On 12/12/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
On 12/10/06, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote: A number of people on the fair use policy pages have explicitly declared
that they consider the free content goal to be secondary at most. I suppose it's fortunate that they haven't started lifting text from other websites en masse...
Some of them have.
Wikipedia stripped of all the fair use images at the moment would suck rather badly.
I believe that some areas would, Yes. But look at the articles on dewiki. Do those suck?
I think we have a need for some unfree images for critical commentary. There are articles where dewiki is kinda poor in part due to a lack of free images.
For example, their articles which best cover the famous photograph of [[Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] are [[de:Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] and [[de:Trảng Bàng]]. Both have external links and encourage readers to follow them to read the pictures.
What good does external linking do for free content? Most of whatever incentive to somehow free that image which could be created by excluding it is lost when we include a highly visible external link to it.
The primary advantage I see in completely excluding unfree works (even ones which can't be freed or replaced) is that we avoid confusing new contributors with an apparently inconsistent policy. On the other hand on dewiki it seems to be instutionalizing the process of external linking to content which would be inside wikipedia in an ideal world. Already enwiki is challenged by people adding externals rather than contributing content.
So nothing is simple. :)
Making Wikipedia worse, in order to try and convince people to put more time in and eventually make it better, seems like a bad tradeoff to me.
Whatever the extent that removing unfree content will make Wikipedia lower quality, making it more free is a move towards our goals. So removing unfree isn't pure loss. We have to consider the balance.