[WikiEN-l] Non-free images, there has to be a better way

Mon Jul 4 14:33:53 UTC 2005

I entirely sympathise. Personally, I don't see why we have to run
around deleting images with non-free licences from Wikipedia when we
have Commons for the fully free licences. What is the reasoning behind
removing all of these images? Apparently my user page image is going
to be deleted because I refuse to release it under a free licence (as
opposed to used with permission).

~Mark Ryan

On 7/4/05, Maury Markowitz <maury at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> During May I wrote an article on the IBM 1360. This machine is
> historically important, it was the first (commercial) terabit store.
> None of them exist any more, they were all decommissioned in the 1980s
> and scrapped. I spent a week getting permission from the UCal to use
> some of their images, images that really helped make the article, and
> added these on June 2nd.
> 
> AFTER posting the images I went back to change the image info on one of
> them. I was shocked to see a notice saying they would be deleted,
> although there was no date given. Needless to say I was more than a
> little pissed off that I was only told about this AFTER going through
> the effort. There was no notice of this, at least at the time, on either
> the main page or the upload page. I wrote about this in the image
> discussion page.
> 
> More recently I went back to the article and found all the images
> deleted. The deleter added a note, but as far as I can tell did so AFTER
> deleting them ( I can't get history on the image itself, of course).. He
> stated I should have tagged them differently. Yes, well, thanks for
> that,  maybe someone should have told me that in the month between me
> uploading them and them being deleted so I could have actually DONE that.
> 
> My complaint here is the completely arbitrary and largely invisible
> nature of this decision and its ramifications. The entire dicussion
> appears to have take place offline. If there was a public online
> dicussion, it was rather well hidden. I certainly was not privvy to it
> until AFTER the decision was made. Further, reading over the discussion
> here, it seems no dissenting views were considered. Nor is there any
> real reason given, other than "we don't like them". I asked for someone
> to explain it to me, but no one did, and they were simply deleted.
> 
> What's particularily baffling is that the deleter suggested I simply
> re-tag them to PermissionAndFairUse. This strikes me as absolutely
> rediculous. First of all, why are these OK and not ones used with
> permission? And if these are OK, why didn't it say so in the warning on
> the Permission tag? And finally why didn't anyone bother to tell anyone
> the answers to these, and all the other questions?
> 
> Maury
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