[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?
Delirium
delirium at rufus.d2g.com
Fri Feb 20 22:30:44 UTC 2004
Delirium wrote:
> However, it may not be impossible to acquire one eventually. As
> Wikipedia gets more famous, the estates of famous people may start to
> dislike the fact that that person's biography has a conspicuous lack
> of an image, and consent to GFDL-licensing an image to fill the gap.
> If we fill it in with a fair use image, that removes the incentive.
To add on to this, not only does it remove the incentive, but it hampers
us as well. If we have to completely gut our encyclopedia by removing a
large percentage of its images before we're allowed to publish a paper
or CD-ROM version in the EU, that's not good.
(This doesn't apply to less borderline things that would be "fair use"
and/or "fair dealing" under most jurisdictions, or at least a large
percentage of them.)
Remember, Wikipedia is not synonymous with wikipedia.org--the end goal
is not just producing a website. But the website is what people work
on, so if the website has all these great images that can't be used in
the paper version, then the chances of the paper version ever actually
looking decent start to look slimmer, 'cause nobody even notices the
lack ("hey, the article online it looks fine to me"). If the website
has conspicuously missing images, people will be much more likely to
notice that something needs to be done to fill the gap.
(Again, not including things like the Tiananmen Square photo, which I
agree we should use.)
-Mark
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