Forum:Setting a date for deletion of unsourced and unlicensed images

As many of you know, Michaeldsuarez has spent the last few weeks diligently combing through every image that has ever been uploaded onto this wiki. He has tagged unsourced and unlicensed images with no source and no license, something that desperately needed to be done. I was going to set up some whole system with multiple people doing certain images, etc., but Michael stepped in and just decided to do it. That’s great! There are now 3,326 images tagged with having no source, and 3,291 images tagged with having no license. This is also great! That said, we can’t simply leave them in this category.

This is a simple proposal to set up a date for deleting these images. We don’t need to approve a mass image deletion like we approved a mass article deletion. All of these tagged images are in violation of United States Copyright Law, which this wiki and all of Wikia are legally bound to follow (even if you do not live in the United States; Wikia servers are in California and subject to US law), so no one needs the permission of the members to delete them. This proposal is to just set a date for the deletion.

Working under the assumption that this proposal will last at least one week, I propose that all of the images begin to be deleted on Wednesday, August 1, 2009. That means users whose images are tagged (which is very likely all of us, as sometimes we slip up or we have images from three years ago that were never sourced) have until 11:59pm on Tuesday, July 29, 2009 to source the images. After that, anything that remains in this category will be deleted. Considering how old some of these images are, it will very likely be all of them.

One question that’s probably going through your mind is “what if the users source their images as being from Wookieepedia and Google, and we don’t know it?” As Michael suggested to me on IRC when we working putting together this proposal, the answer is simple: those are keywords we can search for. Same with “DeviantArt”; if a user sources their image only as “DeviantArt”, we can delete it too because we can search for that. It’s a fairly simple search process that should yield tremendous results in weeding out those who are still not properly sourcing their images so we can delete said images.

If this proposal fails, we can really just send out a massive warning and say “you have 24 hours to source your images” like we would in any other image policy violation. This is just giving people ample time to see if their images are on the list and then source them. My suggestion to you is that you go to Special:Log, type in your name next to “User:”, select “Upload log” from the dropdown menu, and then go through EVERY image you have uploaded to ensure that they are correctly sourced. This is easier than trying to find your images in the category.

As mentioned above, this forum will last until at least Wednesday, July 1, 2009. Please remember that you must meet the requirements of the voting policy to cast your vote in this and any other voting proposal. Please be civil. - Brandon Rhea  (talk) 18:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Support

 * 1) As the proposer. Big thanks to Michaeldsuarez. - Brandon Rhea Rebel symbol Blue.png (talk) 18:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Discussion
Just to make things perfectly clear, this should not be thought of as being the same as the mass deletion process. Users will not be tagging images, they don’t have to review corrections, etc. All we have to do is wait for the deletion date to come around and then delete anything that’s left in the category. It’s that simple. Because of that, it won’t conflict with any mass article deletion work. The only thing it will do is create two large-scale deletions in the span of less than a week. - Brandon Rhea  (talk) 18:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)