Commons:Wikimedia Outreach Project/enwikipedia

This Commons project is believed to be inactive.
Feel free to remove this tag if activity resumes or if this tag was placed in error.

This is a wikiproject to improve the relationship between the English Wikipedia community and the Commons community.

Members

En.wp users can't keep an eye on their images once they're moved to Commons - they are not on their watchlist.
- this is true and even with m:SUL it's not likely this will change. (technical limitation)
- BUT: they can put them on their commons watchlist and be notified via email

Images at Commons takes away local control
- this is true, but Commons is made up of tiny parts of all the Wikimedia communities, and should try hard to be responsive to requests from any Wikimedian. There are many admins at Commons who are "English Wikipedia regulars" (and plenty who are admins too), and most should be happy to help if you ask them.

Commons users/admins are fickle in their interpretation/understanding of particular copyright rules and this leads to content being deleted that was previously considered acceptable.
- Above all, Commons tries to only allow content that is known to be free. In many cases we have no choice but to make our own interpretation of how various copyright laws interact, because they have never been tested in court. Governments also change their national copyright laws from time to time.
- Moreover, it has always been true that as a wiki grows, things that were previously considered acceptable no longer are. English Wikipedia itself has seen many stages of this, from allowing "Wikipedia only" and NC/ND licenses, to banning them, to increasing restrictions on fair use images.
- It can be annoying when things are deleted, but if those things were not actually free in the first place, it is a necessary pain.

Images get moved to Commons without the correct attribution and history being kept.
- this is true on occasion, but is surely inevitable in an open wiki. we are aware this is a problem and are doing what we can to track down and educate users who transfer images with incorrect info. in the meantime, if you notice problems, you are invited to correct them/notify us so we can correct them and talk to the tranfer-er.