QUOTE(Detective @ Sat 4th June 2011, 5:32pm)
Move them all to Simplewiki; they'll be safe there. No admin there has a clue about what's going on elsewhere in WMF. In fact, not many of them have any sort of clue about anything.
Oh, I'm sure they'd get some assistance. Some files may go to Wikiversity, those that have some relevance there. I see that some files were already moved by a user who wanted to save them. There are others of general utility, for example
User:Abd/Lyrikline poetswas a working list, and someone who wants to improve Wikipedia articles on those poets could use that list to find articles where the improvement is simple and obvious. I'll explain.
Lyrikline.org was blacklisted some years ago. A user from de.wikipedia, apparent home wiki, had been going around adding links in articles on poets to lyrikline.org. It seems that this user was affiliated with lyrikline.org, which is a web site created in collaboration between academic institutions and the German government, there is an article that was also created by this user, and deleted for similar reasons as the edits were reverted. Spam blacklist administrators and volunteers seem to feel free to engage in massive, often anonymous, vandalism!
(Later, the article was restored at my request, and edited to make it comply with guidelines,
Lyrikline.org.)
In any case, the user clearly thought that he was making welcome improvements. When this was called spamming, he did stop, and he apologized, but he was still sanctioned. There is a detailed history of all this at
User:Abd/Blacklist/lyrikline.orgThis case showed both legitimate usage of the global blacklist -- to stop a global pattern of rapid addition of links without review, possibly by a COI editor -- and its failure to discriminate between legitimate additions and illegitimate ones. (I'd say there is a complete disinterest in that issue.) In my review of the links, I never found any that were not legitimate, at least arguably.
So the list page I've mentioned shows potential link additions, as well as the ones already added, mostly by me. Further, the red links show, probably, possible articles to be created, since these are all, practically by definition, notable poets. Recognition by lyrikline is recognition by an academic institution. The lyrikline pages on a poet include a biography. Until this was recently fixed, possibly as a result of my mention of it in the lenr-canr.org delisting request, the WMF was blacklisting a notable and reliable source. From prior requests of mine, the English language interface to lyrikline.org had been whitelisted at en.wp, by my request. (That's how I was able to add links.)
Beetstra was the admin who delisted, and see
this meta discussion, which shows the hostility that dogged me, from some administrators.... Beetstra behaves as if his baby, the blacklist, is being attacked. What he doesn't notice is that, sure, a short-term blacklisting could make sense, but this one was maintained for years. There is no expiration on a blacklisting, and delisting was requested many times, and always denied on the grounds that there wasn't anything wrong with the original listing. What was wrong with it was that it, and associated process, immediately damaged content, simply because an editor was "COI." It's all backwards, and, folks, this is how the wiki crumbles.