Notify WikiProjects when removing an article's only image

[Kevan Davis]

Quite a few times I’ve seen that a Wikipedia article (often of a prominent public building) has no photo, but when I start to look for one there are plenty of them readily available on Commons. What’s happened is that a bot has deleted the only photo for whatever valid reason, but no human has noticed this, so nobody has replaced it. It looks like a common situation that a naive editor replaces a mediocre old image with a better or newer copyrighted version, which is later deleted, leaving no image at all.

It’d be helpful if the bot could add “image_needed=yes” (or whatever syntax is required) to any talk page WikiProject templates that accept it, when the act of removing images leaves an article with no images at all. Where no WikiProject templates exist or apply, a simple “Category:Imageless article flagged by Delinker Bot” maintenance category on the talk page may or may not be useful, depending on what articles this tends to happen to. Maybe it could do a quick scan of some older revisions of the article to see whether an image with a different filename ever existed in the past. This could produce a category of easy-to-fix low-hanging fruit.