On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
Silas Snider wrote:
Except when process protects us from (potentially
lenghty and costly)
legal proceedings. Without a tag, it is not clear whether we have the
right to even host the image.
It would be nice if people who put up these claims about protecting us
had half a clue about what they are saying. Such legal proceedings are
always possible no matter what we do. So too is winning the big prize
in a national lottery. If you sign a binding agreement to donate 50% of
that prize to WMF when you win it, I would suggest that the Board not
make that eventuality a prominent part of its future plans.
Ec
I'd like to think I have at least half a clue, having seen loads of
"you are using my copyrighted material, take it down or else"
messages. (And then many more "hey, I wrote this press release, and
you guys called me a copyright violator, take that down immediately."
You just can't win.)
Most of them are just angry and will never actually go to the trouble
of a lawsuit, sure. Some of them might. Considering the volume, not
many of them would have to for it to be a huge waste of the limited
resources of WMF. It's *possible* for people to attempt to sue us for
all sorts of frivolous things even if we take as much care as
possible, yes, but it's not the wisest course of action to invite it
where we don't need to by failing to be responsible.
However:
In this case, there must be some sort of special case. Purist though I
generally am, surely there must be some way to hang on to a few
pictures of deceased editors and tag them appropriately to make their
status clear. Considering all the copyright issues on the project, it
would be a happy day if this were the most pressing of them. I would
be loath for this to be some sort of precedent so that everyone and
his dog wants an excuse to be a special case, but, well, really, I am
OK with this particular image.
-Kat
Just a thought... Dismiss it if that sounds stupid.
I suppose only a minority of you guys have known wikipedia before there
were user pages (within a user space).
In the old wiki, there was no user space. Someone could have a user name
and no page associated with it. As long as the wiki was small, no one
really needed a private place to communicate. There was even no
equivalent to the village pump. We just discussed on talk pages. And
when a wiki has 5 modifications per day, it is not an issue to follow
your own discussions :-)
Then, people started having their own page. It was easier to communicate
with other editors, when the community started growing. Of course, there
was no user space, so user articles... were encyclopedic articles. I
remember when I created my user page... [[anthere]]. It was also a
french word, so my user page was sitting at an article place :-)
But do you know why user pages are really necessary ?
Not really to communicate. In a collective project, it is important to
keep some private space for each individual. A place where they can blow
steam. Where they can make their own personnality more important than
the collective. Where they matter as individuals. On projects with rules
such as NPOV, it is also highly suitable to offer a space for people to
express a POV.
The need for that space was quickly recognised. It was identified and
separated from the encyclopedia. In a recurrent fashion, we observe
issues about user images. These user images actually ARE in the
encyclopedic space. Why ? Why could not they be separated in the user
space just as user pages ? NPOV is a very strict rule of Wikipedia and
still, we do allow opinions to be expressed on user pages. Why could not
user images be stored separately from encyclopedic images ?
ant