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

[geni]

On 25/09/2007, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

The term non commercial is legaly nightmareish

> 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.

The tower was built in 1951 and was a goverment project. As such PD
photos almost certianly exist. Goverment drawings published prior to
1956 will be PD as will any goverment photo taken proir to 1956. So
the problem becomes getting acess to such a photo.

Now the photo here is PD however the scan my not be

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archive/exhibits/festival/list_details.asp?key=546201&rtn=ob%3D%26ob_s%3Dany%26pr%3D%26pr_s%3Dany%26de%3DSkylon%2520%26de_s%3Dany%26num%3D10%26firstob%3D1%26sortby%3D1

Generaly we counter the scan copyright issue by getting out friends in
the US (where the scan is PD) to upload.

-- 
geni