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

[David Gerard]

On 28/09/2007, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> My derived point is that it's somewhat hypocritical to have a
> different stance regarding appropriate and carefully chosen fair-use
> images than for appropriate and carefully chosen fair-use text.
> We would probably do better to have more of both, rather than less, as
> an Encyclopedia, for the Readers.


I mostly agree with you - quoting images is as important as quoting
text, for the same reasons. I think it would be a very bad thing
indeed for en:wp to completely abandon fair use.

However, there are tons and buckets and arseloads of "fair use" images
which are only "fair use" under the hitherto-unknown "I wanna"
provision of US copyright law.

And as I noted before, if it's a living person who's famous enough to
have an article then in almost all cases it's ridiculous not to
require a proper free-content image. (Whenever I talk to people about
"how do I get my stuff into Wikipedia?" I try to get properly-released
images out of them!) It's important to Wikipedia's mission to show
that we can do all this using free content, and make free content the
only sensible way to do a wide-ranging general reference work.

I personally think record and book articles *should* feature the
covers routinely - low-res covers are blatantly academic fair use in
an encyclopedia article on that actual item, and (though the risk does
exist) no reasonable judge in a Berne convention country could IMO
reasonably rule otherwise. But, I'm not going to cry even one tear if
a record or book cover that isn't actually a subject of discussion is
zapped.

Fair use is good, abuse of it under the "I wanna" clause is why it's
very nice indeed to have WP:NONFREE to point to.


- d.