User blog comment:Sarah Manley/ Product Update - Video/@comment-188432-20120319214512

I can quite appreciate that time marches on and we need to upgrade things from time to time. But this update is concerning in ways that you might not have considered. On most wikis, videos are pretty unregulated. So if you change the namespace from 400 to 6, most people will neither notice nor care. But one of our big administrative concerns at w:c:tardis is that people will use the video "upload" feature to simply post any one of the hundreds of thousands of copyright-violating Doctor Who videos available on YouTube. It's sort of rule #1 at tardis that "thou shalt not post the episodes themselves on our website".

Having all videos in a single namespace meant that this rule was easy to police. You get a list of all things in the namespace, and check up on 'em periodically. Since the user can do nothing to change a namespace, it's pretty foolproof. We will harshly block anyone who violates our video policy.

Aliasing ns:400 and moving everything into ns:6 is going to make upholding these policies much more difficult. Or at least that's what it looks like to me at the present moment. Whereas before we could just say the rules applied to everything in the video namespace, now we have to say that the rules apply to everything in the video category. Which means that if someone wants to get around the rules, all they have to do is remove category:videos from the file, and we'll be effectively blind to their activities.

See, it's easy to run reports on videos in their own namespace. Not only could you simply do it by namespace, but you could also do it by prefix, looking for everything that began with Video: Even if they took the category off the video, you could still find the videos quite easily.

But now you're saying it will go to a nomenclature like   There's not even an extension there! I can do some regex coding, but my regex ain't good enough to figure out a list of 'things that start with "File:" but don't end in .jpg, .gif, .whatever.'  How in the heck are we supposed to get a simple list of videos now? You can't say, "Well, just go to the category." Again, people can simply remove the category, meaning that a category list is never trustworthy." And I don't think you can honestly say, "do it with a bot", because I'm pretty sure that once you make this cleanup run of yours and move everything to ns:6, your bot is going to have some problems finding the videos on the basis of the titles alone.

I suppose at my core, I'm just not understanding the technical reason why whatever changes you want to make can't be done within the context of ns:400. Why not just make ns:400 emulate ns:6, if there's something "special" about the coding of ns:6? I'm obviously not opposed to new features, but these seem to be coming at the expense of old features. If you can make ns:400 work like ns:6, that's gotta be preferable to loosing the benefits of a separate namespace.

Please consider the importance of giving admin the power to somehow get a full list of videos in a way that's Even if you forced all videos to end in .vid that would be something. As I see it, there must be some way to "brand" videos as videos in some indelible, user-unmodifiable way.
 * easy (no harder than a simple DPL declaration)
 * absolutely foolproof (there's no way that a user can trick the system)

Also, the current version of WikiStats alerts admin to any new videos that come in. This is a hugely helpful visual tool. Under the new scheme, I'm not seeing a way that we would be able to be easily notified about new videos, since they're just new files. For those wikis who, again, actively monitor videos, there needs to be a simple counter that shows when a new video is uploaded.