[WikiEN-l] Deletion of images under dubious criteria -- policy must be made clearer

Tue Mar 29 20:39:45 UTC 2005

Hi all,

All along I had thought images are deleted because they are copyvio
(using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems),
redundant or low quality (using
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion)
or images that are obviously non-free, e.g. photos of celebrities,
single frames of videos, etc. in cases where fair use cannot be
claimed (using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images).
Note that those in the third category as mentioned here can usually be
restored if fair use is later verified to be OK (since these would be
from easily available photos/videos, etc.) I have myself listed many
images in these pages and all those got deleted. Fine.

But recently I happened to stumble upon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Untagged_images#Request_for_comments
where Quadell asked for comments regarding unverified orphans. The
discussion Quadell & I (& unfortunately nobody else) had has been
moved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans#So_what_do_we_do_about_those_UOs.3F_Request_for_comments.

The talk in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans
seem to imply that many unverified orphans (UOs) have been deleted. I
would assume that most uploaders until mid-2004 (Someone relaxes this
upto November 2004 in the talk page) didn't get a Special:Upload page
that told them that their images would be deleted unless tagged. Even
images uploaded by Anthere, one of the members of the board who has
been a very respected contributor to Wikipedia got deleted due to such
misunderstanding. Now when I look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images I
understand it includes not only material that is uspected to be
available only under a non-free license but also those that are
untagged, which means a lot of images uploaded before 2004 were on the
verge of deletion or were already deleted. Based on Anthere's images,
I would presume that many other UOs were uploaded in good faith and
left untagged as tags didn't exist in those days and GFDL was the
default. I would like Wikipedia not to lose these images (which could
be moved to commons if it is definite that they won't be re-included
in any articles).

Since image deletion is an irreversible process (as I understood very
recently when I found Anthere's images deleted & was alarmed by her
reaction as I had thought it would be easy to undelete them) I would
like a discussion on the issue of deletion of unverified images that
aren't proved to be copyright violations.

Quadell tried to get a consensus at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans
but failed. I tried to bring this to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy) but got
only the reply of Xiong (and hence against not enough people discussed
so there is no question of a consensus).

After seeing that Sj had similarly expressed anguish over the deletion
of beautiful images in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Unverified_orphans
I asked him how I could get the community to discuss the issue and he
advised me to write to WikiEn-l.

I don't want to force my ideas of whether untagged images uploaded in
2002-2004 should be deleted or not. I want a discussion to take place
with enough participants to make the policy of image deletion clearer.
Any pointers on how this could be achieved (on a wiki page, not
mailing list/IRC so the process looks transparent to everyone) would
be nice.

Note that I haven't explained my ideas much in this post. I just want
a way by which a broad-based discussion on the policy could take
place. My personal views on untagged images can be found by going
through the talk pages mentioned in this mail.

Thanks,
Paddu