User:Brianjd
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 | Before 25 October 2022, 11:56:25, this page contained additional discussion of Commons issues. This material was moved to User:Brianjd/Old; it is being moved back into active pages in a more organised manner. |
See also: My global user page. Information about me is on my global user page, linked in the ‘see also’ section above. The remainder of this page is not about me, but rather about this project, Wikimedia Commons (also known around here as just ‘Commons’). All references to articles are to the English Wikipedia.
Commons is a media repository. Commons media can be directly embedded into pages on Commons and other wikis, such as the various Wikipedias in different languages. This embedding does not create additional copies of the media: it simply embeds the original copy. If the original copy is deleted, the media will also stop appearing on all the pages it is embedded in. (Media may be deleted because it is outside Commons’ scope or because it has legal or ethical issues.)
This page includes Commons media, where it is relevant. As explained above, this media appears only when it is still available on Commons for normal use, which implies that the Commons community has accepted (or, at least, not rejected) this media. This does not necessarily imply that I endorse this media.
The sections below describe a variety of issues relevant to Commons. Most sections describe remarkable inconsistencies in how people, particularly Commons users, handle these issues. Even worse, in some cases, these people fail to acknowledge these inconsistencies.
‘Consent’[edit]
The term ‘consent’ can refer to two very different things:
- Consent of the subject, as in {{Consent}} and Commons:Country specific consent requirements.
- Consent of the copyright owner, as in Commons:CONSENT (which redirects to Commons:Email templates/Consent).
These are very different things because the copyright owner is usually not the subject and copyright issues are handled differently to privacy issues.
Copyright[edit]
Copyright complexity[edit]
Copyright is far too complex for most people to understand. (This is why I dedicate all my material to the public domain, meaning that it is not covered by copyright; see my global user page.)
Shown here is a licensing tutorial developed as part of a usability project; it might look long, but it is an extremely simplified description of how copyright applies to Commons. Copyright is so complex that the Commons policy on licensing contains not only the actual policy, but also an overview of complicated copyright laws through an example-based tutorial for non-lawyers. That overview is complex, but still highly simplified. It links to many other pages with more details.
The Help desk discussion ‘How do I cite an image on Wikimedia commons outside of wikimedia projects?’ (archived in November 2021) links to:
- Instructions for using Commons material elsewhere (which, like copyright itself, is complex, due to the variety of licenses that are accepted on Commons)
- An attribution generator (which is supposed to do the hard work for you, but still asks several annoying questions before presenting the license notice and also includes complex instructions on how to use it)
The variation of individual licenses is complex enough, but some material is released under multiple licenses, where users may choose any one license to comply with. As a particularly egregious example, the file Server-kitty.jpg has this crazy triple license scheme:
- CC BY 2.0: a permissive license
- GFDL 1.2+: a copyleft license
- CC BY-SA 3.0: also CC (like CC BY 2.0), but copyleft (like GFDL 1.2+); added as part of the GFDL migration
(This was the subject of the Village pump discussion ‘File:Server-kitty.jpg: triple licenced CC BY 2.0, GFDL and CC BY-SA 3.0’ (archived in November 2021), which did not go anywhere.)
A different situation is where a work contains multiple parts, each released under a different license. In this case, a user who uses the whole work must comply with all the licenses. Sometimes, it is hard to tell which parts are present and which licenses apply. For example, a screenshot of a web page of a Wikimedia Foundation project may depict MediaWiki (the software used by the Wikimedia Foundation), the project’s contents, or both; MediaWiki and Wikimedia Foundation projects’ contents are released under different licenses. More specifically, the Wikipedia screenshot shown here depicts the project’s contents but does not depict any copyrightable part of MediaWiki. But the screenshot’s description contains only the generic notice {{Wikipedia-screenshot}}, which refers to three different (and mutually incompatible) licenses, with no clarification on which apply to this specific screenshot.
Acceptance of copyright violations[edit]
Commons takes copyright very seriously (at least for media); copyright is one of Commons’ core principles. But outside of Commons, copyright violations are commonly accepted. This is because of copyright’s complexity, together with its impracticality (even for people who understand it).
For example, in revision 609375845 (an edit to Commons:Deletion requests/File:USAir 427 Crash Site.jpg), Rubin16 (a Commons administrator) added a link to a Google Street View screenshot uploaded to an external site. Surely this screenshot was posted by Rubin16 for the purpose of responding to that deletion request. Surely this was a copyright violation. Google Street View screenshots uploaded to Commons are quickly deleted as copyright violations; an example is Knilles Ynsesstrjitte.jpg, which was deleted less than 7 hours after being nominated for deletion.
Open deletion requests[edit]
Viona Ielegems[edit]
- Viona Ielegems.
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These photos were nominated for deletion by a user claiming to be the subject, Viona Ielegems; the nominator said that they wanted the photos deleted for personal reasons.