 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Non-free content rules have been around longer than some people think |
This page gives a survey of the historical development of Wikipedia's rules about non-free content, the non-free content criteria and related speedy deletion criteria. This timeline of policy developments provides a useful background for discussions of present policy issues regarding this field.
In discussions about non-free content, editors often display a lack of awareness of how these policies developed in Wikipedia and for how long they have been in place. Many long-term editors are under the impression that non-free content policing has become successively stricter over recent years. Some editors express a sense of dissatisfaction at what they perceive as a tendency of adding more and more "red tape" to the non-free content rules, leading to ever more radical deletion purges. The present page demonstrates that the perception of an ongoing trend towards stricter rules is largely untrue. Most of the crucial elements of the non-free content rules have in reality been in place, virtually unmodified except for minor cosmetic changes, since at least 2006. As far as deletion formalities are concerned, the rules have, if anything, been watered down in favour of making speedy deletions less easy since 2008. The misperception is largely due to the fact that in many cases it has taken a long while until rules that had long been in force in theory could actually be enforced across the project, due to the sheer size of the backlogs and the persistence of non-conformant uploading practices.