[WikiEN-l] Vandalism concerns with commons images

Mon Sep 12 19:09:38 UTC 2005

With increasing hosting of images on commons, there arise vandalism
concerns.

Images hosted on commons cannot be protected by admins from
en.wikipedia.  There are only about 25 admins on commons who are also
active on en.wikipedia.  The commons community has turned down several
requests for adminship from en.wikipedia admins in good standing who
wished to become admins at commons in order to deal with vandalism on
commons that affected en.  It is commons policy that significant
involvement in commons in particular is a requirement for adminship,
regardless of involvement in other projects.

Another problem area is that images on en: supercede those on commons
with the same title.  Therefore, an image protected on commons could be
vandalised by uploading a vandalised image by the same name on en
(Unless there is a technical solution to this that I am not aware of. 
I haven't tried it).  Though cumbersome, an en admin could conceivably
use this as a workaround for protecting images that have been
vandalized on commons.

In general, I believe that there should be more trust and cooperation
between the projects, to the point of having some process for fairly
routine granting of commons adminship to en admins.  This might be a
situation where partial permissions -- protecting and unprotecting
pages only but not blocking or deleting -- might make sense.  A similar
process should be in place for the other large wikipedias, such as de
and fr.

I do note that there is an agreement to protect main page images that
are on commons.  My concern is with other prominent pages.  The
unexpected vandalism spree that accompanied the last U.S. presidential
elections would be an example.

The Uninvited Co., Inc.