[Foundation-l] Instant Commons : INCORRECT

[Daniel Arnold]

Am Freitag, 09. Juni 2006 05:10 schrieb amgine at saewyc.net:
> [...] Fair Use is absolutely necessary for Wikinews.

Why do you think so? Do you know http://de.wikinews.org ? They have a free 
images only policy like de.wikipedia. Neither de.wikinews nor de.wikipedia 
suffer a fundamental problem because of that. Quite the contrary. And of 
course they are everything else but text deserts.

I simply don't understand why every article needs under any circumstance an 
image even if it is ripped of somebodies else property. There are so many 
ways getting a free one and if there's none avaliable just make your text 
even more better.

Quality matters not nice illustrated pages illustrated for the sake of 
illustration.

> The fact Fair Use in any form is not 
> accepted on Commons is the reason Wikinews project sites now have file
> uploads; Commons was not being useful to this project in this regard.

There is a Wikimedia goal: We create free content not *any* content. What is 
the difference between Wikinews and CNN? Wikinews is (at least should be) 
totally freely licensed. If you make a proprietary Wikinews you have nothing 
which makes your project special compared to the zillions of other news 
websites.

The same applies to Commons: There's Getty Images and Corbis already. We don't 
want to copy them (in every aspect). We want to become the radical new freely 
licensed media repository of the world. This is what makes the real 
difference between us and them for the outside people.

> I do not know about others, but this sounds to me very much like Commons is
> dictating image policy to the projects, and not the other way around the
> way Commons was set up to be.

We are not a mere helper project of Wikipedia. Our community has evolved 
beside the helper aspect a strong own identity. People need to have a unique 
vision in order to work happily in a project. A second row helper project is 
nothing you can be proud of. And of course ths "second row helper project 
attitude" has caused our current problems. People throw their files over the 
wall and are simply not interested in getting licensing right (and because of 
that there are many inactive admins, as they don't see the unique vision of 
Commons and are thus not interested in clean up).

> While I greatly respect the work Commons 
> does, when it interferes or harms the projects I have little respect for
> the actions of Commons.

I am justt tired of being sensible because even with this deletion speed we 
can't chatch up with all these ingorant or bad faith people that think 
copyvios are a good thing:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=&page=

Arnomane