On 7/12/07, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/10/07, WikipediaEditor Durin
<wikidurin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
<snip/>
Please help us.
Respectfully,
-Durin
Consider that you may have put yourself (and the project) in a
"helpless" position toward fair use abuse when you resigned as an
admin. I'd love to help in that area too but I doubt I could "gain the
community's trust" as they say.
Whether I am an administrator or not has absolutely no bearing on this.
One (one) of the reasons I resigned as an administrator was the constant,
unending threats leveled against me to have my adminship removed.
I wanted to remove that tool from the people who continually fight
against attempting to bring the project into compliance with our fair
use policies.
Bottom line here; the Foundation has mandated that we come into
compliance by Spring of '08. I'm telling you this is flat our impossible
under the current situation where little in the way of clear demarcation
has been given.
To give an example, in the Foundation resolution, it clearly shows that
replaceable fair use images of living people should be deleted (item #3
on the resolution). We've got people who fight against this anyway, but
at least with the resolution we have a bright line defense that we can
cite; the person is alive, thus it's replaceable. Point to the resolution,
end of debate. This very thing is happening with a user right now on
Wikipedia (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mosquera). With
the resolution, there's no question this fellow is in the wrong.
With broad ranges of other images, we are left almost defenseless
against unending debate about why x,y,z image should be allowed.
As an example, observe the featured article request for Steven Colbert.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Stephen_…)
The article has a number of fair use images which contributed little or
nothing more than illustrating a given show that Steven Colbert was on.
Compare against the "Truthiness" image located near the bottom of
the article, which does directly contribute to the inline text. The images
in use here are very much decorative. Despite this, we have people
arguing against their removal or modification of the text such that the
text needs the image to complete itself. Observe in the FA request
that 17Drew says "Since when does a copyrighted image have to illustrate
a specific scene?" I.e., decorative is ok. This is not an inexperienced
user; he's been here a year, with thousands upon thousand of edits,
10k in the mainspace alone, and an administrator.
The point here is there is virtually nothing to definitively point to among
policy and resolutions to say that decorative use or use to merely
identify something is wrong. Our *general* attitude on en.wikipedia is
that we tolerate fair use when that image is specifically of the thing
the article is the subject of, for example a book cover is acceptable
for an article on that book. But, every time..and I mean every time...
we discuss usage beyond this context, we run into endless debates.
We've got people endlessly arguing over the meaning of "minimal"
in item #3 of the resolution. In one debate, we had people actively
arguing that the use of 133 fair use images on the article constituted
minimal use, because in each case one image was used to identify
a single subject, therefore it was in essence 1 image per use, not 133.
I kid you not.
We've got people endlessly arguing over the term "significance" from
our non-free content criteria item #8, with a very broad range of
interpretations on what that means. There's plenty of people that
feel pure identification is "significant".
How many times do we have to debate these issues? How much
energy do we have to exert? How often do we have to end up in
RfCs, mediations and RfRs (all of these have happened, some of
them multiple times) over this issue?
This has to stop. We need a bright line defense, a clear line of
delineation to end this nightmare. If the Foundation expects
en.wikipedia to come into compliance by Spring of '08 it must
take action to give us the tools necessary to accomplish this.
We're working on 200,000 images used in tens of thousands
of ways. We have virtually no direction, no bright line to point
people to and say "This is policy. This is resolution. Period."
We need a considerably clearer delineation and we need it now.
-Durin