[WikiEN-l] Another sourcing problem

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>> 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.
>
> OTOH it can be defended as an attitude of scholarly type. We want to
> know where our information comes from. We should be concerned about the
> provenance of historical images, also. It is now so easy to fake images
> in certain ways (as I hardly need tell you) that a degree of care in
> asking for background is going to pay off.

Oh, I absolutely agree that provenance and sourcing information is
essential for all images, and more should also be done to verify
images people claim they have taken themselves, as well as ones they
claim are "old". But where someone uploads an image and doesn't
provide the necessary information, the right time to ask for that
information is at the time of upload, not months and years later (as
is sometimes the case on Commons and Wikipedia). And where the
uploader might not know what information to provide or look for, and
where the upload forms confuse them, those who know what is needed
should be helping. One problem on Commons being the different
languages.

Carcharoth