User blog comment:Webly/ADMIN BLOG: Problems I Have Found That Need Change/@comment-1874924-20130307022226

Unlike articles, current policy does not require notifying the uploader of an image before deleting the file--unused image files may be deleted "on sight", although we presumably wouldn't want to do that (in most cases, anyway) with files that were uploaded recently. Deleting unused photos has been my single biggest cleanup activity since I became an admin. When I started, we had unused image files that were three years old and we had over 15K pics in toto. I've gotten the maximum age down to about 14 months. Of course, older photos sometime appear on the list for the first time when the article that used them gets deleted or rebooted.

As for videos, be aware that many--perhaps even most--of those "unused" videos aren't really unused. A while back (months? A year? I don't recall) Wikia changed the naming conventions for video files. When that happened, they had a bot go through everyone's video files and rename them to conform with the new conventions. When that happened, not only did we lose our records of who uploaded those videos (which now identify "WikiaBot" as the uploader), we also lost our records of what pages use those videos. I know this because all of the videos in my story pages started showing up on the Unused Videos report. Editing a page or page section that has a video link will restore the usage record with respect to that page.

Concerning stories: When I encounter an apparent dead fic with an IP author, I leave notices on the talk page of the IP with the most edits and/or the most recent edit, just as I do with registered users. On at least a couple of occasions, the IP user has responded, albeit only to give permission to delete the article. Note that one reason for writing as an IP is to comply with Wikia's age minimum rule. Wikia's rules (the last time I checked, anyway) don't say that users under 13 can't edit, only that they can't register accounts. That preserves plausible deniability for Wikia.