User talk:RBoltz

Image copyrights

Hello! I recently transwikied from wikipedia, and am an active image patroler (for copyright/sources) and would like to impliment something similar. I have seen very little use of the copyright tags, or sources, and soem new tags need to be created, such as some of your "wikifur" only images... ideas? --RBoltz (T | C) 07:30, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Hi there, and welcome to WikiFur! It's good to see more people coming over to visit - and great when they decide to stick around. You're welcome to try imposing some order on image uploading - as with elsewhere, be bold! :-)

That said, we have a few differences with the kinds of images (and their uses) that are normally uploaded here which I should probably outline:

Many images uploaded are what I'd call "standard" fair use cases, such as comic covers or panels, and logos or (in a few cases) mascots that are intended to represent the group or site concerned. Typically these are only used on the appropriate pages, and have tags asserting the fair use.

Another popular image type is character portraits, either of popular fictional characters or fursonas. These are generally uploaded with the permission of someone (or should be :-). Often people upload artwork of their characters that they have commissioned from other people. Generally accepted practice in the furry fandom is to allow the non-profit display of such images on the web in association with a character at the commissioner's discretion, as long as no further copyright permissions are involved (such as the right to sell prints). It's nice to link to the actual creator, and many people do give the name of the person they commissioned it from as part of the description.

WikiFur does not currently require images to be uploaded under any particular license. The default that I would assume for images that are not marked specifically is "you can use it on this site but not elsewhere," and personally I'm fine with that. There have been suggestions of publishing some portion of WikiFur in paper form, and that might require more detailed information on sources (and perhaps permissions or licenses), but that is very much a secondary consideration. Of course, a lot of the images concerned are associated with articles about people, which would be less likely to make the cut anyway.

Clear violations of copyright are generally rare (most often, they occur during vandalism). We do get the occasional question of whether someone has the right to upload an image. Typically I ask them, and if they can't be contacted quickly, the creator (if apparent). I can't remember anyone saying "no" yet once they were told what the site was, although it's only come up a few times. We have had one recent case of the author of an image claiming copyright infringement. It was pretty clear that this was the case, and so I removed it myself.

So, where is this leading? We should probably have something like "this is the character of Y, drawn by X, uploaded with Y's permission". We could probably do with importing a few more of Wikipedia's tags - I've only done the ones I use. And whatever we do, we need to make sure that it doesn't discourage people who just found WikiFur and want to upload a picture of their character (or any other work) to make their first wiki page look nice. We're a relatively small site looking to expand, and so we have to try to accomodate users more than they accommodate us.

In a nutshell - tagging and sourcing is good, but the objective is to find and document reasons why we should keep images where possible, not why we should be deleting them. "With permission" images are welcome. It's a little different from Wikipedia, but then we're not really trying to be the same - at least not in all ways. :-)

I'm sorry if the above is a little incoherent, but it's 6 AM here and I'm about to go to bed. Let me know if you have any more questions or if I didn't answer you properly! --GreenReaper^(talk) 10:57, 1 February 2006 (UTC)