[Commons-l] Friendliness & Lack of User Recognition

[Michael Snow]

On 2/24/2011 10:07 AM, Stan Shebs wrote:
> To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is
> motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa
> recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas.  I've been doing
> penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to
> have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list.  It would
> be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still
> looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it,
> but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies
> arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.
Actually, the real problem is that presumably the list is not freely 
licensed. Even though your annotation of it makes a pretty good case for 
transformative fair use, that doesn't help you with Commons policy. 
Maybe there's too strong of an expectation that Commons is only for 
finished products and not intended to be a workspace, notwithstanding 
that it is still a wiki.

--Michael Snow