On lun, 2002-02-25 at 11:16, Larry Sanger wrote:
On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Lars Aronsson wrote:
From a general, Wiki-philosophical-social aspect, it is interesting
that the upload function gets abused, while general Wiki pages do not.
Actually, there's a good reason for it: the images aren't obviously linked to anything in any article. This is an ABSOLUTELY essential piece of information to have: what articles *use* the image in question? If no article uses an image after 24 hours, perhaps we should delete the image (or put it in a queue to be deleted by a human).
At the moment, though, the non-English wikipedias don't have their own upload capabilities. Images that are used on the other wikis thus tend to end up uploaded to www.wikipedia.com or meta.wikipedia.com without necessarily being used where they were uploaded (especially diagrams and maps with language-specific names, descriptions, etc).
So please, don't delete my Esperantized maps. :)
So, the point is, without a context, unless some image is at face value obviously worthless to any Wikipedia article (e.g., porn advertisements), it's difficult for us to tell whether an image really is appropriate for the 'pedia. It would even make it easier for us to determine whether an image is copyrighted.
One way around this would be to attach images to unique articles, so that the uploading of an image would be logged in a particular article's history. I don't know if I like this suggestion, though, I'm just throwing it out there for your consideration.
I'm not quite sure how to go about doing that.
What could be done though that may be useful, is to add a link to a "pages that link to this file" function next to each name in the uploaded file list. A start, at least, though it doesn't cover the multi-wiki problem.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)