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

[John Lee]

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 so true. I agree with virtually everything Durin has said, and I've
wasted a lot of my life arguing with people who just don't get our non-free
content policies, but the Taylorised hordes (albeit small ones compared to
the hordes of crazed editors who insist images which only identify something
are perfectly fine) of taggers who insist that your rationale is
insufficient are particularly annoying.

My understanding of rationales has always been that they are meant to show
that the editor in question has understood our policies concerning non-free
content and is capable of applying them. Rationales are now used more for
the sake of themselves than anything else, though - I understand a lot of
editors see them as just another hoop to jump through. If you ask me, as
Kirill said, a fair use rationale is quite ridiculously irrelevant to the
free encyclopaedia. It's an admirable attempt to get our policies enforced,
but if you ask me, it's not working.

Johnleemk