[WikiEN-l] More fair use deletion wreckage

Fri Dec 2 06:14:10 UTC 2005

I unexpectedly found myself in Anthere's position today - checked on
my gallery of fair use postage stamp images today, and as expected,
images for which I hadn't yet written the article had been deleted,
but also some images long used in my article about Austrian stamps.
Turns out that some anon had emptied out half the article, this went
unnoticed for several weeks (it's on my watchlist, but must not have
checked it that day), then while I was on vacation and not examining
watchlist daily, the bot came along, marked the images as orphans,
and a couple weeks later somebody else deleted. After *that* a nice
anon quietly restored the article, leaving it unclear why the images
were deleted in the first place.

No moral to the story, except perhaps that figuring all this out (and
re-uploading from my backup copies) is time that could have gone into
content development. I suspect all this publicity is going to bring
a new crop of vandals wanting to "prove" that WP is a failure, so
even more time will go into defending rather than improving.

Stan