Last modified: 2009-12-31 01:11:49 UTC
On Wikipedia, fair use legality issues result in a "shoot first" policy in which images are deleted immediately if there is any fear that they might not be legal to display on the project. This results in a lot of collateral damage, annoyance to newcomers who don't understand the process yet, etc. It should be possible, with a magic word or other such function (which can be included in standard templates like {{no rationale}}, to put something on the image description page that prevents the image from displaying anywhere in the project (and maybe prevents it from being downloaded, too). Then we aren't violating anyone's copyright, but there's also not a mad rush to write fair use rationales, find sources, explain how copyright law works, etc. before the image is deleted.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 8298 ***