Hello,
I have shortly been talking to Amgine on irc about the new policy, as well as read it.
This policy seems very reasonable to me. I am happy you found a solution to be able to upload images necessary to illustrate wikinews articles... all while limiting related risks with competitors. This is good.
I hope other languages will soon follow as well.
Good luck. Anthere
Erik Moeller a �crit: I would like to re-enable local uploads on the English Wikinews for the purpose of fair use image uploads only. We have worked in the last few weeks on a whitelist policy for cases where we believe fair use to be acceptable:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Fair_use
This includes screenshots, publicity photos explicitly intended for the media, logos, and images under "semi-free" licenses which we might get under a fully free license eventually, but where a breaking news situation requires us to make a temporary compromise.
This is very important for us; we've already had to delete screenshots that showed a security flaw scooped by Wikinews because they were non-free and therefore not allowed on the Commons.
For now, there would be two upload links, "Upload media" and "Upload fair use media", one pointing to the Commons, the other to the local upload page. In MediaWiki 1.5, we can point "Upload file" to the Wikimedia Commons, and hide local uploads from the navigation. That way, we can apply "security by obscurity". Only people who read the fair use policy will find the local upload link.
I'd like to ask the Board to register any objections within the next week or so. If there are none, I would also recommend that the other language editions follow a similar procedure to develop their own local fair use policies, so we can re-enable local uploads on these editions one by one.
Eri k
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