Seriously. Also, I just saw the justification for this and about dropped my jaw.
*"We are not a free image host* - *Money and server power is being wasted on hosting millions of images for websites that are completely unrelated to the Wikimedia project. Here is an example of a search for en.WP images that do not mention Wikipedia, [10]http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=site%3Aupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen+-intitle%3Awikipedia&btnG=Search+Imagesover 2 mil. We should not be using our servers for this, as I doubt anyone donated money with this in mind. Copying of free images is obviously fine, just as it is with text, but we don't (as far as I know) host the text for any other site, I don't see why we should do this for image"*
No we are not a free (as in beer) image host, but we do host free (as in beer and liberty) pictures. The vast majority of these images are not actually hotlinked anywhere, and take negligible amounts of bandwidth. On the other hand, by keeping free (as in liberty) images on our servers (preferably commons) we allow them to be used to benefit future Wikimedia projects. And the completely irrelevant ones should have some sort of deletion criteria if they are not being used. I don't see the need to block hundreds of legitimate sites from hotlinking, and swarm us with negative publicity for this point.
"*We should not host non-free and fair-use images for anyone to use without reason* - *Wikipedia hosts many non-free and fair use images for use within the project, but we can not limit usage of hosted non-free images on other sites. Ethically and legally is not a good idea to host copyrighted works for anyone to use with any purpose."*
We don't. Non-free images that are not being used, are supposed to be deleted. What people do outside of the project is their own concern if our uses are legitimate; and furthermore it's not within our scope of concern to be policing external use. Blocking hotlinks is not the solution to this problem either.
*We bog down Wikipedia with uploads of nonsense photos *Statistics show that they're less than 2% of bandwidth. $6,000 a year, tops. Ignoring the blanket statement that the photos are "nonsense" (because really, who's spent the time to check every one of these millions of photos and make a qualititative decision on them?) they don't really hurt us.
Now, lets sum up the bad reasons: 1. Miniscule benefit. Implementing technical procedures for miniscule benefit is usually a bad thing, especially if there are problems and they don't go well. See below. 2. PR - We are all about getting free content out to people. What kind of message does it send when we suddenly start restricting that content? The second this gets picked up on any major news media outlet would be the second that there is a backlash and petition against the WMF, and we lose face everytime we say "the sum of all human knowledge" or "bringing free content to the world" and get the responce "unless it's hotlinked, right?" Honestly, I wouldn't think it unforeseeable that we'd lose more money in lost small donations than we gain in saved bandwidth. 3. Hurts potential business agreements with partner organizations. With this enabled, NOBODY would be able to hotlink images from us. Not Google, One Laptop Per Child, not anyone. This potentially hurts our ability to make business deals with partner organizations. 4. Outside our scope. It's simply not our primary, or even secondary concern what other people do with our content, but rather what we do with our own content. 5. Hurts legitimate users from reusing our content to say good things about us.
Some of these concerns may be slightly overstated, but any one of them outweighs the lack of benefit from enacting this change, and in the aggregate they completely outweigh it.
-Dan
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 3:01 AM, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:57 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester@gmail.com
wrote:
I fail to see the benefit of this trade off when compared to the extreme negative publicity we'd get for it. The 2007 finances report says we
spent
approximately $389,000 on internet hosting. 1.5-2% of that is around 6,000 dollars a year.
You couldn't hope to buy off the negative publicity we'd get from this
for
a $6,000 a year savings.
-Dan
Agreed. I just saw Tim's numbers on it after mailing out the FYI here. Even if it topped at 10k, it's not worth it. Maybe in several years of scaling...
- Joe
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