2012/11/4 James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com:
It is a nasty legal environment right now. I do not blame the legal team for being cautious.
+1
It still amazes me how many people do not realize that anyone can simply jump in and begin improving WMF wikis. If we add a little note to each of these red links (please help us fix this link, click to figure out how) that goes to a page that explains why thy are red, the issues that have occurred, and how to get involved we can launch with editor recruitment built in.
It won't work. Think of the readers, please. They will be frustrated to find a wiki without any pictures. That would be a rather bad start indeed. Readers expect the same standard they have come to love from Wikipedia.
As Roland said, at WV they took great care of checking images for copyright issues. What's more, there have been many imports from Commons to WV. I imported several images from Commons for the articles I edited. At least these images could be located and the links could be fixed in order to have the images show in the articles.
Regards, Jürgen.