On 8/27/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
We're already doing this against the deleted images... A bot downloads the image, computes that sha-1, checks the filearchive table based on the SHA1, and if there is a match it complains in IRC and the new image is tagged.
Why do that in a bot instead of the wiki?? :)
Because bots are an immediate solution that people can write within their comfort-zone, whereas learning the MediaWiki codebase would be much more effort; as well as thinking that you need to either grovel, or be in an obscure clique of developers to have the patch applied. (They are wrong on both points).