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

[Rich Holton]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> 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.
> 

If the non-free image you uploaded were to remain on the article, it 
significantly reduces the likelihood that someone else (or you) will 
obtain a free image for the article. Really, how hard will it be for 
someone to get a free image of the Skylon tower?

Of course, it's *easier* to just use an available non-free image. But 
the easy route is not necessarily the best route.

-Rich Holton