[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Fri Feb 20 22:30:44 UTC 2004

Delirium wrote:

> However, it may not be impossible to acquire one eventually.  As 
> Wikipedia gets more famous, the estates of famous people may start to 
> dislike the fact that that person's biography has a conspicuous lack 
> of an image, and consent to GFDL-licensing an image to fill the gap.  
> If we fill it in with a fair use image, that removes the incentive.

To add on to this, not only does it remove the incentive, but it hampers 
us as well.  If we have to completely gut our encyclopedia by removing a 
large percentage of its images before we're allowed to publish a paper 
or CD-ROM version in the EU, that's not good.

(This doesn't apply to less borderline things that would be "fair use" 
and/or "fair dealing" under most jurisdictions, or at least a large 
percentage of them.)

Remember, Wikipedia is not synonymous with wikipedia.org--the end goal 
is not just producing a website.  But the website is what people work 
on, so if the website has all these great images that can't be used in 
the paper version, then the chances of the paper version ever actually 
looking decent start to look slimmer, 'cause nobody even notices the 
lack ("hey, the article online it looks fine to me").  If the website 
has conspicuously missing images, people will be much more likely to 
notice that something needs to be done to fill the gap.

(Again, not including things like the Tiananmen Square photo, which I 
agree we should use.)

-Mark