Board Thread:Community Decisions/@comment-24510587-20191026212603

Hello there,

I would like to propose an alteration to the image policy. Currently, any non-original imagery is patrolled and deleted by the administrators, if the original artist does not give express permission to share their artwork. The reason that was given for this is that, supposedly, using artwork without express permission breaks fair use and might result in legal repercussions if it were to come to the attention of Fandom.

There is some truth to this, when it comes to official artwork owned by Games Workshop. GW are notoriously protective of their media, and would indeed come after this wiki if they caught wind of their art being used here. However, they also expressly state that their artwork is not to be used without their express permission.

In the case of third party artwork, however, I believe that this reasoning does not fly. I would like to compare to the image policy of the Halo Fanon wiki; Halo Fanon is a significantly larger wiki, one of the largest fanon communities on the platform in fact. Their image policy is considerably more lenient than yours, and they have not experienced any legal repercussions because of it. Thus, if a high-profile wiki like them does not suffer problems from a lenient image policy, it stands to reason that this wiki would not either.

Therefore, I would like to propose that this wiki's image policy is amended after the image of the Halo Fanon policy. Users can make use of third party images, as long as they are properly sourced, and the author does not state expressly that sharing their images without express permission is forbidden. If an author requests the removal of an image, then it is to be removed immediately. That way, no legal instruments have to be involved, while at the same time, this wiki's users gain access to a much wider pool of images to use for their articles.

This amendment is beneficial for everyone on the wiki. For the users, it means that much more imagery is available for their articles, allowing for more inspiration and articles that are of higher quality. Searching for suitable images becomes significantly easier. For the administrators, this means that much less time has to be invested into patrolling the image section of the wiki, as they don't have to inspect every uploaded image for whether or not express permission has been granted, and then go around deleting images and warning users. (And, as a side note, the original authors might gain some additional exposure for their work, so that's something)

TL;DR, lenient image policy good 