And here we go again
Over the last many months, there's been heavy, acrimonious debate over the removal of overuse of fair use images from a variety of classes of articles. Such classes have included album covers from discographies, screenshots from episode lists. Another class where this work has been ongoing has been the removal of character images from "List of characters in ..." type articles. For examples;
Before: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Cars_characters&oldid=... After: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Cars_characters&oldid=...
Recently, yet another debate has erupted over the similar removal of images from a variety of anime articles. For example, Before: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C5%8Cban_Star-Racers&oldid=15... After: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C5%8Cban_Star-Racers&directio...
In a nutshell, the disputants are split into two camps; those supporting removal based on WP:NFCC #3(a) and #8 and the Foundation's licensing policy resolution ( http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy)
A subset of disputants have suggest a compromise position of allowing some characters to be displayed (with an arbitrary metric as to which ones should be allowed to have an image). Opponents to this compromise have noted that if a character is so minor as to not be worthy of an article on its own, there's no reason we must have a copyrighted, fair use image to depict the character in violation of our philosophy on being a free content encyclopedia.
Debate on this issue has roughly centralized into two locations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_Akatsuki_members#Lead_compromise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content#Non-free_images...
Frankly, and bluntly, I'm tired of fighting these battles. There are a few of us who are fighting in these trenches, and there are many times when myself and others feel like we're at the Battle of Verdun, only the people who are trying to uphold the core philosophy of Wikipedia do not have thousands on our side, we only have perhaps a dozen.
It would sure be nice if someone more intelligent than I were to craft a resource point (such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Durin/Fair_use_overuse_explanation, only better) and put the voice of God behind it, along with heavy penalties threatened for continued violations.
These debates keep springing up, over and over and over again. The same tired arguments keep being trotted out in favor of retaining the fair use images. We fight the same battles, over and over and over again. The people working to support the reduction of fair use images are being worn down. It's not sexy work. It's work that guarantees you will be attacked in a variety of ways. I can't tell you how many times people have threatened me with being banned from the project. Recruiting people to do it is second cousin to impossible.
I've made a plea here before. It ended up in yet another long winded debate on the issue.
Please, if you want such abuses to end we need better support. We can't keep fighting these battles over and over again.
Please.
PLEASE
-Durin