[Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects

Wed Dec 14 00:49:44 UTC 2011

On 13/12/11 02:55, David Gerard wrote:
> On 12 December 2011 15:26, K. Peachey <p858snake at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> It's been a requested feature for a while, Someone finally got around
>> to writing it (I believe it needed the Improved metadata handling
>> backend first) and implementing it, It wasn't a sudden "oh lets write
>> this and enable it in one day thing", a lot of work went into it and
>> subsequent testing.
> 
> 
> * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously
> wrongly rotated and were fixed by the feature?
> * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously
> correctly rotated and were messed up by the feature?
> 
> i.e., was there strong reason to apply it to past images, not just new ones?

Such statistics were never gathered. I was told by the developers
involved that existing images with EXIF rotation would be very rare
and that most of them would be fixed by this feature, and I didn't
challenge that.

I think it's too early to focus on recriminations, we risk distracting
people from actually fixing the issue.

-- Tim Starling