On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 4:43 AM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
People stop the flame war, try to design a solution! What would avoid the problem, and still make it possible for the commons admins to do their job properly. Everybody knows they screw up from time to time, its no help if you keep yelling at them. Been there, done that, didn't help a bit.
Why did it fail this time and what can be changed that makes it less likely to fail in the future. Is there any easy quick fix, and is there any larger changes to the overall process.
I would say there's two things that I would have liked to see changed, which would have minimized drama in this case: 1. In large scale deletion proposals, the person proposing the deletion should still personally check each image to see whether it applies. This should not be kept to the people objecting or the person closing the deletion request. In this case it would have meant that only those pictures were proposed for deletion where Facebook was mentioned as the source of the picture, rather than every picture on which the word occurred - and even for those, a quick check of Facebook to see whether it wasn't likely that there were correctly licensed pictures there. 2. No copyright paranoia. If someone comes with a believable story that an image on Commons is correctly licensed, like in this case William's "I know this uploader and it's the celebrity in question", this is sufficient barring evidence of the contrary. Do not delete pictures because 'they could be a copyright violation' but only because 'they are likely to be a copyright violation'.