Yesterday I came across a beautiful panorama, one which any reference work would be thrilled to have, which had been *casually* put up for deletion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wuerzburg_panorama.jpg
This image had illustrated the article on Wuerzburg for a long while, and was then removed by an anonymous edit in February. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=W%FCrzburg&diff=9939546&ol...
It was soon afterward listed for deletion as one of hundreds of "unverified orphans" [UOs] listed in recent months. Quoth an enthusiastic UO deleter: "I've been doing this for about a month, and it's been generally well received."
Out of about 100 such images currently listed on Images for Deletion, I found about 20 which were either clearly uploaded by their creators, or seemed likely to have been (by virtue of composition, edit summaries, image descriptions). Some of these could clearly be used productively in articles, even if they aren't at present; in particular the Wuerzburg image and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Xi%27an_city_wall.jpg
[ Detailed rant: http://tinyurl.com/4zpyb ]
This kind of careless deletion must stop. It should be unacceptable to list a borderline image for deletion, and only afterwards notify the uploader, who may not even visit Wikipedia every week.
A cardinal rule of image deletion should be : take every precaution not to irreversibly delete beautiful, free content. Particularly so long as we tolerate foolish debates about the unproven copyvio-status of everyone's favorite autofellatio image.