[Foundation-l] Resolution:Licensing policy and the projects' autonomy

[Kjetil Ree]

In a discussion at the Norwegian (bokmål) Village
Pump, a nowiki bureaucrat and meta admin claims that
Resolution:Licensing policy is not binding. The reason
is that we are supposed to reach consensus through
discussions at Wikipedia. He further says that when it
comes to images, a small group is forcing through its
will without reaching consensus, and that the
licensing policy is “totally not settled.” He is also
saying that the Foundation can not dictate our
editorial policy. I personally find such arguments
puzzling, as it seems pretty clear to me that the
resolution is binding, and that the board indeed can
decide that we aren't allowed to use NC- and ND
licenses. Is he right?

A somewhat related discussion: nowiki has a couple of
hundred images uploaded back in 2004 and early 2005
without proper sources or attribution of the author.
We take such matters very seriously now, but back
then, nowiki's image use policy wasn't especially
strict on such matters. I have suggested a cleanup
project, where every user should check his uploads
from 2004-05 during the next couple of months, and
give them proper source information. The same user is
opposing this proposal, claiming that our current
image use policy and rules about sources do not apply
retroactively, and that starting to mass-delete images
without a source will be disrespectful to the users
active back then, who were following the rules at the
time (well, actually the lack of rules). I claim that
it is the uploaders' responsibility to make sure that
their uploads are ok, but he claims that it is the
users who want to delete (or points out that a image
is unsourced) who need to prove that the image is a
likely copyvio. Who is right?

Kjetil (User:Kjetil r)