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)
- Lots of good points there, Phlox.
- Illegal uploading doesn't require other contributors to do anything. If Wikia management ever decides that it's hammer (or sickle) time, a staff bot could do all 3,000-odd Wikia with one set of instructions. Many of this wiki's images have been on for a couple of years, uploaded by Brian Yap - User:Yewenyi. No sign of management hammerbot yet.
- Those of us with time on our hands (which should not include this pensioner - in his wife's opinion - but often seems to) can altruistically delve into Special:Uncategorizedimages as I did recently, here (for the half dozen unknowns you will have seen and some others that did have enough info to determine licenses) and on the Engineering Wikia (where I think I did them all - only about 30). A few of those actually state a license but don't show the template that puts the image into the appropriate category. I created Template:unk as a shortcut to Category:Files with unknown copyright status, so that I could have {{GFDL}} on my clipboard, paste it into every image info page that had no template, and just change the internal letters as required; now that I set it out I realise that I could have saved a little time by having a block of all the common ones on the clipboard and just deleting those that didn't apply.
- Now I've just had another look at the list of uncategorizeds and tackled an easy-looking image: Image:Adair_Co_IA.png. Bill had uploaded it but merely stated what WP page he found it on, which statement doesn't, of course, say anything definite about the license. So I jumped to WP, jumped to the Commons page it referred to, and in my usual fashion hit "Edit" and copied everything that was there to our page, prefixing it with a template and an intro and tweaking some links. One advantage is that we get the Commons categories without any extra work; some of them are great (and if Makbot had anything to do with them I'll thank him personally)! Some of the above could be a good instruction page related to Help:Copying from Wikipedia.
- And for the bot expert, maybe those county locator maps (no more than 3,141 for USA) could be copied and properly attributed with very little human effort? Can PhloxBot upload successive Commons images in a particular category - and copy their edit boxes - to Wikia? The Government Wikia should probably have them too. But I have digressed.
- Your pull-down menu could be a good idea - can you arrange it easily? But there again, some other Wikia probably has/have the same thing already operating. And I notice the Starter Wikia has what looks like an automatic procedure to warn of untemplated images - that's where the category came from; I've not looked at all its relationships, but I will if you suggest it.
- Robin Patterson 14:08, 20 September 2007 (UTC)