Lars Aronsson wrote:
I'm a man, I'm a C/UNIX programmer since 1986,
I speak English,
I've been on Wikipedia since May 2001, I have 4,000 edits on the
English Wikipedia, 27,000 on the Swedish Wikipedia, and 1,500 on
Wikimedia Commons; in 2005 I introduced page scanning on
Wikisource. I don't claim to be better than you, I'm just saying
that I'm not a complete newcomer. And yet, my user talk page on
Commons is full of deletion requests. I occasionally contribute a
lot to Commons, but in between I might be away for a few months,
often long enough for deletions to go through.
Remember that there is a send notification of changes on your talk by
email. It will be disabled if it's an old account. For new accounts, it
should be automatically enabled if it isn't already.
The idea that I might be a stable, long time
contributor, well
versed in copyright law and GNU and CC licences, fully able to
take legal responsibility for what I have uploaded, hasn't
occurred to the people posting these deletion requests. Instead,
images are deleted 7 days after the warning is posted. This is
completely equal and democratic, in the worst sense: Loyal
veterans get the same treatment as anonymous drive-by vandals.
Sometimes the deletion requests are anonymous. Sometimes the
conclusion is that the request was invalid because the image was
perfectly legitimate. But I don't see the requestor being punished
for this. In the last year or two, the community culture on
Commons has made this kind of drive-by-deletion-request something
normal. When I pointed out to another user that she needed to
explain why some images should be deleted, *I* was told to behave.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LA2
Seems both Cecil and you thought the other could be a troll...
We're too used to get trolls here :(
(...)
If a user only contributes to the Swedish Wikipedia
and has the
Swedish language user interface setting on Wikimedia Commons, then
why should their user talk page receive image deletion requests in
English?
I try to send the template in the proper language, when I guess which
one it is. But given a contributor many times I can't tell which is his
mother tongue, defaulting to English messages.
Some of these template messages have links to
translations in other languages, but that is an awkward solution.
Will the requestor be able to read the user's answer in Swedish?
Shouldn't it be possible to assign Swedish
speaking admins to
patroll contributions by Swedish speaking newcomers? That's how
it would work if all images were uploaded directly to the Swedish
Wikipedia.
The problem is to know which ones are to be answered in Swedish, English
or Portuguese. Newcomers usually don't know how to add babel templates
(or that they should place one).
Plus, if I see a blatant copyrright violation, I shouldn't have to
refrain from deleting it just because it "pertains to another admin".
And the reason we moved images to Commons is not
because we wanted to confront our newcomers with English messages
or admins who fail to speak Swedish.
If they want to talk with an admin, they should contat with a
Swedish-speaking admin. Maybe the admin list by language is hard to find?
Maybe we should turn the system around, so our Swedish
newcomers
can upload images to the Swedish Wikipedia, where they are
patrolled by Swedish speaking admins. Then, the patrolled images
can be automatically forwarded to Commons, instead of the other
way around. Even though this would require software development,
this seems a lot easier than trying to manage the admin community
on Commons.
That's an interesting proposal.