2011/2/4 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com:
Hi.
This doesn't seem to have hit this list yet, so I'm posting here for general information and discussion.
Effective February 1, 2011, there are two substantive changes to the policies and procedures surrounding identifying to the Wikimedia Foundation.
As a Commons user seeing every day the limits and the potential harm there is in using any picture-authorizing E-mail system, I think that the opinion of Commons users should be taken into account before making any significant policy change affecting Commons.
Sometimes I think the pictures currently tagged with http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:OTRS cannot realistically be reused by reusers (because the reusers are not allowed to see the terms of the permission (1) and to know the identity of the E-mail sender). This absence of conditions where the pictures are realistically reusable by anybody apart from the Wikimedia Foundation itself (which can read the E-mails) make these pictures objectively unfree (even if from a legal perspective they are licensed under a free license), not belonging to the kind of free works mentioned on http://freedomdefined.org/Definition . The reusers must be in a position to check by themselves that the work is free. I.E. know the phone number of the person who reportedly issued the license and phone there to check that it is true.
With the OTRS picture permission system, we are reinventing something that is hardly different for the non-Wikimedia reusers than the "Wikipedia only" permissions that had been banned by Jimbo Wales in May 2005 (2).
If the foundation wants to identify more carefully its volunteers, it could means that it is gearing up to retaliate against any volunteer who would make a mistake. This in turn affects my relations as a Wikimedia Commons user with the volunteers with the prospect that if I ask a volunteer to do something difficult and if, for some reason, he makes a mistake, he will be harmed when the Wikimedia Foundation retaliates against him. In turn I should try less to rely on these volunteers out of fear that they might be harmed.
The OTRS volunteers are left on their own in such a perilous situation that concretely it is better not to involve them. So in fact they are not as useful as you might think.
I think we should go back to the community self-reliance motto expressed by Jimbo Wales in his New Statesman interview (3). And try to do most of the communication between uploaders and the Commons community on the wiki talk pages rather than on a Foundation-owned private E-mail system nobody can read. The wiki being public is a protection. If someone says something bad on a wiki, there are at least witnesses, and people who can show support. The wiki being public makes talks written on it available to non-Wikimedia reusers, enabling them to make their own decision on whether the file is really free, and licensed by a person who has enough authority to do so.
(1) While the licensing terms are often clear, the extent of the permission (number of pictures, a whole website or not, whether the permission applies to pictures made available in the future, what happens if a discrepancy occurs in the future - not to say at present! - between the agreed terms and the mentioned website's terms of use) is not always so clear. The quality of the person (the boss of the company or corporation, or a person with a low rank in the hierarchy, a technical webmaster not usually having authority to engage the company's assets, or even a volunteer not hired as a salaryman by the licencing party, as was one envisaged hypothesis when dealing with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) is never clear. (2) http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-May/023760.html (3) "thinking about community participation and involvement, a spirit of volunteerism, a spirit of helping out, a spirit of self-reliance" http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/01/jimmy-wales-wikipedia...