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In the File:Shannan mcp.png map and File:Nyingchi mcp.png map, we can clearly see what areas are claimed by the People's Republic of China. Those files are used on English Wikipedia's en:Shannan, Tibet and en:Nyingchi pages. That's an ethical and a fair way to represent a dispute/claim.
There are four maps of the territories of the People's Republic of China that don't show this kind of 'claimed' or 'disputed' status, namely File:Administrative Division Zhangzhou prfc map.png, File:Administrative Division Putian prfc map.png, File:Administrative Division Fuzhou prfc map.png, and File:Administrative Division Quanzhou 3.png. I would like to request that some new but similar maps be created that would indicate more clearly what areas are in the Republic of China (Taiwan). The original maps should be used in the Wikiworld for the purpose of understanding the claims made by the PRC, but the new maps I propose would be used for displaying the situation as it is. I am not skilled enough to make these maps well. I think using something like the methodology used on the maps for Shannan and Nyingchi would work great.
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The Wayback machine already works on most major Wikimedia websites.
Dear fellow contributors,
I am proposing to let a bot run on every file on Wikimedia Commons and other relevant pages which utilise external links and archive these links using the Internet Archive for future reference in the same way it is currently done on many other Wikimedia websites. This will allow for license reviewers and re-users to have a point of reference files from external sources as linkrot may obfuscate their original licenses and make it harder to verify them.
Support - Sounds like a great idea!, Although somewhat unrelated I run this tool all the time at EN (which can replace all dead and alive links with WebArchive) - As noted above given licences can and do change I would support this little gem. –Davey2010Talk20:34, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
Support. Archive should be done within minutes. This is also useful for Iranian websites which publish content, but occasionally remove them within hours (sometimes at the behest of "censorship office"). For example see File:Pir Shalyar 20190202 06.jpg which no longer can be license-reviewed. Neither Google cache [2] nor Bing cache [3] nor Internet Archive [4] could save the work in time. File:Mahnaz Afshar 20190201 01.jpg is another example which was fortunately saved using Google cache. In this case the problem was apparently violation of dress code. 4nn1l2 (talk) 08:43, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Support This consensus helps to ensure that later housekeeping or bot maintainers can more easily handle complaints, related to what is likely to affect millions of files. Where there are specialized issues, such as "hot" websites where the quoted source is at risk of being taken down, these may need bot tasks negotiated that periodically rerun. For very large stable collections, like Geograph or the British Library, these can run relatively slowly as background maintenance, and it hardly matters whether a new upload waits to have its links added to WBM for a few months. --Fæ (talk) 12:03, 9 February 2019 (UTC)
SupportBj.schoenmakers I'm already using this to preserve copyright information on sites where people can adjust their own copyright on images. My upload-bot will post the url to waybackmachine/archive.org first and use the returned date in my template in the commons upload: for example {{Archive.orgTimeStamp|20190303145847|https://world.observation.org/foto/view/19508795}} —Preceding undated comment was added at 00:10, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
@Schlurcher: , this proposal is so that all external links could be backed up using the Wayback Machine using a bot, this would create a snapshot of the external website which future people could use to confirm the licenses of files. For example I import a photograph from Amazingfreepictures.fr (example website) but then this website disappears a year later, a license reviewer then tries to confirm the license but can't, now this image will have to be deleted because its free license can’t be confirmed (see “COM:PCP”), now if this external website was backed up using the Internet Archive this file would not have to be deleted. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 21:04, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure why this is still being discussed, but Internet Archive is already doing this and we have stats that nearly all the links we have in file descriptions are already archived. Nemo08:59, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Could you provide a link to the stats, or a link to where someone has confirmed that the tool is crawling Wikimedia Commons, not just Wikipedia? Seconds before I write this, this WBM link is being added to a DoD photograph uploaded in 2016, it was not on the IA until I added it today. The majority of the Commons images I am adding WBM links for are not already on the IA. You may be confusing the undocumented exercise to add all Featured Pictures to the WBM with doing it for everything else. As a quick test using a sample of 1,000 files, the ratio of 'already on IA' to 'not on IA' for the DoD project is 42%, and most have been hosted on Commons for several years; in that time quite a large number have suffered with linkrot (for non-DVIDs sources), so are already too late for the WBM. --Fæ (talk) 09:16, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Nope, I'm not confusing anything; also, I've never heard of this featured pictures wayback archival thing.
It's trivial to check which URLs are being archived on the fly, as shown on mw:Talk:Archived Pages, by looking up either new pages or the EventStream of new links The WARC files end up in [6], by the way, and the list of URLs (private) is in the CDX files.
The stats I mentioned in April are, I think, those I produced for you when we discussed this on 2019-01-05 (os it might have benefited from the archivals you mentioned below). I simply took all the links from the externallinks table and selected a sample of a few thousands, checked it on the wayback machine. This is a more robust method than generalising from the experience with a few domains, which may have had specific problems such as downtime or robots.txt blacklists (the management of which is evolving). Nemo12:46, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
@Nemo bis: I just saw your comments, is this already true for Wikimedia Commons? Because I imported a couple of hundred files from a University which just completely changed how its URL's work and now all of the old URL's don't function anymore, would the InternetArchiveBot immediately recognise them in the Internet Archive? Or aren't these links archived yet? --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 18:34, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
While I generally support the idea, I am a bit afraid that IA ban us when we try to archive large bunch of external webpages. Especially if a user intentionally adds a bunch of links (not necessarily related to the uploaded file) in the file description page. IMO, the better solution would be to archive the links somewhere in Wikimedia (and not necessarily make them available to the whole public). Ankry (talk) 11:09, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
I created over 400,000 links on IA over a couple of weeks as part of housekeeping my Commons upload projects, if their interface is being used correctly, I doubt anyone would get access blocked. As for using Wikimedia, it was confirmed on the Wikimedia-l email list that there are no plans or strategy in place by the WMF to maintain any public archives, ever. If Wikimedia Commons went offline next month, there is zero guarantee that the WMF would give public access to an archive, while the Internet Archive explicitly guarantees it, with a strategy behind it for 100 years. --Fæ (talk) 11:44, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
WMF is already a relatively inefficient org at doing what they do now, it's pointless to ask them to do what others are already doing well. If anything, they could donate something to the Internet Archive to compensate for the various ways we (ab)use it.
As this proposal (Mobile 📱) for backing up external links on Wikimedia Commons through the Internet Archive has been open for a couple of months now and it has received a myriad of support views with no opposition. While it is unlikely to be implemented anytime soon due to the people capable of developing a bot to implement this system such as Fæ not having the time to work on it now, it wouldn't really be useful to leave the proposal open as it’s already been de facto accepted.
I think that an admin can now close it as "Accepted" and that it might be best to create a separate page named "Commons:Wayback Machine" that links to the proposal and smaller scale projects. This page can be used to document the deployment of the proposal and the policy surrounding it (or in this case what the Wayback Machine is, why linkrot is/was a problem, how it makes license reviewers’ lives easier, Etc.) and maybe it should also list a tip to users to also place an external link to the copyright license in case this isn’t present on the source page (for example a website which hosts many images on many pages but have it hidden away somewhere on another page that all works on the website are licensed with a Creative Commons license, although I myself prefer specialised templates for that).
Just to be clear, this page should at the time being only state that there is consensus for all external links to be backed up to the Internet Archive, not that it is currently implemented as linkrot can still affect files today and of course unreachable links won’t be able to be retrieved plus some websites disallow archiving and copyright licenses can change (despite Creative Commons licenses being irrevocable) and a more recently archived external webpage might not reflect what was written there at the time of upload, but for these cases license reviews are more reliable. And the list goes on and on, but so does the list of videos needing their licenses reviewed (12,113 videos needing review as of 11:54, 29-07-2019, Central European Time). --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 10:00, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
The long term solution would be to have User:InternetArchiveBot run here too. Either Kaldari or Cyberpower678. The behavior should probably be the same as on Wikipedia and the main difference is that the primary namespace is 6 (files) instead of 0 (articles on Wikipedia, galleries here). Not sure if either of them is planning to spend any time on this. As a short term solution someone can implement a simple bot to backup specific url's. See for example this code I've been using for a while for things I add to Wikidata. Multichill (talk) 19:38, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
@Multichill: , well, I know of the page "User:Fæ/Wayback" which is a good example of how it could be implemented here, also gallery pages aren't imported from external websites so it would be pretty useless to run it as the primary namespace to archive. But this post is not necessarily about the actual archiving but about the open proposal which has been open for quite some time. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 20:10, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
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Addition to COM:OVERWRITE: allow overwrites to obscure unacceptable elements
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To Substantial changes or completely unrelated files, add:
[OK] Blurring, cropping or otherwise obscuring unfree elements and any other unacceptable parts (like sensitive personal information) that would otherwise result in deletion or a DR, provided that the image is still useful and in scope after the offending element has been obscured.
Overwriting is generally preferable over uploading a new file and deleting the old one. It preserves the file page history, authorship information, license review, OTRS permission, and requires less on-wiki replacements. It also prevents having to link to a deleted file as the source. - Alexis Jazzping plz01:58, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Allow overwrites to obscure unacceptable elements: votes
Support, preserving the useful bits of a file is always good, this shouldn't just apply to copyright violations, but also to people standing prominently next to notable buildings, I've seen useful educational images which could've simply been cropped deleted as "an unused personal file" before, of course in this separate case the page history should be visibly preserved. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 07:11, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Support Definitely something that should be done over creating a new file. Revision deletion is always available for the unfree version. --Majora (talk) 17:00, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Support, after all that’s what has been done in many cases: Blurred book covers (example) or posters, blurred private vehicle licence places, blurred faces, and so forth. -- Tuválkin✉✇18:04, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Support as zero-effort way to maintain attribution, categories, and other metadata, with revdel per Majora. DMacks (talk) 18:52, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Strong support I think this is a perfect example of how the policy should be developped, it is already a de-facto standard, and although it allows to overwrite somebody else's file with another version it is intended to actually increase the chance that the upload will remain on Commons. It is a little strange why it wasn't a policy so far. ℺ Gone Postal (〠✉ • ✍⏿) 06:28, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
Support This is especially important (and existing practice) for the Wikisources, who routinely deal with several hundred to thousand page written works that include one or two illustrations that are not PD. --Xover (talk) 11:57, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
I generally think Commons should be more careful about the use of "image" to describe all forms of media. This particular policy applies equally (in fact perhaps even more so) to non-image media such as books, magazines, movies, and audio. I would suggest "work" or "media" as a replacement, or in a pinch "file" (too focussed on technology, so I don't prefer it for this). In all contexts where a main factor is copyright, such as here, I would suggest using "work". </soapbox> --Xover (talk) 12:09, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
@Xover: I will leave it as "image" in this proposal because that's what was voted on, but after implementation the word "image" can be replaced on COM:OVERWRITE, possibly after a short discussion on its talk page. I personally prefer "file" as the page itself is rather technical. - Alexis Jazzping plz12:51, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
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Strategy Working Group recommendation to change licensing rules
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Hi all,
The Diversity Working Group has recommended for certain changes to our licensing rules to foster diversity and address systemic biases, in pursuit of Strategy2030. This includes hosting (and using) ND and NC media. Opinions on the recommendation are welcome, (until September 15), over the corresponding t/p.
Other recommendations are located over here and feedback is appreciated on the individual t/p(s).
Proposal to introduce Non-Commercial media on Wikimedia Commons
There is an off-Commons proposal by the Diversity Working Group (announcement on VP/C today) to change Wikimedia Commons licensing rules. Presumably this could happen by the WMF forcing a change in COM:L without a consensus with the Wikimedia Commons community.
There are consequences for hosting Non-Commercial (NC) reuse only media that appear to have not been assessed, such as Wikimedia Commons immediately ceasing to be a reliable freely reusable media collection for educators and academics to publish in study materials, academic papers and academic works. The section on negative impacts merely states "All change has negative connotations to some members of the community."Q4a
As the associated talk page on meta has turned in to a vote, and as this vote should be happening on Commons if it is to engage the Wikimedia Commons local community, I have raised this proposal as a vote with the local community. Contributors should feel to raise comments and views here rather than on meta, where most of our community never edit and different editorial policies apply for comments.
Though the recommendation includes a potential No Derivatives (ND) reuse license constraint, for simplicity of an initial vote, this proposal is to assess views about a Non-Commercial change only. Contributors may also wish to highlight issues for hosting ND media especially when these may be different to the issues for hosting NC media.
Strong oppose On allowing NC-only or ND-only media on Commons unless we are talking about a very small amount of Wikimedia logos. In other words if the exceptions cannot be placed on an exclusive list, then that should not be done. However, Support integration of NC and ND licences by CC and other popular licence creators, allowing for an easy way to allow one's own work to be distributed under other licences as long as at least one free licence is also available. ℺ Gone Postal (〠✉ • ✍⏿) 13:01, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
Oppose Dumb idea. Most of our files can be freely combined. A derivative work can not be created by combining a CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC work. BY-SA requires ShareAlike, and noncommercial is not Alike. BY-NC requires noncommercial, but BY-SA allows commercial. Also, the diversity rubbish emotional argument: yuck. - Alexis Jazzping plz08:07, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
Strong oppose Don't let NC licenses get legitimized through adoption by Wikimedia. Fortunately, there is the right to fork, for the worst case. --Marsupium (talk) 21:09, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
Oppose per already mentioned rationales and per the fact that in some legislations it is even unclear what "commercial use" is and what is not. --Túrelio (talk) 07:49, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Strong oppose It completely destroys our mission, which is to generate and disseminate content which can be used for any purpose free of copyright restrictions which limit commercial use, derivative works and similar restrictions. It's also the case that NC and ND licenses can never be integrated into Commons, we're 55 million files too late for this decision, we have CC licensed material which cannot be changed or re-uploaded with NC and/or ND licenses. I'm genuinely worried at the lack of experience and the woeful absence of any level of understanding demonstrated within this proposal by the WMF Diversity working group. We've indefintely blocked editors from English Wikipedia for lacking the competence needed to contribute, and genuinely, in many cases, those editors have displayed a greater competency and understanding than the Diversity working group. Nick (talk) 09:03, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Strong oppose - It is absolutely nonsense to allow NC in a project about free content. I have been talking with the CC folk about the possibility of not promoting their CC-NC licenses, as they have been acting as a cancer undermining the whole free licensing effort, and now the Strategy WG proposes to enable them here? No way. If some community is not comfortable with free licensing, there is a lot of resources other than Wikimedia Commons available to them.--DarwinAhoy!11:49, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Strong oppose - The absolute core mission of this project is to upload and share files for anyone to use without any restriction ...... Accepting NC/ND licences would completely go against that mission, Like Nick says we're 55 million files too late. –Davey2010Talk13:57, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Strong oppose Other than every reason above, and relatively minor issue compared to the principal, Commons is a no-brainer for those Wikimedia communities who chose not to include non-free material. Changing licensing policy is adding yet more complexity to image handling in these projects. No proper rationale has been given for the proposal. --MarioGom (talk) 13:42, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
Oppose. Yes I can see why professional photographers would want this as they could earn lots of money by using Wikipedia to advertise their photos and then charging for any reuse that they could convince a court was "commercial". But even this form of advertising would be toxic, and would lead to edit wars with photographers wanting to keep lucrative photos on Wikipedia articles even if we had more encyclopaedic images available. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:52, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
Oppose The problem is that commercial is not clear defined. (Let's make capitalism history that this question gets obsolete.) --GPSLeo (talk) 19:13, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
Strong oppose Strongest possible. This "marginalized group" nonsense is a distraction. Making the content NC/ND ensures that it will be much harder to store/publish/propagate their cultural artifacts. It is precisely because we want to preserve and publish this unique content that we cannot include such restrictions. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯04:49, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
No no no. Resolve the conflict with the 2007 board resolution (linked by AFBorchert above) first and even if it happens I am not happy with the idea - it just kills this site. — regards, Revi11:38, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
Support for multi-licenses combining NC license(s) with free license(s), and Strong oppose for NC-only/ND-only licenses. --予弦06:10, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
Does integrating historically marginalized groups require that the movement stakeholders rethink its Creative Commons tenets by incorporating use of “No Derivative Works (ND)“ and “No Commercial Works” (NC) licensing (as well as changes on principles of notability and definitions and usage of other sources) to facilitate “authenticity” of voices which have been historically prohibited from telling their own history?
To me, this makes no sense at all. How the hell restrictive licensing can help communities who typically lack access to sophisticated legal advice and whose interests are represented in the global arena by NGOs, often against for-profit entities? This reeks of pork! -- Tuválkin✉✇12:05, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
I think the idea is that some communities (I have particularly heard this about Native American communities but I understand it's broader) don't share their heritage outside of their community, because they don't want that heritage (which is figuratively or literally sacred to them) made available for commercial exploitation [particularly not commercial exploitation by people who colonised their countries, stole their land, etc]. Saying "anything in the Wikimedia movement is available indefinitely for all purposes" makes us a very unattractive partner for them, for this reason. If we really want to record their heritage, then we probably won't be able to do it without in a 'free as in speech' way. Of course, it's a valid point of view to say that we shouldn't attempt to do this, or shouldn't attempt to do it on projects that currently exist, or that if we try to do it it's unlikely to work (including e.g. because -NC -Nd licenses might not be defended in practice). But that's the rationale, as I understand it. The Land (talk) 12:38, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
The Land, we have always known that not everyone will be willing to release their work under a free license. If they are the copyright holder, that is of course absolutely their choice to make. If they'd prefer not to do that, we will refrain from using it on Wikimedia. If such restrictions are needed, perhaps a non-Wikimedia project could be started to accommodate that, but Wikimedia projects are fundamentally about providing "free as in speech" educational content to the public. Seraphimblade (talk) 14:40, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
The Land, This isn't really about whether NC and ND licences are likely to be defended, more that if the concern is cultural appropriation NC and ND don't seek to stop that. Worse, copyright is only for a limited period such as life plus 70 years. That isn't likely to be a concern for a living professional photographer, but for someone concerned about the permanent protection of the cultural legacy of generations long dead, uploading files under a CC-BY-SA-NC-ND licence means agreeing that those files will eventually become public domain with no restrictions. WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:34, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
@Gone Postal: I think by integration other licenses, you are suggesting we do something we already can do. Normally alternative licenses which are not allowed as the sole license per COM:L are added as comments to the permissions parameter, and are fine to display, so long as suitable free licenses are displayed. As an example File:Industry during the First World War Q28320.jpg explains it was released on a NC license at source, but is verifiably expired Crown Copyright. In theory we can "templatize" these redundant licenses, so long as it is done in a way that does not start getting flagged as a rationale for copyvio templates. --Fæ (talk) 13:24, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
Comment, there has been a proposal open to create a special Wikimedia wiki specifically for hosting non-free media files to allow for fair use items to be shared between Wikipedia's and as many Wikipedia's and other Wikimedia wiki's are solely dependent on Wikimedia Commons for their media files this solution wouldn't be a bad one, using The Commons for hosting non-free files on the other hand is completely absurd. Ever notice how the Wikimedia Foundation never seem to list their proposals here, it's clear that they ignore the community and don't want its feedback. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 15:51, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
sorry Whatamidoing (WMF) but the WMF ran a strategy process that wound up with a bunch of perennial proposals being rehashed, without people seeming to have even read the reasons why the community has previously rejected such ideas. When Newbies come up with such proposals it is easy to refer them to past discussions and suggest that they read them and at lest consider past objections. If the WMF has run the idea gathering stage of a brainstorming exercise without such a reality check it would be unfair on the editors involved to simply throw them and their ideas at the community. The WMF needs to run the reality check stage of its brainstorming, and give people the opportunity to amend or withdraw their proposals in light of past community objections. Think of it as a sort of safe space. It may be that some of these ideas should still be discussed, but hopefully with their proponents in a position to say we think for x and y reasons it is time for the community to change its mind on this. WereSpielChequers (talk) 16:04, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
WereSpielChequers, I'm not quite sure how to respond to this (and similar comments from a couple of other people).
On the one hand, we have a handful of volunteers saying that a change might be good for a particular goal (diversity, in this case). The Strategy team apparently thought "transparency!" and published whatever the volunteers were talking about.
On the other hand, we have a couple of volunteers asking why the WMF didn't keep all of those volunteers' ideas secret from everyone else, or at least only publish the parts that the WMF agreed with. Let's ignore the question of whether or not any of these ideas are (or could become) good ideas. My question is only this: Do you really want the WMF to keep you from discovering what's going on? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:25, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
I really want the WMF to avoid publishing proposals under its byline that don't fit with what it's planning to do. Your question is quite stacked; choosing not to publish things that aren't consistent with your goals is not censorship.
The WMF didn't write those recommendations, and Commons is the community that I think best understands the difference between "user who uploaded" and "author". The attribution is given in the edit summaries. There is now a note at the top of each page to help less experienced people figure it out.
I don't think that telling one group of volunteers that they're not allowed to share their ideas with other volunteers is a path that builds trust in either group of volunteers. And my experience with Commons in particular is that Commons is always best served by knowing what other groups are doing that might affect us here, even if – especially if – those ideas might cause problems here. Do I always get what I want for Commons from the WMF? No. For example, there's no automagic screening of uploads for prior publication. (I'm still nagging reminding people about it.) But overall I tend to think that talking to you about what could affect Commons or what we need here builds more trust that springing someone's secret plans on you at the last second. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
The WMF is the publisher, as I said. The WMF publishing this is quite a bit different from uploading something to Commons.
There are groups out there that want your head on a spear, because of your nationality, your race, or your religion. When should your newspaper devote space to their recent statements? If they do it too much, the community is going to have a lot of stress. The WMF publishing stuff like this puts stress on Commons.
Sometime before you started posting to this thread, user The Land said that responding to this was overkill. If responding to this is overkill, then the WMF should not have posted it. That's the context in which these arguments happened.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:01, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
How are they the same? OTRS is only about legality. Any one can upload to Commons; the intervention of the Strategy team is key to why this is publishing.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:53, 22 August 2019 (UTC)
Hi Whatamidoing (WMF) my suggestion is not to think of this in terms of secrecy, not to even raise the idea of secrecy, I didn't mention secrecy and if others did it is a distraction. When I said " When Newbies come up with such proposals it is easy to refer them to past discussions and suggest that they read them and at least consider past objections." I was spelling out how we normally handle such suggestions. My criticism of the strategy process is nothing to do with secrecy and everything to do with process. Uncritically throwing out a bunch of ideas in not brainstorming, it is just the first stage of a brainstorming exercise. You also need a phase for reality checks, to ask questions such as "will this work?" and "why we have not done this already when it was previously suggested?". By omitting this phase or not doing it as rigorously as was needed the WMF has given the impression that they are ignoring "the question of whether or not any of these ideas are (or could become) good ideas". My criticism and the criticism of many I agree with is that this process should have happened during the strategy process, and before the strategy process produced a draft for general community discussion. WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:12, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
AFAICT, the current phase – the one in which thousands of volunteers get to look at what that small group of volunteers was talking about and tell them what their fellow volunteers think – is exactly the "phase for reality checks, to ask questions" that you wanted to see. The same questions are being asked of volunteers and staff alike: Will these ideas work? Are these good ideas? Do you think that you and the other volunteers should have been excluded from that process, and just let staff decide which ideas you get to hear about? I'm willing to take yes for an answer, but I'd like to make sure that "don't tell me what's going on until decisions have already been made" is really your answer. If I'd been asked just a few days ago, I would not have assumed that any regular contributor here would have been so willing to trust anyone to understand this community's unique needs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
Hi Whatamidoing (WMF) I don't recall mentioning staff, I think a few experienced Wikimedians was what was needed. I'm happy to have a process where drafts were exposed to an audience of thousands of wikimedians, Its just that this lot weren't ready for that stage and that size of audience. I occasionally spend time at the village pump handling perennial suggestions from new and newish editors who need to be signposted to previous iterations of their idea. I think it must be a much less stressful process for someone reviving a long rejected idea to have a person or small group of people pointing out the reasons why that idea has been rejected before than to be thrown into the deep end like this with thousands of editors alarmed that the WMF seems to be proposing this. WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:13, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
What makes you think that these people aren't "experienced Wikimedians"? Were you thrown off because they didn't link their usernames in the membership list? The first name in their list has 90K edits across all wikis, and 87,000 are right here at Commons. She probably knows more about Commons than I do. The next person has 100K edits, including more than 1,000 here at Commons. The next name has almost 7K edits, including more than 1,000 here at Commons. The fourth person in the members list has 46K edits, including more than 12,000 here at Commons. I could probably go on and get similar results for the whole list, but I think it should be clear that these draft recommendations come from people who are "us", not from a bunch of outsiders who have no idea how a wiki works. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
Hi Whatamidoing, well yes maybe it would have been better if they had linked usernames rather than real names. Or if they had listed Wikimedia Commons, GLAM or Wikipedia under the "Organization / project" heading. I do recognise a couple of those names, and note I wasn't saying they were outsiders or lacked knowledge of how a wiki works. I was pointing out that these were newbie mistakes not outsider ones. Of course we are all liable to make newbie mistakes when moving into a new part of the wiki, and it is possible to have been very active in one or more areas of commons without having been involved in past discussions about either NC or cultural appropriation. But I'd be surprised if any of those people had a history of being involved in image release discussions with cultural institutions that have material where cultural misappropriation is a concern. Suggesting a licence that in at most a century will expire and drop the file into public domain is not an appropriate response to someone who has such concerns. WereSpielChequers (talk) 20:46, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
I suspect that part of the cause is that their remit is a fairly narrow focus. Something could be a plausible idea for promoting diversity (or whatever good thing interests you) without being a good idea overall, or a good idea for Commons. As for the limits of licensees, even full copyright protection expires eventually. Someone might grouse that an -NC or -ND license is only a baby step in our preferred direction, compared to full copyright protection, but it does seem to be moving in the right direction. And if, say, -ND were really wanted by potential contributors at a separate oral-history wiki (mightn't some potential interviewees be worried about unauthorized remixes changing the meaning of what they said?), then why not let that (hypothetical) community consider whether they wanted that as an option? I don't think it's a necessarily mistake to consider whether the educational benefits could, in some scenario, outweigh the costs. I think the mistake was in assuming that any of this needed to affect Commons. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:00, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
@Fæ: No, you have misunderstood me a little bit. I am not saying that it is currently impossible to do, but that it is not integrated into Commons. Let's say I would like to search for media that is also available under a Non-Commercial licence (perhaps I am integrating that media with something else that is already under NC licence). I could try looking at {{GFDL-CC-triple}}, but it is ugly, outdated, and does not categorise media under NC licence's category. Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Cc-non-compliant gives you something, but trying to figure out from that list where is ND, where is NC, and where is your specific version is impossible. ℺ Gone Postal (〠✉ • ✍⏿) 10:08, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
Comments (NC license)
I don't believe it's accurate to interpret this draft recommendation as a requirement for a wide-reaching change to Commons licensing policy, and for this reason, this is a premature thing to be voting against.
"Present licensing for both text and photographs should change to allow restrictions for non-commercial use and no derivative works, if those will improve the ability of the project to better reflect diverse knowledge on a global scale, such as by including videos, allowing culturally significant text or photos to remain intact without misappropriation, etc. Such misappropriation for a variety of reasons has created distrust from marginalized and underrepresented communities with open knowledge movements."
"...photographs, which are marked ND (No derivative works) or NC (No commercial works) could be made available for use with proper attributions/licensing notices. This would allow distribution of educational videos or materials often licensed only as NC, or culturally significant works marked ND which might suffer from misappropriation. (If this cannot be applied across the board, we need to evaluate project specific use for multimedia, such as the “fair use” policy on English Wikipedia.)"
So this is a proposal for the Wikimedia movement as a whole to consider some ways of supporting some material with a NC- or ND- license. It is not necessarily Commons should change its policies to accept -NC or -ND material in general, let alone anyone forcing this through without further deliberation. And indeed I read it to say that the working group have explicitly identified that there are probably ways to effect this recommendation without individual projects (e.g. Commons perhaps?) being involved at all.
This vote is about a potential license change on Commons. It does not matter whether everyone who votes here has read a document on meta or not, what is being voted on is any hypothetical future change to allow NC licenses on Commons.
If the Working Group wishes to exempt Commons from these radical license changes, then they are free to make that clarification. This proposal is a documented consensus that can support any discussion about Commons policies. If the Working Group wants to, for some reason, either ignore it, or claim it is invalid, we can run a later RfC that does the same thing and can be specifically based on whatever the Working Group states is their final recommendation.
If the Working Group wants to improve its engagement with the Wikimedia Commons community, that would be great. Right now Q4a in the recommendations illustrates perfectly well that the Working Group have a very low regard for anyone that might not 100% agree with whatever changes the Working Group thinks are smart. Feel free to change those words if they do not correctly represent the Working Group, it is their publication.
Could you please declare your relationship with this Working Group. I see no reason as to why that should be made opaque for everyone else, especially if the Commons community is to judge whether your comments here represent the Working Group in any official way, or whether you have special inside knowledge about what the plan for publication of these recommendations is, as this is not declared on meta anywhere as far as my searches can tell.
There's two ways this conversation can go, we can either end up with a long list of people who are opposed to your personal interpretation of what you think this proposal means, or people can engage with the actual recommendation and the thinking behind it. Either's good. The Land (talk) 11:33, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
Please declare your relationship with this Working Group. I see no reason as to why that should be made opaque for everyone else, especially if the Commons community is to judge whether your comments here represent the Working Group in any official way.
This is a Wikimedia Commons community vote. The vote and comments are not my "personal interpretation", nor have I made any "long list" of enemies. It would be simply super if you could put aside any motivation you may have to make further personal attacks in this discussion which is aimed at establishing consensus, not an excuse to play petty personal politics.
Thanks for supporting transparency and openness, part of our Wikimedia family shared values. --Fæ (talk) 11:43, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
I am happy to clarify that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Diversity Strategy Working Group. In no way shape or form did I discuss, review, read, or otherwise contribute to, the recommendations of the Diversity Working Group. I may never in fact have spoken to any member of the Diversity Working Group. If nominated, I shall not run and if elected I shall not serve. I am however a member of the Roles and Responsibilities working group and very happy to engage in discussion of actual recommendations coming out of the strategy process :) The Land (talk) 11:52, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
You have more patience than I would have, The Land, for this sort of dramamongering. Edit: To clarify what I meant, this is a recommendation by a working group, not a complete proposal or something actually happening at this point. I don't think that starting a discussion in three places is a proportionate response to it. Ajraddatz (talk) 12:24, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
This is a draft recommendation that the community strongly opposes. That's why the pile-on. There is a feeling that if things are let to get to the point where it's an actual recommendation, we'll simply have it forced upon us, where as if we complain loudly now, at least WMF can't claim that there was no objection.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:20, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
NC
As the NC name already suggests, non-commericial. The Commons main page already said that "freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute" which is roughly translated to being commercial.
ND
This is an unneccesary load on admins, patrollers & reveiwers. Minor changes such as cropping already violates this and what happens if a user uploads the file with a totally different name?
I don't see why nd is a load. Derivates of ND are forbidden, same as copies of protected content or copies of CC-BY-Files without attribution. What happens if a user lies then? --Ailura (talk) 11:46, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
Commons has no systemic tools to confirm that a hosted file has not been changed before upload. Frequently uploads have been subject to autocorrect, changes in resolution, low saturation images or grey toned images changed to black and white, or adjustment for monitor viewing from an original photograph, it is incredibly rare for these to even be spotted as variations. It becomes impossible to make any sort of verification of authenticity if the source is taken offline, never was online, or the sourcelinks die, which happens to all source websites, even those given as permalinks. --Fæ (talk) 18:16, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
The No Derivative licence restricts some of the changes and adaptations that users here and downstream re-users want or need to make to successfully make use of material - it can prohibit the small changes that Fae has indicated - potentially if a file is uploaded flipped or rotated, we would be unable to rotate the file and use it. It would also prevent updating of graphs, charts, maps, flowcharts and the like, which routinely need changes to incorporate new datasets, changes to borders or boundaries etc. That's the basic issues we face, but No Derivative licenses generate further problems. The 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0 licenses prohibit any derivative works, the 4.0 license prohibits derivative works for public purposes but permits for private usage, which is an added level of complexity for our downstream re-users, most significantly though, is the way in which No Derivative works on Commons could limit the creation of independent but visually similar material - i.e the risk that our own users, generating new material, are going to accidentally violate the copyright of ND files already extant on Commons, with the risk that it may not be possible to update some material. Nick (talk) 10:46, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
While I am against allowing ND-only files on Commons, but ND licence is unable to stop somebody from rotating an image, because that would not be seen as a derivative work in any country I am aware of. Updating of a chart is, however, a big problem. Because when it comes to copyright enfringement you need two things: access and similarity. If I were to make a chart of post office sizes and it would end up looking similar to some other chart that somebody on the internet has put up, I could easily say that I did not copy the file and demand that the other party prove that I had accessed their chart. But if there is an ND chart on Commons, I would be forced to thread very carefully to make sure that my chart is not substantially similar to theirs (to copyrightable elements of their chart) simply because I am already on the site where we have this file, and thus access is much easier to show in court. ℺ Gone Postal (〠✉ • ✍⏿) 17:15, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
@Alexis Jazz: The recommendation wasn't created by the WMF. It was created by a working group which consisted mostly of community members from various chapters and affiliate groups. You should direct your criticism towards them, not the liaison who posted the recommendation to meta (who had nothing to do with creating it). As the proposal page says in huge type at the top "Working Group draft recommendations are not proposals from the Wikimedia Foundation." Kaldari (talk) 02:09, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
@Kaldari: I find that a bit of a weak excuse not to do a basic sanity check. If this proposal is 100% community driven, why wasn't it posted by a community member? What did they need SGrabarczuk (WMF) for? Anyone can create new pages on meta. - Alexis Jazzping plz12:32, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
It *was* posted by a community member, User:Fæ. Note the "Oppose as proposer" in the very first vote. The WMF has nothing to do with the proposal here. It was proposed to gauge community reaction to the possibility voiced in the recommendation, presumably so the WMF will know the community opinion here before they make any decisions based on the recommendation. SGrabarczuk (WMF) has not (at least yet) posted a message here at all. All that person did was post the text of the recommendations to meta, which was obviously a necessary step in that process. Carl Lindberg (talk) 13:22, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
@Clindberg: I meant the working group diversity recommendation (recommendation, proposal, tomayto, tomahto) page on meta. That page was created by SGrabarczuk (WMF). If that was merely a copy-paste, why didn't the working group create that page themselves? - Alexis Jazzping plz17:37, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
@Alexis Jazz: From discussion, I believe that user is the liaison for that group, or maybe just is the person on meta who gets to put up pages like that for the WMF. The working group reported back to WMF, and the WMF is just publishing their recommendations. Criticize the content of the recommendations themselves all you want, but I don't think the WMF has taken any action on them other than just posting the text as they got it back. It's fair to question the process the WMF used, given that the recommendations include such fundamental changes of making the "free encyclopedia" no longer free, and the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" not true anymore, both with absolutely no justification other than a vague "some users will complain about any change" statement when evaluating any negative consequences. Anyways, this page is just discussing Fae's proposal specifically. Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:57, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
Alexis Jazz, right, I'm even both a loony and a silly sod, and eat children for appetizer. Questions? Thanks, pleasure. ... Did you think I could take your words seriously? :D I'm a Wikipedia admin, I've been through worse. Please, have a look at the documentation on Meta-Wiki. I confirm almost everything Clindberg wrote. In the the edit summary, I wrote: "authors: WG members". WG means Working Group. They didn't post themselves, because they spend enough time on writing these documents, and delegate simple taks (like posting, wikifying, designing pages) to others. This isn't a proposal nor a recommendation, it's a draft recommendation, disclosed early so that you could be confused, so that Wikimania participants could explain to WG members how things are according to them, and so that the WG members could rewrite the draft and make a difference between drafts and final versions. I'm not WMF staff member. I wrote that on my user page. That's my basic me. Currently, I work with the Core Team (which leader is Nicole Ebber, she's from WMDE, not WMF). SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
@SGrabarczuk (WMF): I regret the use of the term 'loony' which has negative mental health connotations, and I believe it would be best for Alexis Jazz to redact the phrasing. I am, however, shocked by the profound lack of knowledge and understanding on the part of the Diversity working group with regards to understanding the Wikimedia core mission, and in respect of copyright and intellectual property legislation. They appear to be users who have none of the necessary understanding needed to be drawing up and presenting copyright and intellectual property proposals to the community, and should not be doing so. I'm also shocked and disappointed that WMF has done no due-diligence on the part of the group members, and has allowed members who lack the necessary copyright and IP knowledge to be making detailed but highly problematic and technically impossible copyright policy proposals. The terms defined for the Working Group at Wikimania 2018 are nothing short of scandalous, no experts on intellectual property and no community representatives from Commons being involved in the development of new copyright proposals. I'm genuinely disappointed and really angry at how badly wrong WMF has allowed this exercise to get, straight away. I would urge the WMF to immediately implement a plan which sees a "copyright and intellectual property" working group which includes the WMF legal counsel, our experienced legal volunteers and a significant number of users who have been involved in the maintenance and administration of media on Commons and fair-use enabled projects to oversee all of proposals with a copyright or intellectual property interaction coming from all the other working groups. Copyright and intellectual property is one area where the community does NOT get to decide fully on either WMF-wide and/or project specific policies, we are forced to comply with, at the very minimum, the United States copyright and intellectual property legislation and that will always be our starting point; that legislation essentially prevents a number of perennial proposals, such as hosting fair-use material on Commons and makes others, such as the use of non-commercial and no-derivative licences incredibly difficult to manage. We simply should not have any working group, be it the Diversity working group or any other, being permitted to make proposals which could potentially contravene US legislation if they were implemented in part or in full. I am, on a personal note, deeply saddened that the proposal to allow NC and ND Creative Commons licences has been made ahead of proposals that we double and treble our efforts to persuade media repositories to release their works under the existing fully free licences. I understand and am sensitive to concerns about cultural misappropriation and marginalisation but I fully believe the best way to deal with cultural misappropriation and marginalisation is to disseminate such material as far and as wide as it can be spread, to send out the message from Wikimedia that it's more acceptable to limit important cultural material to non commercial purposes, or to prevent derivative works would be regressive. Nick (talk) 08:42, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
Nick, there was some candidate review process, I don't know if that could be compared to due-diligence. On Meta, you can read why, who and how appointed the WG members, and that it wasn't the WMF. I personally took no part in that. I informed the Core Team about your concerns. Please, copy and paste it as a separate section to discuss on Meta-Wiki, maybe there? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
@Nick: The WMF has not made any proposals. It was one of the recommendations of the working group, but was not a proposal by WMF itself. The recommendation allows that putting them on Commons may not be feasible, and instead could be interpreted as wanting to change EDP scope on individual projects to allow such works locally in some circumstances. The proposal here is independently made by a community member, presumably to gauge reaction on the Commons possibility itself and possibly guide future decisions. Agreed that the misunderstandings of copyright by that working group are rather disturbing -- especially when talking about using "invariant sections" of GFDL, where they both misunderstand the current Terms of Use (Wikipedia text must be licensed CC-BY-SA *and* GFDL; it is not "and/or" which is a huge difference -- the "and/or" refers to further re-users), and also misunderstand the use of "invariant sections" (which by definition must have nothing to do with the subject matter of the main document). Those sections were allowed in order for the GNU Manifesto to be included but not allow alterations to it, but the license expressly requires that any such section discuss nothing relating to the main subject matter, since that must always be modifiable. And the current Terms of Use forbid the use of invariant sections for contributed text anyways. Carl Lindberg (talk) 13:22, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
@Clindberg: Yes, I'm aware these aren't WMF proposals, rather, they're proposals made by members of the wider Wikimedia community as part of a WMF orchestrated and managed Wikimedia 2030 project. WMF have, predictably and sadly, failed to manage this process adequately and have allowed users without the necessary experience or competency to make suggestions which are diametrically opposed to the underlying goals we've built the project on for the last two decades, which may well run contrary to US legislation itself and which could potentially open WMF, editors and re-users open to legal action or civil damage claims. Nick (talk) 18:28, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. 4nn1l2 (talk) 11:30, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
localize upload wizard
currently, the upload wizard only shows US government in default licensee. I hope to have an option to adjust based on user's location and their interface language. So it should be easier for people from outside of the US to upload their files without the need of going through all the different licenses out there. Viztor (talk) 02:52, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
New abuse filter
A filter that prohibits IP and users from adding templates that require vetting, e.g. {{Quality image}} (basically some of the things from Category:Assessment templates). These groups are exempted: Autopatrollers, File movers and Rollbackers. Autoconfirmed cannot be trusted either since the threshold is so low.
I thought of this because I saw 113.172.194.60 (talk·contribs) added a lot of fake QualityImage (the +17 bytes edits). Either a bot has to check for fake ones or we should prevent insertion of these templates straightaway.--Roy17 (talk) 22:43, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
Maybe templates like "{{Quality image}}" should only be added by a group called "Content judges", but then again I wouldn't want to see a whole user group created over an incident that rarely happens. I'm not sure how only stopping IP addresses would be beneficial as someone can just register an account and then do the exact same thing. But then again a lot of abuse filters are created around single incidents or single users so maybe it's not a bad idea. But having a bot automatically compare where the template is used and which images have actually been promoted would be the superior alternative, as theoretically anyone could falsely add a "{{Quality image}}" template, so the bot could alert to all false quality images and then remove the template/report on it. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 06:30, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
@Roy17 and Donald Trung: Why not restrict it to bots? Do humans add those templates too? (I don't pay much attention to it, I mostly notice it when I see talk page spam from bots for QI/VI) - Alexis Jazzping plz16:25, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Template:Wrong source
There is a Template:Wrong license, which is good, but I miss a Template:Wrong source. It seems as there are a lot of files where the users claim that it is "own work" where it clearly is not, such as certain logos etc. Can someone create a template which works exactly like Template:Wrong license, but with the source? Thanks!Jonteemil (talk) 04:43, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
In practice, in years gone by, people would just use the "no source" template for that purpose, although the creation of a "wrong source" would be good. You could probably just copy the wrong lincense template and make adjustments as needed. Killiondude (talk) 19:22, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
@Killiondude: Thanks for your answer. I wonder which template I should copy. Template:Wrong license which just says that it has the wrong license or Template:No source since which says that it has no source AND that it will be deleted in seven days unless sources are added. The graphics are also different. The first one is orange and the second is red with a clear ”THIS IS WRONG” vibe if you know what I mean.Jonteemil (talk) 21:16, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
I still think that we should utilise Wikidata to have a bot flood-create category redirects using a new template (Exampli gratia "{{Redirect-de}}", "{{Redirect-fr}}", "{{Redirect-zh-tw}}", "{{Redirect-es}}", "{{Redirect-ar}}", Etc.) that will automatically display the redirected text as the category title for users who have set their standard language as something other than English and allow for the search engine to look for these alternative names and the MediaWiki Upload Wizard interface should utilise redirect categories in the same way HotCat does now during the submission form.
I think the site could allow non-latin words in such instance. Just wait for one day the interface allow local language display and someone adds an English translation.--維基小霸王 (talk) 01:08, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
To summarize, directly using Chinese would be the most simple and easy to understand way to categorise book scan files. It has the following advantages:
Easier for Chinese users to obtain. Books are only useful if you can understand them. Chinese users will only search in Chinese for books, not in Pinyin. Categorise books in Chinese will get the files noticed by users from a search engine and maximize their visibility.
Using original language will make other language users easier to translate the titles. For example, if you use Google to translate the Chinese title 中國新海軍插圖, you can get the correct translation. [7] But if you translate its pinyin, you can not. [8] (Since the categories themselves will be categorised as such in English, English language users will understand what they are anyway. If a user can't type Chinese and want to refer to a Chinese language category, the user can copy and paste the Chinese title.)
Wikimedia Commons is an international project. While using the widely-used English language in general categories could allow International cooperations, allowing non-latin in some instance like books scans meets its property of internationalization.
Book scan files mainly serve Wikisource. The multilanguage Oldwikisource: use titles for original text in the original language. Also using titles in original language shows consistency across Wikimedia projects.
The easiest way for mass uploaders to create categories. The alternative is to translate the titles to English or Pinyin. The former is an art itself and needs research in each case. The latter is also difficult because many Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation. If dividing pinyin by words, it will require additional manual work. Such useless labour should better be skipped. --維基小霸王 (talk) 01:46, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
I am talking about modifying the policy. And your response is accusing modifying a existing policy is a violation of the policy? --維基小霸王 (talk) 04:35, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
In general, putting in translated descriptions in the category text area should end up in search just as much as the category name. That is generally where translations go, and would be the source for further translations. You can only have one category, as you can't have multiple translated category names and have media show up in the same category page, which is why we have the English-only rule. If someone needs to upload an English translation of that book, what category name should they use? Or Arabic? The filenames themselves can contain the Chinese name, of course, which would also show up in search, usually in preference to the category. Is there a reason why books aren't uploaded in PDF or .djvu format for Chinese, as a base for Wikisource? Those would have the original title. You can put the images in a Chinese-named gallery if desired as well. I'm not sure I understand a concern here which hasn't been brought up before. I guess having a transliterated title is often not that much more understandable than having the title in the source script, and makes it worse for native speakers without adding much for English. But another problem with categories is if there is a need to subcategorize -- managing that gets more difficult if everyone just uses their own scripts. Or creating related categories, like "Characters in <book>" I think your points 1 through 4 are answered by putting in the original title in Chinese in the text area of a category, which would be expected anyways. (Wikisource native titles are in the main article area I think, like gallery names here, not categories.) Not sure that point 5 is worth changing the policy, as it would apply to all languages of course and then why only book names and not people names or movie names or ship names etc. I may not have an issue with creating a temporary category name in Chinese for upload, then redirecting it to a transliterated category name such that the rest of the work is done by bot, to save some busy work on each file, if that helps any. If books are in .pdf or .djvu format, often only one upload is needed per book -- it would be relatively rare I would have thought to need a category just for that book. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:44, 6 September 2019 (UTC)
Support Though logically, it is not an exception as the policy already states "Category names should generally be in English, excepting some of proper names, biological taxa and terms which don't have an exact English equivalent." There is nothing there that stops the use of non-English and non-Latin character sets where this makes more sense than bending over backwards to transliterate into pseudo English. As reminder, the tendency to stick to "English" for categories was a Jimmy Wales championed thing from over a decade ago. It's very Americano-centric, and 2019/2020 might be a good time to put together an example case book and have a RfC about making this a better policy and help reduce the classic historical colonial legacy that exists in our infrastructure and recognize that American English does not need to remain our communication default for infrastructure and fundamental structure like categories. --Fæ (talk) 17:15, 6 September 2019 (UTC)
Oppose - Commons:Language policy does not mention anything explicitly about the usage of scripture or writing systems. Only the usage of English is a subject, which ofcourse uses the alphabet. In my opinion this policy could use an update. But the implementation of this policy (and other similar policies) is also one of the real issues. For the sake of convenience and mass production, the policy is often poorly followed. I raised the issue before, but I was completely disregarded. For example: If a file title should be descriptive of it's content and in English or at least in Alphabet script, why then allow file titles that only contain the archival coding of a donating institution? I am literally talking about hundreds of thousands or even millions of files by now. Entire libraries are being uploaded without a descriptive title but also without any proper description. Often the description is no more than just the general subject of the file or even just a repetition of the archival coding. Additionally the box for "author" is being abused to advertise the name of the employee or volunteer who scanned or made a 1:1 (PD) photo the work, in stead of the real author, being for example the painter of a painting. Also they'll only create categories for their institutions, but refuse to help categorize files in the existing Commons categories. Many institutions are using Wikimedia Commons as a cheap storage space, while implementing their self promotion within the process. And the most culpable, I think, is the collaboration that Commons editors provide. They often even defend this way of working. Under the motto that this is how Commons acquires new media. --- Now I'll get back to the specific subject at hand. If you combine the demand for allowing all scripts with the other issues I've been describing, you will end up in the biblical Babylon and Commons Wikimedia will end up in utter chaos while being useless for the end users of the files. I have been noticing that many or even most people who write file names in non alphabet script, also do not add any description in any alphabet script. Combined with names of categories in non alphabet script, how are people who can not understand the text going find out what the content of file is? And how to moderate for abusive language or content, when we mostly depend on community driven moderation? To conclude, I have the opinion, being a non native English speaking person, that the Commons policy should not allow the usage of non alphabet text in file names and categories, while adding an English description should be mandatory when adding a non alphabet script text as a primary description. After all, don't we intend to be a global community of like minded spirits? A community that aims to share content and knowledge for all to use freely? Then accessibility should be at the foundation of all policies. Please speak out if you support me on this. --oSeveno (User talk) 11:26, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
I respect your point of view as well. It is my believe though that Wikimedia Commons should operate in (specifically) Latin Alphabet. Not because it's the "dominating" Western-centralist script, but because I believe we as a community should be above chauvinistic and nationalistic sentiments. And because Wikimedia, including the software behind it, was build up from the English language. And because by far most users and editors of Wikimedia read and write the English language as a native or second language (or third language et cetera). We need a shared working language, or Commons Wikimedia will become increasingly chaotic in usage. This should be the place were like-minded people should work together for a common good. If we can't agree on this, we will become increasingly divided among each other, where we only communicate with people that share the same language or script. So, if current policies allow the use of different scripts, then yes, I am in favor of restricting that for file upload descriptions, categories and titles, whilst allowing second or third language (and script) translations of the descriptions in addition. I myself, being Dutch, am a non native English speaker, and I accept the dominant role of the English language for achieving our common goals. Please consider approaching this subject from this point of view. --oSeveno (User talk) 09:46, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure why we need this proposal. Scripts other than Latin are already allowed, where non-English words are allowed (such as for proper names). Nemo20:32, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
Oppose. Transliteration is better than the original alphabet. I always have a headache when I see arabic/hebrew/brahmic scripts. I can imagine what other people feel when they see hanzi/kanji/kanas/hanguls.--Roy17 (talk) 15:51, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
不认同。同阿拉伯字母/希伯来字母/婆罗门系字母不同的是，汉字是语素文字，难以使用作为全音素文字的拉丁字母进行精确而可逆地转写。况且汉语族诸语言音系繁杂，基于何方言之音转写为是？显然以任何一门方音/标准音的拼音方案“转写”汉字都绝非好主意。--Snghrax(UTC) 11:44, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Translation: Disagree. Unlike Arabic, Hebrew, and Brahmic scripts, Chinese characters are logograms. It is hard to transliterate them into Latin script, which is an alphabet, in a precise and reversible manner. Moreover, phonologies of different varieties of Chinese language are complicated, and which local/standard dialect should we adopt as the basis of Romanisation? Apparently, it is definitely not a good idea to Romanise Chinese based on any dialect standards. --Spring Roll Conan ( Talk · Contributions ) 12:31, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Support As I recall from discussion in the early days of Commons, there was supposed to be more of this sort of thing for categories where the majority of active contributors would be participating with non-Latin characters; the only proviso being that there should be redirects &/or transliteration hat-notes for the benefit of users participating on Latin-character only keyboards. -- Infrogmation of New Orleans (talk) 02:18, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
I have noticed a user who have moved Chinese categories to apparently machine translated categories[9]. It has made the book less easy to find in google for Chinese language users. Category:Sāncháo běi méng huì biān seems just ridiculous. There is no Chinese search using Pinyin, just like no English user search google using IPA. There are also mistakes. For example, Category:正統道藏, which contains text related to the Chinese Taoism, was translated to "Orthodox road". Forced translation are the contradictory to being international. --維基小霸王 (talk) 05:22, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Support It may be not a good idea to use Mandarin Pīnyīn to rename the title which were written in Han Character and can be read in the whole East Asia. - I am Davidzdh.10:30, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Well, I also noticed JuTa's move of files and categories and found many problems in segmentation/translation or both. I reverted some by moving it into more appropriate titles as I think fit. Yet there are several thousands of files and categories suffered from the problem, and I quickly feel tired. I am not clear whether Pinyin or direct translation apply (some of us preferred Pinyin,) and it becomes a recent topic of debate between some of us. I think that it is acceptable to translate them for the sake of those people unfamiliar with non-Latin scripts, though categories in Chinese characters should retain as redirects. However, others have told me that by doing so, we will create new problems like disambiguation. --Spring Roll Conan ( Talk · Contributions ) 12:41, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
This is gonna create lots of trouble for categorisation:
If book titles can be written in non-Latin, what about movies? Songs? Place names? Human names?
There's frankly not enough users who do categorisation work on Commons. Allowing non Latin is gonna make things worse. Right now it's OK to recat files and dispose of non Latin cats if their purpose could not be figured out, but if this becomes policy, we are left in limbo when someone writes something Arabic/Chinese/Hindi/Thai or just any language in which not enough Commons users participate. Even under the current policy there's a six-year backlog of unresolved problematic cats: Commons:Categories for discussion.--Roy17 (talk) 15:48, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Yeah. I hate not supporting people in their own language, but categories are a special problem. If categories are just in Chinese, how are the other language wikipedias supposed to find and use them? The idea is to upload so it can be used by all. Secondly, if there is another English category which is the same thing, then we can have duplicate categories, which is the big problem we are trying to avoid. Yes, the current system does create participation/usage problems, but having per-language categories tends to fragment things and is an even bigger problem for a shared project. I'm not sure how to word an exception narrowly while still avoiding the multiple-category issue -- obviously it can't just apply to Chinese, but to all languages. Would it apply to all people categories or anything with a proper name? I do sort of like the idea of having an in-language category redirect, which should allow uploading in that category (and have it show up in searches). Although again, descriptions and filename titles also show up in searches just as well, and those can be in-language. It is a special difficulty but I also don't see any specifics in the proposal to limit the usage. Just "certain cases" which could mean anything. Carl Lindberg (talk) 23:51, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Clindberg, how can you use a Chinese book just by its English name? Why wouldnt you require books to be translated to ENGLISH first so that you can read it? --維基小霸王 (talk) 00:54, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
The filenames can be Chinese. The description of the category can be Chinese. Those will both be found by searches. It doesn't seem to be a searching issue. It's really just a matter of giving something a category when uploading I guess. The main issue is to not have categories which are the same thing except in a different language (that makes things harder to find), and also allow a wider audience to help maintain the categories if they get overpopulated etc. If they are only useful to Chinese Wikisource, could they just be uploaded to that project? Or uploaded there first and transferred later? What is the criteria as to which uploads can ignore the English requirement? Maybe a category could be named "Chinese 1722 book <name in native script>" so it's at least partially in English? Or also add English/Pinyin author names as well as the native titles? The Pinyin title is admittedly not terribly useful there. Could book variants (one of the reasons for the proposal) be translated at least a bit into English, if not the entire title? While the titles themselves may be asking too much to translate, it also may be too much to allow fully Chinese names for everything, including non-title portions of the category name. Carl Lindberg (talk) 03:39, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
More convenient to express some things which don't exsist in English
More convinient for local users as they hardly use pinyin (or other transliterations) to search
There are a lot of pronunciations which corresponds to multiple characters. What's more, Chinese is a language using logograms but not the phonograms so the words may lose their meanings after transliterate, searchers might be really confused.
The first answer is part of the reason to oppose, IMO. English has names for pretty much everything. It's better not to have an excuse to avoid English.--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:22, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
Support in cases like books in original names and first names in original language but on condition that they will have categorized with latin category. For example: Books in Hebrew or first names in Hebrew etc. -- Geagea (talk) 19:05, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. 廣九直通車 (talk) 06:35, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
See also: Category:Uploads by Fæ with linkrot.
Support, obviously as the proposing agent. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 11:13, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
Strong support yes please. --Jarekt (talk) 12:59, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
I honestly wasn't aware of the existence of "{{Wayback}}", this would make implementing the above proposal easier as well. 
--Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) ill have (Articles 📚) 12:48, 5 February 2019 (UTC).jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
Accepted" and that it might be best to create a separate page named "Commons:Wayback Machine" that links to the proposal and smaller scale projects. This page can be used to document the deployment of the proposal and the policy surrounding it (or in this case what the Wayback Machine is, why linkrot is/was a problem, how it makes license reviewers’ lives easier, Etc.) and maybe it should also list a tip to users to also place an external link to the copyright license in case this isn’t present on the source page (for example a website which hosts many images on many pages but have it hidden away somewhere on another page that all works on the website are licensed with a Creative Commons license, although I myself prefer specialised templates for that).
Substantial changes or completely unrelated files, add:
Oppose as proposer. --Fæ (talk) 09:57, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
Strong oppose per AFBorchert. — Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me 12:08, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
Comment, there has been a proposal open to create a special Wikimedia wiki specifically for hosting non-free media files to allow for fair use items to be shared between Wikipedia's and as many Wikipedia's and other Wikimedia wiki's are solely dependent on Wikimedia Commons for their media files this solution wouldn't be a bad one, using The Commons for hosting non-free files on the other hand is completely absurd. Ever notice how the Wikimedia Foundation never seem to list their proposals here, it's clear that they ignore the community and don't want its feedback. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 15:51, 12 August 2019 (UTC)