[WikiEN-l] Example of unreverted vandalism

[Tim Starling]

John Vandenberg wrote:
>> On 7/27/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> Just an example of long-term unreverted vandalism for your amusement:
>>
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Art_Tatum&diff=32294907&oldid=29206075
>>
>> External links, language links, categories and a sound sample reference
>> were deleted in December 2005 by an anon. The sound sample itself was
>> permanently deleted a month later citing "orphaned fair use". The lost
>> sections were progressively rebuilt by human effort over the 18 months
>> following, except for the sound sample which remains lost.
>>
>> -- Tim Starling
> 
> Tim, an ogg file named Image:Elegie (Art Tatum).ogg is on commons.  Is
> it the same file?

Yes. But it's only there due to an accident of a maintenance script at
some time in the past. It shouldn't be on commons, because it's not under
a free licence.

> To avoid the need to delete orphaned media, it would be handy to have
> a brief list of articles where a media has been used in the past - the
> last five articles would usually be enough to help work out why it has
> been orphaned.

In this case a small amount of care by the deleting admin would have
avoided the problem. It should have been obvious that the file was a
useful inclusion to the article on the named artist.

Our fair use policy supports the inclusion of such music clips. I'd like
to see a lot more of them on Wikipedia, since a textual description of an
artist's music is always going to be clumsy and imprecise compared to a
short representative clip.

-- Tim Starling