George Herbert wrote:
On 7/19/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
It doesn't particularly matter if free replacements will be added to those articles. "The Free Encyclopedia" means more than "free of charge". It means, to the greatest degree possible, that it should be free of restrictive copyright terms; free to reuse, copy, and modify as you see fit.
View "free" and "encyclopedia" as two equally important halves of our mission. In the case of some articles, a nonfree image adds such tremendous educational value to an article that it's worth it to use it, though it detracts slightly from the "free" aspect. But what, I wonder, do you learn about Wal-Mart from seeing their logo? About your average album or book from seeing what the cover looks like? By using thousands of these images, we're taking away greatly from the "free" aspect of our mission, and adding marginally if at all to the "encyclopedia" part.
I'm sorry, but the additional value provided by visual identifiers such as logos and album cover art is significant.
Human learning and memory processes are significantly keyed by such visual content, and it makes it much more enjoyable to read.
The entire reason that the Web took off in the early 90s and that Archie/Gopher/Veronica/WAIS/etc hadn't was visual content on web pages. They became accessable to "normal people" because they weren't just reading, they were seeing.
The visual design of Mediawiki and the existing projects is acutely aware of this. Pretending that this isn't a significant part of the user experience, or a significant part of the "customer value", is silly.
If all we need is -some- kind of visual, we could easily enough do a free-content picture of a band in the album article or the like. I doubt most people could tell you what more than a handful of album covers or corporate logos look like, but could probably tell you the -names- of hundreds. (I bet you that more people know the name Microsoft, Coca-Cola, or IBM than know what the logo looks like.) There are some logos which have become iconic, such as Nike's, and I don't have any problem with those. But the vast majority are just decorative, or at the very least serve a limited educational purpose. Such theoretical and limited benefits are not worth real and serious damage to the other half of the mission-"free as in freedom".