[Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs ofwomen

[Daniel and Elizabeth Case]

> (I am particularly concerned with bulk uploads from other services
> that don't have such policies in place, such as Flickr, because
> provenance and consent becomes very difficult to trace in that case.)

<climb on favorite hobby horse at first>
This is, of course, another side effect of our overly dogmatic fair-use 
policy, where "it's free like speech as well as free like beer" takes 
precedence over "it's a good-quality, responsibly-taken image" (I bet we 
didn't have these problems when fair use was permitted more broadly). 
Yesterday after reading Sarah's comment about [[Pregnancy]] still leading 
off with an image of a naked woman, I not only added my voice to the 
talk-page consensus that such an image was not necessary (WhatamIdoing made 
the very relevant point that it's not necessary to depict mammary swelling 
since it does not always occur during pregnancy and, at that range, it's 
small enough that it wouldn't really be well conveyed in a picture anyway), 
I looked at the Commons category, not just the well-populated "Nude pregnant 
women" one but the broader "Pregnant women" one. There are certainly better 
images like the USDA one that seems to be the favored replacement, but I did 
notice a lot of the Flickr scrapes, and I really wonder if we should be 
rewarding exhibitionists just for using the CC-BY license (and Phoebe's 
complaint also fits in the broader issue of Flickr's apparent disdain for 
enforcing copyright, to the point that we have a whole page at Commons of 
blacklisted Flickwashers). This has come up before, with a whole bunch of 
homemade porn on Commons that was uploaded under PD-self so people could use 
them to vandalize articles. The vandals have long been blocked but the 
pictures are still there.
</climb down>

Daniel Case