On 28/06/06, Berto albertoserra@ukr.net wrote:
Unfortunately, I believe, trying to set a policy could be interpreted as the Wikimedia Foundation taking responsibility for it too, rather than leaving the responsibility for copyright infringement on the uploading users, as it should be.
It's okay 4 me. Let's give the cops the guy's IP and that's it... I'll propose to pms to publish a guide telling people in BIG black capitals that whatever they do, they do it at their own personal risk. And that they should better get themselves a lawyer before uploading pics :) The rest will simply be a translation of the @ en.wiki policy. Since it's the bigger edition, it's also got to have the huger amount of pics. And if they survived with their policy so far, it means that we can survive, too.
I would strongly encourage /not/ doing that... in fact I would strongly encourage going the other way and disallowing fair use and if possible, gaining community support to turn off local uploads (only use Commons images). Quite a few projects have done this, the most recent being Spanish Wikipedia. This is a trend I like. Are we here to provide 100% free content or what? If so, what are we doing with these stupid unnecessary crutches and disclaimers like "fair use"? Fair use is not at all necessary for a Wikipedia to be decent.
Also, having a more restrictive policy makes it far easier to police. You might not be aware, but en.wp has a huge problem at the moment with trying to sort through literally thousands of images that have been uploaded with wrong or incomplete information. Save your admins the headache and just disallow them from the start!
I also find the notion of passing all responsibility onto the uploader pretty bogus. If we want to say our content is FREE, not just pretty free, or mostly free, or /probably/ free, then we as a community have to be vigilant about educating users and verifying image sources and licenses. What is a Wikipedia riddled with copyvios worth? To me, not very much.
Brianna