On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 19:47, Hunter Peress wrote:
Over these last few months, it has been frustrating when GFDL righteous wikipedians nix each others images because of fear of copyright violation. This respect for the GFDL which is extremely vigorous, but I feel it is also very harmful to wikipedia.
What you don't seem to understand is that adherence to the GFDL is intrinsic to the existence of Wikipedia. To be more specific, the principles of Wikipedia aren't tied to the GFDL per se, but to the idea of a permanently free resource defended by copyright, rather than threatened by it.
It is not fear of copyright violation that propels us to shun using unprotected (in the Wikipedia sense) resources, but the principled stand that Wikipedia will be freely usable, undegraded, by all--and that includes not just people who go to wikipedia.org to view entries, but to people who may have some idea about how to reuse or refactor the content, and to the future generations of people who will benefit from this resource.
It is this long view that puts into relief the unnecessary folly of using external images.
Another way to put it: Wikipedia is an experiment, with the premise that a world-class resource can be created without relying on proprietary resources and methods. Relying on external, copyrighted images signals a failure of that experiment.