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
Magnus Manske wrote:
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?
Amane would be the obvious place to put them. It has a private directory which is not directly accessible from the web, you can write a script to stream out images from it for people logged in as sysops.
-- Tim Starling
toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org