[Foundation-l] Permanent deletion (tangent to the national portrait gallery thing)

[Platonides]

private musings wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> As a tangent to the national portrait gallery thing, I though I'd raise
> something which I've chatted about previously (possibly here, but certainly
> with various community members) which seems unresolved.
> 
> My understanding of the status quo is that when a commons administrator
> deletes an image, that image remains available to all other commons
> administrators. In the context of the NPG's request, I thought it was
> interesting to confirm that even if Derrick deleted all his uploaded images,
> they do, in fact, remain available to him, and all other 'community' members
> with the sysop. flag - I'm unsure as to the implications / consequences of
> this in terms of the NPG action, who presumably would be pretty frustrated
> if Derrick deleted all the images, and another, perhaps more pseudonymous,
> administrator, were to restore them all (likely with the support of 'the
> community' at this point).

Confirmed. Other commons administrators are able to see and restore
deleted images.

> I chatted with User:Lar about this a bit here;
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Lar#permanent_deletion
> 
> and gave the example which concerns me more there - which is illegal and
> potentially illegal images of children on foundation projects. Commons
> administrators will be able to see an image here;
> 
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Brip.jpg&action=edit&redlink=1
> 
> which I considered to be borderline at best, and maybe an illegal image.

Viewing deleted images is really useful for administrator work. Being
able to review other admins action is much more important than those
"illegal images". I don't care about them. Were an adming account be
compromised image permadeleting would be much much worse than him
looking through deleted images to sell as porn to embarrass WMF.


> I consider the fact that I can write 'Commons administrators will be able to
> see an image here' to be the heart of the problem! I hope the foundation
> might consider a software tweak of some sort to allow for permanent deletion
> - along with this tweak I feel sure the foundation staff could propose a
> sensible set of criteria which would have broad support.

Images can be oversighted to hide them from the sight of administrators.


Images deleted before June 2006 were completely gone.
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/32#ZOMG_IMAGE_UNDELETION_WORKS>

Except some software failures, all later deleted images exist in WMF
with varying access permissions.