Erik Moeller wrote:
On 7/19/07, WikipediaEditor Durin wikidurin@gmail.com wrote:
This morning, I did a survey of 100 image uploads. The sample size with relation to the overall quantity of image uploads per month is not statistically significant, but it is terrifying nonetheless. With that grain of salt in mind;
Is there a survey on the _types_ of fair use images that persist a month after upload or so? I would be much more interested in that.
I have no problem with thousands of book & album covers, logos & screenshots. These are cases where there will be no alternative to fair use for the foreseeable future. Wikipedia is, in some ways, like a visitor from another planet, trying to document this one's culture: The fact that _we_ use a free license is very odd, as most contemporary culture is proprietary.
If there's one area we should focus on purging of any & all fair use, it's photos of living celebrities. But the mere fact that the quantity of fair use images is high does not indicate that something is fundamentally wrong; the quantity of articles documenting pop culture is also very high, and documenting contemporary works will often include fair use excerpts. I would be more open to a rigid approach if copyright terms weren't so ridiculously high, but there is no relevant process of contemporary works passing into the public domain anymore. Making use of the few exemptions the law provides seems entirely reasonable.
The issue requires a balanced approach, not a binary one. What are we trying to achieve? Does it help anyone to nuke thousands of album covers, for example -- does it make it more likely that free replacements will be added? I don't think so.
It doesn't particularly matter if free replacements will be added to those articles. "The Free Encyclopedia" means more than "free of charge". It means, to the greatest degree possible, that it should be free of restrictive copyright terms; free to reuse, copy, and modify as you see fit.
View "free" and "encyclopedia" as two equally important halves of our mission. In the case of some articles, a nonfree image adds such tremendous educational value to an article that it's worth it to use it, though it detracts slightly from the "free" aspect. But what, I wonder, do you learn about Wal-Mart from seeing their logo? About your average album or book from seeing what the cover looks like? By using thousands of these images, we're taking away greatly from the "free" aspect of our mission, and adding marginally if at all to the "encyclopedia" part.