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

[Fastfission]

On 7/7/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> There are two important perspectives on this, the per item perspective
> and the overall perspective.
> 
> Periodically, each and every item needs to be reviewed, and the fact
> that one meets today's criteria for inclusion does not imply that it
> will meet those same criteria next year.

Of course, with 14,449 images tagged as fair use (I figured out a way
to get a rough estimate using "What Links Here" and playing with the
numbers in the URL*), this seems extraordinarily impractical. (To our
credit, we have a whopping 46,520 pages tagged as GDFL).

(Which to me says, if we are not going to purge all of them, then we
should try and subcategorize them into smaller fair use categories,
similar to those used for book covers and so forth, but expand to
other relatively "safe" things such as "historical images" and
"headshots" and "large scientific instruments" or something like
that.)

> Beyond that there is no precise rule that can be
> established, but we do know that there is some imprecise point out there
> which will be over the top.
> 
> The straw that breaks the camel's back does not function in isolation.

This is somewhat true, but it should be remembered that we are dealing
here purely with hypotheticals, that in "real life" it would come down
to the discretion likely of one person (a circuit court judge, unless
these are jury trials, but for some reason I don't think there are,
but I might be remembering wrong).

FF

*For future reference, one can see this link to see what I did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&limit=440&offset=14000&target=Template%3AFairuse
If you click, "Next 440", you'll see there are 9 more on top of that
14440. Whether that is exactly accurate or not depends on the behavior
of "What Links Here" with Templates, of course, but this is probably
pretty close to the right number, da? Am I not clever? ;-)