I'm completely stunned by this thread:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notice...
Looking at the whole situation I'm not too concerned about Martinp23's block, which would have been reasonable if the information leading to it had been true (but it wasn't). The anonymous User:84.211.71.5 was not running a bot and was not removing legitimately "fair use" images either. The images he was removing failed the first fair use criterion "no free image could serve the same purpose" and thus were copyvios, mostly pictures of Japanese pop musicians.
I logged onto freenode and spoke to some administrators about this, but nobody really seemed to care. One of them said I should take it to the mailing list, so here I am.
That we have users who are clueless or apathetic about copyright is not a nothing new, I realize, but it concerns me how many of them are administrators.
(ec) Should we rollback their changes? Looks like (almost) all those Fair Use images are legit right now - Alison☺ 23:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
They are? All these people are alive and still performing. The only ones I didn't tag for deletion (out of roughly 75 images removed by 84.211.71.5) were one or two photos of bands which have broken up, as the certainty that they can be replaced is less absolute.
Yeah, I'm going to roll them back. Veinor (talk to me) 23:31, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
"Oh noes, vandalbot that is removing all our pretty pictures"
Looking through the edits, it seems that he was iterating through various categories (or some other system) of Japanese musicians and bands, filling in the infobox with the "no image" placeholder (see [1]), seemingly regardless of whether something was there already or not. Mass rollback is probably appropriate here, as long as the images are checked after restoration (those that I've looked at seem to be valid uses). Thanks, Martinp23 23:34, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
But if you'd checked any ten of them, you would have found at least eight copyvios.
I've been advised to stop commenting at WP:AN/I lest I be labeled a troll, but I would like some idea of how to address a community that handles image policy issues like this so poorly.
And what can be done about this fork of Template:Promophoto? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:HelloProject-Photo If you read the fine print you'll see it implies that WP:NFCC#1 is being waived for J-Pop, which can't possibly be true... I think.
Charlotte
On 21/04/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
I'm completely stunned by this thread:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notice... Looking at the whole situation I'm not too concerned about Martinp23's block, which would have been reasonable if the information leading to it had been true (but it wasn't). The anonymous User:84.211.71.5 was not running a bot and was not removing legitimately "fair use" images either. The images he was removing failed the first fair use criterion "no free image could serve the same purpose" and thus were copyvios, mostly pictures of Japanese pop musicians.
I doubt "and thus were copyvios", but certainly not within policy.
That we have users who are clueless or apathetic about copyright is not a nothing new, I realize, but it concerns me how many of them are administrators.
There are plenty who aren't.
I'm a big fan of fair use and will staunchly defend it as appropriate. Which seems to mean I spend far too much time cleaning up blatant abuse of it as a bad excuse ...
I've been advised to stop commenting at WP:AN/I lest I be labeled a troll, but I would like some idea of how to address a community that handles image policy issues like this so poorly. And what can be done about this fork of Template:Promophoto? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:HelloProject-Photo If you read the fine print you'll see it implies that WP:NFCC#1 is being waived for J-Pop, which can't possibly be true... I think.
I've edited the template accordingly.
- d.
On 4/21/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
The images he was removing failed the first fair use criterion "no free image could serve the same purpose" and thus were copyvios, mostly pictures of Japanese pop musicians.
Be careful of confusing our fair use rules with those applicable under copyright law. Because something doesn't meet our fair use rules does not make it a copyright violation, and you may really annoy someone by accusing them so.
That we have users who are clueless or apathetic about copyright is not a nothing new, I realize, but it concerns me how many of them are administrators.
In many cases, the rules have changed since they were promoted to admin. Also, as I said above - misunderstanding our fair use policies does not equal 'ignorant about copyright'.
Insisting that these images are violations of copyright will make you sound like you are ignorant of copyright law yourself. Instead, the argument should be that they don't meet our fair use criteria, which are intentionally much stricter than those allowed under US copyright law. Even better is to explain WHY our fair use policy is the way that it is.
-Matt
On 21/04/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Insisting that these images are violations of copyright will make you sound like you are ignorant of copyright law yourself. Instead, the argument should be that they don't meet our fair use criteria, which are intentionally much stricter than those allowed under US copyright law. Even better is to explain WHY our fair use policy is the way that it is.
Do we have a quick primer on how to be a proper Wikipedia copyright paranoid? We could do with one.
(It would also help those en:wp admins who want a run at Commons adminship, which is *all about* copyright paranoia. Commons needs experienced copyright paranoids to deal with the ~ 10% of uploads that are copyvios. No, I haven't run myself yet ...)
- d.
On 4/21/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Do we have a quick primer on how to be a proper Wikipedia copyright paranoid? We could do with one.
We do in fact :) [[Wikipedia:Basic copyright issues]]
Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]]
On 4/21/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/04/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Insisting that these images are violations of copyright will make you sound like you are ignorant of copyright law yourself. Instead, the argument should be that they don't meet our fair use criteria, which are intentionally much stricter than those allowed under US copyright law. Even better is to explain WHY our fair use policy is the way that it is.
Do we have a quick primer on how to be a proper Wikipedia copyright paranoid? We could do with one.
(It would also help those en:wp admins who want a run at Commons adminship, which is *all about* copyright paranoia. Commons needs experienced copyright paranoids to deal with the ~ 10% of uploads that are copyvios. No, I haven't run myself yet ...)
- d.
How do the commons get such a low copyvio rate in images?
On 4/22/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
How do the commons get such a low copyvio rate in images?
Be having the majority of their uploads done by experienced users. Commons has a number of advantages
1)For most users it is not their first project so they avoid complete newbies that cause most of our problems (they ran into some issues when one of the larger wikipedias decided to send all uploaders direct to commons) 2)A lot of their images are taken from other projects which in effect gives them two lots of filtering for copyvios 3)A lot are taken from flickr by fairly experienced users which keeps the copyvio rate down.
On the other hand
Commons does not have it's image deletion processes optimised the way en.wikipedia does. Commons does not have en.wikipedia's angry fruit salad upload page.
On 4/22/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Commons does not have en.wikipedia's angry fruit salad upload page.
-- geni
"Angry fruit salad". That's an interesting way to describe it :-) ~~~~
On 4/21/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Because something doesn't meet our fair use rules does not make it a copyright violation, and you may really annoy someone by accusing them so.
Sorry for my ambiguity, by "copyvio" in this context I meant "violation of copyright policy" rather than "copyright law" necessarily. Point taken, I will rethink my choice of words.
The point still stands that I am disappointed that the user who removed these dozens of fair use abuse images was be blocked as a suspected bot and mass-reverted as a suspected vandal, because the community reached an ad hoc decision that these images were "legitimate fair use".
On 4/21/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
In many cases, the rules have changed since they were promoted to admin.
Probably true, but not for this case. Of the three admins I quoted above, two were promoted last month, one of them in August 2006. The first sentence of fair use criterion #1 "No free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information" has not seen any changes during those eight months.
2006-08-01 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Non-free_content_criteri... 2007-04-21 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Non-free_content_criteri...
However, I would suggest that the RFA process does not evaluate a user's understanding of policy as well as it should (though it is arguably a good measure of popularity, niceness, edit summary usage, and things like that). Thoughts?
Charlotte
Charlotte Webb wrote:
However, I would suggest that the RFA process does not evaluate a user's understanding of policy as well as it should (though it is arguably a good measure of popularity, niceness, edit summary usage, and things like that). Thoughts?
Why should it? Many users of admin privileges will only want to use them occasionally, and in limited areas.
Ec