in order of preference, with more free licenses preferred over less free ones. Then, media should be used if:
- It improves the quality or usefulness of the project to a typical reader
Look the "Reasonable person" situation is bad enough.
- It is legal for us to reproduce on our site
Oh dear. Not good not good at all. Not your fault of course we can't expect people to have a working knowledge of over 100 legal and copyright systems but generally policy proposals that would reduce us to to attributed PD due to age content are not a good idea.
Most of our policies are setup to sidestep as much as possible that very question.
- There are no other media files on the servers with preferable
licensing terms that fulfill the same purpose
If you don't like the non-free images, go right ahead and find or take more free ones to replace them. As soon as you've uploaded them to the servers, the less free versions will be deprecated and deleted. But in the meantime, we should use whatever we legally can.
Tried that. Result is a bunch of non free media of questionable legality.