Apps-android-commons: Redacting unwanted location information from file pages

[whym]

This will not be done in Android code but a (Python) script that works on Wikimedia Commons. Comments are welcome. I plan to work on this alone, but if someone is interested, please contact me. (Since it's a one-off job and contains potentially sensitive data collected, I don't want to publish it in the repo.)

In #1599 we agreed to redact file pages that contain location information published inadvertently. I'm working on redacting the information from file pages.

• [x] Create a list of the file pages whose first version contain a location template but no EXIF-embedded GPS data. (and categorized as uploaded via the app)
• [x] Create a list of the revisions where the first location information remains in those file pages
• [x] Prepare a sysop bot to perform the redaction (and get approval)
• [x] Edit and remove the first location information where it still remains in the latest version of the page
• [x] Redact the revisions from non-sysops
• [ ] Ask oversighters of Wikimedia Commons to redact the revisions from sysops (unnecessary?)
• [ ] Do above again for new (post-June) uploads
• [ ] Create a list of affected people and files and send a mass message.

So far, it appears to involve 938 pages, 3294 revisions and 351 users.

[whym]

I submitted https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Requests/Whymbot. Inputs are welcome. (As always, this is not a vote and we don't exactly need a large number of "supports".)

[sivaraam]

Is this done now? I saw the related incident wiki page and found the status of this as "on going".

[whym]

Almost. But I never managed to work on the last item (mass message) mentioned above. It would have been nicer to do that, but after more than one year, I suspect it might be merely confusing than helpful to the receivers of such a message now. I can still try doing that, though.

[sivaraam]

@whym You are right. I too believe it would be merely confusing if we do it now.

Do you think we can just mention that we never did the mass message part in the incident wiki page and close this as done?

[misaochan]

@sivaraam I think that makes sense, and we can probably point to the discussion on this thread for the reason, too.

[sivaraam]

@sivaraam I think that makes sense, and we can probably point to the discussion on this thread for the reason, too.

Done. I've created https://github.com/commons-app/documentation/pull/12 for this.

[whym]

@sivaraam Thanks a lot. I'll close this as well.

(Another thing - I never got a response from my request for oversight (which is like deletion of a higher level) by email. The last message I got was an automated one saying my email "awaits moderator approval". I think not oversighting is a reasonable outcome, as it's only for severe cases.)