New subject: Orphaning/placing Commons images on wikis (was: Deleting images)

12 Nov 2006

While we are on the topic of too much work and not enough people to do it:
Tonight I felt particularly motivated and decided to make myself useful  
deleting superseded images. Trusting the people who had posted those  
images there I made my way through the first dozen or so of the list, when  
I suddenly decided it might be a good idea, just to be on the safe side,  
to perform a check-usage on those images. Turns out some of those images  
weren't only used on one or two Wikipedias, but more than a dozen. So I  
ended up undeleting most of the images, because I really got better things  
to do than first check all those images if they're still in use somewhere,  
and then making I don't know how many edits in as many Wikipedias changing  
the links.
So I think if we ever won't to work off the backlog we have accumulated we  
either "train" the normal users to fix the links when they add the images  
there or we find some possibility to do it automatically using bots  
running parallely on all WPs or something.
I don't know if that's possible to implement, but I for myself have better  
things to do than do all of this by hand.

Lennert B