On 11 March 2016 at 11:35, Adam Baso abaso@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi there - speaking to one thing I'm familiar with, with respect to image selection, we believe https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124225 should address fair use ("non-free") images, although page reparses will happen gradually (pages are cached for up to 30 days or so).
Indeed. I manually triggered a reparse on a page which I knew had a non-free page image (by adding a space https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mario&diff=prev&oldid=709579986 to a part of the page where it didn't affect the layout), and the page image was recalculated and is now a free image. Working as intended! :-)
In reply to Geni's query, it is important to point out, however, that the English Wikipedia guidelines on non-free content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content includes a list of exemptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content#Exemptions which explicitly allows non-free content to be surfaced in search results without accompanying fair use rationales. Additionally, English Wikipedia policy is not applicable on a global page such as wikipedia.org. Therefore, the portal was never actually in violation of any policy. Regardless, as Adam noted, for other reasons where this policy *did* apply, T124225 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124225 was enacted which prevents non-free images from appearing as thumbnails in search results.
Thanks, Dan