Hi wikipedians,

at the moment there is no (easy) possibility to check if media on commons is used throughout the wikipedia projects included into mediawiki.

Wikipedia Check-Usage [1] is a web based tool which can be used to check where commons media is used throughout the wikimedia universe. Also it is able to find "local" duplicates to commons media.

Check-Usage is strongly inspired by Arnomane's check-usage.sh [2] - a unix shell script doing mostly the same job. Because this script has several preconditions to run, like shell access to a unix/linux system and several programs installed on this machine, I though of writing a small web based interface. After short consideration I decided not to write only an interface calling Arnomane's script, but to re-code it completly. Check-Usage is written in PHP using libcurl.

So if you are interested where 'your' pictures are used - give it a try.

And commons sysops can use it before deleting files which are more than a few days old. In the past it was often problematic deleting/moving a file on commons, because doing this the included pictures in other wikimedia-projects were broken.

Bye, Tim.

PS: Regarding the traffic load: only the text of the chosen image-page gets transfered.

[1] http://www.juelich.de/avatar/check-usage/ [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Arnomane/Image_usage