User talk:GreenReaper/Policy3

''This is an archive page, covering admin and policy issues discussed on my user talk page from 4 November 2005 to 18 February 2006. Please do not edit this page - if you wish to bring up a topic, copy the relevant portion into a new section on the current page. Thanks!'' --

Zobeid
Thanks for moving my article! I saw that my name had been linked from the SPR article, so that was really what set me off on the long story about the goings-on there. It really does belong on a page of its own, and I will try to fill in the general article with more neutral (i.e. less anecdotal) information. I'm also glad to see a lot of information about Furscape MUCK has been filled in.


 * If you are not comfortable with being linked from SPR, remove the link. I put myself into that story as my traces still appear to be omnipresent there six years after I left. As for Furscape, we already have one new player who found us thanks to the entry here on the first day of its presence - feel free to add anything that you like! Unci 19:20, 4 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Explicit or not??!!
Reaper?!: I am in a pissed off mood, that like it or not I am on the verge of hating and officially quitting Wikifur once and for all. And you had better beware of that! >:( Upon finding EXPLICIT images (whose warnings come rather too little too damn late) of rabbit character Sasha, by that porn bastard Jeremy Bernal. In that article, the attempt to protect those who'd be offended is a bullshit loophole. Why the hell could the images not be HIDDEN via links only, with fair warning notes too?! Please consider that option.

I am warning you because I will only give you ONE LAST CHANCE to hide ANY explicit images, especially that Sasha character. Because if you do not, then I will want all info about yours truly DELETED AND GONE, because it is a privilege Wikifur will otherwise NEVER AGAIN deserve, and you will LOSE future additions of opportunities. Think about that, because I do not tolerate any unacceptable loopholes. Thank you for understanding, because my trusting you is in extreme jeopardy.

If we can make a deal here, please let me know and E-mail me at jmalecki@rogers.com. Thank you

Yours truly, Jamie Malecki.


 * Because we are an encyclopedia, WikiFur is not censored for the protection of minors and may contain some content which some people may consider offensive. I'll leave GR, to answer this further but I believe the short answer is that we don't hide such images any more than Wikipedia do. Also, as far as I'm aware, the article about yourself has already been locked. --Nidonocu - talk [[Image:Trans 168.png|16px|Nidonocu]] 22:03, 9 Nov 2005 (UTC)


 * I am sorry that you feel that way, Jamie, but I personally feel your edits as of late have shown that your beliefs do not align with those of this community. These are outlined - fairly clearly, I hope - in What WikiFur is and What WikiFur is not.


 * One of the things that WikiFur is not is a place that is censored for minors (or for any other group). Specifically, protecting people from being offended is not a particular concern of WikiFur. This has been pointed out several times on your talk page. The simple reason that I would present for this is that the furry fandom is, ultimately, mostly composed of adults, and some topics cannot avoid covering adult material without being the lesser for it. The grounds for inclusion of images is as for any other content - its appropriateness to the topic concerned, not the morals of the individuals that might read it.


 * It has become clear that you do not agree with this, and it seems from your ultimatim that you are not interested in convincing us that this is a bad policy through debate. That being the case, it may well be best if you do discontinue editing here, at least for now, as I would not wish to have a fellow contributor who does not agree with the ideals of this site.


 * As to trying to "make a deal" with me, I think you misunderstand WikiFur. This is a community site - and is ultimately run by the consensus of the community, not by me. If you wished to "deal", you should have engaged the community on the discussion pages for the articles concerned and tried to convince them that your edits were the right thing to do. Instead, you made edits like this. Surely you can see how such actions only weaken your standing here, where respect is due to the quality of contributions to the site? The use of terms like "porn bastard" don't help your case, either. :-)


 * Regarding your statements about information about you - freedom of speech is a right, not a privilege, as others have found out. You do not legally have the right to force the removal of true information about yourself. Moreover, when you submit information to WikiFur, you are licensing your work for free use and editing by all - even if at a later date you wish otherwise. The notice under the edit box is fairly clear about this.


 * Nevertheless, out of respect for your wishes and according to existing WikiFur policies, I have blanked the page with personal information about you. If at a later date you change your mind and wish it unblanked, you are free to contact me or any other administrator to do so. -- 02:40, 10 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Email required
I am writing on behalf of a small number of parties who wish to have information deleted from the "WikiFur" in it's entirety. We wish to be provided with a direct email address, as we do not wish to:

1) Post requests on a public-viewable board 2) create a "login" for the site.

Please send an email address for any administrator who can remove entries in their entirety and make modifications to others to: delfromwikifur@yahoo.com


 * Hi there! Welcome to WikiFur. :-)


 * You probably want to talk to me. The link to my email is in the toolbox at the left, but to make it simple I've copied this message to the address given.


 * Before you email, you should know a few things:


 * I will treat your emails with a measure of confidence, if that is what you desire. I may share some details with the fellow administrators who I trust not to spread said details beyond that group, depending on the circumstances.
 * I will do things that are provided for by our policies, and particularly our personal information policy (which is the main generally accepted grounds for removing information) unless I have a really good reason for not doing so, in which case I will explain why that is. Note that this pertains both to information that we will remove and information that we will not remove.
 * Please understand that things may take a certain amount of time, and trying to rush it (especially with legal threats, which we've had before) will not help you achieve your goals more quickly. I, personally, intend to attend Midwest FurFest this Friday and weekend, but that's not the main reason, which is . ..
 * This is a community wiki. Not mine, nor that of any other contributor. My decisions are not final. Consensus is the byword here. It may take some time - and, yes, discussion - to reach it.
 * If your requests pertain to personal details, I will want to have some reasonable assurance that the person actually requested such actions, or other evidence that the person's wishes are as you say they are. It was fairly simple to confirm that the most recent request was "likely in intent", but others might not be. This is one reason why concerned persons might wish to contact me directly.


 * Honestly, I think you are misguided in not posting publicly, as ultimately all actions on WikiFur are public and contentious ones will require explanation, or they will be reverted - if not by myself, then by others. I'm willing to lay your case for removal of material on your behalf, but by choosing to forgo a personal request from named people, you lose the basic respect that goes with asking for yourself. Given that most information is removed due to such respect, that is an important thing to consider. I am not willing to make quick and silent removals on behalf of people that I do not know, or for reasons that I do not agree with. You will have to convince the community that it is the right thing to do.


 * That said, I await your email. -- 03:23, 17 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Criteria for protecting/excluding a personal page
Is the text found in this article enough to make conclusions as for the action of protecting and excluding? Or would the person need to contact an admin by e-mail or IM? Just wondering, as I'm kinda new to situations like this. :) --MKerris 19:18, 25 Nov 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm just going to delete that for now. It looks like someone out to cause trouble. -- 19:33, 25 Nov 2005 (UTC)

WikiFur "Shoutbox"?
What if we were to create a general purpose talk page, where users could simply ask questions that could be answered by any other visiting user without having to think of who or where in particular to ask? A link to creating a new thread on this page would be given out in the welcome messages, for immediate access by new users.

However, I'm not really sure how good this would work out in practice, though - it could be overused/vandalized to no end for all I know. But still, it would be great to have a clearly defined way to reach the most possible users on this Wiki at any given time. --MKerris 03:34, 26 Nov 2005 (UTC)


 * There's already such areas on Wikipedia, so there is precedent for how to do it: Wikipedia:Help_desk for questions on using Wikis and Wikipedia:Reference_desk for asking factual questions. --Rat 01:38, 4 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmm. Interesting ideas. I'll have to take a look at those. Sorry for not responding earlier, MKerris - I missed this! :-/ -- 02:03, 4 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * No worries, GR... to keep track on everything at all times can be quite taxing at best. Thanks to both of you for looking into this; it would be a nice and helpful feature to have, imo. :) --MKerris 02:43, 4 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * This thing suddenly came up on my mind again, and I decided that I could just as well try my hand at it - after all, it doesn't have to be nearly as complex as the forum system at Wikipedia. Perhaps only one such page would be enough, where any type of question could be asked, regardless of matter? Makes it as newbie-friendly as possible, which tends to be a good thing most of the time.


 * In any case; what do you (or anyone) think would be a suitable name for such a page? I was thinking of maybe the Oracle, or perhaps something as cheesy as the Refurence Desk, but there are bound to be way better names out there..! :) --MKerris 20:38, 3 Jan 2006 (UTC)


 * Sphinx's Lair? Or some other creature known for wisdom/puzzles/gregariousness... -- Siege 21:15, 3 Jan 2006 (UTC)


 * Hmm, that's definitely worth considering... Not that I have anything against sphinxes, but I'll try pondering about with some other creatures to see what the alternatives could be. --MKerris 08:03, 4 Jan 2006 (UTC)


 * I think I'll just be calling it the Help Desk for now, and put the name ideas on its talk page to relieve GR's page from any future additions. It's not meant as an official poll or anything (rather merely a list), but feel free to comment on them as you like. We could still turn this into a full-fledged poll later, if needed. --MKerris 09:01, 4 Jan 2006 (UTC)

Might want to put that page on Community_Central somewhere, so people can learn that it's about and start to use it instead of this page. -- Siege 19:35, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Novels / Stories / Fiction
I'm question whether the division between Category:Novels and Category:Stories is the best approach to take. Currently, the convention is that if it's commercialy published, it goes in Novels, and if it's web published only, it goes in Stories. A third category, Category:Fiction, seems to be mostly redundant with the other two (and has had a merge template for over a month). More than once, contributors have put stories in the wrong category. Some of the entries in Stories are short stories, and at least one current article in Novels is for an anthology. Maybe we should have categories for short stories, or for multi-book series.

Is there a better way to organize/subcategorize stories and such? I think we can figure out a workable system while it would still require recategorizing no more than a couple dozen articles. --mwalimu 16:29, 27 Nov 2005 (UTC)


 * If no one objects, I'm going to delete Category:Fiction in a couple of days (after checking and if necessary recategorizing all the articles in it). --mwalimu 18:51, 29 Nov 2005 (UTC)


 * Yipe, I missed this - sorry! Umm. Not sure I have a better answer, though. It's always hard to categorize this sort of gradual change from one to another. Perhaps Category:Fiction should be a super-category of both? -- 03:08, 30 Nov 2005 (UTC)


 * Okay, a question then. Should we maintain the category distinction between web fiction and published fiction?
 * If the answer is no, then I propose we make Fiction the primary category. Subcategories of it would include Novels, Short fiction, Story series, and Anthologies.  Most works of fiction should fall into one of these four.  No category distinction between commercially vs. web published.  How does that sound?  --mwalimu 18:38, 1 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree - fiction is fiction, and it really shouldn't matter for categorization purposes whether it was published in paper or not, commercially or not (though it should of course be noted in the article). -- 19:00, 1 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Reorg done. Category:Stories is now basically obsolete, with most of the articles spread among Category:Novels, Category:Short stories, and Category:Story series. Category:Fiction is now used as a higher-level category for these and other fiction-related subcategories. I'm not familiar with some of the stories I had to recat (both the ones with articles and the "To add" lists), so anyone who reads this, please look them over and if you see something in the wrong category, please feel free to move it to the correct one. --mwalimu 21:44, 1 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Link to the wiki?
Hey GR, I was just quoting WikiFur in a post on LJ and I tried to link to http://furry.wikicities.com/wiki, however as you can see that 404's unless you include the trailling /! Could you speak to those at Wikicities to see if they could fix this little bug for us? ^_^; --Nidonocu - talk 10:56, 15 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * It's not really a bug . . . you just pointed at the wrong page. I don't think automatic redirection works with /wiki, which is special to start with and not really a "real" directory, but I'll ask. For now I would recommend you edit the post or repost if it's a comment. :-) -- 15:44, 15 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Body Parts
I agree with having a category for body parts, but may I suggest calling it Category:Anatomy terms instead? --mwalimu 06:29, 19 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * That sounds like a good idea. I just figured I'd put something there as a reminder. :-) -- 06:42, 19 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Say... (Furpile)
...perhaps we should implement the Improvement Drive soon, as you previously mentioned something about here? As we're getting fewer and fewer new articles lately, it's probably about time to start refurbishing the older ones a bit. Maybe we could use this feature to let the long-time "wanted" pages into the highlight as well? Just a thought, anyways. ;)

In my opinion about its placement, though: I don't think we could really call it a "drive" if we were to put it on the community central, as it sadly doesn't get as many hits as one should hope (although things could probably be done to improve on this). How about leaving some space above the Did you know? section on the front page for this purpose? You would have to scroll down a bit more to be able to read the full Upcoming events list, but that would be a rather small sacrifice in my eyes.

Any thoughts/ideas? --MKerris 22:31, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)


 * That sounds like a good idea. For the purpose of evenness at the top, I think it would be better to put it beneath the Did you know? section, though. I have just the colour to make sure it gets read . . . and just the name, too! *evil grin* -- 04:14, 3 Jan 2006 (UTC)


 * Nice choice of name, if I dare say - another step towards making WikiFur a little more visibly genuine (if we could just figure out a fitting name for the Community Central already! *Edit: Oops, I recently found out that the voting had been concluded over two months ago, and that Community Central was actually the name that won. Never mind this, then*) :)


 * Hopefully, this feature will help with increasing the overall quality of the Wiki in the not-so-long run. --MKerris 13:02, 3 Jan 2006 (UTC)

question on posting fur meet info on community pages
GR, got a quick community-ish question regarding the page on Sacfurs. Since we have weekly (or so) meets, and our website is occasionally down, would it be okay to mirror the latest sacfurs.com event listings (say a paragraph or so for the most recent) on the Sacfurs page, so in case of server trouble, people won't miss out?

Also, thanks for the wiki formatting changes on my user page -- i'm still getting used to it. it's quite different from html.


 * Obviously, I'm not GR, so I can't speak for him. But, we do have a upcoming events page on this Wiki, as well as informational pages for several conventions, so I don't see how it would be a major problem to list a schedule for the Sacfurs meets.  --Dmuth 22:10, 11 Jan 2006 (UTC)


 * Indeed. Go right ahead! We're not exactly going to run out of space anytime soon, especially with the new servers on the way. -- 02:29, 12 Jan 2006 (UTC)

Recent changes oddity
May I ask why all the recent edits have red exclamation points beside them? -- Siege 19:12, 17 January 2006 (UTC)


 * (Not GR, but...) I'm guessing it's an artifact of the upgrading process. Not sure if they're done with us or not - let me check around and see what I can find. --Duncan da Husky 19:17, 17 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It's because we're now on MediaWiki 1.5.5. They're edits that haven't been "marked as patrolled". -- 19:44, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Question about defacing?
Hello, How are you? (: I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm running into a little problem with two forum trolls who seem to have a "thing" for stalking me online. Several times so far they defaced my user page (although the effects weren't up for very long -- Great job moderators! and there seems to be no end to it.

I find it funny that they spent OVER an hour writing stupid 6th grade crap like "OMG, U GAY FURRY!!1" (although I'm not gay -- lol), yet the moderators can revert my page with two clicks. While it's fun to point and laugh at these people who pollute our gene pool, I fear that it's going to become a hassle for the moderators after a while.

Is there anything I can do to "lock" the page so that only I can edit it? I'm guessing not, since that somewhat defeats the purpose of a Wiki.

The problem is that these users have eather floating IPs or use a program to make random IP address, so banning their IPs is almost pointless.

Thank you for your time. (:

Taren


 * Hi there - I'm good, thanks!


 * As you might expect, our administrators (and regular users) are used to trolls - they typically get bored and move on or forget about it after a few days once they realise nothing they do will have a lasting impact. All the IPs have now been warned on their talk pages; judging by a few previous edits, they are not all proxy IPs.


 * It is possible (through an evil hack) to make it so that pages are only editable by one user and by administrators - see Personal information for more info, and Crassus for an example. We prefer to avoid that where possible, for the reason you described, but it is an option. Let me know if you feel that it is one you wish to take. -- 05:30, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Problem with Wikifur home page
Er, hi. I was browsing the index page, and clicked on the Popular Pages link, and that led me to an error page which said 'You have requested an invalid special page, a list of valid special pages may be found at Special:Specialpages.' I'm unsure of why this happens; there is no mention of a Popular Page in the Special Pages list. Is this a Wikicities bug? Thanks! Kitsune Sniper 20:55, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Confirmed. The page Special:Popularpages seems to be 404.  --Dmuth 21:40, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * That's an odd one. It shows up as blue so you'd think it would work. Probably something to do with the upgrade, or the miser mode enabled beforehand. I'll ask. -- 22:23, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

It turned out that this was due to items being disabled while in Miser Mode

SAfurs topic vs Furnet IRC
http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Something_Awful#.23safurs

This article isn't objective. It looks like pure furry drama more than good information. I call for your opinion please. --Ozone Griffox


 * WikiFur is not intended for the continuation of incidents of furry drama, but when it is relevant to a topic, I do think it is appropriate to record such incidents. It is my understanding that the foundation of an entire IRC network was due to actions related to this. Drama can be very notable when it changes the course of history. Of course, doing so objectively is the tricky part, especially when everyone involved has strong opinions, as is usually the case with drama.


 * I'll take a closer look at these articles when I get back online later tonight - I'm not a member of either server, so hopefully I can rewrite things without inadvertently favouring one side or another. If you have any references that you know about that you think might be relevant to the articles, they'd be welcome. :-) -- 01:07, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Exemples of what *I* consider non-objective:

This happens everyday on big IRC networks. And I know they organized attacks on more than just this channel. why not change this to "They organized various attacks on FurNet channels"
 * They organized an attack on a channel on FurNet called #dragon_yiff.

I translate this to "The users are stupid and, ahah, blamed the wrong person". I would remove this sentence completly.
 * The users, however, when everything calmed down, blamed it on Sibe.

I would remove this sentence. Sibe is a regular and really, who care about the actions of him specifically. Is he special? (you can answer yes, but no)
 * Much to the disturbance of SA forum regulars, Sibe under an alias on an account purchased by JJcoolJ and several other furries began to post their collections of furry porn there.

"Several of the furries participating in the furry concentration camp were later banned for being a nuisance."
 * Sibe and several of the furries participating in the furry concentration camp were later banned for being a nuisance.

The whole #safurs heading

This is not the truth, or it is at least overly exagerated. Snowpony was just doing her job as part of the Furnet Administrator group. You can't name her specifically, and you can't claim she deemed Jazzy unstable. This whole sentence is wrong.
 * In late 2003/early 2004, Snowpony, an administrator of FurNet deemed Jazzy unstable and therefore unable to keep administrating his channel. Forcibly, ownership was passed on to Bobby (aka Squnq). After getting bored, Bobby passed the channel on to Verix.

Again, this is her work as part of the administrator group. You can't name her specifically: "FurNet Administration began monitoring the channel".
 * Snowpony began monitoring the channel by idling and logging.

Actually, Simba tried to remove Snowpony by showing evidence of a few abuse. The result of this action was two weeks of proofs and argumentation by the goons. Two weeks ignored by FurNet's administration. After those two weeks, The FurNet administration published the new FurNet code of conduct. The goons, seeing their action to havoc FurNet failed, and under the new code of conduct left the place forever.
 * Believing that Snowpony was out of line with her actions, in a rather infamous display of quitting her administrative job of FurNet, turned the tables and akilled Snowpony.

The whole #safurs heading looks like a fight to justify some goon actions against FurNet. Snowpony was the administrator who took the problem in care, it doesn't mean she is responsible. Her actions was to be considered as an administrator. FurNet's administration solved the problem, by writing the Furnet code of conduct.

This whole heading is highly non-objective. --Ozone Griffox 02:00, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your notes. I'm sorry I didn't get around to this earlier, but I'm not sure it would have done much good - it seems to be a rather convoluted situation, and it's getting awfully late, here. Fortunately, on a wiki there is always more time. :-)

I am not sure that I agree that Snowpony's actions were entirely under the heading of "FurNet administration actions". I've been looking over this page and related documents, as well as a few other sources covering the views of both "sides" (and none, just people disappointed that the split occurred). Yes, I'm aware that the first in particular is biased towards making a point. However, they do show direct quotes from Snowpony herself describing actions that she took on her own initiative and which had not previously been discussed with the rest of the admin team.

My own view is that at the server operator level, administrators are personally responsible for their actions. If someone does something that I thought was wrong here, I would call them on it, probably publicly, and I would expect others to do so (as I expect it to be done for my own edits - fortunately I tend to have a good idea of what's acceptable to others so I don't get called on stuff too often). Apparently this is Snowpony's as well: I do accept the responsibility of my actions and will endeavor in future to fully address the administration before undertaking unique action such as has been listed here.

This is in direct reference to her actions in #safurs. The section should certainly be rephrased, at least - for example, "forcibly passed to Bobby" makes him look like someone she selected personally, when in fact she took a vote. Still, it was "unique", and it was her call, not a group call. She took the credit from those who thought it was a good idea, and the blame from those who did not.

Of course, several members of #safurs did do incredibly stupid things that I would have been tempted to ban for myself. But then I control a corporate IRC server, not a public IRC network, and I am expected to take an active hand in channel disputes (except for one channel set for a separate websites, which has its own administration that asks me for help occasionally).

I also agree that topics are public and reflect upon a network. The people creating #AryanFurs were looking for trouble. I wouldn't want to encourage that. Nor do I think that Simba was blameless when he was key in creating that channel. I think he should have recognized that when you are on a network, you should not get personally involved in such things. On the other hand, they were his friends, and I think the #VCL thing was silly, too - again, was an IRCOp looking for things to do. To me, this sort of action suggests a GodKing situation (or Queen, I guess).

I (like quite a few of the newsgroup posters) think that ultimately the main problem here was that there were few written policies, nobody on the admin team appears to have had much of an interest in getting any together (which resulted in things festering and turning it into a direct personal conflict between Simba and Snowpony), and as a result there appears to have been (in general) a lack of agreement on policy, perhaps because nobody felt they were in a position to create it - or didn't feel it was necessary, until it was too late. It may be that Snowpony herself took action because she felt that the admin system was non-responsive to problems - but was that because nobody cared/had enough time to do anything, or because nobody felt it was a good idea, but didn't care enough to comment? It seems there was about a 50/50 split at the end, but who really knows if nobody talked about it beforehand?

Even on a wiki there are a need for written policies that are understood to be the consensus of the group, which is why I took the time to write a few early on (once we'd figured out what that consensus was). I guess the irony is that the policies did get written for FurNet after all. . . it's just a shame that it took a permanent netsplit before it happened.

This is a key piece of furry IRC history, but it relates to several articles and so putting it in any one of them seems inappropriate. I therefore propose a separate article is created to describe the situations leading up to and following the server split - in fact, as that is the important thing, it might be the right title, something like 2004 FurNet/Anthrochat split. This will (hopefully) reduce bias from people who feel they have to edit it towards the point of view of the current pages, or that it is overly biasing those pages, as well as reduce redundancy of information.

I intend to move this discussion from these user talk pages to the appropriate article talk page at the point that it is created (leaving a link), so people can see where we came from. -- 10:02, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Please exclude my profile.
Please delete and exclude my entery, Taren from the Wikifur. It has nothing to do with any past events. It's based totally on my personal reasons. Thank you very much!

~Taren


 * Done. The previous revisions have been deleted (or at least deleted as much as is possible on a wiki - they're only available to administrators). Let me know if you decide you want it back at a later date, either publicly editable or with user editing restricted to your control. -- 05:54, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Image copyrights
Hello! I recently transwikied from wikipedia, and am an active image patroler (for copyright/sources) and would like to impliment something similar. I have seen very little use of the copyright tags, or sources, and soem new tags need to be created, such as some of your "wikifur" only images... ideas? --RBoltz (T | C) 07:30, 1 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi there, and welcome to WikiFur! It's good to see more people coming over to visit - and great when they decide to stick around. You're welcome to try imposing some order on image uploading - as with elsewhere, be bold! :-)


 * That said, we have a few differences with the kinds of images (and their uses) that are normally uploaded here which I should probably outline:


 * Many images uploaded are what I'd call "standard" fair use cases, such as comic covers or panels, and logos or (in a few cases) mascots that are intended to represent the group or site concerned. Typically these are only used on the appropriate pages, and have tags asserting the fair use.


 * Another popular image type is character portraits, either of popular fictional characters or fursonas. These are generally uploaded with the permission of someone (or should be :-). Often people upload artwork of their characters that they have commissioned from other people. Generally accepted practice in the furry fandom is to allow the non-profit display of such images on the web in association with a character at the commissioner's discretion, as long as no further copyright permissions are involved (such as the right to sell prints). It's nice to link to the actual creator, and many people do give the name of the person they commissioned it from as part of the description.


 * WikiFur does not currently require images to be uploaded under any particular license. The default that I would assume for images that are not marked specifically is "you can use it on this site but not elsewhere," and personally I'm fine with that. There have been suggestions of publishing some portion of WikiFur in paper form, and that might require more detailed information on sources (and perhaps permissions or licenses), but that is very much a secondary consideration. Of course, a lot of the images concerned are associated with articles about people, which would be less likely to make the cut anyway.


 * Clear violations of copyright are generally rare (most often, they occur during vandalism). We do get the occasional question of whether someone has the right to upload an image. Typically I ask them, and if they can't be contacted quickly, the creator (if apparent). I can't remember anyone saying "no" yet once they were told what the site was, although it's only come up a few times. We have had one recent case of the author of an image claiming copyright infringement. It was pretty clear that this was the case, and so I removed it myself.


 * So, where is this leading? We should probably have something like "this is the character of Y, drawn by X, uploaded with Y's permission". We could probably do with importing a few more of Wikipedia's tags - I've only done the ones I use. And whatever we do, we need to make sure that it doesn't discourage people who just found WikiFur and want to upload a picture of their character (or any other work) to make their first wiki page look nice. We're a relatively small site looking to expand, and so we have to try to accomodate users more than they accommodate us.


 * In a nutshell - tagging and sourcing is good, but the objective is to find and document reasons why we should keep images where possible, not why we should be deleting them. "With permission" images are welcome. It's a little different from Wikipedia, but then we're not really trying to be the same - at least not in all ways. :-)


 * I'm sorry if the above is a little incoherent, but it's 6 AM here and I'm about to go to bed. Let me know if you have any more questions or if I didn't answer you properly! -- 10:56, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Its OK :) -- Non commerical / permission seems to fit cc-by-nc or cc-by-nc-nd to me... thoughts? --RBoltz (T | C) 17:29, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Request for unprotection
You may remove me from the list of users requested to be exempted from the site. (currently the page under "Canuss")


 * I have unprotected it. You may edit it how you like. --Rat 02:47, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Regular updates
I haven't seen the "Did you know?" block change in several weeks, and the "new pages" listing is slow as well. Have we hit a plateau in new, interesting facts and pages? -- Siege 04:27, 9 February 2006 (UTC)


 * No, this is entirely my fault. I've been slacking on WikiFur (partially due to my work on Galactic Civilizations 2 - but now that's over, so it's no excuse :-). I will try to update Did you know? more regularly, as well as the Featured article, which hasn't actually changed in weeks.


 * Of course, if any of you notice any small collection of interesting tidbits, you are welcome to update it yourself. This is a wiki, after all. Some input over at Featured article candidates might be useful too.


 * As for Template:Newbar, I have spent a few hours knocking together something to keep that updated automatically. I've run into a few problems actually getting the site to accept the input, but the theory is sound. I hope to get that running at some point "soon". -- 04:42, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Article removal
Please remove the articles including my real name.

-BBF
 * The article with your real name has been deleted. I see that you removed your real name from your pseudonymous article, so that should take care of things.--Duncan da Husky 18:03, 10 February 2006 (UTC)