On 6/6/05, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:
- Make the copyvio warning on the edit page more visible. I notice that the German WP comes with a warning in a fat box with a red border. It is so cheap I am positive it will pay for its cost. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see how it looks like: http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Saint-Cloud&action=edit
This is great, we also need to make it a practice of asking uploaders if *they* are the copyright holder.
- Clarify policy: WP:CP works quite well for pages that started as copyvio, at least if they are caught early. The page also gives instructions for dealing with pages "where the most recent edit is a copyright violation, but the previous article was not". However, what if a copyvio added material several months ago, and many editors kept working on the article afterwards? I say the article remains a derived work and must be reverted to the last clean state, but others disagree. Either way, there are too many conflicting opinions scattered all over WP and meta.
I'm in your camp.
- Be strict: I contend that a key reason for the epidemic is that many, even experienced editors are both too lenient and too careless. Large contributions of perfect prose from unknown editors do not trigger suspicion and checks nearly as often as they should. And unlike vandalism or personal attacks, copyvios are often met with a cavalier attitude which sends the wrong message.
This is related to the above, if the cost of a violation is just clipping out some text later then people aren't likely to be strict about it. People do not account for the huge potential liabilities copyright violation places on the project, users of our content, and the cost in terms of negative publicity if we are branded a bunch of theves. Once the quality of the vast majority of our content becomes unquestionably good, the next obvious way to knock us is to say we got there via theft...
I think we need to get much more strict on material submitted by someone other than it's copyright holder. The issues are too complex for us to expect anyone to get it right, at least the "I made this" case is simple enough that we should only go afoul with bad intentioned people and complete idiots. Our community is now big enough that we can reasonably expect it to generate the vast majority of the media we need of any type.. Exceptions should obviously be granted for logos, historic images, etc but they should be handled as exceptions and not the norm. On the plus side this will get us more works which are very well targeted to our needs, rather than misapproiated stock photography which is only partially what we want.