On 7/19/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote: I disagree. There are alternatives; but nobody seems to want to do anything substantiative about it. and the "free only" stance has That is one possible route, yes. As you note (in text not quoted here), other projects have no fair use allowed. Maybe there are lots of people that come to en.wikipedia for the fair use pictures, but those projects continue on despite having no fair use allowed. While people might recoil in horror at the idea of no fair use at all, it is a solution that will not cause en.wikipedia to collapse. I personally am not in favor of the stance, but it at least provides a bright line defense. There is no I tend to disagree. Maybe I'm naive, but we've had diktats that have been enforced before. Right now, as noted in the prior thread, we have a badly muddled situation that is ultimately untenable. There ARE alternatives. Occasional grumbles notwithstanding, I'm personally quite pleased with We've gotten better, but facing 500 thousand fair use images over the next year and calling ourselves "free content" is a joke. en.wikipedia is utterly failing at executing the Foundation's mission, and it is THE flagship project. In any organization, it is a right and good thing to evaluate progress against the mission and vision of the organization. We might be further along towards the goal of properly managing non-free content than we were four years ago. But, the goal is not to properly manage non-free content. It's almost like we're a professional sports team. We lose, year after year after year. Our defense to this? "We're not losing as much as we have in the past, and our marketing seems to be doing ok" The point of a team is to win. Wikipedia's mission is to provide neutral educational content under a free license. We've failed, in so far as images are concerned, and there's no ignoring that or trying to make it better by saying we're doing a better job of managing the failure. When is too much too much? Are we going to allow ourselves to get to a situation where we have 50 million non-free images and be happy about it because they are properly sourced, tagged, and have rationales in line with our policies? That's not what Wikipedia is supposed to be. If people really think that's an acceptable situation, then en.Wikipedia has utterly lost its way. Somebody pass me a free beer... -Durin

On 7/19/07, WikipediaEditor Durin <wikidurin(a)gmail.com> wrote: A significant number will be deleted. Probably a bit less but not to bad given likely artice growth in the same period and that maybe 1/3 -1/2 will be deleted. A lot of uploaders are not exactly part of any wikipedia culture. No longer? Can't. Would be throwing away too much free content. WP:VP Not really. Short of a foundation ruleing there are unlikely to be any significant changes in our upload system without a software change. -- geni

WikipediaEditor Durin wrote: For a long time now we've been pushing the notion that images under free licence should be uploaded to Commons rather than en.wikipedia. I think it's a good approach myself. So it hardly seems surprising (and certainly not "terrifying") that a high percentage of the material that remains is material that isn't under a free licence. If freely licenced images should go to Commons and non-free images shouldn't be uploaded at all, then why even have image uploads enabled on en.wikipedia? That would seem to cover all the bases.

On 7/19/07, WikipediaEditor Durin <wikidurin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Are you sure that using only free images is part of Wikipedia's mission to be a free content encyclopedia? Images weren't even part of the project until a year(?) after it was founded. (We used to just link to images on third-party websites!) And when we did add images and other media to the site, there were no qualms about using copyrighted ones, as long as it was legally permitted (fair use, with permission, etc.) I don't understand why this has changed. Either we need to drop the charade that we are a free content encyclopedia, What does the uploading of non-free images have to do with the fact that we are a free content encyclopedia? All of our encyclopedic content is free, and always will be. I don't see this changing because of our use of non-free images. (And our use of non-free images is only *decreasing* over time, as our ability to use certain types of images is restricted further and further by agenda-pushing policy makers. It's a far different situation now than it was when I started editing four years ago.) If the people are on this mailing list are unable to make decisions on Mailing lists only attract a small percentage of Wikipedia's (technically-oriented) user base, and don't represent the community very well. I, for example, have strong feelings about our use of non-free content, but think that mailing lists suck, and try to avoid reading and posting in most cases. (I only noticed this post by accident.) The mail interface is clunky and outdated, and the social aspects generate too much noise with not enough signal.

WikipediaEditor Durin wrote: This is unwarranted hyperbole. If we're utterly failing, why is Wikipedia a top-10 website that's rapidly gaining cachet as the first place to look for general information, why is Britannica in terror of us, and (specifically on the "free" front) why is the Wikipedia database being used by literally hundreds of mirrors? Also, bear in mind that "free" is only one half of our fundamental goal. The other half is "encyclopedia". Adding fair use content may restrict the "free" half while enhancing the "encyclopedia" half, so it's hardly an obvious net loss. The same rationales that we use for fair use images can be used by others who wish to use Wikipedia's material in the same context (as an educational encyclopedia), so it's not like the fair use images are completely useless for people wishing to reuse our content. They just have to make the judgement for themselves which licences are compatible with their use and strip out the bits that aren't.

On 7/20/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: We're succeeding at the "encyclopaedia" part; not so much at the "free" part. Also, there would be significant legal concerns about hosting the content, let alone publishing it in hard copy form, anywhere outside the US. Also, bear in mind that "free" is only one half of our fundamental goal. not being significantly enhanced by the usage of much of our non-free content. If we're just sticking things in to look nice and illustrate articles without actually using them to enhance the reader's understanding and appreciation of the article's subject, we're not exactly doing much on the encyclopedic front. The same rationales that we use for fair use images can be used by The point of WP is kinda' that downstream reusers shouldn't have to do this, or at least not to the degree that they currently have to. Living outside the US, I would be very hesitant at republishing Wikipedia here because I have no way of differentiating what I am legally licensed to use, or am permitted to use despite lacking a licence, and what I am not. Johnleemk

John Lee wrote: Really? Not my impression. Remember that there had to be a big push several years ago just to differentiate between free and nonfree images, there being a significant percentage of images that were used, but had no identifying information whatsoever, and many of those added by "respected editors". Those editors then later fumed and expostulated when they were asked for sources and licenses. The main thing I see over time is that as the editor base grows, there are more and more individuals who are far out on all ends of the ideological spectra, and by virtue of being outliers, they get more than their usual share of attention. My usual experience with random articles I haven't looked at in a long time is to be pleasantly surprised that they have free illustrations now, when they were unillustrated or depending on fair use before. Stan

On 7/20/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote: Yeah, guess I should have said two or three years ago instead then. My impression then was that even if not everyone appreciated the need to tag images appropriately (I still think the same holds true; people are now fetishising rationales without understanding why they are necessary), at least our usage of non-free content was not as blatant and flagrant as it is today - I feel the proportion of fair use images I saw that were generally justified was more then than it is today. I fully recognise that my impressions are hardly scientific. ;-) The main thing I see over time is that as the editor base grows, there Yeah, I get that a lot too. But I see a lot of fetishisation about our image licensing processes without understanding what they are for, which I think is bad, considering my impression that most of us pushing for better usage of these processes at least understood them, back in the day. Johnleemk

On 7/19/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Our mission says nothing about striving to become a top 10 website. Please have a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mission The same rationales that we use for fair use images can be used by Then we might as well liberally allow fair use, since we're unconcerned with derivative uses. -Durin

On 7/19/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote: This gets to one of the core disputes on the subject; is fair use for purposes of identification alone sufficient to meet our requirements for the inclusion of non-free content? People who advocate for fair use inclusion say yes, because it is legal. Of course this misses the point of what we are supposed to be fundamentally, but even when this is raised they fail to see an issue. Thus, any encroachment on the ability to use fair use for identification without critical commentary is harshly criticized, reverted, and argued over. -Durin

I don't think it's the best solution to restrict uploads. It'd be easier if local uploads were simply disabled, and people would use the free media resource that is Commons. Alex (Majorly) On 19/07/07, WikipediaEditor Durin <wikidurin(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I suggest get more people who like dealing with images to come to Commons and help out there then. Commons' backlogs are HUGE, so every little help would be appreciated. I never upload free stuff to Wikipedia anymore, always to Commons. Why limit it to one project when others could make good use of it too? Alex (Majorly) On 19/07/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/19/07, Alex <axel9891(a)googlemail.com> wrote: Given how dirty the en image stream is that is really not a good idea. -- geni

On 7/19/07, WikipediaEditor Durin <wikidurin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Let me be a bit impolitic here. There's a dynamic between two sets of people here on the project; those who want to build the best possible encyclopedia, and those who want to build the best possible set of completely open content. On some of the foreign projects, either the law or the local set of people have decided that it has to be completely open content. That's fine. The greater majority of the active participants on the English wikipedia do not, in my judgement, agree. A majority of us are encyclopedia-first-open-content-second. In my judgement, it's a majority of senior editors and admins, and a great majority of normal editors. I understand that this is frustrating to those who come to the project looking for open-content-first-encyclopedia-second. I understand why it's causing tension. But the reality is that it's not just your project; it's all of our project. Images matter. The old saw about "An image is worth a thousand words" may not be precisely accurate, but there's significant value to having images. Human beings, readers of the encyclopedia, are very visually oriented. Anyone who feels that a text-only encyclopedia in areas where images are by nature fair-use is ok is greatly misunderstanding how humans take knowledge in and remember it. Is this a project for our writers/editors? Or is it a project for our readers. If this project is oriented towards "us" (the editors/admins) then it would be reasonable to impose our philosophical open content demands on it. But I disagree that it's really for us. The value isn't in what we're doing with it; it's in what everyone else is doing with it. You would not get millions of articles out of a group of a few thousand active people talking to each other for fun. The question of value for readers really isn't concretely arguing for using fair use content either; there's the complication of distribution of fair-use content to other languages, other mirror sites, etc. But using the fair use material significantly helps the english wikipedia, and only hurts other projects if having it turns out to discourage the creation of open content. There are three broad categories of fair use images used. One is where an event happened and is past, and nobody can go back and re-take a replacement open license image. Another is where the nature of the material - a screen capture from a film, tv show, album cover scan etc - is by nature copyrighted, and any attempt to illustrate the character or album or show will by nature have to be fair use. The third is a potentially replacable image, but one which hasn't been replaced. The first two categories are not replacable. You can tell us not to illustrate those articles, but if you force the issue by actions or attempt to remake policy, then call it a vote or consensus or whatever, the fair use inclusionists will win the fight due to sheer numbers. The Foundation policy covered such use, the policies in use now for labeling them cover such use, and a majority of people who care support their use. The claims that there has to be some sort of additional commentary or critical analysis isn't legally supported and is seen by fair-use supporters as a smokescreen for radical open-content-only deletionism. The third category, replacable fair use, is much more of a grey area, and one where the fair-use-discourages-open-content-generation argument may have some traction. The pity here is that a number of people are setting up an unnecessary conflict. If you really truly believe in making everything as open as possible, a project to focus on replacing every replaceable fair use image would probably gain some ground. Doing that is not taking anything away from articles, and is something that even the encyclopedia-first people can agree is good and support. If you made a really active project and applied peer pressure to people, you could probably get a lot of the encyclopedia-first people going along... Despite being an encyclopedia-first type myself, I have spent significant time and effort on generating open content images specifically for the project, and would do so more if I had more bandwidth and more people helping out. Do you want to try and fix the situation by fighting people (and, ultimately, losing in a terrible fireball), or by creating open content? Pick your fights. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 7/19/07, WikipediaEditor Durin <wikidurin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Is there a survey on the _types_ of fair use images that persist a month after upload or so? I would be much more interested in that. I have no problem with thousands of book & album covers, logos & screenshots. These are cases where there will be no alternative to fair use for the foreseeable future. Wikipedia is, in some ways, like a visitor from another planet, trying to document this one's culture: The fact that _we_ use a free license is very odd, as most contemporary culture is proprietary. If there's one area we should focus on purging of any & all fair use, it's photos of living celebrities. But the mere fact that the quantity of fair use images is high does not indicate that something is fundamentally wrong; the quantity of articles documenting pop culture is also very high, and documenting contemporary works will often include fair use excerpts. I would be more open to a rigid approach if copyright terms weren't so ridiculously high, but there is no relevant process of contemporary works passing into the public domain anymore. Making use of the few exemptions the law provides seems entirely reasonable. The issue requires a balanced approach, not a binary one. What are we trying to achieve? Does it help anyone to nuke thousands of album covers, for example -- does it make it more likely that free replacements will be added? I don't think so. -- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

Erik Moeller wrote: It doesn't particularly matter if free replacements will be added to those articles. "The Free Encyclopedia" means more than "free of charge". It means, to the greatest degree possible, that it should be free of restrictive copyright terms; free to reuse, copy, and modify as you see fit. View "free" and "encyclopedia" as two equally important halves of our mission. In the case of some articles, a nonfree image adds such tremendous educational value to an article that it's worth it to use it, though it detracts slightly from the "free" aspect. But what, I wonder, do you learn about Wal-Mart from seeing their logo? About your average album or book from seeing what the cover looks like? By using thousands of these images, we're taking away greatly from the "free" aspect of our mission, and adding marginally if at all to the "encyclopedia" part.

On 7/19/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm sorry, but the additional value provided by visual identifiers such as logos and album cover art is significant. Human learning and memory processes are significantly keyed by such visual content, and it makes it much more enjoyable to read. The entire reason that the Web took off in the early 90s and that Archie/Gopher/Veronica/WAIS/etc hadn't was visual content on web pages. They became accessable to "normal people" because they weren't just reading, they were seeing. The visual design of Mediawiki and the existing projects is acutely aware of this. Pretending that this isn't a significant part of the user experience, or a significant part of the "customer value", is silly. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

George Herbert wrote: If all we need is -some- kind of visual, we could easily enough do a free-content picture of a band in the album article or the like. I doubt most people could tell you what more than a handful of album covers or corporate logos look like, but could probably tell you the -names- of hundreds. (I bet you that more people know the name Microsoft, Coca-Cola, or IBM than know what the logo looks like.) There are some logos which have become iconic, such as Nike's, and I don't have any problem with those. But the vast majority are just decorative, or at the very least serve a limited educational purpose. Such theoretical and limited benefits are not worth real and serious damage to the other half of the mission-"free as in freedom".

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, George Herbert wrote: <anti-spoiler-warning> B-- but it's *redundant*, right? Ease of use doesn't matter; if we're using it to tell the reader something he can already figure out, it must be deleted, right? </anti-spoiler-warning>

Heh that's an interesting way of seeing it. But so much for "free encyclopedia" over "copyrighted image depositary"... Alex (Majorly) On 20/07/07, Garion96 &lt;garion96(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Garion96 wrote: They're probably going to be disappointed since any non-free images that aren't actually used in an article are marked for death, and I don't think even the most fair-use-friendly editors object to this. That'd make for a pretty unreliable depository.

Todd Allen wrote: That's your personal opinion. What serious damage? If the usage really is a fair one there is no damage. I can respect an argument based onan ethical position that such usage is not done, but not an argument that is based on a total lack of understanding of the legal environment. Ec

On 7/21/07, quiddity &lt;blanketfort(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Sadly not quite. There are eventualists who want us to be *eventually* strictly open content, and eventualists who don't really care as long as we are eventually a quality encyclopaedia, under what ever IP Regime. There are also people who are in an unsconcionable hurry to make sure nothing that is of low quality *at the moment* remain on wikipedia, but who don't really register IP issues on their radar. I don't really don't think you can make a case for such alignments. Wikiphilosophical attitudes are very much pick and choose. You won't be able to make "two parties" of wikipedians no matter how hard you try to massage the statistics. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

On 7/21/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen &lt;cimonavaro(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: some thoughts: 1) I realize that nobody *is* an archetype, I'm just trying to reframe the problem from another perspective (using over-generalizations/meta-labels/abstract archetypes (simply because my thought patterns gravitate towards point-form taxonomies)). There doesn't seem to be a consensus forming, and from what I understand of the issues, consensus isn't likely to form, as the two viewpoints are fundamentally opposed. 2) I was specifically thinking of [[Image:Einstein tongue.jpg]] as an example. The immediatists/idealists wanted it gone or fixed instantly; whereas the eventualists were happy with the initial short description under the assumption that it would get expanded at some point in the future. (with many other factors, disclaimer disclaimer, but that was the gist) 3) I was going to suggest what Bryan Derkson wrote: (much like the {{selfref}} template does) though it does get more complicated when one takes into account the non-free images that *are* explicitly discussed within an article. Those sections wouldn't make sense if the images were stripped out. 4) My unhappiness/interest in the issue is primarily due to the harm that it's causing - Good editors are being discouraged/disgruntled/dismayed, on a wide scale. Both sides have intelligent, rational, and positive positions, and we're an idealistic project to begin with, so it's always going to be more complex than a summary can do justice. But the more clearly/simply we define the legal/philosophical/opinion based stances, the easier it might be (for me at least) to discuss them. (Though I'm leaning towards agreeing that we need an official policy "from above", whatever that might be.) Just thinking out-loud, in case it helps anyone :) Quiddity

On 7/22/07, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: They are fairly triger happy in terms of writeing letters. -- geni

geni wrote: Probably so. That can be quite intimidating to most people. This Einstein picture would probably not be a good one for them to take a stand on, but that's as much because of the nature of the picture itself; too many people would turn it into a big joke against them. That's also what would make it a poor precedent for anything else. At some point someone will challenge whether Corbis really owns the copyright of some of the pictures in its archives, possibly on a variety of bases including a lack of a clear title.. I'm NOT saying that we should be the ones to do it, but it should be fun to watch. Ec

WikipediaEditor Durin wrote: developing content under a free content licence does not require that the material be free before we use it. It is more important that we participate in making it free. Ec

Erik Moeller wrote: Absolutely, but I do find that people get stuck on "fair use" when there are other alternatives in law. If for any reason a copyright has expored, or the material wasn't copyrightable in the first place we don't need to consider fair use. Ec

On 22/07/07, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yuh. Mayflower Search on Commons is better than what was there, but it still doesn't feel like it's cracked the problem. (For those online in 1997, Mayflower feels like AltaVista did after the other incredibly crappy search engines; the Google-level advance has yet to be worked out.) - d.

On 22/07/07, Ken Arromdee &lt;arromdee(a)rahul.net&gt; wrote: Yes, that's what Matthew just pointed out. You seem to have missed the point he was making, which is that this is tedious and doesn't make anyone care any more than they do. I note on Harry Potter-related articles, the {{current fiction}} tag is achieving some currency. This is analogous with the {{current}} tag for real-world events. Nicely consistent and gets rid of the argument that sections containing plot elements should be redundantly marked {{spoiler}} because the work is a recent release. - d.

Ken Arromdee wrote: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Nobody_cares Wasn't this particular thread supposed to be about fair use? Why are we discussing spoiler tags?

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Todd Allen wrote: The argument was that fair use images should be avoided because they don't give the user information. The response is given the way the human mind categorizes and understands things, having images makes the article easier to read and understand even if, strictly speaking, the image doesn't provide the reader with new facts. Of course, the same argument has been made against spoiler warnings in plot sections, and (one of the) responses is the same.