On 7/27/07, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
To avoid the need to delete orphaned media, it would be handy to have a brief list of articles where a media has been used in the past - the last five articles would usually be enough to help work out why it has been orphaned.
When I checked a while in the past (~1yr ish ago) the majority of the new orphaned media was either never used in an article or not used in an article for longer than 6 hours. (I saved snapshots of imagelinks every 6 hours).
This might upload and insert into an article process is too difficult for the average drive-by-user to manage... but that isn't news prior usability studies showed this as well. Fortunately the overwhelming majority of the images uploaded by these users are images pulled off the web, not much lost labor... and out of the legal and original works uploaded by these people I expect that most lack enough information for us to know about their licensing status. Alas we have no way to reach these people, since they seldom provide a confirmed email address. :(
While there are certainly a lot of changes to the upload process that will confuse people, no matter how good we make it some people will still be confused.
We need to find better ways to leverage our community to provide friendly realtime help to new users.