On 9/14/05, Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com wrote:
Didn't we already discuss this when Pioneer-12 wanted to retain copyright to his user and talk page postings? Didn't we already decide that anything more restrictive than GFDL on Wikipedia would be license hell and not worth the trouble to administer? Didn't we already decide that the submit button was equivalent to a digital signature agreeing to the terms and conditions of submission?
I thought we already did. I hold the view that the allowable licenses should be consistent across the entire Wikipedia site, and that people should know and follow the rules in all Wikipedia locations. This includes user pages, and certainly includes images submitted as well.
This is what I was thinking. The User namespace doesn't really change the licensing situation at all. We're not actually offering people a little piece of the web to call their own -- we are not a free hosting site. (I'm pretty sure that's written in WP:WWIN somewhere)
I also think it's important that people KNOW that the User namespace could easily be re-used as well as any other, so that the whole "you're an editor on the Nazi encyclopedia" scenario doesn't seem so invasive and awful when it inevitably happens, and people realize that if they post pictures of themselves and their dog on a site which purports to be free for reuse, it might just get reused! Unless we specifically say that User pages are licensed in some other way -- which I'm not necessarily opposed to, because they're not really meant to be part of the "encyclopedia" -- I don't think we should allow people to have the impression that they are.
FF