Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Main Page/Screenshots

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellany page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was No consensus. WP:NONFREE is intended to prevent misuse of fair-use images outside the main namespace. As dgies points out, this page is one of the few project pages that could possibly make a valid assertion of fair-use. It is not surprising that the writers of WP:NONFREE did not foresee this very small possible exception. WP:IAR exists to prevent process from adhering mindlessly to the letter of a rule, when the spirit is different than the strict application. It is unclear whether WP:NONFREE was intended to cover this special case. As such, more deliberation is needed before deletion occurs. The proper question here is not, "does this page violate the letter of WP:NONFREE?"; but rather, "should this page be considered an exception to that policy?" In a case where the WM Foundation itself owns the copyrights in question, "fair use" is (as a practical matter) easier to assert: the Foundation is unlikely to dispute a fair use rationale, if the community finds this page useful. The essential question, then, becomes "Is this page useful to the community?" That matter was barely addressed below, because discussion of the letter of WP:NONFREE diverted from that basic issue. The question of usefulness might be addressed in a talk-page discussion; or, possibly, another MfD, after some time has elapsed. Xoloz 16:48, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Main Page/Screenshots

In essence, this page is a fair use image gallery. The bad thing is, it is also in the Wikipedia: namespace, which violates Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria (fair use media only in articles). The images have been deleted once already (apparently nobody cared for a whole week until Gnome (Bot) (talk · contribs) started removing them), but have since been restored by Alkivar (talk • contribs • blocks • protects • deletions • moves • rights). Thus, I have decided to put this under discussion - I believe the whole page should be deleted as a violation of policy, along with those images that aren't used elsewhere. Миша13 09:55, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

• Weak Keep, I don't find the images particularly offensive, although I can see how a case could be made for their deletion. Does copyright still apply when the majority of a screenshot is original content that's freely available? Would these images be acceptable if the toolbars and the like were cropped out? Tricky case. Lankiveil 10:26, 20 May 2007 (UTC).

• Until that happens, we can't have this page. MER-C 12:30, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

• Delete - violates WP:NONFREE. Also, a large portion of these images have shady licensing information, as they do not have a fair use claim for the software. I will list them on WP:PUI. MER-C 12:30, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
• Delete I don't think it serves any practical purpose, doubth anyone will go out of theyr way to fix display problems in Mosaic or Netscape 1.0 and such, and any "real" problems should be taken to bugzilla or the talk page of the relevant stylesheet. Copyright do still apply to all non-free elements in the images, I guess an argument could be made on the basis of the de minimis principle, but as far as I can see most of them have been tagged as screenshots of non-free software rater than free licensed with some insignificant non-free elements... --Sherool (talk) 12:45, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep most of them are free software with de minimis unfree portions. Retag free ones appropriately and delete non free ones (such as IE). Nardman1 16:57, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Won't that defeat the whole point to display the main page in all possible browsers? I'm not sure there are merits for a middle-ground solution. Also, Wikipedia logo would also have to cropped out, since it cannot be released under a free license. Миша13 17:50, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
• Most of the problems here can be handled with simple cropping (remove toolbars, etc). The page content itself is the only thing that is actually interesting. After that is done, the issue with the Wikipedia logo can be handled. But as far as I know, it is still not policy to remove unfree images from the project pages just because of the Wikipedia logo. --- RockMFR 18:17, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
  • • (edit conflict) I'm confused how using our logo on our own server violates copyright law. If these were used in articles (which is content we re-sell) I'd agree with you but non article space is generally not re-sold. Unfortunately without Foundation guidance on this we are (technically) violating our rules on non-free content. Has anyone asked the foundation about this? Nardman1 18:19, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
• Delete Joe I 06:26, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. A lot of these images are showing up in CSD anyway as "Non legit fairuse" ^demon^{[omg plz]} 12:52, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep Seems a legitimate case of fair use: Investigation and commentary of how different browsers handle the main page. The rule about fair-use only being in articles is to cut down on decorative invalid fair use. Articles are not the only place that can have critical commentary and this seems like a reasonable exception to the rule. —dgies^t_c 18:49, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Well the stated purpose of the page is well meaning, but as I said above it's ultimately not very usefull. Websites using CSS and such will look like utter crap in most ancient browsers, that's just the way it is and no one is going to bother trying to fix that since 99.99% of our users use browsers that don't have those issues. The page is not even well advetised. It's been around since 2004 and have like 4 incoming links. It may have served a purpose when the "new" main page design was beeing hashed out, but as of late it's been pretty much inactive. --Sherool (talk) 12:31, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
    • The initial deletion rationale was fair-use violations, and there've been a number of pile-on comments to that concern. Just because Wikipedia will not look perfect in all browsers is no reason to be unconcerned with backwards compatibility. That the page is poorly-linked is not a good deletion reason: it can be easily fixed. —dgies^t_c 16:42, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep the page unless the foundation says it is forbidden. Collecting these images in one place for commentary and criticism (and just general knowledge) about the way Wikipedia renders in different browser is fair use and valuable. I certainly don't have access to all these browsers. -AmendmentNumberOne 17:33, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
• Comment - the page was moved to Wikipedia namespace back in November 2006. See here, and the talk page. My view is that this is an interesting collection of screenshots of what Wikipedia looks like in different browsers in different systems. Such screenshots shouldn't be arrayed in a gallery, but could be linked to. Also, there should be no problems with Wikimedia developers keeping all these images offline. It is good that GnomeBot alerted us to this problem (see the history of the page), but this is a classic example of a case that needed discussion, rather than bot-driven image removal. The images are also of historical interest as well, and should be kept for the forthcoming (yeah, right!) "History of Wikipedia". Carcharoth 19:20, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. "Wikipedia's non-free content policy forbids displaying non-free images in projectspace. It is acceptable to have free images, GFDL-images, Creative Commons and similar licenses along with public domain material, but not "fair use" images". Unfortunately, there is no way to remedy this without making the page totally redundant; linking would defeat the purpose. Daniel 01:36, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I think the spirit of the policy is to not use fair-use images in situations which do not qualify as fair-use. Since this does appear to be fair-use, it conforms to the spirit, but not the letter of policy. —dgies^t_c 04:54, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.