[WikiEN-l] Image of the day

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 28, 2008 2:52 AM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Carl Beckhorn wrote:
> > Personally, I find it strange to think that any nonfree content not
> > under the control of the foundation should appear on meta.
>
> And I find it completely bizarre that there is apparently no place
> anywhere within any of the foundation's projects that we can host an
> image that's explicitly licensed for our use.

Meta would probably make a lot of sense for things like this: Not to
become a general unfree media dump, but for for cases where such
things are useful for doing our own work.  The counter argument is
that people will start linking to meta to evade project policies, but
that already happens with random external sites.

I think it would be worthwhile to explore what reasonable exceptions
could be made on meta for this kind of thing.

Extending strong requirements for free media beyond the bounds of the
'product' is essential for fostering free media as part of our
community identity, but for intrinsically sausage making things like
letters and awards there probably isn't much benefit.

Whatever we do we need be careful to keep material which is not freely
licensed treated as second-class (and as far away from the product as
reasonably possible), but second class doesn't always necessitate
"deleted".

> I'm all for free content and all, but this has the unsettling feel of
> fundamentalism.

That is *exactly* what you were intended to feel:  .... This
nomination of was an example of [[WP:POINT]].  The nominator did so
with the intention of using it to argue to change the policy. He
didn't get what he expected and now regrets doing that.  :)  Lets keep
this in mind.

Selective enforcement has an amazing power to dull the sharp corners
of any rule.  Had someone not been interested in trying to make an
example out of this it could have happily sat forever with its less
than totally accurate license tag.  Less than ideal, perhaps, but it
would be far far from the worst inaccuracy in tagging.  (Not that I
think the outcome should be changed now...  it stops being selective
enforcement if instead people start voting to ignore the rule)