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The Killing Fields
From Wikitruth
[edit] A Minor Announcement
It's couched in boring language, the quiet and logical statements of recently-elected board member Kat Walsh (Mindspillage), explaining how to prepare Wikipedia for its future, it will move towards open content. The letter is filled with the phraseology one expects a board to have:
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Assuming you don't fall asleep and drive your car off the road trying to read it, it all sounds pretty understandable and reasonable. Free works for all! Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects (Wikipedia, Wikiquote, the occasional Bomis Girl) are to adhere to a uniform, open license to ensure that it will not restrict the distribution and re-use of content. Normally this sort of language comes from the hairy piehole of a technological hippie instead of a delicious little bobbin, but it's nothing new or to freak out about.
Except, of course, this basically says that Fair Use is not necessarily a good reason to have an image on Wikipedia.
In fact, if you interpret it a certain way, this basically says fair use is no longer compatible with the goals and policies of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia.
And, you see, the issue is that at this point there are thousands of photographs, images and text passages on Wikipedia citing Fair Use. Literately thousands.
[edit] Fair Use for Retards
If you don't pay much attention to the doctrine of Fair Use, then this probably isn't all that interesting to you. And we freely admit that in a land of transsexual fascist administrators, Soviet-style disappearing of information, backstabbing of previous collaborators to diminish them, and tits, this sounds pretty dull.
But Fair Use is one of the cherished doctrines and policies of many an academic and critical organization. In a nutshell, it says that you can quote or reference a copyrighted work, even reproduce it to some extent, to provide illustration or a basis for comparison and contrast. Fair Use allows for the quoting and referencing of copyrighted works, so that they may be compared and contrasted by people seeking to enhance knowledge. Essays use passages from copyrighted statements to prove a point. Web pages and books use images that are copyrighted to illustrate a point. News organizations quote speeches or songs or whatever they need to let their audience understand the context of what's being discussed. It's pretty important stuff.
Wikipedia has, for the last 5 years, utilized Fair Use to get some of the growth it has today. In fact, it's sometimes veered deep into plagarism and outright theft of others' works to get where it is. How much easier it is to exponentially grow when you're exponentially stealing! But efforts were being made to weed out all these yoinked jewels and replace them with actual original work. Debates raged over what could be kept and what had to be thrown out since, you know, it wasn't Wikipedia's. Fair Use was held up as a standard and a reason to use pieces of others' works, and to use screenshots, photographs and so on.
Now, with Wikipedia the central source for so much information, all the Fair Use is going away.
[edit] Goodbye, Arrivederci, Avoir, Adiós
In the ensuing conversation now taking place on the Administrators' Noticeboard, it's quite obvious where things are going to go.
See, Wikipedia doesn't do subtle. It does Stalking, it does Petulance, it does Astounding Dumbass, and it does Anal Sexless Librarian, but it doesn't do subtle. And this is kind of a subtle issue.
Amount of time after this discussion came out on the Wikipedia mailing list before Administrator/Jelly Roll Cyde started wholesale deleting images by the truckload? About an hour.
If you tell Wikipedians to trim some fingernails, the nature of the Wikipedia environment is that someone will start chopping off hands. And after you go "Hey, slow down, Tex, that's gone too far", they'll switch to just chopping off fingers and everyone's happy at the compromise.
We think the whole problem is captured beautifully in this quote:
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