On 12/19/06, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
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).
These images need to be reviewed by a human.. many of them obtained a free tag through license roulette and are obvious violations to even the most cursory examination. A move to commons is a good time to perform such a check.
This isn't an argument against the API allowing deletion, but just a factor pointing out that the dream of fully automated moves should never be made real. :)