Alsee added a comment.
The default behavior of PageImages is Free-only for good reason. The Board of Trustee's Resolution:Licensing_policy <https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy> says that unauthorized use of copyrighted content (non-free content) must be "minimal" and subject to EDP (Exception Doctrine Policy), and that this **may not be circumvented, eroded, or ignored by Wikimedia Foundation officers or staff nor local policies of any Wikimedia project**. The reasons and explanations are lengthy, but in short we have a free-content mission. Our exceptions for non-free content are deliberately more restrictive than what copyright law might permit. We allow some non-free images in articles (and partial-article previews) with significant restrictions, and they may appear in maintenance categories for work purposes such as investigating and cleaning up copyright issues. We don't allow non-free images to decorate links. It looks nice and it's nice to have, but "looks nice" and "nice to have" are exactly were we don't use non-free content. Special:Nearby should not be requesting or serving non-free images. Setting Special:Nearby to actively request that non-free images be included is definitely wrong. If Special:Nearby is returning non-free images then that needs to be fixed. If Special:Nearby only returns images from commons(?), then it shouldn't find any non-free images to return. However in that case the code would either be wrong and doing the right thing by accident, or it would be deliberately requesting the inclusion of non-free images as an ugly hack. Either way it is a very bad practice to leave this sort of misleading landmine in the code. It creates an impression that non-free images are supposed to appear here, and a significant risk that some future change will cause them to appear. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T159678 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: aude, Alsee Cc: Alsee, gerritbot, Sjoerddebruin, Viveksr96, Jdlrobson, hoo, aude, Jonas, thiemowmde, Aklapper, Lydia_Pintscher, darthmon_wmde, Ayesh1234, Dibya, 94rain, DannyS712, Nandana, Lahi, Gq86, GoranSMilovanovic, Jayprakash12345, Antohabio, QZanden, Zoranzoki21, LawExplorer, DatGuy, Devwaker, Niklitov, _jensen, Urbanecm, rosalieper, JEumerus, Ananthsubray, Tulsi_Bhagat, Wong128hk, Luke081515, SimmeD, Wikidata-bugs, Snowolf, Dcljr, Jdforrester-WMF, Matanya, Mbch331, Rxy, Jay8g, Krenair
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