[Foundation-l] Commons request for a delinker tool running in every wiki

Fri Sep 22 21:30:56 UTC 2006

Hi,

Recently there was a call for help on foundation-l concerning copyright 
question on soviet works in Wikimedia Commons. Previous to that several 
people have highlighted in various threads on this list several technical 
problems in Wikimedia Commons that have lead to a huge backlog of tagged 
copyvios in Wikimedia Commons.

Since any of the currently 701 Wikimedia Foundation wikis can link to 
Wikimedia Commons, Commons contributors and administrators need to take care 
upon modifying or deleting files. Up to now, MediaWiki only provides the 
embedding of files, and not the necessary bidirectional cross project 
maintenance assistance. In order to overcome these severe technical flaws - 
each one challenging the Wikimedia Commons project as a whole - 
passionate "Commonists" simply wrote the missing tools themselves. One 
essential tool is a file delinker bot that needs to run in every Wikimedia 
wiki and it is unreasonable to await approval by 701 different Wikimedia wiki 
communities. They all use Wikimedia Commons and Wikimedia Commons now needs 
to efficiently interact with them in return:

That for the administrators of Wikimedia Commons request to be exempt from 
local bot policies in order to run this bot.

This is entirely necessary if Commons is ever to not have a backlog of 
literally thousands of images, ever to talk with any confidence of the 
integrity of our wares. And furthermore it is really important to get rid of 
our huge backlog of copyvios in Commons efficiently as this copyvio backlog 
is a risk for *all* Wikimedia projects.

So please have a look at the request page and support it. It is really 
important for the success of all Wikimedia projects:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions/CommonsDelinker

Please also contact your local (wikipedia-, wikisource-, wikinews-...) 
communities so that they are already prepared and know what it is about. 
Communities that are openminded towards that service will take part as soon 
as possible at the beta test phase of that bot running at large scale.

If you are interested to know how this bot will work in detail have a look at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CommonsDelinker

Cheers, Arnomane