Commons:Deletion requests/File:Wikimedia Metrics Meeting - March 2014 - Photo 08.jpg

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This deletion discussion is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive. You can read the deletion policy or ask a question at the Village pump. If the circumstances surrounding this file have changed in a notable manner, you may re-nominate this file or ask for it to be undeleted.

File:Wikimedia Metrics Meeting - March 2014 - Photo 08.jpg

[edit]

Copyright violations. The subject of the photos (User:Fabrice Florin (WMF)) is in the photos. The photographer needs to clearly assert a suitable CC license, and (assuming it's a license requiring attribution) needs to be attributed.

This nomination also applies to the following photos:

-Pete F (talk) 21:10, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Pete F: I would appreciate it if you showed more tolerance for the photos which I regularly post from the Wikimedia Foundation's monthly metrics meetings, such as this one. Since our work impacts the entire Wikimedia movement, I believe these photos provide information that is useful to our community, and serve our transparency goals. In this particular case, I handed over my camera to my colleague Dan Garry, who was kind enough to take a few shots of our team while we were presenting our new Media Viewer project. I uploaded all the photos in one batch, and didn't have time to go change the author name when they were first uploaded. I have since added his name in the author field, as well as added relevant attributions shown for known images in the background. However, it is not practical for us to provide the detailed information which you require in the dozens of shots you just nominated for deletion (just fixing the 6 images above took over a half-hour). I have a lot more important things to do for the movement than to go chasing credits for every slide that appears on my photo coverage of these meetings. We don't do this for our live video coverage of the meetings either, for sensible reasons. This is why I respectfully ask that you remove your nominations for deletions and restore the photos to their original status. Thanks for your understanding. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 00:17, 6 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Fabrice Florin (WMF): , since you are a longstanding Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation, you are familiar with free licenses, remix culture, and tools like the Upload Wizard. So I will skip much of the detail I typically go through with a new contributor. To be clear, I expect to be able to communicate with somebody in your role at a higher level than some random and uninformed Commons user. (I also expect to be able to process issues like these, with somebody in your role, without going to a personal level where we are worried about each other's feelings. I give you my strongest assurance that my nominations were not motivated out of antipathy toward you as a person. I like you; but that has no bearing on the matters at hand. I am not trying to cause you pain, but I am also not going to go out of my way to make you feel valued; I assume you are approaching this as a professional, and prefer to keep the focus on the significant substantive issues, rather than muddying them with a discussion of our feelings about them.)
With all that said, I find your statement above very problematic. To my eyes, it expresses contempt for:
  • the provisions of the free licenses that have been a unifying concept on Wikimedia projects from the beginning
  • the Wikimedia Terms of Use, which were painstakingly written by many members of the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation staff, and which emphasize the importance of dealing properly with copyright issues;
  • the features offered in the Upload Wizard, which was produced at significant expense to the Ford Foundation, with many long hours spent by Wikimedia volunteers around the world and WMF staff and contractors, and which offers very easy-to-use features for adding varied authorship information to batch uploads.
I hope that I am misreading this. If so, I hope you will set me straight.
I see two very simple paths forward, which I do not think are very time-consuming: either address the fundamental underlying issues (which does not even mean you have to spend the time addressing all the details, if your time is truly too valuable -- I am happy willing to sort out the details for you[*]); or else just let the files be deleted. To do anything else would be to assert that the Wikimedia Foundation staff enjoys special privileges, and that it doesn't need to hold itself accountable to the standards we expect of all users, to respect the copyright of one another's work, and to clearly document the important aspects of the files they upload. I believe that message would be very damaging to our movement (especially as the Metrics & Analytics meetings continue to enjoy greater prominence, as is evident in their readership stats), and I hope we can avoid that being the outcome of these nominations. -Pete F (talk) 17:32, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
[*] Here is an example of the kind of work I am willing (but not eager) to do if you are unwilling to do it yourself. -Pete F (talk) 17:53, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@DGarry (WMF): , if Fabrice's choice of CC licenses on your behalf is accurate, could you send a note to OTRS to that effect, or else make a note on each page? -Pete F (talk) 15:05, 8 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've made edits to each of these five images, noting that I gave Fabrice permission to upload these with the specified licence. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 16:41, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Dear Pete and Dan: Thank you both for your help in clarifying the license information for my pictures. Pete, if the recent changes made by Dan and myself address your concerns, could you please withdraw your nomination for deletion for these five pictures?
Pete, in response to your general observations above, I fully appreciate the values of free culture and try to comply with our terms of use whenever uploading media files on Commons. That said, our license policies have become so complex that I am not always aware of all their detailed requirements, such as the need for a colleague who temporarily uses my camera to leave special permission notes on the photos he took at my request. So I really appreciate your gracious offer to help correct these unintentional omissions when they occur. You have my permission to update the file information of any picture I have uploaded (or which I upload in the future), to make it comply more closely to our terms. And to make myself clear, I certainly don't think that WMF employees should be held to a different standard than any other volunteer; I was asking for more tolerance on behalf of all new contributors, not for WMF staff. Before nominating pictures for deletion (which is perceived by the recipient like a slap in the face), it would seem more constructive to first leave a note on the user's talk page inviting them to correct any serious issues.
That said, I encourage the Wikimedia community to review its current policies and look for opportunities to improve them further, so that more users can contribute to our free knowledge base. Our usability research so far suggests that uploading images to Wikimedia Commons is significantly harder than most other multimedia sites on the Web: leaving aside known technical issues, most new contributors are overwhelmed by the complexity of our licensing and attribution policies; and the negative responses they get from our community when they make mistakes makes matters even worse. If we are serious about inviting more people to contribute, we should seriously address these issues together, as a movement -- to that end, we will host community discussions in coming weeks on how to streamline Upload Wizard to make it easier to post media files on our sites.
I have personally experienced these issues before, and they are serious enough to prevent me from contributing as much content to our cause as I would like. Taking photos in our monthly metrics meetings is not part of my job, and I do this as a personal contribution to the movement, in my evenings and weekends. Right now, it takes me a couple hours to edit and upload the photos for each meeting: fulfilling all the other requirements above could easily add another hour or two, which is a lot for me. So the likely outcome of this incident is that I will probably post fewer photos from those meetings, if at all.
So, in my personal view, the complexity of our current policies and the harshness of our deletion practices are depriving the public of valuable content -- and turning away professionals like me. As you know, I have a long track record as a multimedia producer, and would like to donate selected content from my personal archives, which include 24,000 images on Flickr and hundreds of hours of professional video footage from my Hackers documentary or Videowest interviews. But posting even a small selection of that content on our sites under our current policies would be so time-consuming that I would either have to take a sabbatical -- or raise enough funds to hire someone with the right qualifications to oversee that complex effort.
So I hope we can improve the status quo to make these donations easier in the future. I would be happy to do my part to start discussions on that topic in my current role as multimedia product manager, but I would also be grateful for your help in finding practical solutions to this complex problem, which the current policies and practices have not solved adequately, in my view. Regards as ever ... Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Fabrice Florin (WMF): , here's the step in the upload process that you're saying was too complicated:

This site requires you to provide copyright information for these works, to make sure everyone can legally reuse them.
(_) These files are my own work.
(_) These files are not my own work.
(x) Provide copyright information for each file individually on the next page.

If you can find ways to make it more straightforward and easier to understand, I will be impressed.

I am still unsure why you have so much to say about new contributors in this particular discussion. Again, you are not a new contributor. I am used to experienced contributors expressing appreciation when somebody points out errors in their uploads or their practices, as it helps them to learn and grow and avoid future problems. This is the usual and sensible response. So I'm not sure what to make of your essay above.

Since you request a simple notification on your talk page, prior to a deletion nomination -- on your user talk page, there are several such notofications, from various users, dating back to August 2013. Some appear to have escaped your attention entirely. In another case, a user made a very straightforward observation about your upload, and you responded twice, bringing it to a personal level in both comments. I don't presume to speak on behalf of this user, and I'll grant that perhaps you and she established a rapport off-wiki that is not reflected in the text; but I would caution you that some Commons contributors might find that kind of response unprofessional and off-putting.

Note, after looking more closely, in that one case where you did respond, the notifier actually did add a template to the file, indicating how it failed to meet the CC license's attribution requirements -- so it's not an example of a simple talk page notification, after all. -Pete F (talk) 17:22, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not withdrawing my nomination, because it seems to me like you're attaching meaning that I don't understand to all of this. I prefer to leave it to an administrator, who has been elected due to their skill in balancing the needs of diverse groups of stakeholders (uploaders, readers, rights-holders, etc.) to decide whether it's worthwhile to weigh in on the many, many issues you have introduced in what I consider a simple and straightforward nomination. Obviously, most of these files will be kept, so we can all feel good about that outcome. You've still overlooked a couple details, but since you've stated elsewhere that you're out of time for dealing with this stuff, I guess we can let that go. -Pete F (talk) 17:09, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Deleted: Author "Dan Garry" did not submit OTRS form, uploader "Fabrice Florin" is not same as "Dan Garry". Sorry, but there is only one set of rules for Commons. The images can be restored if/when an OTRS is received from Mr. Garry. Ellin Beltz (talk) 05:15, 17 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Retored: As an administrator and also an OTRS volunteer I see no reason to force Dan Garry to send an OTRS permission when he has already confirmed he is the author and he agrees with the licence by performing edits on each files where the diff comment is pretty clear null edit noting I gave Fabrice permission to upload these under the specified licence. --PierreSelim (talk) 07:52, 17 May 2014 (UTC) CC: Pete F, Ellin Beltz, and Fabrice Florin (WMF)[reply]

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