Talk:Local uploads policy

Past discussions:

• Wikimedia_Forum/Archives/2007-10#Disable uploads for new wikis

Future consideration

(No idea if you want to discuss this here or @RfC, feel free to move)

So what happens after the transition? e.g., how do you plan on "monitoring"/"auditing"/"checking up on" the various projects? Will people have to make a sound/sign in/report back every year or so to retain their uploads? Or will they keep the rights indefinitely, no matter what? This should be part of a potential policy... Seb az86556 (talk) 00:20, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Local_uploads_policy#Changing_upload_access is deliberately vague at this point; I thought whatever mechanism is developed for the transition would be adapted for permanent use. As to "reporting back" annually - well that's possible, but rather a heavy workload... myself I just thought we should provide for some mechanism where, if problems are identified in future, they can be raised on Meta, and if sufficiently serious a project can be forced to address them, or risk losing local upload access. I wouldn't worry about details of this now, until or unless the RFC approves the basic principle. Rd232 (talk) 06:47, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Reference standard

"The standard of management required is that demonstrated by the largest Wikimedia projects, rather than a hypothetical perfection."

I understand what is intended, but this wording might be thought to require the bureaucracy of big wikis, while issues can be handled a lot more informally on small wikis. The reference should be explicitly to backlogs etcetera or whatever we want to require.

--LPfi (talk) 08:45, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

I understand the concern. We could try rewording, but I think your infrastructure list (in the next section) is a more helpful way to clarify what's expected. Rd232 (talk) 12:46, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Mandatory infrastructure

• A page describing who is allowed to locally upload files.
• A page describing whether non-free (fair use) images are allowed and under what circumstances local upload is encouraged (instead of uploads to Commons).
• A page describing the procedure for handling possible copyright violations.
• An Exemption Doctrine Policy, if applicable.
• Copyright templates for non-free files, if applicable.
• Copyright templates for recommended licences for own works.
• At least two active sysops.
• ...?

If the required pages are copied or translated from other projects they must be customized to suite the project or judged suitable as is. (originally added to page by LPfi)

No, I don't think a mandatory infrastructure makes sense; the goal is to have people enforce copyright-laws. It doesn't matter how they do that; if some projects just want to copy from elsewhete, good; if others have a completely different solution, let them. Requiring people to set up some infrastructure, and then nobody uses it is senseless. Seb az86556 (talk) 10:59, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

I think we can certainly describe good practice, and I think this would definitely be useful, and LPfi's list seems like a good start for discussion. We can leave room for projects to make a case that they're meeting the Licensing Policy without some or all of the good practice. Rd232 (talk) 12:45, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Not exactly what I meant; lemme try again: if you give people a "checklist", they'll tend to insist "well, we ticked off all the boxes, now you must give us the right". The focus should be on whether or not things actually get done. And that is very well possible without most of that stuff on the list (except for, as I said a few days back, a sysop who actually gives a shit). Seb az86556 (talk) 13:00, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree "good practice" might be better than "mandatory infrastructure". I think the instructions should give sufficient conditions, when implemented with good faith. Otherwise a project with small resources and limited knowledge of English will have a hard time figuring out what they are supposed to do, and might think we are only harassing them if not allowing uploads.

The list does nothing about actually getting things done. The only way to deem actually getting things done is by looking at actual uploads - and even then we often do not know whether there are actual copyright violations or only faults in (the English version of) the documentation. And if the same standards are to be used when somebody wants uploads turned on, then we cannot use existing practice as a measure.

What the items in the list do is documenting (hopefully good) practice in the project somewhere where outsiders can find it, in a way usable also for newcommers to that particular project (so I hope at least). The former is the reason I was making a mandatory list.

--LPfi (talk) 08:12, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Moving forward

I've expanded the draft based on what I feel is the most likely consensus on the RfC. I don't think we're ready for a thourough review ex ante of all projects (because such a review should include all projects, to be fair), so I suggest to use simple criteria: this will be enough for the first bunch of configuration changes and will be fair to everyone and is more likely to be accepted. Qualitative criteria and more thourough assessments should intervene only if deemed necessary (and mostly later on). I also suggest to remove the policy immunity for sysops, as it doesn't make any sense; it can be added (possibly as an emergency tool for local uploads, still considered closed) if a poll/whatever will make it necessary to get the policy approved. --Nemo 11:51, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

It says that an EDP policy is "is stated to follow both the USA laws and the laws most users of the wiki are subject to". It furthermore says in the footnote that "For Wikipedia, the geographies to cover can be checked here. At least 80 % of the users should be covered." On English Wikipedia, the policy is that people only care about United States copyright rules. However, the United States only represent 43.6% of the English Wikipedia users. In particular, UK+Canada together represent more than 20% of the users, and neither country applies the rule of the shorter term on US works, making lots of "PD in USA" works unfree in UK & Canada. I also believe that fair dealing is more limited than fair use, so a lot of the current fair use claims on Wikipedia might not be valid in the United Kingdom or Canada. Wouldn't this proposal mean a big change to English Wikipedia's image policy?

What happens if a project wants to use an image from Commons? Commons images are free in the source country and in the United States, but not necessary in the countries represented on some random Wikimedia project. --Stefan2 (talk) 14:20, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

There is absolutely no consensus on that RFC. Putting it simple, the proposal has failed and should not a basis for any policy. Ruslik (talk) 18:45, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't think there's a good reason to start with so much bureaucracy. For requirements, you could simply start with:

having an Exemption Doctrine Policy

listed in the Non-free content page with a summary,

in a language used by most users of the wiki for local discussions (by default, the content language),

and having a local copy of copyright templates for the allowed local uploads.

I don't think it helps anything to conflate the desire to enforce having an EDP with the desire to define a new metric for "compliance with global standards for licensing and clearing licenses for media". The latter is controversial even within the communities on Commons and on the largest wikis. And I think the right place to have the discussion about a "minimum standard" is not in this policy at all, but with those large communities [as noted above, en:wp doesn't meet the standard that one of the drafters of this policy thought was obvious]. If a standard is developed -- posted elsewhere and supported by all of the large communities that currently manage their own uploads -- and a local uploads policy exists, then in the future one could revise the L.U.P. to reference that standard. –SJ talk  06:40, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments. Of course the RfC is not what this policy should be based on, but it's a good starting point to draft one because there were several common lines.

Stefan, I'm sorry for that footnote, it meant quite the opposite of what you say, I didn't even consider en.wiki and I looked at the other languages to check if our usual 80 % was a reasonable limit. I think this is something projects should consider when writing an EDP, but I'm not particularly attached to it: for instance we might make it a suggestion, saying it's up to the local community to choose what additional jurisdictions to follow if any (e.g. if it.wiki wants only USA or USA+Swiss laws).

I also agree that we should start simple, I've simplified the proposal further. Sj, do you think it's unreasonable to require two local sysops? At least one seems really necessary, unless we add discretionary review of uploads to the mandate of global sysops. Looking at the stats,[1] Wikipedias with one sysop or less have about three thousands uploads or such, those with two sysops add a few more thousands and for sister projects is the same in proportion (except Wikinews which has basically none, only 61 in total for the editions with less than 5 sysops; and el.books which has about a thousand). --Nemo 08:18, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Small wikis

Hi, I'm a little late in this discussion, but I'd like to add one thought though.
Several smaller wikis (e.g. regional/minority languages) are subject to the same jurisdiction as a larger wiki (national/standard language). They should be enabled to use the media of the larger wiki.
As en example the language area of frrwiki is located in Germany, so frrwiki is subject to the same law as dewiki. It would be a great help, if frrwiki could use the media of dewiki (in these cases, where the German law is not as strict as the US law). At the moment frrwiki has to upload these media locally. --Murma174 (talk) 12:23, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

This has usually been considered not technically feasible. I don't know the exact reasons, though; I do know some wikis which have been using two remote repositories such as Commons + a Wikipedia and I don't remember what drawbacks there were.

However, for the legal aspect it's not only a matter of jurisdiction, the point is usually considered to be that the upload and usage (with rationale) under fair use have to be very tightly connected: on the same wiki. It's also a bit improper for content wikis to become file repositories. Anyway, this is a separate topic which is not really affected by this proposal; see strategy:Proposal:Non-free.wikimedia.org (and related) for proposals like yours in the past. Thanks, Nemo 09:04, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

New RfC

I propose to add six months to the transition plan (adding all projects which already have an EDP to the initial list for uploads enabled), to remove the two yellow controversial parts left (or change two sysops to one) and to start a new RfC for approval of the policy, with a global centralnotice, after the fundraising. Thoughts? Nemo 09:09, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Fine by me. Anything to get things moving in a way that has a vaguely reasonable chance of success. Rd232 (talk) 11:16, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Limit to certain categories?

Some time back in a discussion of local upload policies I remember reading that some language wikis limit local uploads to certain categories of image such as 'only images of stamps, coins and banknotes'. Unfortunately I have no idea where I read this or even if it is true. I can't find the citation.

Such a restriction would seem (to me) to greatly simplify the administration needed to ensure local uploads comply with WMF rules. Filceolaire (talk) 22:33, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

That's just called an EDP, a stricter one than en.wiki's. And no, it doesn't simplify that much. --Nemo 19:57, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Unmaintained local infrastructures

The upload infrastructures on local wikis is mostly unmaintained. For instance w:ur:Special:Upload only contains the 2.5 Creative Commons licenses, it must be over 6 years since the last time it was updated... There is no way we can help users fix so many errors and inconsistencies, it's so discomforting. --Nemo 08:44, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Minimum requirement on the size of the project

For Wikipedia:

• 10 000 articles - Commons now has 30 000 000 files. Maybe the first 10 000 articles can be written without non-free files
• 10 active admins - if one drops out, there are enough others. Currently there are sometime
• 100 active users - to prevent that in a small wiki all 10 users declare themselves to be admins in order go around the 10 active admins limit. Also, to ensure there is a pool of users that could become admins, if current admins leave.

91.9.116.242 15:55, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Moving files to Commons

Enforcement of the wmf:Resolution:Licensing policy is easier if WPs should move (copy+locally delete) all files that are eligible for Commons. Then it is easier to find unfree files - all the remaining files - for conformance with the licensing policy. Half of all Wikipedias have already less than 20 local files. CommonSupporter (talk) 22:32, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Re start 2024?

I still think there is a problem with local uploads on many wikis and it raises some questions:

1. Should we care or let local wikis do as they think best?
2. Should we offer help and if yes how?
3. Should we try for force a cleanup upon local wikis?

If the answer is that we should not care or we should only offer help but not try to force anyone then there is not much point in trying to get a policy approved. So I will not edit or comment on the policy unless at least a few other users think it is a good idea to try that.

If we chose the help-option the question is how we can do it and where we should discuss it. There were for example the File metadata cleanup drive. Should we have a File cleanup drive?

I take the chance and ping the users that edited or involved originally User:Rd232, User:LPfi, User:Seb az86556, User:Nemo bis, User:Base, User:Brochon99, User:Ата, User:Minorax, User:Stefan2, User:とある白い猫. --MGA73 (talk) 15:24, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

what problems? Seb az86556 (talk) 01:15, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Seb az86556 problems like files without a license, non-free files violating the wmf:Resolution:Licensing_policy (for example unused non-free files) and lack of a machine-readable format. Also some seem to allow non-free files without an EDP.

The usual response on wikis is they either (try to) clean up or say they want to but are busy or sometimes ask "can you do it for us?". A few times the response is more like "go away and leave us alone". As examples of wikis with problems that said no to help I can mention an: and fy:. It's okay to say no to help provided they actually clean up themselves. We can see in a few months if those 2 wikis are cleaned up. --MGA73 (talk) 09:03, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

There is an RFC here about the topic: Requests for comment/Category of non-free images in Wikipedia in Aragonese wich clearly contravenes the Wikimedia Licensing Policy. --MGA73 (talk) 06:51, 4 September 2024 (UTC)