Kelly Martin wrote:
The difference is that the chess tournament didn't violate copyright, and when told to stop violating copyright, scream that its free speech rights were being violated.
The userbox aficianadoes are.
Kelly
Kelly—
Say an article contained an image not legally usable in Wikipedia. The appropriate action in that case is to delete the image, and remove it from the article, not to delete the article altogether. How, in any way, shape, or form, is the appropriate action for dealing with an image not legally usable in a template to delete the template altogether? The appropriate action is to delete the image and remove it from the template (it can be replaced with simple text or a free image).
Please don't use the copyright issue as a crutch — the reason you deleted the templates wasn't because of the images, it was because you dislike them. It's perfectly acceptable for you to have an opinion on userboxes. What's unacceptable is using your administrative powers to delete those userboxes without any clear consensus. I'm okay with skipping process sometimes if it's unnecessarily cumbersome and there's clear consensus, but that is *obviously* not the case here.