[Wikipedia-l] Automatic image tagging

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 6/5/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> So I thought, why not, upon upload of a new image, *automatically* add
> "{{unverified}}" to any image dewscription that does *not* contain the
> sequence "{{"? This is dead easy technically, and will bring untagged
> images to our attention without wasting time and effort of people who
> could do something more constructive.

A good idea, but I'm concerned that users will just guess a license
when they are fixing unverified images. It is already the case that
wikipedia has many images incorrectly tagged.

Most of the time only the uploader can identify the copyright except
in the rare case of an historically notable image that we're using as
fair use... For other case it would take more effort to locate the
source (if it's even possible) than to replace the image, and in many
of the cases where the image wasn't notable but we could find it
without the uploader the image will not be free for us to use.

Because of this the unverified template need to instruct users not to
add the license. Users should hunt down the uploader and get the
uploader to set it. If the uploader is not available we should dump
the image.