Kirill Lokshin wrote:
The image deletion process is, unfortunately, institutionalizing the assumption of bad faith. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PUI#April 30 (specifically the discussion of the Himmler photo); people seem to be approaching the issue of image sourcing with the intent to delete as many images as possible, preferably for purely bureaucratic reasons.
Speaking of assuming bad faith... :-)
There are not many who upload in bad faith, and those who do tend to weed themselves out by getting blocked. The usual case is ignorance; while one doesn't need to know much to add a legit sentence, valid uploads require more knowledge, including a basic familiarity with the legalities. Even after simplifying the legalese down via templates, and providing lots of links and advice on the upload pages, we still get hundreds of bad uploads per day, many of which will require admin cycles to clean up. It doesn't help that many uploaders think they know about image copyrights already, so there is a lot of unlearning for them to do.
One advantage to commons is that the rules are enforced rather more stringently; while the admins from en: agonize over whether the newbie copviolators are being sufficiently praised for investing a whole 20 seconds copying from a random website, admins from de: come along and blam blam blam, the problem images are gone. :-)
Stan