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Allow tracking recent changes over images (via Special:MediaChange?)
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Description

Alot of GLAM-Wiki and other media donations revolve around encouraging use of donated media within other Wikimedia projects besides Commons. However, at the moment, there is no simple and concrete way to determine which revision (and thus the user who created the edit) an image is added to another Wiki. This knowledge could help GLAM-Wiki organizers and others engage with users both to positively interact with them -- such as provide rewards, connecting them with people interested in the collection (or with knowledge about it), or evaluate the impact of their donation on different language communities -- and to identify patterns of behaviour that somehow obscure collections of media, etc.

Right now, its impossible to track recent changes over images without first doing a comparison of pages the media is transcluded then going into the history of the pages individual on each wiki (i.e. its a pain) .

Event Timeline

Aklapper renamed this task from Special:MediaChange to Allow tracking recent changes over images (via Special:MediaChange?).Jun 14 2016, 1:04 PM

This would probably make sense to implement as a special page similar to Special:RecentChanges, but only for showing edits that link to media files. You should also be able to filter for a specific image or category of images.

This would only go as far back as recent changes goes.

Going back into history would require extremely expensive queries that would take hours to run. It wouldn't be feasible to do a real-time implementation.

This tool doesn't appear to actually work (all the time), but it might be worth looking into what it's doing and if we could make it work for our purposes: http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/blame/

Should have mentioned the actual phab item @Ottomata : T130651

Somehow I missed this from way back into September!

If we can get this information somehow, then yes, we can definitely expose it in EventStreams. Getting it sounds a little tough though. When the revision wikitext is saved, how does it know that an image has been transcluded in it? I think it doesn't, right? If it does, or if there is some background job that catalogs this (like the page categorization job), then I'm sure we can figure out a way to emit a stream of image link events, or perhaps add a field to revision-create that contains links to images that have been added in that revision. That is IFF it is easy and possible to get this information.

@Ottomata I think exposing any kind of information about the "who" that adds the image, would work: as long as that data is broadly available. The software should figure out what is going on, and folks can build tools on top of it that allow activities like: T167614