On 11/28/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/28/05, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
I think what you are arguing is something different to quite a lot of others. They are saying why the policy was necessary. Your complaint is actually that you weren't warned. I don't think anyone would disagree that you should have been notified before the deletions took place.
There were thousands of images (possibly tens of thousands) that qualified for speedy deletion under the new policy. Issuing warnings to the uploader of each such image would have interminably delayed the cleanup, which was already well-overdue. Repeated public notices were issued; we're sorry you missed them or did not realize they applied to you.
The sheer magnitude of the problem is why people aren't being individually notified. I've been keeping track of the number of images involved, and my best estimate of the size of the problem is as follows:
20 000 images tagged as having no source information 5 000 images tagged as having no copyright information 8 000 images tagged as being "fair use", but unused in any article
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.
If the administrator places a warning on the uploader's talk page, in addition to removing the image from articles where it's used, and waits a week to give the uploader a chance to respond, it takes over two minutes to delete an image. This represents the additional time needed to check for responses on the user's talk page, check for responses on the talk page of the admin informing the user, and check for responses on the image description page and image talk page -- and 99% of the time, it's wasted effort, as the uploader has forgotten about Wikipedia entirely. Total effort involved in cleaning up the problem images: 1100 man-hours.
It's not as if efforts to notify people haven't been undertaken. The policy change was announced on the WikiEn-L mailing list, on the administrators' noticeboard, on several Village Pump subpages, in the Signpost, and for several weeks everyone's watchlist had a note on the top informing them of the change. The only thing that hasn't been done was individual notification on the talk pages of uploaders, and that's because there are almost 35000 problem images.
-- [[User:Carnildo]]