Hi Alexander,

Thanks for sharing your experiences again. It is appreciated.

There are (at least) three issues playing in parallel here, and while they interfere, they require different approaches:

* Sometimes admins move too quickly or don't follow the right process. This is something we have to sort out through the regular channels on Commons - because it affects all uploads and not just Wiki Loves Monuments. I don't want to downplay this, but to some extent, this will always happen.

* We need to find good pathways to identify photos that are not matching criteria. Sometimes we can make the extra effort to fix it (like in this case, where someone has removed information that was already there). Someone could make a tool to identify these images, and make a report. This seems to be what you're asking: to be informed. If normal processes are followed, a deletion template/category would be added to the image, and this is actually something that could be reported by a bot. You'd only need to find someone to write that for you.

* What I was concerned about, is that an image gets deleted after the jury process is finished for a valid reason. This happened a few times. There is nothing we can do (or should want to do) to avoid these deletions. However, what I can imagine, is a better process to detect these images earlier, so that they are not nominated in the first place. I went through the top-50 manually, and checked for all kind of suspicious activity. If the metadata looked suspicious, or if anything was missing, I would contact the author. I know that at least one national team also checked each image through google images to see if it was available elsewhere on the web. However, that doesn't scale. But, I'd like to collect approaches here, and then maybe someone can come up with a good way to automate :)

I hope that clarifies.

Best,

Lodewijk

2017-01-30 23:09 GMT+01:00 Alexander Tsirlin <altsirlin@gmail.com>:

I think that I have raised this issue back in September, and at that time Mr. Lodewijk told me that Commons admins are special people who are not supposed to read and check anything. They simply delete an image if they want to do so, while the rest of the community should shut up and comply. I am not sure whether Mr. Lodewijk is going to reconsider his opinion now, but at least it is good to see that others find such behavior of Commons admins detrimental.

Regarding our own license checks, we of course do that for Russian WLM, and we also tried to take care of no-FoP images by systematically tagging them and transferring them to other projects under fair use. However, we quickly found out that Commons admins take advantage of this process and delete the images before we have a chance to transfer them (the notorious sysop Jcb was also part of that story). From that point on, we had to adopt a different strategy and make sure that no-FoP images simply stay on Commons, because there is no reasonable way to organize the file transfer without the danger of having the files deleted before the transfer occurs.

More generally, I am sure that the Commons community has to reconsider their attitude toward the WLM photos. These photos are not regular uploads, and there are always people who are ready to take care of them if problems occur. It will be very natural if WLM organizers get notified about potential problems and have their say before(!) the files are nominated for deletion. I believe that the international organizers should seriously push forward this idea. Otherwise, we can easily face a situation when all winning photos are inconspicuously deleted under weird pretexts like 'no license', and none of us would even understand what happened, because files have been deleted, and all evidence lost.

Sincerely,
Alexander
On 30.01.2017 17:28, Lodewijk wrote:
Thanks!

OK, so in this case the information was apparently removed by someone unrelated to the author - very odd - and deleted by an admin without further checking. I restored the image on the list of winners.

The general question for best practices stands though - especially given the deletions that sometimes happen with regards to freedom of panorama. It would be nice if we could at least catch those earlier.

Best,

Lodewijk
2017-01-30 17:17 GMT+01:00 Ciell Wikipedia <ciell.wikipedia@gmail.com>:
I restored the image, the info still there in the history.

Ciell
2017-01-30 17:07 GMT+01:00 Lodewijk <lodewijk@effeietsanders.org>:
People can also upload images manually. As I'm no longer an admin, I can't check the history of the file - and there was no page with deletion request created. The recent file I noticed was 봄이_온_수원_화성.jpg

Best,

Lodewijk
2017-01-30 17:06 GMT+01:00 Alexander Tsirlin <altsirlin@gmail.com>:
The WLM upload wizard adds the cc-by-sa-4.0 license automatically. Therefore, it is hard to imagine that a WLM photo had no license. It rather means that someone removed the license, and then someone else deleted the file. Was it the case here?

Sincerely,
Alexander

On 30.01.2017 11:51, Lodewijk wrote:
Hey all,

As I noted that two of the national nominees have been deleted after their nomination, I was curious, are there any process improvements we could consider to avoid this to some extent?

I would be curious to hear some best practices that countries have implemented to check for formalities. For example, I noted that one image from Korea was deleted apparently because the licese was missing. I'm guessing that this is something we could check for semi-automated. Are there countries that do this?

I do some manual checking for the top-50 internationally, just before we enter the final round. But it is very hard to scale that, and it eats up a lot of time. Any other ideas?

Best,

Lodewijk
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