Dear Antanana, Your problems with war make all our problems seem trivial in comparison. I wish you and your compatriots peace, and if that isn't available good luck.
Dear Maarten, Though I have hundreds of thousands of edits on commons the Russavia v WMF battle does not involve me. As a volunteer I choose what I contribute time to, and I do not choose to spend my time looking for edits that may be by Russavia. Unless you are an RFA candidate it should be possible to stay out of such battles and only involve yourself if you choose to be involved.
I think it would be helpful if we could build a non-commercial annex to commons for files that are NC but would otherwise be useful. This would mean that NC files could be moved there from commons rather than simply deleted, and in the very long term all those files would move to commons as and when the NC limitation expired. This may seem a longterm investment, but it would make it easier to make the case that classifying things as NC limits their use, and it would make our projects more open by enabling all editors to see files moved and deleted for being NC. Someone might even come up with a "plus NC" search tool that runs across both commons and the annex. This would be especially useful if we could come up with a dual license NC and open for images that are "freedom of panorama NC" until seventy years after the death of the architect or sculptor, then cc-BY-SA when only the photographer's rights need be considered.
There is a broader issue re the maintenance of bots, in the last couple of years we have gone through a series of events that have lost us many bots, the migration from toolserver to labs, and then various changes to the WMF systems. This latest issue reminds me of an old problem, article writers can start an article, leave or unwatch it and others will change it, especially if all the change needed is to replace an outdated template. But we are not so good at maintaining bots, even if the original developers have left the source code. We really need a bot adoption team, even if that requires getting a chapter in a low wage country such as India or Armenia to get the WMF to fund a bot adopter who will adopt bots that editors want to use but the original developer is no longer volunteering to maintain.
Dear Jane, Maarten,
Dear all,
I am actually sorry that some of you get depressed and dissapointed
Please do not give up. Well, it is easier, I agree. But other things are to be taken into consideration
For example, a whole lot of you do not have war going on in your country. And we have
We lose people, the best people maybe, as they are acting on their dreams, and people are to have dreams to move on
We lose cultural and natural monuments. Because of war and because of simple negligence
This wooden church has got burned just because [1]. And as the war is going on, we are not sure if people (surely not our state) can spare enough resources to get it rebuilt. We are lucky to have its image before the fire [2] and WLM is to be 'blamed' here
This natural monument is called Balka Ploska [3]. The images were uploaded during Wiki Loves Earth contests [4].
In 2002 this cute animal -
Hemiechinus auritus - was discovered there [5], and it it a very rare animal in our country
Balka Ploska got burned because of war [6]...
You can rebuilt a cultural monument (to some extent of course), but it is kind of impossible to restore nature...
Well, we do have some positive video coverage from Chernobyl Exclusion Zone [7]. We actually received a wildlife reserve thanks to the nuclear disaster. There are wolves there, foxes. They are not afraid of people [8]
What I am awkwardly trying to tell you all here, is this: please consider the things from different points of view
The hardships are going to to exist everywhere. That's a given
But do think that you can make the difference here, I believe.
Photos can be uploaded locally. Used locally. We are going to have 'a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge'. Just need more time and efforts
Anyway thank you for everything done up to this moment. It matters
P.S. ErfgoedBot (I believe) matters a lot for people outside the Wikimedia Commons