A number of problems are cropping up with the deletion of images.
1. Many of the images being deleted are valid but simply wrongly categorised. Often the problem is simply that the information requested at the time was less detailed than what we rightly request now. (for example {{fairuse}} rather than {{fairusein| }} )
2. Some people doing deletions aren't checking to make sure that the deletion will not make a mess of some articles. Is it that hard to clean up problems a deletion may leave in individual articles?
For example, all images in a template were deleted because they were down as fairuse. They were simply wrong categorised. They should have been in as crowncopyright given the source that was listed on the image, and crowncopyright images are explicitly allowed to be used in templates under their legal conditions. A whole series of templates were turned into blank boxes with red names by the failure of the deleter to simply checking the sources of the images first. (It took 30 seconds to establish that all the images were from the same source, which was crowncopyright.) But by then a template used widely was a mess, and the pages it was in turned into an amateurish shambles. (The deleter didn't even bother to remove the template from pages.)
Another example, a featured article lost a series of fine images taken by the article writer simply because as a newbie, though he had explicitly 'given' the images to WP, they were categorised as source unknown. All the deleter had to do was read what was in the file to know the user meant them to be covered by GDFL. (The information could be read on a copy of our page, still with the images in situ, on another website.)
Can we please remind the deleters that (a) old images may be valid but were downloaded when the commands weren't as informative as we have now. They can easily be fixed in ten seconds, rather than blanket deleted. Check to make sure there really are copyright problems.
(b) have some cop-on about sources. A user may have innocently used the wrong category. (I rarely download images but at this stage I know in many cases automatically if the source of a politics or history image is genuinely fair use, should be crown copyright, or is clearly a copyright breach.)
(c) For God's sake read the notes people have typed in the file. The copyight category is often wrong. If in doubt check a source.
(d) if you delete images, remove them from articles first. Otherwise you'll leave articles in a mess with red boxes where an image once was. Too many articles are being turned into messes because no-one bothered to do any follow up when an image was deleted.
Thom
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