[WikiEN-l] Questionable fair use claims: a case study

Fri Oct 21 19:46:52 UTC 2005

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> And in my opinion, we should move to a policy
> situation where you would
> not have to go through the rigamarole you had to go
> through with this
> image.  You should have been able to delete it on
> sight as being
> tantamount to vandalism, which it essentially is.

As always, this is a question of who's authority and
who enforces it, and what checks can be in place to
remedy such. And because MW lacks any ability to do
revert an image deletion, there seems to be no degrees
of enforcement here. A template message could explain
the situation after the fact:

 On the authority vested in me by Jimbo, I hereby 
 deem this [probably copyrighted] image of [a woman 
 in a safari coat] as *vandalism dangerous to 
 Wikipedia* and do hereby remedy the situation by   
 deleting it with extreme prejudice and hence without 
 any unnecessary and time-wasting debate about 
 fair-use etc.

I would caution against empowering over 400 sysops
with any ability to enforce unenforceable
prejudiciality. I think its hard to find a meaningful
difference between "strange culture" and a operative
respect for Wikipedia:Civility.

SV  

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote:
> > [[:Image:Pgsafjak3.JPG]]
> > 
> > I offer this up as an example of some process
> problems we have in
> > dealing with invalid fair use claims.
> 
> And in my opinion, we should move to a policy
> situation where you would
> not have to go through the rigamarole you had to go
> through with this
> image.  You should have been able to delete it on
> sight as being
> tantamount to vandalism, which it essentially is.
> 
> We have this strange social culture built up around
> images which I
> believe is caused mostly by the fact that image
> deletion is instantly
> permanent, rather than being something that can be
> reverted.  If we
> could revert image deletions as easily (or nearly as
> easily) as we
> revert deletions of random bits of unacceptable
> text, we would be much
> better able to pick and choose images wisely.
> 
> --Jimbo
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