[WikiEN-l] Image licenses; a small suggestion

[Andrew Gray]

Today, I noticed {{Userpage-image}} on WP:TFD - basically a template
saying "permission granted only to use this on userpages".

Obviously unfree, and should be deleted under existing policy.
However, it got me thinking about that self-same policy. First, a
caveat - I am not a lawyer. Especially not a Florida copyright lawyer.
That said, let us float an idea.

We don't accept non-freely licensed images because they can't be used
in a commercial (or, in some cases, any other) daughter project, which
is fine and dandy and a core principle. However, any daughter project
consists basically of the encyclopedia pages, the images on them, and
a credit.

Talk pages? Not needed. The scads of Wikipedia namespace
administrivia? Almost entirely deadweight - what possible print
version will want to have a copy of the 4,987th ROUGE ADMIN!!!1one!
complaint on WP:AN? User pages? Helpful for attribution, but keeping
them can (as we found with our neo-nazi friends) be, uh, prone to
rather unfortunate misinterpretation. Indeed, I believe we now offer
dumps filtered of all user-space material to avoid this. We're seeing
the divide between "front-end" material and "supporting material"
beginning to be a bit clearer.

All text is GFDL-licensed, and I'm not suggesting changing that, but I
'm proposing creating a class of images which are *not intended* for
redistribution because they're not a part of the encylopedia we're
producing - in much the same way that we're starting to discourage
redistribution of some parts of the project to downstream users as,
basically, not particularly relevant.

So, a suggestion. {{project-image}}. "This image is intended for use
in developing Wikipedia content. Copyright is, unless explicitly
stated otherwise, owned and retained by the uploader; it is an
internal working document, not an encyclopedic image, and not intended
for use in articles. Permission is granted to create derivative works
under the conditions of this license." (or something in that general
vein)

And, using a broad definition of working on the encyclopedia, we have
the small amount of editing overhead that goes into strengthening a
working community - not the aim of the wiki, by a long shot, but
necessary to keep it running well. And, as a part of that, people keep
adding photos...

Yes, this suggestion was prompted by people not wanting to freely
license their userpage photos, but I do feel it has potential for use
in other roles (personally, I have no intention of putting a photo of
me up there!); a case of "build it and they will come", in a way.

Are there any practical reasons, other than a blanket "we don't accept
non-reusable images", that this couldn't work? We're already resigned
to keeping around a large collection of images that are only legally
valid in certain articles & off-limits to whole namespaces (fair use),
which knocks down the "but if it's lying around, people will use it"
argument.

Comments appreciated, though I suspect I'll wake up tomorrow morning
to find half a dozen "this is insanely unworkable, and here's 46
reasons why" notes. C'est la vie.

On a related note, though a little less contentious, a tag along the
lines of {{fairuse-project}} could be handy. I can think of contexts
where it's legitimate to have a fair-use image as part of a discussion
on a discussion page ("purposes such as criticism, comment, [or]
scholarship", remember), but where it wouldn't be appropriate to use
the image in the main articlespace for one reason or another
(inappropriateness for the article, or quality issues).

When I was doing image tagging, I found a good few fair use images on
talk pages - mainly maps, as I recall, presumably because they're hard
to "quote". However, as it stands now, our Fair Use guidelines are
solid on "article illustrations only". Comments?

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk