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Riiight...
I don't understand why you find this hard to believe considering that's plainly the justification written for the deletion. This is not one of the (many) rules that can be bent for fun and profit, this one really is just that simple.
Because they can write whatever they want. If someone reversed what's written under which photo, and it remained unquestinedd by other editors, would you be able to tell something is amiss?
There is literally no license for the Charlottesville photo.
I don't understand the question. If there's no license for a photo, it can be deleted per the stated policy. This is a simple, binary question - does the photo include license information?
edit: Now that I look at it, you cannot upload copyrighted images to Commons at all, even if they are fair use (I did mention I'm not an expert on Wikipedia policy). The mugshot was on Commons, so even if it did have a licensing section, it would have been deleted since it's probably non-free. It would need to have been on Wikipedia, which does allow non-freely licensed images, provided, again, that the TPS report is fully filled out.
There is licensing information, hence the section entitled "Licensing" in large print, which is the requirement (see policy linked above).
If someone deleted the Charlottesville photo, and kept the mugshot, would you be able to tell that the policy was misapplied? If not, how can you tell that it was applied correctly here?
And you have evidence no one bothered writing such a section for the mugshot?
Yeah, I've never seen an image on Wikipedia without licensing information, and I've never seen an image on Commons that is copyrighted.
Yes, this user regularly does what seem to be (based on the rate and uniformity of log messages) semi-automated deletions of photos without licensing sections, including those illustrating such hot button issues as some kind of "flag map of Embera-Wouanaan", the logo of Sporge-Jorgen, and of course, the accursed demodex mite.
How would you be able to tell that the image had licensing information after it was deleted?
How is that evidence of anything?
That's irrelevant to the question. Your claim is that if the Brooks photo was not deleted and had no licensing information, nobody could tell. The question is, are there any photos on Commons/wiki without licensing information, and are there any copyrighted photos on Commons?
How is the fact that the guy who deleted this is running an automated unlicensed image deletion dragnet evidence of anything?
In the same minute that he deleted the Brooks photo, he deleted 18 other unlicensed images. In the ten minute window, he deleted 147 images total. All of them had been without a license for 8 days at that point. He then deleted the category that held images that were tagged as missing a license on July 3.
It's pretty obvious that this is an automated process where images without licensing information are tagged, added to a category, and then in 8 days those without licensing information are automatically garbage collected. I don't see any reason to add epicycles to this.
"When the Brooks mugshot was deleted from Wikipedia, it was the worst day of your life. For krd, it was Tuesday."
What? No, I asked my question because it's relevant to my claim, which is - if the Brooks photo was deleted and had licensing information, nobody could tell.
Yes. The way to get a position of influence in an organization is to actually do gruntwork.
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