I just noticed a disturbing trend on Commons that highlights a general
issue with its use as the media repository for our projects.
I recently had an image nominated for deletion under Commons policy against
photos of packaging:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:PACKAGING.
It was of some Japanese candy that someone brought back.
The first issue here is one of demotivating contributors. I took a photo of
an object I owned, and gave it away to be used in Wikipedia. The only
interaction I ever get on Commons about my photos is a notification of when
some fussy neckbeard wants to delete them. No thanks for thousands of
uploads. No notification of how many views they produce for our projects.
No message about downloads for free reuse.
The second issue is what this policy implicates for the scope of Commons. A
huge part of modern life includes things that have logos, artwork, jingles,
etc. This policy seems to imply to me that not just food packaging, but any
photo of a physical or digital product cannot be freely licensed even if
you own it. This covers a huge swath of knowledge to share which by
definition can't be on Commons anymore because we decided to take a very
conservative position on licensing. We are taking away useful photos from
our readers, which basically every other media repository that allows
CC/public domain licensing would allow.
We currently push users to upload to Commons when they want to give photos
to Wikipedia, and I have long done the same. I also used to be a Commons
admin. But this makes me think twice about ever uploading anything to
Commons, since even what seems like photos I own get subjected to an
extremely hardline copyright regime that no other site (say like Flickr)
would ever reasonably enforce on contributors. I'm also not going to bother
uploading to Wikipedia a simple photo of food products if I have to fill
out a form for fair use rationales.
In the long run, I think this kind of thing is yet more evidence that it
was a huge mistake to create a sub-community within Wikimedia that cares
more about strict free licensing than it does about utility to people who
need knowledge. Commons should really just have stayed a database shared
among projects, not been made into a wiki where all our more important
projects are subject to the rules mongering of a tiny broken community.