[WikiEN-l] A Solution to the Image Problem

[Mak]

On 3/22/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
>
> This sort of thing used to irk me terribly, until I stumbled across
> something approaching Enlightenment.  If we assume good faith, the
> answer is obvious: the user isn't lying in a desperate attempt to
> violate copyrights and get us in trouble; he's (it is usually a he)
> merely confused and caught up in process fetishism.
>
> Images aren't deleted because they don't have a tag: they're deleted
> because they have no source and their copyright status is unclear, and
> we've decided not to take the risk of keeping such images around for no
> good purpose.  But if I, or any other person trying to crack down on
> copyvios, try to explain the situation to a newbie, we say: "you need to
> place a tag on this image".  Is it any *wonder* he gets confused?  What,
> will any tag do?  Any source is appropriate, right, even if that source
> says "all rights reserved, do not steal our images or we'll steal your
> thumbs, and what use will your precious Gameboy be then, eh?"?
>
> We confuse what the tags mean with the tags themselves.  I have the same
> problem with other templates, like the {{testn}} warnings: we aren't
> warning people, we're slapping a template on their page
> (congratulations!  You're the 100th RC patroller to tag this page this
> year!  Has it occurred to you that this talkpage already contains 99
> identical boilerplate warnings, and what effect that has on a growing
> lad?), and likewise with images.



This process is called reification, which happens to be one of my favorite
words. It  could  be translated  "thingification", and you're right, it's a
problem.
Mak