Comment by zem
Comment by zem 3 hours ago
I am honestly flabbergasted that his pictures weren't expunged with great prejudice. what is the value they add to wikimedia that makes being associated with this sort of sleaze okay?
Comment by zem 3 hours ago
I am honestly flabbergasted that his pictures weren't expunged with great prejudice. what is the value they add to wikimedia that makes being associated with this sort of sleaze okay?
yes that was me! I love that quote (it's by samuel johnson), so it's really moving to hear it made an impression on someone else too. here it is:
What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."
-- Piozzi: Anecdotes
If you read the discussion, they weren't kept because of their encyclopedic value, or because they were "widespread". I'm not sure why the parent commenter said that.
They were kept to preserve a record of their having been uploaded, and to not create a legal risk for third parties who might be relying on the Commons page as their way to provide attribution.
The original proposal was to keep the image pages with the metadata, but delete the image files. That turned out to have some technical hurdles, so instead the images were overwritten with versions containing big ugly attribution messages, to discourage their use.
I don’t understand why this is sleazy TBH. It’s CC-BY-SA. If attribution isn’t provided it’s a valid case. I once uploaded a map of my state with all the districts in labels in English and my language Tamil to commons under CC-BY-SA. It was used left right and centre, from publications, map sellers to the point I can see them hanging in offices. It’s always pained me, nothing could be done about it. Now I didn’t want money, would have liked the recognition, but would have settled for just seeing the CC-BY-SA logo on it at the least.
A valid question. These kinds of approaches are a pretty standard attack in the copyleft world. I don't know on what basis the community chooses forced-attribution vs deletion.
Marco Verch managed to get his stuff deleted: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests...
So it's a question of the execution of the operation really.
By the way, do you also have the same user handle on Reddit? I have the vaguest memory of you quoting someone else on the subject of denying a person suffering on the street drugs that went something to the effect of not wanting to do it because denying such a man drugs deny him his only escape from such reality or something of the sort.
I never did find that comment again, and it's been at the back of my mind for years (perhaps even a decade) and now I'm not even sure if I've asked you this before.