[Commons-l] Direct transfer of properly licensed images from wikipedias to commons?

[Alex Nordstrom]

Wednesday, 17 October 2007, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Absolutely. And there's nothing to stop anyone from checking the
> uploads through the bot account. They are no different from "normal"
> uploads, except many (most?) of them will already have been checked
> on a wikipedia, as well as by the "transferer", and they all have an
> {{Information}} template.

Ignoring the comparison to "brand new uploads" for a moment to compare 
this to the manual moving of images to Commons, which I think is more 
relevant, it's plain to see that this would reduce the instances of
 * images changing names when being moved to Commons
   (makes it hard to identify transferred images)
 * images losing their Wikipedia histories
   (lots of uploaders fail to cite the images' original locations and/or 
   descriptions)
 * images changing licenses
   (lots of users assume everything on Wikipedia is GFDL--this affects 
   both images that should be transferred, but with a CC-license for 
   example, and fair use images)
 * thumbnails and preview images being uploaded

I could give real-world examples of users committing all of the above 
mistakes en masse, thus causing a lot of extra work (more so than if 
they'd just uploaded plain copyvios), but I don't want to single anyone 
out here.

Yes, bots do wacky stuff sometimes, but people do it way more often. As 
long as the bot makes sure there's an {{information}} template with the 
source filled out and an acceptable license, I'd be more inclined to 
trust the bot to transfer the image properly than the random Wikipedia 
user who decides they need an image from English Wikipedia on their own 
language edition.

And like you said, the images still get screened by the posse patrolling 
the latest files on Commons, just like all new uploads.

-- 
Alex Nordstrom
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LX
Please do not CC me in followups; I am subscribed to commons-l.
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