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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article,

Edit history suggests that it's a licensing issue. If you can find a photo with an appropriate license you should add it.

It seems like a mug shot meets the criteria in other cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump

This image has an extensive licensing section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_mug_shot.jpg

That seems extremely unlikely -- there are numerous mug-shots, as seen on many news sites (including one linked in this very thread).

What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?

"Wikipedia editors make up excuses to justify ideological narrative shaping on hot-CW related topics" on the other hand... would not be a big surprise to me.

What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?

The licensing issue with the previous photo appears to be that there was no license on it.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid=355493040

Yes, police departments do not typically license their mugshots -- this does not mean that they aren't in the public domain.

Mugshots probably don't even meet the requirements for originality. It's a low bar, but it's not zero.

It is not generally the case that works of state and local governments are public domain.

State and local governments usually do retain a copyright on their works. 17 USC §105 only places federal documents in the public domain.[11] However, laws and/or court decisions in some states may place their work in the public domain.

Even if the photo in question was in the public domain, it's still required to indicate this on the photo (example). Having no license on a file is not the same as having a PD license on it.

The equivalent article for Charlottesville uses a the work of a newspaper photographer who literally won a Pulitzer for it -- reduced in resolution, relying on fair use I presume. Does WM really think that the Waukesha Sheriff's department is more likely to sue for infringement than an actual news photographer?

I'm not an expert on Wikipedia policy, but I would suspect that likelihood of being sued is not a consideration when evaluating if a photo should have a license attached or not.

As far as I can tell, the policy is very simple - photos must have a license. Happy to be corrected if I'm overlooking some policy details here.

The Charlottesville photo he mentioned has no license submitted with it, only excuses for why it's fair use.

Quite the opposite. There's a licensing section that clearly indicates that it's a copyrighted image that's used under fair use.

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I wonder if the dudes that used to upload pictures of their semen submitted them with an accompanying license.

This is the go-to excuse wikipedians use when they want to memoryhole something. They also used it to attempt to delete the Trump Raised Fist photo. Of course, this is just a pretext, as the solution is widely used on wikipedia: reduce the resolution of the photo.

This photo continues to exist, so it seems that in this particular example the tactic is not working.

They still tried it and it appears to be working for Brooks...

There has been pretty well documented examples of the politicization of wikipedia. Why would it be different, in this case?

It's not "working" because the trump photo deletion attempt is for "invalid fair use" rather than a lack of a license. That's a totally different argument, and sure, I can believe that it's not always applied in good faith. A license being totally absent is pretty black and white.