2008/11/5 Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
Short of adding some extra queries to see if a file was deleted (remember, all queries here are to a foreign site over their API, not a local database), I'm not really sure how you could easily get this information to the end-users, unfortunate though it is. The only thing I could suggest would be to add a dedicated API module that delivers all of the exact information we need on the client end in one nice big query, but ew :(
Indeed.
In the long term perhaps we need to set up a more sophisticated and robust version of CommonsTicker http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb/CommonsTicker. When using the ForeignAPIRepo the wiki administrator could perhaps subscribe to an RSS/email feed of notifications relevant to their wiki.
Weirdly CommonsTicker is not hugely popular today, I think. Maybe because of delinker bots such as CommonsDelinker. OK, so another idea: Run a delinking/notification bot service that third parties can subscribe to, where they request/allow a bot to make edits in their wiki to remove deleted images and maybe put warning or notices on image pages for nominated-for-deletion images.
I really hope consideration is given to this, about how to run it so that it doesn't kill Wikimedia servers and also makes sense for third parties, because it is the most perfect way for Wikimedia Commons to distribute its works (very mission-fulfilling). You know that situation where you give a great tool as an experiment but people love it too much and you have to take it away again... that sucks! I hope we can avoid that scenario with ForeignAPIRepo.
Future plans? Make caching in general not suck, and have the local thumb cache better integrated with the normal thumb path construction, it's a bit (read: very) haphazard right now. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but I know Betawiki was running the ForeignApiRepo live at one point, pointed at Commons.
Great. Chad, were/are you one of the developers on this or is this just your wishlist for someone else? :)
cheers Brianna