[WikiEN-l] Userboxes and fair-use images in userspace

Thu Jan 5 03:18:09 UTC 2006

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> Jtkiefer wrote:
>
>> Remove the images and put it on your watchlist and also tell the user 
>> why they can't have the images up there and if they put them back 
>> then lock the user page and/or temporarily block the user for 
>> violating copyrights and Wikipedia's guidelines on using fair use 
>> images.  Jimbo himself has stated that we now should have zero 
>> tolerance for people who knowingly violate copyrights.
>
>
> Wow, that's incredibly heavy handed. A better first step would be to 
> ask that they remove them, then if they don't remove them yourself, 
> explaining yourself all the way, and then do protection/blocking if 
> it's really necessary. We're not trying to get rid of people here.

But as we've discovered, lots of people get unduly attached to
images that they can't legitimately use. I've applied a very
light touch on image tagging myself, still get carping and reverts.

At some point (soon I hope) we'll get to where all fair use image
descriptions include links to the exact set of articles where their
use is justified, then it will be sufficient to run a variant of
Orphanbot to quietly comment out all other attempts to use. Bots
are relentless and are hard to accuse of bias or favoritism, so
even the intransigent will learn to give up.

Stan