User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/What would you like to see on Star Wars Fanon?/@comment-3993941-20110201033951/@comment-20644-20110201044714

I wouldn't want to disable the image placeholder or the in-editor upload tool. The fact is that Special:Upload has proven confusing to people across Wikia (and here too), so there are other tools to make it simpler to upload images. What that means is that not only do we have to be more diligent in making sure images get sourced, which is fine, but we have to be understanding of people if they don't automatically do it or if they make mistakes when they do it. It's not the end of the world.

Uploading images is easy for us because we've been doing it for years, but it's a complicated process for newbies when you take into account the method we use for sourcing. Sourcing on Wookieepedia, for example, isn't all that important, if we're going to be honest here&mdash;LFL is never in a million years going to make an issue out of unsorted images. It's just done because it's the right thing to do.

It's more important here, though, because users treat images on the internet as theirs for the taking. A lot of images that are uploaded here are not qualified for fair use, aka. images people just take and use from deviantART as if they're freely available for use, but there's nothing we can do about that because we can't check on all of them, so we make it the responsibility of the individual users to know whether an image can be used. Its also their responsibility to deal with any consequences if an artist wants to make an issue out of copyright.

Once we accept the fact that Star Wars Fanon is NOT going to be held accountable for copyright violations, but rather the uploader, we can relax a bit when it comes to being so hardline about images. Do we still want to make sure they're sourced and licensed? Yes, but let's take a step back and make sure we're doing it as a courtesy to the artists, not out of a paranoid adherence to copyright law. Taking that point of view lets us be a bit more understanding, patient, and helpful to users uploading images.