Alright, before I say anything, I'd like to mention that none of this will be mandatory. Odds are, Licensing (or at least just me) will be the ones doing the majority of this until we get the ball rolling.
The image verification process is fairly linear and transparent: someone chooses an image (and hopefully leaves a source), Tag team notices the image and tags the article with _image, and Licensing notices the tag and proceeds to check the image source.
This process, however, does not take into account the duration of the time where someone may initially find an image and takes days, if not weeks or months to write an article, get critique, and post. During that time period, someone may remove their image or even their entire account from an image hosting service. At that point, Licensing will be unable to verify the image and ask the author to remove the image.
To rectify this, this proposal aims to resolve this issue by highlighting one of the tenets of Creative Commons: that once something is released under Creative Commons (assuming you actually own the image), the license is irrevocable. Therefore, we will encourage users to archive their images via web.archive.org, preserving the image for licensing purposes.
Again, the aim of this is to not make the action mandatory: instead, Licensing will start off the archiving and PM users with images on new articles encouraging them to archive their images in the future.
This proposal will not step on the toes of pre-existing rules regarding images: an image found CC will still be removed if the original author/artist requests it based on the following rule:
If an image is requested to be taken down by the original image author, it will be done so immediately without question.
Furthermore, images that were illegally uploaded to CC due to not owning the image in the first place will also be removed even if archived.
This thread will be up for a week; assuming no objections it will then be put up for a vote.
o4 mirror: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-14465777/discussion-web-archiving-images