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

Wed Dec 7 16:02:38 UTC 2005

On 12/6/05, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> 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.
>
There's also the fact that many of them contain the Wikipedia logo,
which as I understand it is not GFDL or even free.

> 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]]

Well, I like "4) Stop the nonsense about deleting images simply
because they aren't being used in articles."  This whole process is
based on a misconception about *why* relying solely on fair use is bad
for Wikipedia (and these images likely fall under "fair dealing" as
well as "fair use" anyway).

Anthony