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.
To alleviate some of this, we should allow the inclusion of offsite images. This is perfectley acceptable. Take http://news.google.com for example, which is greatly improved by the addition of any image seen fit, also note that not a single image there is hosted on google. I emailed them, and they said that what they do eg: <img src="http://anotherserver/file.jpg"/> is completely within the realm of copyright policy.
There would be no violation of GFDL here. As some people already suggested. And the jumbo about it being bad netiquette is a weak argument against all thats just been laid out.
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On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, 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.
Riiiight.
To alleviate some of this, we should allow the inclusion of offsite images. This is perfectley acceptable.
No, that's not acceptable at all. If you want something to appear inline, mixed into the page in Wikipedia, it should be *part* of Wikipedia. That means it should be hosted on the Wikipedia server, and be easily packaged with backups, distributions, and alternative published formats.
If you'd like to *link* to external images, just like any other external resource, that's A-OK, fine and dandy.
Take http://news.google.com for example, which is greatly improved by the addition of any image seen fit, also note that not a single image there is hosted on google. I emailed them, and they said that what they do eg: <img src="http://anotherserver/file.jpg"/> is completely within the realm of copyright policy.
Copyright is an unrelated side issue here.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
At 04:47 PM 4/9/03 -0700, you 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.
To alleviate some of this, we should allow the inclusion of offsite images. This is perfectley acceptable. Take http://news.google.com for example, which is greatly improved by the addition of any image seen fit, also note that not a single image there is hosted on google. I emailed them, and they said that what they do eg: <img src="http://anotherserver/file.jpg"/> is completely within the realm of copyright policy.
The major problem with offsite images isn't netiquette or copyright: it's that the image (whether of a news event or an animal) that you link now may disappear without notice, or be replaced by something different. An article on the fall of Baghdad shouldn't suddenly be illustrated by a picture of a baby panda, or the president of Congo, or whatever else gets dropped into that slot by the external news source.
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.
The Cunctator wrote:
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.
Well said!
--Jimbo
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.
You seem to be alone in this regard.
1) You do not just want to "link" to a picture on another site, you can already do this now - you want to embed it and present it as if it were your own. news.google.com at least auto-rescales the photos and hosts them on its own servers. Not doing this wastes other people's bandwidth (costs them money, which can get us into trouble) and makes us dependent on their servers' reliability. As the number of offsite images grows, this means Wikipedia becomes increasingly fragmented and unreliable.
2) You call the respect for the GFDL "very harmful to Wikipedia". Well, perhaps you do not understand that Wikipedia is an open content project and intends to stay that way. The more non-free images we include, the harder it will become to distribute and re-use Wikipedia articles. Building an encyclopedia is only half of our mission -- our encyclopedia needs to be freely usable by everyone.
3) Offsite images invite photo vandals who post such nice pictures as http://goatse.cx -- that was one of the reasons they were turned off in the first place.
Regards,
Erik
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