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New special page to see local files that override Commons' files
Open, Needs TriagePublicFeature

Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):

  • New special page to see the list of local files that override Commons' files (same file name). We have reupload-shared permission that allows users to "override files on the shared media repository locally" using same file name.

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):
To find local files with the same name, or names that replace a free file with a fair-use file

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):
It would be useful to detect and delete local files if there is a free file with same name

Event Timeline

The other suggestion on the Discord server was to have it as a tracking category. This is probably easier to implement than a special page.

The other suggestion on the Discord server was to have it as a tracking category. This is probably easier to implement than a special page.

But it is possible that a file exists without a description page and categorylinks does not support adding categories to pages that does not exist.

But it is possible that a file exists without a description page and categorylinks does not support adding categories to pages that does not exist.

Are there many such cases, especially among local files overriding Commons files? AFAIK you can’t delete or create a file without deleting/creating the file page (easily or at all). And reupload-shared permission is usually granted to a small group of users (sysops).

There are two different problems mentioned here as I understand it:

  1. a local file that have the same name as a file on Commons (but can have a different content).
  1. a local file is a duplicate of a file on Commons (but can have a different name).

If a local file exist without a file page then the file will generally not have a valid license and in that case it should be deleted. Perhaps create a special page for files without a file page? Or perhaps have a global bot that can edit all wikis and create a file page. Then it should be possible to create a category for all files that shadow Commons.

As for the duplicates with a different name then there is an on screen notice for files that are duplicates. Is that information stored somewhere or does it only show up when someone view a file page?

At some point I made a script as a test to see if it was possible to locate files also on Commons. It started as a one-time-run on a tiny wiki. Then another one... I also tried it on a larger wiki like uk.wiki that have 115 k files. It works but you have to configure it manually for each wiki and I imagine that it creates some traffic on the server so it should pobably not be run too often.

But seeing this task made me wonder that perhaps someone could make something better with the script. I made a copy here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MGA73/NowCommons.py