[WikiEN-l] Speedy deletions

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/21/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> I may be naive, but I think it is going over the top to generalise
> straw polls as unreasonable just because they come up with different
> decisions to what you expect.

They're not generally unreasonable, but you cannot vote away law and
precedent. Copyright is very complex, and it is unfair to expect the
average contributor to make an informed decision about whether or not
the use of a particular image meets fair use criteria.

I have no problem with someone like Anthony, who has many informed
opinions about copyright law, weighing into a debate or poll. But when
someone wants to upload lots of high resolution scans of comic books
and justifies this with "'''Keep.''' I did the scans myself. They are
useful to the article.", such votes can and should be ignored. This is
equally true for users who are deliberately ignoring policy because
they don't like it.

Blindly giving a lot of power to everyone is equally dangerous to
giving it to only a few. I oppose giving admins arbitrary power to
interpret community opinion, but they need to have _some_ flexibility
to do so. It's a delicate balance.

Perhaps in the long run, we'll have a "Fair Use" course in Wikiversity
and can make participation in that course an ''a priori'' requirement
for voting in a fair use related poll.

Erik