[Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:36 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
<wikihannibal at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After a long and tiring discussion on the Swedish Wikipedia Village Pump (
> http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bybrunnen#Wikimedialoggor_i_artiklar),
> the logos of the Wikimedia Foundation projects have been deemed "unfree"
> (since they are copyrighted) and have since been removed from the article
> namespace, for example in links to the sister project, such as the template
> linking to Commons: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mall:Commons, but also the
> article about Wikipedia itself has no logo (
> http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).
>
> I have been in contact with Mike Godwin, and got the response that the
> "unfree" logos can be used, as I had suspected. But a growing number of
> Swedish Wikipedians felt that the Wikimedia Foundation shouldn't follow any
> other rules than other organisations whose logos are copyrighted. The
> argument was that we shouldn't use images that any third-party user cannot
> use in the same fashion.
>
> The changes were implemented, although there was not a clear consensus to do
> so. I myself was opposed to this, citing from several emails from Mike
> Godwin. My viewpoint is that if we cannot even use our own logos in our own
> articles, something is very wrong. I also argued that we will not gain
> anything by removing these logos - as this is a non-issue for most ordinary
> users of Wikipedia.
>
> Anyways, I just wanted to hear if anybody else have had encountered this
> topic and how the matter was resolved. Is Swedish Wikipedia the first
> language version to not include the Wikimedia Foundation's logos? Do any of
> you find this discussion strange? Or are Swedish Wikipedia just ahead of the
> curve?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Lennart

This seems to me to be an extremely strange and unusual interpretation
of the Foundation's policy on copyrighted images.  I am not aware of
anyone else having brought this up on other Wikis.

That policy can be read by extremists to justify any practical policy
between "please write down a good reason to use this" and "remove them
all using the policy as a pretext".  It has been intentionally
misinterpreted at both extremes.  It was not intended to be used to
justify unreasonable behavior.  This seems like unreasonable behavior,
though I have no ability to read Swedish so I can't comment on the
particulars there.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com