On Sat, 3 Nov 2012 12:30:17 -0700, Erik Moeller wrote:
Hi Berthold,
the short version:
- All files will continue to be accessible via wikivoyage-old.org
[1]. 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 hasnt 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 theres 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 communitys ability to pull this off.
Erik
Hi Erik,
I appreciate your responses and find them very useful. I do not think there is any community decision taken at this point, we are still discussing the options, but it is already clear that the lack of proper notification is a problem. For instance, apparently, the Swedish Wikivoyage community had no idea of the imminent transfer, and even refused to grant a bot flag needed for the transfer (which of course they did after learning what is going on). Is it possible to have somebody of the devs responsible on the migration present on the Task Force on Commons, in case there are questions about the migration process? This is not really a huge time consuption, but it would be good to have timely first-hand answers about possible options.
Cheers Yaroslav