On 12/12/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
On 12/10/06, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)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.