On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:37 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Unless you
intend to try to roll that back on en.wikipedia and the Foundation policy,
Absolutely not. I don't have any real problem with the way fair use is
handled on English Wikipedia, and have uploaded some files myself under
that justification.
A project to facilitate *search* of existing non-free files on Wikimedia
projects (which I think could probably be accomplished in the WMF Labs
project, with no particular need for broad consensus) would, I think, be
worthwhile.
But an effort to establish a new *project* to facilitate and encourage the
upload of non-free files is something I see as problematic for a number of
reasons:
* Setting up a new project would take a lot of technical and financial
resources
* Establishing sensible policies to handle all the kinds of concerns
established on this list would take a lot of volunteer resources; and
strife and division is a possible, though not necessary, outcome
* Volunteer resources to curate the site would need to come from somewhere;
either they wouldn't, assuring failure; or they would come from existing
volunteer pool, diluting our volunteer resources; or, just possibly, armies
of new volunteers might be recruited for this new project, which would be a
positive outcome. But I am skeptical that outcome #3 would be the most
likely one.
* Differing EDPs on various projects means many files wouldn't be useful
across projects, or it would be difficult to determine whether they are.
* If the new project is successful, it would (yes, among other positive
outcomes) have the negative effect of working against efforts to get people
to freely license their work, to upload images that are in the public
domain but locked away in physical vaults, etc. This may not be of central
importance to you, but it is important to a great many Wikimedians.
It is time to rebalance in favor of fairly and equitably supporting the
educational mission.
"Freely share" is part of the vision statement. It sounds to me like what
you propose is simply a different vision than the one Wikimedia has
convened around. I do not think your vision is a bad one, but I do think
it's a different one, and I'm not sure that dedicating substantial
resources to a bold new project is a good way to advocate for changing the
basic direction this movement is heading.
-Pete