Kelly Martin wrote:
On 9/22/05, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
I would appreciate it if you would take the
trouble to see whether
an image was uploaded in anticipation of article use. For instance,
I often upload postage stamp scans in batches, and it may be a period
of weeks before I write all the articles that will use the uploaded
scans. You're not doing anybody a service by deleting these beforehand,
nor are you incentivizing me to create the articles more quickly or
to write first and upload later - more likely I'll just stop writing.
The policy Jimbo set out allowed a seven day window for a use to be
found for a nonfree image. If you need an image held longer, I
suggest putting a comment on the image description page so that
patrollers know that is what's going on.
I've pondered on this a bit, and it occurred to me that there is an
easy expedient that I think could be raised to the level of policy -
namely, to have the image description page contain wikilinks to every
article that the fair use image is intended to illustrate. Reviewers
can then compare those to the image's "what links here" to see that
they match, while as-yet-unwritten articles appear as red links.
To take an example, suppose we have an Israeli stamp depicting
Ben-Gurion. Fair use might mean that we can use it to illustrate
articles on Israeli philately, but not as a substitute for a free
photo in Ben-Gurion's bio. So we make the description page have a link
to [[Stamps of Israel]]; if the article is yet to be written, the link
is red indicating that it's a future plan. If the link is blue but the
page doesn't show up in "links here", or vice versa, something is wrong;
the image is used in an article where it shouldn't be allowed, or
perhaps the article has been edited to take out the legitimate usage -
maybe a free image is now available, in case we can safely discard
the fair use version, or maybe the article has been vandalized, and we
want to respond by fixing the article, rather than deleting the
apparently-orphaned image.
With a bit of formalized structure for this data, it might even be
possible to write a script that verifies correct usage, and only
warns about suspicious "fair" uses.
Stan