On 7/27/07, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
To avoid the need to delete orphaned media, it would
be handy to have
a brief list of articles where a media has been used in the past - the
last five articles would usually be enough to help work out why it has
been orphaned.
When I checked a while in the past (~1yr ish ago) the majority of the
new orphaned media was either never used in an article or not used in
an article for longer than 6 hours. (I saved snapshots of imagelinks
every 6 hours).
This might upload and insert into an article process is too difficult
for the average drive-by-user to manage... but that isn't news prior
usability studies showed this as well. Fortunately the overwhelming
majority of the images uploaded by these users are images pulled off
the web, not much lost labor... and out of the legal and original
works uploaded by these people I expect that most lack enough
information for us to know about their licensing status. Alas we have
no way to reach these people, since they seldom provide a confirmed
email address. :(
While there are certainly a lot of changes to the upload process that
will confuse people, no matter how good we make it some people will
still be confused.
We need to find better ways to leverage our community to provide
friendly realtime help to new users.