For the sake of the curious, I thought I should explain my decision to leave Wikipedia.
Short Version:
I’ve become a bit disillusioned with the focus of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia, and annoyed with Commons because of issues surrounding opting out of the license migration. I’m also finding myself wasting too much time on pointless discussions at Commons and here. I’m keen to spend more time on my neglected website, flagstaffotos.com.au and will be uploading my photos there in the future. I might even join flickr if I develop a social craving :)
Long Version:
The primary reason I’ve decided to retire is that I’ve become disillusioned with the focus of Wikipedia. It’s become ever more apparent, through discussion such as this one, that Wikipedia is not what I thought it was. It seems as though concerns for the quality of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia, are not as important as ensuring all content can be utilized commercially. For me, this is a fundamental flaw in the current Wikipedia philosophy.
The purpose of Wikipedia should be to provide the world with the best free (as in no cost) encyclopaedia possible. Wikipedia is meant to be the realisation of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This goal is compromised when commercial freedom is valued more than the quality of contributions. To descend from generalisations and become specific, Wikipedia’s refusal to allow images licensed under an NC license is shutting off an enormous amount of valuable content from flickr and other places and is preventing people from joining and uploading their photos. The lack of protection is felt in particular by professional or semi-professional photographers who could provide some of the very best images on Wikipedia if only it embraced a suitable license.
There is only so far you can go with PD-esque licenses – and it’s not far above tourist snapshots. True there are a few talented photographers who I’ve met at FPC who contribute excellent photos without NC protection. But there could be so much more high quality content if NC was embraced. The deficit is felt in particular by people articles. It’s fairly straightforward for any skilled amateur to get a good photo of a building or a bird, but getting a good shot of a celebrity is much, much more difficult.
I think the current focus of Wikipedia confuses its purpose with other WMF projects, and in particular Commons - which ‘’is’’ meant to be a free-for-all content repository. True it’s a sister project, but it should be sufficiently delinked to allow Wikipedia to concentrate on giving the world the best possible free reference source. And to do this it needs to adopt NC.
Another contributing factor (as indicated above) is that I’m more than a little annoyed with the way my images were handled in opting out of the recent migration. I don’t have the heart to provide a summary of the issue here (and doubt many people would be interested), but suffice to say IMO some members of the community acted very poorly (and somewhat hypocritically) in this matter and should have shown greater tolerance and empathy. It seems strange, for a project which relies on a photographer's good will, to show such disregard for my wishes concerning my images when it would do effectively no harm to the project. But anyway, that's what happened.
Coupled with what I said above with regard to Wikipedia not adopting NC, I’ve come to the point where I’d like to focus more on my photography commercially. In particular I’ve neglected my website (flagstaffotos.com.au) for too long. So I’ll be uploading my images there in the future as opposed to here! I’m also finding Wikipedia/Commons too distracting during my uni semester and find myself wasting far too much time here unconstructively (on things like the relicense debates for example).
So anyway, after mulling it all over for a long time I’ve decided that today, my 5th Wiki-bday is an appropriate time to retire. I’ve certainly enjoyed much of my time here and hopefully I’ve made a useful contribution to the sum of all human knowledge. And who knows, things may change in a few years time and I might return, but for now it’s farewell!