On 11/12/11 12:14 PM, bawolff wrote:
Message: 9
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:11:08 -0500
From: William Allen Simpson<william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Overzealous Commons deletionists
To: Wikimedia developers<wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, info(a)wikimedia.org
Message-ID:<4EBE7E7C.8070708@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I've noticed a problem with overzealous deletionists on Commons. While
this may be something of a legal and political issue, it's also
operational and affects multiple *[m,p]edias at the same time.
[snip]
There are a number of obvious technical issues. YouTube and others
have had to handle this, it's time for us.
1) DMCA doesn't require a takedown until there's been a complaint. We
really shouldn't allow deletion until there's been an actual complaint.
We need technical means for recording official notices and appeals.
Informal opinions of ill-informed volunteers aren't helpful.
OTRS? This seems like a social (or potentially a legal) issue not a
technical one.
Perhaps you could be more explicit. How does the unmentioned,
unreferenced, and barely documented OTRS handle the technical process of
recording formal complaints and appeals, and managing their handling?
Especially as OTRS specifically states it's for granting permission,
not requesting deletion.
What "social" process does that? The "social" process we have now
for
deletion isn't working.
I'm thinking more like bugzilla.
2) Fast
scripting and insufficient notice lead to flapping of images,
and confusion by the owners of the documents (and the editors of
articles, as 2 days is much *much* too short for most of us). We need
something to enforce review times.
Again a social issue
You plan some kind of social monitoring?
What extra volunteer (and boring) time are you offering, personally?
Sure, somebody could constantly monitor recent updates, and try to
notice that some administrator is scripting and block them. But in
my experience, the recent updates list scrolls by too fast to notice
that each deletion request (or deletion) is happening at a rate that
makes no sense. It's still only a few per minute, lost in the noise.
Why not use technical means instead?
3) Folks in
other industries aren't monitoring Talk pages and have no
idea or sufficient notice that their photos are being deleted. The
Talk mechanism is really not a good method for anybody other than very
active wikipedians. We need better email and other social notices.
Enable enotif for talk page messages by default?
Perhaps. But a weekly bundle won't be fast enough, and a single
message that doesn't repeat again until after the user has checked
the Talk for previous messages won't handle urgency or repeats. So
we'd have to add a special flag for deletion notices.
4) We really
don't have a method to "prove" that a username is actually
under control of the public figure. Hard to do. Needs discussion.
Again a social issue. No amount of technical magic will be able to
solve that issue.
We think of such technical solutions all the time in cryptology. But
none as simple and easy as sending SMS asking to call the Foundation
Designated Agent....
Reminder, in this case the administrator doesn't believe that the
hot lead guitarist for Cee Lo Green would create a user page and
upload her own picture. And I'd asked her to create her own page
and upload her own picture *because* it would be better than me
doing it. It fits the "I, the copyright holder of this work, ..."
He compared her to Madonna. Basically, nothing will convince this
administrator. The administrator has to be taken out of the loop.
We need technical means to handle that message.
5) We probably
could use some kind of comparison utility to help
confirm/deny a photo or article is derived from another source.
That could certainly be a technical challenge, and not a trivial one.
However at the end of the day we can just get a human to compare.
Wow, you really have a lot of extra time on your hands....