Chris,
I appreciate you taking the time to comment here. The forum has so much stuff, half of the time I'm impressed that you do get around to commenting on the things that you do.
I was searching for the right words at the moment, hence why I awkwardly stated it as "thus far declined to implement", not merely "declined to implement". I figured it might have made it on to that big to-do list in the cloud, and almost it's "probably on the back burner", but I wasn't sure that it's even there yet.
I try to keep in mind and understand that WikiTree has a small team in order to remain free and sustainable, and moreover that rapid change can sometimes be to a site's detriment (users are creatures of habit!), hence the development and the introduction of new features tends to proceed at a a the pace of maple syrup in Quebec this time of year!
However, what we eventually implement may not be exactly what you would like.
I believe there's a lot of truth behind the phrase, "you can't please all of the people all of the time", so a corollary of that is that I will be likely disappointed some of the time and so I (and I hope most other users) can make peace with that, provided that you're acting on a reasonable basis and in good faith.
My only real expectation here is that the leaders of WikiTree act in the best interests of the community and are honest and transparent with their actions and reasons, i.e. that you and the rest of the site's leadership act with integrity. And I largely think that you are acting in good faith (and not just because the Honour code says that one should).
There are many community members' interests and factors to consider.
Yes, there are things to balance. But this does not merely affect the community but also how WikiTree is inter-operable with the rest of the internet. That needs to be weighed heavily as one of the challenges of WikiTree is that good progress sometimes gets hamstrung by a minutely small but active faction in G2G. If WikiTree is to expand as a community, the focus should be as much on those outside the community as it is on those who have already been won over.
Inter-operability means we need to adopt standards that are inter-operable, rather than being limited by the wants and needs of current community members. We don't need another competing standard, when a good one already exists: The Creative Commons licenses. That organization's licenses are essentially a web standard and a global standard, utilized by numerous organizations including:
Creative Commons licenses are also already multilingual, an area where WikiTree has been lagging. So it solves that problem in advance!
Hence why I suggest to go with this widely used, inter-operable, global, multi-lingual, human-and-machine-readable standard which offers a variety of terms. Users could upload under CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, etc.... or solely licensed to be hosted by WikiTree -- that too could be made more clear! (Though users should probably be cautioned that if something is only licensed to WikiTree, it does risk being lost if WikiTree goes under.) But ultimately, that selection should be up to the user, provided that WikiTree's interface makes clear what each option means.
Any and all of those license options that a user could select will help WikiTree to improve its efforts to keep point 9 of the Honour Code:
We are united in a mission to increase the world's common store of knowledge. We always respect copyrights and privacy, but we keep information as free and open as possible.
With regard to image content, WikiTree is currently doing a poor job of upholding that mission given the current state. (It's not nothing, but it's not great.) Because currently shared images are under this cloud of ambiguity in terms of who can re-use them and how they can be re-used. As my post explained, even when our community members kindly make their contributions available under open licensing, those works cannot be properly found and thus languish.
This connects to my personal reason for turning to Creative Commons licensing for certain works: I hate to see wasted human effort. In my professional life, if I make a diagram, from which I don't intend to financially profit, why should others who need the exact same thing find it necessary to re-invent the wheel from scratch? Why not just allow them to re-use mine and let them attribute me? That concept is also a big reason why I started using WikiTree and why I believe that the collaborative, open model for doing genealogy is so good: If I privately research some tiny branch of my family tree, I'm the only one who can benefit from that. Everyone else will have to start from scratch. But if I do the work on WikiTree, others don't need to reinvent the wheel. WikiTree and the Creative Commons license share a fundamental goal that way:
to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they (the author) have created
Source: Wikipedia
Finally, there's even an argument (or two) for using Creative Commons licensing as a form of SEO ... and given your post(s) about SEO and building inbound links over the course of 2019, I believe that you may wish to consider my proposal from that perspective. (I should add: I'm not saying that an inbound link would be construed as "required" as attribution, though for most people, working in digital media, it's the easiest method.)
Ultimately, making a formal way to record and communicate license information about image on WikiTree could be part of keeping WikiTree financially solvent, sustainable, future-proofed, and relevant.
