[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project boring to death

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Silas Snider wrote:
> >Except when process protects us from (potentially lenghty and costly)
> >legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the
> >right to even host the image.
> >
> It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us
> had half a clue about what they are saying.  Such legal proceedings are
> always possible no matter what we do.  So too is winning the big prize
> in a national lottery.  If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of
> that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not
> make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.

Of course, it's always possible to be sued no matter what we do...
thus we should not do anything to decrease the probability of lawsuit!
  It's all so simple!


On a more serious note...
It does make sense to permit some things which will never be a risk or
a problem.  The problem is that with thousands of users, for any
instance there is someone who doesn't see a problem with it. My
favorite, although old, example is Raul654 arguing that a cover
recording of [[Alanis Morissette]]s Ironic [[Ironic (song)]] was
public domain.

As a result, we can't simple accept all members of the community
carrying the ability to make exceptions.   To me this seems like a
hard problem.

I oppose this image being claimed as fair use on English Wikipedia in
the Wikipedia: namespace. I'd rather a {{Because Erik Said So}}
template be created, if we're going to grant Erik the ability to
unilateral ignore our requirements for image in the Wikipedia
namespace.  It is important that in the process of allowing exceptions
for obviously harmless things that we do not undo the work of others
who have worked so hard to keep unacceptable material out.  The unfree
image of Tim Starling we hosted on his user page easily caused months
of additional work in reducing unfree images in userspace because it
was frequently cited as a counter example, prolonging uncomfortable
disagreements.

Of course this is not a matter of legal peril... it is, rather, a
matter of commitment to our goal of free content.  I hope that when I
die no one insults my contribution to Wikipedia by increasing the
number of non-free images we have by uploading non-free images of me
to all our projects, especially ones where my only interactions were
interlanguage links.