Recently, I have uploaded som eplant images to the commons. A few of
these might have been incorrectly labeled. The current procedure for
"renaming" them is
#1 someone downloads the image
#2 reuploads it under a new name, with the original description
#3 fixes links on other wikimedia projects via chackusage
#4 adds a "duplicate" template to the original image
#5 the original image gets, eventually, deleted (unless it's an admin
doing reuploading, who can skip #4)
For a site managing >1.5 million files, IMHO this is a rather
cumbersome process. Also, it leaves a (perfectly OK) image deleted on
the server, thus duplicating that data.
Maybe Tims recent file managing upgrade already has a solution for
this, but if not, here's my 2 pennies (I'm in the UK now, after all:-)
* Make image pages movable (with the appropriate changes to the image table).
* Replace the "404 error: File not found" error message for
non-existant images with a script that checks if there's a REDIRECT
page under that name in the database.
* Return the new image if this is the case, and return 404 if not.
This would be an improvement to the manual steps described above:
* MUCH easier and faster to do
* Preserves original upload/edit history
* Direct links to the image keep working
* No space waste due to deleted image
* Cost : an additional redirect page, and an SQL query for requests of
non-existing images
To turn off this behaviour for an image, simply delete the REDIRECT page.
(Seems so easy, I'm afraid I missed someting obvious at this point:-)
Magnus