Hello,
Recently I had been going around replacing fair use images with freely licensed ones on commons. However the official policy is “ We usually prefer that image replacements get discussed and agreed upon before they're made” so I want to stop doing this before I continue, as well as to offer to undo the changes I have made so far if that is more appropriate.
I believe the following categories have the best potential for enrichment from Commons:
- Category:Cult Actor: Mostly promotional photographs from the 70s or earlier that fell out of copyright, or contributor pics from the 2000s on.
- Category:Videogame Systems: Especially home and portable consoles
- Category:Creators: Especially for notable individuals or company logos
Replacing fair use images with free ones from Wikimedia commons has several advantages:
- More cut and dry on what you can do with it.
- Typically better provenance.
- Some images are literally the same picture, but at a lower resolution and quality.. A free file is sometimes uploaded as a copyrighted one. Better to err on the side of caution of course, but still
There are however, some disadvantages as well.
- If I do this en masse, it will create a lot of work for mods.
- Creates many orphaned files.
- Some times fair use images depict things that cannot be captured in a freely licensed image, potentially making no free image a suitable replacement.
- Images direct from commons aren’t resized per style guide.
- For some pages like Adam West, there’s no clear cut alternative I can find on commons that is strictly better, though File:Adam West Batman 1966.jpg may be appropriate given the current caption.