[WikiEN-l] Questions about the "Wikipedia screenshot" category of images

Wed Dec 7 01:18:23 UTC 2005

How exactly should these images be treated? I'm talking about the image  
tag <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikipedia-screenshot>
and it's category  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Screenshots_of_Wikipedia>. The  
template only says that Wikipedia text is licensed under GFDL and that  
Wikipedia is copyright of Wikimedia, but it doesn't rely address the issue  
of the copyright status for the image itself.

According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_copyright_tags>  
it's a "fair use" tag (that's where it's listed anyway), but we are not  
currently treating it as such. Gmaxwell's bot originally tagged these  
images as "far use orphans" if they where not used in articles, but after  
a storm of protests (well 3-4 anyway, I raised some questions myself back  
then) he (reluctantly) excluded them from his bot. Problem is you can't  
rely argue that they are free images, as many of them include either  
copyrighted GUI elements from the users browser and OS, and a lot of  
others include copyrighted "fair use" images from articles.

The way I see it we have 3 choices.

1) Keep using it as a semi-free "special" case, maybe we can argue that  
the screenshot as a whole give enough context to declare the inclusion of  
copyrighted images to be within fair use or some such (IANAL).

2) Make it a GFDL tag, and run an extensive cleanup project to crop, blur  
or otherwise remove all copyrighted elements from the screenshots (and  
clean out other mis-tagged junk).

3) Confirm that it's a fair use tag, and delete all the images that have  
not been used in any articles for at least 7 days (in other words most, if  
not all of them).

Any thoughts? Whatever status they should have needs to be made more clear  
IMHO.

-- 
[[User:Sherool]]