Commons:Village pump/Archive/2008/12

November 23

Wouldn't it be time to be coherent for nude pictures?

When I read such comments I wonder why we still have other Klashort's nude works available here. In fact I wonder why we still have nude pictures where people are recognizable and for which we don't have proof of any model consent! So what do we do? Can we continue to have such a stupid and impartial case-by-case decisions or should we elaborate some more logical and coherent policy about nudity? --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 17:40, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

In my opinion the deletion was wrong. no evidence of permission from model it seems obvious that she agreed to the image being published. He is an artist, she must have known that. no evidence of proof of age, possibly underage model Are there other cases, where Klashorst used underage models? If not, we have no reason not to trust the artist.

But I agree, that a policy for nude content would be useful. --Slomox (talk) 21:06, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

We can't assume someone like Klashorst hasn't gotten the requisite releases? Yikes. We do have Commons:Nudity and Commons:Photographs of identifiable people, but I would have to assume a willing model wouldn't fall under any of those. My guess is the admin assumed that Klashorst would not license his images that way, and was thus a copyvio, but apparently he did so on Flickr. I can't imagine any other scenario where "Peter Klashorst" is a reason for deletion all by itself. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:35, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

No. These models may not even be aware of their rights. Klashorst was contacted and asked to produce some documentation. No contact was ever returned, no documentation was ever produced. That Flickr is (or was) sloppy about this is not an excuse for us to be sloppy. Further, as I say at the undeletion... That we have not found every problematic image and taken care of it is not an argument that this problematic image, correctly deleted, needs to come back. The fix is to go find the rest of the problematic images and delete them too. ++Lar: t/c 13:21, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

The fix is to go find the rest of the problematic images and delete them too. > ... or the contrary! We just have to decide the way we want to be coherent! --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 10:17, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Well no, because undeleting these problematic images just isn't going to happen. TwoWings, you're out of tune with the project charter, the policies, and the norms here. You need to fix that, as right now you're wasting everyone's time with this line of reasoning. ++Lar: t/c 18:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

You misunderstood what I meant. I was just saying you were imagining a conclusion that has not been stated. Indeed the coexistence of 2 different DR cases doesn't mean that one is superior to the other. Rules aren't clear so a real discussion needs to be made before wondering which logic to follow. --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 09:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, we have a couple of choices. First off, we could delete all Klashorst images regardless of consensus on their individual merits. We would then have to go about deleting every photo of a naked person which doesn't specify model consent. That's pretty much all of them, including of course the self-taken ones. This finally allows us a reason to get rid of all penises. We should then go further and remove every photo containing any part of someone's body unless they have specifically signed a model release form.

It is simple - we have to apply the same rules to all pictures. Either we keep all photos of people, or we delete them all. Interestingly, if we do require model consent, the ONLY pictures of people which will be left are pornstars. -mattbuck (Talk) 14:05, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Images that don't contain personally identifiable things (like faces) are less of an issue, but I agree with you. Any image that does not have clear consent, or for which a clear rationale (like it was taken in a public place) which contains personally identifiable material is subject to deletion on the basis of violating personality rights. There is a hierarchy of concern here, though... a picture of a potentially underage model in a very personal pose is more concerning than one of a fully clothed clear adult. In agreeing with you that there is a problem, that does not mean I agree that this image needs to be undeleted. See w:WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS which more fully explains why "X exists and is problematic, so Y should also exist" is not a valid argument. If the only naked pictures we are thus left with are porn stars with documented releases, or pictures with a very clear chain of consent, that's fine by me. ++Lar: t/c 16:15, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

I would have thought "taken by a well-known artist" would carry some assumption of model release or at least assumed no privacy rights -- the photographer is primarily responsible here. The reason for deletion is usually about privacy rights ("expectation for privacy"), not model releases (which is for personality rights, and we have never deleted for that reason). Has there been any external indication that he used models without their consent, or underage, or was this purely based on the fact that he did not bother to respond to emails? I would tend to agree with you on images without such clear provenance (privacy rights issues), but this seems a bit much unless there is some other info I am unaware of. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:25, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

In the past, some people have loudly and vocally expressed the opinion that Klashorst is in fact pretty much a sleazy scummy sex tourist, who seems to have few scruples about going to third-world countries and possibly taking advantage of vulnerable young women and/or prostitutes being held in coercive situations... AnonMoos (talk) 11:59, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Commons:Undeletion_requests/Current_requests#Image:Nude_woman_on_couch.jpg -mattbuck (Talk) 03:20, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Note that many Klashorst's pictures have been deleted for such reasons and other haven't. As for the licence, it had been checked by bots when the pictures were uploaded so this is not the problem (the fact that they're not available anymore on Flickr doesn't change the fact that they had been released with a free licence). --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 09:45, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

I've supported basically, because its pretty wrong to be inconsistent over policy. Should we tighten the policy on that? Because apparently, as is, it has problems.Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 10:59, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

One of the things about Commons is that because of the nature of our project, when it comes to items that are not defined strictly by copyrightability and freeness, we are somewhat freer to allow broader interpretation of policies with regard to the content. The simple fact is that we are afforded an opportunity to weigh the net benefit of items such as these versus the net cost. We simply don't need every single Klashorst image on our servers. We have more than sufficient examples of nude women, in both professional and non-professional settings. We have more than sufficient examples of Klashorst's work. We have a sufficient cushion to be able to remove those images we have question about.

Does the model's presence in the photo, by virtue of her pose prove that she is able and willing to give consent for release? Well, that's also debatable. In many parts of the world, promise of a few dollars and a meal is enough to get anyone to pose nude--and it wouldn't matter whether she were of age of consent or not. Is it our duty whether to decide whether it's right to publish these photos or not? It certainly isn't the first time nor will it be the last.

We have ample examples of Klashorst's work. We have ample examples of nude women, of all colors, sizes, ages and ethnicities. It does us more good to not have pictures such as this problematic one than it does to have it. Bastique ^demandez 17:51, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

I'll never agree with that argument. Even if Klashorst might be considered as a minor artist and even if he's controversial, there's no logical reason to say "well we'll keep those 4 or 5 works and we'll delete the rest of what we have about his production". We would never do so with Van Gogh or any artist because it's not neutral and we can't make a summary of an artist work with just a few works we partially selected. --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 10:17, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I think we are pretty consistent. This image was deleted in accordance with policy set out at Commons:Photographs of identifiable people: "Because of the expectation of privacy, the consent of the subject should normally be sought before uploading any photograph featuring an identifiable individual that has been taken in a private place, whether or not the subject is named.". Similar images by the same photographer have been deleted after very detailed discussion of the very same issues - see Commons:Deletion requests/Image:Gaming (nude).jpg and Commons:Deletion requests/Image:Young black nude-2.jpg. Maybe it's time for somebody to nominate the other images in the Klashorst category that also fall foul of Commons policy. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:01, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

We are not consistent because there were many other DR that concerned other nude pictures where the person was identifiable and for which we had no proof of consent not age. --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 10:17, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

MichaelMaggs: I agree. If someone could carry out a review that would be great. TwoWings: Please nominate any other nude images that you think are of identifiable persons for which we have no proof of consent and proof of age. Or stop bringing up w:WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. We GET that there has been inconsistency. That needs fixing. But each case should be judged on its own merits. ++Lar: t/c 18:05, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

One more: Commons:Deletion_requests/Image:Lick_it_3_(nude_photograph_by_artist_Peter_Klashorst).jpg. There seems to be a pattern. Samulili (talk) 11:58, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

 Comment How could we consider differences of cultures? For instance, if we decide to delete indentifiable nude pictures without proof of consent, should we also delete topless black women from African tribes where that kind of nudity is (and has never been) a problem? And what about "historical" nudes (BW pictures from early photography...)? --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 10:17, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Valid questions, but not relevant to this particular image. ++Lar: t/c 18:05, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I've never said that. The "Nude woman on couch" case was just an example I took in order to launch the reflexion about coherent rules about nudity. In a way I don't care about this image. I just care about coherence for the project. And when we try to think about rules, we clearly see that we mainly want the consent to be derogatory. Therefore, I just want to move on and think about problematic cases if this is what we decide to be the main rule aboyut nudity. We just need clear rules that could help us to deal with any nude picture on Commons. That's all what I want because I'm sick about incoherence and problems. --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk... 09:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Template for IDs

Is there any existing template to include the ID of photos by the US Army?
--D-Kuru (talk) 12:27, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps this one: {{PD-USGov-Military-Army}}. Sv1xv (talk) 15:12, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm searching for a tag where only the ID is important. For example something like: {{ID|050124-M-8479B-002|US Navy}} will turn into "This image was published by the US Navy. The Image ID is 050124-M-8479B-002." {{ID-US}} would also be OK. A link to the image's page could also be included. This would look like this: {{ID|050124-M-8479B-002|US Navy|http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=21234}} "[...] The Image ID is [http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=21234 050124-M-8479B-002]."

--D-Kuru (talk) 17:02, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

You mean like we have {{LOC-image}} and {{NASA-image}}, but for the US mil.? I'm not aware of any such template, but it can't hurt having such IDs available in a standardized and "machine-readable" way. So i'd say, copy and built your own :D TheDJ (talk) 01:53, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

 Done

I've created {{ID-USMil}}. But it doesn't work as I want it to work :-/. If you include {{ID-USMil|030206-M-5753Q-008|US Navy|http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=5011}} you don't get that what you see at Template:ID-USMil#Usage. Maybe someone can fix it :-)

Just for info: Place

{{ID-USMil}}
{{ID-USMil|060730-N-8977L-012}}
{{ID-USMil|060730-N-8977L-012|US Navy}}
{{ID-USMil|060730-N-8977L-012|US Navy|http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=37663}}
{{ID-USMil|060730-N-8977L-012|US Navy|http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Standard_Missile_-_s%3D060730-N-8977L-012.jpg}}
on any TESTPAGE (don't save it so far). You see that {{ID-USMil}} adds a red notice and category Incorrect ID-USMil images. The templte below adds the ID, the one below adds Who has taken the image (US Army, Navy,.... (I'm not glad that you can add also "some asshole" and it works. I'm still surching for a solution for that. Maybe somebody wants to help me :-) ). The third one should add the internet adress, but it doesn't. The third one includes the original Navy webadress while the last one includes the Image's page on Commons. Does anybody know why the last one work and the third one not?

Maybe somebody has some good ideas which could be included!

--D-Kuru (talk) 00:39, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

(undent) The reason your third example breaks is because the URL has an equals sign in it. You could work around it by prefixing the URL with "3=", but I'd recommend instead changing the template slightly so that the URL parameter has an explicit name such as "{{{url}}}"). Then you'd use it like {{ID-USMil|060730-N-8977L-012|US Navy|url=http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=37663}}.

As for checking the second parameter, you can use the {{#switch:}} parser function for that, something like: {{#switch:{{{2|}}}||US Army|US Navy|US Air Force=<!-- OK, valid branch detected -->|#default=<strong style="color:red">Unrecognized branch "{{{2}}}"!</strong> [[Category:Incorrect ID-USMil images]]}}. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 02:08, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Troublesome categorization

Take a look to the image on the left. It's correctly categorized into Category:Polo,Category:Bridle,Category:Bits. Nevertheless, depending on your horsemanship knowledge and "feel", you can see into it very clear signs of pain and of stress of the horse. Inspired by this image, I created a new category Category:Animal abuse, but adding to that picture such a category could be obviuosly seen as hurting and offensive by the author, who - in my opinion - is absolutely sure that all's good in such an image... nevertheless many wiki users would agree with me, and would like to be addressed to this picture by Category:Abuse... what to do when a picture shows something more and different from author aim? --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 11:05, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

How about naming the cat something like "Probable animal abuse"? --Túrelio (talk) 11:21, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Category:Stressed animals? Multichill (talk) 12:33, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for suggestions; yes, my knowledge of English is not so deep to appreciate the "color" of words. There's probably the need of a single word that means "This could be considered an abuse by someone". Ok, let's we go to take a look to a good dictionary...

I found: mistreatment, ill-treatment, misuse; I favour misuse, that has a double significance of "wrong or improper use" and of "abuse", so could be less offensive (it could be simply a mistake). What do you think about? --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 16:41, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't know... were are getting into shaky ground if we start to try to categories images based on personal opinion in very controversial subjects. In this particular case, animal abuse is a crime in most counties and accusing someone of a crime without evidence is often slander/libel. --J.smith (talk) 17:10, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Per J.smith, I would strongly suggest to use Category:Stressed animals only. That seems to be legally "neutral". --Túrelio (talk) 20:31, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

What you think about Category:Controversial animal use? What's the real "color" of such a definition into English? --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 22:02, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

The animal is Stressed, so category:Stressed animals seems reasonable. Category:Controversial animal use.. well.. meh, but better I guess. --J.smith (talk) 23:40, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Agree with others that categories should not express judgement. And if they must (even "stressed" is a judgement call) best to do so in as w:WP:NPOV a way as possible (yes this is NOT en:wp but the principle applies.) ++Lar: t/c 06:50, 1 December 2008 (UTC) (forgot to sign earlier but this is me)

Ok... I created Category:Controversial animal use. If you know animal controversies, you can imagine that many pictures should be added.... almost any use of animals is controversial. ;-) --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 18:51, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

The original photo

I cropped the photo above, from the one shown here. To me, this mare looks like a typical fresh polo pony. Not in pain, not afraid. Excited and engaged. Her ear and eye show that she is looking at something behind her. The rider appears to be cuing her for an abrupt 180 degree change of direction, turning to her left; in which case, she is looking where she is about to go. --Una Smith (talk) 20:39, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Cat a lot friendly

Trying cat a lot for the first time i get a notice :"Are you in the right place? According to our scope, Commons is not an encyclopedia or literary work, but a collection of media that can be used for those kinds of works. If you are wishing to explore a topic in an encyclopedic manner, please go to Wikipedia instead". Thats really inviting...., what happened to feel free ? Mion (talk) 17:27, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Do you honestly feel that your purpose for working here has been limited by the language? Freedom is a privilege which occasionally seems to have an unequal distribution -- an example of this is that I felt the freedom to assist a country other than my own to subcategorize their images yet people from that country felt a freedom to demand a specific language without actually doing much to assist with the subcategorization. I suggest that if the language used there makes you consider if your uploads and edits are more welcome elsewhere then they are more welcome elsewhere. The Commons is a good image server, it can be a better image server and perhaps the best image server available online at this point in time. The change in the language used to help all contributors to feel the same freedoms has not impaired my purposes, edits or uploads here.

What else are you feeling, btw? -- carol (talk) 20:44, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Did i say this was personal ? i thought not and its attitude not language Mion (talk) 21:13, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

However, i see the point of the notice, [[1]], well ment, but the top part is a useless copy of data from other places. Mion (talk) 06:18, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Carol?  ;-)

There is a translation template available {{Translation table}} I grabbed a use of this template that also sets some of the attributes {{Translation table|inline=o|hidetitle=o|width=100% etc}}, you can see it in use several places Category:Gentianales is one example of use. When I put it before any other template or information on categories pages that I am building, the intention is to present the words for the search engines to grab. Commons serves images to wikipedias of several different languages. I admit, the words that I put into this template are pastes from other sources so I humbly ask if it is the fact of translation that you consider useless or if it is the quality of that particular set of translations used at Methane that you are opposed to? -- carol (talk) 18:59, 30 November 2008 (UTC) (ps) Do you feel bitten? -- carol (talk) 19:36, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Don't mind Carol, she sometimes expresses herself in ways that others have trouble clearly understanding. Mion, is there a suggested reword you could offer that is more welcoming? I think you saw that text at the bottom of the edit box too (at least I see it now when I enter this post) ++Lar: t/c 18:33, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

There are some who understand what it is I am expressing. -- carol (talk) 18:59, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I understand it just fine. You were biting a newbie. Don't do that, Carol. ++Lar: t/c 19:26, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

A newbie who is wondering where the old documentation is? Could you define "newbie" as the word is being used in this case? -- carol (talk) 07:09, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Someone who is "Trying cat a lot for the first time". Please knock off the playing dumb, Carol. It didn't work on en:wp, did it? ... and it won't work here either. ++Lar: t/c 22:10, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

thanks, i think i'll try to reword it in the coming week and bring it up for discussion, as for the translation matter, i'm for transclusion, make it part of the software (Italian wiki {{interprogetto|commons=LNG carriers}})). Mion (talk) 00:09, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I look forward to your take on the wording that shows at the bottom of the edit box, Mion. ++Lar: t/c 22:10, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Change terminology of BCbot

User:Infrogmation proposes a change to the terminology in use by BCbot when it transfers files from en.wikipedia to commons. He is of the opinion that "original upload" is a misleading term because it does not limit to the scope of the wikimedia projects. If a file was uploaded first on flickr, than the term "original upload log" for instance would be "incorrect". He has fomulated his proposal here and here. Personally I kind of agree with him, but I find his proposals somewhat annoying. So i thought i'd make a proper proposal here, so we can discuss it. TheDJ (talk) 19:15, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Both headings are worse, the first is to long and the second isn't any good either. BCbot is blocked indef at enwp btw so it won't be doing anymore transfers i guess. Multichill (talk) 20:00, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

"Previous upload log" would be better than "Original upload log". Haukurth (talk) 15:35, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

• The issue, I think, is somewhat larger-- it's been brought up before but as yet no resolution. Bot image moves default set for images original to Wikipedia can create wildly inaccurate results when used to transfer images that originated elsewhere. Images from LOC, Flickr, public domain publications, etc etc, very often wind up with "Author" "Date" "Source" all filled with false information. Supposedly people doing transfers are supposed to take care of correcting bot generated misinformation, but too often nothing is done about it. I've fixed hundreds, and I'm sure there are many thousands of images with utter falsehoods and outright garbage in the image description pages due to sloppy bot transfers. And now it's starting to get so bad that I'm getting resistance when I make corrections! Ack! -- Infrogmation (talk) 22:07, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

So?

• Added comment: I wonder why more Commons regulars aren't simply outraged by the situation. Bots have been pumping in huge quanties of garbage drowning Commons. Some new users have taken their cue from images they see from bots, and filled in fields and categories not according to guidelines but as they've seen on the bot images. False statements of authorship, absurd misinformation in description fields-- these DAMAGE Commons and rob us of credibility as a source of useful free images. Is the problem so big that people have just given up on it? -- Infrogmation (talk) 15:01, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

  Well, those things bug me too. Quite often key information just disappears when an image is transwikied to Commons. And it's ever so annoying when the source is specified as, say, "English Wikipedia" and the image is then deleted on English Wikipedia as a matter of course. Isn't Commons meant to be friendly to reusers? How are they going to figure out what the real source is? Haukurth (talk) 15:33, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

How to create subcategories programmatically

I'm planning to upload multiple images of protein structures where each protein is in a multi-level hierarchy of categories defined by SCOP. I need to be able to create subcategory pages for grouping images. Here's an example of such an image within a hierarchy. As you can see, there are a lot of subcategories that need to be created to hold the images. How can I programmatically do this?

When I tried to use category.py from pywikipedia, it could only add categories that already existed to an image. Thanks for your help and suggestions. Donabel SDSU (talk) 21:33, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

The difficult part is creating a list of categories to create and in which supercategories these should be. The actual creation can be done with a bot. You should have something like

• Category:Immunoglobulin light chain kappa variable domain, VL-kappa parent Category:V set domains (antibody variable domain-like)
• Category:V set domains (antibody variable domain-like) parent Category:Immunoglobulin
• Category:Immunoglobulin parent Category:Immunoglobulin-like beta-sandwich
• ...

This information can be used by a bot to create the pages. Multichill (talk) 22:57, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the suggestion. I already did the difficult part and have a text file with the list of categories and their subcategories. The problem is that I need a way to create this tree. Is there a bot already available that I can use to do this? Donabel SDSU (talk) 01:17, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

en:WP:AWB - not a bot, but semi-automatic. J.smith (talk) 07:44, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Pagefromfile.py in the pywikipedia package can be used to create new pages, for example, put this in file.txt:

AAA
'''Category:Immunoglobulin light chain kappa variable domain, VL-kappa'''
[[Category:V set domains (antibody variable domain-like)]]
ZZZ
AAA
'''Category:V set domains (antibody variable domain-like)'''
[[Category:Immunoglobulin]]
ZZZZ

And run:

pagefromfile.py -lang:commons -family:commons -start:AAA -end:ZZZ -file:file.txt -summary:"Pick a nice summary" -notitle -debug

(remove -debug when you want to start working), Multichill (talk) 12:17, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Looks like we've moved to Commons talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Categorization issue/Structural Classification of Proteins. Multichill (talk) 15:14, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Low resolution photos from Flickr

A surprising number of uploaders at Flickr will release their work if asked (I plan to do some quantitative work on this soon), but some are more marginal on releasing. Some want credit in the article itself or they will only release a low res. version. My question is: what's the best way to get a low res. version? They could upload a low res. one at Flickr and release it there; they could send a permission request here after I upload a low res. one; or they could briefly release then unrelease their work at Flickr without uploading a new version, and during the window I could upload a low resolution version rather than the normal one. This last option seems to require the least from the Flickr provider, but seems a bit contrived and difficult to put into practice (I can just see someone 'fixing' it with a higher resolution version...) I guess I should just tell them to do either of the first two options (probably the first)? Richard001 (talk) 07:27, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

The answer to this question will surely be interesting as I always upload a higher resolution of the same image if available and it seems to be standard practice here, regardless of the license used. I am somewhat familiar with the creative commons licenses used at Flickr and there is no mention or ability or namespace in the xml to include a resolution restriction into the license. My feeling is that such contributors are going to be SOL. -- carol (talk) 08:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

What about convincing Flikr to add a checkbox to the upload form where one can cc-by-sa licence a lowres version: "Check here to allow Wikipedia to use a lowres version of your picture"? ZorroIII (talk) 20:48, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Personally I always upload the largest version. If the owner doesn't like it, they shouldn't be releasing it under a free license. They're free to upload with lower resolution. How do you turn this on (talk) 20:53, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

That is the way to do it. It would take a lot of support to add a feature to Flickr.Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 20:57, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that this is a good Idea, because people wouldn't upload Normal-/High-Res Images anymore... And other people don't mind to get simmilar Images... --Stefan-Xp (talk) 21:11, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I didn't mean it that way, I don't plan on doing that. :) - Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 21:14, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I know professional photographers who will release low resolution version of their photos under a free license and then state "if you wish a higher resolution, contact me to discuss license terms". I assume they're basing that on the notion that the different resolutions are "different" enough to be seperately licensable if they so choose (although Flickr does not provide for this distinction), and the low resolution license does not automatically grant license to the higher resolution one. ++Lar: t/c 22:15, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Quite. I'm not quite professional, but I have images I've released and uploaded at a given moderate resolution, which I would not say gives someone the right to everything that could be made from my underlying negatives. - Jmabel ! talk 23:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I do not think that the answer to the question is actually to be found in flickr functionality, photographer habit or commons personalities who you favor the opinion of or not. The answer to this question should be what the license says. I have a feeling that no one has looked at the licenses for the answer to this question. -- carol (talk) 23:50, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure you can license different versions of the same photo differently; there isn't really any issue with that. I just hoped there might be some easier way than saying 'hey, would you mind uploading a low resolution version here as well, then licensing that one differently'. Uploading at Flickr is pretty simple though so hopefully at least some people will go along with it. I think we would need Flickr's help to make the process easier, and I don't see it being a priority for them. Richard001 (talk) 03:13, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Searching - how long does it take...

How long does it take for new files/pages to register? When I create a new category I don't find it in search results straight away; in fact there seems to be a reasonably long delay. I'm not here to complain, just want to know if anyone knows how long it takes (does it vary?) for them to be included. Richard001 (talk) 07:55, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I think there's something wrong: this search finds 3020 images, and it has been doing so since October 6th; but I know for sure there really are 3312 files with that name ([2]). - Erik Baas (talk) 12:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Were any uploaded recently? I'm not sure how long they take to get into the search system, could even be months. Richard001 (talk) 03:15, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'm guessing 70 to 80 have been uploaded since October 6th ! Before that day the count always changed the day after new files were uploaded, but it has been 3020 ever since. One other thing: according to "PrefixIndex" there are 3314 files like "Image:BSicon*.svg" now. - Erik Baas (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Do we need OTRS for everything?

Today I had the following situation:

• I found a picture in a blog.
• Since the blog is not free-licensed I asked in a comment for cc-by-sa permission for the specific picture
• I received the permission in a comment to the same post
• User:Tryphon believes that we still need an OTRS confirmation

In my opinion what we already have is as good as a site notice with a free license permission. Do we need OTRS also for such sites? What do you think? --Спас Колев (talk) 12:16, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I think Commons:Email templates is much stronger statement then regular yes answer in blog. Actually I glanced in blog and was not able to find permission. Image in question is also Commons:Derivative work from party logos. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:33, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

If the blogger states that they are releasing the content under a acceptable free license then it's fine. Just so long as the blogger is specific about what license and what exactly is being released. --J.smith (talk) 17:00, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Here is the question by Спас Колев ("Is CC-BY-SA fine for your photo of the hall? It is not perfect, but is better than nothing."). The answer by the author is the post just below ("Yes, use freely. I may have other photos that I could e-mail you."). I believe this permission is clear enough about the license. I also don't think it's polite to ask twice for a written confirmation. Such permissions, in public blogs, should be enough for us here at Commons. --5ko (talk) 02:44, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Will be good idea to ask specific version of cc-by-sa. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:35, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

To help with these situations, I've been working on a new page, Commons:Permission. Feel free to help out. ViperSnake151 (talk) 13:29, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Automatic Removal of one category from items within another category?

Hi! I'm trying to put some order to the category African Americans. Most of the 600+ images need to be reclassified. There are over 100 maps which have been mislabeled by a bot uploader. Is there any way an admin could reclassify these quickly?

The images are locator maps for Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, and North Carolina. Here are links to representative images

• Image:GAMap-doton-Cuthbert.PNG
• Image:MDMap-doton-Clinton.PNG
• Image:MOMap-doton-Berkeley.png
• Image:NCMap-doton-Ansonville.PNG

It's possible that the bot put these into African Americans because they all have Category:Demographics of the United States. That category and category African Americans have some overlap.

Would it be possible to remove the African American category from files which begin with GAMAP, MDMap, MOMap, or MCMap?

Unfortunately, only the Missouri and Georgia maps have a category Category:Locator maps of cities in Missouri and Category:Locator maps of cities in Georgia (U.S. state)

I don't relish opening each image, clicking edit, and deleting the African American category.

Can anyone help me, perhaps by pointing me to a tool I can use? Thanks! --Kenmayer (talk) 15:57, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I would suggesting requesting the help of Bots. They can make the sorting really quick. If that doesn't work, can request the help of a user.Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 20:38, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I think the Cat-A-Lot gadget helps you remove many images from a category. /81.231.250.247 14:17, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

• • I've fixed hundreds, maybe thousands, of those maps one by one. Its more bot generated garbage. Shouldn't there be some requirement for whoever approved a bot to put absurd miscategorization on thousands of images be required to take care of cleanup? Frustrated, -- Infrogmation (talk) 14:54, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Should I change the license?

I came across Image:BenPhelps.JPG. While the image is no longer available (couldn't find it from a quick search either) the webpage is. The image states it was released into the public domain per statement on the website but the website doesn't release images into the public domain. Indeed it specifically claims they are copyrighted by Westboro but they may be used for any purpose. Should I tag it with {{Copyrighted free use}} (I see it's already tagged CFU) Should I remove the PD-author claim even though I have no idea what license the image was released under and it's no longer available or presume the original uploader got it right even though it's easily possible he/she mistook the two? I haven't asked the uploader since I'm somewhat doubtful she/he would remember something like this 3 years ago Nil Einne (talk) 16:10, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

On a somewhat related issue, I agree with comments on the talk page that we probably should change the sign for CFU back to a copyright symbol 16:17, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

questions about bots...

What homework should one do before one asks for authorization to run a bot?

Have any bot writers published their source for others to read and learn from? If so, where? If I incorporate bits of others' work in one I write I will, of course, properly thank them and attribute their work. And if I write one I will offer my source for cannibalization and re-use.

Once someone has done that homework, where does one go to get authorization to run that bot?

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 19:41, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Commons:Bots should be a big help for you. Thanks for contributing!Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 20:19, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Image wont show up

Please someone help, been trying to load up image (Image:Ford Falcon Argentina.jpg) and everything works fine but it wont show up, (getting a little box with red circle with a white X) I've tried three times with different names, what am i doing wrong, first time this ever happened, going nuts - Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 20:34, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Usually means the file is busted. Try re-uploading the image?Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 20:36, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Moebiusuibeom said he/she tried three times already. On the other hand Image:Ford Falcon Argentina.jpg shows up fine for me. Powers (talk) 15:39, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

December 2

Can't upload anything.

Keep getting server errors and also this when trying to upload a new updated file.

Internal error

Could not rename file "public/b/b5/The_Ghan_route_map.png" to "public/archive/b/b5/20081202104957!The_Ghan_route_map.png".

It's frustrating me ATM since I want to upload files. Bidgee (talk) 10:52, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Are you trying to upload a new image or update an existing one? If you're updating one I don't think you can change the name. By the way, that sounds like a really bad name; can't you make it a bit more descriptive? Anything with "/b/b5/20081202104957" is likely to get shot around here. Richard001 (talk) 03:34, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Those are automatically generated prefixes for old versions of files, the image name itself is fine. --rimshot^talk 07:06, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh dear, looks like something is rather badly screwed up with the image repository backend. If it's still happening, better let the devs know ASAP. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:03, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

December 3

Uploading from Flickr

Flickr2Commons has been annoying me lately. In the last couple of days it has either been not loading (an issue with the toolserver in general I think) or telling me that stuff is already here. For example, it tells me that this Aztec Thrush image (link removed) is already uploaded (despite not giving me a link to it, and I can hardly search for it (see my last section here) except through the autocomplete tool using image:[expected name]. I really doubt that it is here at all; I think it's just "playing up".

Is it possible to integrate the useful but buggy and only semi-reliable Flickr2Commons tool with the normal, inefficient way of uploading? I suspect that most people use the latter, but it's just a drag having to save a local version, and then a lot of people probably don't save the highest res. version to upload. Considering how many photos we get from Flickr (and how many more we should be getting) and how many people probably use the normal method rather than the bot, I think this is something that deserves to be worked on. Richard001 (talk) 03:32, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, this is weird: I just managed to upload one of my own images and it didn't say it was here. Maybe someone has uploaded them for me? But where the hell are they? Are they just uncategorized and cryptically names, and impossible to find by searching? Richard001 (talk) 03:45, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh, of course, I see what is happening: the bot is "thinking" the file has been uploaded here simply because there is a link to it here. That's why it was linking to my user page (I thought it was supposed to mean that I had uploaded it), and is now linking here as well (removing links...). This isn't a good rule to follow, since you can easily link to the file without it being here. It should, at minimum, avoid treating non-image pages as likely existing copies here. Another bug to fix. I wonder if any of these bugs will get fixed any time soon? I have posted about it on the BugZilla thing for the tool server, but there don't seem to be many people involved. Guess I'll just have to get by with what we've got and be thankful to the people who have got us to where we are. Or learn to fix these bugs myself (very unlikely). Richard001 (talk) 03:59, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Image:Corniste.jpg

The author of this caricature died in 1959. 2008 − 1959 = 49 and not 70. Is this copyvio or did I overlook anything? Debianux (talk) 13:04, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

As can be seen from the edit history, I queried the copyright status on 10 March 2006. The uploader subsequently added a PD-old licence. Man vyi (talk) 15:51, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

And the uploader has not been active for about two years … Debianux (talk) 17:59, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

On :fr he was last active a year ago (fr:Utilisateur:BenP), and the currently only use of that image in article fr:Corniste is somewhat questionable. --Túrelio (talk) 21:18, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

I think we should delete this file because It obviously is copyvio and the author has not been active for a long time. Debianux (talk) 07:00, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I have deleted it as an obvious copyvio. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:06, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

December 4

Abortion images censorship?

Why are there no images of abortion? There are plenty of images of death, but not a single one of an aborted fetus. Is this censorship, and does this constitute a kind of bias? -Zahd (talk) 05:19, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

A 10 second search found Image:6 week old Embryo.jpg. In any case, I don't think there is some kind of conspiracy going on. Getting pictures of a very private medical procedure is not easy, so I have a feeling it's just a matter of availability. --J.smith (talk) 06:40, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

User:How do you turn this on & flickrreview

(poor english) See this. User:How do you turn this on is not a administrator. Is he a trusted user?. The data {{flickrreview|How do you turn this on|~~~~~}} are insufficient; the data may be {{flickrreview|YourUsername|Date|CurrentFlickrLicense}} (see Template:Flickrreview). I can not speak with him, my english is too bad--Lmbuga ^{gl, pt, es: contacta comigo} 15:53, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Yep, they are a trusted user. See this. --Kanonkas_(talk) 16:12, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

The template I use is part of a script. It's also fine the way I use it. If you have issues with the script, you need to talk to Patstuart, who wrote the script. How do you turn this on (talk) 16:24, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

"CurrentFlickrLicense" is an optional field, as far as I know. J.smith (talk) 20:24, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Bundesarchiv donation announcement needed

icon for the announcement

We should put an announcement about the 100k image donation from the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) prominently on the Main Page for a short while. Wikimedia germany just had a press conference about this, and it will be hitting the news any time now. My guess is that lots of new people will drop by, and it would be nice to provide an entry point for them with a connection to the news stories.

it should mention:

• Commons:Bundesarchiv and a link to the sample gallery
• need for categorization help
• upload progress

--Dschwen (talk) 17:03, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

This is a great archive.

• A fast look at some of the files shows that a lot of work will be needed to integrate it into our current categories. Another problem is lack of English translations in descriptions, and German category names.
• I noticed that some of the images are duplicates of images we already have - I assume we should probably keep both versions.
• I found the following statement on Commons:Bundesarchiv very interesting: These images are licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License (CC-BY-SA). Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archive owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license. In the past there was some reluctance to believe statements from different archives that their images are "free" (for example see Commons:Deletion requests/US holocaust memorial museum images or Commons:Village_pump/Archive/33#Great news! WMF does content deal with LoC, US Holocaust Memorial Museum).

--Jarekt (talk) 22:29, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

December 5

Undesirable text in "File history"

I just uploaded an image (commons flickr) using a bot, forgetting that it would copy all of the description from flickr. The problem is, there's a bunch of links to Michael Jackson albums on rapidshare, obviously copyvios. So, uh, is it possible to remove that text? I'm not very familiar with Commons' inner workings. Thanks. --Closedmouth (talk) 15:05, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Tag it for deletion using {{speedy|reason}} (with reason being the reason) and then reupload once it's been deleted. How do you turn this on (talk) 15:07, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Have tagged it for speedy deletion as obviously derivative image of sculpture by Jeff Koons in a gallery. Man vyi (talk) 15:18, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

When this problem happens in for future uploads which might not be a copyright violation, use the edit link on the image page (it is located in the same place on the Image page as it was to edit this page) and edit the undesired text. -- carol (talk) 16:33, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

It was part of the upload log, which is not editable. How do you turn this on (talk) 16:35, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Yow, that is refreshingly thorough for a new uploader to notice this. I never took the first upload comments very seriously with the exception of some of the images which were moved from any of the wikipedias to here and even then, it was only very rarely that useful information could be found there that was not still on the page. The comments for the second and more uploads into an existing namespace are a completely different thing and often contain useful information and I am very sorry when I occasionally forget to put something there.

Did I say "refreshingly thorough for a new uploader" recently enough for it to be remembered? -- carol (talk) 03:42, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, but although I'm a Commons noob, I'm not a Wikipedia noob ;) --Closedmouth (talk) 04:00, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

"What link's here" feature doesnt show links from Wikipedia.

I really like the "What link's here" feature, and like this, it's essentially useless for Wikimedia Commons.

Please show what pages from Wikipedia link to files in Commons.

Your right, that feature is local-only. If you click on the "Check Usage" link at the top of the image page it will do a search for of all of the wikis for you. J.smith (talk) 23:18, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

The original poster has a point: a newcomer might expect to find the Check Usage on the Special:Whatlinkshere page. Is there any way Special:Whatlinkshere can be edited to add a link to Check Usage? Pruneau^talk 09:40, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately "Check Usage" works only for images it does not work for interwiki links many categories and galleries have. --Jarekt (talk) 21:54, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Still, it would be nice to have a link for those pages it works for. In fact, I just wrote a bit of javascript to add one. If there are no problems, it could be added to Common.js. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:41, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Can't just add a link to the special page? Should be no problem. J.smith (talk) 22:56, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... yes, I think we could add it directly to MediaWiki:Linkshere. Apparently, CheckUsage will happily accept image names with the "Image:" prefix in place, so that's no problem. I believe we'd have to make the change to all the translations of the message, if we don't want everyone to see it in English, but that's a Simple Matter Of Editing(TM). The only remaining issue is that I can't think of any way to make the link appear only for image pages without JavaScript, but at least we could make it appear for all pages by default, and only use JS to hide it for non-image pages.

Anyway, replacing MediaWiki:Linkshere with the following should do it:

The following pages link to '''[[:$1]]'''
<span class="plainlinks" id="whatlinkshere-checkusage">
([http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CheckUsage.php?i={{urlencode:$1}}&w=_100000 check usage on other wikis])
</span>
----

For extra interface sugar (strictly optional), the following code in MediaWiki:Common.js ought to hide the link for non-image pages:

if (wgCanonicalNamespace == "Special" && wgCanonicalSpecialPageName.toLowerCase() == "whatlinkshere") {
    addOnloadHook(function () {
        var span = document.getElementById("whatlinkshere-checkusage")
        if (!span) return
        var link = span.getElementsByTagName("a")[0]
        if (!link) return
        if (!/[?&]i=(Image|File)(:|%3A)/.test(link.href)) span.style.display = "none"
    })
}

Oh, and it seems we'd need to make the corresponding change to MediaWiki:Nolinkshere, too. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 07:05, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

December 6

Music Metadata

Hello. I suggest the creation of a template for music metadata, that uniformly informs about artist, title and so on. The template could be added to uploaded audio files and provide detailled information on the content concerning the music, performance and recording. I created a draft of what I am thinking about, in this case for classical music, here: Template:Classical Music Metadata. Is this sensefull ? What do you think ? Teebeutel (talk) 00:13, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

You mean something like Template:Painting, only for musical files? Sounds like a good idea. However, is there a strong reason to have a template specifically for classical music? If possible, it would be better to have one for all musical files. Pruneau^talk 09:45, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, this is what I mean. The reason, why I started a separate template for classical music: It is organized differently:

• the title plays a minor role, instead you have the type (symphony, piano concert...), opus numbers, set numbers, maybe surnames
• very often the performer is the one less important, the composer is the one, "you ask for", e.g. Beethoven's Für Elise
• you need fields like orchestra, conductor, key, movement and others, that would else be useless.

Beyond that, due to to reasons of expired copyrights, classical music is (to my knowledge) much more present on Commons than any other genre. Teebeutel (talk) 23:25, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Image history question

Image:Uruguay coa.svg was deleted as a duplicate, however I have strong suspicions that it had previous versions which were not carried over. Are these required? Can they be merged into the current image? Some may be better than the current version, and if they are visible it may save some trouble if someone tries to improve the current image. 76.117.247.55 01:40, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Bot running weird

I'm afraid commonsdelinkerhelper is not running as it is supposed to be. See for example Image:Paonias.excaecata.mounted.jpg, Image:Magnetostrictive_transducer_by_Zureks.PNG, Image:HighPerformanceCarburator.jpg. It keeps adding the same template over and over. --91.67.51.21 18:02, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

That is weird. I'll drop a note on User talk:Bryan's talk page, since he's the operator of the bot. It might just be because someone submitted the command over and over again. --J.smith (talk) 18:18, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

User:Zephynelsson Von

I would like to request that all of the edits that User:Zephynelsson Von made be reverted. There was the emptying of many categories and requests for deleting them with no reason given. This activity messed up a lot of thoughtful work. -- carol (talk) 20:20, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Template assistance needed/necessary

subtitled:It was a dark and stormy night....

I was told that the Taxonavigation classification Strasburger which was added to {{Taxonavigation}} was the classification system that was being used at German wikipedia. Recently I learned that German wikipedia uses a taxonomy of their own invention (and that the fact that it matches the taxonomy used at [USDA ARS GRIN] with only a few exception in the articles I looked at is just a coincidence) and that the Strasburger classification stuff here was introduced by User:Brynn.

While I figure out how to write an apology for trusting the intra-wiki information, the template should be altered. The template could simply not display anything if "classification=Strasburger" or perhaps it could display a page for [USDA ARS GRIN] similar to the page for APWebsite, it would make that coincidence a more positive (lack of a better word) coincidence.

I am not so good with templates to be confident to make such a change and I also do not have permission to make such a change.

Also, if any have an idea about what my apology for my involvement with this should be like, any assistance will be welcome. -- carol (talk) 20:36, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Commons upload client

Seeing what AutoWikiBrowser can, what about creating a client for commons uploading like e.g. Google Picasa has?--Kozuch (talk) 23:35, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, we do have Commonist. I don't think I've ever used it myself, but it seems like a pretty handy tool. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 00:37, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

December 7

Myst images with CommonSense review--problem?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Myst

"This image was moved to Wikimedia Commons from en.wikipedia using a bot script. All source information is still present. It requires review because CommonSense could not categorise the image during transfer. Additionally, there may be errors in any or all of the information fields; information on this image should not be considered reliable and the image should not be used until it has been reviewed and any needed corrections have been made."

Is this a problem, or can the template be removed? They're in Category:Myst and all appear to be Myst-related. Gotyear (talk) 14:20, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

The notice is because transfer bots can generate garbage misinformation if people don't keep an eye on details during the transfer process. If you can see that everything is correct (eg, the "source" and "author" fields actually show where the image originated for the first time anywhere and who originally created it; etc etc) (or if there were any inaccuracies you have already corrected them), feel free to remove the notice, as you've done the appropriate human review. -- Infrogmation (talk) 14:58, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I see! Thank you for the explanation. Gotyear (talk) 15:24, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, time to update that template. Multichill (talk) 16:09, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

If you mean that the template is a bit intimidating or technical-sounding, then yes. I know some image templates require certain users to evaluate them, like verifying the Flikr licenses match, and I'm not fully-versed in license-speak :) which is why I decided to ask the person who initiated the transfer to verify the seeming-double license. But I can check the rest with no problem. Gotyear (talk) 17:39, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Image:Deaerator2.png seems to be either copy violation or advertising spam

Image:Deaerator2.png was uploaded by anonymous User:BerkeleyLab and claimed to be copyrighted by him/her. I believe it is either a copyright violation or was uploaded simply to advertise a deaerator manufacturer.

(1) There is no such user as User:BerkeleyLab either here in Commons or in the English Wikipedia. So a copy violation template cannot be posted on that user's page.

(2) It is an exact copy of a drawing from a presentation by Stork Power Services (a company in the Netherlands) who manufactures what is known as the Storq Deaerator. See the following websites and scroll down to the see their drawing which is exactly what was uploaded here as Image:Deaerator.png:

• Website 1
• Website 2 (This one take a bit of time to download)

I don't know if this is the correct place to post this message. If not, could someone get the proper person to read this message and take the necessary actions to delete the image? Mbeychok (talk) 21:38, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

December 8

Naming conventions on commons upload form

There should be some mention of the commons naming conventions on the actual image upload form. Noodle snacks (talk) 10:47, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

new uploads under category

hi, which tool to use to check for latest uploads under certain category (with 4-5 categories deep)? --WikedKentaur (talk) 18:45, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

This Soprintendenza ‎nonsense.

Okay, I have made a template here, fittingly called {{Soprintendenza}}. If anyone wants to modify it to make better sense (but please, don't go in run-ons like the person who raised this was using) and add categories, etc, you are free to. I think this is just as ridiculous as the idea that labor is originality. ViperSnake151 (talk) 03:18, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

A link for the "Exemption Doctrine Policy" would be useful.Railwayfan2005 (talk) 22:19, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Where to go?

Where I have to go for ask to merge to picture?-- A2 supersonique 16:46, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

What do you mean by "merge to picture"? If you go to Commons:Bistro, you can ask in French. —Angr 06:44, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

ok

reversion of a Siebot assisted merge

After the beginning of a discussion and without an agreement having been reached, Siebot merged the contents of Category:Plants by country with similar flora categories found in Category:Ecozones. Somewhere in the noise I might have heard that the Category:Plants by country contained such thoughtlessly included categories as Category:Plants of Africa and similar.

The plants of categories -- there did not seem to be any user who knew what those categories contained, while the flora of categories had fairly specific contents.

A reversion of that merge would give time for the users and managers here who know what the contents of the "Plants of" categories were supposed to be and then it could be determined if they actually map into the "Flora of" categories (categories which contained species which were known to be native to that area or photographs of plants which were taken of plants growing in that area.

Botany and adaptive evolution (science related topics and not political) are interested in the area of the earth that species were native to. Ecozones is a tree that is divided into similar sized areas of this planet. Categories which are "of a country" are divided via the political divisions and apt to change. These two different trees have an overlap as there is the need to use definitions to group areas -- Ecozones keeps them all in similarly sized areas. An example of the problem with using the political divisions is that there are very few species of plants which grow over all of some of the countries which include a larger area, like Canada, Mexico, Russia and the United States and others. -- carol (talk) 19:50, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

December 9

Images in Google books

Hi, I have been looking for pictures about the history of Monterrey, Mexcio and I have found some of them in google books. In that page some times you can download the entire book to your computer. The images in that books from before 1900 are GNU free, public domain or have copyright? Can I upload them to Commons?. For example this book of 1902. Thanks,--eliasjorge4 (talk) 04:34, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Most books that old are public domain, but not all. In order to be uploaded to Commons, old works have to be public domain in both the U.S. and in their country of origin. (I assume this book was published in Mexico.) Anything published before January 1, 1923, is public domain in the U.S., so that part is okay. Whether it's PD in Mexico is harder to determine. According to Commons:Licensing#Mexico, "a copyright subsists for the life of the author plus 100 years following the end of the calendar year of death of the youngest author" (I assume "youngest author" means "last to die", not "last to be born" as it usually does), but for the time being, the cut-off date is July 23, 1928. The book you linked to says it was written by the "Comisión de obsequio de la segunda Conferencia internacional americana", so it looks like you may have to find out when each member of the commission died. If they were all dead by July 23, 1928, the book is PD in Mexico and you can upload it. If one of them died later than that, though, you have to wait until January 1 of the year 101 years after the last one died. – I just re-read your question and I see that you're not asking about uploading the entire book, but only photographs from the book. I think in that case you just have to worry about the death date of the photographer, not of each member of the commission that published the book. See User:Drini/Mexican copyright law for more details about Mexican copyright law, and the link there for the entire law in the original Spanish. —Angr 06:41, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

If it's a collective work of corporate authorship, then the copyright rules governing that situation would presumably apply, and there wouldn't be a need to check the death dates of each member of the commission... AnonMoos (talk) 13:59, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Uploading Photos from Others

Once a month or so I find someobody with a photo that should be in the Commons. Usually they are happy to release it to the public domain, and to include their own contact information, but they aren't familiar with Wikipedia, Wikimedia, etc. I'm happy to upload it on their behalf, but I don't know if that's acceptable. Is there a way to get their images uploaded? Lou Sander (talk) 17:09, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

The way you do it is fine - as long as they agree to release the images under a free license, there's nothing wrong with you doing it for them. Best wishes, How do you turn this on (talk) 17:14, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

In addition I would like to add that in such a case a permission email to our OTRS team is necessary. Suggestions how such an email should be worded are to be found here. Cheers, AFBorchert (talk) 17:20, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

All that license talk scares most non-lawyers who see it. For the rest, including me, there's a very strong "this is more trouble than it's worth" factor. (Most of these images are just trivial personal snapshots, for Pete's sake.) Is there a very simple email or procedure that just releases the photo to the public domain? No license, no retention of any rights, just letting anybody use it for any purpose whatsoever. One sentence would be best. Lou Sander (talk) 19:59, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not a lawyer, and it doesn't scare me. It's quite simple, there are only a few licenses Commons will accept. If your friend releases their image into the public domain, just upload it yourself and use the public domain tag. Or they could do it even. How do you turn this on (talk) 20:52, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

You are quite a brave fellow. Please understand that people who want to give their personal photos to a worthy cause don't want to interface with the legal system just to do it. "He who acts as his own copyright lawyer has a fool for a client." Lou Sander (talk) 13:48, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

If you made it, just put {{Pd-self}} on it. ViperSnake151 (talk) 20:49, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

But he didn't make it... How do you turn this on (talk) 20:52, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

{{PD-author}} would be the correct tag here, if the photographer indeed agreed to release them into the public domain. Alternatively, you might want to suggest a Creative Commons license such as {{Cc-by-3.0}} or {{Cc-by-sa-3.0}}: they each have a nice "human-readable" Commons Deed (like this), which summarizes the intent of the license in a few short sentences. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:50, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Does {{PD-author}} require an email? Lou Sander (talk) 13:48, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Not necessarily, but it would be useful. The e-mail doesn't necessarily have to contain anything more than the name of the file and, say, the text from {{PD-self}}. What matters is that we'd like to have a written record of your friend saying that they want to release their image under a free license, not merely of you saying it on their behalf.

What we're trying to prevent, with all the OTRS stuff, is the following scenario:

• Your friend has sent you some nice photographs they've taken. You ask them if it would be OK to put them on Wikipedia, and they say yes.
• You upload the photos to Commons, with a free license tag, just like the instructions say.
• An ad agency is looking for stock photography for a new campaign. One of their employees does a Google image search and finds your friend's photo on Commons. They check the image page, and find that it says they're "free to use it for any purpose, including commercially".
• Your friend is driving to work and sees their photo on a giant billboard. They angrily call the company whose product it advertises, threatening to sue unless they're paid. The company says they need to sue the ad agency. The ad agency say the image was available on Commons under a free license, and your friend should sue Commons if the license wasn't correct.
• Your friend goes to the image page on Commons, and sees that their photo is indeed there with a big box saying anyone can use it for any purpose. They send an angry e-mail to the Wikimedia Foundation, demanding what right we have to say that anyone is free to use their photo. Someone from the Foundation replies, saying that someone named "Lou Sander" had claimed to be authorized to license it thusly, but that the Foundation would certainly take it down if that's not true.
• Your friend calls you on the phone, asking what the hell did you do with their photo. You say you're sorry, but you thought they'd said it was OK. Your friend says they only said it was OK to put it on Wikipedia, not to have it used for free in an ad campaign. You again say you're sorry, you were just following the instructions on the Wikipedia upload page.
• Your (ex-)friend is not satisfied. Their photo was used in a nationwide ad campaign and they didn't get a cent for it. They e-mail the Foundation again, demanding money or they'll sue. They say they never gave you permission to license the image that way, and ask what reason we ever had to believe your supposed claim that they would've done such a ridiculous thing. We reply that we assume good faith from uploaders. They ask if we shouldn't assume sanity from photographers instead. Oh, and they'll still sue unless someone pays them at least $1000 for the use of their photo.

From that point on, the story can go two ways. Either you cough up the money yourself, or find some other way to persuade your friend not to sue. The other possibility is a nasty four or five way lawsuit, with your friend suing Commons and the ad agency, and possibly the advertised company as well, and the ad agency themselves suing Commons, who are asserting a DMCA safe harbor and saying your friend and the ad agency should sue you instead, and possibly you countersuing Commons and/or your friend. In any case, it won't be pretty.

Of course, this is an extreme scenario, and not very likely to happen to you. Yet pretty much all the individual elements have happened before, and I can see so reason why, given the right combination of events, something like this couldn't happen. Maybe not to you specifically, but we'd rather it didn't happen to anyone.

Demanding that your friend send us an e-mail themselves, with the license text they're agreeing to, has two purposes. First, it makes it more likely that your friend really knows what they're doing, and has a chance to back down if they don't like the idea after all. Secondly, in the event that all nonetheless goes to hell and we get sued, it gives us something concrete to point to in our defense. Oh, and it also makes it less likely that you'll end up with a broken friendship, and possibly a lawsuit, just because of a simple misunderstanding. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:24, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Nice story! We should use this somewhere on a help page to explain users why we want OTRS permission. Multichill (talk) 22:59, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Commons:Sexual content

prior to the recent UK broohaha (censorship and 'child porn' problems) I began work on a proposal over on en wiki about 'sexual content' which I think is appropriate here too - maybe even more so. It's important to note that the proposal has thus far been rejected strongly over there, however some of the ideas are perhaps a better fit to be discussed within this community, and I invite all feedback :-) - it's at Commons:Sexual content. Privatemusings (talk) 04:05, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Please see COM:PS#Censorship for current policy. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:06, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I think your article lacks a definition of the problem you see, how you try to solve that problem with your proposal and there needs to be a definition of "sexual content". Neither of these points seem to be evident. I also don't see why we should treat "sexual content" (whatever that is) any different than all other pictures. -- Gorgo (talk) 13:33, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

What he said ^ -mattbuck (Talk) 16:06, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Why is this in Commons space without {{Proposed}}? The reliance on en.wiki policy/guidelines seems to indicate a failure to grasp what the Commons is. The policies/guidelines linked therein (all en.wiki) are redundant to existing Commons policies/guidelines (especially COM:SCOPE and COM:L), reflect only en.wiki preferences (Commons serves all wikis) or have no relevance to the Commons. Frankly, this should be deleted or, at least, moved into user space. Эlcobbola _talk 16:28, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Added. Эlcobbola _talk 16:32, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I have fixed the policy as best as I can and placed why I oppose the policy on the talk page. --J.smith (talk) 18:54, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Privatemusings, your proposal at en:Wikipedia:Sexual content failed miserably. Please don't waste your and our time by starting the whole process all over again. Multichill (talk) 22:07, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Hey, there isn't any sexual content at Commons:Sexual content. False advertising! No fair! Hesperian 23:07, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Can a colorised public domain image be copyrighted?

Hi, I was trying to sort out the colorised photos of World War II ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy that User:Tei111333 has uploaded.[3]. My initial efforts can be seen in Image:Akagi08.jpg and Image:Kaga04 1935.jpg. However, the question of whether coloring such old photos can be considered original significant work and hence copyrightable just popped into my mind. Can such work be copyrighted? Does such a copyright apply to Japan? If so, those images should be speedied as copyviolations since irootoko_jr of the IJN Colorized Photos for inspiration only blog has not indicated any "free" nature to his works, right? Jappalang (talk) 13:27, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I think the colorization can be copyrighted. The good news is that it's easy to convert from colored back to B/W. --J.smith (talk) 18:19, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, agreed. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 20:14, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Also agree. The colorization process would have involved deliberate choice of colors and a degree of artistic input inherent thereto, which would seem to make the colorized image sufficiently more than just a "sweat of the brow" derivative. Эlcobbola _talk 20:24, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay, thank you all. I have tagged them as copyviolations. Jappalang (talk) 00:49, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

• However, at least in the U.S. merely recolorizing (even if it's a painstaking restoration process!) appears not to be copyrightable in the U.S. See en:WP:PD#Derived works and restorations of works in the public domain. Lupo 12:14, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Disagree, and I'm not sure how the information at that link leads to that conclusion. From that page: "A work that is derived or adapted from a public domain work can itself be protected by copyright only to the extent that the derived work contains elements of originality contributed by the author of the derived work" (emphasis mine). Colorization is different from re-colorization. Hearn v. Meyer, 664 F. Supp 832 (S.D.N.Y. 1987) failed because it was making already existing colors more vibrant. Adding color where there was none before is an entirely different matter and is an input of creativity above and beyond labor and expense. Эlcobbola _talk 13:12, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Sure, just follow to "non-creative works" and then to the Compendium II. Section 503.02(a) says "Likewise, mere coloration cannot support a copyright even though it may enhance the aesthetic appeal or commercial value of a work." Granted, though, I don't know what exactly is "mere coloration". Lupo 13:17, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

There's also this, where they quote a bit from that case: "The work done by the various participants was long, time-consuming, and artistic in every sense of the word. The original drawings had to be retraced by hand in three separate stages to correspond to the three separate colors, red, yellow, and blue. Every bit of grass, every check on Dorothy's dress, every bit of shine on the Tin Woodman's body had to be redrawn with pen and ink on acetate and sometimes twice or more." Yet this was still considered a slavish copy. Lupo 13:30, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, because they were "retracing", "redrawing" and recoloring. Not the same as adding what was not there before. Эlcobbola _talk 13:38, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I think it would depend on the process, but most likely, yes. Does the original page describe the process by which they were colorized? The U.S. Copyright Office does not allow many basic colorizations (or changes in color) to be copyrighted, but when it comes to something much more involved like colorizing old films, they do allow it provided it was not done by an automatic process. If these images were hand-colorized, then they could probably be copyrighted. See a 1987 article, and the Copyright Office's ruling (and a subsequent ruling stating that the original black and white version must be submitted along with the colorized version for registration as well). Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Teahupoo, Tahiti surfing images

Hi I was wondering if somebody could get a bot or upload this bank of Creative Commons 2.0 images to the commons? Dr. Blofeld (talk) 18:14, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I've just look three of them and it seems that they are not free enough to be integrated to commons (only Anyone can see this photo). Anyway, if it would have been really nice to have some of them, I think many are redundant (for example 18 pictures of the same guy riding a wave). Vonvon (talk) 18:41, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I didn't say upload every single one. But a good selection would be good, plus I don't know where you are looking but most if not all of them appear to be under creative commons 2.0 Dr. Blofeld (talk) 19:07, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, sorry for the misinterpretation of your upload this bank of [...] images. For the license, you're definitely right, I've overlooked it... Oups. Vonvon (talk) 20:07, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Commons talk:By location category scheme#Location of/in

Hi,

For years, geographical categories seem to use the "of" in the category naming scheme. So it's lakes "of", rivers "of", mountains "of", (this opposed to e.g. constructions: "buildings in", "roads in"...)

Personally, I don't really have an opinion which is best, but I do believe that naming conventions has been discussed quite a few times in the past years, and some sort of consensus on the subject has been reached. Or was this never the case? Anyway, in the last few days/weeks, people have been massively renaming (or requesting to rename) quite a few of these categories "of" -> "in". It might be fine of better to use "in" (I don't know), BUT, taking the fact that people have been discussing this a lot in the past, and have been using this convention for years now, it would be nice to see this move actually being supported by a consensus of the Commons community... otherwise the work by dozens of users in the past years could be messed up by a few individuals now.

See Commons talk:By location category scheme#Location of/in for a longer explanation of my comments/questions.

So to summarize: I don't have a real opinion on the in/of/from/(something else) itself, but it would be nice to be able to find a link to a recent on the subject. Or if that does not exist, people who have been reasoning about it the last years should at least have a chance to look what's going on and have their input on the subject.

See Commons talk:By location category scheme#Location of/in, which might be a place to continue discussion, unless there is a recent discussion or even consensus that I couldn't find? --LimoWreck (talk) 19:13, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Picture of the Year!!!

Hi. What the heck happened to Picture of the Year 2008?? It was supposed to begin in October, but as of today there's still nothing going on! People over there started talking about (mostly) petty things, and then all discussion stopped. It's been almost two months with that page completely abandoned!! Does anyone know if anything's gonna happen with that? I was looking forward to it... --Kreachure (talk) 14:43, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

The people who pushed for-and organised the whole thing have all retired to one degree or another. We need someone who has the time/energy/inclination to take the reigns get it moving. J.smith (talk) 22:19, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

The main difficulty is that last year we relied heavily on special-purpose software written and run by Bryan who has said he is unable to be as involved this year. Nobody else knows much about it, I think. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:25, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... it doesn't seem that complicated. I could probably code something like that in a few weeks, even with everything else I'm busy with — maybe not with all the bells and whistles Bryan's version had, but usable enough. Since I didn't participate in the last two years, though, would someone mind summarizing the requirements? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:38, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

That time might be better spent analyzing and adapting Bryan's software. This it would have the benefit of having an additional maintainer. I also suggest to use his software and keep the same voting procedure as last year rather than trying to come up with something new which would make it necessary to reinvent that wheel. The priority should be to have any kind of POTY 2008, rather than a perfect - but non-existing POTY. As they say perfect is the enemy of good enough. And IMO last year's POTY was good enough. --Dschwen (talk) 17:51, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

That could work, too. The code seems to be here. Alas, my Python isn't very good — I can more or less read it, but anything beyond fairly trivial changes is outside my current skills. I've been meaning to learn it, but this may not be the most convenient time or manner, so it would be nicer if someone more experienced with the language could do it. Anyway, someone should probably ask Bryan just how much maintenance the code needs in order to be used this year. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:20, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, poop. So it's worse than I imagined. Is there any place in Commons or Wikipedia where I could ask people if they could help out on this? I seriously want this to happen. :( Kreachure (talk) 22:53, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

On the Village Pumps. It would need a lot of work to get it running at this late stage, but it could be done. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:29, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm absolutely willing to help if someone points me in the right direction. I don't think it's realy a problem running the 2008POTY in early January - infact, it makes more sense imo. --J.smith (talk) 18:37, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Strange uploads

Something strange is happening. Somebody is uploading molecules structures in bad file formats, creating a new username for every 3..7 uploads, apparently in an attempt to navigate below the radar. Check the timestamps of Gwilliams10 (talk · contribs), Jessicakendziorski (talk · contribs), Christophermahnken 2009 (talk · contribs) and PERod (talk · contribs). --LA2 (talk) 06:17, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Why should that be "bad file formats"? They just uploaded a few of the structures multiple times in different formats. Even Image:Riboflavin Synthase Mechanism.png, despite the problems of MediaWiki to show a thumb, is fine when you click on the full image. --Túrelio (talk) 08:08, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

No, that it not good. Files in .png-format with too many pixels are not rendered as thumbnails, so they are quite useless on the project. Such things really should be done in .SVG. But this does not look suspicious. Maybe these are students in a class that were encouraged to upload their figures to commons. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 08:41, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

If these images are indeed the works of the uploader, then why aren't line drawings uploaded in SVG or 3D models in higher resolution? Using JPEG for line drawings and 700x700 for color 3D models are mediocre formats. And why do these users not respond to questions on the talk page? Instead, they seem to disappear never to return again. --LA2 (talk) 09:10, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

RE:your second question. Only one user had a real question on his/her talkpage (User talk:Christophermahnken 2009). True, he/she didn't answer your first question. However, I made very often the experience that new users don't "see" comments on their userpage. Being an admin, I sometimes even had to shortly block users, currently uploading copyvios, to get their attention. And about your comment on User talk:PERod, that is not a good way to communicate with new users, actually that is bad-faith. You might have asked the question, but should not have greated him/her with a header saying "sock puppet", esp. without havíng proof or very strong suspicion. Anyway, thanks for notifying the suspicion here. --Túrelio (talk) 09:30, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

The names Mahnken, Kendziorski and Williams occur on this page at De Pauw University. However, their fields of study seem to be quite different. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 09:40, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

The 3D renderings are probably screencaps or exported files from molecular structure visualization software (such as RasMol, PyMOL, Jmol, etc). That's why they're only screen resolution: those programs are primarily designed for interactive use, and will by default export images at the size the user is viewing them at. From what little I've used them, it should be possible to get them to export at a higher resolution, but the user needs to explicitly specify that. Anyway, something like 730 × 550 pixels should be OK for Commons; not ideal, but usable enough. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:01, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Based on the circumstances I feel a CU was warranted to clear up some of the questions here. These 3 IDs are almost certainly not the same user. They are all coming in from the same university, but that's it. I'd say the hypothesis of students uploading project work is very plausible... further attempts to reach them should be made as they may have valuable things to contribute if we can get the communication channel going. ++Lar: t/c 12:00, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Add Kt bug 87 (talk · contribs) to the list. --LA2 (talk) 21:13, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Sudden Sorting Error

I am uploading a series of images all of which automatically go to the category linked to from my user page. Starting with the 134th image, the category page's alphabetical image sorting (which I want) went out of whack and now the latest images appear at the top of the page, last first. Can't find anything about this problem on FAQ or eslewhere. Am I doing something wrong? Pls reply to my talk! Thx! EmilEikS (talk) 23:32, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Seems to be a server problem. Commonsdelinker also goes haywire on the File: prefixes instead of Image: headers. Someone will repair soon. Lycaon (talk) 23:37, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh boy, yes, the Image: -> File: change just went live. But that was announced months ago... --Dschwen (talk) 23:41, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Is that the reason then of some problems, or am I jumping to conclusions? Lycaon (talk) 23:43, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Hm, it is not likely to be the reason. I don't see anything going haywire. The File: prefixes are not yet being used anywhere and the old Image: prefixes continue to work. CD should not have any problems. But there might be load on the database servers due to the change.(?) --Dschwen (talk) 23:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I keep on getting this response from CommonsDelinkerHelper. Lycaon (talk) 23:57, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Brion answered on the mailing list: Probably just mixed category sort entries with the old namespace names. It should be sorted out pretty soon, after a link index rebuild. --Dschwen (talk) 04:29, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

FOP in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

I came across this picture today, which represents what I would qualify as permanently installed work of art, in the Kozara National Park (Bosnia and Herzegovina). I searched COM:FOP to see if this kind of picture is copyrightable in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but unfortunately it is not listed. Does anyone has information about this? Of course it goes beyond this picture only, and it sure would be nice if we could add Bosnia and Herzegovina on COM:FOP. Thanks in advance. --Tryphon (talk) 03:16, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

According to this translation (article 51c), reproduction is only allowed for non-commercial means, so such files are not acceptable on Commons, unfortunately. However, I am curious about article 51f, which seems to allow paintings of sculptures and buildings, without any conditions. Pruneau^talk 09:32, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much, and I see that you've already added Bosnia and Herzegovina to COM:FOP (which made me wonder if I missed it before), so I will just nominate the picture for speedy deletion (sadly). --Tryphon (talk) 12:58, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Video categorization

Videos are probably our least common file type (at least of the main three: images, audio and video). I think all videos should be in a video category, i.e. in Category:Video, preferably in one of its subcategories. Many aren't, though. Is there some way we could bring up a list of video files (i.e. .ogg videos) that aren't in category:video or its subcategories? Richard001 (talk) 02:22, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Asking someone to run a query on the toolserver is probably the best option.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 05:22, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Speaking of which, Category:Video could use some straightening out: currently it's a mix of video files and files about video-related topics. Specifically, it seems we should either a) remove Category:AV-media and all non-video files from Category:Video, or b) create a new Category:Video files, move all the other current subcategories of Category:Video under it, and leave Category:Video as a general category for video-related topics. Personally, I'd prefer the latter, and not just because it would mirror the organization of the parallel Category:Audio, but it must be admitted that it would take more work than the first option. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 07:13, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like a good option to me. Richard001 (talk) 00:07, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Gadget slideshow

If I go into my preferences/gadgets I can select the "slide show" tool. It's a nice presentation tool. Who wrote it and why it doesn't work at i.e. with Category:Images_from_the_German_Federal_Archive,_year_1952? Is there a minimum resolution >800px necessary? --Kolossos (talk) 20:04, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Probably an Internet Explorer (Exploder) issue.Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 21:45, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I wrote it, and yes, a minimum resolution is unfortunately necessary, as the thumbnailer does not support upscaling. But if I remember correctly, there is a new thumbnail proxy on the toolserver for which I requested (on the toolserver mailinglist) the fallback to the original picture in case the requested size exceeds the original size. Let me check that... --Dschwen (talk) 22:58, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Alright, fixed. make sure to purge your cache. (Next task would be to preload the images during the wait time...) --Dschwen (talk) 23:21, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Cool tool. It's running now fine (under firefox, IE7 and Safari). I would like to see a little project page for this tool and a link from the gadget option window to this page. So it be wouldn't necessary for me to ask here. One point that could be also good would be a pause and a back button in the slideshow and perhaps a field where I can see the image title and description if I'm with the mouse over this field. But as the first step it is good so how it is. --Kolossos (talk) 11:14, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

December 11

Mysterious category rename proposals

I noticed a category rename proposal in Category:Members of the Riksdag for the Social Democratic Party. It was indicating two links for discussion, but the first one was a red link and the second one did not have any useful information. The proposal was put there by a bot, without any mention of a human originator. So should I do when I do not think the proposal is such a good idea? How does one find out whose idea this was? And should not this template at least contain such information? /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 01:13, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

User:Vogler, who inserted the template, is a human user. And the proposal is the template, the reason is given in it (There is already a category for Members of the Riksdag, also, not all social democrats have been parliament members). The category was already moved to Category:Members of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (the template incorrectly links to Members of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, but the bot figured out the correct name to move by itself, it seems).

Asking at the talk page was correct, but the requester failed to answer your concerns and the bot does not care about objections on the talk page as long as the template is still present in the page. --Slomox (talk) 02:32, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I ended up at this history page and saw only a bot edit. I will contact Vogler. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 07:36, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Why does the bot not wait for 2 weeks until consensus is established on the talk page, as suggested in the {{Move}} banner? --InfantGorilla (talk)

The bot makes the move when it gets the order. Giving the order only four days[4] after the proposal may have been too fast, but the user who made the order probably thought there was no need for more discussions. /81.231.250.110 12:56, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Name for an image category

Is there a name for these diagrams where you see the wheels of a car from above? Some show the category:powertrain, some show the steering. --LA2 (talk) 09:56, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

• 
• 

Personally I'd put them in a Chassis geometry category, which would be a subcat of Category:Automotive technologies, and category:Automobile chassis, there's at least one other file on the Ackermann geometry so it would be a worthwhile category to create.KTo288 (talk) 13:48, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Template:Painting

As there is hardly any traffic there, I'd like to ask here:

1. would it not be wise to rename thisone to tl|Art or similar and use it as widely as ever possible? (I had put this question at its talk page, no reply.
2. there is, for instance, an extra template for similar use, designed for one special museum: See File:MNBA VanGogh 2720.JPG. Although this was a gentle idea, I do not think it was a good one, as any improvements on tl|painting would have to be redundantly done on that single museum's template. Was this ever discussed? Such rather prevents internationality/multilingualtiy than serving common's needs. (imo). Wolfgang 11:18, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Uploading video from Flickr

I have been granted permission for a video at Flickr, but transferring it isn't so easy as it's not in the same format. In fact, it uses Flash and the PCs I'm using don't seem to like Flash at the moment, so I haven't actually even seen the video I want to upload. I assume I'll have to do it via online converters, possibly using more than one to reach .ogg? I have never tried converting Flash, so I'm not too sure what to use here. Keep in mind that I can't install anything, so it will have to be an online converter. Help for this should be added to our Flickr help too. Richard001 (talk) 03:42, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

My favourite online converter is Media-convert. I think it should be able to convert Flash to ogg. Pruneau^talk 09:02, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Can you run things? VLC should be able to do it and it can run without being installed. mplayer too Nil Einne (talk) 11:04, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Media-convert.com won't work. I have trouble just getting the video to run online, and Flash won't let me download it. From here it doesn't run, but from embed it seems to. I VLC is on these computers, but not mplayer. Any ideas? We should really set things up so you can copy it to Commons as easy as a photo, with the conversion and such automated. It should be possible. Richard001 (talk) 02:55, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

how to change the license of my pictures.

how can i change the license of my pictures? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shakeh (talk • contribs) 2008-12-12T12:55:05 (UTC)

Edit the corresponding image description pages -- but be aware that it's unlikely that attempting to change from a less-restrictive license to a more-restrictive one will have any meaningful legal force... AnonMoos (talk) 13:19, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

What about linking to a category in Commons for djvu files?

When trying to add categories to media of others and writing comments on pages of the owners I came accross a DJVU file. On the talk page was already mentioned by BotMultichillT "Please link images". I left a message at the user talk page. The answer was "These djvu files are added automatically by a bot which cant know how to classify them. Also, they do not need to be found here as these files are used on Wikisource, were every word in the books are index by search engines, so they are very easy to find."
One conclusion is that the bot should not add these files to Commons and the present djvu files should be deleted from Commons. If these files should be at Commons BotMultichillT should not tag these these files with "Please link images". Therefore my question "what about linking to a category in Commons for djvu files?" Wouter (talk) 17:39, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

They should be sorted into the fitting categories. For Image:A_grammar_of_the_Bohemian_or_Cech_language.djvu for example Category:Scanned English texts. --Slomox (talk) 19:31, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Adding a constant category for each language can be done. The bot cant yet work out the content, so it cant automatically add more meaningful categories. These files are found by searches of the OCR text (which is far more useful than a few broad categories), which leads people to the appropriate Wikisource project, and links take the viewer back to Commons.

These files do belong on Commons as they can and are reused on multiple projects. Deleting these files will break a large percent of Wikisource, so please dont do that. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 00:31, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The files certainly belong on Commons... clearly within scope. Individual pages can be displayed as images in Wikipedia articles if desired (just use the "page=" argument to a regular Image: link to the .djvu file). I suppose uploads could be added to Category:Djvu files, or some of the subcats like Category:En Wikisource book djvu, if that is where they are coming from. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:06, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

This one [5] includes a notice that the scan may only be used for non-commercial etc use. I assume the view is being taken that such claims are unenforceable? Man vyi (talk) 07:15, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

In addition to being unenforceable, Microsoft has since stopped its "Live Books" program and at the same time they released Internet Archive from the non-commercial contract that existed between the two parties. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:48, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Man vyi (talk) 10:07, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Commons:Categories for discussion

This process is broken.

There are uncompleted discussions from a year and a half ago that noone has discussed.

Furthermore, I just fixed an error that meant all requests for December were missing - The way the page is set up is complicated and confusing, so I had to trace the transclusions up two levels to discover that evidently someone was supposed to have hand-added Commons:Categories_for_discussion/Current_requests/2008/12 to Commons:Categories_for_discussion/Current_requests/2008 - but hadn't. Nonetheless, everyone wishing to set up a category to discuss in the last two weeks was directed to Commons:Categories_for_discussion/Current_requests/2008/12, even while it didn't appear anywhere that anyone would ever find it.

This process is broken, and it does not appear that the rate of discussion justifies keeping a page where there's not even something that could be watchlisted so that people could tell when things show up. I would suggest we instead direct people here, where things can be dealt with quickly and efficiently. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:29, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

I think it would make more scene if it was merged into a single page, much like this page. As for broken... well, I don't agree that inactive=broken. Just ineffective. --J.smith (talk) 21:20, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Non-free image

This image is listed as being in public domain by Serbian copyright law, but it does not fit into any of 4 reasons listed there. Therefore, I suggest it should be deleted and replaced by ordinary table in articles where it is used. --Burga (talk) 21:36, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Maybe someone who speaks serbian could talk to him. -mattbuck (Talk) 00:18, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Archiving of the Village pump

This is the second time I have brought this up: this page is far too long, currently approaching 400kb. It needs to be archived better than this. Richard001 (talk) 00:47, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks like User:MiszaBot is broken somehow. It is archiving old discussions, but then not deleting them from this page. On its next round, it will copy all the old discussions again (including the ones it copied before but did not remove). Some discussions are repeated seven times on Commons:Village pump/Archive/2008Dec. Dunno, maybe those should be deleted by hand here... maybe some odd text is throwing it off. It seems to be working on lots of other pages it is archiving. Carl Lindberg (talk) 06:29, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Someone had used a url that had (at a later time) been placed on the spam blacklist. This caused Miszabot to be unable to save the entries it wanted to save. I archived November by hand, and hopefully, Miszabot should now properly continue with December. TheDJ (talk) 16:00, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

December 16

Creator templates

Wolfgang has asked if the {{Creator}}-template could not be made a collapsible table. This would indeed be possible with only minor changes to the template itself, and no changes whatsoever anywhere else. See User:Lupo/creator for the modified template and compare it's wikitext with Template:Creator... To see this in action, a version of Creator:Vincent van Gogh using the collapsible version is at User:Lupo/creatortest, and User:Lupo/creatortest2 shows how this would look when embedded in a {{Painting}} template. Compare that to Image:Vincent Willem van Gogh 071.jpg, where the Creator-template was just tacked onto the end, apparently due to space considerations within the {{Painting}}.

Should we do this change to {{Creator}}?

Pros

• concise display, suitable to use within {{Information}} or {{Painting}}
• single change in one place

Cons:

• works only with Javascript enabled (uses MediaWiki:CollapsibleTables.js), users without JS will just see the full {{Creator}}-table.
• the strings "show" and "hide" are currently not properly localizeable. We do have system messages for these at MediaWiki:Show and MediaWiki:Hide and subpages thereof (e.g. MediaWiki:Show/fr and MediaWiki:Hide/fr), but the script that does the collapsing stuff (MediaWiki:CollapsibleTables.js) doesn't use them. Don't know how difficult it would be to make that script use these messages. A simpler solution would be to use some graphic character for these show/hide links, such as ↵/✗ or something like that...

What do you think? Lupo 22:03, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I think it looks great. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:27, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

"Vincent van Gogh" would be better than "Gogh, Willem Vincent van". /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 22:33, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Now that has got nothing to do with the table being collapsible. It appears that all Creator templates use the "Lastname, Firstname" for the name of the artist, but are located at "Creator:Firstname Lastname". No idea why, but it doesn't really matter. Lupo 07:44, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

vG is great anyways ;))) -- admittedly this ("Yorck project") was one of the few cases where people (creators) were quoted the "non-wiki" way. Wolfgang (talk) 02:42, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

support collapsibility. i have often removed these because they are so unsightly and don't integrate with standard templates. 65.96.164.13 12:54, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I think it is great. Can we also make this change to {{Photographer}}. Other problem I have with this template is the automatic creation of the directory based on Creator's name. In the past I always try to have separate directory for paintings/photographs BY creator and OF creator, Which at the moment are all mixed together and will have to get separated at some point. --Jarekt (talk) 18:41, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Agree with Jarekt on refusing "automatic" categorizing: This seems helpful at first glance, but may cause problems quite often. One way to deal with, is possibly "overriding" the preset category by setting another parameter for one special file, as M. Manske did for {{Kröller-Müller Museum}}, but I (meanwhile) feel that if such templates would not categorize "by themselves" at all, this would be easier to handle, and be more comprehensive for most [at least: many] users. Wolfgang 19:50, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Automatic categorizing is not done by {{Creator}}! It's done in individual entries in the Creator namespace. E.g. Creator:Edward McCartan uses the {{Creator}} template to structure the brief biographical data, and then contains some categories and, since McCartan was a sculptor, includes any images that use {{Creator:Edward McCartan}} in category Category:Sculptures by Edward McCartan. If an artist was active in several areas (painting and photography, for instance), or if the artist created only one or two main collections of works, it's easy to add parameters to the Creator-namespace entry to put things in different categories automatically. See Creator:Carl Nebel for an example. Or, just make the Creator:X entry always categorize any file in Category:X, and add the appropriate categories ("Photos by X", "Photos of X", ...) manually. I've never understood why some people consider it bad when a file is categorized in both a parent and a child category... Lupo 11:22, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Ooops. I noticed this comment as late as tonight. Concerning vG, I think it would help to keep the category clean if this would be switched off after_all_new_file_descriptions_are_made, which will place the files in appropriate sub-categories (will not happen before the end of this year, I'm afraid). So, the CAT:vG should not contain any files at this point, and later uploads which might be done with less care would show up immediately. I just know that the cat contained 352 items, a few days ago, but 355 today, so there were 3 uploads of which I only "catched" one, because the uploader linked it in the gallery. Besides, any similar category containing more than ~200 files will be quite difficult to survey. Wolfgang 08:05, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

• I've gone ahead and made the change. It will need some time to trickle through all pages using this template. (Which is also why I asked here before doing it. Edit-warring/reverting on often used templates is a bad idea.) If you see a non-collapsible Creator-template somewhere, just purge the page manually (adding "?action=purge" to the URL does the trick). I've also changed "show"/"hide" to "▼"/"▲" as used by MediaWiki:NavFrame.js, so there's no localization issue anymore. Lupo 11:33, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

tl|X-Museum

I (programming=0) did by copy+paste and overwriting former content of another trial version, {{Oil on canvas}}, by user:Dschwen, the collapsible "Museum" template {{Van Gogh Museum}}, for my favourite project. Questions:

1. Can there be anything wrong on such?
2. Can someone have a look at it and improve? I try to explain my wishes (which imo are reasonable and useful to any project concerning any major collections) on Category_talk:Vincent_van_Gogh#Template:X_Museum where unfortunately there is little traffic (unless I go there ;} Of course I could ask same questions here, additionally, if required, but I'm reluctant and would prefer to keep things together where they are hot for the moment. --Wolfgang (talk) 02:42, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Aren't you trying to put too many things onto image description pages? How about simply linking to Van Gogh Museum and let users use the interwiki links given there if they want to navigate to the encyclopedia page about this museum? Is it really necessary to repeat these links on each and every painting that is in that museum? Lupo 12:10, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I think it is (partially) up to the community to find out what might meet better average user's needs. My idea was, that an en=0 user from jp, zh, ar, ... who opens the file might be unhappy about being just linked to en COM:category page. For sure, if there is a page on same museum in their language (or one langusge they'd understand better than en).

But it is also an issue about "reasonable expense": I have no idea whether what I suggested might "burden" servers in an undesirable way. Therefore, no problem to me if such would not be welcome, or difficult to realize, here, at the moment. Wolfgang 14:42, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Similar to be used for galleries

Please have a look at User talk:W./Van Gogh by date and location (introduction, and files "Boy with a sickle", "Potato Eaters" and "Starry Night Over the Rhone" as examples. What do you think about that? I mean, compare such to Vincent van Gogh#Potato / Pommes de terre / Aardappelen /Kartoffel, two files "Potato Eaters", or, even worse, the descriptions of "Starry Night Over the Rhone" with same in "my way" ;). I'd however need help on adapting {{Size}} (it is totally off my limits to do an adapted dummy/sample of thisone).

• Such dummy should mainly disallow word-wrap of the output, except before the opening bracket
• It would look nicer if within gallery descriptions only one font would be used.
• I'd call it SSize, SmallSize, Size_cm or similar, and it could omit everything but calculation for cm=>in and probably vice-versa. If it's name would be Size_cm, parameter_1=cm could be preset.

Having found out that English is the standard language on COM, I omitted the EN-language tags for the collapsible templates I created today, {{VGM}}, {{KMM}} and {{O c}}, in order to shorten display. Hope we can talk about this, here? Wolfgang 10:17, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

@Lupo: If you support my idea, it would be nice if the preset of {{FoldHead}} would just be like for "Creator", i.e. just the symbol within square brackets. Up to now I have to add a dot or "+" to keep it short, which still waists space. Thanks, Wolfgang 10:43, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Made the text optional, removed the "more" default. Can't do square brackets without changing the Javascript, though. Maybe rather change the JS for the {{Creator}} to not produce the square brackets? Lupo 10:53, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

I think that these brackets gently emphasise the "button", which felt useful to me. Besides, I thought that both would be same js, and that the display as in {{FoldHead}} just would be a special "set" of tl|creator, rather than possibly "the other way round".

Until it is more broadly discussed, I'd say, leave it as-is, by now. I'm still very uncertain about multingual articles/galleries [about which I try to make up my mind for almost one year longer than those 8 weeks I work on vG, recently].

Another possible approach would be, imo, to write one "master" gallery in English, say [inexistent] "_Van Gogh" and to allow+encourage complete translations on COM, like _Van Gogh/de, ... _Van Gogh/nl, _Van Gogh/zh.

The situation as-is, in e.g. Vincent van Gogh, is by no doubt the least pleasant solution way do do it. Wolfgang 14:53, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

On {{KMM}} I recently did a slightly different proposal for those "slim-ones". Feedback would be most welcome, especially compared to {{VGM}}. In case anyone has a better idea, just edit one of those (preferably, imo, VGM, or, even better, use something like e.g. {{HER}} for The Hermitage [who hold but a couple of vG's, but that is not the point at all -- we're talking about multilinguality in file descriptions and galleries.]) and drop a note here.

I besides ask whether a similar solution could not possibly be used generally (i.e., overwriting {{Kröller-Müller Museum}} and {{Van Gogh Museum}} by the output of this talk, whilst keeping templates "KMM" and "VGM" as redirects? I'm a lazy old man, u_know ;), and would like to address ~60% of the vG oeuvre (~2200 pieces at all) by such shortcut ;))) ???

Besides: {{KMM}} and {{VGM}} are probably not well-categorized. I left some hidden text in both of them. Can any more experienced COM user "put them on the place where they belong" ? Thanks, Wolfgang 02:40, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

December 10

Hoaxes

(concerning image file uploads): When doing my best to cleanup Category:Vincent van Gogh, I find some user:Search.nr who seems to refer to e.g. "collection_slomovic" (no data by Google, therefore with high probability inexistent) and quite obviously just does his jokes. See, e.g. File:Verso paul gauguin_.jpg. How to deal with such?

IMO, it would be best to SPEEDY ALL the stuff he uploaded without having more than (possibly) one more close look at it, and to block this clown infinitely. Anything else would imo be waist of time. I however put the question here. Wolfgang 13:51, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

May be obvious to you, but not to me. However, I'd agree with speedy. An uploader who just gives "uknow" as author and uploads (at a first glance apparently genuine) certificates (File:Vincent van gogh labo.pdf, File:Paul gauguin labo.pdf)from an apparently reknowned certification institute (which are copyrighted anyway) is not trustworthy. That institute Matthaes appears to be genuine, even if it appears to be a family business and their website looks a bit amateurish.[6][7][8] It's either a rather elaborate hoax, or a plain copyvio. Lupo 14:37, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

BTW, it's possible that this "Collection Slomovic" also might exist for real:[9][10][11] (though the last 2 are from the same site), [12], and according to Google, this is also about Slomovic's collection. Lupo 14:44, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Also try googling for "chlomovitch"... Lupo 14:47, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. A non-elaborate hoax would be a pretty poor one, hä? ;) -- to me (POV), thisone seems just the way hoaxes are to be made:

No question that there was some Mr. Slomovic/Shlomovic/Chlomovic, and that there obviously existed a collection which might have been called HIS. From quoted sources, I rather read that there was a Mr. Vollard, who allowed/encouraged befriended Slomovich to take part of his (saleable) collection away to later Yougoslavia.

Concerning Wikipedia/COM, I still do think it would be better to "freeze" these contributions (I think if they are speedydeleted, they still are in the archives to be restored on reasonable request. In the (imo quite improbable) case, uploader shows up and gives evidence, they might be restored "at low cost". Same, in case any user ever claims [even more improbable, IMO, as the files are not used]. From my POV, it is about preventing to ridiculize COM. Wolfgang 16:22, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Certainly sounds like a legitimate story. Here is the 1989 Yugoslav movie mentioned, and here is a book apparently on the collection, and this is the investigative book mentioned in the articles (with a preview of a few pages). This page also discusses the "Shlomovich Collection". I find it pretty hard to believe this is a hoax. If they are by the artists they say they are... presumably images of just the paintings would be fine under PD-Art, provided the artist died long enough ago (e.g. not Picasso). The two PDFs should be deleted obviously. As to the rest... probably should be in their own category, but I'm not sure it should be labeled as suspiciously as that. Most of the documentation on this stuff is probably either in French, Serbian, or other Yugoslav language, and probably isn't too easy to search on for English users. It's quite likely the uploader wasn't very good with English either. Carl Lindberg (talk) 03:11, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The quoted page says that a ~350 items Shlomovic collection exists in that Belgrad museum (the one I checked yesterday disagreed to some extent, calling it rather [part of] Ambroise Vollard collection ). There is however no proof at all that the files uploaded under the nick search.nr [sounds imo pretty much like "catch me if you can"] and claimed to have been created by some "uknow" have anything to do whith that collection.

I'd therefore propose to handle those uploads, unless they would be deleted, like the quoted Serbian National Museum does: Hide them in some cave, where visitors would only be allowed to see them "on special request" -- "at the entrance" ;)) -- for an encyclopedia, such stuff is imo inappropriate to displayed to the whole world, undocumented "as-is." Any wikipedia contributor is told to give evidence on his/her contributions -- such should apply to mysterious user:search.nr as well. Wolfgang 10:11, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

One of the uploaded photos (File:Paul_gauguin_collection_slomovic.jpg_face.jpg) appears to be this painting, which has higher-resolution versions there. That site also seems to have a more technical analysis paper. The two uploaded PDFs also seem legitimate (copyright violations, but legitimate). They seem to indicate the examined paintings do come from the expected era (but don't go any further). On balance, it fells correct -- it is highly likely that some of Van Gogh's/Gaugin's/other paintings have been lost over the decades and undocumented. For the most part, the way you have put them into a separate category for less-well-documented images is a good idea. Labeling them "an experienced user recommends you don't use these" though is somewhat dubious -- that implies a context, and Commons typically doesn't get into "recommendations". Labeling them as a "hoax" without any supporting evidence is also not a good idea. Hiding them or deleting them just because they have provenance questions is even worse... I haven't seen any indication that they are any different than represented while trying to research them. I would simply document as much as we know -- these purport to come from the Slomovic Collection, which has a somewhat checkered past and therefore less confidence of accuracy, but is partially documented. Let people choose to use them (or not) based on their info or context (and obviously add more information if they can). I do have some doubts though on the copyright status of some of the extreme close-ups, or photos taken under a very different light -- do those still qualify for PD-Art? Especially File:Signature vincent recadrée 2 full engraver.jpg, which seems to be File:Gravure vincent van gogh romero .jpg under a different light. Carl Lindberg (talk) 00:22, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, if you prefer, call it "undocumented stuff" or whatever. The point is imo that any other contribution to WP should be proven by some source, whereas thisone seems to go "just as-is". I did not care much about the label (which was created for "van Gogh pieces 'in doubt'" before I noticed that uploader), but just tried to minimize damage to WP's credibility "ASAP". Call such a warning, if "recommentadation" seems undue, -- I somehow tried to separate contributions which may be taken seriously from more-or-less obvious bullshit. Wolfgang 15:18, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Probably, the link to the foul vG-file is not self-explanatory: I wanted to say that we had an upload from Yorck project which definitely did not show the quoted piece in VGM, but a poorly made replica. 20th century-made, very probably, therefore actually a copyvio too. Wolfgang 10:29, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Sure, to a point -- this is Commons though, not Wikipedia, and there are some differences. If media is properly licensed, we usually want to keep it, and issues like the above are more ones of labeling/documentation rather than deletion. Other than the copyvio part, counterfeit paintings can be interesting on those terms alone (maybe someone would do a wikibook on the topic, or even a section on the van Gogh page so that people can learn to tell the difference, or something like that), provided they are clearly labeled that way. (As a side note, there is nothing on File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 033.jpg to indicate the older version is a fake, leaving it very vulnerable to someone reverting "to the higher-resolution version" at some point. When making re-uploads, the big text area becomes the revision comment; it is a good idea to fill them out... maybe something should be added to the talk page.) The Slomovic stuff seems a lot more reasonable than that -- pretty likely to be genuine actually. The PDFs were uploaded to give them some credibility I would think -- that does qualify as a source kinda, though we will need to delete the PDFs themselves. Potential users just need to be able to take into account the quality of the source to determine if it fits their need. Well-formatted galleries of known, documented van Gogh paintings are just one of the possible uses of the media (a very good one, but not the only one), and lack of usability on that gallery doesn't mean we should delete them. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:19, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Let's leave aside Slomo~/Chlomo~/Shlomovic, for a first step. I noted thisone, and may-or-may-not be wrong. On File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 033.jpg I please ask you to clarify in simple EN, what seemed/was wrong on my statement that there are but two ~"definite" versions of this pic (actually, the generally accepted "definitve" version is just the one held by VGM), and the one we=COM had in this file until recently, which was for-sure-not the one claimed by the file description since 2005, i.e.: VGM's. The copyvio is still visible, but it was, as of now, a makeshift repair "at low cost". See file history. Wolfgang 15:52, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

No arguments -- I was just saying that there was nothing on the image description page at all to say why the new, lower-resolution version was uploaded on top of the old one. Without such an indication, it is quite easy for someone less-informed to think the higher-resolution version is preferable and to revert to it. It would probably be safer to delete the old revision since if it is a fake, the copyright status is probably too vague anyways. I was just saying the reason for your re-upload should be documented on the image page (or the image's talk page), that's all. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:54, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for informing on thisone -- I'm going to do so, soon. I actually wanted to wait with that until my DR (which I withdrew, after overwriting, to avoid extra-work for unlinking the file in exotic languages) would be archived, so that one can permanently link to the talk where it's explained. Wolfgang 07:51, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Requesting Removal of Deletion Guideline

If Commons files are not obscene or profane, but do not pertain to anything in Wikimedia Foundation, then why delete them? They will not cause any harm. Plus, they can not be uploaded in many other Websites without the uploaders giving personal information or paying for it. I say that if the files are kid-friendly, then why delete them at all? -BlueCaper (talk) 21:04, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello BlueCaper. We have a purpose and a mission. We have limited resources in order to fulfill that mission. Please see our Commons:Project Scope document for a discussion of what our mission and purpose is. There are other projects out there on the Internet (flicker, creativecommons, etc) that do not have the same scope that we have and accept a different range of media. --J.smith (talk) 21:11, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Also, we don't delete images just because they're obscene. We may delete penises, because we have enough amateur photos of people photographing their own penis, but commons is not censored, and that an image is not "kid-friendly" as you put it is no reason to delete. As for why we don't allow all photos, the idea of Commons is to provide educational images, particularly images which could be of value to one or more wikimedia projects. A photo of, eg, your friends, is very unlikely to have any value or use to anyone but your friends - no project would want it - and almost certainly has no educational value. Thus, if it's just taking up server space, why should we host it? We are not a webhost, there are plenty of free services you could use for that. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:31, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

(Offtopic: Though wikimedia commons is often abused as a webhoster due to embedding images from Commons to websites like skyscrapercity. Just want to mention this because im very discontent about how our narrow ressources are wasted. --Martin H. (talk) 07:48, 14 December 2008 (UTC))

If they are using one of your photos and using it without respect to your copyrights you could have a lawer write a threatening letter. J.smith (talk) 04:30, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

December 14

Google LIFE archive

Google Images recently released an archive of images by LIFE: [13]. Perhaps it would be of use to us? -- King of Hearts (talk) 00:35, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

It will, however, be necessary to determine whether an image has been published or not. If published, 1923 is OK; otherwise, we need 1800s. -- King of Hearts (talk) 00:44, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Not for most, but some. See Commons:Village pump/Archive/2008Nov#Google_and_LIFE_magazine_images. Carl Lindberg (talk) 00:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

File:Marlin 35 rem 2.jpg

Could an en admin check the licence of this file? 'Couse it's disputed.--Sanandros (talk) 15:32, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not an admin, so I can't see if the original license was GFDL, but it was uploaded to en-wiki by the attributed user (en:User:Rickochet) on February 27, 2006, with the same comment which is in the description. What would be disputed? Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:49, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

The original license was "{{PD}}", included in the original upload. Together with the self-made claim, that would be {{PD-user-en|Rickochet}}. Lupo 16:22, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Individual ships by name

Question about policy. User:Mtsmallwood is creating a separate schema for Category:Motor ships by name. I don't see the advantage to separate Motorships and suggested him to use Category:Ships by name or Category:Ships by individual names. Is that an good suggestion? If yes, first, second or other?

In that case we can all work together to bring the complete Commons fleet under Name, IMO number and the European barges under similar ENI number. I suggest to add the IMO and ENI numbers to the name of the category, because many ships have the same name and these numbers don't change after renaming. And use the standard Wikipedia Ship prefix.

Examples:

• Merchant navy
  • Category:RMS Britannic (Ocean liner 1929) becomes in that case:
  • Category:RMS Britannic IMO 1162316
• Barges:
  • Category:MV Stella Maris ENI 03011455

Comments? --Stunteltje (talk) 12:37, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but I think that the most useful category is the list of all ship names. Most people know the name of a ship without prefixes or even less the IMO/ENI number. Most people hardly know what type of ship it is or for what it is used. So a general Category:Ships by name category would allow for a first level classification and easy lookup. --Foroa (talk) 14:14, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean a list or a category? I don't see any problem with a list, as double or even more the same names can exist in a list for reference. But if you prefer a category, you can't have the same names. --Stunteltje (talk) 23:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I will give it a try with a few ships in a category. --Stunteltje (talk) 06:29, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Anyway, ships with the same name cannot share the same category name. The list in Category:Ships by name looks good. I don't think that it is realistic to expect on Commons a formal ship category naming system that needs a lot of discipline and knowledge. --Foroa (talk) 07:09, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Used KISS. Transferred the content to Category:Ships by alphabet. The only problem left is that individual files of ships have to be categorised in an own category, if they have to be shown in this category. I arrived at 400 ships by IMO number and that means ships of Finland. So probably we will have approx 2000 to 2500 individual ships in Commons. I myself will not start categorising each individual ship, if she is not well known. --Stunteltje (talk) 09:06, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Lilypond Pluggin also for the Wikimedia?

I saw in a German Wiki for teachers that this Wiki uses the Lilypond Pluggin.

• http://wiki.zum.de/Hilfe:Notensatz

Is it possible to furnished this Pluggin also for the Wikimedia? It would be enormously helpful for all music projects! (wikibooks...) --Mjchael (talk) 16:04, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't think we do - see Special:Version. However, a replacement extension may be in the works. We have been asking for it for quite some time.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 19:58, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

December 17

Commons:Anonymous works

Hi, i often see peoples mistaking anonymous work with author's informations missing, and there was no guideline to explain the difference. I think it's a common issue, and that people might need some explanations on the legal concept behind the real anonymous creative work. Thus, this wannabe guideline page Unfortunatly, i'm not that good in english, and i would like some help for correcting and expending it. Thank you very much ! Lilyu (talk) 03:29, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree that it is important distinction, however your guideline does not help in distinguishing the two. I run into many images scanned from books that do not mention authors. Sometimes author is truly unknown, and sometimes authors/publishers did not include any names with the photographs and sometimes photographers might have chosen to be anonymous - most of the time one does not know enough about images to tell the difference. Some other images I have seen were very old family pictures, when upload did not know which long-dead family member took the picture. --Jarekt (talk) 04:10, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Copyright issue about 1906 Milan World Fair

I would like to uplod a series of images (actually, the "Official" series of postcards) concerning the 1906 World Expo in Milan (Italy). The lot was published by publisher Pilade Rocco and bears on the back of each images the following copyright warning: "Il Comitato dell'Esposizione inibisce a chiunque di riprodurre con mezzi grafici gli edifici dell'Esposizione, dei quali gode la proprietà artistica": "The Exhibition Committee forbids anybody from reproducting by means of any graphic technique the buildings of the Exhibition, whose artistic rights it owns".

Has anybody any idea about the copyright status of such images? Many other images of the Expo, to begin with its marvellous poster by Leopoldo Metlicovitz (1868-1944), or the drawings by Mario Stroppa (1880-1964), or the photographs by Luca Cornerio (1878-1940), are still copyrighted because of their authors death dates.

However, could the official series of postcards by a collective entity such as the Exhibition Committee have followed the 70 years rule for corporate works?

Can anyone help? Thenk you. --User:G.dallorto (talk) 06:04, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

feature wishlist

Commons:Features is currently inactive, "kept for historical interest" as the notice there says. I think it would be nice to archive those old comments and restart the page as a centralized wishlist of both features the community would like to have, and features long awaited that have already been implemented (either natively or via gadgets/tools/scripts/whatever). What do you think? --Waldir ^talk 13:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Note: the section immediately above is a good example of how that page could be useful :) --Waldir ^talk 13:48, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I want commons to have a sandwich dispenser. Oh, and a very big laser to destroy my enemies with. -mattbuck (Talk) 14:52, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Footnote.com

Footnote.com has released WW II documents and photos from NARA which are mostly in the Public Domain. The website is free for a limited time. I would like to suggest to ignore http://www.footnote.com/termsandconditions/ forbidding re-use of PD works. One can use sockpuppets to upload PD media from footnote.com. (According to German law there are serious doubts that there is a binding contract.) Contractual conditions are not relevant for us (our position since years). --Historiograf (talk) 14:55, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

"Get a poster of this picture" on fr.wikipedia.org

Hello,
On fr, we've just added a new link/menu on picture pages to get a poster of the picture. It has just started with a first French printer WikiPosters.
I think that's worth announcing this here. If you're interested, I translated the project page and a small press release. Plyd (talk) 16:53, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

English Project Page: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Impression/en English Press Release: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Impression/Press_Release

I commented here about issues with the current statistics system. As it is implemented now it constitutes a clear license violation, since wikiposter offerst the images for download without any mention of license or author. --Dschwen (talk) 17:07, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Apart from that (fixable) detail, I think the overall idea is nice. Is a fraction of the proceeds being donated to Wikimedia? --Dschwen (talk) 17:08, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

The link « Obtenir un poster de cette image » is only there if your language is set to French. - Erik Baas (talk) 17:27, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Really ? I'm suprised. I am checking this issue. Plyd (talk) 17:47, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

ARRRGH that's a trick I used to bypass javascript 30days cache. To make a synchronized start of the project and being able to fix bugs faster than in one month", the version of the javascript for the menu is in the interface messages. Unfortunately, the interface messages are different for all languages... So I added the version link on "en", but that will not make the menu appear on other languages. I don't have any better idea... Plyd (talk) 18:26, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

To answer my own question about the donations: Avant même de commencer, WikiPosters a envoyé un don de 1000€ au projet. De plus, ils reversent à Wikimédia France 1,50€ de don pour chaque commande de poster.. So before the project started WikiPosters donated 1000€ to Wikimedia, and for each order 1.50€ are donated. Sounds good to me. --Dschwen (talk) 17:38, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

They may have trouble complying with GFDL-only licenses... ;-) Carl Lindberg (talk) 05:17, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Do the images attribution of the author and have the same licensing on the poster then the uploaded image? Bidgee (talk) 05:47, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

According to fr:Projet:Impression, "the printer prints a separate page with licence data (with the content of the page associated to the page and the GFDL if necessary)". Pruneau^talk 09:02, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Who's to say if it does do that? As a photographer my images are free to use but only if the licensing is followed. I've dealt with a number of sites and companies which breach the licensing. Is there any way to have a sample on what it looks like (Poster and separate page)? Really I'll rather have a space below the poster (which is done to paintings and some posters but it's not located on the image itself just below it). I'n just sick of everyone claiming images I've taken claim as there own and I don't need my work load increased if I've found that a project has misused my images that I've taken and uploaded or I may as well give up on contributing on Commons and Wiki. Bidgee (talk) 09:41, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

This was done during the test period. Now it is a bit changed (a new header and links smaller) 1, 2, 3 et 4. (from DocteurCosmos) Plyd (talk) 15:08, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

I made the menu multi-language so it is now easy to add languages.

The menu can now be displayed in French and English languages (in preferences)... Plyd (talk) 09:06, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

December 18

Category:WikiProjects

Is there a reason this category is so heavily populated? (1235 images as I type this) It seems many images were added by a script/bot, but no explanation is provided for adding the image to this category, other than using data from Commons:Tools#CommonSense (for example, this edit and this edit by BotMultichill). In my opinion, none of these images reflects the purpose of the category, and should be removed from it. Mindmatrix (talk) 16:52, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

I assume Category:WikiProjects is a category holding categories of each project and as such should not have any images. There seem to be a lot of categories like that (for example most children of Category:Categories by country). Do/Should we have any template to mark that category is not expected to have any images? Then Commons:Tools#CommonSense could skip those, and it might be easier to find misclassified images. --Jarekt (talk) 18:28, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Would be nice to have more people working on Category:Media needing category review. This way any errors are removed faster. We could just remove all images from this category, but that still leaves these images unchecked. I checked a bunch of images in Category:WikiProjects and most of them do contain the valid categories so checking them is quite fast. Multichill (talk) 20:36, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

December 19

Brooklyn Museum Licenses Works Under CC

Hello everybody.

Information : it's forbidden to upload some image from :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklyn_museum/

because they are under CC by-nc-nd license.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11637

--ComputerHotline (talk) 17:36, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

"City" vs. "Settlement"

Is there a convention here for the use of "City" vs. "Settlement" in category names? "City" seems to be the dominant form (Category:Settlements in Botswana redirects to Category:Cities in Botswana in one example) but it seems a bit misleading, esp. for United States categories. Maybe I'm too enwiki-centric but the convention there follows the U.S. Census where settlements are broken down into cities, census-designated places, etc. I'm not suggesting we go that far but maybe something more generic than "city" should be used for micro settlements like the 47-person Benton, Alabama. —Wknight94 (talk) 15:58, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Open Directory Project uses "localities", e.g. [14]. This seems to be the most generic term. -- 3247 (T) 19:54, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

See Category talk:Cities by country. In many countries, "cities and villages in xxx" is used to indicate any settlement (parishes, quarters, hamlets, villages, cities). --Foroa (talk) 16:23, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

December 13

Please delete older pic - human rights

Please delete immediately the older version of File:Dec2008-riot-komotini-2.jpg and the cropped file File:Dec2008-riot-komotini-2 M-cropped - ITN.jpg due to human rights violation!!!--Dimorsitanos (talk) 17:55, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The right to assault the police without being identified? --Kjetil_r 18:07, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Exatly! Wikipedia is not the CIA.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 18:16, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

• I'm not qualified to take that decision, but I hope that the unblurred version of File:Dec2008-riot-komotini-2.jpg will not get deleted. With half their faces covered, the persons on the pictures are not identifiable as it is. If this version is kept, I would like to see your changes reverted. And by the way, human rights might is a very strong term to describe this issue; I guess you meant personality rights. --Tryphon (talk) 18:09, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

No, I meant human rights. It's not a case of violating the privacy of a person. This may be considered as filing the people indicated.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 19:54, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

They are in a public space, per our policy at Commons:Photographs of identifiable people, the subject's consent is not usually needed for a straightforward photograph of an identifiable individual taken in a public place. This is a public place. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:59, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

No, de:Recht_am_eigenen_Bild.  Doneabf /talk to me/ 18:10, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, it's a shame, their looks made the picture very powerful. But if it's the policy, then I see that we don't have a choice. --Tryphon (talk) 18:21, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Note, there is no File:Dec2008-riot-komotini-2 M-cropped - ITN.jpg abf /talk to me/ 18:15, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Stell die mal wieder her: Es gibt von RaeB eine Ausnahme für Personen die an Versammlungen, Aufzügen und ähnlichen Vorgängen teilgenommen haben. Auch eine illegale gewalttätigte Demo ist eine Versammlung. (siehe § 23 I Nr. 3 KunstUrhG). Ausnahmen dieser Art sind allgemein verbreitet und auch von der EMRK und der UN-Menschenrechtscharta gedeckt. sугсго 18:18, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Ausnahme von der Ausnahme? *gnah* naja, wart mal lieber die Diskussion ab, vorsichtig sein is mir erstmal lieber. abf /talk to me/ 18:21, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

There was a cropped version at the english wikipedia main page! Search for similar files circulated!--Dimorsitanos (talk) 18:20, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

It is a shame to blur these out. The image is unblurred elsewhere and I think it makes us look like idiots. J.smith (talk) 18:24, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, this is the unblared cropped version. Please replace it!!![15]--Dimorsitanos (talk) 18:33, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

It is under a free license at http://www.flickr.com/photos/14334763@N05/3094893857/ I see no reason for censorship. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 18:53, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The free license of the photographer doesn't necessarily state the consent of the indicated people to be uploaded on the net! If Flickr violates human rights doesn't mean wiki should do too.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 19:06, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

There is no violation of any human right. sугсго 19:11, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, your it's your call when you receive a letter from a lawyer. The warning was given above.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 19:23, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Maybe you should explain in more detail why you feel that human rights are violated by this picture; you were not very verbose about that when you first asked for deletion. In my opinion, the faces on the picture are not recognizable enough to justify blurring, and the picture looses all interest with the faces blurred. --Tryphon (talk) 19:26, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

It is rather strange to delete images by referring to German law. Although the rioters may have an interest in blurring their faces, I would expect that Greek judges would set the public interest higher. Please undelete. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 19:35, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

These are university students of Komotini, a small town in Greece, recognizable by their eyes. An internal circular was rumoured to have leacked by the Ministry of Education in Greece, asking for the educators going to the protests to be named and face the consequencies. Noone can guarantee something similar could not happen for the students. Filing is an illegal action, according to the greek constitution and such actions that may take place behind the lights of publicity constitute a violation of human rights, according to greek law. There isn't really much more to explain. It's up to you to decide what's best for the wiki foundation.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 19:42, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I've restored the older version, and tagged it with personality rights. Our general policy, AFAIK, is that anyone who is in a public space has no right to expect that no photos be taken of them. If they didn't want to have their faces used in this manner, then maybe they shouldn't have been throwing molotov cocktails. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:51, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, it's your call. The warning was given. You should keep in mind though that legal action may be taken in due time.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 19:56, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

There are no grounds for legal action against the WMF over this. They are hosting an image of people in a public place. That those people are engaged in an act of civil disobedience is utterly irrelevant, as is whether or not it is possible to identify them. If they're in public, they're fair game. If they wanted to conceal themselves properly, there are two obvious solutions. 1 - wear a mask or sunglasses. 2 - don't engage in a riot. -mattbuck (Talk) 20:03, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I consider this discussion over, but keep in mind that participation in an action of filing is also considered illegal in Greece, regardless of what justice decides on their actions themselves, if called to do so.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 20:15, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Wikimedia's computers are situated at a particular place on the planet where a particular set of legislation is in force (US and Florida law). There are different laws in other places and whoever uploaded the image might have broken the law where they are. Mirror sites might be breaking the law where they are based. Viewers of some images (not necesarilly this one) might be breaking the law where they are. But vague warnings that the law somewhere may be a problem somewhere else need substantiation.--Peter cohen (talk) 20:19, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm aware of the fact that Wikimedia's computers are in Florida, although I'm not aware of the US law on the matter. The warning above was not necessarily aiming at the Wikimedia Foundation offices in Florida. It was aiming at any particular person or organization breaking the law according to the greek constitution, or the law of the country the action or participation took place, as you clarify yourself. I hope I have made that clear.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 20:25, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Under US and Florida law, there is no need for consent if the individual is in a public place and has no reasonable expectation of privacy. Please see Commons:Non-copyright restrictions. --J.smith (talk) 21:16, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

AFAIK, there is no problem even under greek law, there is no provision that a photographer needs the consent of an individual that appears in a photo taken in a public place. There are restrictions protecting the personality of the individual, but it is the individual himself (or someone having legal interest) who can demand of his picture taken down if he insists that his personality is damaged. Geraki ^T_L^G 21:49, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it's true that I am not a representative of these spesific people who may not even be aware of the fact that their faces have been circulating around the net. I asked for the blurring of the picture for the interest of Wikipedia itself, as well as avoiding a greater moral firing of violent incidents in Greece after a possible filing of people in a small town, for the interest of the greek government and stability in the region. How many times do I have to clarify that I never talked about personality rights in particular?--Dimorsitanos (talk) 22:22, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thank you for your concern. However, we don't make it a practice to self-censor our images due to concerns that people will freak out. See en:Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy. We received, and continue to receive e-mails from various people about that regularly. --J.smith (talk) 23:55, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm glad this ridiculous suggestion that we should be blurring their faces isn't getting anywhere. I doubt that there is any real restriction under Greek law which prevents taking photos of people in a public place and I don't see how doing so violates anyone's human rights. Adambro (talk) 23:55, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I withdraw the proposal.--Dimorsitanos (talk) 03:07, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Romanian National Archives Photos

http://fototeca.arhivelenationale.ro/ Can anybody contact the Archives in Romanian language to verify my impression that für the use only the source has to be mentioned (according the copyright notice under the pictures). If the Archives confirms that the phtos can be used commercially and for derivate works we can use them --Historiograf (talk) 22:33, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

See also http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cafenea#Fototeca_online_a_comunismului_rom.C3.A2nesc --Historiograf (talk) 22:52, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

I got the same impression from reading that copyright notice, that the images are free to use if they are properly attributed. I did email them three days ago and I am still waiting for an answer. I will send another email soon if they don't answer :D. Andrei Stroe (talk) 01:07, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

I have just received an answer from the National Archives, stating that what is written in the „Usage rights” section of the site actually means that those images are free to use in commercial and non-commercial works, if the source is mentioned precisely. I take that to mean that the pictures can be uploaded here as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Andrei Stroe (talk) 12:00, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, CC-BY requires an explicit release under that license. it's better to create a speceial template for that. Bogdan (talk) 00:23, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I created a category, Category:Fototeca online a comunismului românesc, (sorry, I'm not sure what the name would be in English, so I kept the Romanian name of the database) where I uploaded a few pictures as a proof of concept. If the details are insufficient, please, fill them in as necessary. At ro.wp someone also suggested we make a template that we put in the file description page to show its source. Andrei Stroe (talk) 17:37, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

A new tag can be used: {{FOCR}} (e.g. {{FOCR|id=33540X1X58}}) plus {{Cc-by-sa-3.0-ro}} for these images. As for the license, even if the Archives didn't release the material specifically under that license, the usage conditions corresponds 100% to those of the {{Cc-by-sa-3.0-ro}}--Alex:D (talk) 20:12, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

December 15

I created some tables, and I would like some advice...

Two days ago Tariq el Sawah was charged before a Guantanamo military commission. The DoD published some new documents -- including an official table of his weights. Carol Rosenberg, writing in the Miami Herald, remarked on the wild fluctuations in his weight. I plotted those fluctuations. They show weight gains and losses of over one hundred pounds over just weeks, or days.

I decided to plot the weight gains and losses of some other captives. The ones I have created so far are uploaded to Category:Guantanamo captives' weights.

I would appreciate advice over good tools to use for this kind of table. I used python, and its wckgraph library for the last three tables: [16], [17], [18]. I had to use irfanview to take a screenshot of the tables. For the first two tables [19], [20] I abused an online map tool.

I used irfanview to apply the labels to the last three tables I made -- again not ideal.

I'd like to mark the points of each weigh-in.

I'd like to avoid the vertical line at the beginning of the table.

I'd like thicker lines.

I'd like to use a tool that generates .svg files, because, if I am not mistaken, they can be rescaled better than other image files.

Some contributors here may have doubts as to whether this kind of table fits within the project's scope. I'm interested in that kind of opinion as well.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 05:21, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I started penning a response last night but life intervened and my broadband connection took a holiday. Firstly, what you are doing are called charts not tables. Tables are differents seeen:Help:Tables, for a description of charts en:Charts. THis page seems to be the work of nl:User:Mddwho also has an English page.

If I needed a chart urgently: (There must be a better method) I would draw it in OpenOffice Write. Insert>Object>Chart>Line... etc Right click to change the border.. As I cannot save this as a png/jpeg. I would print to pager- then scan the result, this is saved as a png/jpeg. I would crop the image and upload using Commonist. The last stage is a horrible kludge- others can advise on a neater system.

-ClemRutter (talk) 10:12, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Gnuplot can do all that (and much more), and it is a free (open-source) software. It can be a little hard to use at first, but there are plenty of tutorials on the Internet, and you will get very professional-looking graphics. It is available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. --Tryphon (talk) 10:50, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes- it wasn´t in the Ubuntu repository so I had missed it. I did find RLPlot there and it selfinstalled, and it seems totally intuitive. ClemRutter (talk) 15:23, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Europe Map

Our Europe Map needs to be updated. See its talk page for the country borders that must be implemented. 78.148.251.35 19:58, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

This file needs to be updated. It dosen't have Kosovo, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Basque Country, Vojvodina, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Northern Cyprus. 62.24.251.240 11:59, 14 December 2008 (UTC) - Most of these countries aren't officially recognised by any member of the UN; it could be a little bit early to recognise them here. sугсго 23:37, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

To be more specific, of the entities on the list, only Kosovo is recognized by multiple nations. A number of the other entities (such as South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Cyprus) have one specific "sponsoring" country (such as Russia, Armenia, Turkey), but are not recognized except by the spnsoring country, and possibly 1 or 2 close allies. And furthest down the list, Euskadi and Voivodina aren't recognized by anybody, and have no de facto separate territorial control, so it would be extremely bizarre to include them on a list of independent states... AnonMoos (talk) 10:47, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

December 21

Multilingual presentations by interwiki

This is a question about multilinguality and the use of language templates. Have a quick look at category:Zealand. Is that kind of initial description in 35 languages what we should strive for? Here is how it was done: From category:Zealand, follow the interwiki link to da:kategori:Sjælland on the Danish Wikipedia, there follow the "main" link from this category to the article da:Sjælland, and there find a list of article interwiki links. For each, for example sv:Själland, apply the corresponding language template, {{sv|[[:sv:Själland|]].}} This provides an initial description in many languages, which can then be expanded manually.

This procedure can be repeated for almost every category on Commons, probably even automated with some kind of advanced interwiki bot. But is it a good idea? Does category:Zealand look good? It presents descriptions in all languages to all users. Wouldn't it be better to present only the user's own language? --LA2 (talk) 18:40, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I would prefer that the top gives only a very short description so that the user knows what is included in the category. So reduce the English description to "Zealand is the largest island of Denmark". For more info the user can follow the interwiki link of his/her language. The description should in my opinion be in a very limited number of languages. If one wants to have more translations of just the title, I prefer a table as used for plants see Category:Caprifoliaceae. Further I prefer to use the interwikis of the categories when they exist (in this case Dansk and Svenska) AND to use the interwiki links as on the page http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj%C3%A6lland for the other languages. Wouter (talk) 22:01, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

@LA2. I think any describtion should always be in English first. But there is an alternative. Especially for categories the Template:On Wikipedia has been developed to indicate the Wikipedia article on this subject, and to name the category in different languages. With this template in about 7 to 10 lines all existing languages could be mentioned, see for example Category:Physics. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 22:16, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

All of this is just in the way for images. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 22:22, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree these add-ins are in the way of navigating through. That is why in the Template:On Wikipedia the size is reduced to a minimum. It would reduce the intro in category:Zealand with about 60-80%. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 22:56, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

There are plans to enable an Interlanguage extension that hosts the interlanguage links in a central place (iw bots wouldn't be necessary anymore). With an additional feature to fetch single lines from that central repository, it would be possible to create a template {{Category for|interlanguage-id}} that would render as: "This category hosts media files related to: {name returned by the fetch operation from the interlanguage repository}" in the respective language of the user interface.

So for users with English as user language Category:Copenhagen would say: "This category hosts media files related to: Copenhagen" and for users with German as user language it would say: "Diese Kategorie enthält Mediendateien mit Bezug zu: Kopenhagen"

This solution would work without any maintenance work. --Slomox (talk) 00:44, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

I think this will be a very good solution. I guess in that case one or some lines of text, with or without a link to the article in that languages will do. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 00:52, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Wouter said: "The description should in my opinion be in a very limited number of languages." We could just as well keep Commons entirely in English, as it was originally designed, clean and neat. But the problem we're trying to solve is to make Wikimedia Commons less frightening for non-English speakers. The user interface is already translated, by user setting or by the uselang= CGI parameter. We already have language templates such as {{Sv}}. So let's use them! This is what I tried with category:Zealand. But already at 35 languages (not to mention 250 languages), the view becomes cluttered and ugly. What realistic alternatives do we have? How far away is the interlanguage extension? --LA2 (talk) 06:41, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

The extension is Bugzilla bug 15607. Brion wants some additional features. It's actually not much code, so the extension could be brought to life quite easy. If Brion said: Whoo, great feature! Let's do it! Let's fix the remaining non-integral issues by and by. it could go live tomorrow. But it seems nobody is as enthusiastic about a central interwiki repository as me... If I could bend my mind into the inner mechanics of the Mediawiki software, I would do the programming myself... So back to your How far away question: At the moment it is far away. At the current pace it will never become live. If somebody who does know the inner mechanics of Wikimedia, and is able to program, and is determined to solve the issues, if somebody like that popped up, the extension is away only few days. --Slomox (talk) 15:41, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

It would be rather trivial to hide all languages except the users UI language using javascript and style sheets. --Dschwen (talk) 19:02, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

I take that back. It wouldn't [21]. But you can add stuff to your monobook.css file as described in Commons:Multilinguality#Improvement. --Dschwen (talk) 18:23, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

categorization

Please provide input to a proposed cat scheme at Commons:Category scheme military forces and people involved in wars. Feel free to comment on the bottom of that page. I look forward to your input. Thanks! FieldMarine (talk) 01:26, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Category:Flickr review needed

We currently have a backlog of 600+ images in Category:Flickr review needed, the bot that works the category has been down for some weeks now and trusted users are needed to help process the backlog. Thanks in advance. MBisanz ^talk 06:25, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

I've checked over 200 images. Still a lot more to be done yet. Bidgee (talk) 08:56, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

I wan't to help. I ask for Flickrreviewer permission almost a week ago. Howlong do I have to wait till I can help? Abigor (talk) 09:26, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Please also pay attention to the image size, many people do not recognize the all sizes button at Flickr, i dont know why. --Martin H. (talk) 09:36, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Crazy place

User:Mutter Erde succeeded in de-adminning Gryffindor, admins felt "threatened", and now this very productive and useful user has been blocked for a year, just because he is not polite, and does not have ambitions to become an admin. See Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/User problems#Time to decide. I suppose I will be next. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 23:20, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Tja, zulke dingen hangen natuurlijk helemaal van 's mans (of 's vrouws) gedrag af... Lycaon (talk) 23:22, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

@Pieter Kuiper: should I take that as "User requested block"? Merry Christmas! abf /talk to me/ 23:24, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Was that a "threat"? /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 23:26, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

No, a question. Merry Christmas! abf /talk to me/ 23:26, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Was there any point here, or just whining? If so, there's a thread for that already on COM:AN/U. I'll meet you there.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 01:47, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

December 22

Trouble with thumbnail rendering: File:PIA10245-Martian landslide.png

Is there a known reason why this image can't render a thumbnail? I was under the impression that a PNG is always preferred to a JPG, but should I rather have saved as a JPG this time? Anrie (talk) 11:30, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

It's too big (greater than 12.5 megapixels). Basically big PNGs can blow up the resize engines because the PNG resize algorithm is memory hungry - so there is a limit that stops this happening. If you resize the image slightly smaller or re-up as a jpg it should resolve the problem. Megapixie (talk) 11:48, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I uploaded it again as File:PIA10245-Martian landslide.jpg and now it resizes fine. Anrie (talk) 11:57, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

PNGs aren't really "always preferred to a JPG" -- in photographic-type images, a PNG can have greatly increased filesize without too much ordinarily-perceptible preservation of visual quality, and the Wikimedia software process for resizing PNGs is unfortunately rather poor in several respects. What is true is that for less photographic type images (diagrams and symbols etc.), the PNG format can be more appropriate (since JPEG often has problems with sharp transitions between constant-color areas), and PNG is also better if an image needs further editing (since re-editing a JPG image can often be problematic, unless special purpose limited lossless JPG manipulation tools are used...). AnonMoos (talk) 16:35, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, it helps to understand the "why" of things... Anrie (talk) 17:58, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Pages for SUL requests

Hi, is there any pages here on Commons for SUL requests? --80.202.33.219 01:30, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I think you are looking for Special:MergeAccount. Same special pages exist on other WMF wikis. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:18, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, thats not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the place to put a request for unsurpassing an username here on commons. I'm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gorm and would like to have my username work here as well. 80.202.33.219 00:47, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Are you looking to usurp a current username? Try Commons:Changing username/usurp requests. Mindmatrix (talk) 01:05, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Images in Britannica

Has anyone seen this happening before? I noticed that the article about Imadaddin Nasimi in Britannica: [22] used the image File:Nesimi statue.JPG, created by me and released under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License, which hold that "you are free to distribute and modify the file as long as you attribute its author(s) or licensor(s)". I don't mind Britannica or anyone else using the images created by me, as that's the reason why I place them on commons under GFDL license, I just think that a credit to the creator would be nice, as that's what the terms of the license require. Do you think their notice complies with GFDL terms? Grandmaster 07:55, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I downloaded an image of a Cuban hutia -- a rodent that looks like a big rat, from a publication published in Guantanamo. It was written by a naturalist, or ranger, on staff there. But when I went to stick it in our article on the hutia I found this ranger had pinched an article taken by a German wikipedian of a hutia in a zoo in Germany.

I frequently see wire services credited for pictures I know were taken by GIs.

Cheers Geo Swan (talk) 08:45, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

BTW, good picture...

Indeed the EB picture seems to be a crop of yours. Yes, they should (at least on the image page) mention the author, for instance as "crop of a photo by Wikimedia Commons user "Grandmaster"". As it is, their use is not GFDL-compliant. They might also have chosen CC-BY-2.5, but that requires proper attribution, too. It would also be nice if the gave a link to the source image here at the Commons, so that people knew where to get the real thing. Lupo 09:18, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

At least 80 of my Commons pics are in Britannica - all credited, because I found them by Googling my name. :-) One wonders if there are additional photos, uncredited... Stan Shebs (talk) 09:50, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

If they've not adhered to the GFDL terms, normal copyright applies, so you can send them your invoice for use of the photo. Tyrenius (talk) 15:20, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

I emailed them. Let's see what happens. Thanks for your help. Grandmaster 08:04, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

bug in "no permission"-template

Something is wrong in the programming of the "no permission"-template. When I add {{subst:npd}} to an image, for example this one, the expected red-boxed message appears, containing the string {{subst:image permission|Image:PixieBobMaleAnsonroadLynxJenkinsDSC02910.JPG}} ~~~~ . When I paste that string, as told to do, onto the talkpage of the uploader, a message appears as the first one (below the welcome) on User talk:Gertrudkeazor. Now, when I click on the edit-button to the right of the message-header, in order to add a personal line or to paste the string of another copyvio etc., the edit is "led away" from the talkpage to Template:Image permission/layout. If you don't realize that, you are changing/editing the template. In fact, that happened already some times as the template history shows. Any ideas/solutions? --Túrelio (talk) 19:31, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I already asked User:Alno on this who changed many templates to the autotranslate template. This change is very favorably because the template will appear in your selected language, but the section heading is a bug of this change i think. Alno fixed this by suppressing the edit function for section headings generated by the {{Image source}}, but i dont think this is the best sollution. --Martin H. (talk) 19:48, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Why is there a "subst:" in "{{subst:image permission|Image:PixieBobMaleAnsonroadLynxJenkinsDSC02910.JPG}} ~~~~ " at all? The localization functionality only works if it is included by template. Substing doesn't do any harm, cause after substing it is still included by a template ("autotranslate"), but we could stick with "image permission" if we cannot subst it fully anyway, don't we?

The bug in question could be fixed, if the heading would be hardcoded in the user talk page. Instead of "{{subst:image permission|Image:PixieBobMaleAnsonroadLynxJenkinsDSC02910.JPG}} ~~~~ " you would include these two rows:

== {{image permission/heading}} ==

{{subst:image permission|Image:PixieBobMaleAnsonroadLynxJenkinsDSC02910.JPG}} ~~~~

image permission/heading would contain an autotranslate for the header. --Slomox (talk) 01:00, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

And there seems to be the same problem with Template:Copyvionote/fr. See here, when you click on the right-hand Edit field. --Túrelio (talk) 21:35, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Commons:Deletion requests/Carlos Latuff

Please join the discussion. The issue is rather important, and very few people bothered to read and comment. We need more opinions on this. Drork (talk) 19:20, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

December 23

Strange text in edit summary; bug?

The edit summary in File:Vila Prudente.JPG (edit · last · history · watch · unwatch · global usage · logs · purge · w · search · links · DR · del · undel · Delinker log) has a long text about the Rhodesian flag, which does not have anything to do with the image. But the file is short, and the text does not show when I try to edit this file. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 22:04, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello,

I just edited the image and removed the text. The problem is it don't show up in the editfield but it can be overwriten. So there is / was a bug. Abigor talk 22:12, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, but where could that have come from? The image shows a view in São Paulo, Brazil. I think it is unlikely that the uploader would have used a Rhodesian Encyclopedia. Is there some corruption in the database? /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 22:20, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

December 24

Encyclopaedia Rhodesia

The Rhodesian bug is spreading. Look at the soource of File:Rust_Mite,_Aceria_anthocoptes.jpg. Lycaon (talk) 00:08, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Someone had pasted that text into Template:Source missing/en. It's been fixed, but it may take a while for all the image pages where it's used to update. (Ps. The related changes tool is a good way to discover such deeply buried template problems.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 09:37, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Protected now. Lycaon (talk) 16:15, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Search by filetype

I'm often in search of free SVG images. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to suggest a search/filter based on filetypes? Or do we have something like this? Nichalp (talk) 09:13, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Special:MIMESearch should do the trick in theory. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:57, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I just put in "SVG" as one of the search terms, and it seems to work well enough in an approximate and rough-and-ready way most of the time... AnonMoos (talk) 18:02, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

The new Lucene search (not yet activated on Commons, but active on en: since October and on some other projects since yesterday, Commons hopefully will follow in the nearest future) allows to use the "intitle:" tag. So "church intitle:.svg" will find files for the search term "church" with ".svg" in their title. Try it out on de. --Slomox (talk) 12:45, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

yes, and maybe we restructure Category:SVG, as it will become increasingly useless - instead, with all it subcategories it rips themes apart: you always have to browse into eg. Category:SVG coats of arms and Category:Coats of arms, to find something (see Help talk:SVG #Categorization for that)

does Lucene allow just to search a certain category? or even a branch of categories? --W!B: (talk) 12:28, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki localisation

I would like to change a MediaWiki message, but haven't found a place were you can request such changes, so I'm putting the request here.

Would someone mind changing MediaWiki:Categorytree-member-num/sv to say:

($1 k, $2 s, $3 f)

This would make the Swedish category pages use the CPF-key that is currently used in English and German. Thanks! Väsk (talk) 08:24, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

I think you need to translate empty too. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 17:37, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Done. Väsk (talk) 12:41, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

In case anyone hasn't noticed: "Image" changed to "File"

The "Image:" namespace has been changed to "File:". External tools may need updates, but on Wikimedia sites, the old Image prefix is backwards compatible AFAIK. ViperSnake151 (talk) 23:55, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I fixed it in pywikipedia, Multichill (talk) 00:18, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I noticed {{Duplicate}} does not work. Also Gallery Details seems to be broken. --Jarekt (talk) 04:37, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Typically a case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Useless change, it will just get us more uploads in useless file formats (pdf's and stuff like that). /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 08:31, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

note: see bug 44 for background information. --:bdk: 10:16, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Pieter: This should help people realise that they can also upload sound and video files, which are very much needed. If you think that we shouldn't accept pdfs, you can start a discussion about that issue, but this change is a positive clarification. After all, Commons is (or at least should be) a free media repository, not only a free image repository. Pruneau^talk 10:40, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

It was the first thing I begin to realize when I upload the first image. At de: there are no problems if use file: instead of image: or bild:. But the toolservergallery does not work at the moment. --Herrick (talk) 11:17, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

IMO there should be an option in My preferences if you want Image: or File:. Bidgee (talk) 11:47, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

How would that be useful?  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 15:07, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Reason for template breakage are constructs like {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|Image|.. I also went over all translations of {{Duplicate}} and {{Superseded}}. Hope I caught all cases. --Dschwen (talk) 14:06, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I suppose I'll get used to it but it looks strange to see file where I was used to seeing image. KTo288 (talk) 14:28, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I, for myself, always felt somewhat strange when addressing an audio file as "image". I welcome the change (but am unaware of possibel technical problems with tools etc. which might occur). "file", to me, is a clear and neutral term. Wolfgang 14:51, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Commonshelper doesn't seem to recognise the existence of some file from en:wiki,is anyone else having problems?KTo288 (talk) 10:54, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Do you have an example? Multichill (talk) 13:06, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

I tried to transfer en:File:GROW9A.JPG earlier and en:File:GenRtBarrowUSMC hires.jpg just now, only to be told by CommonsHelper that no such files exists on en:wikipedia..KTo288 (talk) 17:53, 20 December 2008 (UTC)KTo288 (talk) 05:14, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Seems to works for me. Did you include the namespace in the Image name: field? (you shouldn't) Multichill (talk) 14:42, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Duh silly me, so thats what I've been doing wrong, my brain must have switched of for christmas, thanks for setting me right.KTo288 (talk) 21:54, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Fixed {{/FPC}} and {{Assessments}}… I just wasted my whole afternoon to fix that, so I wanted to mention it here, and to thank ChrisiPK in particular for their help to the File:File: problem (second edit) that I got when I —finally— fixed the problem (first edit). →Diti the penguin — 22:26, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

December 12

File:Idog blue.jpg

How does the community see files of objects such as File:Idog blue.jpg, as a toy or as an utilitarian object?KTo288 (talk) 16:57, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

I would see that particular one as a copyright violation of this image (presumably the hasbrotoyshop.com site has a larger version somewhere). Ah, here it is, on hasbro.com. Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:31, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Even if it was self-taken, though, I'd say that the I-DOG "incorporates … sculptural features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independ­ently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article" (US Code 17 § 102, via Cornell Law School and COM:DW). As such, I'd say it's a copyrightable sculpture that, incidentally, also happens to dance and play music. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 11:43, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I was going to nominate it for deletion deletion for "toys are art" but was worried it wasn't properly a toy, I'll know what to do with its cousins now.KTo288 (talk) 21:05, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

What is supposed to be "PD-Italy"?

Someone created a bizarre copyright tag, "{{PD-ItalyGov}}" which appears nowhere in the list of copyright tags used in commons: (here http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_tags ). In it s/he conflates the old, superseded Italian law about image copyright (they fell into the PD after 20 years from publication, if they were not "artistic") with the Usa law stating that works paid for by the Governement are not eligible for copyright. He or she is now uploading a batch of artistic portraits of politicians, under this tag, saying that since their portraits are the work of the Goverment (why? s/he does not bother to tell), they are in the PD now. Furthermore, s/he links from the tag the old version ("copyright from the State lasts for 20 year") and the new version of the law, which merely says that works paid for by the State fall under State copyright (no mention anywhere of the 20 years only limitation). Fullstop. The category has meanwhile become a trashbin for anything, from coats of arms, to stamps, to pictures of war ships to portraits of politicians to photos of victims of terrorist attacks in the 1980s... name it. In order to avoid World War III, I would like your opinion on the matter before asking for the suppression of such a copyright claim, and before dismembering the category, deleting the images that do not meet a real PD status.

BTW in it:Wikipedia we use a PD-Italy for certain particular cases (actually, this is the fancy Italian name for the "fair use" exemption clause... ), but the copyright tag clearly states that images published under this disclaimer MAY NOT be moved to WikiCommons!

Thx --User:G.dallorto (talk) 06:12, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

I think that you should start a RFD as soon as possible.--Trixt (talk) 21:53, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Done http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Category:PD_Italy#Category:PD_Italy --User:G.dallorto (talk) 17:44, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

(un)categorization

We have a lot of uncategorized files (190.000) here at Commons and about 500 more uncategorized files are uploaded each day. My bots tag these files as uncategorized, notify the uploaders and try to find categories. Yesterday this resulted in 325 files which couldn't be categorized by my bots and 263 files which were automaticly categorized by my bots. I would like to ask everyone to help out checking these newly uploaded files to stop the backlog from increasing. The categories to monitor are Category:Media needing categories requiring human attention and Category:Media needing category review. Thank you! Multichill (talk) 18:41, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

My experience in categorizing many of these is that leaving a note at the user page that is not in Commons works. For example at their German user page. In that note I give one example of an image without a link to a category (and I mark it as "to follow" to see whether they do something). This I do only if the user has many high quality images in his/her gallery. The bulk of the uncategorized files I find of low quality and/or not relevant for others. For example a photo of 300x480 pixels of an unspecified dog. Wouter (talk) 20:33, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

A common practice is to remove all the categories, once an image is tagged as {{duplicate}}, or {{Vector version available}}, to avoid the image being found via categories. Your bot however will continue to mark such images as uncategorized. I would appreciate a change in your bot to recognize such special cases and no tag it as uncategorized. It would help a lot to reduce the number of uncategorized images. happy xmas --Herzi Pinki (talk) 23:03, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

{{Duplicate}} marks the image for deletion, so removing the categories is good (also removing it from any galleries it might occur in). {{Vector version available}} is an informative link to a different and often preferable format but the image remains here and in my opinion should be categorized. Wiki image maps is one application which I can think of immediately where svg is kind of a pain (image maps cannot work with scaled svg). -- carol (talk) 23:47, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

*blink* They can't? (Yeah, I know, not really what we're discussing.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 11:31, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

It was in the documentation for the plug-in at metawiki and not actually believing this, I tried it and the documentation was accurate (maybe things have changed in the last few months though). It defies my understanding due to how svg is rendered into png by the wiki software for display and it seems like it should simply just work because of that. -- carol (talk) 14:33, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

You shouldn't remove categories when you tag these images. That's a won't fix Multichill (talk) 00:20, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Unused images without description and with bad names, that are not used, are often difficult to categorized. I have done some work on those categories, but I doubt that it is worth the effort. Also, robots are often adding too many categories. I would suggest an upper limit of three categories for images. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 10:45, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Limit the bots to this, perhaps. If an image is undeserving of a category here, perhaps it is undeserving of being here at all? I have often wondered how images are located on the wikipedias. I never get them in search results and I have also never found one in a category. How many images are uploaded and just sit there only taking space as they are unable to be located via wikipage display or search results? -- carol (talk) 14:29, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Agree with that. For example File:Jc-stencil.jpg with no description no link to a category no use elsewhere. If a bot can delete this type of files let say one month after uploading would be fine. Wouter (talk) 15:06, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

False negatives and false positives, Multichill I was going to bring it up at your talk page but since there is this thread, this seems a better place to talk about it. I think your bots are tagging template categorised files (such as File:Dsc07846.jpg )as being uncategorised, while leaving files (such as File:Paris 2006-02-11 anti-caricature protest bannieres dsc07562.jpg ) which were pretty much uncategorised because the categories they were categorised under were for the convenience of the uploader rather than Commons. As to the wider problem of getting people to help categorising images, I got hooked into this aspect of Commons when I misread the request that appeared at the top of the screen of "Please categorise these images" as "Please categorise three images". Could we run that campaign again along with the counter of how many images remained uncategorised, I'm sure it will attract more users to categorisation.KTo288 (talk) 10:26, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I actually enjoyed that "era". I have made similar mistakes when reading "suggestions" and your mis-read was kind of funny. While categorizing images, I saw many images that was in my opinion crap, but I also saw some really great images and learned first hand how important a good description and a link to the source (if it exists online) is. I got some sense for the category scheme here. Certainly there are people who can just look at the outline for this and instantly "get it", also certainly there are at least a few others who are like me and have greater understanding, appreciation for and questions about while working with it.

I cannot say that this categorization task would be considered to be fun for everyone. Some of the fun I had was removed when they recategorized the uncatted images into dates instead of one large collection of them. That was only some of the fun though. The activity caused me to look at categories of images which I probably would not have looked at if only lead by my interests. Categorizing the uncategorized images also helped me to see what a really cool image server the commons is. There is no other equal online. Even Flickr tags has nothing on a Commons category with the same name and is without the ability to "clean it up" and make the contents make sense. -- carol (talk) 01:01, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Quick preview gadget

Location of the button after activation in the preferences.

Hello,

Being in use for a while in our local Wikipedia (I am French), I also installed the gadget MediaWiki:Gadget-QPreview (source and credits) here on Commons. Its goal is to make your life easier, by proposing you not to waste time in previewing (the standard one needs to reload the page, which can take a significant amount of time).

I tested it intensively for more than a hour, trying to spot any possible bug. I'm glad to see it is still bug-free even after having been internationalized. Give it a try, I think you will hardly live without it. →Diti the penguin — 18:41, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

• I just noticed a small "bug" regarding internationalization. When QPreviewing an image with multiple categories, Categories is spelled Categorys at the bottom of the page. I can live with it, though. --Tryphon (talk) 23:42, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Thank you. I tried to fix that and somehow internationalize the thing, but all I get now (I wonder why) is “Category:” no matter the case. I guess someone will ask for a modification in the talk page if they ever find out how to make this tool better… because my knowledge of Javascript is limited to syntax and algorithmic issues, not to functions like that. →Diti the penguin — 16:45, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

 Info Dschwen is currently improving the gadget significantly. It will have to be translated into every language we can, but it will, I think, be eventually compatible with any wiki. :) →Diti the penguin — 18:49, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

• I know that Dschwen's changes go far beyond this small bug, but it is now fixed nonetheless. Thanks. --Tryphon (talk) 13:51, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

User with many photos claiming copyright

I came across photos of user User:Mailer_diablo who has with all? his photos a message claiming copyright. For example File:M&s.JPG. I have nominated a number of them for deletion because of that. Is there another way of doing that faster than doing that for each individual photo? Wouter (talk) 23:38, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

• Technically I copyright my photographs as I have taken it. Then I upload it, granting Commons and its project the license under GFDL 1.2 or later. I still retain copyright to the photographs, with the free license available for reuse by anyone. What's wrong? - Mailer Diablo 23:33, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
  • In the particular case of File:M&s.JPG there might be a copyright issue. According to {{FoP-China}} you must provide the name of the author of the original work (the architect in this case).
    As for your copyright notice, I don't think it is a problem either, though it can be confusing to some. --Tryphon (talk) 23:54, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
    • No issue now; It's done. [23] - Mailer Diablo 00:05, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
      • Great, thank you very much! I also added the {{FoP-China}} template on the page. --Tryphon (talk) 00:18, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
        • Thanks for all the opinions. For your info: on my talk page I received also the message "Even under the GFDL, all images unless they are in the public domain, are copyrighted, and he has his right to assert, REGARDLESS of the license. ViperSnake151"
          Although there is apparently no problem, I still have what is mentioned above "though it can be confusing to some". See also for example File:KUTNA_HORA_(js)_9.jpg that has a copyright message as watermark in the top right corner. Apparently somebody who wants to use that photo can use it for any purpose and eliminate the watermark. For me it is confusing the Copyright@Jerzy Strzelecki on one hand and the {{self|GFDL|cc-by-3.0}} on the other hand. Wouter (talk) 15:28, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
          • When you license something under the GFDL or Creative Commons licenses, you still own the copyright, so including a copyright notice is perfectly fine (though including a statement such as "all rights reserved" would be a bit contradictory). The copyright owner is giving away some of their rights, but not all of them (it is not nearly the same thing as public domain). The copyright owner is always free to license a work to someone else under different terms. Obviously, we (very much) prefer non-watermarked versions, and it is likely that someone will come along and remove it (which is quite permitted by GFDL or CC-BY). Carl Lindberg (talk) 06:14, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
  • By the way, by releasing your photos under a free license, you accept that your watermarks can be removed —with an obvious quality loss, since we can't guess what was below the text. See {{Watermark}}. →Diti the penguin — 16:53, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
    • Understood, though I don't watermark any of my photos anyway. Can an admin close up the deletion disucssions? Thanks. - Mailer Diablo 17:45, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
      • Oops, I replied to the wrong person. Anyway, I took care of the two last deletion requests. It seems there is another one about a toy, but I don't know where to find a link to the “Korean copyright act”. →Diti the penguin — 19:02, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
        • Thanks! There's one more. I can't locate the link either for the Korean one. I wouldn't mind if you deleted the toy image; I realized it was uploaded in error as well. - Mailer Diablo 19:08, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

December 26

Pseudospace

I would like to propose turning on the namespace alias COM: for the Commons namespace. Right now all pages with a COM: prefix, like COM:AN technically are located in the (gallery) content namespace and are redirects to the Commons: project namespace. It is technically possible to associate any page with COM: as an alias to the Commons: namespace. This is already done at Wikipedia, with WP: serving as a pseudo-namespace to the Wikipedia: project space. This would help keep the (gallery) namespace cleaner and would have no technical downside. Before I file a bugzilla, I want to run it by the community for comment. MBisanz ^talk 08:08, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

This, in my opinion, already has consensus - it's how every treats it anyway. J.smith (talk) 08:14, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

There already was a request for this at bugzilla:12600. /Ö 09:20, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Ahh, that answers my question. MBisanz ^talk 00:41, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

"COM" kind of conflicted with Comanche, but there was supposed to be something about "CM" (which would not conflict with any language code, since the List of ISO 639-1 codes is not supposed to be added to). Not sure whatever happened to that... AnonMoos (talk) 15:58, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism of images

I have seen messages about vandalism including deleting all info with that image, or changing the description to nonsense. To make the author alert of a change I suggest to have the tick box about "follow this image" in the upload forms switched "on" by default. If the uploader forgets to tick that box on it will take much longer before this type of vandalism is noticed. Wouter (talk) 13:41, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

There is an option in your preferences marked "Add pages I create to my watchlist". Enable that to achieve the desired functionality. J.smith (talk) 16:37, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

As I sugegsted already several months ago, the defaults shouls be on. Moreover, authors would learn about the evolving categorisation process and the many potential category threes. In addition, they would be informed if their picture is nominated for speedy deletion or QI/VI pictures. --Foroa (talk) 18:37, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

What should be done to arrive at the situation that all upload forms have the default set to "on" for the "Add pages I create to my watchlist"? Wouter (talk) 19:09, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

In fact that tick box should not be present in the upload forms. Default the page that one creates is added to the watchlist. If one does not want to follow that page anymore the "follow" can be changed as with each page. Wouter (talk) 19:45, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

December 28

My Image

ResolvedThis is done

there is an image of men in like a medical group or something i uploaded it i got it from google but it seems like a genuine old pic can someone maybe correct it before it gets deleted? thank you. --Vaxley (talk) 03:56, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

File:57 4 omermedicaldetachment1900.jpg is likely {{PD-1923}} but it would be good to know which book it came from. --Jarekt (talk) 04:20, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

could you or someone else fix the image page please thank you. --Vaxley (talk) 07:08, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks solved to me. I fixed the Fort Riley cat for you :) - Thanks for contributing!Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 16:52, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Cannot upload this

ResolvedProblem solved

Hello, I'm new at Commons (Special:Contributions/Rainald62), improved Media:Sound-icon.svg (shading, file size) but failed to upload it. Tried first http://toolserver.org/~luxo/derivativeFX/deri1.php?lang=de, but the message Laden... Bitte warten is still rotating. Then Commons:Upload/de: I provoked the hint that there is already a file with this name, clicked on [Upload file], got the warning "Die Datei ist beschädigt oder hat eine falsche Datei-Erweiterung. Bitte überprüfe die Datei und wiederhole den Hochlade-Vorgang." (File is corrupted or has wrong extension. Please check and try again.) Well, I got a congratulation at http://validator.w3.org/. What is wrong with this code?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">

<svg
 width="128" height="96"
 viewBox="0 0 128 96">

 <desc>Loudspeaker</desc>
 <!-- Author: Rainald62, see also commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sound-icon.svg -->

 <defs>
  <linearGradient id="magnet" y1=".7" x2="0" y2="0">
   <stop offset="0" stop-color="#666"/>
   <stop offset=".7" stop-color="#ddd"/>
   <stop offset=".75" stop-color="#fff"/>
   <stop offset=".8" stop-color="#ddd"/>
   <stop offset="1" stop-color="#aaa"/>
  </linearGradient>
  <radialGradient id="cone" cx=".1" cy=".9" r=".9">
   <stop offset=".1" stop-color="#ddd"/>
   <stop offset="1" stop-color="#888"/>
  </radialGradient>
  <radialGradient id="calotte" cx=".7" cy=".3" r=".8">
   <stop offset=".1" stop-color="#ddd"/>
   <stop offset="1" stop-color="#666"/>
  </radialGradient>
  <symbol id="wave">
   <path fill="none" stroke-width="7" stroke-linecap="round" d="M4 4c6,20 6,40 0,60M4 4c8,16 8,44 0,60"/>
  </symbol>
 </defs>

 <g id="speaker_icon">
  <ellipse fill="url(#magnet)" stroke="black" cx="14" cy="48" rx="13" ry="21"/>
  <ellipse fill="#999" stroke="black" cx="37" cy="48" rx="25" ry="45"/>
  <ellipse fill="url(#cone)" cx="37" cy="48" rx="23" ry="42"/>
  <ellipse fill="url(#calotte)" cx="33" cy="48" rx="11" ry="18"/>
  <use stroke="#999" xlink:href="#wave" x="70" y="14" />
  <use stroke="#bbb" xlink:href="#wave" x="90" y="6.6" transform="scale(1 1.2)" />
  <use stroke="#ddd" xlink:href="#wave" x="110" y=".1" transform="scale(1 1.4)" />
 </g>
</svg>

-- Rainald62 15:09, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

---

Try changing the svg tag:

<svg
 xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
 xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" 
 width="128" height="96"
 viewBox="0 0 128 96">

- Erik Baas (talk) 15:37, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks - Rainald62 10:48, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

---

The "xmlns" declaration stuff is required by Mozilla, but not by Wikimedia SVG rendering software. There's a page Commons:Graphics village pump specifically to discuss things like this... AnonMoos (talk) 15:51, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Problem seems solved, see File:Sound-icon 2.svg. Please adjust the description and the license. - Erik Baas (talk) 16:15, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh dear

I uploaded File:St_marys_church_putney_1.JPG just now - the title and categories are correct but it is in fact All Saints Fulham and not St Mary's, as anyone can see. I have made this mistake before and from memory it is very hard to overload the correct image onto the file. Is there any way out? If not, how do I delete and start again? Thanks Peter Damian (talk) 17:56, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Quickest way would be to reupload the image, copy description and stuff across, and tag the old one with {{bad name|name of correct image}}. -mattbuck (Talk) 18:08, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Ah yes thanks Peter Damian (talk) 19:42, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Category:P. Kappus

ResolvedQuery solved.

This category was created to hold pictures taken by Peter Kappus, and does not belong to any category. Before I try and categorize it (and probably ask for a move to Category:Peter Kappus), I would like to know if this kind of categories is useful and wished for. In my opinion, a gallery would be much more appropriate in this case, but I would like some input from more experienced users on the subject. Thanks. --Tryphon (talk) 23:24, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

They are usually allowed. Personally, I don't think every photographer is notable. Commons =/= English Wikipedia in terms of acceptance and notability.Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 23:45, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

no that's perfectly okay. I added it to Category:Photographers, you can move it to the correct category (e.g. by country) and all images should have an(or several) additional category about the topic of course. -- Gorgo (talk) 00:24, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay then, I'll just have it moved to Category:Peter Kappus. Thanks for the input. --Tryphon (talk) 00:52, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

December 29

Files from specific users that need categorization, source info, etc.

For files uploaded by a specific user; how does one get a list of all the uncategorized files, or files needing category review? Without individually clicking all the uploaded file links from their upload log. Also, files that need source info or license info.

See:

• Category:Media needing categories
• Category:Media needing category review
• Category:Unknown

Using myself as an example; how would I narrow down my upload log to only those that I forgot to categorize, or to those that need category review, source info, license info, and so on. My upload log:

• http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=upload&user=Timeshifter

I noticed and corrected some problems with files uploaded by certain users, and I want to correct some more files uploaded by those users. I happened to have a few of their files on my watch list, and so I noticed the problems. Some of the uploaders are newbies, and it is a lot easier for me to correct the problems, than to wait for them to notice talk page requests. Some users do not have their talk page watchlisted, or they no longer keep up with their watchlist. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

The gallery shows categories. --rimshot^talk 10:38, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! I remembered some kind of gallery tool, but didn't know where I bookmarked it. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:01, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Military seal – little doubt

Hello,

I would like to upload a picture of the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) seal. I know that work of the United States Federal Government falls under the public domain, however, what is the appropriate license for derivative work ? I have found two websites that depict the seal, [24] and [25] (better quality, alternative text : “CVN-75 USS Harry S. Truman seal - courtesy US Navy”). However, these may have been resized/alterated.

Does the PD license still apply ? If so, should both {{PD-USGov}} and {{PD-USGov-Military-Badge}} templates be rendered on the picture ? I apologize if you find this question silly, but the complexity of licensing is more than confusing to me.

And, by the way, how do you call this : a seal or an insignia ? (I am not an english native speaker.) I have found both words on official websites, and I can't decide which one has to be used ! Tachymètre ✉ 13:17, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I would: 1) call it insignia and 2) Use both as a precaution, but its up to you ;)-Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 23:51, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Vanity categories

Am I alone in thinking that vanity categories in Commons are pointless and don't belong here? Typically these are Category:Pictures by John Doe or similar and are setup by the pictures' authors. Is there a policy or consensus that such categories should be tolerated or deleted? --TimTay (talk) 20:48, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Such categories are accepted according to Commons:User-specific galleries, templates and categories policy#Categories. /Ö 21:26, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Would you be referring to, as an example, the type of hidden category that I have, Category:Files by User:Adambro? If this is the case then the reason for having it is far from vanity. I, and presumably others, find it useful to be able to quickly find those files that I've created and uploaded amongst the hundreds of others that I upload and using a category seems to be the most efficient way of doing so. It makes tasks, like I've been working on recently where I've been adding geolocation templates to my images where I hadn't already done, much easier. If this is the type of category you are referring then Commons:User-specific galleries, templates and categories policy will probably be of interest. Regards. Adambro (talk) 21:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the swift answers. Clearly I am alone in thinking such things are pointless and vain, but at least I know they are supported by official policy so I can comfortable ignore them. --TimTay (talk) 21:38, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't just call them vanity categories. They serve a purpose. But I'd like to see the naming scheme enforced more strictly, to avoid confusion with actual content categories. There are a number of user categories without the User: prefix. --Dschwen (talk) 22:02, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

So you're saying this category Category:Images by Jongleur100 is incorrectly named? And this one too Category:Photographs by Geof Sheppard? How does one go about getting them changed? --TimTay (talk) 23:33, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

That is partly correct. He is saying that people are sort of using the Category namespace rather than the User namespace. The benefit is to use them as User. I would suggest getting a consensus.Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 23:54, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Huh? This is not about the namespace. Categories have to be in the Category namespace. It is about the naming scheme. The "User:" string in the category name has no functional significance, only a semantic one. And it looks to me as if this is already an established guideline. I do not see the need to discuss this again. Category renames can be requested on the Category page with the {{Move}} template. --Dschwen (talk) 16:30, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

A consensus is given that users are free to create their own categories, i dont think the name of the category (photos, images, by, of) realy matters as long as it isn't 99 characters long or totaly missleading. Adding {{User category}} to the category is recommended, the template makes the category a hidden category. Suggestion: I personaly would add to the policy that usercategories must be hidden as long as the uploader is not a notable photographer or artist (see the very random Category:Photographers from the United States for some examples). --Martin H. (talk) 16:50, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Laika went up into space.jpg

Was Laika went up into space.jpg also taken by the Nasa? Laika space.jpg is tagged with {{PD-USGov-NASA}}. If all are {{PD-USGov-NASA}} Laika dog space.jpg would be a derivative work, but a derivative work which was released into the public domain and thereby allowed. In any case {{Cc-by-2.0}} is not the right licence for Laika went up into space.jpg!
--D-Kuru (talk) 21:13, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Since, iirc, Laika was Russian, I really doubt it. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:53, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Okapi picture

could someone check up on this to make sure everything is correct? thank you. --Vaxley (talk) 22:32, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I presume you are talking about File:Okapi 1901.jpg? The category was wrong. But licenswise it looks good. Published over 100 years ago in the US. Easily PD. Clearly a 2D reproduction. Would be nice to find a larger version though. --Dschwen (talk) 22:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

December 30

Spoken Wikipedia files ?

We host some spoken wikipedia files Category:Spoken Wikipedia on commons. This seems to be OK with the project's scope but is it realy useful to host them here? I mean, they are only another representation of wikipedia's articles which are language specific. They can't be shared among the wikipedias. Isn't it more useful to store them on the language specific wikipedias? --Avron (talk) 20:28, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Well I could imagine the Simple English or English Wikisource linking to the category containing the spoken file as an example of similar content hosted on Commons that would apply to work published by those sources. I agree it is rather narrow, but I suspect it is a good enough reason to host it here. MBisanz ^talk 20:31, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Storing them localy would maybe make nothing worse, but also nothing better. And because I believe we should store as much media here as possible and because of that what MBisanz said, storing them here is really fine in my oppinnion. Regards, abf /talk to me/ 20:47, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I think the are inside the scope and should be hosted on Wikimedia Commons. I mean we have more than 600 projects, not all of them have enabled the uploading function. I think it would be a mess if some projects upload them locally and other upload them on Commons. In my eyes Commons is mend the host files than can be used on all projects. So by uploading them to Commons it would the best solution. Or else we have to enable all upload functions. Abigor talk 21:34, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be possible to request a Spoken Wikipedia Wiki?Mitch32^{(Want help? See here!)} 23:52, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I think the Foundation would not agree with a special wiki to host that stuff. I think its very nice to have them on Commons. I am still seeing no reason to move them somewhere else. Abigor talk 06:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I see the oppinion is to keep the files on commons. OK, now there isn't a big problem but I hope the amount won't rise dramatically. A solution would be maybe to suppress them by option.--Avron (talk) 09:04, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I believe that more is better.. Spoken Wikipedia is maybe the best project to make Wikipedia a better place, it really increase the quality Abigor talk 19:17, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

This is your oppinion. I believe spoken Wikipedia is a vain endavor. Those who really can't read because of blineness they use a screenreader. --Avron (talk) 08:06, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

A screen reader would sound monotonous more often. --AVRS (talk) 17:06, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Category:Flickr images not found

Images in Category:Flickr images not found were uploaded under a free license claim, but when reviewed by FlickrBot were found to no longer exist on Flickr. This means their copyright status has not been and cannot be determined. This category of 480 images has sat for a month or more without any change. I am proposing going through it and tagging all images as needing source information so that the uploaders are aware of the issue and we can clear out this backlog. Any objections? MBisanz ^talk 14:01, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. In most cases they're copyvios anyway, from my experience. -mattbuck (Talk) 15:23, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I spot-checked a bunch of images on the first page... a lot of them were User:FlickrLickr uploads, which proves the original copyright license, so those should all be kept. The FlickrBot should automatically recognize those images and not put a "failed" or "unknown" tag on them... Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:13, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Take for example File:Atari game console.jpg. This image is tagged with {{Flickr-change-of-license}}, but still the flickrreview bots came along.

Tagging it with {{No source since}} would be incorrect for most files: source and author are provided. Multichill (talk) 16:47, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Look at the history, it was uploaded under a CC license, Flickrbot came along and review it and found no license since it was deleted, and then the tag saying the license had been changed was placed. No independent reviewer ever saw the image on flickr with the CC license, so we only have the uploader's word that it was. And given my experience reviewing Flickr uploads, the uploader is frequently wrong. MBisanz ^talk 17:05, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

File:Atari game console.jpg is one of the FlickrLickr uploads. FlickrLickr is a bot which only chooses correctly-licensed images in the first place; that is a guaranteed OK image. It should be marked as reviewed at the time of upload by FlickrLickr. (and also change-of-license... User:Para had scripts which automated that for some time). Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:55, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Agree with Clindberg, according to User:FlickrLickr#FAQ images uploaded by FlickrLicker should be marked as reviewed at the time of the upload. The review process was created after the start of FlickrLicker. --Martin H. (talk) 18:13, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, so assuming I go through and approve all the FlickrLickr images, the remaining ones can be permission tagged? MBisanz ^talk 18:34, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, all FlickrLickr images approved, 302 remain in the category. MBisanz ^talk 19:05, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Technically... the approving user probably should be FlickrLickr itself, and the date should be the date of upload, not today's date -- the tags now state something which isn't really correct (or may not be anyways). Carl Lindberg (talk) 23:47, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually... stop tagging them. I have spot-checked a few more, and most are either OK or probably OK. There are very few obviously bad ones, so being in this category is definitely not the "likely-copyvio" category that many not-passed-review Flickr images usually are. Details forthcoming. Carl Lindberg (talk) 23:45, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay... details. Some of the images have more information on them, which can be used to verify -- the automated stuff sometimes was done on images which had separately verifiable information. Some of the images have simply changed locations on Flickr, and are still licensed fine -- for Flickr users which still have images, you can do searches on keywords and sometimes still find the images. It is also possible to do searches on the Wayback Machine (archive.org); in some cases they have archived versions of either the image page, or of the main user gallery which still contains the image, since that page also has the licensing info. Even if you can't find one particular image, you can sometimes see if the Flickr user typically uploaded images under the stated free license in about that time, which is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the original claimed license was probably correct. Obviously, I'm sure there are a few copyvios, but not nearly enough to simply assume that all of them are. These images really do require more legwork to delete them I think... in short, we should not tag any of these no-source unless some extra work has been done. Specifics:

• File:Pete Townshend - guitare2.jpg is by the same author and very similar to File:Pete Townshend - guitare.jpg, which was verified as fine by FlickrreviewR. It may even just be a crop/rotation of that image. This one is virtually certain to be OK.
• File:PS3 at CEATEC 2006 (vertical-transpbcground).png is just a derivative of File:PS3 at CEATEC 2006 (vertical).jpg, which was confirmed valid by FlickrreviewR. That one is definitely OK.
• File:GreatWall5.jpg: The Flickr user's current images are all CC-BY-SA, and the same was true in 2007, 2006, and 2005 (which is before this image was uploaded there). More to the point, File:GreatWall6.jpg is a picture from the same day from the same Flickr user, which was confirmed by an admin (and is a featured picture). I think it's pretty safe to assume the original upload info was correct here.
• File:Museo de arte Tigre - 200805b.jpg - the image still exists on its stated source and license on Flickr. No idea why the bot didn't work, but it just needs to be re-run.
• File:EZY-A320-INN-1.jpg - the image exists at this URL; the stated license is OK. Not sure if the URL just changed or the original upload URL was mis-pasted. Given that this same situation has happened with other photos, either Flickr changed some of their URLs or maybe the image was re-uploaded by the Flickr user... dunno. But the end result is this image is OK; the URL needs to be changed and the Flickr bot re-run.
• File:Jack Kirby (1982).jpg and File:Jack Kirby (1982) (cropped).jpg - Same situation; image is now at this URL.
• File:Calvin Thibodeaux.JPG and File:CJ Ah You.JPG - Same again; the source image for both is at this URL.
• File:Stewart-Fireworks_fountain.jpg - Image page found on archive.org here; license was definitely cc-by-2.0 in January 2005. Current image has cc-by-1.0, which is very slightly off.
• File:Veleka-sinemorets-mouth-dinev.jpg is on the September 2006 archive.org version of the user's gallery page here (top right image titled "Veleka Outfal"); the license is correct.
• File:Tidal_Pool_Nude_2.jpg and File:Tidal_pool_nude_2_cropped.jpg - archive.org page found here; license is correct.
• File:Hiphuggers.jpg - uploaded by User:Liftarn in late March 2007, who usually knows what he is doing if I recall. Image was actually marked "all rights reserved" on March 10, but Flickr user changed it to cc-by (as stated) on May 24 and August 27. So, that one is fine.
• File:Seawall Vancouver.jpg and File:Vancouver Public Libary Atrium.jpg - Flickr user's uploads were CC-BY-SA at the time so that is likely OK. Even more to the point, the license was confirmed by a Commons admin, but this predated the standard {{Flickrreview}} tag.
• File:Vancouver full moon.jpg - User's current images are CC-BY-SA, and also marked by the same admin as above with the User:Kaveh/Flickr template. All images in Special:WhatLinksHere/User:Kaveh/Flickr should probably just be converted to use {{Flickrreview}}.
• File:Voigtländer Vito CLR.jpg and File:Yashica-Mat.jpg - User:Morven claims to have a separate email for these images giving permission. While these should probably be forwarded to OTRS, the user is both and admin and ArbCom member, so presumably that should be trusted.
• File:Ribadesella (Asturias) 01.jpg through File:Ribadesella (Asturias) 05.jpg (five images) - This user was upload CC-BY images (the claimed license) just a few months later. Probably OK, but can't completely verify.
• File:Reuters camera.jpg - the user did have CC-BY-SA images at the time. Also an image from the same day and event was CC-BY-SA at the time, although that image is now changed to CC-BY-ND-NC. Almost certain that this image was originally uploaded CC-BY-SA as well.
• File:Roma-pontesantangelo01.jpg - User's current images are CC-BY; another image taken that same day both was and is now CC-BY. The claimed license is CC-BY-SA-2.5 which isn't quite correct (Flickr uses the 2.0 variants), but this image was probably OK one way or the other. Maybe change to CC-BY-SA-2.0 to be safe.
• File:Vancouver-public art.jpg - Same flickr user as admin-verified Vancouver images above, though this does not have the admin tag. Still, as mentioned above, the Flickr user was using the claimed CC-BY-SA license at the time.
• File:Nathu_La_Fauna_1.jpg - Flickr user was still using CC-BY a few months later (and still is); this image is probably OK too.
• File:Verona-ponte.jpg - Images at nearly the same time were CC-BY; also this still-existing CC-BY image was taken two days before, and this one a few days after. Almost definitely OK.
• File:IanFreeman.png and File:Stitch&Napao.png - uploader is an admin on en-wiki, and the Flickr user was using the claimed CC-BY license for images uploaded not long before these images were. Additionally, archive.org may eventually have links up which could confirm it; they usually tend to lag for several months before making archived pages public and these images were from 2008. Most likely OK.
• Now we get to images where I could find no info, so there is no indication one way or another -- we just have the uploader's word for it. File:Sony Ericsson-telefoons.JPG, File:Wonton noodle soup boston.jpg, File:Horse Eye.jpg all are in that category. File:Vista_del_porto_di_Bari.jpg is about the same... though images taken in the same city are now marked all rights reserved by the Flickr user, so this one gets a bit more dubious.
• File:ZPachulia.jpg This probably is the property of the Flickr user against my original expectations, as he appears to actually be a professional photographer, but the user's current images are marked "all rights reserved". The Google cache version of his page shows all the same images marked CC-BY-NC-ND, so the user has been changing licenses just recently. It is quite possible they were originally under the claimed license, but it is now hard to prove and it may be best to let it be deleted.
• File:Pollux Palazzo Reale.jpg - a separate image linked to in the image page was deleted for "incorrect Flickr license"; presumably this is in the same boat.
• File:José Augusto (cantor).jpg - Flickr user has deleted all images... no information one way, but gut feeling is that it may have been a copyvio (possibly by the Flickr user, not necessarily the Commons uploader). Ah yes, I found it here, dated earlier than the commons upload. Almost definite copyvio.
• File:Geek Tattoo html.jpg - Image still exists at its stated source, but is "all rights reserved". No idea why the bot didn't work, but should just be re-run to mark it as bad. archive.org shows that the file was still "all rights reserved" four days after being taken. On the other hand, User:Seskapil has just claimed authorship of the photo (see the image history comments; his only contribution), and says the license is OK. The user gives a link to another image of the same person/tattoo on his home page. So, this was a copyvio, but may be OK now. Would prefer to have email sent to OTRS obviously but we should not delete it.

That is the entirety of the images I spot-checked. Of all of them, only two were definitely copyvios (and one of those may now have permission), a couple of other probably copvios, four with no extra info found, and all the rest either definitely or probably OK. Given that hit rate, I would think that most images in this category are in fact probably OK, and we should definitely not be tagging them "no source" (and should go back to remove existing such tags). Images uploaded in 2008 which should have been checked more recently by the automated tools may be different, but if the original upload was 2007 or before (or there was a large gap between upload and bot review), it is probably best to keep it for now until more serious legwork is done. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:19, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Obviously this is something I had not anticipated, so it is a good thing I did not start tagging yet :). I will start examining these images one at a time in the detailed fashion you have. As to the FlickrLickr images, I'm note sure the technical details are important, so much as someone has looked at it and verified it is a valid image (which being uploaded by FlickrLickr makes it). MBisanz ^talk 03:17, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Ah, OK :-) I saw you had tagged File:CJ Ah You.JPG so assumed you had started. I just fixed the URL on that one and removed your tag, although I just noticed the claimed license is incorrect -- the uploader was apparently under the mistaken impression that just cropping an image means he could claim a derivative work copyright, and so tagged it GFDL/cc-by-2.5. That will still need to be fixed. Carl Lindberg (talk) 04:01, 31 December 2008 (UTC)