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

[geni]

On 25/09/2007, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> In what way are they an issue?
>

1)there appears to be a market for low res album covers
2)the shear number of them we use
3)the lack of commentry on the cover art in articles.

Things like [[Abbey Road (album)]] are not a problem but
[[Endless_Love_soundtracks]] is (ignoreing the other problems with
that article).

> Have we had any complaints?
>
> Honestly interested..

I don't belive so. However sites with simular content have had issues
in the past:

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/3608.cfm


> However, the recent practise is to replace AGF with bots because they
> cant assume, judging good in black and white, and dont have time for
> the messy business of intentions.  The balance has shifted without
> consensus due to the efficiency of the bots, and the backlogs they
> cause.  Admins clearing those backlogs on Wikipedia rarely spare the
> time for the easy cases such as logos, PD images that can be detected
> with the human eye and brain

PD images should not be turning up in the fair use pile.

>and user contributed images that are
> almost certainly intended to be donated to Wikipedia under any
> license, except that the new user has no idea how to do that.

The legal situation with regards to these is so messy such images are
best deleted.

> > The more use able an encyclopedia is the better it is.
>
> In context of the email you responded to, this is an argument for
> gracefully degrading when images cant be used.  We can, and should,
> have the 1000 words as well as the image.  Free images are of no use
> to the blind.

That is not a copyright issue.

>
> > > I'll be roundly condemned for saying this, but I believe that the
> > > second and stronger motive for being so rampantly anti-fair-use,
> > > for deleting all fair-use images now (instead of leaving them
> > > around until truly-free alternatives can be found), is that it
> > > helps push a POV agenda that the world's copyright laws and
> > > attitudes about copyright are wrong and need to be changed.
> >
> > Nope. Most of the world doesn't have fair use. If you wanted a better
> > conspiracy theory you might wish to consider the match between fair
> > dealing and our fair use polices.
>
> Does this mean then that you want the English Wikipedia to have our
> non-free media limited to the intersection of all non-free laws across
> the globe?

No

>  Has an analysis been done on what provisions for non-free
> will be left if that was adopted ?

No because no one has suggested it.

>I expect that this would exclude
> all satire, and probably many other types of reuse allow for by common
> law.  A more workable approach would be to limit non-free to the
> provisions in the country of origin where also permissible in the host
> country USA.  A lot of our fair-use media originates from the USA, so
> this would mean that fair-_use_ is still acceptable in those cases.

I really really don't feel like trying to trace all unfree images to
country of origin and then haveing to learn any more elements of
french law than I've already needed to.


> Again, I think that dragons be there, and we are on safer ground by
> finding ways to include most image where USA fair-use applies, and
> ensure that the encyclopedia gracefully degrades where an image may
> not be used.

There are over 100 legal systems on this planet. Have fun working that
one out. While most of the former british empire has fair dealing
based systems there are the other european empires to consider as well
as all the local modifications.

>This would of course be coupled with measures to tag
> images that are replaceable and try to find replacements as soon as
> possible.

Been suggested from time to time.

> > On a local level we have found we are more likely to get free media
> > where non free media is forbidden.
>
> {{fact}}

See our living people bios. Used to be almost every pic of non US gov
person was non free. Now this is not the case and images numbers in
that area are riseing again.

> Forbidding non-free media has a cost of churning through non-free
> images,

Fairly low once people get that we are serious about this free media thing.

> and even the effort to acquire free media where non-free would
> be sufficient, in the short term,

What you accept in the sort term you will accept image copyright wise
in the long term and before long people will be argueing that they
have some right to it.

>is time that could have been spent
> creating free media where there is no non-free equivalent,

Generaly the people who do that are not the same people.

> or
> uploading historically valuable works to Wikisource, or writing more
> free content on Wiktionary, Wikipedia and Wikibooks.  As you know,
> putting works on Wikisource also usually involves adding free media to
> the commons, and expanding Wikipedia increases the visibility of
> Wikimedia, in turn promoting the addition of free media by new
> contributors.

No. You get free media from new contributers by sending a clear
signal. Allowing unfree media does not help with that.

> We need to be careful not to put free media ahead of
> the other free content.

We put it considerable behind.


> > We accept copyright as is. The GFDL doesn't really work otherwise.
>
> Right, nobody who is well informed in this debate is against
> copyright; we all know that it underpins our daily contributions.
> Most of us have been around long enough to intimately understand the
> basis, motivations and long term effects of different copyleft
> strategies.  The debate here is similar to the nature of the "open
> source" vs "free software" debate, only in this case it is "fair
> use/dealing is a human right" vs "free content".

That would suggest that I accept that "human rights" have some kind of
real existance beyond people's power to enforce them. I do not.

> We are all on the
> same side, but have differences on the priorities and how we should
> act in the short term in order to promote the same long term goals.
>
> For my part, it is the current practices for removing fair-use that
> concern me, as I am happy with the policy of limiting replaceable
> fair-use.  I think upload limitations may even be necessary to keep
> fair-use manageable, perhaps using the upcoming flagged revisions
> improvements to build better heuristics into MediaWiki to determine
> when a user should be prevented from uploading more images.

We do not have the ability to only block people from uploading.

> Another solution is to put more eyes onto the problem sooner by
> enhancing the upload function so that, on enwiki, it is an action
> associated with articles.  All new images could initially be placed
> onto a gallery tab of the associated article, and these uploads would
> then appear on the Watchlist of people who potentially care about the
> image.  This would hopefully ensure that images are quickly
> investigated, cleaned up, properly tagged and put to good use, or
> pushed into the deletion queue because the image itself isnt
> desirable.

Generaly experence suggests that copyright is best delt with by people
who don't otherwise generaly interact with the article. See
wikiproject clasical music's attempt at a copyright policy or the
issues that complicated what was copyright wise a fairly
straightforward case with regards to
[[:Image:AntiWarRallyFeb162003.jpg]]

>  A natural extension of this would be to limit the image to
> that one article until it can be verified as free content, or a
> fair-use rationale's for another article has been assessed & approved.

So people upload it twice under different names.

-- 
geni