Category talk:Duplicate

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Good images deleted as "duplicates"[edit]

I have noticed problems with this tag in the past and refrained from commenting upon them, but I believe it to be one which has often been rather grievously misused to eradicate images that are NOT anything close to "duplicates" of other images and with very little or no discussion.

Yesterday Image:Napoleon4.jpg with Napoleon mounted on a piebald horse, which by usage (prior to radical edits by the Commonsdelinker bot) seemed to have been the widely preferred image among those of the 5 different painted versions of Napoleon Crossing the Alps (and which had been a featured picture on the Spanish Wikipedia), was put on the speedy deletion list as a duplicate of a muddier scan of a less striking version of the pose, with Napoleon on a brown horse. This was after the CommonsDelinker bot was used to eliminate its use everywhere in favor of the other image (in my opinion, and I believe that of many others, a clearly inferior one). I removed the tag, so as to preserve it, and reverted some of the damages done to various Wikipedia pages by the bot, including the one linked to above, where the one image would have been wrongly used to indicate 3 of the different versions.

This tag has also within the last day been used to eradicate the use of a perfectly legitimate black and white image of an engraving of Napoleon III (Image:Napoleon3.jpg) in favor of a rather garishly colorized version of it (Image:Napoleon3.PNG). I believe this one seriously detracts from the overall quality of at least one of the pages it was used on, "Causes of the Franco-Prussian War, where it clearly was out of place with the other non-colorized engravings.

Currently it has been used to place Image:Napoleon Bonaparte.jpg as a candidate for speedy deletion. Though this image is not the largest, I believe it probable that others, as well as myself, find it in many ways preferable for use on wiki pages to the more washed out version which has used to totally replace it by the CommonsDelinker bot.

I feel this tag should be used only where the sizes of the images or very minor cropping differences are the only distinguishing difference, and not when there are radically different renderings of a subject, and a cautionary notice clearly made along these lines. ~ Stormrider (talk) 17:55, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This category and Template:Duplicate are not meant for different versions of the same image, only for exact duplicates or scaled-down versions of files. Template:Duplicate, which is used for putting images in this category, says "exact duplicate or scaled-down version". And the deletion guidelines for duplicates say "If the file is the same file type and you're sure that it is exactly the same content (colours, quality, etc) tag it with {{duplicate|Image:example.jpg}}". So the images you mention does not meet those criteria, and should not have been marked as duplicates.
In cases were one version is clearly much worse than the other, the bad image can be marked with Template:Superseded and kept, or nominated for deletion using an ordinary Commons:Deletion request if someone feels that the image really has to be deleted. If the differences are small it is usually enough to link the images together using the "Other version" parameter in Template:Information, so that user at Wikipedias and other projects can decide for themselves which version they want to use. Commons users does not have the right to decide which version should be used on all projects.
Deleting and replacing almost-duplicate images, was one of the reason that COM:DEL/S was closed, let's not make the same mistakes again. There may be some relevant old discussions there or on Template talk:Duplicate. /Ö 20:43, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sort order[edit]

Is there any reason that I should not change the {{Duplicate}} template to sort these images by date last modified ? That would mean that images in this category would be initially sorted by the date that the template was added, so that new additions would go on the end (and image pages that had been edited since the addition of the template would move to the end again too). --Tony Wills (talk) 11:41, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have made the above change, I'd like feedback as to whether others consider it useful or not. I have also changed the advice, on the category page, regarding redirects:
Redirect the deleted duplicate filename to the remaining file unless it is misleading or a very recent upload.
so that agrees with the deletion policy page. --Tony Wills (talk) 10:28, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicate or not?[edit]

While doing some cleanup in flag category I often find nearly duplicates, for example minor differences in ratio or color shade. Should those flags tagged as duplictates or is an normal deletion request the better solution? Also there are some PNG-copys of existing SVG files. What should be done with those ones?--Antemister (talk) 19:08, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Differences in ratio, colour etc are often important to people, there is no need to delete similar files. We do not need to delete near duplicates only exact duplicates, if you really think there is a good reason to delete one then a normal deletion process is appropriate. If a PNG image has been generated from an SVG file, then it can probably be deleted (unless there is some usage where the SVG file won't work), but I don't think the delinker will replace PNG versions with SVG versions so you would have to do that manually. If a PNG version is not generated from the SVG version then it is not an exact duplicate. --Tony Wills (talk) 20:33, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How should versions be connected?[edit]

I found a file in two versions - .jpg and .png. Both of them have text which is worth preserving. Should the files themselves be saved? If so, how should these files be linked?

Is this the best place to ask this? I could not find a guideline on dealing with duplicates of this sort. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:52, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bot request[edit]

Maybe someone can say something here: Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Around_1700_dupes_in_Category:Farm-Fresh_web_icons ↔ User: Perhelion 22:24, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicates with minor differences[edit]

User:PMRMaeyaert has uploaded approx. 50,000 images to Commons over a period of 10 years. These images are very useful, as they document religious heritage from 10 countries, and the images are used more than 6,000 times in Wikipedia. However, thousands of these images are (near) duplicates. PMRMaeyaert has stopped uploading new duplicates. I am de-duplicating the double files that were uploaded at an earlier date, and have worked my way through nearly half of them (see one recent example). 25,000 down, 23,000 to go. This is rather complicated because the old files have very incomplete descriptions, while the image is the same (though sometimes in higher resolution). In most cases, categories and descriptions need to be adjusted while deduplicating. Images sometimes differ very slightly in colour or brightness. I have always kept two identical images (all have a number) if they have a clearly visible difference in colour or brightness. Example:

  • Poblet 1, uploaded 2016, 265 kb
    Poblet 1, uploaded 2016, 265 kb
  • Poblet 2, uploaded 2021, 177 kb
    Poblet 2, uploaded 2021, 177 kb

Recently, one of the admins has rejected several of my proposals to deduplicate. This makes my work (with approx. 23,000 images to go) more complicated, as I have to go back to these files and complete the descriptions and categories. I would like to ask a question, and will give one example.

Am I right in thinking that we need to keep the 2 Poblet images (above), and can deduplicate photos 2 and 3 (Covarrubias)? Vysotsky (talk) 12:14, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicate files from Flickr[edit]

Well, I had just discovered flickr2commons and was using it. By accident (and because they weren’t identified), I uploaded some duplicates… I’m sorry, but as far as I’m concerned, it would take a lot of time to mark all of them with {{duplicate}}, so I preferred to use cat-a-lot and add this category on them. Sorry about anything. RodRabelo7 (talk) 20:34, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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