Yeah. Looking at his talk page makes me sad -- the usual round of scripted & stacked image deletion warnings for copyright reasons. We need socially more appropriate ways to deal with copyright issues.

On 11/6/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: 100% in favor. Wikia is currently funding further development of the LiquidThreads discussion extension, for the purpose of deploying it on Wikia. Funding will continue, and the project will be supervised by me, into December 25.

What about something like the applet at http://wikipedia-irc.cruxwan.de/Chat.html or what about simply promoting IRC a bit more in those templates?

There are a number of other improvements that could be made. For example, the notices that we give people could be made to sound more friendly and personal, and less like a parking tickets. But I think that ultimately it comes back to the software: If we won't accept people uploading without identifying the author (a good thing!) then we should have an upload form that makes such mandatory information actually mandatory.

Yeah. Looking at his talk page makes me sad -- the usual round of scripted & stacked image deletion warnings for copyright reasons. We need socially more appropriate ways to deal with copyright issues.

Here we could improve things by adding a step to new user creation that allows new users to select "for images where I am the creator or copyright holder, I will allow them to be released under this licensing unless I specify otherwise". A default. It could default the license selector, and if the default were made public other people could just fix the tagging rather than nagging. That wouldn't solve the need to ask for authorship, but that issue should be fixed on the upload form.

I've also been rather frustrated with some of the automated tags. For instance, I recently had an album jacket image removed for lack of fair use rationale which I uploaded using a fair use template for album jacket artwork in an article about the album/CD. It was unclear to me where the discussion about fair use was and how wikimedia/ wikipedia could have two different and conflicting views on album artwork and fair use. I asked in the IRC channel and everyone just said, "when I get a bot tag, I just let it get deleted"... which I guess is one way of viewing it... I guess if there were some link to a discussion page or something where you could ask for clarification, that would be useful.

OK, so to be sightly more specific... this happened on en.wikipedia so maybe this isn't the right place to discuss, but... I used this template for my FU rationale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Non-free_album_cover And got this message: Disputed fair use rationale for Image:SummerCDJI.jpg Thanks for uploading Image:SummerCDJI.jpg. However, there is a concern that the rationale you have provided for using this image under "fair use" may be invalid. Please read the instructions at Wikipedia:Non-free content carefully, then go to the image description page and clarify why you think the image qualifies for fair use. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page. If it is determined that the image does not qualify under fair use, it will be deleted within a couple of days according to our criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thank you.BetacommandBot 15:17, 24 October 2007 (UTC) And then this deletion: 21:09, 1 November 2007 Maxim (Talk | contribs) deleted "Image:SummerCDJI.jpg" (Deleted because "CSD I7 - Invalid fair use rationale". using TW)

On Nov 6, 2007 9:29 AM, Joichi Ito <jito(a)neoteny.com> wrote: It isn't ... but thats perfectly okay. [snip] AHH. Have you ever seen [[Brazil_(film)]]? The movie features an oppressive, and apparently nonsensical, government bureaucracy. I don't think it's too much of an overstatement to say that you've bumped into a little slice of Brazil inside English Wikipedia. All unlicensed images on English must have include a statement of why the image is expect to be acceptable as fair use. This isn't an unreasonable demand, or .. isn't when you have our expirence! ... it also shouldn't be a demand that is too hard to comply with. Because of some rather legalistic interpretations of the policy, the template you applied to the image which has *all appearances of a rationale* and which probably says exactly what you would say for a rationale if you spent a long time thinking about it .... isn't actually considered a rationale. You are required to provide a rationale which isn't the template. It can pretty much be a simple repetition of the text in template. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non- free_use_rationale_guideline (which is linked from the bottom of the template) for instructions. I happen to think this is an example of stupid and bureaucratic non-sense to require you to do a bunch of unneeded paperwork to permit an image that we will ultimately accept when the paperwork is done. I've tried to change the procedure on a couple of occasions (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Non- free_use_rationale_guideline&diff=prev&oldid=149336799) but the status-quo on English Wikipedia can be impressively resistant to change, so it hasn't happened yet. (feel free to read the discussion that followed from my comment) What I can't do, apparently, is fix things so that they aren't stupid. But what I can do is offer to do the paperwork for you. Let me know (e-mail is best) when you upload something like an album cover to English Wikipedia, and I'll simply take care of all the byzantine details for you. Sorry for the inconvenience. _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

Because of some rather legalistic interpretations of the policy, the template you applied to the image which has *all appearances of a rationale* and which probably says exactly what you would say for a rationale if you spent a long time thinking about it .... isn't actually considered a rationale.

On 06/11/2007, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: There's probably a bit of that. The problem is that we have a firehose of nonfree stuff being uploaded under the hitherto-unknown "I wanna!" clause of US fair use law. So cleaning it up is getting a bit harsher. I'm a big fan of fair use when encyclopedically useful (and we could get away with *FAR* more than we do), but the floods of crap and the whinier flooders are really quite, um, annoying.

I sometimes wonder if this is an elaborate trick to put people off using non-free images, simply by making it such a hassle that it's not worth their time...

On 06/11/2007, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: No it's to make you think and hopefully show that on some level you understand what you are doing. -- geni

How to quell really stupid deletion requests? AFD on en:wp has the same problem.