[WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

Wed Sep 14 11:55:27 UTC 2005

--- Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do we have an official policy on images on user pages? Correct me if I'm 
> wrong, but wouldn't the use of copyrighted materials there in a way which 
> did not qualify as "fair use" simply be copyright infringement, in the same 
> way it would in the article namespace? Does the law make the namespace 
> distinction? (That sounds like a silly question in a way, but I suppose I'm 
> referencing "safe harbor" laws.) 
> 
> In the end, I think this comes down to "should we allow copyright violations 
> on user pages?" which sounds to me like the answer would be "of course not". 

Copyright violations are one thing and should be removed. Far more sticky are
other types of images that would not be copyright violations per se but are
still against our general policies on image use. A great example are images
under a non-commercial or used with permission license. The reason why we don’t
allow such images in articles is to keep the encyclopedia as free as possible.
But user pages are *not* part of the encyclopedia, thus having those type of
images there does not really hamper third party use of our content. 

So, IMO, we should be far more lax on what we allow on user pages. Mid to long
term, what we *really* need is to offer downloads of content that strip out all
pages in the Wikipedia and user namespace (sic: everything that is
Wikipedia-specific). This would require more extensive use of the help
namespace for things like the multimedia help page and spoiler warning though. 

-- mav

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