[WikiEN-l] Problem with photos

Tue Oct 21 17:12:05 UTC 2003

Ericd writes:

> My photo of a Porsche 912 -took by myself- on the Porsche article was
> replaced by another wich is obviously not a Porsche 912. The new picture
is
> IMO studio works and probably copyrighted. It seems impossible to recover
> the old photo. Why ? Even if the new image is uncopyrighted and better
than
> mine, mine could be useful elsewhere (on a Porsche 912 article) for
> instance.

I just left a few paragraphs on Chris K's user talk page about that.  It
seems he has a history of doing this, given the other comments on his page.

It brings up a software issue, too.  Changes to articles are in the history
and can always be reverted if we don't like them -- thus, no irreversible
changes can be made to an article.  With images, on the other hand, we allow
regular users to delete image files.  Thus, the Wikipedia concept is broken;
changes can be made which cannot be undone.  This is what User:Chris K did
here.

I suspect this ability exists so that users don't clutter up the server with
lots of old image revisions and can clean up after themselves, but it has
consequences and is open to abuse.

I'm not suggesting that Chris K intended any ill by this; he probably just
thought it was a better image for the article.  I do not like that it was
possible for him to remove the possibility of his changes being reverted
within the Wikipedia system.  (Of course, EricD may have the file saved
off-line, but if so, that's luck.  Luck we may not have if a picture is
deleted that belonged to a departed contributor.  Of course, there may be
OS-level backups being taken that would help in such an event).

-Matt [User:Morven]