It's been roughly three years since I first saw this topic filed on
BugZilla[1] and before that is was often raised on IRC and on-wiki
during discussion about it being very clumsy and unpracticle to
systematically patrol uploads. Back then, from my point of view, this
was about local uploads.
Now adays I'm much more active on and for Wikimedia Commons, and not
so much on local uploads.
Obviously with more and more wikis moving towards Commons and the
growth of the wikis themselfs it's about time we can atleast some kind
of method of being able to atleast indicate that a file has been
'checked'. Or, to be more specific, to know what hasn't been checked.
On Commons there are several review systems for common external
resources that are used to import material from (such as Picassa and
Flickr). And those work very well. Bots crawl recent uploads and
whenever a reference to Flickr is found they are tagged as need-review
and the easy ones are even reviewed by bots (since is something unique
to Picassa and Flickr since they are machine readable and license info
can be automatically verified) and everyhting else (false matches and
errors) is manually reviewed.
However this is just a very tiny little bit of all the files on Commons.
Last march I've raised the topic of edit patrol on Commons [2] and
that has been a great success. We've got a team together and every
single anonymous edit made after April 1st 2010 has been or will soon
be patrolled [3]. Not once has it gone past the 30-day expiration time
for recentchanges table.
The same has been kept up for new page patrol aswell for several years.
Commons being primarily a media site, it's a bit of an akward thing to
say that we are totally unable to patrol uploads effectively.
We can't filter out uploads by bots, or trusted users. We can't filter
out what's been patrolled by patrollers. It's just an incredible mess
that sits there.
Several attempts have been made in the past to work around the
software. But no matter how you try, a patrol flag will make things a
whole lot easier.
Once there is the possiblity to click a link and *poof* toggle that
unpatrolled boolean I'm sure it won't take long before there are nice
AJAX-tools coming to make this easier en-mass and a checklist / team
will be formed to get the job done.
Alrighty, enough rant. What needs to be done for an implementation ?
When asking about this on IRC somebody said this; although a bit of a
workarond we can do this already by means of NewPage patrol in the
File namespace.
Unless it's well hidden, this is false. Because uploads don't create
an patrollable entry for the upload log action, nor for the
description page creation. As a matter of fact the creation of those
description page aren't registered in the recentchanges table at all
(Special:NewPages / Special:RecentChanges).
Depending on how uploads will become patrollable the above could
actually be a good thing. Since having to patrol both would be
ineffecient, and uploading a file isn't neccecarily asociated with
creating a page by users anyway. Plus it would mean duplicate entries
in Special:RecentChanges (upload action / page creation).
Log actions are already present in the recent changes table so I'm
guessing it doesn't take that much of a change in order to make
uploads patrollable.
One interesting thing about uploading (the same is true with moving,
and (un)protecting a page) is that it is also listed in the page
history (instead of just in the Logs) which means it is already very
accessable by the users and doesn't require a new system as to where
the [mark as patrolled] links should appear.
For re-uploads on the "diff" page (like with edits) and on new uploads
on the first revision. (although the latter may be subject to this
bug:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15936 which I hope
will be solved though it's not a show stopper, as long as there is any
way at all to get there (even if it requires to go to
Special:RecentChanges) that would be an incredible improvement to the
current situation).
Greetings,
Krinkle
[1]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9501
[2]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2010Mar#Mark…
[3]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Counter_Vandalism_Unit#Anonymous_…
--
Greetings,
Krinkle
A Wikipedia Volunteer
krinkle(a)wikipedia.be
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia