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This editor has created 467 of the 6,895,829 articles on the English Wikipedia number 855

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This editor has 6,292 article edits out of 7,536 total edits

This user is one of the 4000 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

Template:User WP Public art

GLAM / NARA project contributor

GLAM / Archives of American Art project contributor

thumb| archivists at work

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copyright vio: [1]; [2]

User:Slowking4/old quotes

Quotes

Hi I have just logged onto my account after a long time not active - in part because of frustration at increasing bureaucracy to do anything, and in part that hard work was all to easily deleted by people who knew nothing about the topic. I see unfortunately the images were deleted in the meantime. Having read both your polite note on my page and your web page notes about copyright and deletionism, I see you have actually thought about the matter. I would like to belated provide an answer to you.
Let me give you some background to my views and why this sort of thing frustrates me.
AS you mentioned, you are not a lawyer. As you may or may have not noticed from the profile page I was a lawyer, though neither an IP nor a US one, so I wouldn't pretend any great expertise. However I do know enough to know the threat of a New Zealand copyright holder's first approach being to sue Wikipedia over hosting an image (rather than proving ownership and requesting it be taken down) is virtually nil - we simply lack the legalistic culture of the US.
As you are no doubt aware, Wikipedia tends to have an American bias in content. One of the ways this shows in insisting upon applying American law - and in particular American intellectual property law - to postings from the rest of the world about the rest of the world - in the past other deletionists have justified that by the all but irrelevant to the rest of the world fact the servers are located in the US.
One of the problems driving the US bias is Wikipedia's "Free Use" policy dovetails with the way the US government has released many historical government images into the public domain - but not with other countries. Most commonwealth nations have also allowed free publication of historic government images but in a slightly different way that hardline wikipedia policy makers are not flexible enough to allow use on Wikipedia; Commonwealth nations have "crown copyright", which usually allows reproduction free of charge, but unfortunately for the free use policy, with some trivial conditions which vary from place to place - typically these are noting the crown copyright, not altering the image so as to mislead, or misrepresent what it shows. Often commercial use is also banned.
Now - as is also the case in the US - all images taken by government employees are the intellectual property of the government. Therefore finding any images which are not crown copyright to illustrate a New Zealand article is almost impossible. To me the logical thing would be to create a category for crown copyright images but this has been suggested before by others and I understand from my point of view voted down by American free use ideologues who don't care if Wikipedia is unrepresentative provided corporations can use images off it in advertisements :-).
Even when - as a colleague did - permission was with great difficulty obtained from the crown to release an image for free use on Wikipedia, it was promptly deleted again because the deletionist could find it elsewhere on the web with crown copyright tagged on it. One reason why this is not a bigger issue is in commonwealth articles many clearly crown copyright images have been added and have gone unnoticed by deletionists.
Anyway as a New Zealand aircraft article writer frustrated by this, I was delighted to find a whole filing cabinet of aircraft photos from the 1920s to 1950s for sale amongst the estate effects of a PRIVATE photographer. Furthermore, after a lot of explanation about your policy and essentially WTFing from the vendor, they were quite happy to release the images of the photos I purchased into the public domain.
Naturally the 'tick which box of American Intellectual Property Law Applies to your image" was too simplistic to cope with this reality, hence my explanation. I have no idea what the usual WP:OTRS procedures are, had never heard of them when I added the material and searching Wikipedia for that produces a lot of German and no answer. Frankly I don't care; the images are no longer easily accessible and frankly my frustration with the increasing number of hoops to go through to add content and this sort of accidental well intentioned entirely within policy vandalism and has seen me give up.[3]

I see your comment there and I agree with you, and will say as much, but I am also going to say that I do not think the WMF can or should prevent the community from doing something like this. I've consistently opposed their interference in our content beyond the minimum legal necessities, and I've opposed some of the policies resulting from it, such as the excessively stringent NFCC restrictions beyond the requirements of copyright law, and the adoption of a BLP policy that permits use to suppress unfavorable but well-sourced articles on significant subjects, and is potentially destructive of NPOV. I saw their attempt last year to impose a policy of restricting sexual images, which was only reduced to some degree of reason by a change in board membership. I see their willingness to encourage a mechanism within Wikipedia to facilitate outside censorship; again, the only thing which has kept this from being not just encouraged but required, was a change in board membership. This will be a recurrent issue. I oppose using them as a court of final appeal for issues within Wikipedia, and shall continue to do so. This far outweighs almost any individual issue. Even though we may decide wrong, at least letting the WP community decide gives freedom of action to the individual Wikipedias to have divergent policies, and thus allows experiment even in sensitive areas, which is the only way to prevent stagnation. IMO, this applies both to the board and to the programmers. I opposed the introduction by the programmers of a crude and unscientific system of article rating, and their willingness to expand it, without each time getting explicit consent of the community. It has nonetheless apparently been accepted by the community, and I am not sure it is worth the effort to involve myself in its improvement. I opposed their attempt to introduce a deficient version of vector as the default, similarly--at least then, so did much of the community, and we were at least able to get it improved significantly.
Yes, I consider the introduction of this feature a potential disaster. I expect to see the number of incoming editors fall precipitously even below its present unsatisfactory level, as soon as it is implemented, and possibly not recover even after the trial has stopped. The attraction of being able to make an article is one of the primary motivating factors for editing. It is however possible that I have misjudged, and the proven discouraging effect of the extremely negative comments that new editors encounter is even worse, and the decrease in this might counterbalance the negative effects of not being able to immediately start an article. The only effective thing I can do in this case is to try to persuade people to diminish the length of the trial, and try to find ways of working with new editors despite the constraints, and, perhaps, try to keep fewer promising articles from being rejected via the article creation process--at present, too many of the few people working there insist on a good quality, rather than just an acceptable article.
Sometimes a cause is lost. I opposed the use of BLP Prod, but it was adopted, and my experiences at prod patrol indicate it has had at most a trivial beneficial effect, as everything it properly deletes would and would have been deleted anyway. and a considerable negative one, as it leads to many deletions of articles on people who could have been sourced had anyone experienced here had the time & incentive to do it under a deadline--and it has not noticeably decreased the number of incoming unsourced BLP articles. I've given up on getting rid of it, even though it takes a good deal of my time to prevent whatever percentage of inappropriate deletions I manage, and thus has decreased my participation in other things, such as just this sort of policy discussion.[4]

He/she means that since we don't enforce WP:BEFORE, it has no effect, i.e., it is a "legal invalidity"; and that we are now at a rate of deletion that he/she wonders when the deletion rate will exceed the creation rate of new articles; and that the deletion process would be better as a quality improvement process if replaced with quality teams; and that since we work without quality standards, we don't actually know that deleting articles increases the quality of the encyclopedia. Also, that we should respect DGG and give him/her a title of teacher. Also that civility should be given metrics and thereby enforced, so that editors that use words such as some of those in the previous comment would get low marks, negative feedback, and maybe sent to the DGG school for civility.[5]

If they had a time machine, they'd be using it to solve mysteries, not to worry over fair-use photos. See, this is where you run into the typical deletionist mentality. They're always looking for an angle to satisfy their need to delete stuff. You can't have a fair-use photo of a living person because theoretically some wikipedia papparazzi could snap one. Once they're dead, you still can't have a fair-use photo because it's "decorative". When it's pointed out that it illustrates the subject, they'll claim it's "not needed" - Translation: they don't need it themselves, therefore the reading public doesn't either, because wikipedia editors know what the public needs better than the public knows

You all have fallen into the classic copyright trap. Just because something has been released for public distribution does not mean that the image has been released into the public domain. They are very different concepts. Additionally, the thing you're thinking about for public domain with government-released works in the United States only applies to original works of the United States Federal Government. Absent a state law to the contrary, it is not the case that original works of state and local governments are public domain. States and localities are allowed to claim copyright on their works. And in any case, this is not an original work of any government agency, but appears to be a family photo. Thus this photo belongs to the family, and more than likely is also the copyright holder to the photo. And permission to reprint a photo also does not transfer it to the public domain [6]

Lists

Barnstars

		The Wikipedia Saves Public Art Barnstar
		Thank you for all the work you're putting into creating public art pages and sharing your great photographs too! Missvain (talk) 04:26, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

		Archives of American Art Barnstar
		Thank you for your valuable efforts in creating new articles about American artists! - Sarasays (talk) 20:54, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

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