[WikiEN-l] Image deletion : policies and technology

Fri Jul 8 20:02:35 UTC 2005

This follows some discussion in a recent thread Timwi started about
adminship.  Deletion policies -- specifically the visibility of and
accountability for deletion of articles and images -- are extremely
slanted towards admins, and towards hiding their actions.  This is
clearly not an intended effect; but it likely results from the fact
the the people discussing and implementing admin interfaces are all
logged in as administrators while testing them.

Even as an administrator, whe I go to a deleted page, or try to track
down a deleted image, it is hard to identify who deleted a given page,
and what reason was given -- the list of deleted revisions is not
coordinated with the deletion log.  For images it is worse:

I don't know of a way to see the file history for a deleted image, and
not just for its page.  [[Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion]]
doesn't use subpages; has no effective archive; and its history is too
busy to allow effective browsing back more than a few weeks.  Recent
comments from IFD:  "(Thanks for notifying the creator; I forgot
that.)"

Here's an image which was supposedly "in commons", and clearly marked
PD by its uploader, but was orphaned.  It doesn't seem to be in
commons after all.  And the uploader wasn't notified... although he
hasn't edited in the past week, so probably wouldn't have seen the
message in time to respond, anyway.    It's a shame to see work erased
in this fashion.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jane_austen.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion&oldid=18138126#June_30

I hope that we can a) fix image-deletion policy, so that we are NOT
deleting useful content, and on a more fundamental level, b) make
image deletion temporary*, not permanent, with a special "permanently
delete" option that is used far more rarely.

--Sj

*  It would be fine if there were a slow, off-wiki way to extract an
old deleted image revision; say an on-wiki way for anyone to see a
list of all revisions of a deleted image, and a separate fileserver
where anyone? admins? could go to request a specific deleted revision.
 Then there could be a page for deleted-image requests...