Hi all,

I've sent this to wikitech-l before but I see now online that it  
didn't create a new thread but instead recognized it as reply to an  
old thread. Not sure what happened, but here again:



It's been roughly three years since I first saw this topic filed on  
BugZilla[1] and before that is was often raised on IRC and on-wiki  
during discussion about it being very clumsy and unpracticle to  
systematically patrol uploads. Back then, from my point of view, this  
was about local uploads.

Now adays I'm much more active on and for Wikimedia Commons, and not  
so much on local uploads.
Obviously with more and more wikis moving towards Commons and the  
growth of the wikis themselfs it's about time we can atleast some kind  
of method of being able to atleast indicate that a file has been  
'checked'. Or, to be more specific, to know what hasn't been checked.

On Commons there are several review systems for common external  
resources that are used to import material from (such as Picassa and  
Flickr). And those work very well. Bots crawl recent uploads and  
whenever a reference to Flickr is found they are tagged as need-review  
and the easy ones are even reviewed by bots (since is something unique  
to Picassa and Flickr since they are machine readable and license info  
can be automatically verified) and everyhting else (false matches and  
errors) is manually reviewed.

However this is just a very tiny little bit of all the files on Commons.
Last march I've raised the topic of edit patrol on Commons [2] and  
that has been a great success. We've got a team together and every  
single anonymous edit made after April 1st 2010 has been or will soon  
be patrolled [3]. Not once has it gone past the 30-day expiration time  
for recentchanges table.
The same has been kept up for new page patrol aswell for several years.

Commons being primarily a media site, it's a bit of an akward thing to  
say that we are totally unable to patrol uploads effectively.
We can't filter out uploads by bots, or trusted users. We can't filter  
out what's been patrolled by patrollers. It's just an incredible mess  
that sits there.

Several attempts have been made in the past to work around the  
software. But no matter how you try, a patrol flag will make things a  
whole lot easier.
Once there is the possiblity to click a link and *poof* toggle that  
unpatrolled boolean I'm sure it won't take long before there are nice  
AJAX-tools coming to make this easier en-mass and a checklist / team  
will be formed to get the job done.

Alrighty, enough rant. What needs to be done for an implementation ?

When asking about this on IRC somebody said this; although a bit of a  
workarond we can do this already by means of NewPage patrol in the  
File namespace.
Unless it's well hidden, this is false. Because uploads don't create  
an patrollable entry for the upload log action, nor for the  
description page creation. As a matter of fact the creation of those  
description page aren't registered in the recentchanges table at all  
(Special:NewPages / Special:RecentChanges).

Depending on how uploads will become patrollable the above could  
actually be a good thing. Since having to patrol both would be  
ineffecient, and uploading a file isn't neccecarily asociated with  
creating a page by users anyway. Plus it would mean duplicate entries  
in Special:RecentChanges (upload action / page creation).

Log actions are already present in the recent changes table so I'm  
guessing it doesn't take that much of a change in order to make  
uploads patrollable.

One interesting thing about uploading (the same is true with moving,  
and (un)protecting a page) is that it is also listed in the page  
history (instead of just in the Logs) which means it is already very  
accessable by the users and doesn't require a new system as to where  
the [mark as patrolled] links should appear.

For re-uploads on the "diff" page (like with edits) and on new uploads  
on the first revision. (although the latter may be subject to this  
bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15936 which I hope  
will be solved though it's not a show stopper, as long as there is any  
way at all to get there (even if it requires to go to  
Special:RecentChanges) that would be an incredible improvement to the  
current situation).

Greetings,
Krinkle


[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9501
[2] 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2010Mar#Marking_edits_as_patrolled
[3] 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Counter_Vandalism_Unit#Anonymous_edits

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