Talk:Wikilegal/3D files and 3D printing

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Default practice[edit]

The Wikimedia community has a default practice of promoting freedom of all sorts and accepting media contributions which advance the Wikimedia educational mission.

Until and unless there is a community discussion which establishes a consensus which is contrary to the default practice, then the Wikimedia community would expect the default of accepting all these media files. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:01, 16 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Data which can come from photos is okay[edit]

In 2008 the academic paper Reconsidering physical key secrecy: teleduplication via optical decoding (Q57398322) demonstrated that anyone can 3D print a physical key to open a lock even from a lower-quality photo of that key. The implication is that if someone uses a key to open a door, then a distant photographer could photograph the common practice of inserting a key into a lock and get a copy of their key. There are lots of other academic papers which treat the act of converting 2D photos to 3D models as a problem which contemporary software applications can solve with accuracy and detail that surprises contemporary human intuition.

To set a baseline in Wikimedia projects I propose that we never prohibit 3D data modeling files which give the same sort of information which can readily come from photographs which we host on Commons. For example, since we host Wikipedia articles and high resolution Wikimedia Commons photos on the katana (Q172736), a dangerous Japanese sword which is part of global pop culture, then we should expect that it would be trivial for anyone to be able to convert our photos and other information into a process for recreating the shape of these swords with 3D printing or otherwise. I would be in support of Wikimedia projects hosting any media files which contain a similar amount of of data as in Wikipedia articles and Wikimedia Commons photographs. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:01, 16 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]