On 11/13/11 4:21 AM, Andre Engels wrote:
I would say there's two things that I would have
liked to see changed,
which would have minimized drama in this case:
1. In large scale deletion proposals, the person proposing the deletion
should still personally check each image to see whether it applies. This
Agreed. According to the current policy, that's what they are already
supposed to be doing. The problem we have is a few administrators
(and potentially anybody else) spamming out hundreds per day each,
without doing actual checking.
should not be kept to the people objecting or the
person closing the
deletion request.
Administrators are supposed to be the cleanup crew. We're not supposed
to be cleaning up after administrators.
In this case it would have meant that only those
pictures
were proposed for deletion where Facebook was mentioned as the source of
the picture, rather than every picture on which the word occurred - and
even for those, a quick check of Facebook to see whether it wasn't likely
that there were correctly licensed pictures there.
We've seen this problem before with page moves, and with category
deletion, and with other disruptive processes. We added technical
measures to regulate them.
Looking at nearby days, I'm seeing these runs of 300 per day.
Consequently, they have a huge backlog to review.
With no real checking by an "independent" administrator, and no real
opportunity for the copyright holder to be notified or respond.
As Russ Nelson mentioned early in this thread:
# A lack of prompt response is taken as proof that their claim
# (no matter how wild) is true.
2. No copyright paranoia. If someone comes with a
believable story that an
image on Commons is correctly licensed, like in this case William's "I know
this uploader and it's the celebrity in question", this is sufficient
barring evidence of the contrary. Do not delete pictures because 'they
could be a copyright violation' but only because 'they are likely to be a
copyright violation'.
Agreed. This is partly a "social" change. But I proposed a
technological enforcement mechanism, because it's virtually
impossible for any human to monitor. Most of us don't have
the time. Linking actual complaints to the deletion process
would be helpful in forestalling this guessing behavior.