Hi Erik,
to keep wts and shared repositories did not mean a bulk transfer to Commons. But it makes the media files directly accessible to the wikis.
Now there is a slow bulk transfer organized by some bots like MGA73bot. This bot is checking nothing -- no freedom of panorama standards -- nothing. What's the difference to make the repositories available at the WMF?
Surely, it's necessary to check the files before (but this was not done by the bot). Now it makes a huge effort to check the images twice -- at Wikivoyage and at Commons. The original place as noted by the bot will vanish after some days. No community member has the chance the check the original file to get the category, for instance. And we will have maybe about 40.000 ownerless objects at Commons.
The use of wts and shared repositories will give us enough time the check all carefully. And you can have a sitenotice that all images are subject of a check.
And I repeat by myself that red links are a catastrophe. Maybe we should give the advise at the wikis to go to wikivoyage-old.org to find the articles in complete. The red links will be a state for several months or years which could not be accepted by the communities and readers. And as compared to Wikitravel the readers will go Internet Brands. And others will laugh about the inability of the WMF staff to make the technical job. The Wikivoyage staff made a good job transferring all date from Wikitravel -- and you?
Please tell your legal department that is more important to have a good and and a big community than having strong reservations. And they think only about media files. What about the Textual information of the Wikis?
Therefore, I ask you again to transfer the repositories.
Yours Roland
----- Original Message ----- From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, November 3, 2012 8:30 pm Subject: Re: [Wikivoyage-l] Migration without the repository "shared" To: Wikivoyage Mailing List wikivoyage-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi Berthold,
the short version:
- All files will continue to be accessible via wikivoyage-old.org.
For how long only depends on Wikivoyage e.V. but Roland suggested multiple months would not be a problem.
- Files need to be transferred by the community because
- not all files may be eligible for Commons due to its licensing policies
(freedom of panorama standards and other copyright specifics). Some files may be eligible under the new EDP that is being developed, but then they would have to be uploaded to the local wiki.
- licensing and description templates as well as categories may need
to be updated to work on Commons.
- files should generally be checked for copyright issues, we need to sort
out different standards and practices for things like email permissions to grant the rights to use an image, and so on.
Our legal department has strong reservations about a bulk transfer, and I have strong reservations from a community perspective. This is not just Wikivoyage being hosted by Wikimedia, this is Wikivoyage becoming a Wikimedia project. That means taking the time to do this properly.
Technically it is easy for anyone to do a bulk transfer. The reason this hasn't happened is precisely that people want to take the time to do it right.
If people are really worried about having red links, we can defer the migration date until more files have been transferred. Technically there's nothing forcing us to do it next week. Hans however will have greatly reduced availability after that and we currently depend on him to produce the database dumps.
It continues to be my recommendation to live with the red links at launch, and to just make it a priority to do the files migration through November. We can help with tools advice/support, and I would not underestimate the Wikimedia community's ability to pull this off.
Erik
Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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