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Wizards, Metadata, and Memory: Unearthing and Reconstructing UploadWizard's Lost History

guillaumepaumier.com

One in three pictures you see on Wikipedia was added through UploadWizard, a tool I designed in 2009. Over the past 15 years, 1.8 million unique volunteers have uploaded over 42 million files with UploadWizard to Commons, Wikipedia’s media library. But unearthing those metrics turned out to be more complicated than I expected. What began as a straightforward question became a journey through over a decade of evolving logging practices, overwritten traces, and quietly deleted markers. The road of metadata archaeology is wild and wicked, winding through the wood. Follow me, my friend, to glory at the end.

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