[Foundation-l] Speedy deleting images w/o explicit license

Sat Sep 17 21:38:23 UTC 2005

Jimbo I think it's a terrible idea to delete images w/o explicit
license information because the default assumed license is the GFDL.
The uploader may not know that the image needs to be tagged, and we're
going to lose many images this way. I've already found one that got
deleted, but fortunately the author was still around and reuploaded
it:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:CMOS_NAND.png&action=history

If the auther is gone, the image is gone, and for no good reason.
Additionally, this could mean that images incorrectly tagged with the
category [[Category:Images with unknown source]] could be gone in 7
days. Are administrators going to make sure that all images in that
category are legitimate before firing away? Expect trolls to start to
take advantage of this loophole to cause data loss.

We don't require text to have an explicit license, why should we do
this for images? For no explicit license, the implicit GFDL should be
imposed unless we find otherwise. If it looks suspicious it can be put
to the vote, but I wouldn't make those speedy deletions. We'll use
many free images this way.

Dori