User talk:Sedicesimo

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Sedicesimo!

First steps tutorial Our first steps tour and our frequently asked questions will help you a lot after registration. They explain how to customize the interface (for example the language), how to upload files and our basic licensing policy (Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content). You don't need technical skills in order to contribute here. Be bold when contributing and assume good faith when interacting with others. This is a wiki. Getting help More information is available at the community portal. You may ask questions at the help desk, village pump or on IRC channel #wikimedia-commons (webchat). You can also contact an administrator on their talk page. If you have a specific copyright question, ask at the copyright village pump.

Goodies, tips, and tricks Put Babel boxes on your user page so others know what languages you can speak and indicate your graphic abilities. You can find the files you have uploaded in your Uploads. Please sign your name on Talk pages by typing ~~~~. To link to an image page without embedding the image, type: [[:File:Foo.jpg]], which produces: File:Foo.jpg. You may enable gadgets (custom features) for your account. There are several tools to upload files. Have you edited Wikipedia before? This guide might be useful. Made a mistake? Do you want to have a file renamed or moved? Use the move link and wait for an authorized user to rename it. Do you want to have your recently uploaded picture removed? Tag it as {{speedy|reason here}}. For more information read the deletion guidelines.

-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 09:49, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

File:Frenchhospitalrochestermain.jpg

File:Frenchhospitalrochestermain.jpg has been listed at Commons:Deletion requests so that the community can discuss whether it should be kept or not. We would appreciate it if you could go to voice your opinion about this at its entry. If you created this file, please note that the fact that it has been proposed for deletion does not necessarily mean that we do not value your kind contribution. It simply means that one person believes that there is some specific problem with it, such as a copyright issue. Please see Commons:But it's my own work! for a guide on how to address these issues. Please remember to respond to and – if appropriate – contradict the arguments supporting deletion. Arguments which focus on the nominator will not affect the result of the nomination. Thank you!

.     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 22:20, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

File:David R. Russell.jpg

File:David R. Russell.jpg has been listed at Commons:Deletion requests so that the community can discuss whether it should be kept or not. We would appreciate it if you could go to voice your opinion about this at its entry. If you created this file, please note that the fact that it has been proposed for deletion does not necessarily mean that we do not value your kind contribution. It simply means that one person believes that there is some specific problem with it, such as a copyright issue. Please see Commons:But it's my own work! for a guide on how to address these issues. Please remember to respond to and – if appropriate – contradict the arguments supporting deletion. Arguments which focus on the nominator will not affect the result of the nomination. Thank you!

.     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 22:20, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Your questions on User talk:Jameslwoodward

Sedicesimo, as you stated in your comment, you are a new user. You have a lot to learn and some to unlearn. You have jumped to conclusions, it's common with new users. My goal here is to make clear what may have been unclear for you, and to empower you to accomplish what you want to accomplish, if that is possible. If anything is unclear, you may respond here, I will be notified. You wrote:

Dear Jim: I have this evening received notification on my talk page of "planned deletion" of the main image on w:en:French Hospital (La Providence) and w:en:David R. Russell, both of which are pages set up by me.

You do not have email setup. Without email setup, you don't receive notifications of edits to your talk page. So my suggestion: enable email and set it to notify you of edits to your user talk page. A power user will also set it to notify of all edits to pages on the watchlist (and will set the preferences to automatically add all edited pages to the watchlist). That is how experienced users know what's going on! Wikimedia Foundation email is quite secure. You will not see piles of spam, and nobody will know your email address unless you email them, or, the same, respond to an email from them.

You have not stated what wiki you are working on. There are hundreds. However, I can find out.... Okay, enwiki. I have replaced your italicized names of the articles, in what I quoted above, with actual links. When you refer to an article in the future, see if you can link to it, instead of expecting the user to figure it out. You will get more mileage.

To my astonishment I see that the images have been deleted forthwith and that discussion of the matter is closed. No warning was given to me of this deletion and therefore no time for me to comment on what is now an unfortunate foregone conclusion.

The two notices on your talk page were placed here by Jameslwoodward on April 5. Because you don't have email set up, and because you did not look at Commons, probably, you did not see the notices.

Then, because the deletion reason was straightforward, "Photographer is not uploader. No evidence of permission," and after seven days, April 12, the files were deleted by Didym. If you think Didym made a mistake, this would be the administrator to query. Didym, however, did not make a mistake. This deletion was completely routine. Sometimes if there is an issue of "OTRS pending," deletion can be postponed, but that is only possible after the email to OTRS has actually been sent. By the way, I'm fairly new at Commons myself, though I've gotten, ah, involved. So I may get some details not exactly correct. Don't worry. I won't be too far off.

In both instances permission was given to me by the copyright holders for the pictures to be used within Commons. In the various tags made available to editors at the time of uploading images the procedure for giving ocular proof of permission is not made very clear and you will readily see that I am rather new as a contributor to Wikipedia and therefore was not aware at that time of the email template for copyright holders to confirm their permission.

We don't need to know why you didn't correctly enter the license information or handle the matter. You could have read the Commons pages on the topic, but I know full well, and speaking for myself, I just want to get the effing file uploaded so I can use it!

We also know that the upload process is difficult for newcomers. Some of us work on that, but most people focus on photography and their own images, etc., and since they have figured it out, it's not important to them. Frankly, I avoid uploading to Commons, it can get so complicated, but if I have a need, I do it. You can bet, though, that I'm going to ask if I have a question, and I'm going to see any warning on my talk page, sometimes quickly, certainly within a day.

I can of course readily obtain this permission by having the copyright holders write the appropriate email. I hope that steps will be taken by administrators to reinstate the two images removed so precipitately. Looking again at my talk page the notification messages have mysteriously vanished and without trace on the view history page; yet looking again at the two pages affected the pictures have definitely vanished from their respective pages. There seems to be something awry here and the procedural progress is definitely demotivating.Sedicesimo (talk) 21:45, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

When you write a message that later you can see as incorrect in some way, and there has been no response yet, you may correct it. It's okay. If there has been response and you want to correct it, you can use strike-out, like this (that was wikitext <s>like this</s>). Beyond that, you would simply add anything you missed....

The deletion request was closed after seven days, the normal time. You had not responded. Commons does not reach out to other wikis and notify users there, beyond the activities of CommonsDelinker and Filedelinkerbot. Apparently you were working on en.wiki and saw the removals of links in your watchlist.

Commons is famously difficult. To make it easier to use takes work, it doesn't happen automatically. Commons is also complicated in that Commons serves all the various languages; further, copyright is itself and intrinsically complicated. If you were to watch Commons process, overall, as I am, you would see that there are many unresolved disagreements, differences of opinion.

And there are something on the order of 25 million files here. There are many files with problems.

Yet Commons is also working, in certain ways. If you will take a little time to learn what do do here, you will find that it isn't as difficult as it seems, if there are no real copyright issues (because if there are copyright issues, and they are not resolved, the files will almost certainly be deleted, or deleted until the issues are resolved), and if the images are in use (because if they are in use, there will be no issue of "scope." If a file is not in use, someone may propose deletion because the file is "out of scope," i.e., from their point of view, useless. Or perhaps there is a better image already hosted.

To give some perspective, this is yesterday's deletion log, showing 1288 deletion/undeletion actions. The vast majority of these are routine, not actually controversial. That includes your files. Users use various tools to search for files with license problems. Your files showed up. So Jim had two choices: he could tag the file for copyright violation or create a Deletion Request. The copyvio tagging is a single edit and will normally be actioned quite rapidly. You'd have a warning on your talk page, but frequently the file would be deleted before you notice it. However, if a file is speedy-deleted, it can be fairly easy to get it back. It's more difficult to get it back if there has been a discussion.

(Jim, being an admin, could also have just deleted the files himself. On some wikis, admins do just that. Better practice is that administrators do not directly delete themselves, but follow the same process as is followed by other users. They only delete files where it is requested by another user, so there is always two sets of eyeballs on the issue. That is how we do it on Wikiversity (my real home wiki).

From my point of view, Jim took the more considerate route, he filed the Request, which is more work. Had you responded, it's possible deletion would have been avoided. You would have quickly understood that OTRS was needed. On the other hand, the templates he used are not adequately informative. Don't blame him! The templates need work, the whole process needs work. Who is going to do it? Would you like to get involved? It's very easy to complain about how deficient Commons is. Not so easy to fix it. Commons is a wiki, so w:WP:SOFIXIT applies.

In this case, you will need to go through COM:OTRS. Read that page carefully. The instructions you get when you upload, using the Wizard or whatever, are not easy to change. Those are protected files, so how does one change protected files? There is a way. It is work. Someone has to care enough to go through that process, to negotiate consensus, etc.

Dear Jim: Further to the above, I now see that there is a separate talk page for Wikimedia Commons and that your messages about the deletions are shown there. The fact remains nevertheless that I only saw the message this evening. Things may be set up so that Wikimedia Commons messages do not show up in Wikipedia and may therefore be missed.Sedicesimo (talk) 21:58, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

You have edits on a lot of WMF wikis, see Central Auth. I just checked and you also do not have email enabled on en.wikipedia. I count 13 wikis on which you have edits. You will not get any notifications from these wikis, unless you are actually looking at them. You have uploaded files to Wikipedia (for fair use) and you have uploaded files to Commons. You will not see notifications for Wikipedia on Commons and you will not see notifications for Commons on Wikipedia. If you enable email on each wiki, you will get all notifications by email, plus on-wiki when you are looking at the involved wiki. You have many user talk pages. Those pages are often created when you make your first edit, and some are created by bot when you are auto-registered. So you may have user talk pages on wikis you have never edited. For example: [1]. For fun, take a look at my own user talk page there. I looked at a page on the wiki and saw a yellow notification that I had a message. With the first screen from the wiki! The user registration log shows the same time as the bot; that isn't so surprising, but that the bot could respond before my page was served from the same request that triggered the bot, very weird. I should ask my developer friend, but haven't.

Now, consider this: Jim is also a Commons administrator. His time is precious. He doesn't need to know your excuse for not seeing the message. It is completely irrelevant. You didn't see the warnings, and he could probably guess that! For users with email not enabled, good chance most of these don't see the warnings. And users and administrators here don't have time to track down the user. Consider that deletion log. 1288 deletions in one day. That is actually small, and my guess is that Commons is falling behind. Admins are overworked, and the pay is lousy. I.e., zero.

There is now a standard process for dealing with this deletion. You go through OTRS, the copyright holder verifies permission, any issues are resolved, and OTRS arranges undeletion. No more regular administrator time here necessary. An OTRS admin does it all from a list with a semi-automated editor. Something on the order of fifty per minute. What takes time is the OTRS volunteer actually reviewing the email, requesting more information if needed, etc.

But your images are gone for now. What can be done?

First, get the permission emails going. I've never gone through the process, but I'd suggest that the copyright owner send an email to OTRS as described, with cc to you. If this were me, I'd read the suggested email format and I would draft a mail for the owner, so all the owner has to do is resend it to OTRS, make it simple for him or her. Read the page about permission mails, get it right the first time.

Be sure to list the deleted filenames in the email and anything else OTRS might need to know to verify permission.

Once you have a copy of the permission mail to OTRS, this is what I would do: Ask the deleting administrator, i.e., on User talk:Didym, succinctly and politely -- no complicated story -- to undelete the file pending OTRS, putting that template on it, or tell the admin that you will put the OTRS pending template on the file immediately on notice that it has been uploaded, or to give you permission to re-upload the file with proper permission and the template. The admin might do it.

If that doesn't work, there are more possibilities, such as COM:REFUND, but I'd advise avoiding that page until you have your sea legs here.

COM:REFUND does have general advice about undeletion process.

As well, you could upload to Wikipedia directly. I know even less about Wikipedia upload policies and practices; however, there is also a Wikipedia OTRS pending template.

If you decide to upload the files to Wikipedia, and you use the same filename as here, then your articles will serve the image from the Wikipedia server, until the Commons file is undeleted. You may then place a speedy deletion tag on the Wikipedia copy, it is w:en:Template:Now Commons.

Good luck, and when you have done this and have a grasp of the process here, consider helping another user you discover lost in the wilderness, up the creek without a paddle, and getting frustrated. --Abd (talk) 02:58, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

• Jim just responded to you on User talk:Jameslwoodward#French Hospital (La Providence) and David R. Russell. He intends to speed your OTRS request through, so read his instructions. --Abd (talk) 03:09, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I responded on my talk page two hours before Abd wrote the entry above, shortly after I saw your questions, last night. Yesterday was the first really nice sunny day here of this year, so I was not on computer during the day. I agree with much of what Abd says above, but two things struck me as wrong:

"A power user will also set it to notify of all edits to pages on the watchlist"

I have 66,000 pages on my watch list. Yesterday more than 100 of them changed. I have no desire to get 100 e-mails from Commons.

"As well, you could upload to Wikipedia directly."

No, WP:EN's rules are similar to Commons -- images must be PD or freely licensed. While WP:EN does allow fair use, that cannot be applied to images of a living person or an existing building. Users are strongly discouraged from uploading images to the single language WPs -- policy is that they must be uploaded to Commons in order to make them free for use on all WPs. .     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 10:20, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

So far, I think I gave the user correct advice, even in those two cases. That upload is possible; it would include the OTRS pending template. Assuming OTRS has actually been emailed, it would not cause a problem for the user there. "Are strongly encouraged" has a lost performative. Encouraged by whom? By those who delete their Commons files? Yes, the user would have had the same result there if the file upload were deficient, as it was here. But I wasn't recommending that. With what I recommended, the enwiki file would stand for the OTRS queue time, and be deleted on the user's request when OTRS restores here.

However, it is likely unnecessary, because of what you have promised.

As to the watchlist, someone in your position can have that issue. Personally, with that watchlist I would still want the 100 emails a day. They might go to a dedicated account for that purpose, and I use filters to sort my email. Pages where I don't want the notifications, I remove from my watchlist. I have been, at times, the major maintainer of en.wikiversity. I welcome a lot of new users, and that creates traffic, but then I know what is happening with users I have welcomed. I take responsibility for assisting them. It is not too much. On the other hand, I only have 4300 pages on my watchlist there. In any case, thanks for assisting this newcomer. It is appreciated. --Abd (talk) 02:36, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Dear Abd: Many thanks for all your comments and suggestions so swiftly given to this newcomer to the bewildering but fascinating world of Wikimedia Commons. Sedicesimo (talk) 07:32, 14 April 2015 (UTC)