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Commons is worse than English Wikipedia? Read this....

Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 9:59 am
by CrowsNest
Commons gets a bad rap, critics tend to mindlessly repeat the trash talk propagated by English Wikipedia editors directed toward their supposed brothers in arms, as if it was true. It often isn't. It's never really been deserved, because pretending like Wikipedia has higher standards than Commons, is like pretending McDonalds has better food hygiene than Burger King. In several cases, Commoners totally eclipse their Wikipedian brothers in terms of integrity.

Here's a brilliant example. Commons takes copyright super-seriously, and anyone who spends any time there will eventually find out that, by policy, they do no accept any arguments of the form that Commons can get away with hosting a copyright violation or otherwise don't have to act on it for some practical reason, like the license holder doesn't know or hasn't yet sued, or it's an old revision. You'll typically be shown the following policy page, and if you continue to ignore it, you get blocked, no further warnings, no special treatment.....

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Comm ... _principle

Contrast that with the recent comments of NewYorkBrad, talking about the prospect of wading through thousands of old potential violations committed by one of the most prolific Wikipedians ever, Dr. Blofeld. Not only is Brad the Wikipedian's Wikipedian, seen as their elder statesman, he's also a lawyer, which makes these comments doubly reprehensible, potentially a violation of his professional ethics.
To the extent there is a problem involving decade-old contributions to articles with hundreds of revisions since, it may frankly not be fixable. I'm not sure what the implications of that may be—though they are probably less than some people might fear, if we've never had a complaint in all these years from an actual copyright-holder—but I thought I'd flavor the discussion with a tinge of stark realism. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:56, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but the trouble is that now we know there's a potential problem, all the duty-of-care and precautionary-principle stuff kicks in.....‑ Iridescent 23:03, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

In principle you are correct, but in the realm of practicality, a review of all those articles and revisions simply won't happen. If we try to undertake one, the common experience is that we'll wind up with a big project in which people lose interest after a week. So logically, we need to proceed on the basis of some spot-checking of the most likely problems and work from there. Reaction to any copyvios that are found also needs to be proportionate; I don't feel the need to revdelete 1000 revisions of a page that used to have two infringing sentences in it, for example. The community simply is not going to drop everything else it is doing to address the problem described here, assuming it is a problem, and as a practical matter we can't expect it to try, no matter how fully we try to respect rightsholders' legal and ethical rights. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:11, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
As such, anyone who pretends Commons is somehow worse than English Wikipedia, probably hasn't got the required experience with both, their policies and principle actors, to be making such statements, if they're not simply an English Wikipedian themselves.

The real irony there of course is that Iridescent, the guy making the argument that is straight out of Commons policy, is a frequent basher of Commons. That shows his criticism is either not very informed (how could he possibly not know his views on this issue align with Commons?), or it is based on some unspoken prejudice.

Re: Commons is worse than English Wikipedia? Read this....

Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 8:21 pm
by ericbarbour
Might as well drop Commons crap in one place. Today I stumbled over this one:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p ... he_ISS.ogv

Remember that, monkeyboy! "Super Woosh aaaaaa so fast etc"!!!