[WikiEN-l] There are no pictures in Wikipedia any more

[John Lee]

On 9/24/07, Armed Blowfish <diodontida.armata at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 9/24/07, Armed Blowfish <diodontida.armata at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >> Maybe not banning free image providers
> >> for the sake of The Bureaucracy (TM)
> >> would help.
> On 24/09/2007, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > Which free image providers are banned for
> > the sake of a bureaucracy?
>
> I'm not dragging individuals into this.  But
> surely you have noticed that if someone
> breaks some bureaucratic rule (most of which
> have nothing to do with legal issues) and
> someone else draws attention to it, it doesn't
> matter how much that person has contributed
> to the encyclopaedia (images, text, good
> articles, featured articles, whatever), and the
> person gets banned?


I haven't noticed. Most bans are often justified; we are not a democracy, we
do not have due process (which is pretty much a legal concept specific to
the US, as most other countries have different approaches - and besides, we
are not a country). If the community consensus wants you gone, it does not
matter whether you have done something wrong or broken any rules, you're
tossed out.

We can debate whether this is desirable, but it's worked pretty well. If one
admin does not like what's going on, then that admin unblocks (community
bans only work if no admin is willing to lift the ban). Wheel warring and/or
discussion may ensue, and after all the ridiculous crap that goes around
comes around, we either ban or unban and get back to work on the
encyclopaedia.

It's imperfect, it's definitely not what I like to see. But the point is, it
works, and I've yet to see any ideas that would be more effective without
causing so much controversy and chaos as to make the costs outweigh the
benefits.

But this is off-topic. (Those replying to specific parts of this email can
cut out the irrelevant bits, I suppose.)

Back on topic, I agree from a user's standpoint that the lack of pictures is
pretty bad. But as David says, we should show we're aware of this and that
we're working on getting freely reusable and redistributable pictures onto
our articles. Kudos to those who came up with and worked on this ingenious
solution (I believe geni was one of them?).

On another note, newbies replacing these with unfree uploads is a *major*
problem. If there are free images on Commons, we should probably create a
Commons page for the article's subject and use a commons template on the
article to show that there is free content out there. Newbies will toss out
the free image, but they rarely remove a Commons template at the same time.

Johnleemk