[WikiEN-l] Fair use issues; we need serious help

[Todd Allen]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Garion96 wrote:
> [snip]
>   
>> Less bad, but still bad. I still think it is excessive that we have over
>> 300.000 non-free images (anyone has the exact number?) for two million
>> articles.
>>     
>
> Until recently we could only guess but a recent massive template
> standardization effort, mostly undertaken by Cyde, now makes counting
> them trivial:
>
> At this moment there are 323,495 non-free media on Wikipedia out of
> 757,395 files. This is down from a recent high of something like 450k
> ... due to cleaning up the backlog of unused images, and some general
> large scale non-free media clean up efforts. (Many of which have been
> a bit over-zealous in my view.. but thats another story).
>
> On 8/22/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Yes, that sounds bad. Imagine that 12.5% of our articles were
>> cut-and-paste copyvios. The idea here is to be making a -free content-
>> encyclopedia, not just any old encyclopedia, and we seem to be failing
>> at that.
>>     
>
> Now, I dare you to ask how many of the 1.75 million commons images are
> actually used in enwp articles.
>
> I think the more useful question is not what percentage of the images
> are non-free, but "what percentage of the articles contain no non-free
> images?".
>
> ... of course, what you think would be a good or bad answer to that
> one depends on your feelings on a lot of different subjects including
> things what percentage of WP articles you feel should be about
> pop-culture subjects.
>
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>   
Well, I think we've got a lot of articles on pop-culture subjects that
could be merged. There's no question we should have an article on a
popular TV show, but unless some character out of it really stands out
and has been analyzed by sources in an out-of-universe fashion, we don't
need separate articles for characters and the like.

But what if we do? We don't need an image to illustrate every anime
character that has an article, or to show the cover of every album, or a
screenshot of every video game. We can have pop culture articles without
nonfree images. No nonfree images is an option. So even 2 million pop
culture articles wouldn't necessitate one single free image. The German
Wikipedia seems to do just fine with that, I think we would too.

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