User talk:Future Perfect at Sunrise/Historic fur list

Initial thoughts

I've had a quick look through the list, and I'd be prepared to review them. It would take a fair amount of time though - I don't think the suggested "Twinkle" approach suggested at the TfD for the template will help. Sometimes replacing the historic FUR with another FUR will help, sometimes a handwritten rationale is needed. By the way, I like the look of User:Future Perfect at Sunrise/HistFUR. I'm thinking that a specific rationale for images where there is an article about the image might also work for that very specific set of article and images. See Category:Photographs for the examples that have been categorised. Do note that not all famous photographs have their own articles. Sometimes an editor has taken the decision to write a section in another article about those photographs. See Birmingham campaign for two examples of that. One more thing - even if this is a temporary page, could you let me know if you delete this talk page, as I'd like to save what I've written here somewhere else. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 11:26, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

You're right about the section-only articles. Actually, the draft template at User:Future Perfect at Sunrise/HistFUR already caters for that, I just didn't yet document it sufficiently. It takes a "section=" parameter and then outputs "... used in the [[xxx#yyy|yyy]] section of article [[xxx]]..." Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:59, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. What is the best way to divide up the list we have here? In case of disputes over images, it is best to mark who has reviewed it. I'd personally try and arrange the list by date (Wikipedia and the software should really be able to do that, providing people actually input the data about when a picture was taken), and then divide into "historic", borderline, non-historic, needs other template, needs hand-written rationale, and so on. What is the best way to do this? Carcharoth (talk) 12:18, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Difficult. To retrieve the data you mention, you'd probably have to code some kind of bot. I'm sure I could do that with Perl and the query interface, but I'm not sure I'll have the time right now. Sorting the results in the way you mention would be a good idea though. We can just make section headings on this page, and everybody who's reviewed a batch and thinks they've worked out the correct outcome moves them there, maybe with a sig so we'll know who did what when. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:25, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Portrait and people pictures

A large number are portrait pictures, mostly B&W, presumably (they were in most of the cases I checked) used on the articles about the person in question. I've identified 60 "head shots" so far, and there are also full length "body shots" and others of "people" doing things or talking with others It doesn't excuse incorrect use or tagging, but a good step would be to list these people and portrait images separately and tackle how to deal with portrait pictures of people used in articles about them. Also, one of the key things about a process like this is to leave some indication that a review has taken place. When someone comes to the image later, it helps if they know whether someone has reviewed the image or not. Silent approvals don't show up in the histories around here. Carcharoth (talk) 12:31, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Example of reviews

Managed to do the first seven. Can someone turn this into a table?

• Image:Vietnamescape.jpg
  • Hubert van Es, Fall of Saigon, used in the article on the photographer who took this photograph, and the article that describes the event depicted in this photograph.
  • 29 April 1975
  • Historic event
  • American diplomats and families boarding helicopters to leave Saigon.
  • Unique event
  • {{non-free historic}}
  • generic tag "This image is a faithful digitalization of a unique historic image, and the copyright for it is most likely held by the person who took the image or the agency employing the person."

  Use in Fall of Saigon is a genuine "historic" use - only a few other images of these events exist, none of which are likely to be free. Use in the photographer article (Hubert van Es) is more debatable, but that kind of use can easily be identified, tagged with an "article subject is famous as a photographer and took the photo" template, and kept under review. Need better information on the source and preferably an URL.

• Image:Oskar Schindler.jpg
  • Oskar Schindler, Photograph depicting subject of the article.
  • Head and shoulders portrait shot.
  • Dead
  • 1974
  • Source: "Shoa"
  • {{non-free historic}}
  • generic tag "This image is a faithful digitalization of a unique historic image, and the copyright for it is most likely held by the person who took the image or the agency employing the person."

  Generic use of photograph of a dead person in the article about them (Oskar Schindler). Source for this picture needs clarifying, and a search for free images should be undertaken and noted. Date of first publication is also needed to work out when the photograph will enter the public domain.

• Image:Paulmartinsr.jpg
  • Franco-Ontarian, Paul Joseph James Martin, used in the infobox as an example of a Franco-Ontarian, and the article about the person.
  • Head and shoulders portrait shot.
  • Dead
  • 1992
  • National Archives of Canada and DFAIT-MAECI records
  • {{non-free historic}}
  • generic tag "This image is a faithful digitalization of a unique historic image, and the copyright for it is most likely held by the person who took the image or the agency employing the person."

  Generic use of photograph of a dead person in the article about them (Paul Joseph James Martin). Source for this picture needs clarifying, and a search for free images should be undertaken and noted. Date of first publication is also needed to work out when the photograph will enter the public domain. Use in Franco-Ontarian is not valid. Free images should be found for that article.

• Image:Popark.jpg
  • Pacific Ocean Park, article about the location.
  • circa 1959
  • Entrance plaza to amusement park on a pier.
  • Demolished
  • Around a year after opening
  • 1967-1975
  • http://naid.sppsr.ucla.edu/venice/articles/pop.htm
  • {{non-free historic}}
  • generic tag "This image is a faithful digitalization of a unique historic image, and the copyright for it is most likely held by the person who took the image or the agency employing the person."

  Postcard from circa 1959 showing the entrance to an amusement park that closed in 1967 and has since been demolished. Image source link no longer works. Uploader (in 2004) tagged it as PD. Possibly OK, but a search should be undertaken and noted for free images for Pacific Ocean Park.

• Image:SM S-55.jpg
  • Savoia-Marchetti S.55, used in the article about the aircraft.
  • Shows the aircraft taking off from water.
  • Retired aircraft
  • Retired in 1945
  • |http://www.russian.ee/~star/air/italy/savoia_s-55.html
  • {{non-free fair use in}}
  • Photograph of an aircraft (Savoia-Marchetti S.55) that first flew in 1924 and was retired in 1945 (date of the picture will be in that date range). Image source link no longer works. Location could possibly be ascertained from the building in the background and the places the aircraft operated. Other images of this aircraft may exist, but not sure where or what their status would be. Do any of the aircraft still exist or have they all been broken up? Does the photograph showing it taking off make this image preferable to any freely licensed pictures of museum exhibits, if they exist?

• Image:Andrei Sakharov and Igor Kurchatov.jpeg
  • Soviet atomic bomb project, shows two of the people involved in the project described by the article.
  • Two people sitting on a bench talking.
  • Both dead
  • 1989 (Sakharov) and 1960 (Kurchatov)
  • {{non-free historic}}
  • generic tag "This image is a faithful digitalization of a unique historic image, and the copyright for it is most likely held by the person who took the image or the agency employing the person."

  These two Soviet physicsts (Igor Kurchatov and Andrei Sakharov) took part in the Soviet atomic bomb project (and Kurchatov was the lead physicist), but the image would only be acceptable if it showed them at the time of the project. Note also that the copyright status of old Russian photographs is uncertain at the moment. Also, possible copyvio of an AIP (American Institute of Physics) picture. See [1] (their identification number is "Sakharov Andrei C11"). That page says no date, but this page says 1958. Depending on where AIP got the photo from (the "Physics Today Collection" bit suggests it was published in "Physics Today"), then this is a clear copyvio of an image being sold commercially.

• Image:Mentmore towers gold room.jpg
  • Mentmore Towers, shows appearance of a room mentioned in the article.
  • Mentmore Towers, Mentmore, Buckinghamshire, UK
  • Internal room shot
  • Room rearranged
  • Owners of building
  • {{non-free historic}}
  • generic tag "This image is a faithful digitalization of a unique historic image, and the copyright for it is most likely held by the person who took the image or the agency employing the person."

  Boilerplate FUR replaced with handwritten one: "Fair use in Mentmore Towers as an irreplaceable document illustrating an earlier state of the building. Image belongs to former owners of the building and is no longer used in publications, therefore no infringement on commercial interests."

That's enough for now. I'll wait for some responses on these. At the moment, I'd delete Image:Andrei Sakharov and Igor Kurchatov.jpeg (copyvio) and remove Image:Paulmartinsr.jpg from Franco-Ontarians, but the others range from debatable (use in article about a photographer) to OK (the Saigon one). Not sure what the current approach is to pictures of dead people, but it would help if there was some way of reliably indicating whether a previous review and search for replacement freel-licensed images had been carried out, plus whether the sources had been confirmed as present and reviewed, along with everything else. Carcharoth (talk) 14:21, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for this very thorough work. I just wonder, can we reduce the reporting to something less cumbersome? It seems like a huge lot of work to do it this way. What I'd suggest is to primarily sort images into subsections on the list page: "Dealt with", "provided with new rationale", "asked uploader to provide rationale", "tagged for deletion", and so on. Each entry just with a short, informal comment perhaps? Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:25, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

As for the portraits, that's a real problem, because it's a grey area in the policy. Fair-use tags have traditionally been worded so as to imply portraits of dead people are generally okay, and many people have drawn the (false) reverse conclusion from our rule about living people ("can't use non-free for living person; hence: can always use it for dead person"). The first problem is, copyrights for these photographs rest very often with third parties, and whatever our legitimate interest in showing these personalities is, that doesn't give us a very good fair-use case for infringing on an unrelated third party's copyright. The second problem is, for early- or mid-20th-century portrait photographs, we very often don't know who the copyright owner is in the first place. They could be anonymous private snapshots, or photos by official agencies, or just about anything. In many cases, the danger of stepping on anybody's commercial toes is probably very low, but it's difficult to say with any certainty. So, upshot is, the only thing we can safely say about historical portrait photos of dead people is, they generally pass NFCC8; all other NFCCs need to be assessed separately just like everywhere else. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:33, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I've been going through them again. I'm concentrating on the portrait pics. As you said, the above reviews were too cumbersome. A lot of the portraits are Canadian politicians (with a few from other countries). They seem to have been moved to historic fur from their own template following discussions such as this one and this one. I'm also trying to flag up where they are used in other articles. For instance, List of premiers of Prince Edward Island, List of premiers of Quebec and Prime Minister of India. There are also some pictures in use on featured articles and featured lists (eg. List of premiers of Quebec and Sex pistols and Liberal Party of Canada leadership convention, 1968), so there may be some strong objections in store. Carcharoth (talk) 11:07, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Portrait or people images used in the article about the subject

As I said above, this is one of the largest types of images found on this list. I believe we should tag or categorise these images in some way to make tracking and reviewing them easier (they will need checking for several reasons: (1) to ensure the sources are present and correct; (2) to check that no free images are available or have since become available; (3) to check when the images become public domain. Rather than the exhaustive review above of each image, I'm limiting myself to those where the image is used in an article about the subject of the image. I've limited this to pictures of individuals used in articles about individuals, excluding pictures of groups used in articles about groups (eg. Image:Sex Pistols.jpg, though that image use is debatable). I'll put my "portraits" list on the front page (it is not exhastive - other portrait-type pictures are elsewhere on the list). Carcharoth (talk) 12:37, 31 August 2008 (UTC)