Realistically, the pool of people who will be able to effectively work on
the image transfer is limited, and will not include more casual users who
notice the red links. We're doing a huge amount of work on the transfer
right now, but won't be ready to shut down wts and Shared by Tuesday--that
will make it much, much harder to do the necessary work: (1. check and tag
images on the original repositories, 2. transfer tagged images to Commons,
3. review transferred images on Commons and make sure they are properly
categorized.) Disabling edits to wts and Shared will halt tagging and
deletion of irrelevant files there, tying our hands behind our backs.
I also think that people might be underestimating the quality of work done
on WV and WT in ensuring that images are not copyright violations. In the
thousands of images we've tagged in the past several days, we've really run
into only a couple dozen images that required outright deletion. Many
images are "not free enough" for Commons, and will need to be transferred
to local WV language versions under a non-free content policy (under
discussion), but again, this will be an easier task if the repositories are
still editable.
I don't really understand why the WMF is unwilling to keep the repositories
around while we do all this work (some prior discussion with the community
might have acted as a useful sanity check...), but the facts that a
read-only status would impede the transfer process and that the site-wide
broken image links would make the project look bush league make it seem
worth delaying the move to the WMF altogether. Unless the WMF is willing
to reconsider how to handle this.
-Peter