Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-02-20/Discussion report

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20 February 2012

Discussion on copyrighted files from non-US relation states

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Discussions

• RfC about the assessment of community understanding of article title decision practice.
• RfC on the proposed cessation of selective delete (other than history merge fixes) and resulting changes to deletion policies, including the removal of a Revision Deletion criterion.
• Invitation to comment on candidates standing for 2012 Audit Subcommittee appointment

A request for comment on how Wikipedia should handle copyrighted files from countries without official copyright relations with the United States was opened on February 12, by Dpmuk. The focus of discussion is a statement made by the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales which is paraphrased at WP:C: 'Regardless, according to Jimbo Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Wikipedia contributors should respect the copyright law of other nations, even if these do not have official copyright relations with the United States.'

Editors discussed various proposals on how to tag these types of files, including naming the location where the file originates from and a disclosure that the file might not be in the public domain. A proposal presented by Buffs for a pair of tags was the most favorably received, with twelve participating supporting it.

Shortly after discussions began, the opinion of Wikimedia Foundation's legal team was sought. The legal team responded that according to United States copyright law, files from countries not in relations with the United States can be used as if they are in the public domain. However, the legal team did note that each editor is responsible for the usage of files according to their own country's copyright law, which may differ from the United States. Since their reply, postings have been relatively few. The discussion likely will be closed this week.

A request for comment was started on February 11, by FT2, discussing what to do when encountering a breach of non-free content policy #9. At the time of writing, policy criterion #9 states, "Non-free content is allowed only in articles (not disambiguation pages), and only in article namespace, subject to exemptions". The initiator of the discussion pointed out that the policy criterion is vague and moot with regard to editing out violations versus deleting all history pages where the violation is visible.

The initiator outlined some proposals concerning how to deal with images that are in breach of the policy, including removing the image from being displayed and/or deleting the revision where the image was embedded. Discussion has been slow on this topic, but the consensus appears to be in favour of merely removing the image from being displayed when it is found to be in breach of the policy.

• An extensive discussion about an administrator's deletions has been opened. According to the complainant, the administrator, Fastily, has made some "questionable" deletions. Some editors suggested opening a request for comments for user conduct.
• A discussion about topic banning an editor because of disruption to BLP-related articles is coming to a close.
• A discussion about the deletion of the template Rescue, which had been primarily used by the Article Rescue Squadron, has been opened.
• The proposals to delete the templates {{Persondata}} and {{Cleanup}}, covered in the last edition of the discussion report, were closed as "keep" and "no consensus", respectively.

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20 February 2012 (all comments)

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