On 9/28/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/28/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/28/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/28/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/27/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Close on 50% of the images on en are non free. Text on the other
hand?
A few percent maybe.
Maybe you mean "a few percent" of all articles contain unfree exerpts of a larger published work... I could stomach that.
But saying "a few percent" of all article text is unfree... that seems excessive, and hopefully incorrect.
Well, it depends on what we're looking at, but I assume most articles contain at the very least quotations under copyright. I would be
surprised
if the absolute number of articles with copyrighted text in them is only
a
few percent. I would not be surprised if the overall proportion of copyrighted text in Wikipedia, however, is a few percent - that seems
about
right. You can't write a proper, comprehensive encyclopaedia article
without
quoting someone (be it a historian, the article's subject, etc.), unless you're intentionally going out of your way to make life difficult for yourself and your readership.
I think this is untrue in many subject areas; in practice, no quotes are needed for most technical articles and many popular culture articles. They should be more common in history and so forth.
Haha, FA/GA reviewers these days are pretty strict about quoting critics in popular culture articles; in fact, I suspect the vast bulk of our unfree content, both text and images, is concentrated in this category.
Very few of our popular culture articles could make FA or GA now. Eventually everything should aspire to that status (hah, maybe next millennium, when we catch up with the article creation rate? 8-).
I don't mean to overemphasize the use of fair-use quotes in the encyclopedia; I try to be realistic about it. My point is that whatever that use is, it is enthusiastically embraced as necessary and proper.
Yes. Unfortunately some people have gone overboard with the images; I'm by no means a "make everything free!" kind of guy, but sometimes seeing pop culture articles full of unnecessary imagery makes me wonder if we really need all this.
Right. We're not a comic book, we're an Encyclopedia. The Images should inform (show what the thing looks like) and encourage interest (look good, be placed well, not overwhelm the text or be overwhelmed by it, but draw someone into the article as a whole).
Album covers are a very good balance, as standardly used.
A couple of images of a character, one by themselves to identify, perhaps another in context with other characters or some key event, in a popular culture character article, will help.
The ones that are image-happy are a detriment to themselves and the Encyclopedia, from an encyclopedia standpoint much less an image-fair-use-policy one.
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.
Indeed it is.
We would probably do better to have more of both, rather than less, as an Encyclopedia, for the Readers.
The most important thing is to use them as necessary and appropriate; as far as possible, we must avoid any less (which harms the encyclopaedia) and any more (which harms the free nature of our encyclopaedia).
Right. We generally have a functional balance at the medium, with a limited usage which most people agree on.
There are articles with both too many and too few. Both of those should be corrected.
If image deletionists did the tag-and-rationale-as-required and deleted only excess images, leaving the appropriate ones, I would be happy. There is a tendency to delete to excess in the hope that they can push the balance point overall, which is merely destructive to the community and the article value.
If image adders just added appropriate ones, I would be happy. There is a tendency for many of them (and the bulk of new images, I think) to be added to excess in the hope that they can create cartoonish image articles rather than enhance and attract and inform mostly textual articles. I don't think that they generally are as intentionally trying to push the overall balance point but are effectively doing so, and that's also merely destructive to the community and the article value.
Blocking both sides equally would perhaps help establish the balance point more effectively; however, the problem is identifying those doing both to true excess and constantly enough to make it worth pursuing.