[WikiEN-l] Another sourcing problem

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 11:43 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

It is an interesting point that being hardline about copyright puts
pressure on some organisations and governments to reconsider their
laws and regulations. But there is an element where Commons (and to a
lesser extent Wikipedia) is seen as acting like the copyright police,
overextending and throwing out (for lack of information) pictures that
may well be public domain. The solution there is to knuckle down and
find that missing information, or help people find that information.
Too often, though, I've come across an attitude of "well, you can't
prove it is public domain, so delete". That is a cautious and safe
attitude to take, but it is not an attitude that actually helps when
trying to identify and free up new image sources.

In other words, rather than try and make decisions *now* (which
discourage people), it is better to direct resources to finding the
necessary information. I've lost count of the number of deletion
discussions on Commons where people speculate on whether something is
in copyright or not, and then instead of saying "actually, we don't
know and don't have enough information, delete until and unless more
information is found", they say "not free, delete" (making the
assumption that because the information is not there, that this proves
it is copyrighted).

Carcharoth