Dear Lodewijk,

I find it a bit difficult to assume good faith when someone approaches me with a knife. I find it more natural to defend, and that's what we have to do now.

I truly regret that Commons did not develop a more civil approach than submitting deletion requests on every possible occasion. Even if we assume that this is the reasonable course of action, it hardly makes sense for WLM, because only uploaders receive notifications about possible file deletion. The organizers have no idea about it, although they should be contacted in the first turn. Most of the uploaders are new users who do not speak English. What do you expect to hear from them?

All photos related to WLM Russia contain a template saying:
Please read the guidelines before making any changes that can affect the monuments database!
If you actually read the guidelines, you will see the following:
If you see a potential candidate for deletion, inform us in the first place. We will organize the file transfer and you will be able to delete the photo afterwards. Should you do it differently and nominate a WLM/WLE photo for deletion without informing us, this will be highly detrimental and disrespectful to our work. We don't like vandals.
All these deletion requests are indeed highly disrespectful to our work. But they happen, and we have no other choice but to fight against that. And whet our knives, because we will likely need them.

Sincerely,
Alexander



On 17.09.2016 12:17, Lodewijk wrote:
Hey Alexander,

Assuming good faith is always good - even if you have to work harder for it. It makes the interactions more pleasant and the work more fun. So I will always recommend to keep doing it - even if it goes against your natural response. 

The case where the names don't seem to match seems like a valid case to me to ask questions, and this process is (unfortunately) the process being used for that at Wikimedia Commons. It is uncomfortable, but it is what we have to deal with. Because there are so many pictures, there is a bunch to be expected. 

I'm not going to pretend that the Wikimedia Commons community is always easy or fun to work with - but their intentions are usually good. They are very tough on copyright, and very suspicious. While these are some disadvantages, it does allow us to use a lot of shared infrastructure, and makes competitions like this one possible on an international scale. Please do realise that the number of uploads typically raises with 30-100% during Wiki Loves Monuments, and this puts some stress/strain on the reviewers too. 

Best,
Lodewijk

2016-09-17 8:58 GMT+02:00 Alexander Tsirlin <altsirlin@gmail.com>:
Rather than complaining to the process could you please for once think that this is your project too and everyone in this together?
 It is not my project. Like many other people, I am forced to use it as a common image repository, even though I emphatically do not want to. As you probably know, before migrating to WMF servers Wikivoyage had its own image repository, and we wanted to keep it, because it was much better organized than Commons, and we did not want other people to impose their rules and practices of "nominating everything for deletion" on images that we have carefully collected ourselves.

Unfortunately, our request was ignored by the WMF, so yes, we are also in this strange thing that was supposed to be a common project, but is in fact run by a handful of people who believe that unjustified and well-hidden deletion requests are the best way to solve all problems. But it stinks, and we try to be as far from it as possible.

Your experience of license review for WLM Bangladesh might be interesting if we would ever have time to do this. At the moment, I spend most of my free time on finding and fighting these well-hidden deletion requests. Thank you, my dear Commons community, for creating such a wonderful working environment.

Sincerely,
Alexander



On 17.09.2016 11:32, Nahid Sultan wrote:

Though it seems a bit odd but on a commons perspective it is also a normal procedure. Commons has a huge issue with people finding images online and then uploading them as their own work, so regular contributors on commons can sometimes be overzealous in making sure that people actually have the right to release what they are releasing. That is where the OTRS system comes in. Rather than complaining to the process could you please for once think that this is your project too and everyone in this together?


We, from WLM Bangladesh team have created a work-board/list for such users who have problem with metadata, previously published same image on other media to make sure that they are actually own the copyright. we even created a hand book for reviewers explaining what to look during the review (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:NahidSultan/WLM). So, every reviewer check for those mistakes when reviewing an image then if they found such problematic user they immediately contact them via email or talk page and list them on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:NahidSultan/WLM/possible_copyright_problem.  It works for us.


Best,



From: WikiLovesMonuments <wikilovesmonuments-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Alexander Tsirlin <altsirlin@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2016 11:09 AM
To: Wiki Loves Monuments Photograph Competition
Subject: Re: [Wiki Loves Monuments] WLM photos are deleted on Commons
 
Now it is not only about Freedom of Panorama and non-free images.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_uploaded_by_VekaSpb
Here, one Commons user nominates a bunch of excellent photos for
deletion after he sees that the user name does not match the name in
EXIF, even though the connection between the two is pretty obvious. This
deletion request has been closed yesterday, but it still costed me a lot
of time and a long e-mail exchange with the uploader, where I tried to
convince her that everything is fine, and this deletion request was only
a mistake. Yes, just a small mistake, really...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_uploaded_by_PhotoJinn
Here, the same user nominates for deletion some photos of a 13th century
cathedral claiming that there is no freedom of panorama. What???!

---------------------------------------

That's a very systematic course of action against us taking place on
Commons. It would be silly to assume good faith here.

Best,
Alexander



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