Steve Bennett wrote:
How much value does a photo being "free" really add to any given encyclopaedic article? Is this policy about promoting "free" images not at odds with other policies which are all about producing a high quality encyclopaedia? What happens when the goal to produce a "high quality" encyclopaedia is at odds with the goal to produce a "free" encyclopaedia?
"High quality" but not "free" could mean lifting current EB articles, fixing the mistakes, and putting them on the site. After all, if you're just extracting an article here and there, and our site is educational, that's fair use, right? :-)
Every nonfree image cuts into our status as a free resource; it also affects downstream and commercial reusers of content, who likely can't afford to track down the copyright holder of every single nonfree image and license them, so they just filter them out en masse. So "nonfree" ends up becoming "no picture at all".
Stan