Hi all,

All along I had thought images are deleted because they are copyvio (using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems), redundant or low quality (using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion) or images that are obviously non-free, e.g. photos of celebrities, single frames of videos, etc. in cases where fair use cannot be claimed (using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images). Note that those in the third category as mentioned here can usually be restored if fair use is later verified to be OK (since these would be from easily available photos/videos, etc.) I have myself listed many images in these pages and all those got deleted. Fine.

But recently I happened to stumble upon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Untagged_images#Request_for_comm... where Quadell asked for comments regarding unverified orphans. The discussion Quadell & I (& unfortunately nobody else) had has been moved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Un....

The talk in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Un... seem to imply that many unverified orphans (UOs) have been deleted. I would assume that most uploaders until mid-2004 (Someone relaxes this upto November 2004 in the talk page) didn't get a Special:Upload page that told them that their images would be deleted unless tagged. Even images uploaded by Anthere, one of the members of the board who has been a very respected contributor to Wikipedia got deleted due to such misunderstanding. Now when I look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images I understand it includes not only material that is uspected to be available only under a non-free license but also those that are untagged, which means a lot of images uploaded before 2004 were on the verge of deletion or were already deleted. Based on Anthere's images, I would presume that many other UOs were uploaded in good faith and left untagged as tags didn't exist in those days and GFDL was the default. I would like Wikipedia not to lose these images (which could be moved to commons if it is definite that they won't be re-included in any articles).

Since image deletion is an irreversible process (as I understood very recently when I found Anthere's images deleted & was alarmed by her reaction as I had thought it would be easy to undelete them) I would like a discussion on the issue of deletion of unverified images that aren't proved to be copyright violations.

Quadell tried to get a consensus at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Un... but failed. I tried to bring this to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy) but got only the reply of Xiong (and hence against not enough people discussed so there is no question of a consensus).

After seeing that Sj had similarly expressed anguish over the deletion of beautiful images in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_and_media_for_deletion/Un... I asked him how I could get the community to discuss the issue and he advised me to write to WikiEn-l.

I don't want to force my ideas of whether untagged images uploaded in 2002-2004 should be deleted or not. I want a discussion to take place with enough participants to make the policy of image deletion clearer. Any pointers on how this could be achieved (on a wiki page, not mailing list/IRC so the process looks transparent to everyone) would be nice.

Note that I haven't explained my ideas much in this post. I just want a way by which a broad-based discussion on the policy could take place. My personal views on untagged images can be found by going through the talk pages mentioned in this mail.

Thanks, Paddu