On 6/28/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
As for requiring email address... eh. They are typically just as throwaway as a wiki account. I have no problem with the current method of deleting with extreme prejudice. By deleting such images WP is not missing much.
The practice of deleting with extreme prejudice is the best tool we have today on enwiki. It is, at least somewhat, effective. However deletion creates a lot of opportunity for tension in the community, there are a lot of people who would like to keep their favorite image at any cost, at least any cost short of them figuring out the copyright status themselves...
The status quo has become socially harmful, so we must reach out for more middle ground approaches which do not compromise our legal and ethical obligations or the fundamental goals of our project.
When I can demonstrate that I've make a more complete attempt to avoid deleting an image a reasonable person should expect to have a more calm response.
It depends if you want to implement this as a way of verifying licenses (I don't think it will help with this), or as a way to slow down image uploaders (it will slow them down, but I think it's a bit underhanded). Now what would be REALLY good to slow down problem uploaders would be if we could block users from uploading, only ( see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4995 , my baby!). Seems like it could be really handy on en.wp too. Because copyvio image users do not also tend to be copyvio text users, that's my observation.
We have previously used email contact in some cases to verify licenses but since around 80% of deleted images do not have an email contact it's not possible currently to institutionalize the behavior and gauge its effectiveness.
I am unsure exactly what level of image upload reduction there will be but based on the impact that the removal of anon editing had on the creation of new articles I would not expect much if any at all. I must also point out that whatever reduction does occur will almost certainly be strongly biased in favor of reducing the uploads of images which we would be subsequently deleted. Thus it would only take a small number of rescued images to offset any reduction in the rate of good image uploads.
A question for the list, is anyone aware of a single other site which is even semi-popular and accepts images uploads without an email confirmed account? It's is my thought that such a request has long since been the norm on the Internet, and as a result will not pose a substantial or unexpected hurdle for our users.
The fact that one of the internet stock photo sites we've we've taken images from on commons has confirmed emails will likely save hundreds of free content images from deletion.