Wikipedia is for use, and there is a primary use and a secondary use. The primary use is for people linking to the site and reading the articles. The secondary use is for people who wish to reuse the content for other purposes.
WP is an encyclopedia, not a content distribution service, Commons, on the other hand, is a content distribution service. For a content distribution service for Foundation project operating under a variety of copyright regimes, it is reasonable to include only material which is free in all or almost all of them. For an encyclopedia, it is reasonable to include content which is legal at the country where the encyclopedia is published.
It is sometimes proposed that we fork enWP to have one with free images only, and one with more liberal rules. But a fork already exists, and it is between commons and enWP.
I know I am suggesting something against established policy. I suggest that it is time we changed the policy, for it is interfering with the production of a good contemporary English-language encyclopedia.
I know this will not be adopted now, but the alternative should be clearly stated: enWP should be open to all content legal in the US. (or alternative country if we find one with more liberal rules)
On 9/24/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/07, Armed Blowfish diodontida.armata@googlemail.com wrote:
On 9/24/07, Armed Blowfish diodontida.armata@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@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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l