In message 31073ef90511291035n12c94836u50ccff2784357f9@mail.gmail.com, Mark Wagner carnildo-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org writes
On 11/28/05, Arwel Parry arwel-wfA80NnNzEcG2Il/BtU0GPXRex20P6io@public.gmane.org wrote:
In message
<31073ef90511281617x7d096a26m53c249a3f1d17e3a-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@pu blic.gmane.org>, Mark Wagner carnildo-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w-XMD5yJDbdMReXY1tMh2IBg@public.gmane.org writes
Assuming Wikipedia is running along smoothly, an administrator can delete one image every twenty seconds, if they don't notify the user first or remove the image from pages where it's used, and if they do only the quickest check to see if the image is tagged correctly. Deleting all these images would take 185 man-hours of effort.
If the administrator removes the image from articles where it's used before deleting it, it takes about 40 seconds to delete an image. This increases the effort needed to 370 man-hours.
Just a minute - are you honestly advocating that images should be routinely deleted without removing links from articles which use them? Because in that case I STRONGLY object to this attitude. For some time I've been coming across articles on my watchlist which suddenly have red image links in prominent places: apart from looking damned ugly, it's highly give a highly unprofessional impression of Wikipedia. It should be OBLIGATORY in my opinion for the people deleting images to FIRST remove the links to them, and hang the extra work involved!
Guess why images tagged as "fair use" but not used in any article (such as the image Anthere was complaining about) are being deleted so quickly? It's because the images can be deleted without removing any links to them. Links from talk pages shouldn't be removed, because doing so would disrupt history, links from userpages can be ignored because they shouldn't have been made in the first place, and links from templates have mostly been taken care of by the drive to remove fair-use images from template-space.
That's all very well, but the links I was referring to are from principal articles - I first noticed it when the picture disappeared from the infobox in [[Bertie Ahern]] leaving a damned great broken link prominently at the top of the article. But then, he's only the Irish Prime Minister, so no-one would notice....