Message: 9
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:11:08 -0500
From: William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Overzealous Commons deletionists
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, info(a)wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <4EBE7E7C.8070708(a)gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I've noticed a problem with overzealous deletionists on Commons. While
this may be something of a legal and political issue, it's also
operational and affects multiple *[m,p]edias at the same time.
[snip]
There are a number of obvious technical issues. YouTube and others
have had to handle this, it's time for us.
1) DMCA doesn't require a takedown until there's been a complaint. We
really shouldn't allow deletion until there's been an actual complaint.
We need technical means for recording official notices and appeals.
Informal opinions of ill-informed volunteers aren't helpful.
OTRS? This seems like a social (or potentially a legal) issue not a
technical one.
2) Fast scripting and insufficient notice lead to
flapping of images,
and confusion by the owners of the documents (and the editors of
articles, as 2 days is much *much* too short for most of us). We need
something to enforce review times.
Again a social issue
3) Folks in other industries aren't monitoring
Talk pages and have no
idea or sufficient notice that their photos are being deleted. The
Talk mechanism is really not a good method for anybody other than very
active wikipedians. We need better email and other social notices.
Enable enotif for talk page messages by default?
4) We really don't have a method to "prove" that a username is actually
under control of the public figure. Hard to do. Needs discussion.
Again a social issue. No amount of technical magic will be able to
solve that issue.
5) We probably could use some kind of comparison
utility to help
confirm/deny a photo or article is derived from another source.
That could certainly be a technical challenge, and not a trivial one.
However at the end of the day we can just get a human to compare.
If there's a better place to discuss this, please
indicate.
Commons-l or the VP at commons since these are mostly complaints
against the social practises, not technical issues.
-bawolff