[Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia

[Thomas Dalton]

On 07/01/2008, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wouldn't it make sense to enforce the restrictions on non-free images
> prior to upload rather than after, when its become viewed as 'content'
> part of an article and folks are distressed about deleting it?
>
> If the object is to use non-free content only where we have to and
> until we no longer have to (which it is) then each instance of
> non-free content should be reviewed against this rubric before being
> uploaded into the article space. By a person, or a group of people.
> This may create a different sort of backlog than what we've got, but
> at least it is a review/inclusion backlog rather than a deletion
> backlog.
>
> Uploading is easy - making a superficially sufficient fair use
> rationale is easy. Finding and deleting these images once they have
> been uploaded is difficult, and the images are a risk and a violation
> of our license while they remain. Therefore, the logical response is
> to make uploading non-free content harder.

That would involve a very large amount of bureaucracy and a lot of
effort. I think Bold-Revert-Discuss is a good method for dealing with
such images, just as it is for other types of content. The discussion
is going to be just as heated whether it happens before or after the
image is added. All this would do is reduce the number of images by
creating more hoops to jump through - such a reduction doesn't
discriminate between good and bad images.