On Sat, 3 Nov 2012 12:30:17 -0700, Erik Moeller wrote:
Hi Berthold,
the short version:
1) All files will continue to be accessible via
wikivoyage-old.org
[1]. For how long only depends on Wikivoyage e.V. but Roland
suggested
multiple months would not be a problem.
2) Files need to be transferred by the community because
- not all files may be eligible for Commons due to its licensing
policies (freedom of panorama standards and other copyright
specifics). Some files may be eligible under the new EDP that is
being
developed, but then they would have to be uploaded to the local wiki.
- licensing and description templates as well as categories may need
to be updated to work on Commons.
- files should generally be checked for copyright issues, we need to
sort out different standards and practices for things like email
permissions to grant the rights to use an image, and so on.
Our legal department has strong reservations about a bulk transfer,
and I have strong reservations from a community perspective. This is
not just Wikivoyage being hosted by Wikimedia, this is Wikivoyage
becoming a Wikimedia project. That means taking the time to do this
properly.
Technically it is easy for anyone to do a bulk transfer. The reason
this hasnt happened is precisely that people want to take the time to
do it right.
If people are really worried about having red links, we can defer the
migration date until more files have been transferred. Technically
theres nothing forcing us to do it next week. Hans however will have
greatly reduced availability after that and we currently depend on
him
to produce the database dumps.
It continues to be my recommendation to live with the red links at
launch, and to just make it a priority to do the files migration
through November. We can help with tools advice/support, and I would
not underestimate the Wikimedia communitys ability to pull this off.
Erik
--
Hi Erik,
I appreciate your responses and find them very useful. I do not think
there is any community decision taken at this point, we are still
discussing the options, but it is already clear that the lack of proper
notification is a problem. For instance, apparently, the Swedish
Wikivoyage community had no idea of the imminent transfer, and even
refused to grant a bot flag needed for the transfer (which of course
they did after learning what is going on). Is it possible to have
somebody of the devs responsible on the migration present on the Task
Force on Commons, in case there are questions about the migration
process? This is not really a huge time consuption, but it would be good
to have timely first-hand answers about possible options.
Cheers
Yaroslav