User:J Milburn/Album covers in artist and discography pages

If you have found your way here, then I have (or perhaps someone else has) removed a large number of album covers from an article that you edit. It may have been a page about an artist, it may have been a page about only the discography of that artist. That it is irrelevant- what is relevant is that this is a breach of our fair use rules.

You may have been involved with or be aware of the recent debate on the subject of screen shots in lists of episodes. This is basically the same thing- we want Wikipedia to be as free as possible, and placing large numbers of unfree images in pages goes completely against that idea, completely against our founding principles of building a free encyclopedia, and, in some cases, against the law. The lists of episodes have now been stripped of their screenshots amid much controversy and angry editors, and this serves as an example of how our fair use policy comes before making an article look pretty. If you are annoyed with what has been done to your article, then your argument is not with me, it is with one of Wikipedia's five core principles.

So what does our fair use policy say about the subject? Well, it does not allow fair use images to be used for decorative purposes—they must add significantly to the article. Obviously, the cover of the album adds significantly to the article on the album itself, and some would say it is essential. However, what is it actually adding to the article on the discography, or the artist? Not a lot. The policy says that, to ensure that we are doing all we can to complete our mission, we must use the absolute minimum amount of non-free content. Piling copyrighted images on to discography and artist pages is not doing that.

One of the best places for us to look for inspiration on how to write a great article is not to look to our policies, guidelines and essays, but to look towards our best articles. Frank Black has no album covers used in lists or tables, AC/DC has none, Slayer has none, Megadeth, Rush and "Weird Al" Yankovic are all lacking- in fact, at the time of writing, as far as I can see, none of our featured articles abuse our fair use rules in this way. All of these use images of album covers inline while talking about the band's history in an acceptable way, and all of them should have detailed rationales for why the use of that image is acceptable in that place. However, simply having a gallery of copyrighted images is abhorrent from the point of view of our rules.

See also

• Our fair use policy
• WikiProject Music's standards for discographies