[Commons-l] Deleting images

Mon Nov 13 02:20:06 UTC 2006

On 13/11/06, Lennert Böhm <lennert.boehm at gmx.de> wrote:
> While we are on the topic of too much work and not enough people to do it:
> Tonight I felt particularly motivated and decided to make myself useful
> deleting superseded images. Trusting the people who had posted those
> images there I made my way through the first dozen or so of the list, when
> I suddenly decided it might be a good idea, just to be on the safe side,
> to perform a check-usage on those images. Turns out some of those images
> weren't only used on one or two Wikipedias, but more than a dozen. So I
> ended up undeleting most of the images, because I really got better things
> to do than first check all those images if they're still in use somewhere,
> and then making I don't know how many edits in as many Wikipedias changing
> the links.
> So I think if we ever won't to work off the backlog we have accumulated we
> either "train" the normal users to fix the links when they add the images
> there or we find some possibility to do it automatically using bots
> running parallely on all WPs or something.
> I don't know if that's possible to implement, but I for myself have better
> things to do than do all of this by hand.

Yes, indeed. Please see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions/CommonsDelinker
which is a proposal for a Wikimedia-wide bot to delink for us.

Brianna