2008/11/5 Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com>om>:
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
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/