On dim, 2002-05-19 at 12:50, Bryan Derksen wrote:
At 03:38 PM 5/19/02 -0400, you wrote:
On 5/19/02 3:25 PM, "Axel Boldt" axel@uni-paderborn.de wrote:
I propose that we completely forbid the overwriting of existing uploaded files.
But that's annoying if you want to update a file with a corrected version. There should be a better way.
It would be nice if uploaded files had a "history" like articles do. That way a vandalism like overwriting with junk could be easily undone.
Hmm...
Also, while I'm thinking about it, a "trash bin" where deleted files and articles go for a while before being truly and permanently deleted would be a nice safety feature;
That would be pretty easy, I think. Just create a separate directory (with web access disallowed), move 'deleted' files over it; maybe have a cron job clear it out every now and then.
Oh, and an "articles that link here" feature for the files in uploads would be great, too! Would make it easier to spot the files which are actually used by articles and the ones put there by jerks just using Wikipedia for free hosting space.
This would be easier if we add a table to list external links just like we currently have for internal links to existing and nonexisting articles. When saving an article, we could list all the web links, images, and perhaps inter-wiki links, dump them to this table; then, it's a simple database query to check against the URL and grab any article -- on _this_ wiki -- that links to a given file.
(If there's any reason not to do it this way, let's discuss further on wikitech-l; however it's implemented, it's a needed feature.)
This will not solve the problem of tracking files that are used on _other_ wikipedia sites; a lot of images are shared between articles on the different languages 'pedias, and a number of specifically non-English files (labelled maps and diagrams, for instance) are hosted on the English or Meta 'pedias because the others haven't been converted yet... though theoretically this could be tracked in the future by checking the link tables for each language's database.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)