John Vandenberg wrote:
On 7/27/07, Tim Starling tstarling@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&ol...
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