[WikiEN-l] Non-free images, there has to be a better way

[Maury Markowitz]

During May I wrote an article on the IBM 1360. This machine is 
historically important, it was the first (commercial) terabit store. 
None of them exist any more, they were all decommissioned in the 1980s 
and scrapped. I spent a week getting permission from the UCal to use 
some of their images, images that really helped make the article, and 
added these on June 2nd.

AFTER posting the images I went back to change the image info on one of 
them. I was shocked to see a notice saying they would be deleted, 
although there was no date given. Needless to say I was more than a 
little pissed off that I was only told about this AFTER going through 
the effort. There was no notice of this, at least at the time, on either 
the main page or the upload page. I wrote about this in the image 
discussion page.

More recently I went back to the article and found all the images 
deleted. The deleter added a note, but as far as I can tell did so AFTER 
deleting them ( I can't get history on the image itself, of course).. He 
stated I should have tagged them differently. Yes, well, thanks for 
that,  maybe someone should have told me that in the month between me 
uploading them and them being deleted so I could have actually DONE that.

My complaint here is the completely arbitrary and largely invisible 
nature of this decision and its ramifications. The entire dicussion 
appears to have take place offline. If there was a public online 
dicussion, it was rather well hidden. I certainly was not privvy to it 
until AFTER the decision was made. Further, reading over the discussion 
here, it seems no dissenting views were considered. Nor is there any 
real reason given, other than "we don't like them". I asked for someone 
to explain it to me, but no one did, and they were simply deleted.

What's particularily baffling is that the deleter suggested I simply 
re-tag them to PermissionAndFairUse. This strikes me as absolutely 
rediculous. First of all, why are these OK and not ones used with 
permission? And if these are OK, why didn't it say so in the warning on 
the Permission tag? And finally why didn't anyone bother to tell anyone 
the answers to these, and all the other questions?

Maury