James Heilman jmh649 at
gmail.com Sat Nov 3 22:59:02
UTC 2012:
If we had the new travel site up and running would it not be easier to
address the image issue? We will get more volunteers joining in and it will
be easier to figure out what work needs to be done.
Actually, no.
Volunteers are not your unpaid employees. They are not here to fix things you (or the WMF)
have deliberately broken, for whatever reason.
As far as I know, the original reason why the community left Wikitravel for Wikivoyage was
that the site was poorly-maintained and unreliable.
Giving them something even more broken (for instance, all images turned into redlinks) is
just a way to lose the users entirely.
If we can keep
wikivoyage-old.org up and running for a
year that should
give ample time to address this, no? Would be great to go live as a WMF
site before X-mas.
James Heilman
Not really. It would be preferable to do this properly as a broken site isn't much of
an Xmas gift.
Given the number of images involved (it seems to be about 13000 out of a set of over
30000?) there is no reasonable prospect that someone is going to
manually go through all of those images for you, on your arbitrary deadline, just because
you thought it would be a good idea to move a wiki
prematurely and leave the images stranded on some other website.
There are just too many of them.
The only way I can see this working is if everything were automated - 'bots to exclude
unused images or images already on WMF commons:
bots to search-and-replace filenames if the commons: version is called something else,
bots to take any images which are in use and not already
on commons and move them to the individual-language Wikitravel project(s) using them,
marked with a template indicating that they should be
checked for suitability for tagging to move to commons (much like there are 'bots and
tags to move free images from w:en: to commons:)
Perhaps the site should be left where it is for now. Haste makes waste.