On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, james duffy wrote:
One final point: a quick glance suggests that many of the earlier DWs (notably Ron Davis but also others) downloaded many images with no indication of copyright. These may also have to be removed from articles and deleted. The downloads of Joe Canuck have now been deleted from wikipedia.
I should point out that, regardless of copyright issues, as a matter of academic ethics we should *never* use third-party materials in Wikipedia without citing the sources. That goes just as strongly for images as for text.
Yes, we've got a lot of images already here that aren't well documented; and they do need to be gone through and either documented or tossed out, which will be boring and take a lot of time.
People uploading _new_ images should know better, and ought to be citing sources as they upload. If you forget to do so, that's okay; but when someone calls you on it, you need to correct the fault and cough up the cite, not threaten and insult them and hide behind nonsense about copyright and the DMCA. That kind of behavior is not going to be tolerated, and images under that kind of dispute are almost certain to be deleted on principle.
(Speaking only for myself, but I don't think I'm wrong here.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)