Tim, an ogg file named Image:Elegie (Art Tatum).ogg is on commons. Is it the same file? To avoid the need to delete orphaned media, it would be handy to have a brief list of articles where a media has been used in the past - the last five articles would usually be enough to help work out why it has been orphaned. On 7/27/07, Garion96 <garion96(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've just worked through 34 on that list, and only four were actually damaged. The majority of those entries appear to be due to maintenance tags and normal editing. -- John

On 7/27/07, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] When I checked a while in the past (~1yr ish ago) the majority of the new orphaned media was either never used in an article or not used in an article for longer than 6 hours. (I saved snapshots of imagelinks every 6 hours). This might upload and insert into an article process is too difficult for the average drive-by-user to manage... but that isn't news prior usability studies showed this as well. Fortunately the overwhelming majority of the images uploaded by these users are images pulled off the web, not much lost labor... and out of the legal and original works uploaded by these people I expect that most lack enough information for us to know about their licensing status. Alas we have no way to reach these people, since they seldom provide a confirmed email address. :( While there are certainly a lot of changes to the upload process that will confuse people, no matter how good we make it some people will still be confused. We need to find better ways to leverage our community to provide friendly realtime help to new users.

On 7/27/07, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip] Though the deletion itself is easily undone once the error is discovered... Almost as easily as the section removal. Asking human resources to spend perhaps 10x the amount of time on an unused image just doesn't scale well, that process is already way over taxed. The problem could also be addressed by better handling of vandalism. Not that thats an easier problem, but solving it also solves a lot of other types of wiki-rot that more care with deletion doesn't solve. In this case the vandalism never should have stuck: The diff was obviously bad. Any experienced human looking at it would have reverted. I'd argue that the total removal of all categories is so infrequently valid that we could painlessly have a software agent autorevert, or at least bring the edit to human attention. We're still seeing a constant stream of bad edits which could trivially be identified as bad by software sit around until a human editor finds them on their own. (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cannabis_%28drug%29&diff=prev…) Can someone please tell me why this is still happening? We've had the software to identify bad edits for years now, why isn't it working? The IRC bad-edit feed that I used run went down due to technical reasons... I didn't bother putting it back up because it wasn't fun to use since people using it were slower on the draw than folks directly skimming the RC feed. ... but the fully automatic reverting bots shouldn't have a problem with non-fun work. ;)

On 7/28/07, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Ahh. I'd missed that detail. I've gone and recovered the file. Ah. Er. I see you beat me to it. ;) In addition to snapshotting all of en's uploads at a couple of points, back then I was also saving a copy of every file I automatically tagged precisely because deletion wasn't revertible otherwise, although I never had cause to recover more than a couple of them. (Interesting th In this case the file was even in the 2005-05-30, so I presume that even more than you and I could have recovered it. I know, not your point either. ;)