User:Pfctdayelise/file age

File age: how many days does a file last after being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons before it gets deleted? (Files also get deleted if they are "renamed".)

Based on the frequent editing to the Wikimedia logo mosaic, I have a suspicion our files are not nearly as reliably persistent as one would hope for from an archive-like collection.

I checked the upload logs from 2006-08-01. 2646 files were uploaded that day. Today is 2007-10-13, over a year later. 2247 remain, nearly 85%.

Then I checked how many days elapsed before the other files were deleted. 50 were deleted in less than a day. 166 were deleted within the first two weeks (including those 50). There was one unusual outlier: at 110 days, 70 files were deleted.

So 166 deleted within the first two weeks, 232 deleted from two weeks to the present time.

#days after upload #files deleted
0	50
1	10
2	7
3	3
4	2
6	2
7	72
8	2
9	7
10	6
12	3
14	2
15	2
16	2
18	1
23	1
28	2
30	1
32	1
35	1
38	1
40	2
44	2
45	1
46	1
47	3
51	1
53	1
54	1
55	3
56	1
61	1
63	1
64	3
79	1
82	1
83	3
88	2
94	1
102	2
104	2
105	1
106	2
109	5
110	70
116	1
117	1
119	1
131	1
132	1
133	6
135	1
146	2
150	1
161	2
165	1
172	3
173	1
177	1
185	1
190	1
202	3
203	1
207	1
214	1
218	1
219	2
223	1
224	1
229	2
230	1
232	1
244	3
248	1
265	2
272	24
273	1
275	1
276	1
277	2
284	9
295	1
296	4
311	2
312	1
316	1
320	2
322	1
355	2
356	1
370	1
372	1
374	1
376	1
383	4
385	1
388	1
415	1