[WikiEN-l] Re: yet another image lost for posterity

[Mark Wagner]

On 11/28/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/28/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think what you are arguing is something different to quite a lot of
> > others.  They are saying why the policy was necessary.  Your complaint
> > is actually that you weren't warned.  I don't think anyone would
> > disagree that you should have been notified before the deletions took
> > place.
>
> There were thousands of images (possibly tens of thousands) that
> qualified for speedy deletion under the new policy.  Issuing warnings
> to the uploader of each such image would have interminably delayed the
> cleanup, which was already well-overdue.  Repeated public notices were
> issued; we're sorry you missed them or did not realize they applied to
> you.

The sheer magnitude of the problem is why people aren't being
individually notified.  I've been keeping track of the number of
images involved, and my best estimate of the size of the problem is as
follows:

20 000 images tagged as having no source information
5 000 images tagged as having no copyright information
8 000 images tagged as being "fair use", but unused in any article

Assuming Wikipedia is running along smoothly, an administrator can
delete one image every twenty seconds, if they don't notify the user
first or remove the image from pages where it's used, and if they do
only the quickest check to see if the image is tagged correctly. 
Deleting all these images would take 185 man-hours of effort.

If the administrator removes the image from articles where it's used
before deleting it, it takes about 40 seconds to delete an image. 
This increases the effort needed to 370 man-hours.

If the administrator places a warning on the uploader's talk page, in
addition to removing the image from articles where it's used, and
waits a week to give the uploader a chance to respond, it takes over
two minutes to delete an image.  This represents the additional time
needed to check for responses on the user's talk page, check for
responses on the talk page of the admin informing the user, and check
for responses on the image description page and image talk page -- and
99% of the time, it's wasted effort, as the uploader has forgotten
about Wikipedia entirely.  Total effort involved in cleaning up the
problem images: 1100 man-hours.

It's not as if efforts to notify people haven't been undertaken.  The
policy change was announced on the WikiEn-L mailing list, on the
administrators' noticeboard, on several Village Pump subpages, in the
Signpost, and for several weeks everyone's watchlist had a note on the
top informing them of the change.  The only thing that hasn't been
done was individual notification on the talk pages of uploaders, and
that's because there are almost 35000 problem images.

--
[[User:Carnildo]]