On 7/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
I hate to spoil your fun, but what is going to stop people from just claiming "Yes, I made this" on every random image they get from Flickr/Photobucket/Google images?
It is pretty clear that our copyvios come because strangers to our project don't know any better... It was free for them to obtain from some site, so they can't see a reason we can't have the picture too.
Unfortunately it seems that when the site tells them no (as happens with the prohibited options in the drop down, a great many people have no reservations lying to the site in order to get it to not say their images will be deleted. :( I don't think this is because people are dishonest at heart, but rather because people are conditioned to press buttons until the computer does whatever they want.
That said, I think "saying no" would cause a real reduction in bad images... but if we aren't careful how we say no we will encourage people to twiddle the knobs until they've left misleading metadata. I'd rather we have more violations which are tagged somewhat correctly than fewer violations but with them tagged as free content.