[Foundation-l] Fair use on English Wikinews

Fri May 13 04:29:27 UTC 2005

I would like to re-enable local uploads on the English Wikinews for the 
purpose of fair use image uploads only. We have worked in the last few 
weeks on a whitelist policy for cases where we believe fair use to be 
acceptable:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Fair_use

This includes screenshots, publicity photos explicitly intended for the 
media, logos, and images under "semi-free" licenses which we might get 
under a fully free license eventually, but where a breaking news 
situation requires us to make a temporary compromise.

This is very important for us; we've already had to delete screenshots 
that showed a security flaw scooped by Wikinews because they were 
non-free and therefore not allowed on the Commons.

For now, there would be two upload links, "Upload media" and "Upload 
fair use media", one pointing to the Commons, the other to the local 
upload page. In MediaWiki 1.5, we can point "Upload file" to the 
Wikimedia Commons, and hide local uploads from the navigation. That way, 
we can apply "security by obscurity". Only people who read the fair use 
policy will find the local upload link.

I'd like to ask the Board to register any objections within the next 
week or so. If there are none, I would also recommend that the other 
language editions follow a similar procedure to develop their own local 
fair use policies, so we can re-enable local uploads on these editions 
one by one.

Erik