It's been roughly three years since I first saw this topic filed on BugZilla[1] and before that is was often raised on IRC and on-wiki during discussion about it being very clumsy and unpracticle to systematically patrol uploads. Back then, from my point of view, this was about local uploads.

Now adays I'm much more active on and for Wikimedia Commons, and not so much on local uploads. Obviously with more and more wikis moving towards Commons and the growth of the wikis themselfs it's about time we can atleast some kind of method of being able to atleast indicate that a file has been 'checked'. Or, to be more specific, to know what hasn't been checked.

On Commons there are several review systems for common external resources that are used to import material from (such as Picassa and Flickr). And those work very well. Bots crawl recent uploads and whenever a reference to Flickr is found they are tagged as need-review and the easy ones are even reviewed by bots (since is something unique to Picassa and Flickr since they are machine readable and license info can be automatically verified) and everyhting else (false matches and errors) is manually reviewed.

However this is just a very tiny little bit of all the files on Commons. Last march I've raised the topic of edit patrol on Commons [2] and that has been a great success. We've got a team together and every single anonymous edit made after April 1st 2010 has been or will soon be patrolled [3]. Not once has it gone past the 30-day expiration time for recentchanges table. The same has been kept up for new page patrol aswell for several years.

Commons being primarily a media site, it's a bit of an akward thing to say that we are totally unable to patrol uploads effectively. We can't filter out uploads by bots, or trusted users. We can't filter out what's been patrolled by patrollers. It's just an incredible mess that sits there.

Several attempts have been made in the past to work around the software. But no matter how you try, a patrol flag will make things a whole lot easier. Once there is the possiblity to click a link and *poof* toggle that unpatrolled boolean I'm sure it won't take long before there are nice AJAX-tools coming to make this easier en-mass and a checklist / team will be formed to get the job done.

Alrighty, enough rant. What needs to be done for an implementation ?

When asking about this on IRC somebody said this; although a bit of a workarond we can do this already by means of NewPage patrol in the File namespace. Unless it's well hidden, this is false. Because uploads don't create an patrollable entry for the upload log action, nor for the description page creation. As a matter of fact the creation of those description page aren't registered in the recentchanges table at all (Special:NewPages / Special:RecentChanges).

Depending on how uploads will become patrollable the above could actually be a good thing. Since having to patrol both would be ineffecient, and uploading a file isn't neccecarily asociated with creating a page by users anyway. Plus it would mean duplicate entries in Special:RecentChanges (upload action / page creation).

Log actions are already present in the recent changes table so I'm guessing it doesn't take that much of a change in order to make uploads patrollable.

One interesting thing about uploading (the same is true with moving, and (un)protecting a page) is that it is also listed in the page history (instead of just in the Logs) which means it is already very accessable by the users and doesn't require a new system as to where the [mark as patrolled] links should appear.

For re-uploads on the "diff" page (like with edits) and on new uploads on the first revision. (although the latter may be subject to this bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15936 which I hope will be solved though it's not a show stopper, as long as there is any way at all to get there (even if it requires to go to Special:RecentChanges) that would be an incredible improvement to the current situation).

Greetings, Krinkle

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9501 [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2010Mar#Marki... [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Counter_Vandalism_Unit#Anonymous_e...

-- Greetings, Krinkle A Wikipedia Volunteer krinkle@wikipedia.be - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia