[WikiEN-l] The Damned Commons Image Deletion Cycle
I have just had to deal with this - AGAIN - and would like to rail for a moment, hoping to provoke discussion to promote change. I posit that this is big enough to deserve a Foundation-wide venue for initial discussion so am including Wikitech-L. Most of us are probably familiar with the cycle: Person A on en.wp (or, any project) uploads an image which is apparently public domain or free use by any reasonable standard. It gets put on article X. There is much rejoicing. Person B later thinks "Oh, this is something other projects might use, and it's 'free', so..." and uploads it to Commons. It then gets deleted at en.wp by a helpful bot. Person C on Commons later identifies that it fails to be an entirely free piece under the much-stricter Commons rules, due to some factor that A and B were unaware of. Person C nominates it for deletion there. Poof. Gone. Now, we have NO image, for something that is sufficiently legal under our rules and the law for use on en.wp (and likely, most of the rest of the projects). A delinker bot helpfully comes along and nukes references to the image off the pages that used to have it. Maintainers who miss the bot edit fail to notice that it's gone. Many months or years go along and finally someone notices, and either is an admin and restores the image on en.wp or finds an admin who restores it on en.wp. Now, for someone who sees images as an integral part of the total READERSHIP value we present, in terms of helping people understand things by drawing their attention and expressing ideas and history in a visual manner, the long periods where we've lost all image are mind-numbingly counter to our core mission. That we've evolved into this cycle due to bureaucratic friction does not make it acceptable. PROPOSED: This is not acceptable. Something must be done. SUGGESTED FIX #1: Create a parallel "Uncommons" project, for shared images which meet minimum project legal non-copyvio standards but do not meet the threshold Commons is insisting on (or we have defined Commons to be). This requires coding in the WMF to allow a parallel project as image source, and would require that Commons' deletion process be modified such that deletions for copyright niggles be a shift-to-Uncommons rather than an outright delete. SUGGESTED FIX #2: Stop deleting things from local projects when they're uploaded to commons. This requires additional diskspace from the Foundation (by some as-yet unknown amount). Ops team - Could you attempt to determine if this would be significant, troublesome, small enough to not be significant, etc? These are not the only two possible solutions, but they come to mind immediately (and have previously when I thought of this). Additional fix concepts solicited and welcomed. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] The Damned Commons Image Deletion Cycle
On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Tyler Romeo wrote: > On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Huib Laurens wrote: > > > Suggestion 3: Restore the file on en.wiki if it gets deleted on > Commons... > > No coding needed at all. > > > > This right here. It should be trivial to just have an admin restore the > deleted file. I am an admin, it took about five minutes to find the proper file name and undelete it again. HOWEVER - this was 16 months after it was deleted in the first place. The imperfect nature of people catching such changes in watchlists is the problem. This means that the delay until local restore can be arbitrarily long on non-super-popular pages. IF the Commons upload were to include the origin file / project and require the deleter at commons to notify en.wp admins to restore it there, that would solve the problem. Or, alternately, we could require that the image be added to all the constituent projects now using the file in article space upon commons deletion (undelete on the origin, add it to the projects for other ones that started using it). Put the onus on commons deleters to do that and make it a policy requirement that they did. I put wikien-l back in the cc list as these are non-technical proposals and would require ... I guess, commons process. I don't know what the commons list is, and am not on it to be able to post to it. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] The Damned Commons Image Deletion Cycle
On 5 August 2013 08:53, George Herbert wrote: > I put wikien-l back in the cc list as these are non-technical proposals and > would require ... I guess, commons process. I don't know what the commons > list is, and am not on it to be able to post to it. commons-l, but the actual decisions are made on Commons. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] The Damned Commons Image Deletion Cycle
On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:54 AM, David Gerard wrote: > On 5 August 2013 08:43, Tyler Romeo wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Huib Laurens > wrote: > > >> Suggestion 3: Restore the file on en.wiki if it gets deleted on > Commons... > >> No coding needed at all. > > > This right here. It should be trivial to just have an admin restore the > > deleted file. > > > Or, indeed, for the delinker bot to mark it for restoration. > ...if the same filename was used in Commons as in the source wiki. That does not solve the "now used on other wikis" problem, however, for those other wikis. That is quite possibly a least-effort trajectory however... -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Damned Commons Image Deletion Cycle
On 5 August 2013 08:36, George Herbert wrote: > > > These are not the only two possible solutions, but they come to mind > immediately (and have previously when I thought of this). Additional fix > concepts solicited and welcomed. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Do_not_move_to_Commons Already exists. -- geni ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Damned Commons Image Deletion Cycle
Do you want to apply that to all millionish of our local media files, or do you want me to? (ducks) George William Herbert Sent from my iPhone On Aug 5, 2013, at 5:05 PM, geni wrote: > On 5 August 2013 08:36, George Herbert wrote: > >> >> >> These are not the only two possible solutions, but they come to mind >> immediately (and have previously when I thought of this). Additional fix >> concepts solicited and welcomed. >> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Do_not_move_to_Commons > > Already exists. > > > -- > geni > ___ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Damned Commons Image Deletion Cycle
On 5/08/2013 7:36 p.m., George Herbert wrote: I have just had to deal with this - AGAIN - and would like to rail for a moment, hoping to provoke discussion to promote change. I posit that this is big enough to deserve a Foundation-wide venue for initial discussion so am including Wikitech-L. It is probably one of the causes of the increasing backlog at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_with_missing_files I had tried to clear the backlog but it is futile. A ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
