[Commons-l] King of the FlickrLickrs

[Erik Moeller]

On 2/20/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Erik, if a Flickr user misclicked on the dropdown and selected the
> wrong license unknowingly and unintentionally they did not make a
> valid release under that license.

There is no dropdown on the upload screen. Licensing is a user
preference, and not an easy to find one (I just took about 3 minutes
to find it again, even though I've been there several times -- it's
under "Your account|Privacy & Permissions|Defaults for new uploads").

The main problem is that Flickr does not indicate the currently
selected license on the upload screen (though it does show it once the
file has been uploaded), and that it makes it easy to "change" the
licensing retroactively as many times as the user wants. But I find
any claim of accidental CC licensing on Flickr very hard to believe,
as it takes significant effort and understanding to use the CC option
in the first place.

> A second human review is a good sanity check against
> situations where the flickr user is not really the copyright holder.

I encourage copyright review and verification on all resources hosted
on Wikimedia projects. The Flickrreview process is strangely specific,
especially given that FlickrLickr _already_ involves human volunteer
reviewers. When repeated copyvios from a particular Flickr user are
pointed out to me, I also delete all their metadata from my database,
so that no further images are shown for review.

We should work towards a solution that is not specific to one
resource. The underlying principles will be similar to the "stable
version" idea: if a user is not trusted, all their uploads will have
to undergo copyright review. Such review could take two stages - smell
test, and detailed review. The smell test would be the check for
obvious signs of copyvio: promo photo, screenshot, etc. The detailed
review could involve contacting the copyright holder. The smell test
is mandatory, whereas the review is optional (but desirable).

A first way to implement this approach without special software would
be to only use positive tagging for pictures that _have_ undergone
in-depth copyright review, rather than trying to negative-tag all
those which are semi-suspicious.

-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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