It is good that Steven Walling is observing the way he is treated by the officious fanatics at Commons and now is "thinking twice about ever uploading anything to Commons." It's a completely dysfunctional project that has little to do with the task of creating and illustrating an encyclopedia. It's a little hyper-political fief run by malicious and petty bureaucrats and anal retentives worshipping at the alter of "free content."
Upload straight to Wikipedia, be sure to use the {{keep local}} template, and deal with the only-slightly-less-crazed photo rights people there with fair use statements, as needed.
WMF is the one entity that can fix what is broken at Commons. They know how, they just don't have the will to do it.
Tim Davenport "Carrite" on WP Corvallis, OR
====
Steven Walling wrote:
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.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org