One of the main purpose of file namespace pages is to allow to store author, license and source metadata related to files we have. We seem to regularly run into files that list a URL which is on spam blacklist as their source. If an image meets our license and scope requirements and blacklisted URL is its source that URL should stay.

I would like to propose to either exempt file sources, or if not possible file namespace, from spam blacklist, and possibly keep track of files that were exempted to allow higher scrutiny. At the moment many files with sources on the blacklist can no longer be edited. I guess websites were added to the black list after file upload. I personally run into this issue several times, see Commons:Administrators'_noticeboard#File_can_not_be_edited_due_to_blacklisted_external_site or https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive_43#Spam_protection_filter_blocking_edits and there never seem to be a good solution. So far I have seen people deleting sources, replace some letters in url with Russian characters that look like English characters to obfuscate links or get creative with <nowiki> or other tags. All of those "solutions" are confusing to everybody else and there have to be a better way.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34928