User:Geo Swan/what I really did wrong...

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what I really did wrong...

Summary of my interaction with User:Imissdisco on the WMF commons

For well over a decade the Canadian Film Centre has been holding events, attended by figures in the Canadian film and television industry, and other VIPs, for several decades. Well over a decade ago they opened a flickr account. They started uploading images from these events of those people, often identifying them by name. They uploaded several thousand images under a cc license that allowed them to be freely re-used on WMF projects.

I am not the only WMF contributor who went through those images, looking to add images to wikipedia articles. Wikipedians from non-English wikis found some, and uploaded them to commons. But I started going through the images methodically, around a decade ago, and I think I ended up doing the lion's share of this work.

About 400 wikipedia articles are illustrated with a free image because they use an image from the Canadian Film Centre. How much time did I spend on this? I don't know. Hundreds of hours.

I considered this, I still consider this, time well spent. I am sure it was completely consistent with all WMF policies.

In recent years approximately half a dozen of the approximately 1000 images we have where the face of an individual was cropped from a larger CFC image has had a request for its deletion. All of those which came from individuals who claimed to be the person in the image were problematic. Only one of those individual was able to engage with the OTRS team, and it took him several months.

In my opinion it is absolutely essential that any WMF project that considers requests from third parties, like requests for the courtesy deletion of properly licensed images, or articles that contain biographical information, require those third parties to first confirm they are who they say they are. I have seen a few instances where Jimbo Wales, or someone else who had been entrusted with authority, has said something like: "Forget being cautious. I am personally 100 percent convinced this third party is who they say they are, and I insist we proceed as if they had thoroughly confirmed their identity."