User:FranksValli/Magic Moments

=Wikipedia Magic Moments!= This page is dedicated to my unpleasant experiences on Wikipedia. All of them are out of proportion and serve as more of a place to vent my frustration, I hope you'll excuse that... The stories you will hear are true, the names have been changed to protect the guilty suckers.

July 2005 - Too Quick To Judge

 * Nothing of epic proportions here - I just created a newly-created template that I was slapping on all the World War I Aviation-related articles. The template just initially had a little picture of a plane and a message saying matter-of-factly "This a World War I Aviation article".

Low and behold! Several hours after its birth it has a comment on its Talk page! It's popular already, sweet! But no, I get a message from the content police - "What is the point of this template? It seems to give a single rather obvious piece of information in an overly large and prominent format".

Well it seems that the template was STILL IN DEVELOPMENT. Just a short time later I added more things to the template to make sure it was worthwhile to holy Wikipedian eyes. We can't have any of this "rather obvious" crap on here!

July 2005 - Super Restricted Ugly 1921 Photos and the Italian Gustapo Copyright Police

 * Obscure and ugly 1921 plane, the Caproni Ca. 60, gets its own page with pictures, thanks to me (not that anyone else would be so interested in such an ugly plane). Not a few days later and the page has been completely brought down by a graffito-tagged message saying that the page is in suspect of using copyright material (oh no!!!).

Ok, so it was true - I had copied two sentences from a webpage and then cited the webpage as a source in the External Links section. Not good enough for the copyright police! But as a read up on the copyright policy, I sent an email to the author and kindly got permission to use his text. He also sent me several other pictures. Sweet! Anyhow, back to the serious business at hand.

After reading up on the Wikipedia Fair Use policy, I find that taking only two sentences out of a webpage, which does not represent the whole, is totally acceptable. Combine this with the fact that I now had permission from the author! So I take down the graffito-tagged copyright notice and put up my page again, with multiple explanations everywhere that I was allowed to use the material.

But oh no! The person must persist in seeing to it that my page is not allowed to be shown here! So I get a message saying "First, do not remove copyright notices, blah blah blah". Then they go on to say "Yes, you are correct, you are allowed to use that material [referring to the text] under Fair Use doctrine". Sweet! I get to keep the page up! But no! "But now we have a bigger problem - according to Italian copyright law, unless the photographer died before 1935 or the photos were published anonymously, they are still in copyright! PWNED!!"

So there you have it. How am I supposed to find out who the photographer was, or if the photos were published anonymously? So I said screw it, and wrote "NUKE THE PAGE" and "NUKE THE PICTURES" and it was done, everything was deleted and the page and pictures no longer exist. We can't have the Italian Gustapo Copyright Police knocking on our doors, inquiring about those oh-so-important pictures of the ugliest plane to come out of 1921!