Forum:Proposal- no upload without license declared

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Proposal- no upload without license declared

We are getting a lot of images where the user has failed to declare the copyright info. Let's face it, wikitext is not great, and it's not hard to imagine what novices are thinking even if they do know about the license tags

eg: "typing {{PD}} or {{GPL}} or was it {{JPL}}??? oh what the heck who cares about this mumbly nonsense- I just want a dang foto of Uncle Herbie in the article and then Auntie Margaret will get off my back..."

Robin set up Category:Files with unknown copyright status, and it's a necessary step. The hammer is going to fall, but it really is nicer if we could head off the noisy deletion process by just preventing acceptance of images without tags in the first place.

Proposal- use the code for a pull downlist like on Commons of acceptable licenses. Warning message to user if they don't select a license. Tell them not to falsely declare license/ insert pointer to a education page on rights/ tell them Interpol blokes will come knocking on their door if they lie about it. Don't do the upload until they select a license. ~ Phlox 18:54, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Ow! Some of my forgotten work may get deleted. Anyway, the brave person who sets up the KGB (Krook Genealogy Banning Dept) and its "education page on rights" will naturally include easy links to Help:Images and Help:Image copyright tags. Possibly the sort of thing that should be aired at Central Wikia because some other Wikia probably has it already. Robin Patterson 07:01, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, it certainly is a noisy issue and there will be quicker growth if you let people proceed without a lot of restrictions. But on some of these guideline pages I see the ominous sounding stuff about "if you do not declare copyright status your image may be deleted..." Well, if that hammer is really going to fall some day and we have to carry out that policy it basically means we will be deleting most of the images. Period. On commons at least you could defend an image by looking up facts about it. How do you defend a picture of someone's random auntie? The only person that knows what the rights on 90% of these images is the uploader. And if you don't ask them when they do it- face it- most people aren't going to. I don't know which is worse- slowing down growth of the wikia or being forced by the suits to run a bot to delete all the images without copyright declared. If it is unlikely the suits are ever going to come telling us to do that, I am all for encouraging people to pay attention to the warnings, but not barring the upload if they want to defer the decision about whether they are doing something foolish by giving something away for free. But if it is inevitable, then we even if image upload gets slowed down to 30% of what it is now, we will still be ahead of the scenario where we had to delete 90%.

Really- I don't care, I'm doing my bit on the images I upload but I just want to point out that the situation could get ugly with all these images with zero documentation on them. ~ Phlox 16:49, 16 September 2007 (UTC)