Free content
There is a big discussion going on now on Wikipedia about how we should deal with some classes of non-free content. It’s a long story to where we are now, but here’s my take on it, a little inside baseball but hey. In the dark ages there were a lot of images that had no tags. There was a big project to tag them all using things like {{album cover}}, {{film poster}} etc. Many images were tagged this way by people that didn’t upload them. A little after this there was a growing consensus that all non-free (previously referred to as fair use) images needed a text rationale on the image description page. Many images didn’t have a rationale, and there was always an uneasy gray area regarding many image’s adherence to policy. Some people stated that the text in the categorization templates themselves constituted a rationale, most felt that this wasn’t the case, but when you still had thousands and thousands of untagged images people picked their battles.
Along came the fair use rationale guideline, now the non-free use rationale guideline. This was an attempt to make it a little easier to explain to people what should be on a rationale. Later, CSDI6 was changed to reflect this growing sentiment in the community, giving explicit instruction to use the guideline, and stating that the boilerplate templates were not acceptable. Then the foundation spoke. All images needed rationales! But in what form? More on that later… And all was fine in the land of images, because we weren’t really enforcing any of it. (except for new uploaders, and they did complain, but not effectively).
Then comes betacommandbot. We began automated tagging of the large number of images that had only template rationales for deletion. This made many people mad quickly, people with userpages. So the discussion started in a couple places at once. Are templated rationales ok? What does the foundation mean by a rationale anyway? People always assumed the foundation meant a rationale in the same way english wikipedia did, a textual written statement. It turns out at least some of them meant a rationale in the abstract. So, it looks like the pendulum might be swinging back to templated rationales. Not a loosening of our commitment to free content, but a simplification of the tagging of the non-free content we allow anyway. I’m coming down on that side, which is somewhat surprising to me, I’m usually one of the hard-nosed free-content only people, but I think we’re making people too upset. Better to move slowly and with consensus than upset everyone.
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