Ericd writes:
My photo of a Porsche 912 -took by myself- on the Porsche article was replaced by another wich is obviously not a Porsche 912. The new picture
is
IMO studio works and probably copyrighted. It seems impossible to recover the old photo. Why ? Even if the new image is uncopyrighted and better
than
mine, mine could be useful elsewhere (on a Porsche 912 article) for instance.
I just left a few paragraphs on Chris K's user talk page about that. It seems he has a history of doing this, given the other comments on his page.
It brings up a software issue, too. Changes to articles are in the history and can always be reverted if we don't like them -- thus, no irreversible changes can be made to an article. With images, on the other hand, we allow regular users to delete image files. Thus, the Wikipedia concept is broken; changes can be made which cannot be undone. This is what User:Chris K did here.
I suspect this ability exists so that users don't clutter up the server with lots of old image revisions and can clean up after themselves, but it has consequences and is open to abuse.
I'm not suggesting that Chris K intended any ill by this; he probably just thought it was a better image for the article. I do not like that it was possible for him to remove the possibility of his changes being reverted within the Wikipedia system. (Of course, EricD may have the file saved off-line, but if so, that's luck. Luck we may not have if a picture is deleted that belonged to a departed contributor. Of course, there may be OS-level backups being taken that would help in such an event).
-Matt [User:Morven]