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

[WikipediaEditor Durin]

On 7/12/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> You could learn to pick your battles a little better. When a militant
> uses a bot to flag one of my old uploads for deletion in seven days,
> because my fair use rationale isn't at least 3,000 words long and
> written in grammatically elegant Latin or whatever the goalpost happens
> to be that day, I lose interest in helping out. I've fixed up thousands
> of fair-use images in the past, I don't need to be lectured about the
> concept by some noob.

This is a good example of what I speak.

The bot (BetacommandBot) was approved for the actions it is taking. The
policy it is operating under stipulates that a fair use rationale must be
supplied for each use. BetacommandBot doesn't determine how good
a rationale is, it just looks for *any* rationale. A bot can not be described
as a "noob", nor can Betacommand himself be described as such. Yet,
in the above post we see him/the bot come under attack. This attack
serves no purpose.

This sort of behavior is all too common in working on fair use images,
regardless of who is doing the work, regardless of whether it is a bot
or not. I don't mind the unending personal insults. I do mind not having
adequate Foundation support to correct our serious fair use situation.

-Durin