I have just had to deal with this - AGAIN - and would like to rail for a
moment, hoping to provoke discussion to promote change. I posit that this
is big enough to deserve a Foundation-wide venue for initial discussion so
am including Wikitech-L.
Most of us are probably familiar with the cycle:
Person A on en.wp (or, any project) uploads an image which is apparently
public domain or free use by any reasonable standard. It gets put on
article X. There is much rejoicing.
Person B later thinks "Oh, this is something other projects might use, and
it's 'free', so..." and uploads it to Commons. It then gets deleted at
en.wp by a helpful bot.
Person C on Commons later identifies that it fails to be an entirely free
piece under the much-stricter Commons rules, due to some factor that A and
B were unaware of. Person C nominates it for deletion there. Poof. Gone.
Now, we have NO image, for something that is sufficiently legal under our
rules and the law for use on en.wp (and likely, most of the rest of the
projects). A delinker bot helpfully comes along and nukes references to
the image off the pages that used to have it. Maintainers who miss the bot
edit fail to notice that it's gone. Many months or years go along and
finally someone notices, and either is an admin and restores the image on
en.wp or finds an admin who restores it on en.wp.
Now, for someone who sees images as an integral part of the total
READERSHIP value we present, in terms of helping people understand things
by drawing their attention and expressing ideas and history in a visual
manner, the long periods where we've lost all image are mind-numbingly
counter to our core mission. That we've evolved into this cycle due to
bureaucratic friction does not make it acceptable.
PROPOSED: This is not acceptable. Something must be done.
SUGGESTED FIX #1: Create a parallel "Uncommons" project, for shared images
which meet minimum project legal non-copyvio standards but do not meet the
threshold Commons is insisting on (or we have defined Commons to be). This
requires coding in the WMF to allow a parallel project as image source, and
would require that Commons' deletion process be modified such that
deletions for copyright niggles be a shift-to-Uncommons rather than an
outright delete.
SUGGESTED FIX #2: Stop deleting things from local projects when they're
uploaded to commons. This requires additional diskspace from the
Foundation (by some as-yet unknown amount). Ops team - Could you attempt
to determine if this would be significant, troublesome, small enough to not
be significant, etc?
These are not the only two possible solutions, but they come to mind
immediately (and have previously when I thought of this). Additional fix
concepts solicited and welcomed.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com