On 3/22/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
This sort of thing used to irk me terribly, until I stumbled across something approaching Enlightenment. If we assume good faith, the answer is obvious: the user isn't lying in a desperate attempt to violate copyrights and get us in trouble; he's (it is usually a he) merely confused and caught up in process fetishism.
Images aren't deleted because they don't have a tag: they're deleted because they have no source and their copyright status is unclear, and we've decided not to take the risk of keeping such images around for no good purpose. But if I, or any other person trying to crack down on copyvios, try to explain the situation to a newbie, we say: "you need to place a tag on this image". Is it any *wonder* he gets confused? What, will any tag do? Any source is appropriate, right, even if that source says "all rights reserved, do not steal our images or we'll steal your thumbs, and what use will your precious Gameboy be then, eh?"?
We confuse what the tags mean with the tags themselves. I have the same problem with other templates, like the {{testn}} warnings: we aren't warning people, we're slapping a template on their page (congratulations! You're the 100th RC patroller to tag this page this year! Has it occurred to you that this talkpage already contains 99 identical boilerplate warnings, and what effect that has on a growing lad?), and likewise with images.
This process is called reification, which happens to be one of my favorite words. It could be translated "thingification", and you're right, it's a problem. Mak