[WikiEN-l] Transwikiing free-content images

[Bryan Derksen]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/11/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> It's uncontroversial to move images individually, people do it all the
>> time. Mass moves seem like less of a good idea, unless you had a group
>> that had already all been vetted for source and license. Commons doesn't
>> have the resources to clean up after a move of, say, 100K images of
>> which 5% are copyvios.
> 
> It is such a painful, slow process to manually transwiki an image that
> I pray to god that someone will start doing mass moves.
> 
> I understand that we would not want to blindly move tens of thousands
> of images at a time, but surely there is a middle ground. Someone
> could make a tool whereby you could quickly just tick off a list of
> acceptable images, and the move would "happen"?

In recent weeks I've been spending a fair chunk of time wandering around
[[Category:Free use images]] and marking individual images with {{Move
to Commons}}. Based on some other images I'd seen transwikied that
seemed to have been done in a semi-automated manner I had assumed that
there was a bot somewhere that followed up on such taggings, I hope I
haven't been making a lot of manual effort instead.

I've mostly been tagging images that will be relatively easy to convert
to SVG and that otherwise have no likely or obvious licencing problems,
in case anyone was worried. I've been doing a little sanity-checking of
licence tags in the process and moving some stuff to other licences
where the current one seemed obviously wrong. It makes for a nice
cleanup project that only a human editor can really do well. I can't
really say what percentage of the free images are actually incorrectly
tagged though since I've been picking a non-random sample.