[WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

Thu Sep 15 16:58:15 UTC 2005

On 9/14/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is still perfectly reasonable for a person to naturally want to show an
> image of themselves or other Wikipedias at say a WikiMeet without having to
> release those images under a license that would allow for extensive reuse. Out
> of respect to users, who contribute without pay and just for the fun of it, we
> have always been a bit lax on what users do with their user pages.

It's completely reasonable, but it's not necessarily a smart idea nor
one our licensing scheme accomodates for. As it is, even User pages
are included in our GFDL licensing. They can be reused accordingly and
often are. I think we should either formally carve out a specialized
niche for them as something distinct from the article namespace or
not. Having them be an unspecified informal zone seems like bad policy
for me, because it encourages an idea about "personal space" which is
not currently covered by any of our official or legal policies.

I wholly support any approach that would keep User pages either out of
the GFDL or out of our database ports, to be honest, though I'm not
completely aware of what that would entail in terms of licensing
requirements or technical ones.

> Forbidding such images for no practical reason smacks of fascism to me. So once
> the technical issue I mentioned is fixed, I see no valid reason for us to not
> be more permissive on image licensing in the user namespace (within the limits
> of WP:NOT a personal web page provider)

Well I assure you there is no attempt at fascism here and I'm not
quite sure I see the correlation with what I've asked and the
political systems of Mussolini, Franco, or Hitler, except for the
whole making the trains run on time bit, which I guess I'm somewhat
inclined towards in my mannerisms. ;-)

FF