Recently I was asked [1] to delete the obsolete WeatherBot images. (Background: Over most of 2005, User:WeatherBot uploaded about 25000 images depicting current temperature worldwide. WeatherBot is now defunct, and the old temperature maps are no longer used. Deletion was discussed in a bunch of places on the Commons over many months.)

Today, I started deleting the old maps, with a bot. My bot archives each image before deleting, so if it makes a mistake, any image can easily be restored. I deleted 2284 images (in 88 minutes, or 2.3 seconds per). Then Duesentrieb pointed out [2] that by flooding the deletion log, I was breaking his CommonsTicker tool.

Duesentrieb suggested I should post to the mailing list before continuing. (My bot stopped running automatically as soon as he posted his comment to my talk page.)

At full speed, the remaining 23000 images will take about 15 hours to delete.

Does anyone else have a tool that watches the delete log? If you'll be affected by me deleting 23000 images, please let me know. I'm open to suggestions. Two possible ideas: I could run the bot in 3-hour chunks at a particular time each day. I could also throttle the bot slightly. As slow as 1 image every 10 seconds would still get the job done in 3 days.

If no one says otherwise, I'll plan to restart the bot next Saturday, June 7, and allow it to run at full speed until it's done.

-- Commons:User:Dbenbenn

Links:

[1]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dbenbenn#Deleting_WeatherBot_ima... [2]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dbenbenn#Weather_Images [*]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WeatherBot