[WikiEN-l] Deletion before discussion

[Philip Welch]

On May 17, 2006, at 4:52 PM, Rob wrote:

> If I ever wanted to put a pic of myself or my kids on WP, I wouldn't
> want to release it under a free (or free-ish) license so every troll I
> block for vandalism could put my family on their webpage.  Of course,
> they can already do that, but not legally, for what it's worth.

Sounds like putting a pic of yourself on Wikipedia is not for you.

On May 17, 2006, at 6:24 PM, Rob wrote:
>
>> If you don't want trolls using your family photos then you  
>> shouldn't be
>> posting them on Wikipedia in the first place.  Our licensing policies
>> are non-negotiable.
>
> They should be for articles, of course, but I don't see a compelling
> reason why they should be for userspace.

By the site's design and architecture, anything  on it, including  
images, can be changed, deleted, altered, replaced, etc. by anyone.  
The reason for PD/GFDL/CC is that without these measures, it would be  
illegal to use the wiki process on, say, your userpage.

My userpage is copyright me, but released under GFDL. It is, in  
design, a derivative work of Talrias's userpage, which is copyright  
him but released under GFDL. Without GFDL, I couldn't steal Talrias's  
user page design.

A couple people have added pirate jokes to my userpage. Again, the  
revisions they submitted are copyright them, derivative works of my  
revisions under the GFDL. Wikipedia works the same way everywhere as  
it does here due to technical convenience—if userspace wasn't free  
content, it would have to be locked and protected from everyone  
except the user whose userpage it is. This isn't even desirable, and  
even if it was, it would waste valuable developer time and resources.

-- 
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch