Commons talk:Project scope/Update 2013/PDF and DjVu formats

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Scope Review 2013 links: Discuss stage 2 of this review Translation Help your community by translating the review Background Main review page: Background and process FAQ Links to current rules Project Scope Photographs of identifiable people Discussion: Introductory Scope wording Aim of Wikimedia Commons Excluded educational content Discussion: Files Must be a media file Must be an allowable free file format Must be freely licensed or public domain Licensing terms Evidence Precautionary principle 'Realistically useful for an educational purpose' PDF and DjVu formats Discussion: Pages, galleries and categories General pages, galleries and categories User pages, galleries and categories Discussion: Areas of particular concern Censorship "Neutral point of view" Discussion: Identifiable people Lead Legal issues Consent Moral issues Identification Examples Removal requests Other image sources Other proposals Other proposals

Proposal 1

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Proposal 2

--MichaelMaggs (talk) 12:56, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

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We shouldn't be adding more difficult-to-reuse file formats. At the same time, I think summarizing them as "difficult to reuse" file formats misses the point. PDFs and DjVu are the optimal formats to use for a book preserving the original typography; a collection of PNGs is a pain to deal with when you want a book, and store no actual text. Our audio files, as a general rule, are premixed and give you no chance to, say, drop the singer's track and leave the instrumental track. Movies are horrible; I don't think there's a single movie on Commons where the spoken audio track is separate from the music and the background noise, which makes dubbing or replacing music impossible. Bitmapped graphical formats obscure text and clean lines, which is why we encourage vector graphics. We so far don't support a single graph format (as far as I know) that's actually easy to reuse, where you could add a couple columns of data or adjust a line due to new data by simply changing the data, like you could if it were a spreadsheet graph. (Not that those aren't problematic for Commons in many ways, but they would let graphs be edited cleanly.)

If it is to broadened, I think it should be done very carefully, and probably with less emphasis on specific formats then any format inappropriately used.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:56, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. The important point is not that some formats are difficult to use, per se, but that uploaoders should be discouraged from selecting such formats for the sole purpose of trying the prevent others from modifying. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:38, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

It is interesting that "re-use" is used instead of "modify." PDFs and DJVUs are very easy to reuse. Additionally, preserving the integrity of the original work is important to retain data. A Wikisource book that was modified from the original document would potentially disrupt the intention of Wikisource. Modification is a secondary aspect of our licensing, not its primary purpose. That should be made clear. Ottava Rima (talk) 00:46, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Current deletion request

Just FYI for everyone watching this talk page: there's a current deletion request about an otherwise out-of-scope PDF that is in good faith use on another Wikimedia project. This is an interesting situation directly related to this discussion - I'm not sure what to think of it. darkweasel94 12:02, 4 July 2013 (UTC)