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

[William Pietri]

Rich Holton wrote:
> It's tough to beat no image as an incentive to find one. And it's easy 
> to ignore a frame or a notice. How ugly and intrusive a frame or notice 
> would you be willing to accept?
>   

Yes, I agree that making the encyclopedia less useful is the most 
dramatic spur to making it more useful.

Must it be ugly and intrusive? If the notion is that people care about 
free images, I'd think a simple and reasonable notice would be enough. 
We could try that theory, anyhow, and see how it works.

The alternative theory seems to be that even the people who want free 
images believe that most people don't care, and so making things ugly is 
a way to force everybody else to conform to their standards, avoiding 
the hard work of persuasion, or the even harder work of actually taking 
the photos they want. That's not the theory, is it?


>> I may be going out on a limb here, but I've always thought our primary purpose here was to make an encyclopedia for people to use, and that free content is the mechanism by which we do that, not the main point of the project.
>>
>>     
> As I and others have stated elsewhere, the primary purpose is to create 
> a *free encyclopedia*.
>   

Ok. That's not inconsistent with what I said. I see a public 
encyclopedia as a goal, and Gnu-style freeness as the mechanism.


>> Is there some practical purpose to what I gather is a recent wave of 
>> image deletions? And by practical, I mean described such that a named 
>> group of people will experience near-term benefits. I've only seen it 
>> explained in terms of ideological compliance or technical license 
>> compliance, which has always left me underwhelmed.
>>
>>     
> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in 
> the sum of all knowledge."
>
> Every non-free image we have makes that goal more distant.
>   

Perhaps I was unclear, but you didn't answer my question. You gave me an 
ideology, not a practical reason to do this. And personally, I think 
"freely share" is not strongly related to Richard Stallman's particular 
definition of freedom. Let me try again:

Would you please name a group or groups of people who are prevented from 
learning from Wikipedia because of the not-completely-free nature of 
some images?

Thanks,

William