As some of you may know, Wikimedia Commons has a huge problem with a
backlog of files to be deleted. Problematic images and outright
copyright violations are piling up by the thousands. Part of the problem
is that, once you delete an image on the commons, it is really gone -
there is no undelete function for images. So, admins hesitate to delete
images, which is understandable.
Until the problem is solved within MediaWiki (likely a complicated
issue), I have written a script which can store images that are to be
deleted from commons on the toolserver. The images are given random
names, and the admin who invokes the script is given the mapping of
original and new name, so he can recover it in case the deletion was
unjustified. The random file names make it very unlikely for anyone to
"stumble" on a copyright violation, so there should be no harm in
storing them that way.
Currently, I am using a subdirectory of my toolserver account to store
the images. But, given the sheer volume of (bad) images on commons, I'll
soon run out of disk space.
Does anyone have an idea where to store these images on a more ...
permanent basis? I can always run a bot to delete images when disk space
gets low, but I'd prefer to keep these backup images around for a few
month at least. Increasing my disk limit is of course the easiest way to
do that, but maybe there's a better solution?
Magnus