User:Jenolen/Album Covers and Logos article

As per discussion at WP:POST/TIPS, here's a version of this article for editing.

Defrocked Admin On Deletion Tear; Album Covers, Logos subject to new policy interpretation

User:Betacommand, who recently lost administrative powers due mainly to image tagging, deletion and poor communication issues, continues to stir things up when it comes to image use on Wikipedia. Now, relying on a new interpretation of WP:NONFREE, Betacommand and his Betacommandbot are tagging thousands of logos and album covers for deletion. The problem? Previously, album covers and logos were presumed to have self-explanatory fair use rationales, a position explained by User:Lexicon in a posting on the Administrators' Noticeboard: A logo is fair use because it's a logo; a logo is an important visual representation of an organization that serves to immediately identify that organization in the real world and it serves exactly the same purpose on Wikipedia. If we can write up a fair use rationale for one logo, then the exact same rationale will apply to all other logos as well.

Betacommand, supported by a few other editors, isn't buying that, and now proposes that every logo and album cover used on Wikipedia requires a unique fair use rationale. Thousands of album covers and logos have been uploaded to the site over the past three years, the vast majority of them relying on the generic "boilerplate" rationale stated in the album-cover template, or having no rationale at all.

Betacommand defended the tagging and deletion spree, saying, we have let these images slide for over 3 years, that is way too long. we need to take action and fast. Other users weren't convinced that Betacommand's latest tagging and deletion program was in the best interests of Wikipedia. Mariano wrote You can't expect to have all the fair-use images uploaded since Wikipedia's creation to get a rationale in one week. Many users that uploaded those images don't contribute to the Wikipedia anymore, and can't place the rationale to those images.

Left unclear, at least for now, is how a unique logo fair use rationale could be constructed for the thousands of different logos currently hosted on Wikipedia. As User:BigDT put it, The rationale for using a Microsoft or Virginia Tech logo in their respective articles is obvious and anything you would want to say about them could be stuck on a template. There is nothing whatsoever that you can say about the Virginia Tech logo that you couldn't also say about the logo for Michigan State University or Notre Dame. When you want to repeat text, you put it on a template, so there's no reason that any rationale we would want for a logo couldn't be put on a template and shared for all of them.

Deletions for some of the Betacommand tagged images could occur as early as June 1st, perhaps earlier.