[WikiEN-l] Technical solution to bad fair use (was:Uploading images should be a privilige...)

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/3/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article
> basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is
> never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high

Eh? Britannica has done pretty well at producing a high quality
encyclopaedia, but they haven't gotten off the ground in the free
stakes.

> quality even if it lacked fair use images. Most encyclopedias do *not*

It would be, shall we say, "less high quality".

> have an image for every article and do not feel the need to, much less
> images of lesser known celebrities and video games.

Wikipedia is not most encyclopaedias, it's a hell of a lot better.
It's much broader, and significantly deeper in many areas. Most
encyclopaedias don't have a photo for every article because they don't
have room to publish them, not because they don't feel they would be
of value.

> Also, I think the more free and good looking images Wikipedia has, the
> more impressive and useful it is. Wikipedia is currently the only site
> I know of on the 'net where you can get high-quality vector images
> illustrating a wide-variety of things (parts of cars, household items,
> hydrogen bombs).

Yes, it's a pity that we have to do all our diagrams from scratch,
there are thousands of articles that need some.

> Ugly free images can also inspire better free images. I have many
> times replaced well-intentioned but amateurish free images with
> re-done, more professional looking free versions. If everything is a
> slick un-free image, though, the obviousness of what should be
> replaced goes down a bit.

I would have no qualms against putting a red border around non free images.

Steve