Steve Block wrote:
So that means we aren't an encyclopedia about anything then? We're actually an encyclopedia about what suits commercial usages? Fair play, we have to look out for commercial users, but what is more important here, the encyclopedia or the potential reuse of it?
We've never been *solely* an encyclopedia---we've explicitly been a *free-as-in-freedom* encyclopedia. The *entire point* of creating Wikipedia is to make a reusable encyclopedia, not solely to make an encyclopedia hosted on wikipedia.org and distributed by the Wikimedia Foundation (if that were the goal, there would be no reason to have an open-content license in the first place). In the case of fair use, this is a tradeoff: We want to make as unencumbered an encyclopedia as possible, with maximal possible reuse by anyone for any purpose, balanced against the fact that we'd like maximal coverage of everything as well. So, we allow fair use, but generally prefer free sources where possible, and only use fair use where it ads something that makes it worth the potential copyright difficulties for reusers.
-Mark