On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Much of the image deletion policy is based around the fact that there are maybe a dozen people on Wikipedia who understand the image use policy well enough to enforce it, and are willing to take the time to do so. At the same time, over two thousand new images are uploaded each day, adding to the 553,000 images already on Wikipedia.
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
I, too, have faced all the challenges that you mention in your email... I especially 'enjoy' watching someone play license template roulette. :-/ But I don't believe it would be wise to turn off image uploads.
What you say about copyright being hard is mostly true, but I think that what matters more than it being difficult is that it doesn't match up to people's natural instincts. They think "I got this off a webpage for free so it must be okay." or "No one will complain".
That's my point with "they don't understand it, and aren't aware they don't understand it".
In any case, I think the worry about copyright is ignoring the real problem: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHERS! Even if we ignore the advantages of being able to work with the creator, when the copyright holder uploads their own content our problems are greatly reduced.
At the same time, we have no incentive to increase the number of photographers. When you can just grab a picture off the web and stick it in an article, there's no incentive to get out there and start taking pictures. It's not like digital cameras are hard to come by -- every other cell phone has one, and cheap dedicated cameras can be had for $50-$75.
We could also replace the upload link in the standard public skin with an instruction page... and require people to redlink images in order to upload them. (This would reduce the huge number of images which spend their whole life orphaned, freeing up our resources.. and would require new uploaders to read a bit in order to figure it out).
That would certainly help. Part of the problem is that it's so easy to upload images, people are surprised when they get it wrong, and they haven't been around long enough to know how to fix things, or where to go for help.