[Foundation-l] Loriot

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* Risker wrote:
>Well, given that you've been repeatedly directed to the WMF staff members
>who are able to answer your questions, you seem to be working awfully hard
>at *not* asking the people you've been directed to.  Have you even made an
>attempt to post to Geoff Brigham's MetaWiki talk page?   While I cannot
>speak for the manner in which Geoff would respond to you, I don't think you
>have grounds to complain that he is not responding to you directly and
>publicly if you have not contacted him directly and publicly.

By the looks of it, the Wikimedia Foundation has received legal advice
that the Commons community has an incorrect or incomplete understanding
of the legal status of a class of images and deleted some as a result.

What it should have done is inform the community of their reasoning, or
inform it that an explanation is forthcoming but delayed, alongside in-
formation on possible remedies, like whether hosting the images on the
german Wikipedia instead of Commons would be okay, or not, or that they
have yet to look into that question. Otherwise it would be putting the
members of the community and possibly also the Wikimedia Foundation it-
self in legal jeopardy.

Instead it seems to have done nothing to inform the community until it
was asked about the matter, and since then could only suggest that any-
one who wants details might try e-mailing some address, where they may
or may not learn anything which they may or may not share with the rest
of the community. Someday. Which even days later has not resulted in
any more information, other than that someone asked someone to maybe
post somewhere something.

What's not to complain about that? We most likely wouldn't be talking
about this if the Foundation had posted "The information on the legal
status of some images in this class of images is possibly misleading;
based on legal advice, we have decided to remove several images on
Commons; our legal counsel is currently working on an explanation that
will be posted here, but it may take up to two weeks; please do not
restore them on local wikis while we review the situation further" or
something along those lines and had linked that in the deletion log
summaries. I would think that is what the community expects, and it'd
seem telling the Foundation the approach here irritated the community
would be the first step towards improving the Foundation's behavior.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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