[WikiEN-l] Another sourcing problem

[David Gerard]

On 16 July 2010 08:53, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

> One of the problems, though, is that the founding principle that
> content must be freely licensed has resulted in large swathes of
> images being declared forbidden (because you would need to pay to use
> them and you couldn't freely redistribute them). There are also
> freedom of panorama considerations that lead to many images being
> excluded that many people not familiar with how this varies from
> country to country expressing surprise that pictures of modern statues
> and buildings in public places in some countries are not allowed on
> Commons.


This is a problem that, in large part, eventualism will solve. I say
that because our hard-arsed policies relating to free content have
*directly* caused the freeing of quite a lot of content that wouldn't
have been otherwise. Indeed, the US government bias you note has been
a most useful thing to point out to countries that don't free up
government works.

en:wp does allow quite a few historic images under fair use. And no,
they're not safe. But we're in this for the long haul, not a pretty
page today.


- d.