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

[Ian Woollard]

On 24/09/2007, Nick <heligolandwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> We've not banned anybody for contributing images to Wikipedia, be they
> freely licence or copyrighted and used under our fair use provisions, and
> I
> don't think we've blocked any users for uploading fair use material
> roughly
> in accordance with policy (copyright, source, rationale etc). People who
> are
> getting blocked are people who are claiming copyright on work that is not
> theirs,  and we're not talking about the misguided souls who think because
> they've made a screenshot, they own the copyright, we're talking about
> people who continually claim ownership of stuff they're finding on the
> internet in a deliberate attempt to circumvent fair use and deletion
> policies.


I don't know, the image stuff is a total balls-up IMO. As an example I found
an image of a Skylon tower on the internet. The image was *not* free, but I
contacted the guy that owned copyright and he relicensed it, but to non
commercial only. I had no choice, that was what he chose.

So I uploaded it on wikimedia.

An admin guy removed it on the grounds that it was not allowed to be sold
commercially. The guy that did it also accused me of lying about having gone
to the trouble of relicensing it; even when I had included the email
permitting its use in the text when I uploaded it as well.

I have mixed feelings to say the least about deletions on the grounds of
being non commercial, the article was left without any images at all, and
there was and is no free replacement anywhere (in the end I uploaded a
god-awful sketch I made). It would be much better just to strip out the non
commercial images when appropriate.

Did anyone gain from the deletion? No; the wikipedia site itself lost an
image, and we had a legitimate license to use it for non commercial reasons.

And the upload pages UI is a complete disaster, even when I'm uploading
stuff that's completely legitimate half the time it gets put up for deletion
on purely bureaucratic reasons; it's not at all obvious (or it wasn't I
haven't uploaded recently) what the heck you were supposed to do?

All in all, I'm not surprised we don't have more pictures, the system is so
very bad in loads of ways, unless the image is public domain, there's almost
no chance in practice that you can use it.

Nick
>

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.