[WikiEN-l] BetacommandBot, (currently) centralized discussion

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/23/2008 9:43:03 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
tonysidaway at gmail.com writes:

A book  cover is not free unless it's specifically licensed as such by
the  copyright owner.  If that's what you think of as tendentious,  it's
hardly going to surprise anyone if you describe a lot of the  tagging
as tendentious.  "Free" does NOT mean "we can probably get  away with
using this here under fair use", >>


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And no one has ever implied that a book cover is free use.  However,  imho, 
it is *fair use*.
However, some editors want to eliminate any fair use entirely from the  
project.
That to me is not in the best interests of the project.
 
If, in a biography of Patti Smith, we have no free images of Patti Smith,  
but we have a book cover of her biography writen by John Brown or whatever, and  
that book cover, is in fact, a photograph of Patti Smith, we can and should 
use  it in the article.  That photograph enhances the project, harms no one, 
and  is fair use.  Rejecting it for bureaucratic reasons, making the *rule* more 
 important than the participants, is not in the best interests of the  
project.  I'm not suggesting we have a rule for not using book  covers.  I'm 
suggesting that those people who interpret our policy to state  that, are harming the 
project.
 
Some editors place the rules as gods over the community, without realizing  
that it is the community which made the rules.  Some editors place such a  high 
reliance in their personal interpretations of general policy, to fit  
specific situations, that they cannot comprehend how harmful their actions are  to 
the project, when they create such a level of internal discord, and when the  
end-result denigrates the project without creating any enhanced value.
 
The removal of all fair use photographs does nothing useful for the  project. 
 It does however harm it, by removing useful illustrations from  articles 
that could use them, replacing their removal with a vacancy filled by  nothing.  
That isn't progress.
 
Will Johnson
 
 



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