After receiving a complaint in the office about our retaining an image on an article which was causing great distress to the living survivors of the depicted individuals, I noticed the relavent discussion at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Three_Dead _Navy_SEALs_in_Operation_Redwing.PNG. I'm rather shocked and surprised that our contributors can so callously treat the feelings of living individuals just so that we can upload "free" photographs of dead people; pictures which are certainly not necessary to our projects.
This is not the same thing as censorship...this involves close personal connections between living and dead people.
We regularly delete photographs of individuals based on personality rights; not because we're afraid of being sued but because it's the right thing to do. The insistence that we undelete these photos simply because they're free and that they're not against policy, without any consideration of the living survivors casts a rather dim shadow on our underlying efforts, that of sharing knowledge.
I sincerely hope some individuals with sympathetic concerns weigh in on the discussion.
(My comment at http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3ADeletion_requests% 2FFile%3AThree_Dead_Navy_SEALs_in_Operation_Redwing.PNG&diff=17521626&oldid= 17519286, for reference).
Cary Bass [[User:Bastique]]