Brion Vibber wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
So by analogy "Linus Torvalds style pragmatism" might provide for a third-party filter program that inserts non-FDL images into Wikipedia articles on a reader's computer as they're loaded. ;)
Like a web browser?
[Brion then gives several objections that seem reasonable. But I'll comment on the ones that seem least so.]
- the kernel-module combination is never redistributed
- the article-image combination is redistributed by local saving,
hardcopy, mirroring, or format conversion of the articles unless careful effort is made to avoid including the image (which the article includes programmatic commands to include)
So the article-image combination is never redistributed now (given that the images aren't included in the downloaded tarball -- I believe that this what began the discussion this time around). When I say that we need to separate out the fair use pics from the free ones, I mean precisely to prepare for such redistribution in the future, where we may (in some cases) have to strip out the nonfree pics.
Most importantly, the paradigm of separate text and image files is simply a technical limitation of the HTML format used. If Wikipedia were distributed in PostScript, PDF, MS Word documents, RTF, or the printed page, there would be no such separation.
Right, so maybe we'd have to strip them out if it were distributed thus '_`.
The problem, it seems to me, isn't that we use the images, but that we pretend that we're using them under the GFDL.
Either we are, or we're violating the license of every article that someone has modified by putting a non-GFDL picture into it.
This I don't agree with at all. When I submit GFDL text to a page, and somebody creates a modified version of that with [[Image:Foo]] in it, then they're definitely not violating the GFDL license of what I wrote. They just said "[[Image:Foo]]" next to it! The "technical limitations" are quite relevant here -- they're actually one way that HTML is much better than the printed page!
Our fair use images should be treated as *auxiliary*.
I'm all in favor of putting them on a separate server with a separate database and *not* embedding those images inline into articles, but allowing explicitly external links to those images which users would have to follow knowingly.
All right, maybe that will make everybody happy. I can live with it, I think.
It should ''never'' be vital to an article that we include an image, if we can help it, not only for distribution but also for accessibility.
Thanks! This removes the sense of urgency that drives some people to add non-free images knowing they are not compatible with the project's goals. Hopefully they'll stop immediately. :)
That said, sometimes we can't help it. Consider all the arguments presented in recent debates for why [[Clitoris]] needs good photographs and drawings. ^_^
-- Toby