On 12/19/06, Mark Clements gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
The current system works fine, as far as I am concerned. The import is a one-way process, and doesn't touch the material on the source wiki. This is as it should be, as there will be situations where you are trying to copy, not move the material. Currently you do the import and, if the content is being moved, login to the remote wiki and either delete the page or add a soft redirect. There should definitely _not_ be a mechanism for remotely deleting wiki content from a remote wiki!
Why not? If I'm an admin on that remote wiki, it might be handy when moving images to Commons. At the moment of writing this mail, there are 657,331 media files on en.wikipedia. If 1/3 of them (rough guess) are suitable for Commons, that means >200,000 manual deletions when moving. If an api would allow image deletions by admins, it would save a lot of unneccessary work, without compromising safety (the images are kept, and the api could also offer undelete).
Magnus