User talk:Dadadaft

Info on tagging images
Well basically Dadadaft, the copyright basically works something like this... In the case of the naruto series, the copyright belongs to the company that creates the series. Whether you scanned something yourself, cut it from a fansub or scannalation, or clipped it from an AMV, if it was cut from the actual naruto series, then the copyright to that image still belongs to the people that create the naruto series. And the people that have licensed the series also have jurisdiction against people misusing the series in the area they have licensed the series for. In other words, Viz also has the right to take legal action against anyone violating copyright inside of North America.

Now, as for how it goes on the wiki. We basically use official images from the series under fair use/fair dealing laws. Basically it's a part of the law that in a way lets us use restricted portions of the series (we're not hosting videos, we're not scanning entire manga, and we're not selling anything, and 90% of the material we use is already publicly available. We're only using it for documentation on the series itself). Of course there are limitations of that. But we also need to tag images as such to comply. So basically all the official images taken from the series, need to be tagged with a valid tag, and also given a  to justify their use. Technically if we are not using an image, even if it's tagged it's a good idea to delete it. We have a good set of information on how to create a good Fair use rationale on Forum:Fair use tagging tips...

On another part, we also have our own informal policies on the quality of images we use. Firstly, when there are multiple images that can be used in an infobox, ones with proper tagging always have dominance over those tagged for deletion (ie: Missing proper fair use tagging), even if the images are of far poorer quality. We also prefer images closer to the character's first appearance in the series (ie: We use images of Naruto Uzumaki from early on in Part I).

Then there is also image quality itself. Most of the time if an image is watermarked from another site it gets deleted immediately, though occasionally we might just tag it with a tag signaling that another non-watermarked image should be found to replace it. Also, we prefer images of a bit higher quality, we're only taking individual frames, and MediaWiki automatically resizes images so we don't need to worry about the filesize of images being viewed by readers. So we tag images as as well for replacement.

More on quality, we don't like .gif images. The GIF file format is not meant for big images like shots from series. .gif images are good for animated images, however we don't use animated images in articles since they distract from the actual page content. Additionally .gif images are limited to a 255 color pallet (ie: low quality color) unlike .jpg or .png images, so if an image was ever converted into a .gif it has lost most of it's defining color quality, and that cannot be recovered.

Then there are widescreen images. Sometimes these come with the black strips you see on your tv, these are meant to make the video fit on the tv screen, however they merely add cruft to images when placed on the web. Additionally, widescreen images as well pose an issue. The wideness of them increases the overall borderspace (space not being focused on the content of the image) and as a result when widescreen images get thumbnailed it nearly always ruins the image by making it hard to see the actual content of the image. So when it comes to widescreen shots from movies its normally a good idea to crop the image to just contain the actual content of the shot, ie: Whatever character or jutsu you are trying to get a shot of.

And lastly Leafninja images. Most of the time these are edited, we really don't like edited images, technically the copyright stays the same, the people who edited the images technically have no right over the image itself, only the small portions they created themselves. But it reduces the originality of the image and makes disputes complected. But as for the image themselves, 90% of the images from leafninja are cropped down to a real tiny thumbnail size. This really doesn't fit the wiki, Leafninja does it because of the format of their site, and to reduce the size of things transfered to the browser. However we don't have those issues, our content format is larger, and we have systems that let us upload large images, without needing to worry about the browser needing to download huge images on every page. So we always tag leafninja images for replacement.

Oh, I should also note that we prefer to keep subtitles or fan made translations out of images. It's ok to cut from a scannalation or a fansub, but it's best to make sure the frame doesn't contain extra subtitles or translations. It does add complexity to the copyright, but moreover we don't like to advertise the use of illegal material, and it again reduces the originality of the image, as well as reducing the quality of the images themselves and adding unnecessary cruft to articles.

Hope all that helps... ^_^ I think I just typed enough to create an entire forum article, or even policy page with... heh. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) current discussion Sep 28, 2008 @ 01:40 (UTC)