[WikiEN-l] Careless image deletion : a minor outrage

Tue Mar 15 15:55:45 UTC 2005

Yesterday I came across a beautiful panorama, one which any reference
work would be thrilled to have, which had been *casually* put up for
deletion.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wuerzburg_panorama.jpg

This image had illustrated the article on Wuerzburg for a long while,
and was then removed by an anonymous edit in February.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=W%FCrzburg&diff=9939546&oldid=9902946

It was soon afterward listed for deletion as one of hundreds of
"unverified orphans" [UOs] listed in recent months. Quoth an
enthusiastic UO deleter:
  "I've been doing this for about a month, and it's been generally
well received."

Out of about 100 such images currently listed on Images for Deletion,
I found about 20 which were either clearly uploaded by their creators,
or seemed likely to have been (by virtue of composition, edit
summaries, image descriptions).  Some of these could clearly be used
productively in articles, even if they aren't at present; in
particular the Wuerzburg image and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Xi%27an_city_wall.jpg

[ Detailed rant:  http://tinyurl.com/4zpyb ]

This kind of careless deletion must stop.  It should be unacceptable
to list a borderline image for deletion, and only afterwards notify
the uploader, who may not even visit Wikipedia every week.

A cardinal rule of image deletion should be : take every precaution
not to irreversibly delete beautiful, free content.  Particularly so
long as we tolerate foolish debates about the unproven copyvio-status
of everyone's favorite autofellatio image.

-- 
+sj+