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

[John Vandenberg]

On 9/26/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

How does this impact our use of album covers under fair-use?

> 2)the shear number of them we use

This is due to the the shear number of albums in Wikipedia.

> 3)the lack of commentry on the cover art in articles.

The majority of our hosted cover art are due to us having an article
about the work.  Fair-use on the article about the album can be
minimally justified as for identification purposes.  Not ideal, but
also not disputable.  As a result, it should be clearly undesirable to
delete images of album covers where we have an article about the
album, or expect to in the near future.  Yet they are deleted from the
fair-use pile on a daily basis.  Of the 100 images in [[Category:mages
with unknown copyright status as of 18 September 2007]] when I looked
this morning, five appeared to be album covers, and they were all
deleted (as many logos were also deleted):

[[Image:Trapt LIVE!.jpg]]
[[Image:Sugababeschangeofficial.jpg]]
[[Image:Thevines highlyevolved.jpg]]
[[Image:Evanescencecover.jpg]]
[[Image:66 chobits002.jpg]]

Obviously we would prefer a commentary to strengthen our fair-use
claims and to improve our encyclopedia.  Necessary improvements in
articles can be noted and managed with tags.  I wouldnt be surprised
if there was a group of Wikipedians that would love to
work on [[Category:Album articles with cover art in need of commentary]].

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

Obviously unnecessary.  Do we have bots/tools tracking cases like this
where non-free media is being used on articles without a fair-use
rationale?

> > 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

Thanks.  That does look like a concern.  Where they hosting high res
images?  Do we know why they were targeted?

> > 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.

I have seen them in the fair-use pile, and I have put some in the
fair-use pile because I wasnt adequately confident that PD applied.

The "no license pile" is treated with even less care.  Automating the
tossing of images onto piles considered to be junk inevitably leads to
this, and taking them off that pile is difficult work.

For example, before breakfast [[en:Image:Edward_Ginn.jpg]] ([[Edwin
Ginn]]) was also in the nld pile for September 18; not surprisingly it
was deleted by the time I came back from breakfast.  It takes time to
figure out whether an image is PD, or failing that to justify that the
image is not replaceable.

> > 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.

No.  We should require that they are put onto a separate pile, and
reasonable attempts are made to contact the uploading user.  As it is,
there is little point contacting the user as another admin will delete
the image before the user has responded and understands how to address
the license problem.

> > > 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.

Only if you dont want it to be.

The context was that we do not need to be responsible for all possible
downstream copyright limitations.  We can and should do everything
possible to ensure that where there are limitations, downstream users
are able to use our metadata to easily comply.

Adding this metadata makes our encyclopedia more re usable.

> > > > 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

Then I misunderstood your comment.  What type of non-free do you want
protected and encouraged on English Wikipedia?

> >  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.

You personally don't need do all this for my suggestion to be
workable.  We have residents of France amongst us, and it only takes a
few copyright savvy people in each country for the rest of us to know
the clear cases.  For jurisdictions where we dont (yet) know the
boundaries of acceptable non-free, we would err on the side of caution
and reject dubious non-free.

> > 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.

Time is on our side.

> >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.

I attribute that more to the growth of our Commons project; the body
of readily accessible knowledge about what is "free" in other
countries, and a strong team of people dedicated to finding assisting
people find and upload free content.  Deleting a set of non-free
images "resets" the project a little, and of course the second time
Wikipedians are likely to do a better job, and will try to find a free
image with assistance of the Commons community.

The same result could also be achieved by identifying types of readily
replaceable free images, listing them all and driving the list down to
zero.

> > 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.

We are serious about it.  There is a project dedicated to it.

> > 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.

At present, we scare new contributors away.  Even if a new user makes
it through the upload form, it is quite probable that they wont tag it
sufficiently or be able to work out how to add it onto the article,
and it will probably be deleted anyway.

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

No; we strongly prefer free media, and have a project dedicated to
cultivating it.

> > > 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.

By qualifying and using them appropriately, we strengthen the ability
and resolve of the wider public to keep fair-use alive.  This in turn
keeps copyright laws in check and ensures that copyright holders know
that if they want to control all access, they should keep their works
out of the public eye.

> > 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.

Software can change.  What limitations on uploading would you like to
see in the software?

> > 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]]

Strong opinions from motivated individuals are not avoidable.
Deleting images before they notice only results in churn and
resentment.  It is better that they are aware of new images as they
are uploaded, and are forced to pick and choose.  Also if new images
are seen by more eyes on upload, and they are tied to a specific
article, we can strengthen the image CSD to allow deletion of
unjustified fair-use on sight rather than wait seven days.

> >  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.

This is a lesser evil that can be discouraged, identified easily and
fixed with no harm done.

--
John