G'day Stan,

There are not many who upload in bad faith, and those who do tend to weed themselves out by getting blocked. The usual case is ignorance; while one doesn't need to know much to add a legit sentence, valid uploads require more knowledge, including a basic familiarity with the legalities. Even after simplifying the legalese down via templates, and providing lots of links and advice on the upload pages, we still get hundreds of bad uploads per day, many of which will require admin cycles to clean up. It doesn't help that many uploaders think they know about image copyrights already, so there is a lot of unlearning for them to do.

Or the users who don't give a damn about copyright; they've found a purdy picture and YOU USELESS BLUDGING VANDALS are trying to RUIN OUR HARD WORK.

Maybe we should just have a big, red, bold, blinking sign up before uploads: "Note: if you do not know what you are doing, FUCK OFF. WE DON'T NEED THIS IMAGE AS MUCH AS YOU THINK WE DO."

It'll look quite nice, under my other proposals: "WIKIPEDIA IS AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA" "NO, NO-ONE CARES" "EDITING IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO HELP OTHERS, NOT A RIGHT TO SATISFY YOUR OWN EGO. DON'T LET IT PASS BY." "BE CIVIL, MORON." "NO, 'CENTRE' IS NOT AN ERROR." "JIMBO DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR PATHETIC ATTEMPTS AT TROLLING." "YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO ABUSE OUR GENEROSITY FOR ADVERTISING." And my personal favourite ... "WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A TOY!"

You might say I need a break from editing. The problem, however, is that I've just had one, doing stuff that's far more stressful than Wikipedia ever is ...

One advantage to commons is that the rules are enforced rather more stringently; while the admins from en: agonize over whether the newbie copviolators are being sufficiently praised for investing a whole 20 seconds copying from a random website, admins from de: come along and blam blam blam, the problem images are gone. :-)

Heh!

Cheers,