Commons:Village pump/Archive/2011/05

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Instructional videos?

Have there been attempts to make instructional videos for the Wikimedia Commons and/or various Wikimedia projects? These videos could be about Commons, Wikimedia, and/or Wikipedia policies and procedures. From my understanding, all such videos would be hosted on the Commons

Some possibilities to consider:

  • Dubs
  • Subtitles (for any given language it may be easier to subtitle a video in an existing language first, then wait until that language gets a full dub)
  • Sign language additions (American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Taiwanese Sign Language, etc)

Unfortunately I do not have experience making videos. Are there any interested parties who are willing to make instructional videos? What are your ideas? WhisperToMe 23:52, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Have you seen Category:Instructional videos on using Wikipedia, meta:Video tutorials, and outreach:Instructional videos? Powers 17:08, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Thanks! I did not know that these existed!
So some do have voiceovers. What those videos need are subtitles and/or versions with sign language interpretation
Some videos have on-screen text, and no voiceovers (not sure if it is intended for them not to have voiceovers)
Also, I will check relevant pages on the Wikipedias - If the pages lack links to the videos, I will link them
WhisperToMe (talk) 12:33, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

April 30

User:Delimad

Hello!

Are those images of User:Delimad inside the encyclopedic usefulness? I know that the Commons is no cencored media library but this goes to far. --91.57.87.99 20:42, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Good gracious me, thank God I have not had my dinner yet. Please don't look at them if you are easily impressed. They seem to be copyvio, by the way, tineye returned this for one of them.-- Darwin Ahoy! 22:45, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Have it out at Commons:Deletion requests/Scat uploads by Delimad where I've attempted to replicate the argument that prompted this thread. – Adrignola talk 03:50, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

May 1

File:L.K Advani & Buddhadeb.jpg

Today I upload one file File:L.K Advani & Buddhadeb.jpg from Press Information Bureau, Government of India website. Look their COPYRIGHT POLICY. Please advice are those images available in this website , reuse in wikipedia/wikimedia? If I am doing any wrong, I can nominate for deletion. Thank you. Jayanta Nath (talk) 08:57, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for being aware about copyright issues. The relevant clause on the website states:
Material featured on this website may be reproduced free of charge and there is no need for any prior approval for using the content. The permission to reproduce this material shall not extend to any third-party material. ... The material must be reproduced accurately and not used in a derogatory manner or in a misleading context. Wherever the material is being published or issued to others, the source must be prominently acknowledged.
I don't think the clause is clear enough for Commons purposes. It refers only to the reproduction of images and specifically states that "material must be reproduced accurately". This seems to rule out allowing people to modify content, and Commons policy requires files to be freely modifiable. I would suggest that you send an e-mail to the website owner requesting confirmation that content on the website may be modified and used for commercial purposes as well, and forward any positive response to OTRS for verification and archiving. — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 11:11, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Bot rejects CC-BY_SA image

I'm trying to use the Flickr upload bot to upload http://www.flickr.com/photos/55592184@N08/567594852/in/set-72157626621430544 - but the bot says the image has an insufficiently free license. It's CC-BY-SA and looks OK to me. Have I missed something, or is there a problem elsewhere? Andy Mabbett (talk) 21:55, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Looking at this link shows an "Site not found: that's not what you are looking for". -- RE rillke questions? 21:58, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
That's very bizarre; I copied & pasted the URL, and it was working yestrday thanks, anyway. Andy Mabbett (talk) 15:49, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Memorial page

FYI, now we have a memorial page for deceased Commons contributors: Commons:Deceased contributors. --Túrelio 12:14, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Just a comment. I have seen in the list people who have contributed for only 1 or 2 days. I would expect only names of people who have contributed significantly to Commons. Wouter (talk) 21:47, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Then what is "contributed significantly"? Recommend further discussion on the page's talkpage. --Túrelio (talk) 18:45, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
A good idea; I have put a comment there. Wouter (talk) 20:46, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Overwritten file

Hi,

I'm not sure where to write this, but what happens when files get overwritten? File:Beit_Jimal_2.JPG was used in a portal header in Hungarian Wikipedia and someone overwrote it with a different picture. I'm not sure the uploader can communicate in English as his/her userpage is in Hebrew. Both images look good enough to keep, I don't want to revert the new one but we liked the original. – Alensha msg 19:37, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I have reverted to the original version. Someone can upload the intermediate version under a new name if they wish to use it. –Tryphon☂ 20:15, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks! – Alensha msg 23:23, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

May 3

Template:Share

I've just written some javascript code into User:TeleComNasSprVen/noTemplateShare.js which may be of some help to a few of the users complaining about the large Template:Share box located on the current Picture of the Year page. Unfortunately it has to be imported from a local js file, because for some reason, as I tried to load it with a &withJS= call in the url for index.php, MediaWiki:Common.js gives me an error message: "User:TeleComNasSprVen/noTemplateShare.js javascript not allowed to be loaded." So apparently this only works if my js page is in a MediaWiki file (in its namespace) or it is imported directly by a different js file, like: 

importScript('User:TeleComNasSprVen/noTemplateShare.js');

:| TelCoNaSpVe :| 06:33, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Pic, Roger (1920-2001) / Gallica

Gallica claims that photos collections of the photographer Roger Pic (1920-2001) in public domain. For example Danses de Géorgie. 1965 : photographies / Roger Pic or others her. Somebody knows anything about it? In generally, can we use this claim of Gallica? Geagea (talk) 22:30, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

When reputable large institutions claim some works are in Public Domain we often trust their judgment, unless we have clear reasons to believe they are wrong. I agree in this case it would be interesting to know the basis of the claim. --Jarekt (talk) 03:55, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
may be I'll upload one file under {{PD-GallicaScan}} and made DR. More info about the photographer: Roger Pic or Roger Pinard ... Roger Pic, un Photographe à l´Opéra (1959-1970) ... Geagea (talk) 01:13, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

May 2

Wire services routinely add public domain images to their libraries

Wire services routinely add public domain images to their libraries -- so those who claim images need to be deleted here when they find some element of an image has been published with a credit to a wire services' library make a serious mistake.

I routinely come across images I know are in the public domain that I see published with a credit to a wire service. Today I came across yet another nomination to delete an image, where the nominator argued that the image had to be a proprietary image because it was credited to the associated press, here. With a few minutes work I found the same image credited to REUTERS, GETTY, AFP and SCANPIX.

I don't mean to pick on this particular nominator for repeating this terrible mistake. This was the time to voice this concern because w:tineye found so many instances.

So please, potential nominators, don't blindly nominate images for deletion just because you found an instance where the image was credited to a wire service. For all we know wire services employ people to go through public domain images our volunteers have found, and centralized, to add them to their library, so they can start charging their clients for indexing them. Geo Swan (talk) 09:15, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it often occurs that what appear to be copyvios are actually copyfraud of PD images (I'd be surprised if there were a good PD image that Getty didn't claim). Of course it's reasonable to be suspicious of images claimed as copyrighted by some commercial agency, but a thorough investigation of any work that isn't recent involves determining the original publication date and author. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:03, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
There is no legal requirement to identify public domain works as such. There is only a prohibition against attaching a fraudulent copyright notice to any work, including public domain works. Photo agencies typically do not actually attach copyright notices to public domain works. In the case of Getty Images, they watermark images with their logotype (not the same as a copyright notice), label them as "rights-managed" (not the same as copyrighted), offer them under a license with an indemnification clause (not a pure copyright license), and insist on "credit" (not the same as a copyright notice) being given to Getty. News organizations use them as a source, probably for the convenience of having a central repository and for the indemnification. In order to gain these benefits, the news organizations have to pay the fees and comply with Getty's other requirements, including crediting them as the immediate source. Nothing in this procedure actually constitutes copyfraud, although it certainly appears to be deliberately designed to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in anyone wishing to use genuine public domain works without going through an agency.
If it can be shown that a work is in the public domain, a credit to a photo agency does not prevent it from being hosted here. Conversely, public domain status cannot be inferred from a work being distributed by multiple photo agencies. The default assumption is still that all previously published works are non-free unless the opposite can be demonstrated. —LX (talk, contribs) 13:49, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

May 4

Category Intersections

I just run into Category:Painted portraits of men of France which seems like intersection of 4 basic categories:

  1. Category:Paintings (1)
  2. Category:Portraits (2)
  3. Category:Men (3)
  4. Category:France (4)

Logically it should be a subcategory of 4 intersections of 3 of above categories and 4 intersections of 2 of above categories:

  1. Category:Painted portraits of men and Category:Portrait paintings of males (1-2-3) sub of
    1. Category:Portrait paintings (1-2)
    2. Category:Portraits of men (2-3)
    3. Category:Paintings of men (1-3)
  2. Category:Paintings of men of France (1-3-4) sub of
    1. Category:Men of France (3-4)
    2. Category:Paintings of people from France (1-4)
    3. Category:Paintings of men (1-3)
  3. Category:Portraits of men of France (2-3-4) (does not exist yet but there are images categorized as such and we already have Category:Portraits of women from France)
    1. Category:Portraits of people from France (2-4) we have portraits from 10 other countries loke Category:Portraits of Germany, etc.
    2. Category:Men of France (3-4)
    3. Category:Portraits of men (2-3)
  4. Category:Painted portraits of people from France (1-2-4)
    1. Category:Portraits of people from France (2-4) we have portraits from 10 other countries like Category:Portraits of Germany, etc.
    2. Category:Portrait paintings (1-2)
    3. Category:Paintings of people from France (1-4)

Similarly we have many other intersections

  1. Category:Painted portraits of women of Kalmykia
  2. Category:Engraved portraits of women from France
  3. Category:Painted portraits of women from Spain in national costume intersection of 5 basic categories
  4. Category:Group paintings of nude males intersection of 4 basic categories

The number of possible combinations of intersections of 4 of 5 basic categories is astronomical and as Commons grows we will be filling all the missing combinations. I suspect that at some point this structure will become impossible to maintain. I would propose to change recomendation on categorization to cap number of basic concepts in a single category to 3 (4?) and put more effort into development of tools for tools for better display of category intersections. CatScan2 is a good start, but does not display thumbnails and often times out when working with large categories. Other possibility is tag based categorization. Sorry for the long post. --Jarekt (talk) 16:52, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I do agree on it and the exponential growth of overlapping "side" categories, such as in Category:Rivers of France by region, department, name ... makes it impossible to ensure consistency; we even don't have a tool that can make a proper category list of the rivers containing the parent categories (such a list is possible for images, not for categories). The result is that none of the categories is correctly filled up. Problem is that I have a problem to specify a simple rule that is easy to apply and enforce.
This tag thing would already be very useful to do a second display selection to filter out type of media (video, sound, jpg, SVG, B&W, ...), Names space (cat/gallery/templates/...) and date ranges along with potential category depth of display. . --Foroa (talk) 17:53, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm helping, I deleted 1400 categories today. -mattbuck (Talk) 18:05, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
I noticed (and you restored many too); it takes along way to get the whole world down into Cumbria. --Foroa (talk) 18:11, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
My reference until now was Category:Black and white photographs of smiling women ; but I must say Category:Painted portraits of women from Spain in national costume trumps it all. Nice find ;-) Jean-Fred (talk) 18:14, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
You might enjoy reading User:Multichill/Next generation categories, it also touches the concept of intersected categories. Multichill (talk) 18:52, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
I think three points you had in User:Multichill/Next generation categories are very concise description of what kind of category system is needed at Commons. The current system was designed for articles and it is probably adequate for that. En Wikipedia has less articles than we have images and they do not rely as much on categories to find things. So I feel like we are in unique position of bumping into the limitation of the current category system.--Jarekt (talk) 13:03, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid Mattbuck's statement ("I'm helping ...") explains the case. One user concentrates on removing wacky categories. Another one sweeps Category:Stockholm. Yet another one classifies countless coats of arms by all sorts of possible grades... There's a very limited pool of volunteers doing mass categorization, and most operate in their own niches independently (talk about consistency...). There's simply no resources for a "general assault" (don't even mention continuous maintenance). NVO (talk) 03:00, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
  • In the short term, I think this problem is adequately resolved by just not creating intersection categories unless the categories they are based on are already large (say, all have more than one page of files). Otherwise, the existing categories suffice, since one can simply browse them for the image in question. This will dramatically count down on their number. Dcoetzee (talk) 15:02, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
    • Building a structure based on the number of files in a category is hardly efficient and not really consistent with the current way of building subcategories. Further, I think this fails to address the main problem pointed out in the sample above. Given that one can move around the files in the sample above from one subcategory to the others, which ones do you think should have subcategories? --  Docu  at 02:26, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Hi. I am one of the guys creating dozens of subcategories of subcategories, eventually some of them as wacky as the Spanish women in national costume. I usually work with art, coats of arms and geography. Yesterday or the day before, by coincidence, I needed some files from Category:Painted portraits of men and stumbled upon the horrible mess in that category. There were almost 900 files, many of them very similar to each other, intermixed with some peculiar "men" such as Jesus Christ and Saint John the Baptist. I lost some hours trying to sort it out, and even with the help of AWB I could only move to subcats a little more than 300 of them until I got exhausted and bored beyond belief. That category, as it is now, is virtually unusable, and is a good example why subcats should be implemented there, the more the merrier. Until there is a more practical system to categorize in place, "wacky" subcats should actually be encouraged, if they help in finding what we are looking for.

I also disagree with Dcoetzee suggestion of using the "page" as limit. Take Category:Paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour, something I've been working in lately because I wanted to upload some paintings of him and wanted to find out which were already here. When I started out, it was a huge mess all in Category:Henri Fantin-Latour. It was a mess, even if it didn't exceeded more than one page. Drawings, pictures, photographs of the guy and even paintings of him by other artists, all mixed together - It was a headache to look at them and try to find the painting I was looking for. So, no, avoiding subcats by page limit is not helpful in the least, quite the opposite.

Actually I very seldom, if ever, found "wacky" subcats to be a problem. Thank God someone created Category:Painted portraits of women from Spain in national costume, so that those pictures are not populating the upper categories creating unnecessary noise. The opposite, however, has ever been the greatest problem I've had here, to the point that I more than often get distracted from what I am doing to sort out densely populated categories. It's boring as hell, but much less boring and less painful than to have to look into densely populated cats to find something.

Another problem I've meet upon is "parallel categorization". A while ago I was categorizing carriages, and was quite impressed by how few examples of them were available here, with many important models, such as the landaus, missing entirely. As I found out later, they were dispersed into the parallel system of cats "carriages by country", so to find the landaus I had to look into every damn subcat of "carriages by country". This is one case where it would have been much more helpful if they were categorized as "carriages" as well as "carriages in country X", that way I would only move them into the subcats instead of sweeping the parallel cat tree to find the models I was looking for.

Those are some thoughts on the subject, I wish this thread wouldn't die, since I believe it is a very important debate.-- Darwin Ahoy! 19:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I think we are all searching for a golden middle between too many and too few categories, and everybody has different ideas how many categories is too many and what constitutes "useful" category. I personally like to categorize based on
  • information found in matadata (date, location, identities of people)
  • non-obvious features of the context (identification of animals, vehicles, weapons, geographical features )
  • source categories (current location of artworks, books image was scanned from)
  • author categories
  • technique categories (etching / painting / rare photographic process / rare camera type, etc.)
The kind of categories I do not like are:
I think a lot of effort is wasted on categories which are easy to identify by looking at image thumbnails while many non-obvious categories remain empty. --Jarekt (talk) 03:45, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for a good laugh so early in the morning! xD Indeed, I've never understood the usefulness of categories such as "facing left" or "facing right", unless it serves as a stratagem to relief pressure from upper categories already over-crowded, such as "Portrait paintings of men facing left". I personally prefer more useful categories like those you mentioned, but sometimes they get exhausted, and you end up with a still overcrowded category. I'm facing that problem right now in Category:Quarterly shields, which is bound to receive thousands or tenths of thousands of pictures over the time. I pretty much exhausted all the obvious subcategories already, and I'm not willing, at least not yet, to create something like "Quarterly shields with lions" as it would be both unscientific and distracting, burying down pictures that perhaps deserve a better categorization than those tricks to help empty the category. However, it will have to be done eventually, if no other triage method could be found. :S-- Darwin Ahoy! 06:45, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
I do not think all categories over 200 images need to be split, since at some point you can not logically divide them. At some point I opened DR for some photos of a user who (along with great many very good images) had tendency to upload most of the images he took including: 20+ almost identical images of someones legs in stockings, pictures of back sides of large number of women he run into on the streets, or 20+ images of a landing plane where in most images plane is not bigger than a few pixels. The most obvious examples were deleted as out of scope, but the question remains: how would you categorize large volume of almost identical images? As for Category:Quarterly shields most of the subs are concentrating on apperance - I think it would be good to categorize them based on country of origin and possibly century of design. --Jarekt (talk) 13:12, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
When we are dealing with categories which are at the end of the line, there is no problem to have hundreds of images inside them, but a category like "quarterly shields" needs to be irradiated, it's a place where we can go "fish" for novelties and place them in the proper cats, and overcrowding really hardens that task. As for using appearance, the case of coats of arms really is one that needs to be like that, since that's the only thing we are certain about in a large number of them, and it's something than everybody can do without needing any local knowledge of other countries CoAs. Classifying by country can be quite annoying, since it duplicates the tree and is a completely artificial classification which does not fits well with coats of arms. COAs more than often do not recognize country boundaries. The Drummond coat of arms, which is originally Scottish, of course, ended up being extensively used in Portugal and is part of our nobiliaries and was effectively "created" here, based in the original. We share the Bettencourt CoA with Spain, and possibly even France, and it would be impossible to tell one from the other since the Bettencourts established themselves at the same time in Portugal and Spain. Many other cases are similarly unclear. As for the year of design, such things more than often are lost in the night of times. In the 1755 earthquake all the registry books for CoA charts were lost, and we only have secure information after that date in Portugal. Other countries have similar problems. In a later phase, when things would get more organized, it would be interesting to research each coat of arms and use more advanced cats such as year of attribution and so, but right now, at least for me, it's not that important.
My aim in categorising them is to make a systematic tree to be used in the future to classify even completely unknown CoAs, such as the ones one photographs in the streets of old towns. That is much more useful than using country and date of design, indeed. Country cats are, as I've already said, a pain in the a. sometimes, since people place there every kind of shield according to their limited knowledge. Therefore, a Portuguese CoA observed in a Spanish city will be classified as "CoA of Spain" until the day someone with some knowledge of Portuguese heraldry happens to see that category. I can well imagine that some of the CoAs we left in India will end up categorized as British or Holland CoAs as well, if they are not already. The only way to effectively correct and dispel such errors is to always give precedence to the categorization by appearance.-- Darwin Ahoy! 13:56, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
Some quick comments. Category:Quarterly shields is typically a case where additional display filtering tags would help to avoid an exponential increasing number of subcategories. This additional tag filtering (media and file types, date ranges, ...) will come one day for sure.
We are a media repository, so often visual categorisation is something that is never done on wikipedias and provides significant added value to Commons: red cars, green ..., round ..., red hair, ... Although for some of them (facing left for example) I have some doubts, but maybe it responds to a real need. --Foroa (talk) 15:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
At first sight, coats of arms are one of those cases where filtering tags would seem perfect for classifying, avoiding the fastidious work of creating endless categories to filter down the images. However, I have some doubts about it. I'm having some difficulty in understanding how it would work in more elaborate cases such as the one in the right (which is not even nearly the most complex ones). Would it be tagged with dozens or hundreds of tags describing every feature in the image? Have a look at the current categories (which are still developing, of course).-- Darwin Ahoy! 01:31, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
That is an extreme case, but indeed, it would require as many tags (although the basic categories could be used as tags too = intersect). But if one is going to create all sorts of categories that combines all permutations and combinations, it becomes endless. Already with the few tincture color combinations, we are reaching the feasibility limit. --Foroa (talk) 07:24, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Lol - No, this not an extreme case, it's quite common indeed. To the right there is what can really be called an extreme case.
The problem, here, is that while the above arms of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, despite it's apparent complexity, can be accurately described in it's entirety using only two categories with the current system (one for the right part, another for the left, since they are the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom (Hanover) impaling something else, her father arms probably), to accomplish the same using tags would be a complete nightmare. For instance, you can't just tag with Lion and Sable and expect to get something meaningful, since there are at least three different versions of lions sable there, each one representing a different CoA. You'll probably end up with a tag system as complex as the category one, and possibly less intuitive. That's why I have my doubts that it could actually work using tags and filters.-- Darwin Ahoy! 07:51, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
DarwIn, Jarekt: "facing left" or "white shirt black tie" are actually very useful for certain users. A wikipedia editor, most likely, does not need such categories, but place yourselves in the shoes of an advertising or website designer. The guy needs "white shirt black tie" to fill the void in their pages. "Facing left", because the image will be placed on the right. Categorizing by "obvious visual" features is essential for such jobs. If commons declared itself a free stock photo dump, then it has to have navigation tools for this type of users. 78.107.117.194 04:47, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
I had not thought about those situations, and they are useful indeed in those cases. I usually don't mess up with categories whose purpose I do not understand, and eventually use them now and then to un-clutter some parent category. I agree that classifying by visual elements is even more than essential in some cases, such as coats of arms. That's the only available way to gather them in useful categories, otherwise they would be dispersed between the "by countries", "reliefs", "paintings", etc. Yes, you will still have in the most meaningful categories (the by country) some instances, almost all SVGs and digital drawings made by users, but without visual classification, the actual thing, the actual and historical representations of the CoAs, will be dispersed in the most unexpected categories, without any feasible way to easily place them in their proper places.-- Darwin Ahoy! 04:59, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
I am with our IP friend on this. At first, I was also frustrated by the Facing categories, but after a while it made sense as well (even for Wikipedia, mind you, cause it is "better" to have facing left in infoboxes for example). Heck I even created Category:Buildings facing right, but it never quite caught on :-D
I believe there is nothing wrong with such weird criterion ; the thing we have to be careful about is to not use these as intersections with other categories − I would hate some Cat:Actresses facing left for example. Thus, I am a bit skeptical about stuff like Category:Three-quarter view painted portraits of men, facing right − what was the need and the rationale, really? Jean-Fred (talk) 08:13, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
The problem of categories such as Category:Three-quarter view painted portraits of men, facing right is that if you want to do some more meaningful classification of Category:Three-quarter view painted portraits of men (by country, century, decade or period) you have to look inside those cat-bags as well.-- Darwin Ahoy! 08:22, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Commons also as a repository for templates and pages

Per the Bug 4547, we might need this thread for historical reasons. Please vote below. Btw, I am not the original nominator of this proposal; just passing the word. Please see the bug for further information. Rehman 13:25, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

  •  Oppose How do you deal with the language issue ? Commons exists because most pictures and videos are silent and can be used in a similar way by all language communities. The same hardly applies to templates. Teofilo (talk) 13:48, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
I think you're overstating the case a bit. Many images -- maps and diagrams especially -- have annotations that need to be translated to be useful in other-language projects, yet we still host them. Obviously, language-specific templates wouldn't be a good idea to host here, but language-neutral ones like {{Football kit}} ought to be fine. Powers (talk) 13:55, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
Template:Football kit a) bears an English name; b) is inserted into English named "Category:Football kit templates"; c) is using English language variables such as |leftarm= , |rightarm= ; d) Is not documented, which is far from providing a multi-language documentation so that users not fluent in English can understand how to use it. This bugzilla #4547 creates a situation where non-English speakers are worse off than English speakers to use, modify an existing template or create a new one. See also my last post at this village pump. Teofilo (talk) 14:18, 25 April 2011 (UTC) As this bugzilla #4547 creates a modification of COM:SCOPE, I think a more formal vote announced in many languages on village pumps in each language and a sitenotice announcement is necessary. As for now, templates are out of COM:SCOPE (Commons is a media repository, not a template or software repository), and the answer to bugzilla #4547 must be "No" at Wikimedia Commons. Please consider creating a new wiki for software and template sharing at m:Proposals for new projects. Teofilo (talk) 14:32, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  • I'll play devil's advocate a bit here... the category is only on Commons, not transcluded to other projects, so the category name is fine. Projects could have a name in their own language on their own project, implemented as a redirect to or transclusion of the Commons template, so usage for people on that project is fine. The variable names are a fair point, but could also be implemented in a local template using local language names, just forwarding the values when transcluding the Commons template. The documentation though needs to be multilingual, something we haven't worried much about before. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:06, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  • Football is a game of English origin so there is English template on it. There are surely many well-constructed set of templates in other language wikipedias on topics related to respective culture. These templates could be moved to Commons without changing original non-English names, so other wikis could use it. This usage would not be anglocentric and would be a great way for promoting some non-English culture across other languages. --M5 (talk) 17:06, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  • I don't get Teofilo's argument. Many (most?) images around here also bear an English name and are inserted into English-named categories. Image descriptions are also mostly in a single language (and when this language is not English, we're even worse off than English-only content, since, like it or not, English is the default lingua franca nowadays). If you look at the issue of text inside images (labels, etc), we can foresee how these global templates could work: translations would be created according to usage. Plus, we already have a quite complete template translation infrastructure here on commons. I really don't see this as such a problem, and can see many benefits with centralizing template development. --Waldir talk 15:04, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose. I have to agree with Teofilo on this. It's already a problem for some people that Commons is so much English-oriented, making being fluent in English almost a requirement to participate around here. Having templates hosted here for all projects would leak even more English-based syntax into projects primarily using another language. Of course, for the content of the template itself, there might be technical solutions such as auto-translation, but the template name and the names of the parameters seem to be more problematic. We need to work out what can or needs to be done in order to solve these issues, before we commit to extend Commons' scope. –Tryphon☂ 14:43, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
Your argument only works for top 10 language Wikipedia. There smaller ones are not concerned as much of "leaking English-based syntax" as of creating encyclopedic content without getting distracted on the useless task of inventing their own templates for the sake of "language purity". Proposition would greatly help the smaller language project and would do nothing bad to more established projects, since no one will force them to use common templates. --M5 (talk) 17:06, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
For MediaWiki projects outside of the WikiMedia family it would be very helpful to get some basic templates such as {{tlx}} or {{-}} from a central InstantCommons repo, even if the {{tlx}} variant existing here is the ugliest I'm aware of. There are lots of useful templates not affected by language issues at all if you accept English acronyms as template names. There are lots of smaller English MediaWiki projects without a working set of say cite-templates, because importing this stuff from Wikipedia or meta would be a PITA. The MediaWiki default Book sources for an amazon ISBN search were broken some weeks ago in the stable version, a working English Book sources page here would help. A missing translation is less work than starting from scratch for small projects. –Be..anyone (talk) 20:25, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support. As far as I can tell, one purpose of doing this is greater internationalisation of templates, which is not going to be difficult. And why create a new project when it would be simpler to have one site for 'common' features of Wikimedia projects? I think that's the idea, and I certainly don't see major problems in it. —innotata 14:49, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
Why did you change comments to "votes", Rehman? Anyway, yes, I'll say I support this. —innotata 14:57, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
This thread is basically to reach "a consensus from Commons", as a comment in the bug said was missing. The vote templates are just for ease of counting... I hope you didn't mind me doing that. :) Rehman 15:02, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Comment This seems... problematic to me in most cases. Most templates use language, and are more appropriately hosted at their home projects. Each project typically has its own stylesheets, and the same style names can have different display characteristics -- i.e. each project will often want stylistic control over their project and may not want to use "standard" templates which don't fit that style. Mediawiki versions can sometimes also be different, and definitely can be configured differently per-project. This may also lead to editing conflicts between commons and other projects... well-meaning changes here may have detrimental changes to other projects. Dunno, it seems like this would be useful for only a very small percentage of templates actually used, but maybe there are situations where it could be very useful that I'm not thinking of. Usually having the ability doesn't hurt, since it's a choice whether to use it or not, but... hm. The interwiki links idea sounds useful at first blush, except that means now that Commons would be expected to store a template for (conceptually) every single article on all Wikipedias, so that it could be transcluded in similar articles in other wikipedias. Would editors need to login to Commons to edit those? I'm not sure of the real utility of that. The other example given is about current software versions... dunno, maybe, but currently if software program articles have an older version listed as "most recent" that probably indicates that was the last time the article was updated, meaning the information there is current only to that version -- having the "latest version" updated externally means that little hint is lost. I'm just not sure how useful this would be in practice. If this is something desired by other projects, perhaps it could be done. I guess I'm opposed mainly because I can't think of any really good uses but am certainly open to arguments. I think its utility would be very limited but perhaps in particular situations it could be useful. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:02, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support. The proposed common templates would be of great help to the smaller language projects. --M5 (talk) 17:17, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support I would assume that it would be implemented in a manner similar to the way files are visible at wikis. If local name exist than local template takes precedence (this feature can be used to "mask" undesired templates conflicting with local practices). Great many templates like Category:Translated license tags, Category:String manipulation templates or Category:Mathematical function templates are either already translated into multitude of languages or do not need translation. I always found it strange how much parallel development happens to create templates for the same purpose like Category:String manipulation templates for example. This way some templates would reside in single central location and would be available to all the wikis which would not have to be occasionally synch together to ensure that bugs corrected years ago let say at en wiki make it into Commons version. As for language issues local wikis can have redirects to help users find templates and hopefully they would help with translating documentation. --Jarekt (talk) 17:56, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support: That would be a nice feature with some caveats. E.g., Wikipedia apparently adopted a consistent template/doc-subpage style of template documentation. That's not required on say meta, where a simple <noinclude> documentation or a documentation section at the top of the template talk page are also permitted. There are also families of related templates for date calculations, where mixing sources from Wikipedia and meta could be tricky, and besides there are unfixed parser function bugs for MOD and DIV affecting date calculations since 2006, e.g., 6068 and 6356. –Be..anyone (talk) 18:53, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Makes editing more and more complicated, it is already a problem that newcomers leave wiki's for that reason. Make less templates and use template keys on your own computer instead. --Havang(nl) (talk) 19:19, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support As long as local projects can still have language-specific templates, etc. hosted locally, it's obviously beneficial for us to host language-neutral templates. Some templates are so complex that they are essentially becoming part of the software on Wikipedia, and forking them for each project is a guaranteed way to create a long-term maintenance nightmare as template fixes and new features have to be slowly migrated from one project to another, since nobody keeps track of the copy-paste movement of templates. Having templates in one place would also limit the degree of CC-BY-SA violation that frequently occurs when copying templates between projects. This is not only a good idea, but absolutely essential. Dcoetzee (talk) 19:26, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support. Let me give you the perspective of smaller projects. My home wiki is 'nds'. We have a stable but small community. When I recently created an article on a German highway I noticed the neat infobox in the German article that provides information on the junctions etc. My first idea was to copy the infobox and localize it with translated parameters etc. But my next thought was: how stupid would that be? German Wikipedia already has all the articles and I'd need to manually fill the template each time I create a new article on a German highway. If I just keep the German parameter names all I have to do, is to copy the box from the German article and that's it! Much easier. See nds:Bundsstraat 73. The infobox facilitates a number of subtemplates. It's not unlikely that the templates on German Wikipedia already have improved since I copied them and nds.wiki is now using outdated versions. If the templates were stored centrally our small wiki could benefit from any improvements immediately. By the way: the English Wikipedia went the same way and also uses German named templates like en:Template:B-Ort to create the infobox. And even the English Wikipedia with its massive userbase has problems keeping up to date. The article en:Bundesstraße 73 has a broken infobox.

    As a smaller project nds.wiki would greatly benefit from a well-maintained source pool of templates.

    Language is an issue. Carl Lindberg already suggested some solutions. Commons does really a good job on localizing and translating its own templates. We have the skilled people who can do the same localization work on the shared templates. Each project can create wrapper templates to localize parameters and can apply local CSS to change the design of the templates. If they absolutely dislike the shared template they can just use a local one. Nobody is forced to use the shared templates.

    And the potential becomes even bigger with a central datawiki. --Slomox (talk) 19:33, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

  •  Support as being long overdue. This would work exactly as it would for images, and local templates will always take precedence, so that isn't an issue. — Huntster (t @ c) 20:37, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
    •  Comment except the whole purpose is to standardise across all wikis and make available all updates/improvements available to all as they occur, the moment a local wiki template take precedence these purpose are negated rendering such a change as pointless. Gnangarra 05:35, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
      Wikipedia didn't like to import the technical help articles from Meta and created its own set of help articles more closely related to their elaborated policies and guidelines. Besides the manual import procedure was a pain. I guess they will also insist on their own templates, and they have the resources to maintain their own set of templates closely related to their convoluted policies, guidelines, help files, and procedures. Other WikiMedia and MediaWiki projects are not in the same position and could profit from shared resources. –Be..anyone 08:57, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
      Gnangarra, I'm really confused why you would say such a thing. Are you proposing that if this went through, that it should have radically different behaviour from the images we already host? That makes no sense, and it goes against long-standing practice to somehow force downstream users to simply accept anything we throw at them. Local projects must always have the final control. We're simply a service provider here.
      Be..anyone, what en.wiki wants to do is completely irrelevant to what happens here. If they don't want to use the product, that's their prerogative. — Huntster (t @ c) 19:44, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
        • Yes it has to have a different behavior to that of images because images are static and appear in a small number of articles, where as templates are dynamic they have variables and appear in 1'000s of articles multiply that across the 280 odd language wiki's and its a scale for disaster, for major disputes no right minded admin would make a decision based on a limited 30 or 40 person discussion here in english that affect so many wikis. We'd need to establish dispute processes on the scale larger than en, we'd have to facilitate translators for every language to ensure equal participation by all, its just a logistical nightmare to dump here. Start a new project altogether get the skillsets you need develope your processes let other wiki opt in as they choose dont ambush them through their need to opt into commons Gnangarra 04:24, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Assuming you are referring to "problems with transcluding files from Commons" (which is the basis the proposal works on), could you point out to the current problems with media files? Rehman 00:11, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm referring to normal wikiactivity on Commons. I don't believe that you think Commons is, generally speaking, without any problems, actually (unless your purpose is to be argumentative). I think that our effort should be directed to solving these problems, not to adding others, and to be also a repository for templates and pages will certainly create others problems.--Trixt (talk) 07:44, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support I agree with what Slomox said. Helder 00:48, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  • question. I'm confused about future administration of these shared templates. Right now, each wiki sets its own rules, creates and deletes templates per local "consensus". On a lower level, certain projects on certain wikis impose their own micro-rules (cf. "no templates in articles on classical composers" in en-wiki). What will change, and how? I have no objections to enabling opportunity of having shared templates, but think ahead - what happens when members of a larger wiki decide to delete a template which is also used by a smaller wiki? NVO (talk) 02:50, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
Templates are rarely deleted if still used. Just like removing a file from en Wiki is not a reason to delete it from Commons and "smaller wikis", I assume the same will happen with templates. En Wiki can just stop using a template without deleting it. --Jarekt (talk) 03:35, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
Templates are regularly deleted per BIO, BURDEN or NPV concerns; templates can be coattracks, spam, slur, you name it. It happened, and in such cases templates are deleted regargless of their usage. A Polish-POV template has no chances in Soviet wikipedia, a Soviet-POV template will not survive in Polish wikipedia - but what will happen here? Sure, very few POV-warriors will store their stuff here (instead of wikipedias) but what if they do? there's not enough volunteers to do even basic backlog work. NVO (talk) 15:33, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support. Slomox has given a very good reason to provide us the technical ability of using shared templates. I believe that there are no language issues that can't be solved (autotranslation etc.) ; as there could not be any obligation to use central templates, all we possibly and hopefully get is a simplification of Wiki work. Grand-Duc (talk) 05:33, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support It does not matter much for the biggest mediawiki projects, which have the resources to create their own templates. It does matter for the smaller ones, which often lack these resources. No one is forced to use the feature. Commons can easily be common resources, not just common media. The reason it is common media now is that this is what the software until now allows to share. The idea of common is to share, not to limit sharing for historical reasons. If we start writing the wikimedia history in stone, we will wall ourselves in with the same stones. --Vigilius (talk) 08:29, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support Slomox makes a good case. All the issues I can think of are moot as long as a central template can be overridden by a local template. I don't really care whether this ends up on Commons or on another, newly created wiki. Pruneautalk 08:50, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support to a template-repository in a separate project for templates that are language-independent, transclusion only with namespace-prefix;  Oppose using Commons. -- RE rillke questions? 10:17, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Strong oppose We already have technical issues with template limits for heavily used templates. Making them international would blow up that templates even further. Many templates are also designed for one language (formating) and so on. This would be a massive overkill. I don't even want to think about issues due to the language barriers, discussing which parameter is needed and which not. How about internationalized parameter names? Do we now expect any contributers to read them in English? Way to many open or unanswered issues to support. -- ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ 苦情処理係 10:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
    The problems we have with template limits are no big problem. Small improvements to the Mediawiki core could easily completely remove them. By the way: Commons templates are already internationalized at the moment. Nothing will change about that. About the parameter names: As Carl Lindberg stated above, local projects can easily build wrapper templates that allow the local project to use localized parameter names. Many templates are also designed for one language: What's the problem with that? If it's not useful for other projects, just don't migrate it to Commons. Local templates will work the same way as always. But even templates that are only relevant for one language have a place on Commons. If a template does for example French-specific formatting it's useful for French Wikipedia, French Wikibooks, French Wikisource, French Wikinews, French Wikiquotes, French Wiktionary, French Wikiversity and also French pages on Meta and Wikispecies.
    Language barriers may be a problem, but these barriers already exist on Commons. We cope with that problem since the creation of Commons and although it's certainly problematic, the benefits of Commons as a central repository have always outweighed these problems. Even if it fails, the worst case scenario would be the status quo, everybody proceeds to use the local templates. --Slomox (talk) 14:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
    "If it's not useful for other projects, just don't migrate it to Commons... " I see an opposite scenario: "if the template is likely to be deleted in its native project (for example, for violating NPV and POV and WEIGHT), just move it to commons! They'll waste another year sorting it out!". NVO (talk) 15:43, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
    There's "MediaWiki:Bad image list" to exclude problematic Commons files from transclusion onto local projects. The exact same mechanism could be used to do the same with templates. --Slomox (talk) 19:17, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
    And again, the local wiki can simply create a local "Deprecated template" in that namespace and they'll never have to worry about the Commons version. I think people somehow believe templates would work drastically different than how images do now. — Huntster (t @ c) 19:54, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose, reluctantly. I am swayed by the argument that this would be biting off more than we here at Commons can chew. I have great sympathy for the smaller wikis that would be helped by this, but this would be a massive change to the Commons philosophy and scope that needs to be carefully considered -- and to have supporting procedures and resources in place -- before being implemented. Powers (talk) 13:57, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
    It's always a good idea to be prepared. Could you elaborate on which procedures and resources you are thinking about? --Slomox (talk) 14:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Strong support -- this would change nothing in wikis that don't want to make use of the feature. As I see it, it's a win-win situation! --Waldir talk 15:10, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose proposal:
    •  Oppose interwikis. It's already complicated to get them right for Commons.
    •  Oppose templates unless the pages using these templates are included here as well. --  Docu  at 03:29, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Strong support. I don't see things like "would create more work", anywhere near to being a problem. In that case we can limit Commons file uploads to a few hundred per day, because of the increasing work load of the expanding upload rate. Commons is a central repository of content; why wall ourselves when we really do much more that what we can currently do? Yes we would need to alter a few pages here to add templates+pages to our scope, and yes that means extra work, but saying no to a new feature just because I can handle the work, just isn't right, is it? From what I see, this feature is definitely a net positive, with the little negative just being the extra work load. I'm sure once we pull in the templates, there would be hundreds of more valuable editors from those wikis swarming in? As some have pointed out, those who wish to not use templates can simply create a local "depreciated template", to block the Commons version; it is as simple as that. Rehman 01:32, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support—There is a distinction to be made between templates which provide content and those which provide functionality. Many of the more complex templates rely upon other templates to render complete functionality. Re-creating the entire hierarchy of templates (I considered this at one time for Wiktionary from templates on Wikipedia) is a MAJOR undertaking. Thus, one could definitely look to commons as a repository for those elements which are required to provide functionality to complex templates. Granted, the WikiMedia software uses latin script and English syntax logic in the code, but I do not think that people are complaining about that as much as "the text of Infobox Company needs to be rendered in all of the languages in which Wikipedia is rendered" . . . and therein lies the distinction between templates as infrastructure and templates as presentation devices. Now, this being said, there are commercial systems which deal with multi-lingual lexicons in a rational fashion and one could envision a day when Commons provided template infrastructure support and faceted multi-language implementation options ... but that is something for an altogether different thread. -User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 04:24, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
    • Maybe you want to write a more detailed proposal. Bugzilla:4547 referenced just mentions two samples, neither seem to be covered by your interpretation. If we adopt this "just passing the word" proposal, in the short term, most Wikipedias would probably just end up with unusable data dumps. --  Docu  at 04:55, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose, commons is designed as a global repository for images not templates, lets not try to add even more mess here, also since this also effects more than just commons the vote should be held else where (eg: meta) and every where that would be effected be invited to participate in the vote. And just as a note Bug 4547 only covers the implementation of such a feature that works, another bug will need to be filled for it to be activated once the feature is implemented. Peachey88 (Contribs) (Wikipedia: User) (Wikipedia: Talk) 06:01, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose We need a formal strong proposal. Yes we need a very strong document. What have we to do exactly? Do you know how many tons of templates there are in Wikipedias? Who will patrol it? We must, we can, we can't discuss for their changes (ff course Commons is free but what exactly Commons community is expected to do)? We will protect it and then unprotect every time someone want to change a single dot? People loves to make and change templates the way they consider it an art work. And how many discussions:the color, the link, the shape, is useful, not useful, we can merge, no we can't (see #New copyviol template, i just express the need for a shortcut to work faster). In other way we have to change job or need a very lot of new admins.--Pierpao.lo (listening) 05:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
I think you misunderstood. All templates would not be transferred of course, just the core templates which most other templates depend on, plus those templates that can support the interlang functions. Also, there wont really be a need for that much of admins to handle it; most of the work can be handled by normal users itself... Rehman 06:03, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Very glad to hear it but just a little more optimistic about the work to be done--Pierpao.lo (listening) 07:31, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Weak oppose, not a bad idea, but not feasible. As others may have stated above, hosting templates heavily used on other projects puts an additional burden on us, that we are not able to shoulder. If such a template is vandalized and we don't correct it soon, this will add to the feelings of animosity against Commons that already exist in local projects. Though I am not a template coder, it's my superficial impression from earlier times on :de, that some of the coders are very specialists in the area for which they developed a template, but may not be well-versed in english and might not at all be interested to maintain "their" template on Commons. In addition, there is the potential language problem, already mentioned by others. No offense meant, but those long enough on Commons may well know that users from some language areas have emotional (or whatever) reservations against using english. --Túrelio (talk) 08:15, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
 Concern User:Pierpao and User:Túrelio have an excellent point the templates likely to be stored globally at Commons would also be likely to need protection from vandalism so only admins would have right to work with them. This might not go over well with wikipedia admins who currently perform all the maintenance tasks for those templates. Also Commons admins should not be the only ones allowed to maintain unfamiliar templates. So we probably should give protected page edit rights to all admins on other wikis. As an alternative we could employ system of sandbox and testcases templates for all protected templates. --Jarekt (talk) 12:50, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
 Comment There is already a feature implemented in MediaWiki to handle this concern: the flaggedrevs extension. It's an easy way to get and define a user group of people willing to maintain templates and to limit the fear of vandalism on heavy used templates. As there are already distinct user groups below the adminship for file moving, rollbacking and patrolling, it wouldn't be a big deal to have flagged template reviewer. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 19:06, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose way outside Commons scope, tempates require a whiole different type of skill sets from that of a media repositiory. Also note that templates that try to create one size fits all uses become unweildly to use within a singl language project, to have that translated into multiple languages would only add unnecessary complication. If you look at en settlement template discussion page to understand how difficult it is get consensus and changes made, that page has 19 archived pages of such discussions.. Gnangarra 05:28, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Seems to be a good idea, but Commons doesn't look as the right place to implement it, as many have said. Meta seems to me to be a more appropriate place to handle this.-- Darwin Ahoy! 09:32, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
     Comment mw: already stolemoved many help pages from Meta, they would certainly deserve to get this zoo as free bonus. And infrastructure templates are very near to other mw: topics. But does InstantCommons work with other Wikis as source, or is it bound to commons, as the name says? –Be..anyone 09:58, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
    The Mediawiki wiki is about the wiki software our projects run on. It's not the right place for shared templates. Commons on the other hand is already exactly that: a wiki dedicated to host and maintain shared content that can be commonly used by all Wikimedia projects. --Slomox (talk) 10:39, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support. It's a long needed step forward both for Commons and for smaller wiki-projects. There are a lot of non-controversial culture-independent project-independent templates (like, say, population of a city, USD inflation-adjustment, string manipulation or license templates) need to be duplicated, supported, synchronized, updated in numerous of projects. It's just a waste, waste of resources, waste of volunteer effort. And Commons is a great and natural place to implement a shared template repository. Commons is already a shared repository for wiki-projects (for another type of content, but anyway), Commons community is the largest international multi-language community amongst all WMF wikis and already has a lot of experience with internationalized template building and cross-project cross-cultural interaction. There is no other project that fits for this task better. Of course, it's possible to create a new dedicated project especially for this problem, but really, is there a good reason to create a one more half-dead wiki? there is already a serious wiki-project bloat. --Trycatch 12:17, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Support. The language issue is not trivial but using Commons for language neutral template could already be useful. Additionnally Commons uses multilingual templates, and some of them work pretty well. I think we should see it as an occasion to get some template designers from various projects cooperating here. And rather than a source of technical difficulties, we should see it as a way to disseminate best practices.--Zolo (talk) 04:49, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose using commons for a template repository unless the scope is very clearly limited to copyright templates only. Commons is a media repository, and has its own issues to contend with. It should not be a factoid repository. Centralising Wikipedia templates means centralising Wikipedia battles by moving them onto Commons. No thank you! Remember that existing Wikipedia decisions (arbcom and admin decisions) do not apply on Commons, and havent been needed so far. If this goes ahead, an ArbCom on Commons will follow. That said, the feature being built is way cool- it deserves its own new wiki (templates.wikipedia.org?). John Vandenberg (chat) 02:14, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Enabling feature, not migrating content

From what I see above, I think there is a rather big confusion here. The original proposal is about enabling the transclusion feature in general, and not proposing a general migration of content (i.e. templates) all at once. Of course, one may do some "migrations" according to their will, or according to their wiki's decision, but that is not what is being discussed at here. Feel free to vote or comment below. Rehman 11:54, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Wouldn't both have the same effect eventually? -- Orionist ★ talk 18:53, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
There is no discussion or suggestion to mass-move templates to Commons. That would be pointless and counterproductive. Only templates that would prove useful to a wider, multilingual audience (less than you may think, I believe) need be transitioned. — Huntster (t @ c) 19:27, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

This discussion is silly

I don't think this discussion is helpful, prudent, or necessary right now. The feature doesn't even fully exist at this point. There are a lot of options for implementation (including Meta-Wiki, where most global pages are currently, Commons, or a separate wiki altogether), so debating whether Commons wants this with a vote, instead of first examining the technical aspects and what the best options might be, is silly. Please stop being silly. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:04, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid I'll have to agree with what you say.-- Darwin Ahoy! 21:53, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Mmm, I actually started this thread per the "I actually see no discussion about enabling it on commons or consensus for it linked either" at the Bug. So I don't know... Rehman 00:08, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
This discussion is occurring because the bug report was frozen due to no evidence of consensus to implement such a feature. Rightly so, the devs didn't want to build the feature if it wasn't going to be applied. — Huntster (t @ c) 05:13, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
In the discussion above I seem to see a clear consensus for that feature, I believe everyone wants it implemented, the opposes are for implementing it here on Commons.-- Darwin Ahoy! 08:10, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
I agree that consensus seems clear for development, but I dislike the idea of a separate repository for templates. I fear that would only further subdivide the editor base and make keeping everything in line more difficult, not less so. Commons was necessary to allow for sharing of media...I don't see another such parallel project as being so useful. — Huntster (t @ c) 08:32, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
There's absolutely no-consensus either way there are 38 votes of which 19 oppose the idea thats a 50/50 split. Gnangarra 02:32, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Since there is significant support to bring it here, I say, why don't the people supporting it create a task force to do some tests with it? If it doesn't work well, the worst that can happen is to keep the few templates used in the test, and stop further uploads of such things. It seems to me that Meta is a more proper place to this, but I know nothing about tech limitations. And since there is a crowd asking for it's implementation, if the work stays with that crowd, I really can't oppose this.-- Darwin Ahoy! 04:56, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

If the global-transclusion thing is ever enabled, I think it should be Commons; this is anyway the media repository, and any other non-wikipedia wiki just has far less volunteers. Commons:WikiProject transwiki migration was created with the intention of also dealing with transwiki transclusions once the feature is turned on. From what I see, there seems to be opposes only to the mass transferring of content, and not the feature as a whole. So, maybe we could just enable the feature and then discuss the potential of mass transferring content? Rehman 12:55, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
for clarity I oppose the feature because of the burden such a feature will place on commons, and over a concern that such a feature will create unnecessary disruption, that commons doesnt have the capability of dealing with. Gnangarra 02:43, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
I've no objections. Indeed, I'm even curious to see how it works.-- Darwin Ahoy! 19:57, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  •  Oppose I can see the idea but I can also see the pit falls of it. Having templates in one location can make it easier to maintain, however it makes it easier for those who want bloated templates to be used in articles which a not suited (been many discussions and will likely to continue into the future on Wikipedia) but having them located elsewhere means it can allow (goes unchecked) those to push what they want and not the Wiki community to have there say. Also I don't think the templates should be located on Commons, I like John Vandenberg's idea of a purpose template Wiki but think templates.wikimedia.org would be better then foo.wikipedia.org. Bidgee (talk) 09:33, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

April 27

File:President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden.theora.ogv

President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden.
For those who do not have MwEmbed activated (seems not to work in Opera, works in Firefox):
• Watch with subtitles in your interface language
• Ansehen mit deutschen Untertiteln
• Watch with English subtitles
• Watch with Suomi subtitles
• Watch with Svenska subtitles

We need subtitles in various languages for

Lemme check to see which subs are already available WhisperToMe (talk) 06:13, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

  • I have added a thumb here with view links. Maybe we should integrate those in the subtitle template ... at some day in the future. ;) Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 00:51, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
    • Thanks for starting the German translation :)
    • Other translations I suggest are:
    • Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Urdu - and there are probably many more to add
    • WhisperToMe (talk) 03:53, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Licencing of derivative works

Good evening. I was doing some experimenting with the file on the right, correcting the perspective for better view (the result is not the 8th marvel of the World, granted), and I'm having doubts on how to licence it. The original file (File:Kabel I (2004.a.).jpg) is licensed under {{Copyrighted free use}}. I usually upload all my files under CC-by-sa-3.0, can I use it here too, or must I use the original license? Sorry for the newbie question, but I'm still getting familiar with all Commons licensing subtleties.-- Darwin Ahoy! 00:25, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Use the same copyright tag as the original file (copyrighted free use). All devderivative files are licensed with the same licence as the original, but there is nothing that prohibits users from double licensing the photo under another licence as well.--Snaevar (talk) 00:44, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

"All devderivative files are licensed with the same licence as the original". That's only true of copyleft licenses, e.g. cc-by-sa, GFDL, etc. For {{Copyrighted free use}} (which is effectively public domain), you can relicense the derivative however you want. Kaldari (talk) 01:04, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, that answered my doubts about the restored photos with PD-old in the originals I sometimes upload. They are public domain photos, but possibly the time I spend with the restoration deserves some attribution.-- Darwin Ahoy! 01:13, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
It should be noted that your modifications must meet the threshold of originality before you can impose license restrictions on modified versions of public domain works. Time and effort spent, while commendable, is not a factor in the ability to assert copyright in most jurisdictions. —LX (talk, contribs) 14:06, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Hmm.. I'm not willing to impose anything, in case there is some dispute. Perhaps it would be better in most situations to keep the original license and add mine to it.-- Darwin Ahoy! 14:18, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Just to be clear, when I used the word "impose" above, I meant it in the sense of "apply" rather than pushing an unreasonable agenda. All I'm saying is that you should consider whether it is likely that someone else would have made the same changes independently or whether they represent an original expression of yours before you require attribution or preservation of a specific license. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:36, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't believe they are that "creative", it's technical stuff that everyone can do with a graphic editor, probably much better than I do. :S -- Darwin Ahoy! 20:13, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Category:PD-Art (PD-Old-100)

Good evening. Today, while adding {{PD-Art|PD-Old-100}} to File:Henri Fantin-Latour - Vase de Pivoines (Vase of Peonies), 1881.jpg, something I do quite often, it came up with this novelty of a category PD-Art (PD-Old-100) which has already more than a dozen files inside. What's wrong with those templates? -- Darwin Ahoy! 20:17, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Use {{PD-Art|PD-old-100}}, the template is Template:PD-old-100 and the category is Category:PD-Art (PD-old-100). --Martin H. (talk) 20:20, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
or {{PD-Art-100}}. Geagea (talk) 20:27, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. I could swear that I have used this syntax before without any problem, however.-- Darwin Ahoy! 20:42, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I went ahead and fixed all images with this miscapitalisation. Dcoetzee (talk) 03:53, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

May 6

File:Royal Crown of Portugal.svg isn't showing up

For some reason, File:Royal Crown of Portugal.svg isn't showing up in any of the categories that I linked it to. What did I do wrong?--Glasshouse 02:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

It did not show up since you have modified the derivativeFX output heavily and deleted the last nowiki tag.
Which were the source images for this svg? You need to input all at the beginning of the upload process. Currently your description page is incomplete. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 03:17, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Originally, I used the Royal Crown of Italy with the Royal Monogram of King Peter V of Portugal.svg image and tried to reference both it and the source for the monogram itself, but now that I have the Crown of Portugal, I wanted to swap them out. I'm sorry for the confusion and the mess I've created. I have more monograms for which I'll be wanting to swap the crowns, but I want to make sure I do things correctly. Please advise, and thanks for your help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Glasshouse (talk • contribs) 2011-05-02T23:49:03 (UTC)

hmm, I still do not know which files. which filename hast the "Crown of Portugal"?
You can easilly fix it by yourself: open http://toolserver.org/~luxo/derivativeFX/deri1.php and name all files in the first step. One after one. Continue but do not finish the last step (this is were the full page of code is displayed). Mark this whole code and copy it. Then go to File:Royal Crown of Portugal.svg, edit, and paste the code. Then save. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 00:59, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Problem with template

Template:MetaCat links to Commons:Naming_categories#Categories_by_CRITERION. However, the header of Commons:Naming_categories states unequivocally:

References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy".

This is skipped because the link leads to a section. By its use in "official" template, it is implied that the non-policy is policy, and in a very sneaky way it must be said (skipping a non-policy warning by using a redirect-to-secion; the user will not normally see the warning). The result of this is major cleanup workload like this, this, this and this; see also the discussion here and here and here. Please someone fix it. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 18:24, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I am not sure what you would like to fix: Template:MetaCat never describes Commons:Naming_categories as "policy". In the mean time Commons:Naming_categories serves as De facto policy: it is stable and mostly unchanging capturing best practices of naming categories, like many other would be policies nobody is in the hurry of pushing it to the next level of consensus building and approvals to make it into "proper" policy. We are much more disorganized as compared to other wikipedias in this department. If you are bothered by lack of official approval you can try to push Commons:Naming_categories further in the process. --Jarekt (talk) 19:29, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
Consider the discussions I have linked. It is not a feasible policy, as may be recognized by the fact that this proposal has been around for 4 years without being accepted. Do you have any knowledge of set theory? If so, you would recognize it as impossible to implement (would it be "photos of humans by activity by country by name" or "by name by activity by country"?).
It is precisely the "de facto policy" that is causing a lot of trouble, as can be seen by the numerous categories that have been created by this "de facto policy" only to be deleted for various reasons (redundancy, bad naming, pigeonholing, disregarding of extant sorting schemes).
As for "official policy", the fact that it is an official template (i.e. not itself marked as inofficial) constitutes a claim of officiality. Suppose the license templates would link to Commons:Exemption doctrine policy instead of COM:L.
I am not bothered by the proposal status, but by the fact that this proposal is claimed as policy and used to destabilize working and 100% policy category systems. I.e. some editors are pushing it without approval as if it were policy. Some of them, however, seem simply to be misled. Some Commons subprojects use their own system within the scope of COM:CAT (COM:CAT is the only official categorization policy that may be linked by anyone or anything), which is not accomodated by and runs against the one proposed here, and this is being wrecked piecemeal. The categorization backlog is bad enough to start with, and as an editor who is mainly doing category cleanup I find this a major nuisance and pointless proliferation of categories (introducing an additional layer of complexity in direct violation of COM:CAT#Creating a new category #1).
Again, read the CfD links I provided and perhaps read some introductory work into set theory. The proposal is pigeonholing through and through; the basic idea is alright but the implementation is a load of crap (Do we have people on Commons who have professional experience with set theory I wonder, or am I the only one?). Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 13:00, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
As I stated already several times, the links are referring to some sort of prevailing definition of a meta category, not to a standard. I have changed many hundreds of would-be meta categories with that as a reference and rationale. As far as I know, this part of the Commons:Naming_categories#Categories_by_CRITERION has never been contested. If you want absolutely avoid a mix up, you can move the meta cat definition to another page and change the related links. --Foroa (talk) 13:38, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
"Never been contested"? Well you too need to read the CfD links I provided. The metacat project was abandoned for 2 years before some ignorami started to push it in force and to mess up the extant category system with it. That is the problem here. We are struggling hard to maintain categories, and this is absolutely unhelpful and disruptive; pushing such a pet project that has been shown times and again to have grave errors cannot be considered in good faith anymore.
It looks good in theory but it sucks in practice, because whoever set it up had insufficient hands-on experience with catsorting on Commons.
In a nutshell, COM:CAT is MANDATORY POLICY and Commons:Naming_categories#Categories_by_CRITERION IS NOT POLICY, and you are not permitted to overthrow this simply because you like the proposal so much (it is bad faith editing!).
Because we have an extant category system that is working well, only certain metacategories are permitted under certain circumstances. Whereas the present state invites users to invent them whole cloth, sensible or not. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 14:02, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Addendum: see Commons:Requested_moves#Metacategories, Commons:Categories for discussion/2010/02/Category:Rivers by country by name, Commons:Categories for discussion/2009/12/Some of categories "by alphabet", Commons:Categories for discussion/2010/10/Category:Flat categories, Commons:Deletion requests/Category:Countries by category, Category talk:Templates generating hCards, Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2009/10#Categorize_and_CatDiffuse, Category talk:Categories of the United States by state, Commons:Categories for discussion/2010/08/Category renames for quick review - Round 1: Meta categories and several points raised at Commons talk:Categories.
How can anyone seriously claim that this is workable and uncontested? On the contrary! Even the editor who originally proposed it says:

I totally agree that we [have] been getting carried away with these metacats.

I stand by my proposal to let metacategories evolve (create them whenever the parent category is >200 subcategories according to the criteria used by the subcategories), but not to permit their creation "just so". The sorting criteria have been established in ignorance of the category tree that is already in use. Maintaining the present metacategory scheme would in essence establish 2 conflicting categorization schemes for Commons.
The biggest problem - the main pigeonholing issue - which will completely screw this up is this:
As soon as there are too many metacats themselves, they need to be stacked. This works only according to the proposed guidelines if the stacking topics are themselves hierarchical (part of the same category subtree). E.g. "state" as a subdivision of "country", this will be "by country by state". But if stacking topics are part of different subtrees, it cannot work:
Consider Category:People by occupation by country, Category:Occupations by country, Category:People by occupation, Category:People categories by country. Why is the name "People by occupation by country"? There is no logical reason to prefer it over "People by country by occupation", because countries and occupations are not in a hierarchical relationship.
This problem will increase in scope as more content is pigeonholed into metacats, and at some point it will be realized that the metacat system is completely unworkable as proposed (it creates more problems as it grows) and it will have to be abandoned. The workload will be beyond belief. To put it on hold and eliminate any formal reference to it until it has been sorted out seems to only feasible solution to prevent Commons from imploding on itself.
In a nutshell, this conflict is between those who create metacategories, and those who actually categorize files and have to deal with the mess on a daily basis. In some cases it has become so tangled that you can't even use HotCat anymore. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 14:19, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
{{Metacat}} links to Commons:Naming categories#Categories by CRITERION in order to describe the term "meta category." It does not refer to it as a policy. It does not imply that it is a policy any more than {{CatDiffuse}} implies that Commons:How to create new subcategories is a policy. On my screen, Category:Commons proposed policies and guidelines and Category:Commons help are clearly visible at the bottom to dispel any doubts.
Certainly does refer to it as a policy! Not verbatim, but the template is not marked as "proposal" and it skips the introductory warning; it furthermore cannot refer to it verbatim because templates generally do not make such a reference; they are (or ought to be) based on policy and refer to it by linking to it (consider the "categorise" template for an example). Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
The term "meta category" is probably not self-explanatory to most people, so linking to an explanation is, in my opinion, useful. As long as we have meta categories and a {{Metacat}} template, not linking to the definition of "meta category" from {{Metacat}} would probably not avoid the cleanups you linked to.
My idea would be to add a brief section to COM:CAT and link it from the template. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I have read the discussions you linked to. I have done a fair amount of categorisation work. It is still not clear to me what you would like to achieve. Are you suggesting that we do away with categories like Category:People by country, move over 200 subcategories directly into Category:People and do away with the concept of meta categories and {{Metacat}} altogether? —LX (talk, contribs) 14:54, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
No, I am advocating to exercise far more restraint with metacategories:
  • change the link in the template (so that novice users are not encouraged to "metacategory spamming"), e.g. make a short metacat guideline under COM:CAT#How to categorize: guidance by topic
  • create them only when needed (as in the "People by..." example - "over 200", that would entirely warrant metacategories I think)
  • explicitly prohibit metacategories for immediate daughter categories if the "over 200" rule does not apply. E.g. no "Green animals by taxon" as long as there are less than 200 subcategories in Category:Green animals. (Rationale: this is in direct violation of the mandatory policy "Do a thorough search, to be sure there isn't an existing category that will serve the purpose")
  • allow a working metacategorization scheme to evolve on an as-needed basis and then revise the propsal accordingly and make it official. It would certainly get my vote.
The idea is sound in theory but the implementation is flawed in practice (Category:Ursus maritimus in Manitoba would eventually be in "Organisms by taxonomic kingdom by species by location" - or "by location by taxonomic kingdom by species"? Or perhaps "Organisms of Canada by..."?)
Because at present sweeping changes to Commons' categorization system are being implemented without any proper discussion or established guideline, and not based on accepted policy, and too often without further maintenance (once the metacats are created, their creators too often tend to treat them as their private property yet do no maintenance work). This is not acceptable; it violates all that Commons stands for.
In the meantime, we need to categorize. Clean up the horrendous backlog.
Because we cannot really tell what metacategories are "good" in the long run, except in a few cases (like "People"). I've been cleaning up "Nature of [country]" categories for the last half-year, and boy is the content mis- or undercategorized. And we cannot (meta)categorize what we cannot see.
And this is the biggest problem: people tend to create erroneous daughter categories, because they think they are warranted, instead of populating the main category first and then choosing what main category is warranted... this applies not just to metacategories, but to all categories: consider Category:Ratingen; I refrained from creating "Animals of Ratingen" but it would certainly be more warranted than Category:Automobile dealerships in Ratingen... Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Actually, I hadn't read your last post when I wrote this. You certainly have a valid points about problems with multi-level meta categories. I don't think that what you say is contradicted by Commons:Naming categories#Categories by CRITERION or that the proposed policy suggests creating complex meta category structures willy-nilly. There are de facto common practices even for multi-level meta categories. Perhaps we should try to examine what they are and which ones make sense, and formalise them. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:16, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Agree, except for the willy-nilly bit. Because I have seen this in practice - daughter metacats being created to unite a handful of subcategories because "we have the parent metacat". E.g. "by country" metacategories in a category which contains only very few country daughter categories, like Category:1174 by country. The user going to Category:1174 has to go to the metacategory, but there is no practical reason not to put Category:1174 in Georgia directly into "Category:1174" until we have subcategories for many countries and topics there. The metacategory needlessly introduces another layer of complexity.
As for a working policy, perhaps "meta-categories should parallel the extant category subtree" perhaps. As it is now, it invites to create metacategories that are not in line with the extant categorization scheme, based on the fact that a similar metacat has been used elsewhere. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
(Edit Conflict) Dysmorodrepanis, I also read discussion above and checked your links but still have problems what you object to what is your proposed solution. What I gather is that you are frustrated with current categorization approach. I agree with your frustration, see Commons:Village_pump#Category_Intersections discussion related to this subject. I do not think you need set theory to see that current system does not scale well and can not be maintained forever. I do not like Categories_by_CRITERION with 2 "by"s and do not think 3 "by" should be ever used. But I like Categories_by_CRITERION so subcategories by different criterion are not mixed together. My ideal categorization approach would be similar to the one proposed by Multichill here, possibly combined with software improvements for handling categories with more than 200 files. Metacategories you object to, are only specialized categories not intended for files. As with any tree structure some nodes serve as leaf node and store files, some are internal nodes with subcategories and files, and some are intended to store only other categories - for lack of better name we called them "metacategories". They are identified by {{Metacat}} so it is easier to spot files incorrectly using them and move them to the proper categories (either parent or sub-category). By the way COM:CAT is not a policy: it does not claim to be and is not listed in Commons:Policies and guidelines. We actually do not have any policy related to categorization other than this. Also your points might be taken more seriously if you refrain yourself from calling other users "ignorami" and "wondering" if you are "the only one" with "professional experience with set theory". --Jarekt (talk) 15:59, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
(Fixing Edit Conflict) Removing a sentence no longer valid since Dysmorodrepanis explained source of his frustration, with which I mostly agree. --Jarekt (talk) 16:19, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Fair enough, but it is frustrating to be threatened because one has "dared" to tag a redundant metacat for merge. And people who simply like to spam metacategories but do no actual category maintanance work are bad-faith editors, and I do not think notorious bad-faithers deserve kind treatment.
I am not frustrated with present categorization, but by the fact that metacategories tend to overthrow it even if it worls fine as it is (NCARS).
As to the main problem - e.g. Category:Animals of Canada would not seem to need metacategories now, and possibly ever. Because its subcategories will be limited to "Animals of [Canadian province]", and "[Animal taxon] of Canada", and special-purpose categories (zoos, statues, hunting, books, husbandry etc, which are not amenable to be put into a single metacategory). We can pipe the province categories with "| " and the special-purpose ones with "*" and pipe the taxon categories with "|[taxon]", just as it has been done forever.
The main problem with (multilevel) metacategories: file-sorting and file-browsing is actually made more complicated if one has to look into the metacategory to see whether an appropriate subcategory exists for the parent category where you move content down from.
And yes, set theory is very helpful here. The "overlapping categories" problem is precisely that. Commons, in general, has a problem with a tendency to value quantity over quality. It fails where the English Wikipedia has been hugely successful: getting the respect of people with expert knowledge. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 16:19, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I tweaked Commons:Naming_categories#Categories_by_CRITERION a bit to clarify that categories with too many BYs are not recommended. If there are other specific objections you have to this recommendation page, lets discuss it here how it should be fixed. Dysmorodrepanis you mentioned merging metacategories with each other or with parent category. The problem with that is that let say you have Category:Paintings and it has 100's sub categories. Categories_by_CRITERION allow us to group them logically into sets based on some criteria so that Category:Oil paintings, Category:Paintings in Russia and Category:1061 paintings do not have all sit in Category:Paintings. Categories_by_CRITERION are most likely unnecessary for categories with small number of subcategories or files. --Jarekt (talk) 19:31, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Again: I agree fully that metacategories should be implemented whenever the number of daughter categories is too large (200 - they need do be created. 100 - they can very well be).
The problem is that some editors create metacategories with great enthusiasm, even if they will only contain a single subcategory, and often will block any attempt to merge them back and sometimes even become abusive because someone has dared to touch "their" creation. I can sort of understand the psychology behind that (nobody who has built a large part of Commons likes to see it taken down again), but it is still wrong. We're not doing all this for self-glorification; there is no medal going to the editor with the largest number of contributions. We're doing this so that the users can find their content with the least number of clicks and confusion, or at least this is how it should be.
Thus, metacategories should be something that is used whenever there is need to diffuse a messy jumble of dozens and dozens of subcategories. But as you can see this is clearly not the case; we have a veritable "metacategory spam" problem already that has resulted in a major usability issue. Trying to correct this is going to take a lot longer than it took to create them in the first place, so we are left with a losing battle if no action is taken to restrict the creation of metacategories to the cases where it is necessary. The four proposals I outlined above will, I think, serve this purpose. If they (or something similar) are implemented, we will eventually arrive at a metacategorization scheme that is stable and can be adopted as policy (or de facto policy considering COM:TOL is not official <---- why isn't it? It's been around as long as I can remember). What is happening now is basically people trying to guess what content will be there in the future, but this is impossible.
(And FWIW, the original problem still exists: the redirect in the template skips the header at the top of Commons:Naming_categories. And this is very bad style. The warning is there for a purpose, not to be deliberately hidden.) Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 20:02, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Hello Dysmorodrepanis. Hi agree with most that you say above, but not with that 200 threshold, nor even with 100. It is much more practical to sort files in daughter categories if they are organized in subgroups. Have a look at Category:Horses in heraldry which I organized yesterday or so, using two metacats. I agree that they were not that necessary right now, especially the country ones, but it eases categorization, especially when the number of daughtercats is expected to increase steadily, with horses by tincture, demi-horses, horses by theme, horses by emblazonment, etc. Possibly there will be no need to create more metcats for some time now, but the ones I created, especially "horses by attitude", I believe they are useful since they can be grouped with similar metacats in a parent metacat, as I have done with horses by attitude and lions by attitude, allowing for the comparison of different treatments of animal attitudes in heraldry according to the animal. As for the "by country" cat, an IP had the most unfortunate idea of creating 3 country cats which right now only serve to disperse content, and I thought that placing them on the same level as the "attitude" ones would refrain users to place files there randomly. In anycase, those "by country" cats are expected to increase in the future, if someone gets interested in classifying the horses that way (I must say that I greatly dislike it on first sight, due to the dispersion factor).
In any case, using 200 as threshold is a number far too large. It makes categorization (pigeonholing, if you like) quite tiresome, having to pick something from dozens of subcats which are not logically grouped.-- Darwin Ahoy! 20:34, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, but categories are not created for ease of categorization (for us editors), but for ease of browsing (for the users). This is the main problem. Furthermore, in your example, if one wants to down-categorize an image in Category:Horses in heraldry, one first has to look up whether the appropriate daughter category exists. This is naturally more complicated if the daughter categories are "one metacategory apart", particularly if (as here) both sets of dauther categories may apply. So, my approach here would have been to use "|*" piping for "crest"/"supporters"/"by attitude", but use "| " piping for the country cats instead of a metacategory, until there are far more country cats.
In a nutshell, use piping until the group created thus gets too large, then take the group and put it in a metacat. I have seen "| ", "|*" and "|+" being used for piping; they will collect as a group at the start of the subcategory list. However, "|!" is generally used to denote "needs attention" (e.g. unidentifieds) and there are some others which have a sort of fixed usage (like "|†" for extinct organisms and "|×" for plant hybrids).
("Pigeonholing" is a term referring to categorization errors by overly rigid application of a category structure, which is precisely the problem the present approach invites.) Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 23:35, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
E.g. File:HUN Balatonszentgyörgy COA.jpg has no country category yet, but this is not obvious from "Horses in heraldry"; it needs to be looked up and this takes time, which is annoying if one wants to categorize a large and diverse amount of content. Note Category:Saint_George_in_heraldry - certainly it won't be a problem if you categorize all the content of St. George mounted, but if some other editor does this, s/he will have an increased workload. (Ultimately though, we may find the two metacats to be justified when all the "St. George mounted" content is in "Horses in heraldry". But we can only really tell when this is done.) Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 23:48, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I use categories both for categorization and for looking up, especially for looking up, indeed, so I try to organize them in a manner that would be practical to find the content I want. Of course I do this according to my knowledge and needs, therefore it probably has some faults, which I try to correct over the time (occasionally eliminating metacats which are not justified, indeed). About the File:HUN Balatonszentgyörgy COA.jpg, yes, it has no country category, and thanks God it hasn't. The worst thing that can happen to those categories is to bury the items in some meaningless categories such as "Horses of heraldry of Hungary", making it a torment to properly classify them afterwards. In the case of that CoA the most important classifications are those that objectively describe the CoA (St George killing the dragon, with the appropriate tinctures, not yet there) and a category for the CoA actual function, which is already there (COA of municipalities of Hungary). Everything else is non essential categorization, and if inappropriately used (bury down the thing in "horses in heraldry of Hungary", for instance) can greatly hinder that work, and serves very little purpose.-- Darwin Ahoy! 03:20, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

(reset indent) While I generally agree with the problem of complex "x by y by z" categories and the many unnecessary meta cats, I do not agree with principles that one has to wait till one has 200 categories before creating a meta category; sometimes, one knows what is going to come and sometimes it is better to maintain a symmetric, predictable structure. But some people seem indeed to enjoy to create new category structures, categorise 3 or 4 items in it and leave the rest for the others.

Some problems are related to categorisation which goes too deep (for example down to river per city), which forces then to add besides the "main" category, one or more "side" categories (Both concepts are missing badly on Commons). For example, Category:Rivers of France is completely unmaintainable. I made already a crusade against unnecessary "x by name" categories, but never got support. Many of them are just not maintained, precisely because they are side categories (rivers, lakes, ... by name) and basically, nobody needs them. A recent example of such a unnecessary "side" category is Category:Zoos in the United Kingdom by name, while the main category is now mainly empty. --Foroa (talk) 06:45, 5 May 2011 (UTC) Another example: Category:Art by period: there are still many new permutations possible...

"Zoos in the United Kingdom by name" is a good example of things that shouldn't happen. But it is quickly made and takes a long time to unmake. Thus the changes I proposed; otherwise the "bad" metacategories will eventually outnumber the "good" ones. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 11:14, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

I think that many people want to have meta categories because they think that people will leave no images in it, so it will force better categorisation. Just like people think that when adding diffuse , crowded, overpopulated, ... templates in it, that people will do a better categorisation job. As if that will change something. --Foroa (talk) 07:13, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

And all the time you get things like Category:Animals of Scotland by location (which I have tagged for merge back). The editor who created it could have put all the horse and sheep categories into "Mammals" where they belong, but no; I had to do this now while s/he created a metacategory instead of cleaning up first. This is precisely what I mean: instead of category cleanup, additional categories are spawned with no real reason. (I found this while looking for categories for File:Apamea monoglypha larva from Beith, Ayrshire, Scotland.JPG; it is really annoying if one has to sift through layer after layer, to decide at which level one has to add the "Insects of..." or whatnot.
To categorize content now is much harder, as one must go to the metacat to look up whether the geographic location already exists. If these locations were all on the main cat (sorted alphabetically), categorizing the content would be much faster and it would be more obvious that the content needs to and can be categorized even if neither mammal nor bird, because you would actually see them there. And that's the big problem - metacategories hide away subcategories. This is good when there are too many of them, but we have the metacat and 2+2 other subcategories, so the metacat content could easily be the "body" (alphabetical) content of the main cat. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 21:31, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Public Domain in Spain requires attribution?

Hello, I was checking the Spanish copyright legislation, and got intrigued by article 41, which says: "Las obras de dominio público podrán ser utilizadas por cualquiera, siempre que se respete la autoría y la integridad de la obra, en los términos previstos en los apartados 3. y 4. del artículo 14." , "Public domain works may be used by anyone, given that the authorship and integrity of the work is respected, in the terms stated in items 3 and 4 of article 14" (Article 14 is about moral rights). Is this important enough that something such as "PD-old-Spain" should be created to require attribution and the additional provisions, or can it be neglected entirely, since the servers are in Florida? -- Darwin Ahoy! 12:29, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

According to article 14 of the Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996 the recognition right is un-resignable, moreover, it's an imperative; so in case you know the author you must attribute it. According to article 133 and 134 the author, appart from the civil and criminal actions he's entitled to use, he can request the cease of the system used for the publication, the destruction of the files and so on. --Dferg (talk) 13:27, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
There are similar provisions in the copyright laws of most countries, particularly in Europe. According to Commons' policies, the source and author must always be provided whenever possible, regardless of local laws. It is generally understood that such attribution requirements do not prohibit use of anonymously published public domain works. —LX (talk, contribs) 13:59, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, the US has no such requirement, but in many other nations (e.g. Spain, France) the right to attribution is inalienable and cannot be lost or surrendered by any means. Dcoetzee (talk) 21:24, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, these are called "moral rights" and are separate from the "economic rights" that our licenses deal with. Many (most even) countries have them. These rights don't explicitly exist in the U.S., at least in most cases (Congress dabbled with them for a narrowly-defined set of "works of visual arts"). In general, violating moral rights is not at all the same thing as violating the economic right; there are usually very different penalties and lots of ways to fix them. With the attribution clauses of the CC licenses etc., missing attribution is actually committing full-blown copyright infringement of the economic rights, as the works are basically being copied without permission. People should know the law in their own country and follow it, regardless if it says "PD" on Commons. This is also why it's a very good reason to document all authorship details etc. as much as possible, including on PD works. Carl Lindberg (talk) 21:33, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

{{PD-Libya}}

Should I use this template for pictures published in the 30's in Libya (at that time en:Italian Libya)?--Kimdime (talk) 12:17, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Problem with image previews

There seems to be a problem with image previews on some images, like File:Fresco chehel sotoun 27.jpg and File:Fresco chehel sotoun 2.jpg. Full resolution is OK, but preview is barred with black lines. Anybody sees the same ? I'm currently viewing from mozilla. Fabienkhan (talk) 00:05, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

I get a red X with Internet Explorer for thumbnail and full size. – Adrignola talk 00:51, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Its not a Browser problem, its Commons (Mediawiki). But I see too IE(8) cant render this JPEGs. Im also not a expert, but I see this JPGs have no ColorSpace (32bit instead of 16bit?) and a "CMYK" compression!? -- Perhelion (talk) 01:05, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, it uses the CMYK system, which Commons cannot render properly. I can convert it to a usable format, but due to differences between systems, the colour palette changes dramatically, resulting in unnaturally bright and vibrant colours. If someone knows of a way to preserve colours between CMYK and RGB, please do so, and this image might be saved. It's a very nice piece. — Huntster (t @ c) 04:55, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
I have uploaded a new version of File:Fresco chehel sotoun 2.jpg, the black lines are now gone. Opened in Gimp and saved with minimal metadata - no changes to color profile (unless Gimp automatically set one). To reduce generational loss I set Gimp jpeg settings to high quality, hence the larger file size. If this version is acceptable, I will also convert the second file. MKFI (talk) 17:42, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes MKFI, that's perfect, please do the same with the other image. I don't know why I wasn't able to get GIMP to do the same. — Huntster (t @ c) 04:08, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I have uploaded a new version of File:Fresco chehel sotoun 27.jpg stripped of Photoshop metadata. MKFI (talk) 07:46, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

{{Attribution}}

This template isn't deprecated, is it? And if so, what should be done with images on other wikis with this license? I've been transferring files under this license from enwiki, and User:Nikbot has been tagging them as lacking license information. —innotata 01:26, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Probably {{Copyrighted free use provided that|Attribution:}} and do not delete {{Attribution}}. -- RE rillke questions? 07:14, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Why not simply use {{attribution|text=image credit}}? – Adrignola talk 12:08, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Specific attributions were not explicitly specified on enwiki. It looks like simply {{Attribution}} works: and it's what shows up with {{Copyrighted free use provided that}}. —innotata 15:12, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Categories are not included with redirects? {{CopyrightedFreeUseProvided}} is a redirect to {{Attribution}}. But the problem is that it does not categorize in "License tags attribution". Nikbot tags files dependent on the categories. -- RE rillke questions? 16:37, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Nikbot just needs to add Category:Copyrighted usable (and subcategories) to it's license category list. Kaldari (talk) 21:30, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Relicensing on Flickr

A while ago I uploaded two photos from Flickr (1 and 2). However I have now noticed the original author of the work has relicensed it preventing it from being used commercially. I'm assuming it's still alright for these images to stay on Commons? If so should I add anything to the file page to let possible re-users know? Thanks, Editor5807speak 18:19, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Your uploads are fine User:Flickr upload bot/upload certifies that the license was correct at the time of upload. --Jarekt (talk) 18:25, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
By the way shall we move template User:Flickr upload bot/upload to template namespace? This is not a correct place for a template. --Jarekt (talk) 18:31, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
You can also add {{Flickr-change-of-license}} to files if you would like something extra to assure reusers when this happens. – Adrignola talk 18:42, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
OK thanks for that, I thought they would probably be safe. I'll use the template if I notice it again. Editor5807speak 00:19, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Need to get files back

Can we get these files back:

They were deleted because no source was given, but the source for all of them is NASA, which makes them in the public domain. Bubba73 (talk) 23:14, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

 Not done. They were all transferred from en.wikipedia and had PD-USGov-NASA tags on them, but they had no actual source for the files to prove they were created by NASA (and not a third party photo that was shown on NASA's website). Wikipedia is not a source. – Adrignola talk 00:45, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I can get that information if I have the files back. I have CDs with those photos on them, so I can get the NASA photo number and link that to the photo on a NASA website. I can do that if I have those files back, but I can't do it without them because I don't know what the Passive Seismic Experiment (for example) looks like. I can fix the source if the files are back. Bubba73 (talk) 02:16, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
And, by the way, what "third party" was on the Moon to take the photos, other than NASA? (If they are photos and not drawings - I don't remember) Bubba73 (talk) 02:18, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Okay, restored. Rehman 02:59, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. So far I've found some very similar ones in the NASA images, but not those exact ones. I need more time to look. Bubba73 (talk) 04:29, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
These are taken from an Apollo program manual...I recognise the font type and styling...but I don't know which one. Certainly NASA, in my opinion. — Huntster (t @ c) 05:56, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Aha, at least some of these images, or re-labelled versions of them, come from Apollo 17 Mission Report (JSC-07904). I'll add sources for those I can find. Note that other Apollo mission reports are at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-mrs.html. — Huntster (t @ c) 06:39, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. I've been going through my Apollo Lunar Surface Journal discs looking for them. I found some very similar ones, but not those exact ones. Bubba73 (talk) 15:05, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
At least some of them seem to be from the appendix of the Apollo 17 Mission Report by NASA. Bubba73 (talk) 15:17, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes I've added the source with pages, but only 3. The one image is very similar so the source of NASA is more than likely. In A16 I found no image. -- Perhelion (talk) 15:30, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I think we can find all images at NASA. The images in the PDFs have also much higher resolution. I've exported 2 (with Inkscape) they have also lower size because they are real monospace images File:Active_Seismic_Experiment_Thumper.png(old) and File:ALSEP RTG ALSEP.png(old) Can anyone replace them? -- Perhelion (talk) 17:15, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

May 7

The other ways images can enter the public domain...

I just uploaded an image from flickr's small commons section.

Flinfo applied a {{Flickr-no known copyright restrictions}} liscense tag. That tag, when instantiated, lists four possible reasons why the tag applies, including: "The copyright was injected into the public domain for other reasons, such as failure to adhere to required formalities or conditions;"

I have always suspected that there are images where we are too careful. For instance, when a grieving family member hands out family photos to random reporters, without taking their names, or imposing conditions, I have always wondered why those images shouldn't be considered to have been placed in the public domain. Other contributors here have insisted we would still require an OTRS ticket when an image is widely republished after they handout out copies to random photographers, without imposing conditions.

I agree when a private individual gives another private individual a copy of an image they made, they retain all the IP rights.

I've been told that when PR types prepare a package to give away during a press conference they typically try to impose conditions on how the information they released is used. In particular, I have been told by other contributors here, that images handed out at press conferences will have conditions stated about their re-use.

What if those PR types forget to state their conditions on how the images in the press release can be re-used?

I know IP rights can be lost when the rights holder is reckless or careless. To what extent can we take this into account when determining if do require an OTRS ticket?

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 13:05, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

As an OTRS volunteer I must still keep in mind Commons:Project scope/Precautionary principle. Regarding the grieving family member handing out photos, that's a case of thinking that "the copyright owner will not mind/should be pleased that we have disseminated his/her work."
As for rights holders being reckless or careless, well that's what the OTRS volunteers are for. Sometimes people get annoyed and think we're just being bureaucratic when we ask for specifics. No, we're actually looking out for them. – Adrignola talk 14:47, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
If I'm not mistaken, that clause applies to US failure pre-1989 to include a copyright notice, or failure pre-1989 to renew a work after 28 years. There is virtually no way a copyright holder can lose their copyright by being reckless or careless; in the EU, there are rights a copyright holder can't surrender by contract or any force short of an act of law.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:57, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
As Prosfilaes stated, the "required formalities" referred to by {{Flickr-no known copyright restrictions}} are earlier U.S. requirements for copyright notices and renewal registration. Under current copyright laws, no formalities are required for copyright protection. Family photos and PR photos used by the press are typically handed out with the understanding that they will be used in a relevant context according to fair use; see Commons:Image casebook#Press photos. Distributing a work does not place it into the public domain. Requiring an explicit permission statement for such photos is not being "too careful." If no conditions are stipulated, the photograph is still fully protected by copyright. There are some so-called "intellectual property rights" (a misnomer, since it doesn't deal with property), such as trademark rights, that can be lost if they are not enforced. Copyright is not one of those rights. —LX (talk, contribs) 18:15, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Watchlist help

Is there any way to restore my watchlist to its state of 24hrs ago? I tried to edit it, but since it contained 30,000 items it just timed out and now I'm down below 10k. -mattbuck (Talk) 13:33, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Quick, now you can edit all the british railway images without mattbuck noticing! --- sorry, I can't help... Amada44  talk to me 17:31, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
did you try to edit raw watchlist?? it should load faster.   ■ MMXX  talk  17:56, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
That was what I did. I tried to re-add stuff, but when you click save it times out after a couple of thousand entries. -mattbuck (Talk) 18:59, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
How many items did you try to add? see this.   ■ MMXX  talk  19:10, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
You had how many files on your watchlist? :o — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 17:16, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Convert to JPEG

We have many convert to x templates, but we don't have a Template:Convert to JPEG. I've haven't run across many images where it is needed, but maybe others have. Today I saw File:D.tiff and thought that image would be better as a JPEG because it is a low-resolution image, provenance doesn't appear to be important for that image, and tiff is not as accessible. John Vandenberg (chat) 04:44, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

  • It's already converted to JPEG by MediaWiki software -- Right Click on the thumbnail and you can use JPEG as you wish. On the same time manual conversion of lossless formats to lossy is hardly a good idea. Trycatch (talk) 05:12, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
    • I agree that conversions from w:TIFF need care. Not all tiff files are lossless, as it is a container format that can contain either (including jpeg compression). In the case of File:D.tiff, it is losslessly compressed, however the conversion to JPG doesn't need to have any significant loss, and JPEG is good enough for photos of a person. Someone *could* do a poor quality conversion depending on what level of JPG compression they enabled.
      Consider File:Blondel.tiff. It is uncompressed 928 × 666. Mediawiki gives a preview of 800px × 574px. People like you and I know we can obtain a lossy jpg version by going to a different URL [1] (100.04 KB) but the average user doesnt know that. I would assume that this URL is not lossy, however it is also 100.04 KB. this 'png' is also the same lossy JPG. To obtain a lossless image, I need to ask for this (526 KB) However, it is a (Maybe the "Download" gadget can help by recognising TIFF and giving a 'Full resolution lossy' and 'Full resolution lossless' option.) John Vandenberg (chat) 13:39, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

old interface translations

Do we need all these old interface translation messages that are identical to the translated message

John Vandenberg (chat) 14:57, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

All Dutch or also other languages? If a message is the same as the default one than the message can be deleted. I think I have a simple script to do this (just loop over all MediaWiki messages, compare the content with Translatewiki, if it's exactly the same, delete the message). Multichill (talk) 15:29, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
See also betawiki:Thread:Support/Messages customization statistics. --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 20:23, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

I've deleted most of them.[2] I am unable to delete watch/* and unwatch/*. Of those, only mediawiki:unwatch/el should not be deleted, as it is also customised on el.wp. I've raised bugzilla:28889 --John Vandenberg (chat) 02:37, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

exif descriptions

On bugzilla:28625, it has been pointed out that our metadata section contains labels that are terms which the average user wont understand. I think we should link these descriptions to Wikipedia articles or local help pages. e.g. MediaWiki:Exif-fnumber, which can be seen at File:Tapir anta 1.jpg. John Vandenberg (chat) 15:03, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Good idea. Maybe create a page like Help:Exif with descriptions of all possible fields? Multichill (talk) 15:32, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Sounds good. Here is an overview: Special:AllMessages&prefix=Exif-. --  Docu  at 15:40, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
For not so few of those fields and their possible values, there are normative or quasi normitve web pages describing them pretty good an detailed. Some are even available in several languages. See betawiki:MediaWiki:Exif-scenecode/qqq for links to samples, and to links to message documentation linking to those pages. --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 20:17, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Two comments. How do you plan to keen commons links up-to-date with en-wiki content? Looks stable today, may change tomorrow (I wouldn't even think of interwiki mess with yet-emerging wikis). Look at the links to camera models. Some articles never existed (and never will), others existed once and where then deleted or redirected to articles about their manufacturers example. Second. I doubt that wikipedia will ever have meaningful content on most arcane exif entries. What is "maximum land aperture"? Why did "flash did not fire" if the camera has no flash at all? Why is "Light source: Unknown"? Why does it say "Auto white balance" if the pic was processed from raw file, etc. This stuff will stay unanswered. NVO (talk) 22:52, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Since it would be help about mediawiki software, and not necessarily an encyclopedia, I think it would make more sense to put it in the help namespace of mediawiki wiki (and only link when there is such a page). We could have a new message, like say mediawiki:exifhelp-whatever, which contains a url to mediawiki wiki, if such a help page exists, could have say a - to disable, and different languages would link to translated versions if available. Bawolff (talk) 02:24, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I like the idea of putting the documentation in the mediawiki help namespace, which is public domain. Those help pages could be included in the default install in future. I've created MediaWiki:Metadata-help with a link to Commons:EXIF. John Vandenberg (chat) 02:58, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Procedures voor renaming: Category Old Paris Tramways

This category has two proposals to rename it. These proposals date from 15 february. Moderators probably leave it wel alone and nothing is going to happen. What is the procedures for this kind of rename issue? How can one make a choice? A voting system? The old name is unsatisfactory, but the proposed names are is 100 % either and there maybe a better choice. How do we go from here? Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:29, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

I guess you are talking about Category:Old Paris Tramways. It has now been deleted and moved to Category:Historical trams in Paris. I'm not sure where any discussion took place; nothing links to either page, and neither of them has a talk page. The standard procedure for proposing a category move is to use {{Move}}, which places the category in Category:Requested moves (all), or to bring it up on Commons:Categories for discussion. Both are heavily backlogged. Weighing options is best done by following existing naming patterns where available, examining the arguments for the different alternatives, and if all else fails: being bold. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:40, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
There were two different {{Move}} requests outstanding (restored by now), none was discussed. Sorry, but I moved first to the most plausible destination compliant with other categories worldwide. It is easier to discuss/decide moving from an acceptable name to a better one than having to decide about two un-discussed moves. --Foroa (talk) 16:28, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Note that the second move request was a request to split the content in two parts. I responded in a bold way because last weeks, with the help of several contributors, we reduced the [:Category:Requested moves (all)]] backlog with nearly 500 items. Problem is that when the backlog decreases, people tend to issue more move requests. --Foroa (talk) 16:37, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Nice work! I don't think {{Move}} should be used for making proposals to split content. That's just the sort of thing that builds up the requested moves backlog. Splitting proposals should either be made at COM:CFD with some actual arguments – or just done boldly if the change does not require discussion. —LX (talk, contribs) 16:52, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Special:Import

So, I have a silly question, probably been brought up a million times. Why don't we enable Special:Import on Commons, seeing as it's enabled on multiple other projects. This would make moving images from those projects a lot easier. Magog the Ogre (talk) 06:54, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

It's enabled, I did some tries ages ago. If I remember correctly it only imports the text so the steps I had to take:
  • Import file page
  • Transfer the file
  • Overwrite the description with a description suitable for Commons
It wasn't really worth the effort. Multichill (talk) 10:43, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
One major issue is mapping local templates to Commons templates. Our existing tools (like Commons Helper typically do this (with mixed success) through hardcoded rules. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:57, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
See File:Kenley Station.JPG for an example import. Multichill (talk) 20:00, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Why was file:Olav_h_hauge.jpg deleted?

The file was a picture of a sketch by nn:Brukar:Andreasv for use on wikipedia and was given the {{ cc-by-sa }} license. I tried to look for your reasoning by searching for the file name and by looking in the Special:WhatLinksHere/Olav_h_hauge.jpg, but found nothing. The file is now restored at nn:Fil:Olav_H_Hauge2.jpg. -- Hogne (talk) 11:24, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

The reson is given in the deletion log and the deletion discussion linked there. The drawing is derivative of someone else creative work, a photo. --Martin H. (talk) 11:40, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
OK, could you give a link to the deletion log? Why isn't it possible to find the log by searching for the file? Hogne (talk) 11:46, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
On the image page it states "Warning: You are recreating a page that was previously deleted... * (show/hide) 13:53, 26 June 2010 Jameslwoodward (talk | contribs | block) deleted "File:Olav h hauge.jpg" ‎ (Per Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Olav_h_hauge.jpg) (view/restore) (global usage; delinker log)". Click the deletion request link. -mattbuck (Talk) 12:09, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

{{PD-Libya}}

Should I use this template for pictures published in the 30's in Libya (at that time en:Italian Libya)?--Kimdime (talk) 11:34, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Template:PD-UKGov

Currently this template categorizes files into Category:UK Government images, but it also designates that the tag can be applied to "artistics works" created via Crown copyright. Do sound recordings fall under the classification of "artistic works" and, if so, should the category be renamed, possibly to something like Category:UK Government artistic works? P.S. I'm also having a bit of trouble determining the copyright of a recent file I've uploaded, which is somewhat related to this issue, at File:Winston Churchill - Be Ye Men of Valour.ogg. :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 23:56, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it applies to all kinds of works. I would use PD-UKGov for that one, I think, which would cover the underlying speech. The sound recording itself... yuck, as those are messy in the U.S., but it would not have been restored by the URAA, I don't think, as that recording was PD in the UK in 1996. I'm not sure if BBC stuff is crown copyright, or just a normal copyright, but it probably doesn't matter much for sound recordings are the terms are pretty much the same. They have changed the rules a couple of times, and is a bit tangled to follow, but it appears to be 50 years from first publication, or 50 years from first broadcast, provided that publication or broadcast happens in the 50 years after it's made. However I think recordings made before 1957 continue to have their term based solely on when it was made, and not published etc. (per here). I'm not sure we have a specific tag for UK (or EU) sound recordings, but the terms are different than the usual 70 pma stuff. Carl Lindberg (talk) 04:59, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
But the URAA only applies to federal copyright; early sound recordings are all under state copyright. Capital v. Naxos is explicitly about this case, where sound recordings fell into the PD in the UK in 1990, but a New York court ruled they were still under copyright in NY.--Prosfilaes (talk) 17:09, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Good point. Any idea what the situation is under Florida law? (I presume that's the only state that matters to us.) --Avenue (talk) 03:53, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I believe last time I checked, Florida had a blanket law with no time limits.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:10, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Florida Statutes 540.11.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:25, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, that's good to know. --Avenue (talk) 08:52, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
One thing -- the URAA did claim to restore copyrights in pre-1972 sound recordings (17 USC 104a(h)(6)(c)(ii)). If they didn't, yes, due to the general messiness of US sound recordings, non-restored works may still have state copyright. We do take PD-UKGov to expire worldwide (URAA or not), but if it's a private copyright, then possibly. On the other hand, unless it has commercial value, not sure that state copyright would protect it. We truly do need to use common sense with those I think. Carl Lindberg (talk) 04:22, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I think the URAA only applies to certain pre-1972 sound recordings. In particular, the clause you cite does not apply to recordings whose copyright has expired in its source country, due to the preceding clause (17 USC 104a(h)(6)(b)). So it would still be under state copyright. Florida's Statute 540.11 says nothing specifically about commercial value, although it mostly prohibits commercial acts. I think this makes such recordings non-free (but IANAL). --Avenue (talk) 08:52, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

May 8

I need Help against upload wizard

The menu upload file opens now only the upload wizard, and does this very slowly. Fotr the basic upload form, I have to return to the old form. This is a very time-consuming path. Can someone help me how to come fast to the basic upload form? --Havang(nl) (talk) 08:38, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

click here: Special:Upload. TheDJ (talk) 08:45, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Perfect, Thanks! The link is on my home page and on my favorites now. --Havang(nl) (talk) 08:56, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
or you could use the JavaScript pointed out by Dcoetzee above (Switch to UploadWizard section) and pasted it in User:Havang(nl)/common.js. Bidgee (talk) 09:15, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
But Java-script shouldn't be needed for normal wiki use. --Havang(nl) (talk) 16:11, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
It's not. If you turn off your Javascript, you'll be sent straight to the old form. Kaldari (talk) 22:45, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Licence at files from WikiSkripta.eu

Since WikiSkripta installed the extension InstantCommons and enabled so direct usage of files from Commons, many of their local files have been moved to Commons, so that also other wikiprojects could use them – e.g. Pneumothorax_001_cs.jpg, during that the licence was preserved, assumably. Afterwards, the original file at WikiSkripta was removed, so that there won't be any duplicates (when the Commons files are linked directly). Consequently, the licence cannot be confirmed in any way (similarly like at the files from Flickr). Also OTRS confirmations wouldn't be usable well, as some pictures have been uploaded to WikiSkripta by users, that had not indicated any contact to them. Do you have any ideas? --Petrus Adamus (talk) 20:33, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

en:Template:KeepLocal

I just noticed en:Template:KeepLocal used at English and Belorussian Wikipedias requesting for local files not to be deleted after moving them to Commons. See for example File:RalphStover.jpg and en:File:RalphStover.jpg. I assume this reluctance is due to inability to watch you uploads in the wikipedia watchlist. May be we should push for Global cross-wiki watchlists as discussed in Bug 3525 - Cross-wiki watchlists and Proposal:Global_watchlists. In the mean time it meant that more images from commons will be masked by local copies. --Jarekt (talk) 21:05, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

This template is also used in cases where the copyright status in the source country is unclear, and thus there is a chance that the file will get deleted from Commons at some point. (Since Commons requires a file to be public domain in both the U.S. and the source country, while some wikis only care about the U.S. copyright status). Kaldari (talk) 22:48, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

May 11

Category:The rule of law

The above category is just a very bad taste joke or is there a reason behind it that escapes me? I'm sorry not to be able to suggest a better place for its subcategories. Vapmachado (talk) 00:16, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Those records are all private legal correspondence and psychiatric evaluations going back to 1992 related to legal fights someone has related to his medical pension due to schizophrenia (first noticed in 1977) which was revoked due to patient not continuing with his medical treatment. This decision was appealed (and thrown out) all the way to European Court of Human Rights. The files were uploaded by the user who also had few very hard to follow posts here and on Commons:Bar. As far as I can tell all his images in Category:Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia should be out of scope, unless there is some educational use for them I can not figure out. --Jarekt (talk) 19:01, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I've done the following:
— Cheers, JackLee –talk– 08:45, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

UploadWizard as default uploader is coming

Hi,

(cross-posted to commons-l)

We’re planning to make a change on May 9, 2011 [1]: We’ll replace the link in the Wikimedia Commons sidebar that currently points to Commons:Upload with a link to Special:UploadWizard (in all languages). If all goes well, we'll also invite Wikimedia wikis to begin changing upload links that currently point to Commons:Upload or Special:Upload to Special:UploadWizard.

If you haven't tried the UploadWizard yet, go to Special:UploadWizard to test it.

We’ve a made it easier to get back to the old form from Special:UploadWizard, and added an invitation to help with localization.

NOTE: We still need lots of additional translations, so if you can help with that, please do so on translatewiki.net.

Sign up for translatewiki:

Translation group:

Current status:

The quality, status and up-to-dateness of translations of the old upload form is very mixed. By switching all languages immediately to UploadWizard and working with translatewiki.net, we're hoping to accelerate the process of getting solid localizations across the board. We apologize for the short term inconvenience this may cause. [2]

The old upload process will remain indefinitely available. There’s no reason to remove it. This is purely a change to the default process we’re exposing to the world. We feel we’ve fixed all the obvious bugs that we know about (there are some annoying bugs that we do know about left, but they’re not showstoppers). The best way for us to find the remaining bugs is to have people actually use it as their first upload experience and to continue to receive and process feedback.

As a reminder, here’s what UploadWizard gets us:

  • Up to 10 files can be uploaded in one batch. We are hoping to expand this feature set to allow for parallel uploading, multi-file selection, and more.
  • Some metadata is automatically extracted and pre-filled.
  • You can see thumbnails before you’re completing your upload.
  • Error cases should be handled in a clear and understandable interface.
  • Less clutter due to systematic learning design as opposed to mixing instructions and process.
  • Much, much friendlier to new users as validated by our usability studies.

Major remaining gotchas:

  • If your entire upload takes longer than 25 minutes, it fails. Very annoying, we know. Not entirely trivial to fix but we know how and we’ll get to it soon.
  • Thumbnails for some file formats (video and audio, for instance) are not shown during the upload process. This should not affect the success of the actual upload.
  • Right-to-left support is far from perfect and consistent. Suggestions for improvement are most welcome. If you speak an RTL language, please hammer the wizard and tell us is if it's a showstopper issue for you -- we don't think that's the case, but we need your input.
  • There are a number of other known cases where uploads will stall and the user has no option to fix the problem. It happens much less often than it does with the old upload form, and we believe the most important bugs (e.g. title blacklist related failures) will be squashed as part of this release. There is a link to provide feedback right in the subtitle of the page – if you do have a problem, please report as much detail as possible!

How do we know the new process is much improved? Through qualitative studies of the upload interface. See the report on the multimedia usability project for details and videos:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_usability_project_report

We’re also continually user-testing the software through quick and cheap user-tests using usertesting.com -- we’ll share our first batch of test videos soon.

Please continue to add your thoughts & comments to the feedback page, and we’ll aim to respond in a speedy fashion.

I'm very excited about this change and I hope you are, too. :-) We've received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback regarding the UploadWizard experience, and while there are still lots of ways in which we can do better, we hope you'll agree that it's a huge step forward.

All best, Erik Moeller 03:21, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Notes

[1] We may choose to push the date forward a bit if we run into deployment issues.

[2] There's a subheader in the UploadWizard which takes you back to the old upload form. To ensure that at least the link to the old form is translated into your language (if you're an administrator or can find one), you can edit the following user interface message in your language (add "/language code" to the URL, e.g. "/pl" for Polish):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Mwe-upwiz-subhead-alt-upload

Great to see the new upload wizard go live! Multichill (talk) 11:21, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
What about those who use the current upload form and the basic upload form (IE: Will both stay? Will it be linked on the Upload file ect)? Bidgee (talk) 12:05, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I would like to see the current bugs fixed first. Are they (e.g. browser's back button handling)? And please provide an easy(!) way (... maybe a link on top: "please use the old form as standard for me") for non-newbies to switch permanently (until revocation) back to the current standard form. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 01:09, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Continued at section → #Switch_to_UploadWizard. --Saibo (Δ) 02:42, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Switch to UploadWizard

The WMF switched the default upload mechanism (for English users) from Commons:Upload to Special:UploadWizard today. Please report issues at Commons:Prototype upload wizard feedback. More info here. If this roll-out goes well, other languages will be switched over as interface translations are completed. Kaldari (talk) 21:53, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

FYI: If for some reason the sidebar link needs to be changed back, an admin can revert MediaWiki:Upload-url/en to the previous version. Kaldari (talk) 21:58, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Note that many users arrive here through links on local projects. I've just updated the link on en:Wikipedia:Upload to point to Special:UploadWizard instead of Commons:Upload. Please help me update similar links on other projects. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:01, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Sigh, where's the gadget or preference to make the old form my default like so many other crappy changes you've implemented over the years? -Nard (Hablemonos)(Let's talk) 22:30, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
@Nard: Use this Javascript in User:Nard the Bard/common.js to make the old upload form the default one linked from the "Upload file" link in the sidebar. Dcoetzee (talk) 03:56, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
English Wikibooks will not be able to switch to the Upload Wizard without filing a bug report, which will then have someone request to show consensus for the change, followed by several months before it's handled. So it's not going to happen for that project. – Adrignola talk 23:36, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Any admin can change the upload form for Wikibooks. Technically, it's not difficult. Kaldari (talk) 17:20, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
We only allow fair use files through the local Special:Upload. The upload link in the sidebar is manipulated through $wgUploadNavigationUrl in the wiki's settings, which an admin cannot change, and which currently points to Commons:Upload. – Adrignola talk 18:33, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Ah, I see. I'm sure once all the kinks are worked out from UploadWizard either $wgUploadNavigationUrl will be changed for all wikis or Commons:Upload will be changed into a redirect. I don't think there's any hurry to change everyone over right now though. Kaldari (talk) 20:27, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
The link to the real upload form could be bigger and brighter. In fact it could be the only thing there. Well, it could be worse. NVO (talk) 03:38, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
+1. For now you should go through several tedious steps before you will understand that the new upload form is unusable, because it simply doesn't have a license you need. Trycatch (talk) 04:09, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
No bull? How did you get there? I'm stuck at "upload" button - I mean, the button is stuck, there seems to be no code attached to it. NVO (talk) 10:53, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
There is even no link to Creative Commons licenses in the deed, so a novice would have no idea about what kind of license (s)he will sign:

I, ____, the copyright holder of this work, hereby irrevocably grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, as long as they credit me and share derivative work under the same terms.

This means you release your work under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license.

a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license? What does it mean? CC-BY-SA 1.0+2.0+2.5+3.0? And the text above doesn't mean that "you release your work under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license"! It's a very misguiding statement at least. Trycatch (talk) 04:09, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I have to agree with Trycatch here, the statement they sign should explicitly say that they release the work under whatever license, including a link to the CC page. We can then tack on our short laymen's explanation. Otherwise it may not amount to a legal release statement. If enabling the wizard helps catch easily-fixed issues like these then that's a good thing. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:13, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Have you guys visited the rest of the internet lately? Like Flickr or Picassa or anywhere? Flickr doesn't even give you an explanation, much less any links. And we honor their licensing just as much as our own. Picassa gives you a brief description, but doesn't even tell you what license you're applying. You don't have to give people pages of legalese just to allow them to relinquish their rights. It's not like we're not twisting people's arms. Regardless, I don't think it would hurt to link to the license. I'll add that. Kaldari (talk) 17:37, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Agreed that a link makes sense, opening the license in a pop-up or a new tab. I find the release statement in the wizard actually much clearer than anything in the old form, which is a huge wall of text (ignored by most users), while the actual license selection is a mysterious dropdown (without links), which is only explained by another huge wall of text if you open the "help" menu. The explicit consent is a much more obvious signal to the user that they are making a choice with consequences.--Eloquence (talk) 18:06, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Neither Flickr nor Picasa is a free media archive, neither Flickr nor Picasa has anything to do with free culture/content movement. They can don't care about enforceability of their CC-licenses, it's simply not their problem (to honor Flickr & Picasa their license change menu is actually not so bad comparing to the new one in Upload Wizard). But for Commons free content and copyright are the Alpha and Omega, we routinely deal with things like attempts to revoke a free license, and Commons doesn't have such a luxury as usage of vague copyright deeds with dubious real-life enforceability. Trycatch (talk) 18:43, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
In that case we should stop automatically honoring Flickr licenses. Kaldari (talk) 18:49, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
It's not so clearcut, but there are problems with Flickr pictures. E.g. if a flickr-user uses a free license for his pictures and at the same writes in his profile something like "To guys from Wikipedia -- STOP STEALING MY PICTURES!!!" -- there is something wrong somewhere.
Maybe there is some misunderstanding. The only thing I propose to swap the first and the second paragraphs as Dcoetzee said -- "statement they sign should explicitly say that they release the work under whatever license, including a link to the CC page. We can then tack on our short laymen's explanation. " Trycatch (talk) 19:06, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I have to disagree. It is more important to us that the user is aware of the meaning of the license and agrees to the general concepts than it is that they "sign" version 3.0 of a legal document that they won't read or understand. We want users to donate their images consciously, not by accident. Making sure that people are actually aware of what they are agreeing to - unrestricted reuse which only requires attribution and retention of the same terms - is more important than how strongly we can "enforce" the CC license against people who didn't want to donate their images in the first place. We're supposed to be promoting the free sharing of knowledge, not hording media against people's will. Most of the world has no idea what "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike" means, which is one of the main problems with the old form that we are trying to address with the UploadWizard. Put yourself in the place of someone who has never heard of Creative Commons before. Which wording would be more useful for them? Kaldari (talk) 20:56, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
And if we slap a CC-BY-SA tag on an image when the user never actually agreed to release the work under the CC-BY-SA but just some super-vague laymen's version of it, we are fraudulently affirming that they signed a contract that they never signed. The details of the license will matter in the event of a legal dispute. Both are important but we can't just add the license name as an afterthought, and we certainly shouldn't claim that our terse laymen's description is an accurate representation of the license in its entirety, which is what the present wording suggests. Dcoetzee (talk) 19:31, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
If a person doesn't read the text of a deed they sign, it's solely their problem (and IRL it will be solely their problem if they don't read software EULA or insurance contract as well). But if there would be a bad license deed it would be not their problem -- it would be problem of Commons, community of Commons, our reusers and downstream. Minor or non-existing benefits of the current vague deed (it would not be harder at all to read a more explicit version of the very same text) are incomparable with drawbacks of flooding of Commons with hundreds of thousands dubious pictures. Trycatch (talk) 20:11, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

How can one change the link to the old form for i18n purposes ? It is not among the messages on TranslateWiki (rightly so) and I was unable to locate it in the MediaWiki namespace. Jean-Fred (talk) 08:04, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

See MediaWiki:Mwe-upwiz-subhead-alt-upload.--Trixt (talk) 08:32, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I know about this message. My question was precisely about the variable that is inserted inside this message. Jean-Fred (talk) 11:27, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
There is currently no way to localize the link itself. I'll file a bug on this. Kaldari (talk) 17:56, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Ok, thanks Ryan. Jean-Fred (talk) 18:05, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I tried copying and pasting the script mentioned above into "User:Jacklee/commons.js" but it doesn't seem to work for me (and, yes, I did try bypassing the cache a few times). Did I do something wrong? Or is this a problem relating to the sluggish nature of the server that I am currently experiencing? — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 11:51, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

common.js not commons.js :) Jarry1250 (talk) 22:09, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Question. I finally got to "upload form" (thanks to RL advisers - it turned out that "donations" actually mean "next step, stupid!"), uploaded eight files, then stumbled at "description" page. Apparently this thing does not recognize {{CC-BY-SA-3.0}}, or {{Own}}, or {{Information}}, or all of them so I had to abort. After uploading files, after providing two sets of dates and authors for each file, etc. What happened to these files? What happened to pages of text inserted in the forms? They did not show up in Special:NewFiles, but can we be positively sure that they were indeed discarded, and are not preserved in some digital limbo? in the latter case, there's a chance that a file may show up somewhere without proper attributes. NVO (talk) 15:11, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

If the upload process was abandoned, the files are left in stash and will be cleaned out by normal file system maintenance. There's no chance they will show up on Commons. They're probably already deleted by now. Kaldari (talk) 17:25, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Due to unknown site problems, I've had to revert the roll-out of UploadWizard for now. For some reason the Javascript is taking forever to load today. We're working on troubleshooting it currently. Kaldari (talk) 17:25, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

It looks like there are some networking issues that are causing slowness between the caching servers and the web servers. The ops team is working on it. This is probably affecting more than just UploadWizard. Kaldari (talk) 17:41, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
And toolserver lags by more than five hours. IMO this is a priority. NVO (talk) 18:51, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
The WMF doesn't operate the toolserver so it's not in competition for prioritization. Kaldari (talk) 20:22, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I had requested an easy and permanent way to get back to the old form already above at #UploadWizard_as_default_uploader_is_coming. Nothing seems to have been done for this. People need to manually insert some code snippet in the skin.js. The current situation is like this for me: Click the upload link, wait 15 seconds until the big image and stuff has loaded and then I can click on the link to take me back. But there is no setting to save this permanently in my settings.
As always: just push forward and do not even respond to questions, huh?
Oh, by the way, it is still switched on for de users: MediaWiki:Upload-url/de; without being mentioned here. --Saibo (Δ) 01:11, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
User:Eloquence reverted it. Unless there is a option for the user to easily go back to the old form I suggest to modify theupload form in such a way User:Saibo/Sandbox4 if the wizard needs to go live now. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:18, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Hello,

a quick summary of where things are:

1) UW is currently disabled to resolve an issue which arose today which causes UploadWizard to not load at all. I've removed changes to the sidebar made by WMF, as well as the sidebar changes by community members in other languages on Commons, and the change on the English Wikipedia. We'll resolve the issue ASAP and then return to the previous state.

2) If you used UW yesterday on Internet Explorer and failed at the "describe" step because UploadWizard wouldn't allow any of your titles to go through, this issue should be fixed with the next deployment. It was caused by a malfunctioning title blacklist detection.

3) If you'd like to use one of the old forms after UW is re-enabled, the easiest thing to do is to bookmark whichever form you prefer (and there are many) -- no need for any custom JS.

Thanks for your patience; today was not a lot of fun due to general site issues, which also delayed resolving the new UW issues surfaced today. We think this first version of UW will already be a huge improvement on the default upload experience (which most new users are completely befuddled by), and there's lots of stuff we hope to be able to do to make it even better, including highly wishlisted items like multi-file selection.--Eloquence (talk) 02:31, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

ad 3: Suggest people to bookmark (then) hidden URLs should be the solution... Come on. First finish development, then switch it live for all. Why the rush?
By the way: The link "Back to the old form" does not seem to be localized (at least in the German interface). It links to the English Upload form. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:48, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

May 10

Image previews

Is there any way to preview an image's metadata before saving it? I've been using the basic upload form, but all I can preview is the text I write, not the metadata text. Any suggestions? --Philosopher Let us reason together. 14:23, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

The file's properties (Windows or Linux) or info (Mac) should show the metadata. For information on editing metadata tags, see Commons:EXIF. --Avenue (talk) 14:56, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, that should work. It would be nice if there was a way to preview it when uploading, though. I'm filling in the date= parameter in {{Information}} on the photos I'm uploading and matching that information with the information in the metadata (the photos were taken over the course of two days, but are mixed together), which is why the preview would be useful. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 15:15, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Oh, well. Not really necessary. Might be a good idea for a gadget one day, though, if one of our gadget-makers finds themselves with too much time on their hands. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 15:48, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I have heard the Upload Wizard reads the date from the EXIF metadata. But it is switched off currently due to tech problems. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:48, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Embedly support for Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons thumbnails

At my request, Embedly now returns thumbnails for images on Wikipedia:

http://api.embed.ly/embed?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BirdNotes-22-3.jpg

and Wikimedia Commons:

http://api.embed.ly/embed?url=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John-Madin.jpg

Cheers, Andy Mabbett (talk) 17:56, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Is there some way to remind Embedly users to comply with the acknowledgment requirements of CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licences? — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 20:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Is this photo OK under U.S. building FoP?

According to COM:FOP#United_States, FoP is only applicable to buildings in the U.S. There's currently a discussion in the German Wikipedia (in German, of course) regarding the question whether a particular U.S. photo could be transferred from English WP to Commons. The photo in question is en:File:GantryPlazaStatePark.jpg. The buildings in the background should not be a problem, neither the gantry cranes, which are not artworks. But I wonder: maybe the (very simple) fountain/pond design in the foreground counts as a work of sculptural art? What do you think? Gestumblindi (talk) 19:58, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

In my opinion, no, that particular fountain does not meet the threshold of copyrightability. It's just a circle of water. Dcoetzee (talk) 20:33, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
"that particular fountain does meet the threshold of copyrightability" - it seems you mean "does not meet"? ;-) Gestumblindi (talk) 20:38, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Er yes :-) Fixed. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:34, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

May 12

{{PD-Libya}}

Should I use this template for pictures published in the 30's in Libya (at that time en:Italian Libya)?--Kimdime (talk) 11:10, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Categories starting with the word "Famous -"

I propose renaming these categories with the suffix "Notable -".205.206.8.197 05:42, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Please, no - don't infect the category names with unnecessary Wikipedia jargon. It would be better to just get rid of the prefix altogether. --Avenue (talk) 12:11, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Why have such peacock descriptive at all, its a reasonable presumption that just having a photo uploaded to commons confers that basic premiss. Gnangarra 12:55, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
I agree. Arbitrary modifiers like "famous" or "notable" have no place in Commons category names. --Skeezix1000 (talk) 13:16, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Category:Famous people is very filled with subcategories like Category:Houses of famous people by country and should be kept, I think. But I agree, that f.i. Category:Famous trees could be as well Category:Remarquable trees. --Havang(nl) (talk) 13:54, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
"Remarkable"? - Jmabel ! talk 15:58, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing it here! I think that, along with "Topics", "Sources" and "Licenses" dimensions, Commons category schemes also need a "Get Real!" scale. Chemical formulae on "Colder than Iceberg" extreme, mating elephants in the middle, and this - "famous people" - on the other end. Give it a chance, it's a great comic relief. Who are these "famous people", after all? Will my mother-in-law qualify? Trust me, she would. Keep. Famous. NVO (talk) 15:19, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Get rid of "peacock" descriptions where the criteria are necessarily completely subjective. Winners of particular awards? Sure. Buildings with landmark designations? Sure. But "famous"? "Notable"? No. Nothing to prevent someone from creating a page with the most prominent examples in a category and its subcategories, but it's not useful categorization. - Jmabel ! talk 15:58, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

What's notable or famous in the Welsh area might be completely different from what's notable in the Basque country or in Tibet. The fact that they are somewhere are on Commons makes them notable. I don't think that we need additional subjective filtering. A CFD should help to clear that out (for good I hope). --Foroa (talk) 07:34, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Everything on Commons is not famous or notable. If I take a good photograph of my dog which is not notable, the photo may still be used on Commons for illustrating something about dogs. There are lots of dog images and some of the dogs are notable by themselves, so it can be useful to group them together in some way. /Ö 14:46, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I agree; this is not Wikipedia, and we are not limited to images on notable subjects. Where did this idea come from that everything on commons is presumptively notable? Powers (talk) 00:26, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Template in EXIF

File:LG Headshot.jpg, this should not happen. --Martin H. (talk) 23:57, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Ouch (for those how do not want to see themselves: a CC license template in EXIF data is expanded). The EXIF data does not seem to be sanitized / preserved from any interpretation enough by our software. --Saibo (Δ) 00:01, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
See Jeffrey's EXIF viewer. --Martin H. (talk) 00:10, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
So how should we prevent this from happening? Something we can do or do we write bug report? --Jarekt (talk) 01:48, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Interesting image. "Mike Fedele took and owns this picture"... I don't believe it for a second. Lupo 06:52, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I agree but than again almost all photograph self-portraits look equally suspicious. From my own experience I have a lot of photographs of me climbing taken by friends or random people with my camera often after I set the camera, adjust everything, suggest where to stand and where to point. I consider those joint authorship, but it gets more tricky if I do not know names of my co-authors, like here where a stranger I have never met asked me if I want a picture with my camera after he took a few with his. But very professional studio shoots of business people and politicians, like the image above or this might be a different category since I doubt it was even their camera.--Jarekt (talk) 13:41, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Some more examples: File:2010 Rick Weddle.jpg, File:Bill Vass.jpg or File:George photo for book.jpg. I do not think authors are correct but it might be a case of work for hire and it seems to be something that should be settled between person and his hired photographer. --Jarekt (talk) 13:52, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Jarekt, I wasn't so much commenting on the "self-portrait" claim, but was expressing the fact that I consider it highly unlikely that the uploader was Mr. Fedele or acted with his consent. Besides, "work made for hire" describes a very special kind of relationship in the U.S. It basically means the photographer is your employee, he regularly works for you, and you're paying his social security. Not the case with this Mike Fedele image, which is likely an official portrait likely taken by an official photographer employed by the state of Connecticut. A one-shot uploader who had previously uploaded a photo at en-WP taken from a press kit: en:File:Christopher Coutu 47th District.jpg; first upload 2011-01-22, upload comment "Christopher D. Coutu is owner of this picture taken in 2010.", deleted 2011-01-29, re-uploaded 2011-01-30? And then the same here with this Mike Fedele image? This has all the signs that shout "copyvio". Away with it! Lupo 16:38, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I stuck a bugzilla entry in: bugzilla:28954 --brion (talk) 12:21, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, brion, I not know how to do this. --Martin H. (talk) 12:34, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Here is an other example of a template in the exif data: File:Arrow-dsc02903-nevit.jpg. - Amada44  talk to me 08:48, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

May 13

Rotating a photo upload

Apologies, but for the life of me I can't seem to figure out how to rotate this image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JanineOLearyCobb.jpg

Or how to delete it so I can try uploading again. I have no idea why it did not upload properly (it should have).

Many thanks to someone who can help a newbie like myself. --Kathleen5454 (talk) 17:59, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

You can't rotate stuff within the interface, I've tagged it to be rotated by a bot. For your future information, the way to do it is tag with {{rotate|90}}. However, the image is suspicious to me - it's a photo of a photo, so where did the original photo come from? -mattbuck (Talk) 18:27, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Many thanks, Mattbuck. The photo comes from the author herself who gave permission for use; it is on Flickr with a Creative Commons license so it is ok. I'll work on getting a better image, but in small, it works just fine on the Wikipedia entry which is what I was looking for.

--Kathleen5454 (talk) 13:29, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Bad Rendered PNG Files

Hello :) This SVG file has bad rendered PNG files (tested with Firefox, Camino, & Safari). From the downloaded original SVG file, using Inkscape I get well rendered PNG files. Perhaps the problem is due to the render make by the Wikimedia software. What you think? Thanks for help.--EnekoGotzon (talk) 19:46, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

The current renderer librsvg used by the Wikimedia Software is a "peace of shit". It can't handle fonts, and any kind of effect well. I suppose that you export it as a PNG with higher resolution and upload this as an alternative to the current SVG. If support for SVG increases in the next 10 years, then we can use the SVG instead. -- ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ 苦情処理係 20:10, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for help :) May be is better to leave the SVG format because it allows to make larger images. OK?--EnekoGotzon (talk) 21:26, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I meant it like this: SVG, PNG -- ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ 苦情処理係 21:29, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Having a fix like this is a better alternative in my opinion. The text has been converted to path, which means that it can not be edited. Preserving the original file solves that problem. You can ask me or Commons:Graphic Lab for this fix. --ZooFari 22:40, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
OK. This is a way to get around the font issue. But for anything else is PNG the currently only option. -- ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ 苦情処理係 23:22, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I am a beginner. I have (almost) everything to learn. For now I will simply replace the problematic file by its edited version. You are a great partnership. With colleagues like you to learn a lot is possible. Thanks for your knowledge.--EnekoGotzon (talk) 10:11, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
The edited file shows a .svg extension but really it is a PNG file. IMHO it is better to leave the original SVG format file because it allows to make larger images.--EnekoGotzon (talk) 10:46, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
SVG files are rendered as PNGs by the software. It is actually an SVG file; the software won't let you go and rename the extension on a PNG file to SVG and then try to claim it's an SVG. The line below the picture is just for the rendering and doesn't reflect on the file itself. – Adrignola talk 13:10, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

File:Gipton Outside.JPG

Can one of you have a look at this image? If this were on Wikipedia I'd nominate it for CSD, vandalism. The image is not of a school but of a church, and was uploaded without the proper paperwork. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 20:24, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry, it's already been tagged by a bot for deletion for not having a license. — Huntster (t @ c) 21:17, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Drmies, if you look at the panel on the left side of each file information page, you should see a list of links including one that states "No license" and another that states "Nominate for deletion". — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 02:17, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

May 14

File:G.Alinovi-Veduta Palazzo Ducale e Pilotta.jpg was uploaded by error.

Hallo, I uploaded the above image with a wrong file name and description. The author of the painting is Giacomo Giacopelli (1808-1893) and not Giuseppe Alinovi as indicated also by the file name. One solution might be to move the file to another name and the edit it with the right data, or delete it and then upload the image with the right name and description.
I don't know which way is best. Can somebody help me?. Thank you, --Gab.pr (talk) 10:19, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

It's been renamed to File:Giacomo Giacopelli - Veduta Palazzo Ducale e Pilotta.jpg. Jafeluv (talk) 13:18, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
For the future, you should be aware of the {{Rename}} template. - Jmabel ! talk 16:26, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Date differentiation

I have modified the template {{Author}} so that it could support the parameters original and photo, enabling easy multilingual description of more authors (even more parameters would be useful – crop, purification etc. – but I do not know how to add them without making the template too “heavy”, what regards the condition parser functions, well also now they are too many). See its use with a simple parameter and with the {{tl|Creator}} template.

Do you think using similar parameters in a template for date would be useful as well?

--Petrus Adamus (talk) 18:57, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm getting increasingly concerned with all the complicated template constructs build in the last couple of months. It looks to me like we're trying to implement things for which MediaWiki is not build. Multichill (talk) 19:19, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
The constructs are so complicated, because no variables can be used. I do not know how to describe files multilingually in another way, a simple indication like {{photo}}: Name or Name ({{photo}}) are probably not usable for non-latin-alphabet or right-to-left written languages. There is also problem, as many template name, teoretically useful for translations, have already had other usage ({{Original}}, {{Crop}}) etc. Yes, maintaining a multilingual project isn't easy. --Petrus Adamus (talk) 19:37, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Multilingual support for #time is checked in and awaiting deployment, BTW. Kaldari (talk) 17:49, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I am afraid that multilingual support for #time will not sort this problem out – I need to write multilingually for instance:
  • 9 May 2010 (original), 5 January 2011 (crop)
You cannot use just {{ISOdate|2010-05-09}} ({{i18n|original}}), {{ISOdate|2011-01-05}} ({{i18n|crop}}), as (disrigarding the complication) not all languages use brackets and commas, not all are written left-to-right etc. Petrus Adamus (talk) 19:40, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

When US Federal agencies don't know how to liscense their PD images on social networking sites, like flickr...

In the last year or two many groups within US Federal agencies have started to republish their PD images on social networking sites, like flickr. Ideally flickr would let those officials place a PD liscense on those images. Flickr does allow a small number of institutions to use a PD liscense -- but they are all, or almost all museums.

Some of those officials use the most generous CC liscenses that flickr supports for non-museums. Others state "all rights reserved", and others try to place "no derivatives" conditions, or "no commercial use".

Recently I noticed another contributor had uploaded some images from flickr, where the US Federal employee(s) tried to apply a nonfree liscenses. I had considered uploading images from that flickr-id, and had chosen not to, due to the liscense complication. But this other contributor is basing their PD liscense on the EXIF data, not on the flickr liscense. I hadn't noticed this.

Is this a good idea?

Nothing stops someone else from noticing this, and placing a {{Flickrreview}} tag on those images.

{{Flickrreview}} can handle most good flickr images. But about five percent of the time it requires a human to do the review. Would it make sense to have another similar tag that always requests a trusted human to verify that the EXIF data confirms that a flickr image is PD, even if the Federal employee who uploaded it used a non-free liscense?

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 02:14, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

What is the file? Link to the Flickr account? If it is a work of the federal government, then the license they apply to Flickr is useless...it will be public domain. Is there something about the image that makes you think it isn't public domain? — Huntster (t @ c) 17:32, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Flickr does have a special "US Government Work" license as well, which is what should be used ideally, but it's not something available by default. Some of the US Gov flickr accounts have that set up, but I'm sure not all have bothered. Anyways, if they are works made by US Government employees in the course of their duties, they are public domain and (at least in the United States) they cannot claim those licenses. A human reviewer should see the validity of the PD license and ignore the Flickr one. And if the source page is under a free license, it doesn't hurt for Flickrreviewr to document that. The USGov license can be added any time. There is a mostly theoretical question on whether the USGov tag is fully applicable in other countries, so evidence of a fully free license could be of use if those theoretical issues ever started to become reality. I don't think anything needs to change. I guess the only issue is if there is a non-free license on Flickr and an admin deletes without realizing that PD-USGov applies as well. Carl Lindberg (talk) 18:06, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
That is good to know. I have uploaded thousands of flickr images, but I have never seen one of these liscenses. Is there any chance you had handy a url to an image with one on it? Thanks! Geo Swan (talk) 20:41, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
There are plenty: the White House's photostream (as with the situation room photo), for example. The FlickrreviewR bot can recognise at least some specific Commons PD-USGov tags, like that for the State Department. —innotata 22:26, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
@Geo Swan: how about some examples? Lupo 22:24, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Just because some U.S. governmental agency like the U.S. Army publishes a photo on Flickr doesn't mean yet that the photo was created by an employee of the U.S. government in the course of his duties. For instance, this photo is actually a contractor's image (copyright held by Remington). But also this photo (at the Commons as File:XM2010 November 2010.jpg) is in all likelihood not a U.S. Army picture but most probably also "all rights reserved" by Remington, as I argued just a few minutes ago in a slightly different context. Lupo 22:24, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
It's a very interesting find. There was a DR about this photo: Commons:Deletion requests/File:XM2010 November 2010.jpg, the picture had been kept basing on response of a Public Affairs/Strategic Communications of PEO Soldier. I can't download this catalog, their Windows-based server is down, but maybe the DR should be reopened basing on this new information. Trycatch (talk) 23:45, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Hm, I have no problems accessing the remingtonmilitary.com web page. However, downloading the catalog works only if you have JavaScript enabled. Lupo 06:34, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Examples? I didn't offer examples before because the individual who found the EXIF data confirmed that these should be PD images is a contributor I have had some friction with in the past -- but who I hope I am on the cusp of a reconciliation -- and I fully agree with their use of EXIF data. U.S Embassy Kabul Afghanistan is one of the offending flickr-ids. Some flickr-ids operated by USCG personnel have the same problem. The jtfgtmo flickr-id had all their PD images marked "all rights reserved". I considered uploading their PD images anyhow, and ignoring the bad liscense. Instead I wrote what I thought was a tactful note to them about using a free liscense for their PD files. They did not reply, but they erased all their images. Anyhow Here are a couple of recent images, with good EXIF data. Geo Swan (talk) 23:57, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Hm, you might find this useful. Lupo 11:29, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Copyright violations

Hi, in my opinion, this picture is a Copyright violation since it comes from the blog of the band Asha and in its description, it says that this is the official picture of the group. What do you think about this? I hope to hear your replies soon. мιѕѕ мαηzαηα (talk) 15:41, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Had it been uploaded by the photographer, he would have known how to find the date take from the Exif matadata. Mark it as a violation.--P.g.champion (talk) 16:22, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Photo Permissions

Hi, I've added this to http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Kuota_logo.svg after copying it from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Kuota_logo.svg I don't know what to put as the permission. It says not to upload to commons but it was already here on the german version: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/3/3a/Kuota_logo.svg Any help? Do i need to remove it? Or is there another way to put permissions on it? Cheers

bensnowden


I've flagged this for speedy deletion as I realise the copyright permissions are uncertain. Bensnowden (talk) 19:13, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

May 16

Suggestion: Making valued images more noticeable in categories

I'm not sure what's the actual impact and contribution of the valued image classifing, because there are some many of them and the lists displaying them (here and here) aren't really navigable. My suggestion is that when an image is promoted to be a valued image of some scope, a noticeable template featuring the image in thumb and stating that the picture was promoted to be a valued image of this scope, will be added to the top of the category's page. I think it will achieve the goal of making the valued image classification a tool for editors who edit an article concerning this scope. Tomer T (talk) 13:40, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Be good for FP, QI images as well though it can get cluttered over time Gnangarra 04:18, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
I know that for these cases it can get cluttered over time, so that's the reason I didn't suggest it for FPs and QIs. But valued images are the best pictures depicting a specific scope, so every category should have only one image of this tagging. Tomer T (talk) 08:21, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
Does it need a special approval? Just insert the markup in category's heading manually. Oh yes, the image may be re-categorized into a different bucket (i.e. from "cows" to "cows in Basingstoke" to "skinny cows in Basingstoke") but if it's still a VI of a cow it will be still appropriate for "cows". NVO (talk) 08:54, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Requesting help from specialists on astronomy

What's that exactly?

Hi everybody, I've found some nice Flickr pictures of one of the least well known of all really interesting science museums in the world, see Category:Crypte aux étoiles. But being the amateur I am, i find it hard to categorize some items otherwise than very generally. Could somebody help out with a bit of specific knowledge? Thank you very much. --Edelseider (talk) 12:37, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

First step done: Added identification / info sources for File:Planetarium_(1).jpg. To be extracted and categorized. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:42, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Second step done: this http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Planetarium_%2811%29.jpg is this: http://cortrie.de/uhren-und-schmuckauktion/index.php/lose/incategory/taschenuhren/4512 --AtelierMonpli (talk) 11:57, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Third step: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Planetarium_%282%29.jpg it's a flame photometer from 1937, a heliostat and a polarimeter, for more information enlarge the pic to 1600 x 1200 pixel and read the text. (cannot translate)--AtelierMonpli (talk) 12:33, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
4.step:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Planetarium_%288%29.jpg this thing is called theodolite (Winkelmessgerät - Vermessungstechnik?)--AtelierMonpli (talk) 14:44, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 Question Are those pictures under the correct license. Just because on FLICKR they are CC does not necessarily means that they are really CC. --Yikrazuul (talk) 12:41, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
I see no issues here: @photo: the person seems to have visited Strassbourg (EP and museum using the same cam according to EXIF) and @works shown: they are probably quite old and/or nothing copyrighted. The map (first file) is from a person who died 1665. ;-) Did you mean anything in particular? Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 00:31, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Thank you everybody so far. @AtelierMonpli : about the third step, I got that right, of course. It's the other instruments I am was not sure of. Cheers, --Edelseider (talk) 05:55, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
tadaaaaaa...here it is: Thing Nr. 4 (in French) also Thing Nr. 4 with declaration :-) it was identified by the Vorarlberger Amateurastronomen by Peter :-) Cheers --AtelierMonpli (talk) 18:19, 17 May 2011 (UTC)--AtelierMonpli (talk) 18:48, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

updating the license tag of own-work uploads by author

Would there be any objection against updating the license tag of own-work uploads by the author him/herself to a more recent version of the same license type? For example from CC-BY-SA 2.5 to CC-BY-SA 3.0. Most of my earlier own-work uploads (until midth of 2007) were licensed per the non-ported US-version of the CC-BY-SA 2.5[3], because it was the most recent CC-BY-SA license on Commons at that time. However, I would prefer to have all my own-work uploads under the current CC-BY-SA 3.0, 1) as this makes it easier to have a one-for-all attribution/credit line, 2) as I am not living in US jurisdiction and 3) as there is a :de-ported version available for this license release. Though I’m actually asking on my own behalf, this question may be relevant for other long-term contributors. Taking into consideration WMF’s somewhat controversial “License Migration” from GFDL 1.3 to CC-BY-SA 3.0, this plein version update by the original author shouldn’t really be an issue. --Túrelio (talk) 14:38, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, otherwise this thread would be meaningless. A generally important difference between CC's 2.5- and 3.0-license family is that only in the latter the issue of moral rights was addressed clearly[4]. As these rights are non-waivable in most jurisdictions anyway, it is rather important that re-users are clearly notified about that. Even CC recommends to relicense existing works under the newer version[5]. --Túrelio (talk) 18:04, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
  • In short, no. "Updating" the license amounts to revocation of the old license, which is not permitted. You're certainly not obligated to state that it's available under the old version of the license if you publish it on your own website or whatever, but here (as with Flickr images) we like to keep track of all the licenses a work is actually available under. WMF was only able to update from GFDL to CC-BY-SA because of a specific clause added to the GFDL expressly for the purpose of allowing them to do so. Dcoetzee (talk) 20:34, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
So, a re-user "may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one"[6], but the author may not even update to a new version of the same license. I'm really impressed. Besides, your "keep track" argument doesn't fit at all, as a license update will be clearly recorded with date stamp in the file history. --Túrelio (talk) 20:49, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
"Not permitted" - get real! It's just a game - strings of characters ("user accounts") subscribe to abide with other strings of characters ("licenses"). Don't you know the difference between real life laws and phoney made-up "licenses"? Look, "we" can all seriously dance around christmas trees singing legal code in unison, but it won't change the reality - made-up licenses are just this, made-up strings of characters, in-universe jargon. NVO (talk) 21:12, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Um, no. It's people (represented by "strings of characters") who have issued legally-binding licenses to copy otherwise protected work ("other strings of characters"). You could argue similarly that deeds, wills, and contracts aren't "real" and you'd be just as wrong. That said, the legal effect of licenses may be limited by the laws of your local jurisdiction (I haven't studied IP law, so I don't know whether that is or is not the fact in most jurisdictions), so taking the license at face value may be just as much of a mistake as ignoring it. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 01:00, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
How about this: if licenses like those of Creative Commons are "phoney" and "made up", why do governments like those of Britain and the Netherlands, among many others, use them? —innotata 02:17, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
Governments do many things that they find appropriate or acceptable, which they (their counsels) believe will be safe and acceptable, or pass unnoticed, or "to hell with it let's do it". Their approval of their own actions does not mean much for a lay person. NVO (talk) 04:43, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Look at the "Termination" section of the license. What you are trying to do is to terminate the current license and re-issue the work under the new one. I haven't read your particular license, but the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license only contains conditions for revocation on a case-by-case basis (for individual licensees), which won't do you much good here. As someone who is interested in the law, however, I'd be interested in knowing whether the law provides additional rights not included in the text of the license? --Philosopher Let us reason together. 00:54, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

As Creative Commons licenses are perpetual, the licensor cannot forbid anyone who has received the work with the CC-by-sa 2.5 license to continue to distribute it under those terms. Nevertheless, if an uploader changes their mind and politely requests deletion and the files in question are not of special importance, Commons frequently chooses to acquiesce. The rationale seems to be that it is more important to maintain good relations with our contributors than to hang on to every uploaded file we are entitled to keep. Updating the license version (without making the terms more restrictive) has a much smaller impact than deletion, so I see no reason to obstruct such wishes. —LX (talk, contribs) 09:05, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

I think that Dcoetzee is right, but, if there's a license change with a more free one, we don't need the more restrictive tag on the description page; the page history is enough for future reference. For example, if a user releases his work under CC-BY-SA and after one year he wants change to PD, I think that the we should not have {{Cc-by-sa-3.0}} and {{PD-self}} together on the same page, but the PD tag only.--Trixt (talk) 09:07, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

PD is so vague here and so country-dependent in real life, it's almost orthogonal to CC legalese (and outright illegal in some jurisdictions, as is the case of yours truly). My point is, it's not always clear which tag is more restrictive, PD or CC. You presume that PD is more open than CC, but it is not necessarily so. NVO (talk) 11:24, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
We can stay here for hours expatiating on "freedom" of licenses/law concept; like ignostics, a coherent definition of freedom must be presented before the question "more/less free" can be meaningfully discussed. But this is not the topic. Please change in my comment "with a more free one" with "with something of more relished for the copyright holder and "more restrictive tag" with "old tag", the concept doesn't change.--Trixt (talk) 18:56, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

I think it's preferable leaving the old one, but you can certainly add a new one. Anyone could always re-add the 2.5 version of the license to the pages, as it was licensed that way and it is a perpetual license. Otherwise, it could theoretically seem to force some derivative works to use 3.0 instead of 2.5 (since derivative works can use any later version, but not earlier I don't think). If you make a copy of the work (i.e. not derivative) you need to use the exact version, not any version of your choice, so changing the license on the images may give the appearance that copies previously made did not do that. For similar reasons, when CC-BY-SA-3.0 was added to images as part of the GFDL migration, any existing CC-BY-SA-2.5 licenses were left alone, and the 3.0 was an additional license listed on the page. "Migrated" licenses were not added to images if and only if an image already had the exact 3.0 version present; even if 2.5 was there the 3.0 got added. Replacing a 2.5 with a 3.0 probably wouldn't get noticed that much, but it could cause some aggravation for previous uses which accurately made use of the 2.5 version, as now someone would have to go through the image page history to find they had done it correctly and did not mess up their license versions when making copies or derivative works. It may seem silly but there were enough questions on it to make sure to leave existing licenses alone. Carl Lindberg (talk) 13:34, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Let me emphasize this fact again, changing the CC-BY-SA license from version 2.5 to version 3.0 does not change any rights, neither for the licensor (rights holder) nor for the licensee (rights user).[7] However, the newer version does inform the licensee more clearly about the existence of moral rights of the licensor (author only), that are and have been non-waivable (per a CC license) in most countries anyway.[8] Therefore, a CC-BY-SA 2.5-to-3.0 change is actually a service for the licensees, because it may spare them the surprise of litigation for moral rights infringement. Not knowing about does not protect you in court.
CC does recommend[9] the 2.5-to-3.0 license "update" also for existing works and calls it "relicensing". However, I'm not advocating for general license "update". --Túrelio (talk) 18:39, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

You could argue that the 3.0 license makes it full-blown copyright infringement to violate the moral rights, whereas normally moral rights mistakes have quite a bit lesser penalties in most laws. It has different legal code, so it is a different license, and while substantially the same there may be subtle rights changes. It may be better overall yes, but it would be preferable to note that (existing) files were licensed under the 2.5 version as well, as there are certain technicalities associated with that. If it was the exact same, there would have been no need for the new version ;-) If there have been derivative works made from your uploads, those derivative works can be licensed with CC-BY-SA-2.5 as well, but a derivative work of a CC-BY-SA-3.0 work cannot be licensed with the 2.5 version, by my reading -- it has to be the 3.0 or higher. Hiding the fact that the files are in fact also licensed with 2.5 could cause some aggravation in those (theoretical) situations. Certainly you can make the main license the 3.0 one, but at least a mention that they are also licensed under 2.5 would be good (or a combined tag, maybe). We do have a {{Cc-by-sa-2.5,2.0,1.0}} tag for a previous incarnation of combined versions, but I don't think we have newer ones. I don't think there would be a huge stink if you did something like this, but other editors are also free to restore the 2.5 tag to the pages as well, as they were distributed to Commons using that license, which is not revocable, and it could be a useful history. Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:19, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
Hmm, as there have been (possibly legally relevant) changes from version 1.0 to 2.0+, I don't think that would be a good idea. Anyway, I remember to have seen a note somewhere on the CC website discouraging the use of CC 1.0 licenses. --Túrelio (talk) 08:20, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't think its a big deal switching from 2.5 to 3. All the concerns mentioned above are highly theoretical and in essence the license is the same. Amada44  talk to me 08:47, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

May 15

media file Dump

Hi everybody, I'm Cristian and I'm a member of the board of Wikimedia Italia. I have been contacted by a Cefriel (a Milan's research centre) researcher who need a (at least partial) dump of Commons Images for test use. How can we get it? I know that full media file dumps are not available. (You can also write me an email if you have an account on Wikipedia or at cristian.consonni (at) wikimedia (punto) it. Thanks in advance -- CristianCantoro (talk) 15:22, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

You will probably need a system administrator for any sizable sample. Try the wikitech-l mailinglist where theWikimedia system adminstrators reside. TheDJ (talk) 12:47, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

May 17

Why does my username "not exist" when I go to upload a picture?

I just recently created an account with a username and everything. I have no problems signing in initially, however once I go to upload a picture, it then says I am not logged in and need to do so. When I click "Log In", and retype my exact same username and password as I just used, it says that the username I'm typing does not exist. Why is this? —Preceding unsigned comment was added by 99.230.62.104 (talk) 00:45, 17 May 2011 (UTC) (UTC)

What's your username? -mattbuck (Talk) 01:15, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Missing categories selection from English upload forms

Help: To anyone who is using FF 4+ Emglish, on Win XP - The category selection list box disappeared from the upload options of this upload page http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload. It's gone from all 3 upload forms I know of. I booted in safe mode, no difference. Here is the image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Upload_options.jpg Ineuw talk page on en.ws 03:18, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Please try again. (You may need to reload your browser's cache first.) It might have been caused by this edit from May 15, which caused JavaScript errors, which in combination with bugzilla:28626 may have prevented the JavaScript upload form enhancements to run at all. Lupo 10:17, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Lupo. At least I know that it's not my browser, since it worked fine 2-3 days ago. I creared the cache many times, as I do this on a regular basis, so that didn't help and now I am stuck with hundreds of images waiting to be uploaded. Can this be repaired soon?Ineuw talk page on en.ws 11:23, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Licensing Confusion

Hi - I want to use the following map (and related maps) in a report I'm writing which will distributed freely over the internet.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gdp_nominal_and_ppp_2005_world_map_single_colour.png

I've looked at the licensing requirements - can't figure out at all what I need to put into my report to properly use this and related maps.

Is there a way I can contact the author and ask him what he wants?

It's licensed under: 1) GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

2)This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. 

   You are free:
       to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
       to remix – to adapt the work
   Under the following conditions:
       attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
       share alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

Thanks, Lvk

Please see COM:REUSE. In short, you choose one of the licenses and follow its terms. If you choose CC by-sa 3.0, you must attribute the author using the name specified on the description page, and you must specify the license wherever you display the image (with a link if possible), and you must release any modifications you make to the image under the same license. Powers (talk) 14:24,
Thank you so much. The image is so helpful and I really want to do the right thing here. So for this image, could I do the following? I write "This image was created by Wikimedia UserName: Dwrcan and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0" I then have the Creative Commons be hyperlinked to the license agreement. 1) would that work? 2) Could I instead do thatonce at the beginning of the document saying something like "The images in this document titled GNP by Country, etc. etc. were created by Wikimedia UserName: Dwrcan and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0?" Or do I have to do that each page the image appears? User:Lvk2011

17 May 2011 (UTC)

The problem with this image is that is has no author and no real source information. No wonder that re-users get confused. I've notified the original uploader. --Túrelio (talk) 14:36, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Bad transfer from en.wp. The original log is here, the authors to attribute are Distantbody, Roke, and the Commons users Davius, MaCRoEco, Dwrcan and Bogdan K. --Martin H. (talk) 16:06, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
And I realy wonder, why people update an illustration of GDP in 2005 with 2008 data..... *facepalm*. --Martin H. (talk) 16:13, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Do you mean I really put into a legal notification This image was authored by Roke, Distantbody, Davius, MaCRoEco, Dwrcan and Bogdan and is covered by CC-SA 3.0, etc." That sounds far out. Can someone show me somewhere on the net where someone did what is supposed to be done with licensing images from wikimedia authors? It would be a super help. Thanks User:Lvk2011
I have no idea what you mean by "legal notification ... That sounds far out.". If you want to (re-)use a CC-BY-licensed image, authored by multiple authors, then you have to credit/attribute them; otherwise you violate their copyright.
I meant that putting someone's Username - like Distantbody or Dwrcan - vs. their real name in a staid licensing agreement in my e-book seems a bit comical.User:Lvk2011
May be, but any author is entitled per copyright law and per CC-BY to specify exactly how he/she has to be credited. If that is a problem, you are alway free to contact an author and ask if that could be changed. --Túrelio (talk) 07:28, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
And your question was already answered more than once. Again, on this page Commons:Weiterverwendung, though the text is in German, you can see examples of correct attribution. Though you are not strictly obliged to add the credit directly under the image, that is recommended in order that the reader can make the association between image and credited author. If all the images in your report are from the same author, that would be less a problem as when you use images from different authors. --Túrelio (talk) 19:24, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Great. The examples are just what I needed. Thank you User:Lvk2011
For an example of people doing it, see there (in fact I personnally did it with the site admin ;-). --Aʁsenjyʁdəgaljɔm11671 09:55, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Images to be deleted: entirely my own fault

Hi

Here is a list of pictures I uploaded from Flickr which, upon closer inspection, are not meant to be on commons according to their licenses. I apologise for this foolishness of mine. I will post both the images as they appear on commons and on Flickr to make things simpler

1. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_wolf_by_cknara.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_wolf_by_cknara_%282%29.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/cknara/5674386066/

2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wolves_the_Elusive.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wolves_the_Elusive_%282%29.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/cknara/5673815323/

3. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crocuta_lion_piracy.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidbygott/4046797848/

Apologies again. Kind regards Mariomassone (talk) 17:13, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

✓ Done. --Túrelio (talk) 19:27, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Info namespace

Wouldn't it be more favourable to use the namespace Info generally, instead of Creator and Institution? Info could be used for everything, why should Commons give such a “privilege” of a special namespace just for this two groups? As a continuation, there should be established many other namespaces, like Organization, Company, Municipality, Parish and many others. What advantage does it have? --Petrus Adamus (talk) 17:37, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

It is rather unclear what is the purpose of the Info pseudo-namespace - there are very few pages using it and there seen to contain pages for different purposes. Creator and Institution namespaces contain two families of specialized templates. I do not think they need to have specialized namespaces but using namespaces allows more friendly syntax and makes maintenance easier. I do not see us creating in the future namespaces, like Organization, Company, Municipality, Parish, etc. Although it would be useful to have separate namespace for category:Book templates, and maybe Category:Single artwork templates (If the use of those became more frequent). --Jarekt (talk) 18:01, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Unclear what is the purpose – you describe it like a newly discovered hormone, whose function is inherently, vis maior given and has to be disclosed. A namespace here is yet a community-made creature and the community can define its function. It seems natural to me, when Commons don't use an unique namespace, it should create special ones for everything.
Disregarding it, churches are institutions according to the present point of view (and can have a template in that namespace)? I have found Basilica di San Nicola da Tolentino (Tolentino) and Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille. --Petrus Adamus (talk) 14:41, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Splitting year train transport categorys

I made two new categorys (1980 in tram transport) and (1982 in tram transport) as a subdivision of year rail transport. I dont know how far up the chain it is usefull to split up. Decade? In general I find trams a very different subject to trains. There some grey areas (difference between tram en heavy rail)(How to classify some mountain railways, dockland railway in London) but in general the difference is clearcut. Where it is unclear I would place in both. Smiley.toerist (talk) 19:13, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Way to study

Some commons people make more QI than others. Is there a place where they share an experience? Are there any case study places where I can see the conditions and abilities to do this or that photo explained by its author? Thanks.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 19:40, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Just ask on their talk pages. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:52, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

May 18

Address to send an authorization to Commons to upload images.

Hallo, I must say it is not easy to find the address to send an authorization to Commons to upload images, and the related instructions. This address should be more clearly indicated in the help page. Where is it?. Thank you, --Gab.pr (talk) 07:43, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

See: OTRS. --Túrelio (talk) 07:56, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Question about categories

What to do when two users don't agree about the cateorization of an image? Usually, discussions of images are empty of participation. Where do we have to discuss it to let another people to participate? Thanks. --Millars (talk) 11:49, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

If you start the conversation here, you'll soon be pointed to the right place, if one exists. A page analogous to En:Wikipedia:Third opinion might be created though for such requests. Fred Bauder (talk) 12:36, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Usually two parties can discuses and settle it between themselves ( or one party quits in disgust and goes on to categorize some other corner of Commons). But here at VP is fine place to check whose view gets more support. --Jarekt (talk) 12:41, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

UploadWizard default link restored in English sidebar

UploadWizard should be up and running again, and we've restored the default link for now in the English language sidebar. Please let us know if you encounter any issues loading or using it, and as before, please bookmark Commons:Upload or Special:Upload or whichever form you prefer (or follow the "Back to the old form" link in the wizard) to use the old forms.

This deployment should also fix issues with Internet Explorer that cause uploads to fail due to false title blacklist matches.

Provided everything is working smoothly now, we can again change the links in other languages/projects.--Erik Moeller 10:26, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

The wizard works - except that it hinders the process I use to speed up the upload. I use a standardized template for the required info where only the image description changes with each image, and the category changes with a batch of several images. Otherwise, the rest of the information is identical for a volume containing anywhere from 100 to 200+ images SEEN IN THIS GALLERY. The upload forms' omission of category selections have seriously affected my work & time. PLEASE SEE THIS POST.Ineuw talk page on en.ws 12:54, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
The problem with vague license deed (the deed even lacks a link to the full text of the license, it even lacks to mention a version of the CC-BY-SA license!) still is not solved. It's absolutely amazing giving that the problem was pointed out by Geni almost a _year_ ago at commons-l mailing list: [10], and again about a _week_ ago at the Village Pump after the first attempt to deploy this new upload form. Nothing was fixed since then. Is there a possibility to fix the problem from our side? Trycatch (talk) 14:26, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
The relevant UI message is MediaWiki:Mwe-upwiz-source-ownwork-assert-note, it's easy to change by any admin. I've added a link to the license, although it would probably be nicer if it would open in a popup or at least by default in a new window.--Eloquence (talk) 14:51, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Also activated for the German interface – but in a smoother way: Commons:Hochladen as discussed in Commons:Forum#upload_funktioniert_nicht. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 18:44, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Did not upload categories. Messed up language templates. Inserted some unnecessary stuff. Took some ten minutes to upload + fix description instead of one. Brilliant. But, on the other hand (contrary to Trycatch's experience above) it did offer a proper choice of licenses (although instead of {{Information}}, they ended up in the wrong place). And, for the record, I did not donate anything. Not a penny. NVO (talk) 16:12, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Assuming the page at Special:UploadWizard is the new upload wizard, it doesn't work for me with Opera 10.10 for MacOSX/Classic skin: I get a page with the standard header/footer/sidebar, but no content. --Carnildo (talk) 22:24, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, it is. Could you please add it in a new section at Commons:Prototype_upload_wizard_feedback? Be sure to switch on Javascript. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 23:08, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

uploading multiple images

is there a way to upload multiple images in a single go? instead of adding one after the other and give indivudual descriptions? Leovanderven (talk) 23:29, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Remember, most times images need individual descriptions and categories to be useful. However, uploading several images in a go may be a bit easier with the new upload wizard and with using the external tool Commons:Commonist (takes some time to understand). Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 00:01, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

May 19

Category search result is incorrectly displayed

The first displayed result of THIS CATEGORY SEARCH begins with the item following the searched for category. This means that one must revert to the 50 previous categories and scroll down to the bottom of the page to see if the searched for category actually exists. Try the following example, (or any other search): "Horse heads" and see that the actual category is the last, at the bottom of the previous page.

Who could correct this and have the display begin with the searched for category???Ineuw talk page on en.ws 03:42, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking about. If you're wanting a better way to search for categories, I would suggest using the default Special:Search function, and uncheck everything except for "Category". It works better, in general. — Huntster (t @ c) 08:23, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Special:Categories provides an alphabetic list of categories, starting from the term entered; for searching categories advanced search is a better option.
That said, Special:Categories can be a bit unintuitive because if the term entered matches exactly a specific category that category is not visible on the resulting page: entering "naval ships" does not include Category:Naval ships in the first results page, but as the last item on the previous page. Entering "naval ship" does include Category:Naval ships. Perhaps it could be altered to include also the category matching the precise term entered. MKFI (talk) 08:52, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

The reason for using this simple list is that there are no images and multiline info, I just need a quick see through the categories. A good search layout can be found in Wikisource Please check it out. Also, I am familiar with the advanced search Ineuw talk page on en.ws 10:29, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Special:AllPages can be found also in Commons. MKFI (talk) 10:48, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
What I use. I go to a disambiguation category, such as Category:Inn. On the bottom of the message box, I have links to 3 ways of searching categories, the first two ones are quite similar. And yes, I often remove the last letter of my search terms, especially when it is a plural s. --Foroa (talk) 08:29, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

== Category:Famous_class_cutters ==

I propose a rename to category:notable class cutters.205.206.8.197 09:57, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

File:Charles B Tripp autograph 1907.jpg

I uploaded this file this morning. It was published in or before 1907. Thanks to the continual screwing around with licensing that you guys do, I cannot figure out the proper license. I thought there was a PD-us or PD-us-1923, but that doesn't seem to exist anymore. What's the right license to use with this thing? 22:28, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

{{PD-US}} works, as would {{PD-1923}}. I don't think the names have changed. Carl Lindberg (talk) 22:49, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Redirects created from the lowercase US names. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:36, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Thank you for fixing. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:30, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
I see it is tagged as "Own work". That presumably relates to the scanning. Is the original source known? Where was it published before 1923? Finavon (talk) 07:20, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Of course its known, its scanned from a publication, that publication is the source. --Martin H. (talk) 11:00, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

May 20

No preview or thumbnail for my svg

I created an svg File:ParkOffice-Logo.svg and ran it through the (http://validator.w3.org/check) with no errors. The image did not show properly as preview or thumbnail (click the "broken image" icon and it looks OK!)

Gregors (talk) 11:24, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

I tried the "render as PNG in other sizes" links, and got the following error message:
Error creating thumbnail:
librsvg-ERROR **: _rsvg_acquire_xlink_href_resource called for external resource: 
file:///home/gregor/Desktop/2SVG4WikiCommons/LogoPO.jpg base: (null)
MKFI (talk) 12:04, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Remove the two images that are on a different/hidden layer. Librsvg won't render images with external links to other resources. -- ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ 苦情処理係 12:06, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
I've done this.
Anyway, the W3 validator is semi-useless for telling whether or not there will be RSVG display problems; go to Commons:SVG Check instead. AnonMoos (talk) 17:12, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Resolved

-- Perhelion (talk) 13:52, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Using LangSwitch instead of autotranslate for small templates?

Hi. In the past, I have used the {{LangSwitch}} format to translate templates that are very simple with only one line of text. Using this method prevents the creation of unnecessary subpages that {{Autotranslate}} uses. Take Template:WikispeciesCompact for an example. This method, in my opinion, is a better option for small templates like userboxes. Someone has recently been changing this to the autotranslate method, and the user does not speak my language well so it's hard to communicate. I would like to request opinions about this and see if anyone else disagrees with me. --ZooFari 16:38, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

I think with Autotranslate is more easy for non technical people to provide a translation. If you do not intend to move the whole template to a new name do not care about the pages - we have enough hamsters. ;) An advantage with autotranslate is the list of other languages displayed (doesn't this come from autotranslate). So if someone wants to see the template in another lang he just needs to click. With Langswitch he needs to manipulate the URL with &uselang=xx or edit the template's page.
But I agree - Autotranslate also has disadvantages which weigh in more at small templates.
So I am not really sure. If I discount the effort it needs to set up a autotranslate template Langswitch is probably better. But unless the person convert masses of templates: just leave him. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 04:00, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Some statistics (some of the reworked templates):
    • {{User win}}:
      • before autotranslation: from 9 December 2005 to 24 March 2010 - en;
      • after autotranslation: from 9 May 2011 - de, en, eo, ja, ru, sv (de, ru - by me)
    • {{User flickr}}:
      • before autotranslation: from 31 March 2007 to 12 March 2011 - de, en;
      • after autotranslation: from 14 May 2011 - de, en, es, gl, it, ru (ru by me)
    • {{User Flickr uploader}}:
      • before autotranslation: from 29 September 2008 to 7 September 2010 - en;
      • after autotranslation: from 15 May 2011 - en, es, gl, ru, sv (ru by me)
  • Others after my reworking also have added one-two translations. --Art-top (talk) 09:01, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages and that is why they are both equally popular: over 1000 smaller templates use {{LangSwitch}} (here) and over 750 bigger templates use {{Autotranslate}} (here). So I do not see one method being better than the other in general but for specific tasks it might be better to use one over the other. For example using {{Autotranslate}} for {{Paris}} would be a disaster and I would not use {{LangSwitch}} for license templates. However as with any major template changes, switching translation styles should have been discussed ahead of time and possibly sandbox template and testcases template should have been created to verify that new template works better than the old one, while still handling correctly all the tasks of the old one. --Jarekt (talk) 13:06, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
Autotranslated templates have another advantage - if there is no translation into the language of the current user, it is possible to identify and propose to translate. Compare the same page in different languages: en and be. If this scheme fails, I can remove my changes because I made ​​them only to offer translation. --Art-top (talk) 18:29, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
I made ​​autotranslation the following templates: {{User Adobe Illustrator}}, {{User Adobe Photoshop}}, {{User flickr}}, {{User Flickr uploader}}, {{User reviewer}}, {{User since}}, {{User SUL}}, {{User win}}. --Art-top (talk) 18:44, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
Autotranslate lay have advantages but there are some things I don't like about it:
  • I agree with Zoofari: all else being equal, adding translations takes longer than with langSwitch and the many subtemplates make maintenance harder.
  • it can be confusing to have several ways to change language. Autotranslate is incompatible with {{Mld}} (I mean mld does not change the autostranslate languages. Ans to me MediaWiki:AnonymousI18N.js makes all this partly obsolete.
  • Nested autostranslate look lengthy and confusing (see PD-Art)
To me a better solution would be to add a "translate this page" prompt in some templates using langSwitch. I tried that on template:focus stack.--Zolo (talk) 03:06, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Springtime for Hitler

Good morning. I stumbled upon this most delightful picture of the Fuhrer, which seems to have come straight from the Franz Liebkind musical. It is marked for no export to Commons in wiki-en. However, it was produced by an agency (Presse Illustrationen Hoffmann) and is now more than 70 years old. In Portuguese law this would be public domain by now, but I don't know about German law. Can someone shed some light upon the copyright state of this picture, and if can it be imported to Commons?-- Darwin Ahoy! 10:52, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Category:Heinrich Hoffmann. --Martin H. (talk) 11:03, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Is it governed by German law, at all (vs. French law)? or both? NVO (talk) 11:57, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Does German law apply (by Commons' policies)? Is Germany the source country just because the photographer is German? Or is Germany the source country because it was (surely) published in Germany?
I do not know if French law applies (by Commons' policies) - as it is photographed in France. But was it also published in France? In French law it could be still protected (if I understand correctly) as the photographer Hoffmann died 1957.
Maybe we have two source countries + US law here? Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 16:24, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
The United States seized the property, but not the copyright, so I believe it only has to do with German law. My doubt was because it was credited to an agency, rather than to an individual, and in those cases, in Portugal, it gets pretty much the same protection as anonymous works, 70 years after publication, unless the individual authorship was made public during those 70 years (and not after). I'm not familiar with the case of Heinrich Hoffmann agency, if he usually took the photographs himself, it would be copyrighted, but if he delegated that to collaborators, even if now and then, it would have no protection in Portuguese law. If it's the later, I don't know how the Germany law deals with this kind of situations, that's why I asked.-- Darwin Ahoy! 00:01, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
The photo is not credited to Presse Illustrationen Hoffmann, its only a template in en.wp mentioning that name. The photo can be directly credited to Hoffmann. Also the copyright on photos distributed by Presse Illustrationen Hoffmann belong to the photographers, this photographers are known and documented in most cases, the copyright not expires 70 years just because the work was distributed by an agency. --Martin H. (talk) 00:25, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
You're certainly more acknowledged than I am in the particulars of those photos and licences, therefore I believe your judgement. My doubt was indeed due to the wording of the template, was originally copyrighted by the Presse Illustrationen Hoffmann. Actually, I will have to dig into copyright laws and photo particulars, since I have some postcards from the 1930's here that I wish to upload on Commons which are copyrighted to a name, which may or may not have been the photographer. Possibly it's the editor name, and it's not even a Portuguese name (sounds rather German or Swiss). I'm a bit uncertain on what to do with them.
In any case, it seems clear that this particular photo of Hitler can't be transferred to Commons, unless German Law is void in respect to war seized items, which I don't believe to be the case.-- Darwin Ahoy! 01:07, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Proposing to move a template

Resolved– Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 09:46, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

According to {{Move}}, there is no template for requesting a template be moved to a new name, and I'm not quite sure where to start a discussion about this. I was hoping to request that {{N}}, which—along with its sister template, {{Y}}—is barely used at all, be moved to another name, any other name (maybe {{N1}} or something?). I thought it might be nice to have template:N be a redirect to {{Neutral}}. Thoughts on this? Or should I start this discussion elsewhere? Thank you! – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 12:43, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

The templates {{Y}} and {{N}} where just being used on one page for formatting, and that page hasn't been updated for a few years, so I simply subst'd the template contents into the page. Because of their very specific usage, I don't think we need to retain these templates in any form (wouldn't bother renaming them). But I'm not sure that using {{N}} for {{Neutral}} is the best use of one of this pair, I would expect that a more likely use is for multilingual yes/no templates. --Tony Wills (talk) 23:13, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Okay, I'm fine with that. I'm new at FPC and noticed people using shortcut templates for "oppose" and "support", so I went hunting for a "neutral" shortcut, but if {{N}} can be used more efficiently elsewhere, by all means. I definitely agree that it shouldn't be separated from {{Y}}, since they go hand-in-hand. Thanks for the reply! : ) – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 09:46, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

File:METC Aerial view.jpg

Hello. I apparently spelled aerial wrong. I do not have the ability to rename this file, could someone help me out?--TParis (talk) 14:45, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi again,
I renamed your picture.
You will be interested by the {{Rename}} template, to ask such a rename.
The syntax is {{rename|New picture name.jpg|rationale for the rename}}.
e.g. {{rename|METC Aerial view.jpg|Misspelling}}
--Dereckson (talk) 14:54, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
Great thanks, I will use in the future.--TParis (talk) 14:58, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Restore file history

Moved from Commons:Administrators'_noticeboard#Restore_file_history —-– Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 16:54, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Hello, can this File:Bonifatius-gregorius-aedelbertus-noordwijk.JPG have one revision history restored, but not the image (which contains an unfree frame)? I would like the upload history to still be there. The result should look like File:1831_Quaglio_Ansicht_FrankfurtM_anagoria.JPG. Thanks! – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 02:43, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Second request: same thing for File:Cornelis_Schut.jpg. Thank you! – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 02:46, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

May 22

Yale releases 250K images

I'm new to the commons so I don't know where to publicize this, but this would be very useful:

Digital Images of Yale’s Vast Cultural Collections Now Available for Free

http://opac.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=8544

Their statement As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. is a bit vague and a direct question about the licence is probably needed. --Petrus Adamus (talk) 15:32, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
There is this memo, which includes these bits:
It is Yale University’s goal to make digital copies of unrestricted public domain collections available for use without limitations. Yale University will not restrict use of items digitized from its museums, libraries and archives collections which have been made openly available through the University’s electronic interfaces, and which are no longer under copyright, except where other rights or restrictions apply. Any content that requires Yale University log-in/authentication is not considered openly available.
and more to the point:
License: Use of these digitized collections will be permitted under licenses such as those provided by the Creative Commons that allow for use, including reproduction, without further application, authorization, or fees. Users are asked to attribute the work in the manner specified, without suggestion of endorsement. For more information on CCBY, see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
To me, that is pretty clear that images of paintings etc. are PD-Art (as normal) and all others are CC-BY. That seems like a pretty clear statement, and this indeed seems really useful. I'm not sure there has been updates to their online collections to reflect this... for example here which is listed as "open access" but still has a Rights section which says "Contact the Yale University Art Gallery". But it sure seems as though CC-BY will be the license. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:56, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
In cases where the photo is available under a CC license I prefer to specify that rather than PD-Art (or give both) so that the images are safe against any potential reversal (legislative or judicial) of Bridgeman. Dcoetzee (talk) 19:49, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Yeah, that is a very good point. It's helpful in real situations too, as PD-Art is U.S. law but there are some countries which may not use it, and CC-BY will help there. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:24, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Sorry, I'm new to a lot of licensing terms: what's "reversal of Bridgeman"? – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 06:45, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
A hypothetical reversal of the en:Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. court case in the United States, which is a primary basis for the {{PD-Art}} tag. Carl Lindberg (talk) 13:13, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Incredibly, someone just used the term Corel vs. Bridgeman in an unrelated discussion I started elsewhere on en.wikipedia, and I was able to find the exact article you pointed to with the extra keyword (Corel). I came here to strike-out my question. Thank you so much, though, for at least confirming it! – Kerαunoςcopia◁galaxies 14:18, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

File:Gluehlampe 01 KMJ.jpg

No matter what I do, I cannot get the reverted image to display. I have purged everything I can, even the image url. Weird thing is, the normal url is showing the old version, but with ?action=purge it is showing the new one. But the plain url and even the latest thumb in the history continue to display the old image. What do I have to do to force the latest version to be displayed? — Edokter (talk) — 12:25, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Now I tried manually uploading the original, and it still displays the bad version, but my reverted version is now correct??? Can an admin just please deleted all new versions to restore the original, and do a complete system purge of this file, or whatever can be done to force the proper image to be displayed? — Edokter (talk) — 12:34, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Seems to be related to #Bizarre_image_caching_problem. Please comment there if needed and not here to avoid splitting the topic up. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 21:10, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

May 23

How do I re-upload an image which has been deleted?

As a beginner I experiemented a bit trying to upload some book cover's onto wikimedia, I must've ticked the wrong copyright boxes because they have since been deleted. Now I know the correct procedure and copyrights but it won't let me upload the same content that has previously been deleted. Is there a way around this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vfishal9 (talk • contribs) 14:07, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons is a media repository which only accepts free content (see Commons:First steps and Commons:Licensing). The book covers you uploaded were deleted because they are protected by copyright and not published under a free license. Only the book cover's legitimate copyright holder can issue a valid free license. You should not make something up just to get around the upload form; that's copyright infringement.
You should also not attempt to recreate previously deleted content. If you do, you may be blocked from uploading altogether. If, after reading the applicable policies, you wish to dispute the deletion, you may do so at Commons:Undeletion requests.
Some Wikimedia projects, such as the English Wikipedia, allow non-free content for a specific context to be uploaded locally to that project. See en:Wikipedia:Non-free content for the English Wikipedia's guidelines. —LX (talk, contribs) 14:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
And then you went ahead and recreated the deleted copyright violations anyway. Why bother asking if you don't care about the answer? —LX (talk, contribs) 16:23, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Dealt with - Jcb (talk) 16:42, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Administrators by language

Do you think that a categorisation of the administrators by language would be useful? There is just a list now, but not enabling sorting according to non-native languages spoken. It could be a problem for inexperienced users, searching an sysop mastering a language not included there. --Petrus Adamus (talk) 16:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Some French Commons contributors use Commons:Bistro when they need to contact an administrator, with success, as we're several fr-3/fr-n administrators to follow this page.
This leads me to reformulate your question as "Is such categories a good way to let contributors get in touch with an admin speaking their language?"
Categories won't certainly hurt but I don't know where to put the information "look this category".

--Dereckson (talk) 01:45, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Did you see Commons:List of administrators by language --Jarekt (talk) 03:38, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, I have seen it. The problem is that the table does sort under a language just users speaking it nativelly – thus you cannot find anybody for instance for Slovak (yes, you can find him by Ctrl+F "sk", but not under the title Slovak). Maybe it would be possible to change the table behaviour, so that it can sort in other way. Thereafter, the categorisation suggested wouldn't be beneficial. --Petrus Adamus (talk) 08:25, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes I see the problem. Yes, it would be good to track admins with skills in languages without native speaker admins. But that might have to be manually maintained list. --Jarekt (talk) 17:56, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Isn't is possible just edit the actual list? Eventually, couldn't a bot maintain it-up-to date? --Petrus Adamus (talk) 12:24, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Panoramio

Is there a tool for uploading files from Panoramio?--William S. Saturn (talk) 03:44, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Try Flinfo. Lupo 10:18, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
Thank you.--William S. Saturn (talk) 18:17, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Double categorys

In the main category: "Construction sites by type" there are two similar categorys:

  • Rail transport construction sites
  • Railway construction sites

The last one should be transferred to the "Rail Transport" one. Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:52, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Make a renaming request at "User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands". — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 08:54, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
"Railway construction sites" is now empty and can be deleted.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:48, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Don't delete it, make it into a redirect, it's an useful one.-- Darwin Ahoy! 10:17, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Concur with redirect. - Jmabel ! talk 14:46, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
✓ Done. Can I remove the delete marker or is this for a moderator? Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:36, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Hmm.. I believe it's up to you. you may remove the mark and place a {{Speedy}} in Commons:Deletion requests/Category:Railway construction sites, while you're still the only contributor in that page.-- Darwin Ahoy! 23:36, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

File:Trent floodwaters - geograph.org.uk - 663283.jpg

Is a version of this file (File:Trent floodwaters - geograph.org.uk - 663283.jpg) also available? Or all photos of the geograph.org.uk photo host in this small size? --A.Ceta (talk) 11:19, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Convenience link: File:Trent floodwaters - geograph.org.uk - 663283.jpg. - Jmabel ! talk 14:47, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Files at geograph.org.uk are downscaled to 640px at the longer size, see http://www.geograph.org.uk/faq.php#resize. The geograph user not made available a larger version of this file. But you can contact him at geograph.org.uk. --Martin H. (talk) 16:39, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Uploads to geograph.org.uk used to be limited to a lower size until not too long ago (possibly 640px). Thus most images from geograph are low resolution images. --  Docu  at 20:42, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
But I have seen already photos from geograph.org.uk here that had higher resolutions. But I cannot find it anymore. --A.Ceta (talk) 11:30, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Conscription map of the world

In Conscription map of the world the color of Germany needs to be changed to blue. Volunteers (pun intended)? Thx in advance, p@io4it (talk) 17:54, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

The file history says Germany will abandon conscription on 1 July. Has this changed? If not, we should wait until then. — Huntster (t @ c) 20:09, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
That said, I've fixed the file, and removed a lot of the junk that was inflating its size (now at 1.25 Mb, rather than 2.04 Mb. Just let me know if it needs to be uploaded now, or on 1 July. — Huntster (t @ c) 20:53, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

New gadget, NoUploadWizard

After enabling UploadWizard for French-speaking users, and having the first complaints, I created a new gadget to have the old link back (based on some JS by Dcoetzee). (As it is my first gadget, JS wizards might want to have a look).

Jean-Fred (talk) 20:01, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

It's working for me, and I use the English interface. Thank you, thank you so much. I don't want to use that wizard thing any time soon.-- Darwin Ahoy! 20:03, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
I never had a problem with the Wizard so far. mickit 09:43, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

May 25

Image use question

Can someone help me with advice? I have this image supplied to me by email from Derby Museums so I can use it on Wikipedia. They are aware of the implications. How do I record this correctly? Victuallers (talk) 07:58, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

A good idea is to forward the whole mail exchange to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org, I think, our OTRS volunteers will take the record of the permission in charge. Please make use of the {{OTRS pending}} template in the permission field on the file. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 08:49, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Uploading in bulk

I remember a few years back there was a page of advices for people who want to upload many files at once. I can't find it now, so I'm guessing it's gone.

Anyway, I'm trying to upload a large number of OGG files, several hundred of them, and I wonder if there is a way to send them as a ZIP file or something like that. They all have the same license, same date, same author, the file name is already set. They can be grouped in chunks, according to the category they must be placed into.

I tried uploading them manually one by one, and after about 40 files I got tired and gave up for the day. A bulk uploading procedure would make things a lot easier. Any advice? — AdiJapan 09:13, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

I do not know if this will help, but have you tried new Upload wizard? You can send 10 files at once. mickit 09:32, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
Commonist is great for bulk uploads Gnangarra 10:13, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
I tried the upload wizard. It's a bit better, but I still have to go through each and every description page to add the category. The wizard says it does it for me, but it doesn't (probably a bug). And the 10-file limit is still a pain.
I might try the Commonist. Thanks. — AdiJapan 10:36, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Last call — renaming of files with commons names incongruous with source

I would like to rename 22 glyph files whose source lables them "early Aramaic" but which are currently named here "Paleo-Hebrew". The discussion is at File talk:Paleo-hebrew - alef.png. Two support, none oppose, so if nobody minds, I'll make the moves. Dan Pelleg (talk) 11:51, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Category:Panoramics

This category is a disaster. See Category:Panoramics of cities especially, where three different synonyms are used, "panoramics," "panoramas," and "panoramic views." See Commons:Administrators' noticeboard#Remove empty category for a discussion. I think we should standardize the terms, but which one should we use? -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 16:39, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Please move and continue this discussion on Category talk:Panoramics. --Foroa (talk) 17:29, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Batch

There's a bunch of images spamming some noname online store opened in 2011 (see link in title above). The article was speedy-deleted twice from en.wp on G11 and A7. See here. Perhaps you might want to see to those images as well. Cheers. --Rebel (talk) 17:11, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Commons:Deletion requests/Files by User:Basstards. --Martin H. (talk) 17:50, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Files with the most uses globally

I thought this report might be useful and/or interesting to the community at large. Request is found here. Enjoy. Killiondude (talk) 07:02, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Interesting, but it's not entirely surprising that the most-used images are those that appear in templates transcluded everywhere. — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 07:30, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't know that I would have predicted that the one image of mine in the list would be File:IHS-monogram-Jesus-medievalesque.svg... AnonMoos (talk) 15:23, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Personality rights check

Does File:Strip Club Customers Seated at Tip Rail.jpg comply with COM:PEOPLE? Are strip clubs sufficiently open to the public to be considered a public place? What about the stripper? My guess is that photography is usually prohibited at these places because these women don't want photos of themselves floating around the internet. I'm not sure how to apply the guideline in this instance. No stupid jokes please. Wikipedia and Commons already have enough trouble attracting female contributors without men acting juvenile.--Chaser (talk) 23:22, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

The pictures were apparently taken in this establishment, which despite the less than lavish interiors, seems to be something well known locally. I believe it's impossible to identify the stripper, so that would not be an issue. The guys in the foreground seem to be in some sort of groom party (that thing you go on the last day before marriage, dunno the English name), and the Flickr stream seems to be about it, actually, and I doubt very much that identification would be a problem for them (or else they wouldn't have published it on Flickr). There is at least one costumer in the background which may be identified, but I don't know to what point it would be n issue. Curiously, there actually seem to be more women than men in that place, they seem to be less worried with that gendergap thing tahn some people in the Wiki universe. ;) -- Darwin Ahoy! 01:54, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
English language term is "bachelor party". - Jmabel ! talk 05:11, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
It may depend on the country, but I think that would normally be considered a public place -- I don't think you have any right to expect privacy there (in a back room may well be different). You are surrounded by multiple people you don't know, and thus have no expectations of any actions you take to be private. Publicity rights (also called personality rights) are completely different, and are for using someone's image in conjunction with advertising and things like that -- those rights certainly still exist. But COM:PEOPLE is more about privacy rights, and not those (as it explicitly says towards the bottom). It is more concerned about laws where Commons/Wikimedia itself may be liable for simply hosting them. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:57, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Really only the bloke turning round in the foreground is really recognisable (up close stripey-shirt-man really isn't detailed enough, nor I think is anyone else). I've prepared a noisy-blurred version that partially obscures foreground-bloke's face in a way that (given the wobbly nature of the original) isn't objectionable. If you want I can upload it over this one. -- Finlay McWalter (talk) 16:02, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Hmm, actually, considering I've been "credited" for images I didn't take but just tweaked (e.g.), and I don't want credit for this, I won't. If anyone wants to: lasso-select, select-feather, HSV noise, gaussian blur with small filter kernel, more HSV noise. -- Finlay McWalter (talk) 16:11, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Finlay McWalter -- I know how you feel; I've made a revised version of File:NSDAP-Logo.svg with drastically reduced file size, but I don't really feel like having it appear on my gallery of uploaded files, since I did a minor technical fix on the AWB emblem five years ago, and have been semi-regretting it ever since... AnonMoos (talk) 19:50, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
This photo stream is about a small bachelor party. The group first went to some sort of Irish pub, then around midnight went to Club Live (the strip club), where they stayed for one hour, probably to comply with bachelor party traditions. By 1 in the morning they were already heading home. The bloke in the foreground is one of the guys from the group. Frankly, compared to what is usual in Portugal, especially in the province, this seems like a nun's excursion. If I was in those photos I would be more offended if someone defaced me to "protect my identity" than anything else, I can't see anything there that would raise bells about privacy. It's just a group of guys and girls amusing themselves in a cool night out.-- Darwin Ahoy! 16:31, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

OK. Consensus is clear. Thanks all.--Chaser (talk) 04:05, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

May 24

hotcat fail?

hi;

hotcat stopped working for me several hours ago.

anyone else having problems with it? Lx 121 (talk) 19:39, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

I've been using hotcat without problems (i expect), but cat-a-lot seems to be bugged, look at this: [11]. I'm glad I was not moving 100 files at once. :S-- Darwin Ahoy! 19:44, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Old postcard

Could someone check this very old, English, postcard and advise me how to tag it, please? Andy Mabbett (talk) 20:18, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Obviously A photograph, which was made available to the public (e.g. by publication or display at an exhibition) before 1 January 1941. So I would say that {{PD-UK-unknown}} is the one you want.--P.g.champion (talk) 20:31, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
What's on the back? If it's a postcard there's usually some publisher identification which might help narrow down things.Railwayfan2005 (talk) 20:42, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Announcing our new community liaison

I’m delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has engaged Maggie Dennis (User:Moonriddengirl on the English Wikipedia and elsewhere) to serve as our first Community Liaison. The Community Liaison role is envisioned to be a rotating assignment, filled by a new Wikimedian each year, half year or quarter. One of Maggie’s responsibilities is to begin to lay out a process for how this rotating posting would work.

Maggie has been a contributor to the projects since 2007 and is an administrator on the English Wikipedia and an OTRS volunteer. She has over 100,000 edits, including edits to 40 of the language versions of our projects. Her broad experience and knowledge made her a natural fit for this role.

This role is a response to requests from community members who have sometimes felt they didn’t know who to ask about something or weren’t sure the right person to go through to bring up a suggestion or issue. Her initial thrust will be to create systems so that every contributor to the projects has a way to reach the Foundation if they wish and to make sure that the Foundation effectively connects the right resources with people who contact us. If you aren’t sure who to call, Maggie will help you. Obviously, most community members will never need this communications channel - they’re happy editing, doing the things that make the projects great - but we want to make it as easy as possible for people to communicate with the Foundation.

The job of the liaison will have two major parts. First are standard duties that every liaison will perform which may include maintaining a FAQ about what each department does, making sure that inquiries from email or mailing lists are brought to the attention of appropriate staff members, etc. However, we also want liaisons to be free to pursue unique projects suited to their particular skill sets. Maggie will develop such projects in the coming weeks.

Maggie will be on the projects as User:Mdennis (WMF) and can be reached at mdennis@wikimedia.org. Her initial appointment runs for six months. I look forward to working with Maggie in this new role!

Philippe (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Congratulations, this seems like a useful role, and I think you have chosen an excellent candidate. I'm primarily on Commons, but have noticed her very productive cross-project contributions.--99of9 (talk) 04:26, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Although MRG is primarily an En contributor, she is the lead of the Copyright Problems force there, and so highly knowledgable about matters of copyright, which is important for many of the concerns that tend to arise here. She's made some informed opinions on some of our deletion requests as well. If you have a concern about a copyright-related matter on Commons that you'd like the WMF to consider, I highly recommend contacting her. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:06, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

May 26

Problem with cat-a-lot

I've been experimenting problems with the cat-a-lot gadget, as it's adding "Category" after the new category name. See here, for instance. I've already commented on this above, but the lack of feedback has led me to suspect it may be something only happening with me, so I decided to open a dedicated thread. Can someone please confirm if that is indeed the case? I've already cleaned the cache, but the problem persists.-- Darwin Ahoy! 00:58, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Have you tried using the gadget's talk page? -mattbuck (Talk) 05:08, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
It working again now. --DieBuche (talk) 10:20, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, it is. Thank you very much.-- Darwin Ahoy! 19:16, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Trying to upload improved version of protected image

On File:Facepalm3.svg, there's no notice that the file is protected, but if you click on the "Upload a new version of this file" link, at the very last step you get an errormessage which tells you to go to Commons:Requested updates to protected images. I followed the procedure detailed there over three weeks ago, but nothing has happened yet... AnonMoos (talk) 14:37, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

You can see here which administrators protected the image and why. mickit 17:37, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
The requested updates page seems to have been somewhat neglected, with the oldest pending requests being from 2009. I cleaned it up a little — now there are just a couple of map/flag disputes that I'd rather not deal with right now. It might be useful if some more admins were to watchlist that page. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:12, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks... AnonMoos (talk) 21:39, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

May 27

some certificates from the "International Institute of Welding"

Good morning! - In march 2010 a guy from mexico upload some files from the "International Institute of Welding" - I have added a new (red) category - are these files a copyviolation? see [12] most of them certify a mexican institute for material science, so there are better categories needed - thanks and best wishes Cholo Aleman (talk) 03:52, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Merging files in different formats and subsequent redirects

I know there is plenty of discussion about whether superseded GIF/PNG files should or should not be deleted after a suitable SVG file has been made. But what about the replacement of GIF files by PNG versions, or PDF files by DJVU equivalents. And if this practice is acceptable, is there anything wrong with creating redirects from the GIF filename to the replacement PNG or from the PDF filename to the DJVU replacement? --Tony Wills (talk) 03:09, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

We should neither replace nor redirect. Instead we could add informative links from the GIF or PDF to the alternative PNG or DJVU. This gives the user of Commons the maximum choice and avoids breaking external pages that embed or link Commons images. -84user (talk) 23:31, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
I tend to agree, DJVU and PDFs compress things rather differently, for instance whereas a PDF may contain literal scans of pages, the equivalent DJVU may apparent just store scans of each letter of each font used, so what it displays might be a recreation of the page, rather than a bitmap image (potential loss of information, especially if the letter recognition isn't 100% accurate). I'm not sure whether there are any issues in converting GIFs to PNGs apart from the colour-space issues mentioned at w:Image file formats. Is there any Commons policy on the matter? --Tony Wills (talk) 10:56, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
There should be no loss in converting from (static) GIF to PNG. Pretty much all other conversions between file formats allowed on Commons have at least the potential to be lossy. (Actually, PNG to TIFF or XCF should also be more or less safe. The matter of JPEG to PNG (or Vorbis to FLAC) is a bit tricky: the output stays identical, but you probably can't recreate the original file exactly, as the recompression would be lossy.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:47, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
However, converting GIF to PNG can often worsen thumbnailing performance. AnonMoos (talk) 15:07, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
I think Commons:Superseded_images_policy needs to be expanded to cover other areas where people want to replace images with those of a different format. --Tony Wills (talk) 11:24, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
@AnonMoos: Thumbnail quality will be improved in most cases. --Leyo 12:40, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
However, thumbnail performance will be worsened in many cases -- i.e. the PNG thumbnail will be much larger in filesize than a corresponding GIF thumbnail. AnonMoos (talk) 02:57, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Categorization of disambiguations and empty redirects

Hello. Some time ago, I aimed to improve the categorization of our carriage images here in Commons. For the effect, I extensively researched the history of carriages, and created Category:Carriage types by name and other similar categories based on my findings in the many treaties available on the subject. Very early on that endeavour, I noticed how confusing the nomenclature was, with the same designation being used for completely different types of carriage depending on the country and time. I therefore created a number of redirects and disambiguations to take that into account, and categorized them in Category:Carriage types by name and the other "by name" categories as appropriate. That had helped me a lot when categorizing something down the tree, as I couldn't remember all the variants, and there are many.

Today a Commoner noticed it, and according to the Template guidelines, uncategorized some of them (Berlines, e.g.). I've now noticed that the template says that the redirects should not be categorized, but I found this so helpful that I thought it would be better to see what is the Community opinion when dealing with cases like this. I know that in wiki-en the categorization of redirects is allowed under some circumstances, and the same happens in my home wiki, wiki-pt.

I thought about placing this discussion in the template talk, but I believe the subject is broad enough to bring it to the Village Pump instead. I am very interested in knowing your opinions on this issue.-- Darwin Ahoy! 20:24, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Darwin, could you explain more clearly the scenario in which you find this useful? It seems to me that the main reason to include a subcat in a category is to make it easy to find when browsing that category, and I can't think why I'd ever want to find a redirect in that list, rather than just look for a proper category. - Jmabel ! talk 21:08, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, certainly. Suppose we have a picture of some carriage we cant't identify right away. Then I go to "Carriage types by name" and we see there "caleche", which rings a bell. Caleche takes we to the Category:Barouches, where we can confirm if that's indeed the correct type. The word "caleche", for instance, has broader meanings in other countries besides England. The same with the vis-a-vis, for instance. While you can immediately recognize something as a "vis-a-vis" looking at the types, the word actually applies to at least two or three completely different types of carriages.
This is particularly helpful for non-English speakers, since we don't know what particular translation of a native word they have in mind when they are classifying something. In Portugal, for instance, berlina is extensively used for modern coaches, while coche, which resembles the English coach and certainly has the same root, only applies to carosses. To confuse things further, carosses resembles the Portuguese word carroças, and undoubtedly has the same root, but carroças in Portugal are actualy carts and wagons used for the transport of goods, and not carriages themselves. For that motive I thought that presenting the broad set of available English designations under Category:Carriage types by name, including disambuguations and redirects, would be helpful to others, as it has been to me.-- Darwin Ahoy! 21:23, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
With a new supply of rolling paper and a nice cup of coffee besides me, you'll perhaps excuse me if I extend my explanation on why I intentionally indulged in the categorization of redirects and disambiguations for carriages (and other subjects as well, but very seldom). Every author I checked pointed to the very poor record of the English language in coming up with native designations for carriages. As a result, English designations are almost all not native, but rather a puzzle of foreign terms borrowed from here and there, especially the Eastern European countries, but also such exotic places like India (remember the buggy?). This also happened to some degree across Europe, so that many Europeans can recognize a particular type of carriage if every English variant of that model is presented, or at least be informed in the category they drop in, by "see also" or some other info, about the proper category they are looking for. I therefore aimed at compiling all those variants under Category:Carriage types by name to provide for an usable way of classifying the subject either for English speakers, and non-English speakers as well, while still respecting the use of English as the base language for Commons. The usefulness of it has proven successful for me, but I would like to gather other users experiences and opinions, especially since this is a non standard procedure, and eventually my categorization work will get destroyed, even if slowly, if no consensus on the usefulness of it would be reached.-- Darwin Ahoy! 22:12, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
If you redirect one term to anther, it would be helpful if the target category would include the names redirect there, e.g. Category:Milords redirects to Category:Victorias. The later could list "midloards" in an enumeration at "Alternate names/spellings: ...". --  Docu  at 06:35, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, I know, actually I left that work unfinished, as I needed a break from carriages, but I've here literally hundreds or thousands of files to upload on that subject, along with the descriptions for every model you can imagine. They are on hold for now. But what is your opinion on the categorization of those redirects? -- Darwin Ahoy! 07:51, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Disambiguations, empty redirects, category redirects are not categorized into the topic categories. If you want to see what pages disambiguate/redirect to a page you have to check the Special:WhatLinksHere. --Martin H. (talk) 08:31, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

There are many good reasons not to categorize redirects. I will come back on that extensiveley within a couple of days. RussBot empties all categories that are hard redirected and replaces it by a category redirect (unless there is already a soft redirect). As far as I could see, categorization of redirected articles is allowed on wikipedias within very limited rules, but most wikipedias forbid categorisations of redirects. Could you point us to wikipedias where they have other rules and examples ? --Foroa (talk) 09:35, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Rather than mixing them within regular categories, you might want to consider adding them into a separate maintenance category outside the topical tree. This has the advantage that you can still use CatScan with the topical tree. Tools such as hotcat wont be affected if you categorize redirects and disambiguation categories. --  Docu  at 11:07, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Seems like a good solution, indeed. Would it be ok to transform Category:Carriage types by name into an hidden maintenance category, then? That category gets sort of useless if deprived of the redirects and desambigs, since it's main purpose was to group them.-- Darwin Ahoy! 11:25, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
Let's try that. You might want to rename it though as "by name" at Commons is used to list all existing subcategories in a field as direct subcategories, e.g. Category:People by name. --  Docu  at 05:52, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll do it right away. As for the name, does it really have to be changed? I recall Category:Ships built in YYYY (which I believe you are quite familiar with) which is set of hidden cats, though they use a very common nomenclature.-- Darwin Ahoy! 06:07, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
These are index categories part of the regular Category:Ships topical tree. Thus there is no problem that they use the standard nomenclature. --  Docu  at 06:43, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, those are no maintenance categories indeed. What name do you suggest, then? I've already hidden all three "by name" cats which I used to group the redirects, disambigs and regular cats together.-- Darwin Ahoy! 06:52, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps the Carriage gallery page could be expanded to include examples of different carriage types and descriptions of them? It would also be possible include the different names for various carriages in the descriptions. The gallery page could then be linked (or included) from different carriage sub-categories for categorization instructions. It would provide a single, central point where to find help on different carriage types. MKFI (talk) 10:38, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
I confess that I hate dealing with gallery pages, and generally avoid them, as they are a drag when it comes to maintenance, and usually prefer to check the wikipedia articles (which in this case are virtually useless, as they are very incomplete and ridden with errors). That Carriage gallery, as it is, is also almost useless, but I really hate all the process of picking images and building a gallery, especially when I never use them. Perhaps a small gallery on top of each category could be more useful, maybe. I really don't know how to deal with general galleries, as picking the archetypal example of a coach, a phaeton, etc. is a true headache. There are so many variants that a written description is quite difficult already, let alone translating it into an image. However, if someone is interested in building such a gallery, I would gladly assist in what I can. As I mentioned before, I've here immense material, including many illustrated books in public domain, which can be used for that.-- Darwin Ahoy! 11:56, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

May 29

Uploading unidentified images

I plan on adding these images for Wikipedia. I need someone to identify the images before I upload it. The images can be found here: For Wikipedia Drakesketchit (talk) 15:26, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Provided these images are really under a free license (and not only "for Wikipedia", which we don't accept here), you might ask User:Meneerke bloem, who is a specialist in botanical identification. --Túrelio (talk) 06:09, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
If the 3 images are just as on the website, I should not do the effort. They fall in the category "Small images" and two of them are not sharp. Wouter (talk) 06:59, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

May 30

White House flickr photos public domain? What about the extra restrictions?

The white house flickr photos all have an extra set of restrictions attached to them: "This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House." However, we're calling them public domain. How did that discrepancy get decided? Sancho (talk) 23:04, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

I wonder whether the extra restrictions were drafted by someone with an understanding of IP issues. Recently all kinds of military commands and diplomatic missions have started to make official photos available via flickr, facebook, etc. Several of the flickr-ids used by these USGov personnel have used liscenses that impose restrictions, or which claim all rights reserved. In some cases, a simple note to the flickr-id results in them changing their liscenses. In other cases those notes are ignored. And, in a few cases, the flickr-id solves the problem by deleting all the images.
If they cant explain where the authorization for these restrictions came from, I think we can safely ignore them.
If the White House press secretary really wanted to impose these restrictions I think they would have to contract out all their photograpy. If J Bloggs photography has the contract to take all official photos, so the actual photographers were employees of J Bloggs, not actually Federal employees, then they could impose those restrictions. However, I doubt they would do that because of the security hole it would open. Geo Swan (talk) 23:48, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
So, nobody has checked what the actual case is? I was told this was sorted out among Commons contributors, but I can't find the discussion. Sancho (talk) 05:05, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Thats Commons:Non-copyright restrictions, we had this in the past. As per Template:PD-USGov or Template:PD-USGov-POTUS its not a copyright restriction. --Martin H. (talk) 10:51, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, this has been discussed many times before. The White House photos are public domain and the additional restrictions are bogus. Just ignore them. Kaldari (talk) 17:45, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Could you please point me to one the previous discussions that led us to conclude that the photos that the white house posts to Flickr are public domain photos despite the additional restrictions listed by the poster? Sancho (talk) 07:26, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
The policy page is linked above. You can search as well; one previous discussion is here. We use "public domain" to really mean "no copyright restrictions" in particular, not necessarily free of all possible restrictions. U.S. law makes abundantly clear there is no copyright on the photos and thus no conditions can be imposed by the White House based on copyright. Personality rights could possibly still apply, depending on the photo and the situation, as well as misrepresentation-type things. Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:24, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Recently a newspaper in NYC that tries to comply with orthodox Jewish rules published an official white house photo of the President, cabinet members and senior aides watching and listening during the recent raid to kill Osama bin Laden. They photoshopped the photo, and removed Hilary Clinton and a female aide. Apparently some orthodox jewish people believe respect for female modesty requires removing all women from photos published in newspapers. That newspaper has apologized for breaking the White House rules on editing official Whited House photos we have discussed above. Geo Swan (talk) 00:03, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
For thoroughness,
Ryan, Erin Gloria (2011-05-08). Hillary Clinton Photoshopped Out of Situation Room Photo. Jezebel.com. Retrieved on 2011-05-20.
is the reference. Richardc020 (talk) 21:01, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

COM:WHITEHOUSE should help when this comes up in the future. Please add and improve!--Chaser (talk) 21:21, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

May 9

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