This screwing up of articles has been bugging me for weeks, as has deletions without any notifications. I hear all the complaints about how time consuming it is contacting people and how few reply and how time consuming it is cleaning up articles. My response is simple: tough. If you want to delete images, you make sure you don't screw up things in the way you do it.
Bertie's article is just one of many that has been thoroughly turned into a mess. The only bigger mess is the whole deletion process. Good images are being lost with the bad, as Anthere highlighted. Fixable images are being lost with the unfixable ones. I recently lost one image that I myself took because there was a minor error in categorisation, all because it was downloaded when I joined WP in 2003 and I put the wrong tag on it because I didn't know there was a better one. If the deleter had bothered to inform me about the problem I could have fixed it. (And checked other images to make sure there were no problems.) They didn't, just deleted it, and left a featured article missing its primary image. The image was also used elsewhere and all other articles were left with ruddy great holes in them. As I no longer had the photograph I had to go on a journey and take another one.
I've seen images deleted that were described as 'no source' even though the source was explicitly stated in detail on the page. I recently uploaded an image (not a great one, but a temporary holding one until a better version could be prepared, for an infobox). A new one was found by another user and installed. In fact the new image wouldn't work. When I discovered the new one was corrupted I went back to get the old one to find that it had been proposed for deletion and deleted. Again no-one informed me. At this stage, having spent so long cleaning up the deleters screw-ups I can't be bothered doing any more. So that article has no image and will have no image from me. And I'm not spending another week patching up articles that have been torn to shreds by wholescale deletion of images without fixing what is left.
And why the hell when people delete images now that a version is in commons, can't they bother to check to make sure the commons image is linking to the articles the original one was. I've had to trawl through commons four times recently to trace images that had been deleted without the commons images being linked. That sort of incompetent amateurism is making WP a joke, and annoying the hell out of me, Anthere, Adam and a host of others because we are the ones left cleaning up other people's mess, or worse undo damage where images that should never have been deleted have been.
Arwel Parry arwel@cartref.demon.co.uk wrote: 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....
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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