Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-03-31/Community view

Thanks for writing this. Just nominated the Ardern photo for FP after seeing this piece.

My typical response to comments about "over-vigilant Commons editors" is to urge cutting them some slack for devoting a lot of time to a mostly thankless task of dealing with complicated copyright-related rules most people don't have a great understanding of (freedom of panorama and de minimis being good examples). As with Wikipedia, that a copyright violation was made unintentionally or for this or that reason doesn't do much to mitigate its inevitable removal, but on Commons there are several different rules with many variations based on country, and the person doing the maintenance work is much more likely not to have the same first language as the uploader, so it can be hard.

But there's a reason I said that's just "my typical response" -- because I think you make an excellent point about context. We often lump all copyvios, original research, unsourced content, etc. together in terms of how we react. We revert on Wikipedia or tag for deletion on Commons, then leave a template (or something along those lines). Sometimes we vary that process based on assessments of good faith/bad faith. The subject of the contribution can provide context sometimes, but it's more likely to provide the context leading us to be harsher (original research added to some particularly controversial topic, for example). What we don't often do is consider context in the way you've described -- that for some topics like this, a contribution may be a means of coping with or making sense of terrible events and complicated feelings. And for that, we don't have a Twinkle template. &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 17:14, 31 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Some of those deletion debates are still ongoing.-- Auric   talk  23:40, 31 March 2019 (UTC)


 * "Wikipedia is the first draft of history". Unfortunately, it was not designed to be the first draft of history. Wikipedia was built to be the final draft, subject to occasional alterations. This is why I generally shy away from current events. And yet, when things like this happen, people turn to our encyclopedia, as we've often aggregated the most information about a given event than any other outlet in one page. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:28, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
 * - I flinched when I read that line - for exactly the same reason. And the same awareness - we are both not suited nor designed for the job, but we do it (and may be preferable to any other option). Nosebagbear (talk) 22:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)