The problem with Russian submissions this year was that the files were
mass-nominated for deletion. Whereas it has merit (indeed there is no
freedom of panorama in Russia for monuments), and it looks we can not do
anything on our end, there are two problems with these nominations: (i)
users who had their WLM submissions deleted never ever submit anything else
for WLM; (ii) we can not transfer all files to the projects (in our case,
the Russian Wikivoyage) because the fair use regulations require that files
are use on the project, and it takes a long time to add files to the list
and to choose which one of the multiple photos of the same monument should
be on the list (and others should not be transferred). We had the same
problems in 2015, but then we were able to negotiate that nominations are
frozen and then closed after Nov. 1. In 2016, several trigger-happy admins,
including Jcb, took a stance "copyvio is copyvio and must be deleted as
soon as possible does not matter what", and all mas-nonimations were
deleted promptly in a week. Jcb then gave me a "permission" to restore the
files one by one for transfer, as if I need his permission for that, but
refused to do anything else. Well, specifically about Jcb I hope he will be
soon desysopped (it will be his second desysop for cause) since he scews up
every administrative action he can screw up, but there are other admins
with the same position, and this is why many people believe that Commons is
broken. No bot notifications would help us with this issue.
Cheers
Yaroslav
PS Also trying my new mail address, the old one stopped accepting messages
from mailing lists since October, and I was not able to fix it on my end.
