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.