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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