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Funding for expenses needed, estimated $30 for 100,000 high quality files to be released on Commons
Could someone like to suggest the best way to get a quick funding commitment to pay postage expenses of an estimated £20 or £30? It looks like to get 100,000 high resolution images uploaded I will need to post 2 small USB hard disks from the UK to WMF operations in the US. To get a grant from the WMF would probably mean using meta:Grants:IEG, which appears takes months. For reasons out of my control I am not a member of Wikimedia UK, my local chapter, and the chapter will only give grants to members. I have asked the GLAM supplying the images but this seems a bit lost in their systems for small expenses like this.
I'm planning to post off the first disk on Monday (28th), and can keep the receipt to claim it back later, so at this stage I just would like some authoritative commitment that the expenses will be covered and I'm not rich enough to just write these sorts of cost off. The deadline I'm aiming for to get the project under way on Commons is around 4th August, so we can 'officially' launch this at Wikimania. As you might expect from an experienced batch uploader, in the background categorization and other issues are being sorted out.
By the way, I have no doubt that the WMF would like to cover these sorts of teeny initiatives that create bags of high quality project content in return, but I'm not aware of any existing process that makes this easy to sort out that would not demand more of my time on bureaucracy than I will spend sorting out the disk and posting it off (copying the data, packaging, going to the post office, might take 2 hours of my time).
PS I'm going to be at Wikimania, so a really cheap way of paying me expenses would be to do so in cash, in person. For an organization like the WMF, transferring money around might cost as much as the amount in expenses I would like to claim. --Fæ (talk) 16:43, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
Fæ, what's the subject? Every now and again, I run across someone who is willing to pay for things out of their own pockets, if it's in their favorite subject areas. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
The history of medicine. I don't really want to officially announce it yet, but anyone interested in the nitty-gritty can look at the bugzilla ticket or have a look at the early test uploads.
It would be nice if this were to set an example of how those of us active on global Commons projects could get small expenses paid for, so my preference would be if a Wikimedia group could work out how to cover this. Failing that, yes a kind individual sending me some money through Paypal might be the way to get stuff done. --Fæ (talk) 17:48, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
I agree that figuring out a standard way for small projects like this would be good. For this particular task, you already mention transferring the reimbursement funding at Wikimania, why not instead just bring the device itself and hand it off? DMacks (talk) 19:21, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
I suggest you bring the volumes to Wikimania and throw them on a sysadmin of your trust perhaps even someone from OPS will be there. I also agree that there should be a venue to get reimbursement for such small expenses with less hassle and bureaucracy. Did you already ask Janice Tud? If someone knows how to, she will! -- Rillke(q?)21:12, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
Actually, we have arranged for me to get the first disk back at Wikimania, so postage is only for UK→US with it coming back informally by hand. The idea is to get the uploads underway (or done, though probably with categorization improvements needed) before Wikimania, so that it can both be "announced" plus be used as a significant batch upload case study to discuss. --Fæ (talk) 21:30, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
Kushti, thanks James. This is the second offer to cover costs , so there's plenty of happy interest in my little volunteer project. It may be that the WMF or the GLAM in question will want to cover expenses by the time we reach Wikimania (which is a more repeatable process for other Commons projects), but I'll keep receipts and shamelessly tap you for a score or a bertie at Wikimania if the bigger boys do not pull through by then. --Fæ (talk) 21:55, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Green Giant (talk) 13:14, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
help me
Hi guys. İ want to use Hizbut Tahrir's logo in Turkish wikipedia. İ uploaded logo of Hizb-ut Tahrir(avaible in enwiki) to commons. But the logo removed.(because of copyright) help me Deathh (talk) 16:36, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
You could contact Hizb-ut Tahrir and ask a permission to publish their logo under a free license. If the Tuskish WP allows logos under w:fair use (I don't know), you could upload it there. Regards, Yann (talk) 17:13, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
Probably not; whoever does this needs to be able to read and write Turkish, and follow whatever policy is laid out in tr:Vikipedi:Adil kullanım politikası. Other than what's there, it's pretty simple: you go to the full-resolution version in the English-language Wikipedia, use the browser's usual download tool to download to your computer, then upload on the Turkish Wikipedia using tr:Özel:Yükle. - Jmabel ! talk15:48, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
August 02
Geo notice
Is it possible to get a geonotice for a meeting invitation placed on Commons like on English Wikipedia? --Pine✉23:42, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
Your question has little to do with a free image repository, which is what Wikimedia Commkns is supposed to be, but because I'm a nice person, you might find some useful information in the English Wikipedia article about the Ford Explorer. Green Giant (talk)17:31, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Green Giant (talk) 16:50, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
I have reverted the image to the original version for now. The cropped version should be re-uploaded under a new name. --Sebari (talk) 15:16, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --Sebari (talk) 16:58, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
August 01
Dupe policy is contradictory and annoying
Many duplicates on Commons get not deleted, per DR, as I now realize. (Apart of these, that the claims for a duplicate SD are very very close.) Apart of these, that are huge differences from admin to admin. The simple reason seems, that the only and completely imprecise rule here on Commons is "case by case basis", as on COM:Dupe.
The most reason is always "in use, no reason to delete" (if not applicable, an expert keep-admin gives also other reasons, like: "in scope, could be extern linked"), which seems completely illogical and against what on COM:Dupe stays: “…you will need to replace all instances where the image is used with the superior file.” So for every new user the given admin justification are only incomprehension and annoyance.
This point becomes even more clear, as step by step each project shifts its own files to Commons, regardless of whether the file already exists or not. So with this justification the Dupe policy becomes nearly meaningless.(small example)
So also this sentence seems inconsistent: “Before requesting that a file be deleted please consider other Wikimedia projects that might still need to use it. If in doubt do not request deletion.”[1]
A good (admin) justification must be clear and precise, otherwise it acts unfortunately simply arrogant and arbitrarily (but this seems the good and normal case on Commons).
Also a distinction between the raster-formats PNG, JPG, GIF as keep reasoning seems fully illogical (with exception of deliberate thumb/compress duplicates).
Last to say: I thought Commons is to share (useful) medias for other projects, not to store every (crap) “from” every local project. Have a nice day. → User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)09:58, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
Are you referring to files that are literally duplicates (same format, either identical or one is just a lower-resolution copy)? If so, can you give an example or two where this didn't lead to deletion? - Jmabel ! talk15:51, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
Ok (I don't like to mention any admin name but there seems no way to avoid this, primarily to avoid any form of argumentum ad verecundiam or ad hominem). Unfortunatyle I've not saved any cases, so I can give still only this:
some minis png in this cat: My first try the cleanup up mini coa (~50×50px) which are replaced by "official" scalable vector versions (the admin comment was this annoying). But I know SVG replacements are more difficult and so this is not a concrete example. - bigger, but also official replacement – not a concrete example.
What you are referring to are coats of arm or icons where we have raster (like jpg) and vector (like svg) versions I was under impression that we keep both of those, but it seems like current duplicate policy says that about case by case evaluation. I am not sure when that changed, or may be I was confused. --Jarekt (talk) 04:40, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
For traditional European-derived heraldry, the textual blazon is the authoritative source, and many different artistic renderings of the textual blazon can be equally acceptable. They are not necessarily "duplicates" just because they represent the same coat of arms... AnonMoos (talk) 09:38, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for response.
@Jarekt, why we keep duplicates for every file-format? In contrast, an afterward raster (PNG JPG GIF) duplicate of a SVG is an clear deletion reason.
So we can clear say the rule behind this is the quality and the reference, yes!?
@AnonMoos, this is not (my matter of concern and) the case here, all examples are digital copies.
Do we have a category for shadow as a resting place? All the categories seen to be specific for objects. I could put this under shadows of threes but that is not really the point. Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:13, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
Once I've found a page/script somewhere here that allow users to batch import pictures from their Flickr account, I just can't find it anymore :( someone know about this script/page?Dianakc (talk) 06:57, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
It is perfectly OK to use "unidentified" in the file name, and perfectly normal to rename them after identification. If you don't have rename rights, just use any of the standard ways of requesting a rename. A redirect will be left behind in case anyone has referenced the "unidentified" name.
The categorization is completely separate from that. Anyone can create the relevant categories and place the images in the categories. - Jmabel ! talk15:40, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm aware that users of the mobile site will need to have 75 edits before they can upload a file now.[2] Does this affect the Commons Android app? If so, this will render the app almost useless for new users, since it has no ability to edit existing images not uploaded by the user. Also most pages here are files, and it's very difficult for newbies to make an edit on those. Any ideas? Zhaofeng Li [talk...contribs...] 08:09, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
I guess these 75 edits are rather meant to be uploads via desktop and maintenance work than new users making (invalid) minor edits to file pages … FDMS 4 08:25, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
@FDMS4: Please read the linked bugzilla discussion above. This is meant to prevent copyvio uploads by new users. So this will make new mobile contributors' life ridiculously hard, won't it? At least users won't be able to get started on mobile. Zhaofeng Li [talk...contribs...] 08:30, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
AFAIS, it was only merged to the MobileFrontend, not to the Apps, though it's not impossible that those apps use parts of the front end. The mobile team decided to go that way for now because they need time to elaborate ways how to educate uploaders on mobile properly. -- Rillke(q?)08:48, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes. But even there "places" is to vague. A botanical garden has lots of places. Suggestion: "Buildings in the Botanical Gardens of Charles University".Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:02, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
No. Ceaușescu did not have any property in Timișoara because it not needed. "Vila (sic!) Ceaușescu" was a colloquial name for a small hotel located in the center of Timișoara, in which he was hosted during visits. --Turbojet (talk) 13:00, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
It is an "Gypsy palace" build by people having to much "illegal money". daily mail. Maybe time to have an wikipedia article "Gypsy palaces in Romania". (There are other places called "Gypsy palace")Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:44, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
You can find me at Wikimania wearing a volunteer red shirt—no, I'm not in Star Trek security.
I am happy to announce that my upload project of historic American buildings has completed today, perfectly timed the day before the Wikimania hackerthon! The upload has taken around 2 months of calendar time, with a major part of my time being spend "housekeeping", such as adding better geolocation tags, identifying National Register of Historic Places numbers and fixing odd category matches (such as "Mobile" being a place in the USA, rather than a phone!). This means we now have fifty times more images from the Historic American Buildings Survey on Commons and available to Wikimedia projects.
There is plenty to be done to improve the use and categorization of these images. For TIFFs that are too large to be rendered on Commons, I am slowly but systematically generating equivalent PNG files that are usable (please appreciate this means pulling the files one at a time down my home internet and processing the file on my ancient underpowered Macmini; it takes a while).
If you are coming to Wikimania, you may wish to join a session which explains how I uploaded this many images:
That is awesome, Fæ! And what you call "housekeeping" (adding better geolocation tags, identifying National Register of Historic Places numbers and fixing odd category matches) is almost the most important thing... :-) --Atlasowa (talk) 07:18, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
It is a great and wonderful job that Fæ has done! I request to him to explain the uploading process as I am not able to join the Wikimania 2014. -- Biswarup Ganguly (talk) 08:49, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
If you go to mw:Help:Extension:GWToolset there have been some recent updates to the manual and there are some videos which give you an idea of how the tool works. I was in discussions today about how training materials are improving for the tool, and I'm sure that one of the benefits of talking through the tool, user experience and where the tool seems complex to use, will result both in improvement to the documentation and some good usability improvements. I probably underestimate how tricky some parts of this are, so I'm sure that the hackerthon workshop tomorrow will emphasise these barriers.
Removed irrelevant personal photo.
Does anything "wiki" permit users to list &/or link to their own sites &/or blogs as references and additional sources of information? — Preceding unsigned comment added by LegalWiseParent (talk • contribs) 18:27, 5 August 2014 (UTC) (UTC)
Wiki is a technology. You can, of course, build your own wiki and link anything. Doubtless someone somewhere has a wiki that lets you do this.
However, to the best of my knowledge, nothing of the sort is available on the sites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. For the most part, our mission focuses on educational information; while different WMF projects view that educational mandate more or less broadly, personal blogs (except when they are personal blogs by established experts, or by the subject of an article) are generally not relevant to that mission. - Jmabel ! talk18:53, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
You have your own personal user page at User:LegalWiseParent. You can use that page to introduce yourself, and putting a link to your blog or the legalwiseparent web site there on your user page would be OK. Linking to your blog or other personal sites elsewhere may indeed not be compatible with our mission and might be seen as advertising. Lupo20:51, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
May someone check if Modern Sketch is public domain (Commons-eligible)?
It doesn't look like it was done by one artist, rather by many, therefore some artists almost certainly lived past 1945 (for the US) or 1963 (for China) and thus the work as a whole is almost certainly not PD in the US or China.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:28, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Duplicated file
Hello. I have found a group of images which are almost identical to some other images in Commmons (because they are based on the same source). These groups are File:Angiospermes arbre1.svg and File:Classification phylogénétique1.svg (from 1 to 10). What should be done in this case?
The complete story is:
In 2004 User:Jeffdelonge uploaded ten diagrams depicting an angiosperms' phylogenetic tree (File:Angiospermes arbre1.png). As it follows from here, the author as well uploaded the source files in OpenOffice Draw format to allow editing.
In 2010 I converted the OO Draw images to SVG and the original files were deleted (File:Classification phylogénétique1.svg) (Recently I reuploded a improved version of the vectorial files).
Should be merged, the new from Hazmat2 seems to have better (manual) code. It is indeed a bit curious that he has uploaded a second version. Maybe he can answer. Would you do merge this? For this simple purposes of illustration there is no duplicate needed IMHO. → User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)17:16, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Hazmat2's file has only one version. Did you refer to mine? I uploaded a second (manual) version trying to simplify the previous one, generated by Inkscape. At that time I ignore that there was duplicates.
I lost the ability to use the IA-upload tool of Mediawiki which helped me transfer material directly from Internet Archive to the Commons. I disabled it ot re-enable it, thinking that a new token would solve the problem, but there is no info on how to enable it or who to ask for help!!! Attached is the screenshot of the error message. File:Ia-upload error message.jpg. I have unified login but it won't accept my token. Can someone please help? Ineuw (talk) 04:59, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
I have seen such errors myself, but it usually disappeared after a forced reload. Tpt is the developer of this tool, so he may know. Regards, Yann (talk) 05:34, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Yann, my problem was where to post to Tpt, which site, since he's active on so many. I will try here first. Ineuw (talk) 05:51, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
Have you retried after closing your browser and removing cached content (cookies...)? It may solve your problem. (An other temporary solution is maybe to use an other browser). Tpt (talk) 07:13, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
@Tpt: First, I revoked the access in Preferences - closed the browser, cleaned the cookies (I use Firefox 31 and CCleaner in Win XP to clear all temp cookies) and when I reopened the Preferences, I still have the two connected applications - Yours and Magnus'. BTW I also have unified log in.
To help you resolve the issue, I installed Comodo Dragon (Google Chrome) and the it failed with the same error. Interestingly, direct image transfer from Wikipedia to the Commons, using Magnus' OAuth works. So, I just emailed you the link used to activate ia-upload [0.2]
If you think it helps, I also use XUbuntu with FF and Google Chrome, and Apple with Safari and Firefox. Just let me know if you want me to try it. Ineuw (talk) 22:30, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Sudden decline in the most active Commons contributors?
I have been informally keeping a table of the most active Commons contributors at User:Fæ/Userlist. Checking through the history of the table today, shows a pleasing pattern of steady growth in the number of active users with greater than 10,000 lifetime edits over the last 10 months. "Active" is defined as making an edit in the last 30 days. However there has been a sudden sharp drop in this number this month, knocking out the growth entirely:
Month
Users with 10,000+ edits
October 2013
918
January 2014
921
March 2014
950
July 2014
978
August 2014
899 872
I'm aware that this might be a seasonal thing, perhaps all of our lovely French volunteers are on holiday at the same time. I would welcome any insights or comparative trend statistics on the growth or decline in the number of active users on Commons. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 11:29, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
Would it be just because it is the holidays in many part of Europe? I think you would need stats over more than a year to be really meaningful. Do you have the data for the summer of 2013? Regards, Yann (talk) 12:58, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
No, sorry, I only go back to October last year; I agree it may be lots of people finding better things to do on their holidays than editing Commons. I'm using the Commons API feature that tests if a user is "active" or not. It would be possible to work out some of this retrospectively by examining contribution histories individually, but it would be very expensive in transactions and processor time as the historical data is not sitting in nice reports anywhere, as far as I know. I guess the huge data dumps could be used, but that would be a bit too much of my volunteer time disappearing into abstract research. --Fæ (talk) 13:11, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
Not sure what you're looking for, Fæ, but i'll throw you this:
3) The mediaviewer has isolated commons from Wikipedias since activation (mw:Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan#Timeline). Click-through rate from mediaviewer to file pages at commons is minimal:
MMV deWP stats: for (daily) 1,25 million thumbnail-clicks ~1.000 clicks to commons file description page,
MMV global stats: for (daily) 10 million thumbnail-clicks ~12.000 clicks to commons file description page,
traffic to commons has decreased considerably: [3], [4], etc.
The number of users that opted out of MediaViewer on Wikipedias is low. Media Viewer enwiki metrics: Opt-in opt-out: 2.070 registered user opt-outs (0.38%), of which 1.010 active user opt-outs (2.57%) and 441 very active user opt-outs (11%)
BTW, most stats.wikimedia.org are not updated and end in May 2014:
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/very_active_editors seems to be encouraging. It shows active editors with 100+ edits significantly increasing over the past year, in line with my table if you ignore the last data point. When you compare this pattern for Commons with the other large projects (many indicating declining numbers or flat-lining), this shows we must be doing something right to attract and keep contributors here. --Fæ (talk) 13:18, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
Look at the MediaViewer numbers, Fæ. I think they are really scary. Normal Wikipedians no longer reach wikimedia.commons. If you can get your hands on recent commons-stats (Page Views for Commons) and analyse them against mw:Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan#Timeline (May 1 - Dutch and French Wikipedias; May 8 - Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish; May 22 - Italian and Russian Wikipedias; June 3 - English and German Wikipedias), then please do. --Atlasowa (talk) 13:46, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
1. Why and why not use Commons? (Media survey 2009)
2. Number of Files uploaded?
3. Own works?
4. Why participate?
6. From which projects? (Referrers)
Likelihood to participate in Wikimedia Commons depending on the language of origin. Three groups stood out. Respondents coming from Wikimedia websites in Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish and Chinese language are correlated with regular participants in Wikimedia Commons. Users from projects in German, Hungarian and Vietnamese language are in a similar but less pronounced situation. On the other hand, respondents originating from a Wikimedia project in English, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish language show the opposite correlation: many of them do not participate in Wikimedia Commons. The size of Wikipedia does not seem to be a decisive factor; we suggest that policies and culture on each wiki are, in fact, mostly responsible for these differences.
Yes, it is worrying, as the casual editor who may otherwise spot something wrong in image page details, will lose the easy opportunity to make changes, if they are only going to stay in the viewer. However I doubt that this is the frequent path followed for our high volume contributors. Those making 10,000 edits have normally been editing Commons for a year or longer and I suspect started on Commons with more than clicking on images in Wikipedia. However we do not know the route the people take to becoming serious Commons contributors. This could be the basis of a very useful survey of our higher contributing editors, for example a survey of Commonsists with more than 1,000 edits which asked them "how did you first find Commons and start making changes or uploading?"
For me, I was a English Wikipedian first, being an admin on that project for 2 years, so I got to know quite a bit about Commons from that perspective. It was only after an Arbcom case blew up in my face, in all probability making the English Wikipedia forever an unwelcoming and often hostile project for me, that I started really concentrating on this project. For those that don't get it, or create their views based on those that specialize in trying get get newspapers interested in writing about "porn" on Commons, this is an amazingly mellow project stuffed with common-sense people with great international language skills, compared to the gladiatorial dramas of many other projects in our circus. For that reason I suspect folks get more out of volunteering for the long term here, so long as they can avoid getting sucked too often into copyright debate time-sinks. --Fæ (talk) 14:23, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
I think the "frequent path followed for our high volume contributors" is starting out as a low volume contributor to commons, coming in from Wikipedia. And those users no longer come to commons, it seems: 0.38% Mediaviewer opt-out rate for english Wikipedians, and a MediaViewer to Commons-file clickthrough rate of ~0,1%... and meanwhile the uploads to commons are growing. --Atlasowa (talk) 14:36, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
If there is a specific action you would like to see, I suggest you make a proposal. It is highly unlikely that the WMF would switch off the mediaviewer regardless what any local RFC might conclude.
I have amended my table, the latest figures show an 11% drop in the numbers of active 10,000+ edits contributors this month. Remember than this is highly active Commonsists being completely inactive for 30 days or longer, so more than the normal wikibreak for the holidays.
If someone with the wherewithal would like to create a database report to check my figures that would be great. The way I create my numbers is by slowly pinging the API for active users, there is a possibility this introduces glitches of some sort, so verification would be smart before these are taken as 'official' in any way. --Fæ (talk) 11:00, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
With regards to the MediaViewer RfC on Commons: WMF has writtenWe would like to hold off on any actions related this RfC until the WMF has had a chance to discuss the community's wishes. Most of our team is now on its way to London for Wikimania, so the earliest we can get together to meet about this RfC will be Tuesday. We will follow up with a response within the next few days. Thanks for your patience and understanding. So there is still some time for lobbying on behalf of Commons at wikimania ;-) I don't think WMF has looked at repercussions of MediaViewer to Commons activity yet. If you can print out all the graphs and data and show them around, that may make people think. MediaViewer on Commons is a bit of a weaker duplicate of Help:Gadget-GallerySlideshow, which was last supported (but not created) by user:Rillke, and he said that he would be thankful if the mediaviewer would replace this gadget and implement the missing features, because he has not enough time for gadget-support. I think on the MediaViewer maybe-to-do-list i saw a similar slideshow feature. MediaViewer will probably not be disabled completely, but it can be improved and it can be implemented less intrusively..?
MediaViewer screenshot. This thumbnail (if on Wikipedia) could use the commons-icon (with link to the commons file page) instead of this in the corner
With regards to the MediaViewer on Wikipedia: WMF has said they don't want to disable MV, but they would improve it... Unfortunately that seems to mean an incredible feature creep of user preferences. I propose to just add a Commons icon to images on Wikipedia ( or with link to the commons file page), next to the caption of thumbnails. Instead of this . And another icon, if the image is from a local Wikipedia file page. See Commons:Forum#de:WP:.3F.23Armeefilmsequenz für Katzenartikel and de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier/Archiv/2014/07#Vorschaubildchen_ohne_Gewand. This would greatly enhance the visibility of commons (visual connection of logo to WP images), give some info at first glance (commons image or not), lead readers and users to file page and full licence info with one click. (There could even be an mouse-over with attribution info in the distant future) And it would stop this either-or approach (either no mediaviewer at all - or no easy one-click to commons) and this MediaViewer preferenes feature creep. What do you think?
I think the WMF Multimedia Team is not yet realising, that their first feat (with the MediaViewer) has been to make Commons a dead place that nobody visits anymore. How are Wikipedians supposed to get messages about deletion requests for their Commons uploads, if they no longer visit Commons? Or notifications? By typing the Commons URL into their browser from time to time? Or through their unified multiproject watchlist... haha. Real multimedia strategists. --Atlasowa (talk) 12:30, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, this side-effect of MV is very worrying. Actually, this is best argument supporting disactivation of MV by default. I was quite neutral about MV, but this completely convince me that it is a ill-conceived feature. In addition, MV was far to be a priority. Improving the UploadWizard is the most important priority, IMO. Did anyone send this data to WMF? Regards, Yann (talk) 13:34, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm not convinced by this study. It is not well done. Why use this indicator "users with 10 000+ edits" ? It should be justified in a serious work. The sample is also too short. Pyb (talk) 14:46, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
I think we all agree that we need better data. Fae has explicitly asked to check his stats. I have actually complained that most stats from stats.wikimedia are dating from May and June 2014. But the stats that i do see are worrying. The WMF Multimedia Team should be able to present data. In April, User:Tgr_(WMF)answered "IMO creating artificial traffic on Commons by forcing the user to go there just to get a decent look of the image was a bug, not a feature." Hm.
I'm not opposed to the MediaViewer on principle. I enjoy clicking through WP article gallery images. And i wish readers a convenient way to view bigger images. But the workflows of Wikipedians are really impacted in a big way, and the only answer of WMF is "you power users should adjust your preferences". I don't think they have thought through the ramifications of creating this dichotomy readers/editors. WMF believes they "know what the reader wants", the 99%. They don't. They don't even see what the readers see, unless editors file bugs and tell them. And if editors no longer see what readers see... And then there are also new editors and casual editors... For instance, how do you know if you're in the Wikipedia MediaViewer or in the Commons MediaViewer? Which one did you active/deactivate? --Atlasowa (talk) 16:07, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Atlasowa, I can double-check the stats if Fae specifies what he considers as active (a user with any edit in the last 30 days?), but the assumption that Media Viewer somehow makes users with 10K edits avoid Commons seems very unlikely to me. That new users do not discover Commons unless it is shoved in their faces could be a reasonable concern, but for power users with thousands of Commons edits I really doubt shoving makes any difference. The reason for the decrease in the number of users with 10K+ edits is probably something else - my guess would be seasonal variation (summer vacations etc) or just plain random noise.
Also, keep in mind that thumbnails in most projects do not link directly to Commons (AFAIK dewiki and frwiki are the only large projects which by default enable the gadget doing that), so Media Viewer might actually make getting to Commons easier on those projects. Without Media Viewer, after clicking on a thumbnail and ending up on the file page, you need to find the text saying "This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons..." and click on the link. The text does not give you any reason to do that; it basically tells you there is another copy of the page you are currently viewing and you can visit that if you want. (But why would you?) In Media Viewer, there is a Commons logo with a hover message explaining that this is where you can find further information about the image, which does give you reason to click the link. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 17:35, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Tgr (WMF), "link directly to Commons (AFAIK dewiki and frwiki are the only large projects which by default enable the gadget doing that)": You're wrong. (Which pretty much makes my point about the WMF having no clue what readers are seeing...) Have a look at the list at mw:Snippets/Direct_imagelinks_to_Commons#Notes:
Actually if you look at meta:List of wikipedias, amongst the WP with over 1 million articles, those that do not have Direct-link-to-Commons are the exception: english WP, italian WP (and the botpedias); all other big WP have Direct-link-to-Commons. Oh and a few days ago, german WP disabled by default the Direct-link-to-Commons, because of incompatibility with Mediaviewer: If anons want to re-activate Mediaviewer, they are sent to the local file page for that, which doesn't work with Direct-link-to-Commons, they can't reach the local file page. (i still consider it a bad decision to have disabled by default the Direct-link-to-Commons)
"Without Media Viewer, after clicking on a thumbnail and ending up on the file page, you need to find the text saying "This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons..." and click on the link. The text does not give you any reason to do that; it basically tells you there is another copy of the page you are currently viewing and you can visit that if you want. (But why would you?) In Media Viewer, there is a Commons logo with a hover message explaining that this is where you can find further information about the image, which does give you reason to click the link." Uhm, that is the big improvement? Look at the local italian file page, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bellegarde-sur-Valserine_panorama.jpg , you get a big template leading you to commons, and there is a "Commons logo with a hover message explaining that this is where you can find further information about the image"... So you think Mediaviewer is better? The clickthrough rate of Mediaviewer is less than ~0,1% according to your stats (MMV deWP stats: for (daily) 1,25 million thumbnail-clicks ~1.000 clicks to commons file description page) - can the local file page be even worse? Show me the numbers that support your assertion. And this asserted miniscule improvement for smaller projects is worth cutting off big WPs from Commons?
"That new users do not discover Commons unless it is shoved in their faces could be a reasonable concern" How about the ~97% active users that did not opt out of Mediaviewer? Maybe another reasonable concern? Or the 99,6% of registered users that did not opt out of Mediaviewer?
According to similarweb stats, Monthly Visits to commons.wikimedia.org have dropped in the last 6 months: April = 75 million visits, May = 54 million visits, June = 29 million visits, July = 27 million visits. Look at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/commons.wikimedia.org, see how the Traffic Rank dropped in May, and how the percentage of visits coming from a search engine have increased since May 2014? (Take those sites with a bit of salt, but...) --Atlasowa (talk) 00:28, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Where's the option to turn off Mediaviewer? Are you talking the line "Redirect image links to Commons for files that are hosted there", sixth tab out of eight, section one out of eight, option six out of fifteen? Doesn't seem to be. So the fact that "only" 3% of the users have found it is not surprising, unless you really expect the joy of Wikipedia users to be digging through huge piles of undocumented options.
Actually, it's not difficult to turn off Mediaviewer. Easiest is to go in the Mediaviewer, scroll down, click on "disable Mediaviewer", done. Or you can go to your preferences and search (as you have described).
But the power of defaults is really strong. It took me years to both discover user preference options AND to dare to change them. If Wikipedia doesn't "work" by default for users, that is really bad.
BTW, i completely agree with Yann that improving the UploadWizard is the most important priority. Unfortunately, i read that the UploadWizard will rather be repaired than actually improved. --Atlasowa (talk) 13:08, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
I hope i am too pessimistic about improving the UploadWizard. See File:Upload_Wizard_Slides.pdf ("Should we divide our time evenly between these tasks?• bug fixes: ~32 points, • UI improvements: ~32 points • code re-factoring: ~32 point"). They want to start with first easier category tools in 2015 Q2, but add media to a page seems to be their "Big impact issue #1". I really hope this doesn't end up (a) making it easier to add crappy image uploads to Wikipedia, while (b) not improving the UploadWizard to make it harder to upload crappy images to Commons (copyvio, selfies, unidentified stuff). --Atlasowa (talk) 18:19, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Upcoming media viewer changes
Hi! I'm at Wikimania in London, and I have to say that what I've seen presented here about the next proposed changes to Media Viewer seems (to me) incredibly encouraging.
Basically, the idea is for what MV presents to basically be reduced to (i) a big picture, (ii) the picture's caption on xx-wiki that's it's been accessed from, (iii) a big blue button saying More Details. (There will also be a single line giving in very abbreviated form the picture source or creator, and identifying the licence.) See especially this slide (slide 29) for an idea of what is now being thought of as the way forward.
I think this should lead to a big up-tick of clicks through to File description pages, when this starts appearing. In particular, it looks like a realisation that MV is not a description page replacement, so this represents a conscious retreat from trying to present too much on the MV page, and recognition that for more than the bare minimum, the best thing to do is to send people to the (Commons) file page. I think it could be a very good thing. Jheald (talk) 14:39, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. What you describe sounds a lot like the mobile WP image view. Compare:
I'm repeatedly getting the following error: An unknown error occurred in storage backend "local-swift-eqiad". This is happening when I try to upload a routine image, which from a technical standpoint is functionally the same as my last upload — same camera, same resolution, etc., and I'm uploading from the same physical place (my bedroom) using the same process (Special:Upload without an upload wizard) in the same browser. Any ideas what could be wrong? Nyttend (talk) 13:17, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
I eventually got it uploaded, but now I'm getting the same error with a much reduced image, something taken by a dumpier camera with far smaller resolution, so it's not just a 6MB image. Nyttend (talk) 13:31, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the updates from everyone. My point about the camera was that I wondered whether it were having trouble with a higher-resolution upload and if a lower-resolution upload might be better, or whether perhaps the one camera had experienced an error that prevented this photo from being uploaded, so once I found that the other camera's image produced the same result, I wanted to note that now I knew that neither of those possibility was the problem. Nyttend (talk) 17:10, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Is there a way to filter items uploaded with GLAMWikiToolkit from Latest Files, and if there isn't do you think that there would be any interest in having one be developed. I love that so many images are being uploaded with it, but it does really make it difficult to search for copyvios being uploaded as they sort of overwhelm the Latest Files page. Zellfaze (talk) 01:26, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
Seems like a good idea to me. As GWToolset users have to apply for the rights to use the tool, when the Bureaucrats assess the request, there should be sufficient confidence that the user can be trusted to know enough about copyright and Commons conventions to avoid making a big mess; or at least if they do make a bit of a mess, they are capable of getting it fixed. --Fæ (talk) 07:21, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Authorship for images where subject is not the photographer but is the person who sets things up
First off, apologies for the bad title, I didn't know how else to word it.
It was brought to my attention at Wikimania that we have some issues about images where the subject provides a photo of themselves but did not themselves take the photo. Specifically File:Julio Ríos Gallego 2014.JPG, the subject chose the setting, the lighting, the pose - did everything except press the shutter, which was left to his wife. The image got deleted initially as a probable copyvio, but was restored after OTRS confirmation. However, in this, the author got changed from "Julio Rios Gallego" to "Wife of Julio Rios Gallego". Now, I am not disupting that she took the photo, but that she is the author is tenuous at best. Furthermore, Mrs Gallego did not wish to be mentioned here.
I think that we need to reconsider the way we attribute photos in these situations - we shouldn't be naming people who don't want to be named, and should instead use the author as originally stated. If this seems problematic from a copyright perspective, then I suggest we look at it the following way - CC-BY licences state that the author should be attributed in the manner of their choosing, and the copyright holder chooses to be attributed as someone else. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:42, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
Perhaps they could be considered as joint authors, and the credit given to "Julio Rios Gallego and his wife"? She could get rid of any unwanted copyright interest with a simple copyright assignment, but this wouldn't change who the "author" is. If you want unambigious authorship, it seems like it's better to use a tripod and timer. --ghouston (talk) 01:04, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
"CC-BY licences state that the author should be attributed in the manner of their choosing, and the copyright holder chooses to be attributed as someone else" - This seems reasonable. An author can also choose to remain anonymous. --ghouston (talk) 01:43, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
The monkey case seems different to me, since there the camera owner isn't claiming to have framed the photos or asked the monkey to press the button, so their only involvement was presumably technical settings like shutter speed and ISO, which I'm not sure is enough to make them a joint author. --ghouston (talk) 03:42, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
I run into this issue sometimes with climbing photographs, like File:New River Gorge - Supercrack - 2.jpg where I place one of my friends at a specific ledge and give them my camera which I preset and then tell them when to take a picture. In such a cases I use two author attribution. The issue is more messy when one picks a camera and set up a photo and than ask some stranger to take the picture. In such cases I feel like the whole creative process was done by me not the stranger and I am the author. Another case I run into is when lets say when I am climbing a bored friend picks up my camera and takes some pictures. In such a case the image would be authored by my friend, even if he/she has no access to that photo (unless I give it to them). --Jarekt (talk) 02:16, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
August 10
Use of the photos from Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna.
Use of the photos from Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna.
I'm not clear about the law of the museums in Austria about photos.
At Kunst Historisches Museum is allowed in the halls to visitors shut photos without flash and without a tripod, then is possible upload it here?
There are consequences?
In the official website I could not find information about this.
At other country are very allow maximum personal use, in Austria the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna is the same?--95.236.249.20201:28, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Using the default CC-BY-SA licence the upload wizard provides is sufficient, don't forget to add them to Category:Kunsthistorisches Museum. Artefacts along with simple labels are fine and there can be no copyright on the displays of natural objects such as stuffed fish, crystals or meteorites. You should avoid uploading complex modern posters, or the videos/computer displays as these may not be public domain. From my memory, the museum has an extensive series of delightful panel paintings around the tops of the walls that reflect the original collections (which have been moved around a bit in modern times). These are old enough to be public domain too. --Fæ (talk) 05:51, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm quite new about this, and my English isn't very good.... all objects of the museum it's possible to put into the wikimedia commons? There's limitation? And the image of artwork's card with the explain (artist's name, artwork's title...) is possible?--87.15.253.20607:48, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Need botanical knowledge (subalpine flowers)
Trying to disentangle some categories; I may be as guilty as anyone of error here, and I need someone who knows more than me to help.
As far as I can tell, Category:Aster alpigenus should be merged into [:Category:Oreostemma alpigenum]] (taxon was changed), but also I think some are misclassified in either direction with Category:Erigeron peregrinus, a somewhat similar-looking flower that lives in the same environment.
I'm hoping someone can take this on (and let us know here that you have) or can suggest a WikiProject group on Commons or on some other wiki that could presumably sort this out.
Cited in the Transparency report of WMF and in more than one hundred of press article all over the world. Pyb (talk) 22:55, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
So... is it a live discussion again, or still closed? If closed, maybe it ought to be page-protected. TJRC (talk) 23:13, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
No harm in letting them discuss it further - it looks like they're coming to the same conclusion again. Although I do suggest that someone removes the description in the metadata - that probabaly wasn't written by an ape. --99of9 (talk) 00:49, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
There have been a lot of news articles making the rounds about this recently. [5][6] The case may seem peculiar, but it could have ramifications that would make some people a lot of money. For example, suppose we have a CC-licensed "own work" photo of the Statue of Liberty from a visitors' area. The metadata in the photo show it was taken from a camera phone using all the default parameters, auto-focus and auto-exposure locked, just point and shoot with the camera held in the usual "right-side-up" landmark configuration. So ask: should the contributor have the right to release this photo, claiming the "creative act" of pressing the button from the usual place? Or does the company that engineered the CCDs, the lenses, the auto-focus and exposure algorithms, the raw and compression formats have the right to say that this was their work and ban it from Commons, since the contributor put in no more thought than the monkey, and it is all that sweat equity in the set-up that really determined the artistry of the picture? Wnt (talk) 14:42, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
Law and precedent is pretty clear it's who frames the shot and presses the button. Not who owns the camera, not who set up the shot, not who paid for the shoot - the one who framed and clicked. The entirety of professional photography relies on this legal fact (and it's solid enough to call a "fact"). This is why you don't own the copyright on your wedding photos unless there's a specific contract saying you bought that too - David Gerard (talk) 08:14, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
Be careful with this generalization. It is entirely correct in the USA, but, like so much else in copyright law, it varies from country to country. In the UK from 1912 until 1989, the copyright to commissioned photographs belonged to the customer, not the photographer. If I recall correctly, the same is true of several other countries now. . Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 15:39, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
It was also in copyright law, in Canada, until 2012. Those who commisioned the work automatically got copyright. Now it must be contractually turned over. Nevertheless, the precedent is not so much about who pressed the shutter but who had a measure of creative control over the outcome. Saffron Blaze (talk) 16:21, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Hey, I have no idea how to place this , sorry.
Relating to the "monkey selfie".
Many animals show an interest in camera lenses - they are similar to an eye.
Could anyone prove the monkey knew he was taking a photo?
If it was just an unintentional act, the result of the monkey "playing with the camera" then by a similar note, if you dropped your camera or it slipped from where it was and fell to the ground and took the most amazing photo- that you decided to make a living from by selling- until someone turned around and said you didn't take the photo, that fate did (or the ground did or god did) so it's public domain.... would they be justified?
We're not talking about a painting, it's a photo. If it was a painting then IP goes to the monkey hands down. But for all we know this monkey thought he was making a friend as he's pushed a button (that probably made a sound when he did it).
A smart idea would be making it commonly understood that animals and say children under 18months are generally not aware of the nature of a camera and therefore should probably not be able to enforce or have inferred ownership /copyright of any images produced as a result of pushing the button.—Preceding unsigned comment was added by 123.243.114.233 (talk) 18:36, 2014-08-11 (UTC)
In the U.S. copyright protects only "works of authorship," and U.S. Copyright Office policy is that "authorship" requires a human author. "The term 'authorship' implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable." U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium II of Copyright Office Procedures, § 202.02(b). TJRC (talk) 19:48, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
At least in theory, {{Mld}} is preferred for categories and galleries. If you look at the documentation at Template:Multilingual description, it gives a pretty good rundown of what is preferred where. But, in general, anything that gets the info across is a lot better than not doing it at all, and I think language templates typically show up in categories & galleries because they are what the largest number of contributors are familiar with. - Jmabel ! talk18:06, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for asking this question, Ricordisamoa. I had been using {{En}} and similar templates, but I'll start using {{Mld}} instead. @Jmabel: , is that template preferred for files as well? --Auntof6 (talk) 21:25, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Notification of DMCA takedown demand - DMCA Takedown- File:Erbil_city_center.jpg
In compliance with the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and at the instruction of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal counsel, one or more files have been deleted from Commons. Please note that this is an official action of the WMF office which should not be undone. If you have valid grounds for a counter-claim under the DMCA, please contact me.The takedown can be read here.&ensp
I'm sensing a trend here. In Category:Self-portraits of animals there are images of alleged selfies by an otter and a lamb. Otter's aren't primares. As far as I know, they lack the forelimbs to achieve much in the way of dexterity and ability to handle objects from much of a distance. Judging from the shot, it's very difficult to imagine that the otter managed to grab the camera, frame the shot and press the camera button all by it self. It just doesn't seem plausible. As for the lamb, I don't know what to say. A sheep handling a camera without any human assistance? How did it suspend the equipment, even if was just a phone? How did trigger the camera and hold it at a distance? Even through some bizarre stumbling it seems physically impossible without human interference, accidental or not.
The source for claims of dubious selfies seem to be articles like these.[7][8] In a lot of cases, the images seem to be animals merely grabbing cameras, or activating camera equipment deliberately set up by a human.
I'd just like to alert users here that I'm concerned about how frivolously images of certain macaque selfies are being used in articles out in the Wikipedias. It's been included in various galleries without much of an encyclopedic justification (mildly annoying) and has even completely supplanted superior general illustrations like this (utterly frivolous).
The latter is not acceptable in my view. It degrades articles by using like this on a "because we can"-basis. I know this is technically an issue for each project to decide for themselves, but I would really like to encourage anyone who reads this to put pressure on any Wikipedia version you're involved with to exercise restraint in using the macaque selfies.
It certainly appears that way, though I believe in most cases it might be people's judgements short-circuiting in favor of a copyleft fanaticism. I'm trying my best to fix the most obvious examples of overuse in other Wikipedias. Some seem to get the point, but other don't. Best example so far is Bramfab (here as well) at Italian Wikipedia who decided to simply block me for a week (!) after refusing to motivate his own revert. No discussion, no warning; just block right away without even allowing talkpage privileges.
I am still not convinced this should have been forced into the Public Domain by the WMF. Regardless, the efforts by some to "stick it" to this photographer speak well to the lack of characater of some free culture activists. Saffron Blaze (talk) 12:19, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
I agree - while I do believe that the image is probably PD, the way people have been going around with this is like a playground bully. It's legal but it's morally wrong. -mattbuck (Talk) 12:58, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
as noted by User:Peter Isotalo, the image is in the public domain (I was wrong in my !vote to delete it but the discussion was closed before I corrected my error in text). I'm generally of the position that individual projects should use the image with some discretion, rather than adding it everywhere because it's wikifamous. However, let's not get too het up about the damage done to Slater--the photo is famous precisely because of the novel means of creation. A monkey taking it made it interesting and happened to also throw its copyright into question. Had Slater just taken another photo of a monkey, he'd have ownership of a photo of no particular interest to the globe. Also, I disagree with the characterization of the WMF as playground bullies "forcing" the photo into PD. Whether or not it is PD is a matter for the lawyers and the lawyers at the WMF made what was to them a reasonable claim based on the law in response to a takedown request.
All that said, just as the photo is famous because it wasn't taken by a natural person, it's likewise "famous" on wikimedia projects because of the copyright fight and only that. We should, as editors, push to have the photo linked only where it is appropriate; however, that's largely a matter for individual projects, not commons. Protonk (talk) 14:56, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
It's not for Commons to decide, but there are plenty of Commons users that are active in the various language versions. I'm urging those who are active elsewhere to make this point. There seems to be a lot of editors out there who think that "free to use" means "can't be removed from articles once it's inserted".
Btw, Protonk, I believe "bullying" in this case refers in great part to the insensitive behavior exemplified by this tweet. And I've seen some pretty ugly rants about Slater's motives for having the nerve to capitalize on his own photo expedition. PeterIsotalo19:54, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Between a photographer attempting to assert control over, and demand payment for, a public domain work via threat and misrepresentation; and someone using a public domain work, I have no trouble determining that the label "bully" is more aptly applied to the photographer. Yeah, we can be a little classier about it, but it's hard for my heart to bleed for an IP troll of any stripe. And, Saffron, the photo was not "forced into the Public Domain by the WMF"; the photo was in public domain ab initio because it did not qualify as a "work of authorship" as required by the US Copyright Act. WMF had nothing to do with that. TJRC (talk)
My take on this is that its a cultural thing down to the UK by and large respecting sweat of the brow and the US not. It has some parallels with how Commons view digitisations of PD paintings by museums and galleries as PD derivative works with no recognition that the institution had to use its own funds to create the image. If a photographer can't make money from an expedition, why bother paying for plane tickets and trek into the jungle? That said I think the photographer lacks a bit of imagination, he reckons he's lost tens of thousands of pound in republication rights, when what he really should be doing, before someone else does it, is try and trademark the image and some catchy slogans and put them on T shirts and mugs, how about "make a monkey of yourself, Wikipedia has" for a t-shirt and "oh what a lovely mug" for mugs. The current furore would certainly getting the image back into the public awareness.--KTo288 (talk) 09:18, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
August 11
Is Austrian's law permit publication on wikimedia commons?
The Austrian's law permit publication on wikimedia commons of all object's photos from art museums (paintings, sculptures, build's views in and out, music instruments, coins, medals, crown, clothes....) take in public area where we must pay a ticket? The Austrian's law permit publication on wikimedia commons of photos object's card with the explain (artist's name, artwork's title, history, style...)?
Media Viewer is now disabled by default for all logged-in editors
Hi community, following the outcome of the MediaViewer RfC, and the decision of the Wikimedia Foundation that it can only be disabled for logged-in users, I have now disabled Media Viewer by default for all logged-in editors on Commons.
If you'd like to keep using Media Viewer (like me), you can just disable the new gadget in your preferences. (I did that, and it works just fine — I can use MediaViewer when I untick the box.) Thanks, odder (talk) 11:11, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
I believe the outcome of the RfC was that it be disabled by default for EVERYONE. Please don't ignore readers like me without accounts just so the WMF can pretend they have a victory here. --98.207.91.24614:03, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
At this point in time, given the ongoing situation, it is blatantly clear that the WMF will use technical measures to prevent the actual consensus of the commons community being implemented. I point at the wheel wars on both the English and German Wikipedia, the threat by Eloquence (talk·contribs) to remove the administrator userright from an enwiki admin, and the fact that Eloquence has been blocked for a month on dewiki for taking action in violation of a community-wide RfC. I think your complaints are better addressed to people other than odder. Revent (talk) 14:50, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
Nansen Collection
Hello!
I've uploaded almost 3000 images from the Norwegian National Library's Nansen Collection, these are images from Fridtjof Nansens personal collection donated to the National Library along with his personal archives. The collection contains photos from his polar exploration, Aid efforts in Russia in the 1920s and later work with the League of Nations. The entire collection have descriptions in Norwegian and about half have descriptions in English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Spanish.
Unfortunately the photos are untitled and not cropped (they are raw photos from the digitalisation).
I've rechecked the original files, apparently it is as black as this one. Odd, perhaps someone forgot the lens cap... I'll list it for speedy deletion. Profoss (talk) 12:31, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
The version on the web is based on an old digitalisation from the 1990s, the whole collection was redigitalised in 2010, which is probably were the error occured. Side note, Commons have higher resolution images than the ones on nb.no. Profoss (talk) 17:54, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes that was a stupid mistake of mine while moving stuff around so it's loaded on demand. Some peer-review and it wouldn't have happened. -- Rillke(q?)19:52, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Definitely. I think we should ask for superprotection of all MediaWiki pages. Perhaps site requests in Bugzilla? Or just injecting code into cat-a-lot that disables MV? -- Rillke(q?)22:09, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
The latter is definitely the quickest way to get super protection. It would be cool to have flagged revisions for scripts and a bit of code review. At least on the high profile pages. --Dschwen (talk) 22:27, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Problem is I don't see any of it as CC-BY-SA; they're almost all PD works, with some undated drawings that are unclear on publication which could be debatable.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:46, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
August 14
Crops
Hello,
I have a question regarding licensing & author information formatting of some crops of a picture. The original is here and this is one of the crops. Have I got the right?
Regards, --Mihai (talk) 16:24, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
I fixed it up a bit. If by "Have I got the right?" you mean to say "Am făcut acest drept?" the answer is "Mostly". If you mean "Trebuie dreptul de a face acest lucru?" the answer is "yes." - Jmabel ! talk02:15, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
Ups, that was a typo. I meant „got it right”. Mulțumesc :D for the help, I'll use the template for the other files as well. --Mihai (talk) 11:52, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
Actually, it's not as massive as I thought: only about 20-25 different topics. I've already refined the categories for a hundred or so of the images. I can probably do this myself, and should get it done over the next week or so. - Jmabel ! talk22:27, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
Here is one that isn't Seattle at all (presumably in that batch because the ship in question eventually ended up in Seattle). Clearly, that's the western span of the Bay Bridge (San Francisco Bay) and I've marked it as such, but given that it's the western span that title mentioning Oakland seems a bit odd to me. Is that perhaps one of the islands in the bay (which?) in the middle ground and a 1930s Oakland skyline in the background? - Jmabel ! talk01:45, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
My view is that it is pretty much mandatory for categories to provide, whenever relevant, the Interwiki links that show up (in most skins) in the left-hand navigation column, connecting to appropriate articles or, occasionally, categories in the various language Wikipedias. It's perfectly OK to also make a visible text link along the lines of {{en|[[:en:Topic]]}}, or a longer text that may or may not include that link, but until such time as Commons may be fully integrated with WikiData such that the need for Interwiki links in Commons may go away, the one along the lines of [[en:Topic]] is pretty much compulsory.
His view, as I understand it, is that a link like {{en|[[:en:Topic]]}} removes all need for a link like [[en:Topic]], and he has (at least in some cases) been actively removing the latter. (Allen, if you feel I've mischaracterized your view, please feel more than free to clarify.) -- Jmabel ! talk05:39, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
Jmabel, I think you’re wright and that Allen4names is wrong. He should be stopped. (Too bad stopping Wikidata from their current policies regarding articles’ vs. categories’ interlanguage links is not nearly as easy to do.) -- Tuválkin✉21:51, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
I think we need to recognise that the environment is going to change radically at the end of this month, 26-28 August, when "In other projects" links are going to be rolled out on Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote sidebars, working through WikiData. As presently constituted, those links can only be category-category and gallery-article.
I've put up a new page at Commons:Wikidata/Commons-Wikidata sitelinks to present the issue -- it needs a lot of discussion and expansion, but I thought it was worth putting at least a skeleton up.
It's important to note that while we may think the current structure at Wikidata is daft, that is their Plan A, and they are simply not prepared even to discuss anything else (ie category and gallery links) -- I've tried quite hard over the last couple of days at d:Project chat and d::Contact the development team and could not even get a "feature request" number to be created for the idea on Bugzilla. Lars also suggested it on the wikidata mailing list last week, and got a fairly short brush off. For the moment, there is simply no point in asking for this on the Wikidata forums, in particular besieging the two above would just be counter-productive. That's not to say Plan B is a bad idea, but we need to better understand just what are the full technical and social issues blocking it from discussion at the moment. Which we can perhaps do on that page above, at the moment still in very skeletal form.
This is an issue we need to crack, but we need to be getting sitelinks into Wikidata to get other things to work, and for the moment those links need to be category-category and gallery-article. Jheald (talk) 00:32, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
So does this mean we are going to need to create hundreds of thousands of basically redundant galleries replicating categories just so that links will work? That seems insane. - Jmabel ! talk01:13, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
That's inacceptable, using cats for interwiki links to articles is valid, especially if no gallery is present. Often they are removed from Galleries as redundant to interwikis at cats. This common practice is not to change unless replaced by something properly working at Wikidata. --Denniss (talk) 07:35, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
We must make sure the current commonscat -> article link data is harvested and not lost. And we can try to build up the technical proposal for Plan B, and try to understand what it is about it that the developers at Wikidata have been so hostile to. But for the moment this is the way it has to be. Jheald (talk) 07:51, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
Jmabel's position is the one that is the accepted practise on Commons, however given the seeming unwillingness of wikidata to compromise on this issue, in order to get the links to work, we need to consider a change in policy to allow single image galleries to serve as place holders for subjects where there are both article space pages and categories in the wikipedias. For those subjects where there is an article but no category in wikipedia, a workaround would be the mass creation of gallery pages to as redirects to categories. Anyone know someone who can create a bot to do it?--KTo288 (talk) 07:58, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
On the original subject of Jmabel dispute with Allen4names, I agree with Jmabel position we do need [[en:Topic]] style interwiki links in our categories. I often use them and I do not like digging them out from text in the page. As for discusion on wikidata, I think it is only a matter of time before the wikidata software catches up to our needs, and I agree with position of many wikidata users do not want to see temporary fixes which might jeopardize long term validity of their database. Each article wikidata page has property "Commons category" that property is not being used at commons at the moment but I am sure that with time we will be able to use it. --Jarekt (talk) 15:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
Having thought about it a bit more, I agree that [[en:Topic]] links on categories are harmless -- so long as in wikidata the link is category-category. In that case the explicit [[en:Topic]] will over-ride what gets shown in the sidebar, but won't interfere with the underlying assumptions needed to make templates work.
It should be possible -- very soon -- to create a standardised template that can be put at the top of the category, giving multilingual short-form explanations and language links automatically pulled from Wikidata. So then one wouldn't even need to scroll down to the sidebar.
For galleries, we should be able to do something richer.
Again, we should be able to offer template than can produce short-form explanations and multilingual links.
But for galleries we also ought to be able to automate infoboxes to pull multilingually from Wikidata.
Based on a post to the glamtools list yesterday (ie the list for GLAM people doing or about to do mass-uploads to Commons, using the GlamWiki toolset + the toolset developers).
There may be bits that I've got wrong (hope to see everybody on the discussion page); but I hope what I've written tries to capture the overall shape.
Personal views:
There is an opportunity at the moment, to work out exactly what will and will not be stored on WikiData, and is important enough that the dev team should include it in the data modelling for Commons Wikibase.
There is also an opportunity to start porting our templates (particularly specific museum ones), so they are ready to draw on WikiData; in particular trying to get involved with the various creative WikiData communities to make sure their data modelling is sufficient to capture all the cases that we would want to put on.
We should also start making sure we have good cataloguing of those templates, and think maybe how we can generalise and standardise what are currently often quite idiosyncratic designs.
Setting up a new WikiProject at Wikidata may be a good place for this,
I suspect the project team may have enough bodies to produce something that works, but if we want a smooth evolution, I suspect we need to start preparing the ground ourselves - and soon. Jheald (talk) 00:48, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
I really want to encourage people to participate in this. It is very important that we implement this correctly, getting data OUT of commons is hellish now. TheDJ (talk) 19:46, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
How do we handle inaccurate HABS data?
How do we handle inaccurate HABS data, such as on this file that says "depicted place = Washington; King County; Seattle" based on where the ship in question was eventually based, but where the image itself is presumably at the shipyard in San Francisco where it was built? Should we just change it like we would inaccurate information by a random contributor, or do we somehow want to preserve it because it comes from an official database. - Jmabel ! talk03:00, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
I think we should do what we do for files from the Bundesarchiv, and other similar donations, keep the original description intact, but add a template telling people that it is an original description, and may be inaccurate and misleading. If so we can then also add a supplementary description saying why the original description is inaccurate.--KTo288 (talk) 14:10, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
Outdated Stockholm Metro station name due to official name change
Hi. I'd like to inform that the Stockholm Metro maps containing the station name "Vreten" are outdated now, since the official name has been changed to "Solna strand". - Anonimski (talk) 19:28, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
Hi Anonimski. It would be best if you were to contact the uploader, or modify the images yourself. Categories and files can be renamed easily if necessary. -mattbuck (Talk) 20:10, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
Wikidata / Commons Wikibase thread at COM:AN
Hey all,
Just to say that there's a thread at COM:AN about getting information out of and putting it in to Wikidata, plus the new proposed Commons Wikibase, and how we feel about all of that.
There are a couple of separate sections at the end, that I would really like to see people's feedback on, namely
Thread - Would we like the new "In other projects" sidebar that is about to be piloted on Wikipedia automatically include links to both the relevant Commons cat and the relevant Commons gallery for each Wiki article and each Wiki gallery; or would we prefer only category-category and article-gallery links? (The latter is what will happen if we don't ask)
I took this picture from the Belgrade - Zagreb train. I suspect that the train was still in Serbia, but I am not certain as I cant find any Ruma-Pyma or Pyma-Ruma location. The dual naming confuses me.Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:13, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
@MPF: done - File:Courtship_rituals_of_the_heath_hen.webm. However looking at the copyright tags, is the copyright actually ok? The article says the film was made circa 1918 (And certainly before 1923 when the bird went extinct), but its unclear if it was "published" (And I'm not entirely sure I understand the technical meaning of the word published in a copyright context). The article says that "Massachusetts officials commissioned the film nearly a century ago as part of an effort to preserve and study the game bird, once abundant from Southern New Hampshire to Northern Virginia. Then, like the heath hen, the film was largely forgotten", which doesn't scream published, but at the same time it seems a reasonable assumption that the film was shown to scientists/interested people and what not at the time if that was its specific purpose. Anyways, I trust if there's any problems with the copyright, you guys can sort it out. Bawolff (talk) 04:37, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
FYI: The WMF has added a 'superprotect' right – granted to the 'Staff' global user group – which can be used to prevent sysops from modifying site-wide infrastructure pages (such as default javascript/css pages). There are suggestions that this new right would allow introduction of better version control to these very important files to prevent undesirable effects. The first use of 'superprotect' was to prevent German Wikipedia sysops from using Common.js to deactivate the mw:MediaViewer. There is currently a RFC on meta: meta:Requests for comment/Superprotect rights --Steinsplitter (talk) 06:29, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Awwww, WMF pet developpers are sad that their shiny toy is underappreciated by the team responsible for the Foundations’s highest editorial quality project?… Now I need to go stand barefoot on a bucket of Legos to take this grin off my face… Hmm, capital idea: What about a super-super-protect right to keep idiots from ruining Wikimedia with more unwanted, unneeded, harmful crap? -- Tuválkin✉06:46, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Rather than put Media Viewer back into Beta, so that users can optionally enable it if they find it beneficial, WMF has enforced its deployment of this software to all readers, with threats of desysop-ing on English Wikipedia, and now preventing this interface message from being altered by sysops on German Wikipedia... The WMF has also ignored community consensus on Commons (@MW RFC). --Steinsplitter (talk) 06:53, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
From Erik Möller's e-mail: "we've clarified in a number of venues that use of the MediaWiki: namespace to disable site features is unacceptable. If such a conflict arises, we're prepared to revoke permissions if required." I'd like a few actual clarifications (rather than just proclamations) in relation to this statement. Let's start with the easy ones and work our way down.
Where was this "clarified"?
What really needs to be clarified is why this is supposedly unacceptable, so: why?
What exactly is considered a "site feature" in relation to this unwritten policy?
Which permissions are you prepared to revoke? Administrative privileges of administrators carrying out the consensus of the projects that they serve? Editing privileges of project participants advocating changes which the WMF disapproves of?
Why do you consider community consensus to disable functionality which is malfunctioning or unwanted a "conflict"?
If a community feels that certain functionality hinders them from working effectively, do you think that overriding their consensus and threatening to revoke permissions aligns well with the foundation's mission to empower and engage people to effectively collect, develop and disseminate content?
Who is your position intended to benefit? If it's the individual projects: Why are you a better judge of what's good for the projects than the communities of those projects?
If the WMF is going to exert more power with respect to controlling site functionality, which steps (if any) is it going to take to assume greater responsibility to ensure that, for example, the Upload Wizard isn't utterly broken for all users of certain browsers and that the Media Viewer and Stock Photo gadgets don't fail to comply with licensing requirements for large groups of files? (These are not hypothetical examples.) I don't recall ever seeing anyone responsible for the Upload Wizard following up on Commons:Upload Wizard feedback – are you going to become more active there?
Can you show any evidence of a mandate given to you to override a project's consensus and hinder or punish administrators who carry it out?
@LX: I suggest to use meta for this discussion. There are already so many discussion fragments on this from en.wp, de.wp, meta, mailing lists etc, adding one more location is probably too confusing to people. TheDJ (talk) 09:23, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
I couldn't figure out the structure of the RFC on meta or where this would fit, and my questions are less about the new "master race bit" and more about that e-mail in relation to Commons-specific issues. But all comments here are freely licensed, so feel free to copy and extend my list of questions. —LX (talk, contribs)10:45, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
@Steinsplitter: I'm a bit confused as to your role in making announcements for the Wikimedia Foundation. Is the Wikimedia Foundation going to engage the community on Commons in an appropriate way, such as raising an official notice with explanation on this Village Pump, or do we have to discover these by watching out for code changes? The latter scenario just seems, well, rude. --Fæ (talk) 10:59, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
I don't work for the WMF, and i don't make announcments for the WMF. This was only a FYI for the community because the WMF don't have posted a notice here. Sorry if the FYI is confusing. --Steinsplitter (talk) 11:01, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifying, you are always on the ball . Could someone nudge one of the WMF paid Community Advocates (or whatever title they use right now) that it would be seen as a good thing for one of them to write up an explanation here and explain where we are supposed to give feedback, rather than in haphazard channels? Unfortunately off the top of my head, I don't know the right person to ask. --Fæ (talk) 11:13, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
The community liaisons are usually attached to specific development projects (They try and gather and organize feedback about said project, as well as informing the community about changes related to that project). They are not general internal PR people for the foundation (Or at least that is my understanding). Thus I don't really think its their responsibility to inform the community that the foundation has decided to make a new protection level (I have no idea whose responsibility it would be. Probably should be somebodies). For reference, User:Keegan (WMF) is the community liason for media viewer. However, at this point the super-protect controversy has little to do with the MediaViewer "project" itself. There are discussions about it everywhere. One of the more prominent ones is at meta:Requests_for_comment/Superprotect_rightsBawolff (talk) 19:21, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Sorry, I totally misread Fae's comment to say community liaison instead of community advocate. If you want to talk to a community advocate, I'd recommend leaving User:Philippe_(WMF) a message. Bawolff (talk) 19:27, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
I propose the creation of a "collateral damage" list or sub-page listing those users who have retired or cut-down their activity due to the WMF's recent behaviour. --Túrelio (talk) 21:02, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
Old upload form javascript is malfunctioning. Browser console (Firefox 31) shows the following:
"Exception thrown by ext.centralNotice.bannerController"load.php:161"URIError: malformed URI sequence"URIError:malformedURIsequenceStacktrace:decoded@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z line 4 > eval:51:2004$.cookie@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z line 4 > eval:52:764@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=ext.centralNotice.bannerController&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z&*:1:513@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=ext.centralNotice.bannerController&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z&*:8:1runScript@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z:171:166execute@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z:172:353mw.loader</<.implement@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z:178:172@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=ownwork&modules=ext.centralNotice.bannerController&skin=monobook&version=20140812T191220Z&*:8:1load.php:161URIError:malformedURIsequence
I get this error ocassionally too, e. g. on the upload page or right now editing the village pump. This is very annoying as it seems to break all scripts running after this code (upload form customization, some gadgets, search auto-completion). (Environment: Firefox 31, OS: current Ubuntu and Windows 8.) ireas (talk) 20:03, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
"Exception thrown by ext.centralNotice.bannerController"load.php:161"URIError: malformed URI sequence"URIError:malformedURIsequenceStack-Trace:decoded@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z line 4 > eval:36:415$.cookie@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z line 4 > eval:38:20@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z line 4 > eval:118:1523@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z line 4 > eval:125:1runScript@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:171:166execute@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:172:353mw.loader</<.implement@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:178:172@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z line 4 > eval:125:1.globalEval/<@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:4:655.globalEval@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:4:621mw.loader</<.work@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:174:383request@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:172:864mw.loader</<.load@https://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20140819T181338Z:179:743@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Quality_images_candidates/candidate_list&action=edit:35:1
I haven't yet managed to reproduce this. If anybody can reproduce this "more often", appending "?debug=true" (if there's no question mark yet in the URL address) or "&debug=true" (otherwise) to the URL address is welcome, to get non-minified output in the browser's error console. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 13:30, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
I managed to get the following (the problem is intermittent). Firefox 31, Windows 7, monobook skin:
UseofgetUserData()orsetUserData()isdeprecated.UseWeakMaporelement.datasetinstead.requestNotifier.js:63"JQMIGRATE: Logging is active"load.php:10332URIError:malformedURIsequencejquery.cookie.js:17URIError:malformedURIsequencejquery.cookie.js:17"Use of "insertTags" is deprecated. Use mw.toolbar.insertTags instead."load.php:11403console.trace():load.php:11405mw.log</log.warn() load.php:11405mw.log</log.deprecate</<.set()load.php:11434<anonymous>index.php:17<anonymous>index.php:187
That's unrelated. The local-swift-eqiad error happens when the servers where we store files become overloaded (Called swift, after the software it uses, eqiad is the name of the cluster where all the servers are). Bawolff (talk) 18:39, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Having read the instructions on using the Wikipedia search tool, I remain confused and frustrated. I'll give the example I've been working on. I'd greatly appreciate advice on how to be a smarter user of the Commons, and be able to successfully do searches like this:
Today, I was looking for images of Black Bears that are in the public domain. I began by doing a search of the Commons for the combination of the two phrases "black bear" and "public domain". You can see the results here. At this moment, that search returns 33 hits.
If you do a broader search for just "black bear", you come up with many more hits, one of which is an image entitled 52bear.jpg. Now, this image shows a black bear, and contains the phrase "black bear" in the image description. This image is also in the public domain. Oddly, it doesn't show up in results from the more specific search. You can check this fact by doing that two-phrase search, asking for all results on one page, and then asking your browser to find the number "52".
My best guess is that the search tool is looking for search terms only in the description and URL fields. The 52bear image doesn't have "public domain" in either of those fields, and is therefore excluded from the search results. Is there some way I can search for black bear images in the public domain, and be assured of getting all images that fit those criteria?
For public domain images, there's no guarantee that the words "public-domain" will be included in the actual text of the image description page which is accessible to an internal search engine (and in fact, most of the time it won't be). Instead, text such as {{PD-self}} or {{PD-1923}} (invoking a template) will be there. For an internal search engine to work in the way you want it to work, it would have to resolve template transclusions, or be made specially license-aware. You may have better luck with external search engines, which work with the HTML as delivered to a browser, rather than with the raw image-description page text... AnonMoos (talk) 03:00, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
@AnonMoos - Thanks for the advice. I've tried a few searches with both of those strings ({{PD-self}} and {{PD-1923}}). Neither seems to be real helpful in finding public domain images using the internal search engine. I'll explore some external search engine options. Is there any scuttlebut about changes to the internal search engine? Addition of advanced options to allow searching or filtering by a wider variety of fields? TimBur (talk) 04:00, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
One quick option would be to go to Category:Ursus americanus, click on the little arrow next to the "good pictures" at the top right, then on "in this category and in" and enter Public domain for images that are also in Category:Public domain. The "Quick intersection" tool gives you some more control, but apparently no thumbnails (example query). For more advanced category intersections there is also Catscan. Finally, if you have the new Cirrus Search activated under the beta features something like incategory:"Ursus americanus" incategory:"Public domain" should work as well (documentation). However, I get zero results for this query – guess the Cirrus Search doesn't search in sub-categories? --El Grafo (talk) 10:55, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Hmm. The subject categories (e.g. "Ursus americanus") do appear pretty accurate. So it does seem like that would be a better way to search. Unfortunately, the "public domain" category appears more complicated. It looks as if there are several flavors of that category (e.g. {{PD-1923}}), and that those flavors aren't organized as subcategories of a broader "public domain" category. TimBur (talk) 16:08, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any current plans to increase the upload limit beyond 1 GB (Although I haven't heard anyone say anything against doing that. I imagine limit will probably get increased once there is more demand). There are some reports of some stability problems with chunked uploads for very large files that really need to be addressed. Bugzilla tickets are usually handled fairly quickly, sometimes even within a couple hours. It may speed things up to add hooonline.de and legoktm.wikipediagmail.com to the CC field of the bug when filing the bug (They are two people who often handle that sort of thing, so adding them to the cc list makes sure they know about the bug right away). When uploading files in the 100mb - 1gb range, I often use the User:Rillke/bigChunkedUpload.js user script instead of upload wizard (Either works, but the user script allows you to bypass the license information hand-holding). Bawolff (talk) 18:36, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Allcaps template
I have imported {{Allcaps}} from the English Wikipedia. This will be particularly useful when transcribing text from memorials, foundation stones and other such objects. Andy Mabbett (talk) 11:33, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Open letter to Wikimedia Foundation (Media Viewer/Superprotect)
An open letter to Wikimedia Foundation concerning the recent conflict over the implementation of Media Viewer and SuperProtect has been started here. I believe this is a serious issue which deserves a close attention and participation of us all. Alvesgaspar (talk) 11:55, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions
The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.
If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.
I am notifying you that a brainstorming session has been started on Meta to help the Wikimedia Foundation increase and better affect community participation in software development across all wiki projects. Basically, how can you be more involved in helping to create features on Wikimedia projects? We are inviting all interested users to voice their ideas on how communities can be more involved and informed in the product development process at the Wikimedia Foundation.
I and the rest of my team welcome you to participate. We hope to see you on Meta.
I make it 15 screen-fulls of text to read as a long and complex essay, mostly of bullet points and with heavy jargon use that look like the brain dump of several internal development workshops (rather than a workshop with volunteers as well as developers). There are 7 screen-fulls of talk page discussion so far, and the essay itself is not supposed to be edited by us volunteers, a red flag that unpaid volunteers are interlopers for process improvement rather than key to it. I'm afraid this falls into my TLDR pile.
WMF management - if you insist on controlling the agenda and create a process where volunteers have to 'argue the case' to change any word in your mostly done-deal creations, then expect hardly anyone to turn up to experience being repeatedly rebuffed in preference to the status quo. Most of us have experienced this game many times before, and found it very unsatisfying as an investment of our unpaid volunteer time. --Fæ (talk) 06:47, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Seriously, it looks like nobody has touched the page since 2010 (and there are subpages that aren't linked to the main page). Either someone needs to go through the list and fulfill all of the requests one at a time, or this picture request system needs a real overhaul so it will be more usable. Qzekrom (talk) 23:43, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Maybe it could be quietly archived? COM:VP seems to have taken over the proposed role of this page long ago. As it is, it just entraps now and then someone who assumes it is being monitored, leaving the odd request unanswered and needlessly doing a disservice to the requester. -- Tuválkin✉01:44, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Yeah, that's what I suspected. I'll copy and paste my image request here.
A version of Ukraine location map.svg in which individual regions of Ukraine (white), as well as neighboring countries (gray), are closed paths (like File:BlankMap-World6.svg), instead of individual borders being open paths. Transnistria should be a separate object, too. This will make the map a lot easier to color in. (I just need it for an art project involving a Ukraine partition plan.)
Hi folks, we wanted to give you a quick update about Media Viewer project and what we are working on for this project.
1. Disabling Media Viewer for logged-in users on Commons
Earlier this week, we disabled Media Viewer by default for logged-in users on Commons, as discussed in our response to the Media Viewer RfC. While we are not planning to disable the tool for logged-in users on other wikis, we made an exception for Commons, to address the unique requirements of editors who curate media files on this repository. The plan is to continue to provide readers with a tool that improves their viewing experience on Commons, and we are finalizing configuration settings to support that goal.
Please note that users who had previously enabled Media Viewer as a beta feature will need to re-enable it as a user preference. To re-enable Media Viewer as a logged-in user, go to your "Preferences", select the "Appearance" section, and check this option under "Files": '[ ] Enable Media Viewer’. Once you click "Save", images will open in Media Viewer again for your account on that site. For more information, check this help page.
2. Media Viewer Improvements
We are now working to improve Media Viewer in coming weeks, to address editor concerns while making it even more useful for readers — our main target users for this product. Here are some of the improvements we are planning to test and develop for the next version:
a much more visible link to the File: page;
an even easier way to disable the tool;
a caption or description right below the image
remove additional metadata below the image, directing users to the File: page instead.
Will the upcoming Wikidata/Wikibase/Structured Data/Whatever it is called stuff, which I don't fully understand, obsolete the need for categories like this? (And for all of the "taken with such-and-such camera" categories?) I sort of got the impression that one of the things it would enable is searching on metadata directly? --Ppelleti (talk) 01:57, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
We talked with user:Manybubbles about indexing this kind of metadata in the search. That would be possible, but no really user friendly way of retrieving the data (unless you consider querying the api with javascript user friendly).
Indexing could probably implemented now already, but without an easy way to retrieve it, it would be a bit of waste of effort. Multichill (talk) 13:53, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
As I read the page about audio codec Opus it seems to be superior for all codecs we are now using in Commons. But the prefered codec is still Vorbis in Ogg container. When we could use Opus audio in its native container? I know, there is filed bug on Bugzilla (now rated as "Low enhancement with 3 votes"), but there was no contribution for year. --KuboF (talk) 23:00, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
As soon as we upgrade libav to a version that supports opus so that people can play the file. From what I understand, that's going to happen as part of the app server upgrade when moving to HHVM (aka people have been saying soon for a really long time now. Last status update at [10]) (Point of note, the native container for opus is ogg. The only difference between an ogg file containing opus audio and a file ending in .opus, is somebody renamed the file. Opus can also be used for the audio part of a video file [Both in .ogv and in .webm]. There are currently about 343 files containing opus data on commons). Bawolff (talk) 01:07, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
p.s. To actually be really clear, if people want to be able to upload files ending in .opus and are ok with them not yet being playable, all that's required is a vote to show consensus. Bawolff (talk) 01:07, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Thank you Bawolff! So, I will wait some weeks and if not change, I will ask about uploading .opus files (if successful, should be thousands of files ;). --KuboF (talk) 13:59, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
You want the .opus file extension, right? Otherwise, you could just batch-rename the files you have to have an .oga or .ogg extension, from what I get from bawolff's reply. -- Rillke(q?)14:05, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
August 23
Managing the deletion of files depicting modern buildings in South Korea.
Hi. I was wondering if it's possible to use photos published on the site of the Croatian Ministry of Defence. I'm not an expert on photo copyrights so I was wondering if this explanation at the bottom of this page means I could somewhow upload them on Commons?
The given statement implies that content from the site can be reproduced when attribution is given, but it is not clear that producing derivative works is permitted. It might be useful to contact the Croatian MoD to request adjustment of the permission statement for clarity (this may not be very likely) or have them provide confirmation via OTRS. --Gazebo (talk) 01:38, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Hi all. After trying to switch the default search engine over to Cirrus just before Wikimania, we had to roll back due to performance considerations. We've done a couple of things that should help in this regard so we'd like to try cutting Commons over next week. Nik and I planning to do this at 16:00UTC on Monday the 1st of September if all goes according to plan. The deployments calendar will be updated shortly. As always please let us know if you encounter any issues or have suggestions on ways to improve it. ^demon (talk) 22:00, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Mea culpa! I forgot Monday is a holiday in the United States. We'll be doing it Tuesday instead, same time of 16:00UTC. Thanks! ^demon (talk)
MMS request
Hello, Photos and Videos are upload in my mobile phone. I send the photos in commons in my mobile phone please provide in the MMS number. Thanks you
Naresh Raja Kumar (talk) 12:03, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
I can't make any sense of what you wrote there. Can you reword, or can someone who can make sense of this paraphrase? - Jmabel ! talk15:58, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
And we have no plans of supporting: MMS is on its way out, and securely authenticating over it is... problematic. Also, it seems to me that the price of a MMS is higher than the price of mobile traffic required to upload a phone-grade image in most markets. MaxSem (WMF) (talk) 19:03, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
August 20
License tag help requested
I've been reading the articles about possible tags for images, but can't find which one best suits the image I uploaded:
It's a photo of a painting made in the 17th century.
The artist is unknown / anonymous.
In my country it's considered public domain (70 years after death of artist or first published over 70 years ago)
It is in the public domain in the United States.
When I use template PD-Art|PD-anon-1923 the text it produces doesn't mention the part about the author being anonymous. Which template should I use with which parameters ?
— Preceding unsigned comment added by OSeveno (talk • contribs)
I don't understand the problem. "PD-Art|PD-anon-1923", as you used in this example, shows the text of the embedded template, including in this case the mention of anonymous. Is it a problem when you view the text in a language other than English? -- Asclepias (talk) 17:57, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Correct; this is the case: in Dutch is doesn't mention anything about 'anonymous'. To try help clarify this issue, below is the original Dutch text plus the translation into English, the latter being my literal translation of the Dutch text, not the official English version:
Dutch text as presented by template PD-Art PD-Art]|PD-anon-1923:
Het tweedimensionale kunstwerk afgebeeld op deze afbeelding valt in het publiek domein omdat het auteursrecht op dit materiaal is verlopen (de auteur is meer dan 70 jaar geleden overleden of de datum van publicatie is van voldoende ouderdom). Reproducties van het werk kunnen ook worden beschouwd als publiek domein omdat het geen oorspronkelijk karakter heeft. Dit is geldig voor reproducties gemaakt in de Verenigde Staten (zie Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.), Duitsland en veel andere landen.
Literal translation of the Dutch text into English:
The twodimensional artwork depicted on this image is part of the public domain because the authors-rights on this material expired (the author deceased more then 70 years ago or the date of publication is sufficiently old). Reproductions of the work can also be can also be seen as public domain because it has no original character. This is valid for reproductions made in the United States (see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.), Germany and many other countries.
I'd like to add that I noticed that there are other Commons license tags of which I noticed they do not present a correct translation into Dutch. In some cases when the license tag speaks of 100 years, the Dutch translation of the presented text speaks of 70 years. And since I didn't check all available tags, only about 10 percent, statistically speaking there may very well be many more. I have being the bringer of bad news, but here it is. Consequence of these errors could in the worst case be that a) uploaded material may be tagged as wrong license and therefor deleted; b) Commons may be sewed for violation of authors license.
--OSeveno (talk) 13:33, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Ah, it seems that the problem is with the PD-Art template when viewed in NL. Then it does not embed and display the status template that is inserted as a parameter, as it should and as it does when it is viewed in other languages. So, in NL, the reader sees only the text of the template PD-Art/nl, but the text of the status template in the parameter, PD-anon-1923 or another, is not displayed. The code of the template PD-Art/nl currenly does not seem to provide a parameter. I guess you could fix the code of the PD-Art/nl template by making it more similar to the PD-Art equivalents in other languages. Compare for example with the code of PD-Art/fr, PD-Art/de, etc. -- Asclepias (talk) 15:21, 22 August 2014 (UTC) N.B.: I went ahead and updated the template PD-Art/nl with the provision for the parameter, to make it similar to the other language versions. But please update the Dutch text of the template PD-Art/nl to reflect a meaning similar to the other language versions and to include the links to Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag and Commons:Reuse of PD-Art photographs, etc. Also, note that the template PD-anon-1923 does not have a NL version PD-anon-1923/nl. You can create one if you want that template to display in NL. -- Asclepias (talk) 16:05, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for looking into this and for adjusting the template. I'll try to find time to write a proper translation for the Dutch version. Regards, --OSeveno (talk) 17:28, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Are photos from public university websites considered to be public domain?
I have a public domain related question. Are photographs of US Federal, State, or local governmental facilities, officials, etc. posted on official governmental websites considered to fall under public domain? Would such coverage, if applicable, also extend to public educational institutions? I am just curious because I came across these two photos (File:Robert S. Nelsen.jpg and File:Havidan Rodriguez.jpg) uploaded to Commons and currently being used on Wikipedia articles. If there's no problem with the licensing, then fine. If there is, however, a problem, their use on Wikipedia would be affected. If this kind of thing has already been asked and answered before or if it should be asked somewhere else, then my apologies in advance. Thank you - Marchjuly (talk) 02:07, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Photographs taken by U.S. federal government employees in the course of their duties, or taken as part of "work-for-hire" on behalf of the U.S. federal government, are certainly normally in the public domain. The same applies to a minority of state governments (by no means all). The only "federal universities" in the conventional sense are the service academies (West Point etc.), as far as I'm aware... AnonMoos (talk) 02:50, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply AnonMoos. Would "work-for-hire" also include photographs taken by professionals not employed by the federal government? For example, a private photographer hired by a government to photos of certain government officials, etc. Would the photographer in such cases still typically hold, unless they have agreed otherwise, the copyright over said photos?
Regarding the two photos I referred to above. One of them (File:Robert S. Nelsen.jpg) was deleted about an hour ago for violation of copyright. The other photo File:Havidan Rodriguez.jpg was essentially uploaded using the same rationale, but was not deleted. Not sure what the difference is between the two. File:Havidan Rodriguez.jpg was taken from this webpage. At the bottom of the page is says "Copyright 2014 The University of Texas-Pan American™". I am assuming that copyright includes not only the text, but also the images on the page. Would such an image qualify as "public domain"? - Marchjuly (talk) 04:18, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
It is copyrighted, it isn't in the public domain and isn't licensed as CC-BY-SA-3.0 by the university. Photo deleted. Bidgee (talk) 04:48, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
(Edit conflict) Well, the second one also should be deleted. (I see it just has been deleted.) Photos on university websites, whether public or private, are in general not in the public domain. And while AnonMoos' statement above is technically correct, "The same applies to a minority of state governments (by no means all)" may be misleading. In general state materials are not in the public domain. There are a few license templates in Category:PD-USGov license tags (non-federal), mostly about traffic signs, and then about public records from a select few states.
Even on websites of the federal government you need to watch out for contractor's works and works that the government doesn't own but uses under a "fair use" clause. Contractors' works and commissioned works, even if commissioned by an agency of the federal government, are copyrighted. The contractor retains copyright unless the contract stipulates otherwise. In particular works from U.S. national laboratories may be copyrighted, see the cautionary note in {{PD-USGov-DOE}}. (The U.S. government in such cases typically has the right to use the works, but that doesn't place the works in the public domain.)
Back to public universities: the same rule as for other websites applies: unless there's a clear mention of a free license or of public domain copyright status works are copyrighted and must not be uploaded here at the Commons. Lupo05:01, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks to everyone who replied. Just for the record, my goal was not to get these two particular photos deleted. I assumed they were uploaded and used in good faith. The rationale behind their licensing just seemed a bit of a reach to me. I am always looking for photos to add to certain Wikipedia articles, so if photos such as these could be used without any problems, then that would make it much easier to upload other similar ones to Commons. Anyway, thanks again for all the information. - Marchjuly (talk) 07:40, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
With regard to "service academies" -- there are two service academies that might be overlooked, and I believe there are other educational institutions that are both solely education DoD personnel, whose staff are all DoD personnel.
The US Army, Navy and Air Force each run a separate University for future officers. Graduates of the Navy College can opt to be officers in the Marine Corps. The Coast Guard also has a service academy, and among the several colleges that train students to be officers of merchant vessels, there is one that is run by the US Federal government, that I believe is also considered a service academy.
The USN runs the Navy Postgraduate School and several other degree granting institutions, that I think are not usually considered "service academies". I think their staff and student are, nevertheless, Federal employees. I started an article on a USN officer who was part of the stable of high-class call girls operated by an infamous Washington DC madam. It has since been deleted, at afd. But I remember that she was an instructor at a DoD institution that was not a degree granting institution, like the service academies, that granted certificates. But its staff and students were also all federal employees.
So it is my impression that there are at a dozen, propbably several dozens, of institutions with students and staff who are all federal employees. Geo Swan (talk) 18:14, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Greetings! As you may have heard, we are starting a discussion about Structured Data on Commons, in collaboration with the Wikidata team and community volunteers from Wikimedia Commons, such as Multichill, and other sister projects. We invite you all to join that discussion, to help define goals and first steps for this community-driven process.
The Structured Data initiative proposes to store and retrieve information for media files in machine-readable data on Wikimedia Commons, using Wikidata tools and practices. It aims to make it easier for users to read and write file information, and to enable developers to build better tools to view, search, edit, curate and use media files.
This process is likely to be a massive collaboration between the Commons and Wikidata communities, to define what they would like from structured data. Once we get a clearer idea of what our communities need the most, the WMF Multimedia and WMDE Wikidata teams plan work together to provide the engineering support architecture to empower our volunteers.
To that end, we propose to investigate this opportunity together through community discussions and small experiments. If these initial tests are successful, we would develop new tools and practices for structured data, then work with our communities to gradually migrate unstructured data into a machine-readable format over time.
We would now like to extend this discussion to include more participation from other community members interested in this initiative. Please take a moment to read the project overview on Commons, then let us know what you think on this talk page.
Lastly, we propose to form small workgroups to investigate specific challenges, such as identifying workflows, data structure, research, platform, features, migration and other open issues. If you are interested in contributing to one of these workgroups, we invite you to sign up directly on this hub page.
We look forward to productive conversations with many of you in coming weeks. In previous roundtables, many of you told us this is one of the most important contributions that our teams can make to support multimedia in coming years. We heard you loud and clear and are happy to devote more resources to to improve our infrastructure and provide a better experience for all our users, in collaboration with you.
Just found this Category:Encyclopedic useless huge files of poor quality. It was created in April and includes a dozen-and-half photos in PNG format (all taken in Marburg, Germany, under which this category is, solely, categorized). While photos in PNG is enough to bring my fangs out, too, maybe 5 months is enough and this content should be taken care of (re-uploaded as JPGs, maybe) and/or the category should be renamed to a tamer, yet more helpful, epithet — such as Category:PNG photos of Marburg (to be made a hidden category, while needed). -- Tuválkin✉05:45, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Yeah, renaming the category seems like a good idea. They don't seem to be of "poor quality" to me (i. e. they're not out of focus, or anything like that). They seem to be in scope, therefore not "useless". And they're not really huge, either; we have plenty of JPEGs that are just as large. --Ppelleti (talk) 07:20, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
The images should be categorized meanfully. PNG is not a very good idea if used with photos, but they are not useless. -- Smial (talk) 09:38, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
The underlying format KML files in My Maps are my ownership. (Google does not allow to make them community property) They can be used on any underlying maps, for example Openstreetmap. Unfortunately this format cannot be imported in the Commons. The danger is if I die, My Maps in Google Maps wil be lost for the wikimedia community. I have zipped all the kml files. Can I send this file to OTRS as backup? Of course I give my permission to use these files under a opensource licence.Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:29, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
(I'm not sure were this question properly belongs; I placed it here thinking this was the best place to start the discussion.)
By the same logic that the famous macaque selfie is a public domain image, could we also upload the monkey's image of David Slater, the photographer, as seen here (or here, as printed in The Guardian)? Or should we wait until the whole copyright issue is settled legally? — Loadmaster (talk) 16:19, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
I think that your logic is correct, but the words "add fuel to a fire" come immediately to mind, remember also that in addition to legal copyrights, individuals have Personality rights ( see Commons:Photographs of identifiable people), and given the present bad blood between Mr Slater and the Wikimedia Foundation, it would be very unwise to make such a provocative gesture.--KTo288 (talk) 17:38, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
What KTo288 is saying. I also think it would be a bit pointy. Much the same as the selfie fest at wikimania in my opinion was pointy. However that was also sort of a consequence of the media picking this from the transparency report and running with it like we landed on the moon... For attendees it was as much about the copyrights as the media's and social media's superficial obsession with things like this (that's how I interpreted it at least). Morally, I'm of the opinion that it is not necessary to drive this much further by uploading an image of David himself. TheDJ (talk) 20:54, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
I don't know if this has been written somewhere but otrs is getting quite a few mails of unhappy people (eg. I have donated to wikipedia but will never again... , I love you guys but what you did here is really shitty… and so on). Publicity wise the monkey was not good for wikimedia and it was definitely not worth the few images the monkey took. Peoples opinion is, that even if it is lawfully correct, it is morally wrong. Should the copyright issue be settled in favor for wikimedia we will get that victory with an other wave of bad press and unhappy otrs mails.
So maybe not upload more pictures taken by monkeys. Amada44talk to me19:12, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
Indeed. As I said about that previous infamous incident, we must respect the interests and freewill of the authors than merely looking on the legal sides. Otherwise, we will loss a lot of gentle people. I know Flickr and many other similar sites give much importance for photographers. But Commons is difference. Here we care the interests of authors, reusers and the unpaid efforts of the maintenance volunteers at the same time. It is good, and I respect that point of view. But we should maintain an equilibrium so that the voice of each group is taken care and one group is not neglected by the aggressiveness of others. Unfortunately it is happening frequently because the maintenance community is most active and dominating here. Jee02:51, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
You're not wrong about the bad publicity, I had been negotiating with an organisation to release photographs under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license but it has fallen though due WMF's controversial position of the "Monkey Selfie" and they want nothing to do with any WMF projects. Looking at ORTS, most of the emails I've seen are from very unhappy people. Bidgee (talk) 06:22, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
We've got our hands stuck in the cookie jar, forgetting that the way to get more cookies is to let go of some of the ones we're holding.:(--KTo288 (talk) 14:42, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
It is really unfortunate if generous people made generous donations to WMF projects only to regret it later when they learned they didn't fully appreciate the meaning of free licenses. If that is what is happening with the potential donors who were alienated by our stand on the Monkey pics I think the underlying lesson is that we need to make sure those generous donors understand our core goals and principles -- not that we should amend our core goals and principles in order to chase donors.
Some people may think there are no underlying principles worth defending over the copyright of the Monkey pics. I disagree.
Mr Slater is not the only professional photographer who has shown he doesn't really understand the fundamental principles of intellectual property. It is sad phenomenon. It is unfortunate. And, IMO, these are principles worth taking a stand over.
Let me share a couple of anecdotes:
Infamously, there was a hapless innocent Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who American GIs tortured to death in December 2002. An American freelance photographer sought out his family and published a family photo of the young man, from before his capture and torture. This freelance photographer claimed he owned the worldwide IP rights to the family photo.
Wire services, like AP and Reuters routinely add public domain images to their libraries. We routinely treat all images that have been published with an "AP file photo" credit as if that was equivalent to AP claiming they owned all the IP rights to the image.
I'd uploaded a considerable number of CC images from flickr. In November 2009 I decided I would always take an extra 20 seconds, and leave a comment on every flickr image I uploaded (1) thanking the flickr contributor for using a CC license; (2) telling them the URL of the commons page.
Lots of flickr contributors really appreciate being told their images are being re-used. But I have had three or four people who were upset, because they didn't understand what the CC license meant, or that it was unrevocable. In three of those cases I started a DR discussion over their images. One guy seemed to have a nervous breakdown. He was a very good photographer, and prolific. His position was undermined because he had created a Commons ID for himself, and had personally uploaded three or four dozen images here. About three hundred of his flickr images had been uploaded here by Commons contributors. But none of those earlier uploaders had ever told him they had uploaded one of his pictures.
My thank you seemed to precipitate a crisis for him. I think it made him look, and count, how many times an image of his had been uploaded here, and he was shocked to see how many there had been. He changed his default license on all his thousands of flickr images, from CC to "all rights reserved". And he tried to speedy delete all the hundreds of images that had been uploaded here.
As part of his meltdown, he repeatedly denounced us, calling us thieves, saying we had ruined his hobby of 40 years. Since flickr let him change his mind over licensing he thought we should too.
When the DR closed as keep, he swore he would dedicate himself to warning the world about us. He erased all his thousands of images from flickr.
The underlying lesson I took from this incident is that we need to do a better job educating our donors as to our fundamental core principles.
I think some of comments here imply a view I think is a big mistake. Should we be grateful to financial donors? Sure, just as we should be grateful to those who donate images, or donate their time in helping organize our files. IMO it is a mistake to treat financial donors as if they were the only donors who count. When facebook issued its IPO we saw how a major internet site could be worth ten figures. If the WMF projects were closely held, for profit enterprises, that were about to issue an IPO, their worth would be comparable to that of facebook or twitter.
Only tiny fraction of the value of the WMF projects is due to the financial donations -- so let's stop acting like they are the only donors whose views count. Geo Swan (talk) 17:41, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Can someone link to evidence of an active legal case? If there is no legal case on-going, then there is nothing more to say. However if there is a real case, then disregarding the interesting debate of theoretical copyright or non-copyrightability, if part of the case is on-going damages due to Commons hosting and promoting this image under a free licence which is disputed, then we (us volunteers, not the WMF) should re-open the DR and discuss the reasonableness of taking down the image whilst the case is open in order to show due care to limit potential damage and our good practice of simple courtesy. The image is not so educationally valuable as to justify ignoring the courtesy aspect and a legal case of this type, cannot really be considered an attempt to censor or suppress material of unique educational value. --Fæ (talk) 04:09, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
I think it is safe to upload that picture, the US Copyright Office released a document some days ago stating animal-produced works are not eligible for copyright. --Diego Grezreturn fire05:28, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
@Fæ: My understanding while reading this is that David Slater approached The US Copyright Office and they refused to register those works. But I agree with you on the possibility of a courtesy deletion. Jee03:44, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
That's not what that's saying. The US Copyright Office has a guide to their internal policies, and just released a draft of the third edition. Section 306 says "The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants." and has a list of examples, the first of which is "a photograph taken by a monkey". While I believe that choice was inspired by this case, it's a collection of general guidelines, definitely not a ruling on any case in particular.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:37, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
(And this is the tip of an iceberg that I barely fathomed.) I’m sure that regardless of the finer details of this matter, there should be only one of each such categories. -- Tuválkin✉21:11, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
I agree with KTo288: they categories are not duplicates. The one for Korea would include both South and North Korea. I'm not sure how useful the nonspecific Korea categories are, but they seem to be wanted here. To me, they make sense only for things that are either 1) related to Korea as it was before the split or 2) things that are cultural and not specific to North or South (which I suppose are things from before the split anyway). --Auntof6 (talk) 18:56, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Okay, if you guys want to pretend that in the example above, about 2011 — and indeed in any category concerning dates after 1956 — "Korea" means "both Koreas", and not as a misleading synonym for "South Korea" (based on the naive and oblivious notion that "Republic of Korea" can/should be named "Korea", just like "French Republic" can/should be named "France"), then we can play that game too:
So we have both Category:Tigers in South Korea and Category:Tigers in North Korea, then we should have an intermediate Category:Tigers in Korea, under the (grand)parent Category:Tigers in Asia (to be created) or the current Category:Tigers by country… Let this be done for tigers, august 2011 events, black and white portraits of smiling men facing left looking at the viewer at bust length in the 1970s, — and indeed anything and everything there is currently under either Category:South Korea, or Category:North Korea, or both. Even if this is a good idea, all these "Korea" categories should be treated as metacats, with any file content mandatorily diffused into either north or south, with maybe the exception of having all these "Korea" categories also being used as an equivalent of "...in unknown location in Korea" (i.e. unknow whether North or South).
Frankly I see no advantage in this: Looks like a true can of worms that should be better avoided — but the original point still stands: The current contents of Category:August 2011 in Korea should be moved to Category:August 2011 in South Korea, cause that’s what they pertain to. The remaining empty Category:August 2011 in Korea should be, if not deleted, then interspersed within its right place in the tree. (Ditto for an unfathomed number of such cases.)
OK, I take your point that something in 2011 is either North Korea or South Korea. If everything in the Korea category is for South Korea (and I mean absolutely everything), then move it to the South Korea category. Then if you want, you could nominate the Korea category for deletion as an empty category.
As far as other Korea categories, I wouldn't create new ones without the north or south qualifiers if the only thing in them would be the corresponding categories for north and south. I'd also be in favor if deleting existing categories if their only content is one or both of the north/south categories. The Korea-only (no north or south) categories should be only for things where either 1) we don't know which place it belongs to, 2) it pertains to the country before the split, or 3) it's about things that can't be differentiated for some reason. We won't get rid of the Korea-only categories completely, though, because we do keep categories for former countries (such as Korea, the Soviet Union, etc.). Those go under "by country" categories along with present-day countries unless there's a separate category for former countries. --Auntof6 (talk) 01:05, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
I have two questions regarding the CommonsHelper tool:
1. The tool requires OAuth permissions to transfer images directly to Commons. I've granted it permission, but it would often ask for permission again, especially when I use a different computer. Are the permissions not permanent?
2. I get an error message when trying to transfer certain images, such as this one. The page only says "Warning: ERROR" and nothing else. How do I resolve this?
Right, OAuth permissions are usually temporary AFAIK, just like we have to repeatedly log in if we don't check "Keep me logged in"
Using some tools I saw a connection to https://tools.wmflabs.org/magnustools/oauth_uploader.php?rand=0.4(Redacted) with response: {"error":"Warning","data":[],"res":{"upload":{"result":"Warning","warnings":{"was-deleted":"Pawnee_Buttes.jpg"},"filekey":"(redacted)2.jpg","sessionkey":"(redacted)2.jpg"}}}. It likely means that the file of the same name was deleted previously. You can check "Ignore warnings" to bypass that warning.@Magnus Manske: any solutions? --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 09:00, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
I assume we're referring to toollabs:commonshelper. Agree with Zhuyifei1999 for #1. OAuth logs you out frequently unless you check "Keep me logged in". For problem #2, just check the box for "Ignore warnings (overwrite existing images)". -FASTILY03:09, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
National sport(s) team
Hello everybody, please forgive my basic level of english, but that's why I'm here: in the Category:National sports teams by country, I can read otherwise "National sports teams of (name of the country)" or "National sport teams of (name of the country)". I may have created some of those a few months ago by copying existing categories, but before creating new ones, I'd like to know what's correct. Regards, --El Funcionario (talk) 23:27, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I believe both are correct in UK English, but in the U.S. "sports" is the only one we normally use in this context (we'd never say a "sport team"). - Jmabel ! talk00:58, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Im not sure how that rfc is relavent to the average commons contributor. At most it might be of interest for people who create user scripts. Bawolff (talk) 16:12, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Need to upload duplicate image to keep reference consistency.
why not just make the one image be a redirect to the other. (For reference its possible to overcome by using special:upload and selecting ignore all warnings, but i really think a file redirect is a better choice). Bawolff (talk) 16:16, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
In the process of renaming files to improve titles, four of them somehow became unviewable, in which the image doesn't display and when clicking the image a 404 error message appears stating "The resource could not be found". Seeking advice on how to fix these files. The files are:
No idea about the technical error (other than the idea that the guys who are paid to keep the engines running smoothly for us are instead busy creating crap nobody wants and then comploting to get us silenced). Concerning the filename changes you did, however, please note that COM:Renaming clearly says that file renaming should not be used to achieve filenames which are «a bit better», which is the case of things like
Hamburgers and fries at a restaurant in Brandon, Florida.jpg ← BrandonChicagoMaxwellsBurgersFries.jpg
Pizza (7).jpg ← Pizza 7.jpg
While camel case is one of the examples given in our file renaming policy about what not to change, just adding brackets to a meaningless number qualifying an over generic word reminds me of Mr. Simon Jerk who went to great bureaucratic troubles to have his name officially changed to Mr. Peter Jerk… The 404 is unfortunate, but these filenames would have been probably better left alone. -- Tuválkin✉06:00, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Moved a bit back and forth now the main image is connected to the proper page (done for first two) but the thumbnailer has not catched up. The failed/improper moves have to be investigated though. --10:32, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Came across this... what happened here? Uploaded as "Native American" -- obviously wrong. Somebody changed the description to "Africaans"[sic], but left the file-name. Source-links not really conclusive... (move this to correct board if posted in wrong place) Seb az86556 (talk) 19:19, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Mmmh … It was the original uploader who changed "Native American" to "Africaans", just one minute after upload [11], so I would assume that the former just was a mistake (note that file renaming wasn't possible in 2006). On the other hand, File:Afrikaans USC2000 PHS.svg (by the same user) looks very different. Unfortunately, User:Martin Kozák doesn't seem to be very active any more, but you could try writing him a Wikimail … --El Grafo (talk) 20:45, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Please take a moment to join the discussion and add your suggestions for improvement. The goal of this consultation is to review the current status of this project and identify any critical issues that still need to be addressed. The consultation will remain open until September 7th, and will help us plan our next steps, based on your feedback.
To learn more about planned development tasks for Media Viewer, visit this improvements page, where our team will post regular progress updates.
Off topic but, whatever. I wish more WMF developer time and resources would go towards maintenance and improving the reliability of the core MediaWiki platform (as well as upgrades to the WMF servers) instead of goofy pet projects like Media Viewer. A number of medium size companies (including the one I work for) are interested in adopting the MediaWiki software into their infrastructure, but are somewhat hesitant to do so given questions related to reliability/maintainability, sparse documentation, and a lack of a dedicated support team :/ -FASTILY03:27, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
What sort of reliability/maintainability concerns do they have? (I'm just curious, feedback from third parties is somewhat rare). Unfortunately WMF has decided to mostly not care about non-wikimedia users (And also has a tendency to hire most of the volunteers who partially cared), resulting in not a lot of love for third party users. However, the marks are starting mw:Groups/Proposals/Wiki_Co-op with the stated goal of fostering communication between external groups wanting to use mediawiki and mediawiki developers. Bawolff (talk) 16:12, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
The one week window for feedback is insufficient. In most of Europe it is holiday season, in my case I am still recovering from the impact of a Bank Holiday and my time is squeezed due to a booked holiday of my own in early September (timed to fit in with the normal academic year). Holidays/vacations are likely to exclude a lot of people who are either not around right now, or are unlikely to have much volunteer time. --Fæ (talk) 05:19, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
First, I am again really disappointed by the poor quality of Fastily's processing deletion requests. I wonder how long do we have to tolerate it. An admin who deletes a widely used template should take care of the remaining usages, instead of waiting until someone requests it on AN. Second, unfortunately, there seems to be no possibility to perform a VFC custom replace on the link list, it is hardly possible to remove all this by hand, so the only way is a bot. I hope anyone of our bot owners is reading this. Thanks --A.Savin08:48, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
Votes and comments on Commons by WMF employees on WMF programmes of work
For a very long time, I have found it confusing when WMF employees take part in !votes or discussion about WMF programme initiatives, without making it clear they are commenting while being an employee; often it being a shock to find out that someone I had been interacting with was an employee and I was automatically talking to them assuming they were a completely unpaid volunteer. Sometimes the only comments against a WMF statement has been employees using non-employee accounts saying how they support it, this latter situation is particularly of concern due to the potentially misleading impression of support from unpaid volunteers it gives when actually no unpaid volunteers have made any comment. This has always looked like an undeclared conflict of interest, especially as it is quite hard for volunteers to trawl through various user pages in addition to following long discussions (often, if employment is mentioned, it turns out to only be mentioned on non-Commons user pages).
Reading the recent statement by the WMF here, I would expect WMF employees are now consistently to use their employee accounts in all situations that relate to prioritizing, supporting, promoting or communicating WMF projects of work, even when only tangential to their personal employment. In the past, volunteers like myself, probably felt it was somehow rude to ask questions about whether !votes or comments had an undeclared conflict of interest, I suggest that we move away from that culture of embarrassment, where being an employee, or other potential undeclared interests, was something to keep quiet about, to a more straight forward and consistent style where it remains perfectly clear who are employees and who are unpaid volunteers by using well named employee accounts.
See the related archived Commons RFC on this issue [12].
Wait, you mean that you want WMF employees to always use their WMF accounts in votes ? That's just insulting.... TheDJ (talk) 12:16, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Please take a moment to read the words I have written rather than what you think I have written. I have not said that WMF employees have to use their WMF accounts in all votes. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 12:20, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
No contradiction, the policy you refer to is focused on declaring commercial interests when creating Commons content, the WMF statement is concerned with transparency of its employees' activities in relation to the projects they are being paid to support, which in practice has almost nothing to do with particular content. --Fæ (talk) 17:38, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Reading User:Philippe (WMF)'s statement, it sounds like what's going to happen is that work related edits must go through (WMF) accounts, and non-work related edits will need to be done on non (WMF) accounts. Since comments on !votes are mostly people commenting from their personal perspective (To my knowledge, WMF hasn't paid people to vote a certain way on things, pretty much ever), the new WMF policy actually would require people to do the opposite of what you're suggesting and use their personal accounts to denote it as a personal non-work action (based on my, possibly incorrect, reading of it). That said, I actually somewhat agree with you that in those cases there are undisclosed conflict of interests which aren't being handled in the best way possible, I just don't think Philippe's statement is agreeing with your statement. Bawolff (talk) 17:54, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Over the last couple of years, every time this subject has arisen one of the key reasons put forward for avoiding any improvement to transparency has been that employees are acting as volunteers. When a discussion or vote is about the programmes of the WMF, policies of the WMF (such as this one), or as elsewhere on this page, senior managers are making announcements, I find it bizarre to pretend that when employees are making comments as if they were just ordinary volunteers, that us "unpaid volunteers" are supposed to look the other way and pretend that employees do not have a legal contract in place that means they risk their job if they say something that were to damage the direct interests of the WMF or otherwise be against their contract terms or HR policies. For this reason I have never accepted this as a valid line of argument, and I remain completely unconvinced that it could be a reason to avoid the simplest measure of transparency, being that it is ethically right that employees declare their vested interest in the outcome of discussions, policy changes or ensuring that WMF management announcements have a positive reception by the community. In most volunteer communities, it would be extremely clear who "paid volunteers" are, even while they are free to influence the "unpaid volunteers".
Wikimedia is now in the shameful position that when a brave volunteer such as myself, dares to ask employees to declare that they are in fact employees, they are shouted down with claims, such as has been made here, that even posing the question is "insulting". There is something fundamentally wrong with this picture, you should not be ashamed to be an employee and it is not an act of "outing" to call you one. --Fæ (talk) 18:32, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
I made no claim about the morality of using non (WMF) accounts. All I'm saying is that you claimed that Philippe's statement supported your position, and when I read it, it sounded like it was saying the opposite of what you were saying. Maybe what you're proposing is a good thing, maybe its a bad thing. All I intended to do was raise a technical objection to your argument. Bawolff (talk) 19:35, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
The WMF statement includes "work-related edits will be made from specifically designated (WMF) accounts, and there will be no more comingled accounts". My understanding of "work-related edits" on Commons will be any edits you make that are related to your work in the WMF in any way. To avoid issues, it should be fairly obvious that this ought to be interpreted conservatively by all employees. Consequently doing things like discussing WMF related employee policies (this discussion) would require you to use your designated WMF account, responding to communications from managers in the WMF where the community is being encouraged to support roll-out plans, consultation on plans, strategic changes, associated staff project rights, staff issues, WMF politics such as election of trustees etc. etc. are all work-related edits.
I fail to see how such a clear statement from the WMF is the opposite of anything I have written here.
Let me repeat my earlier clarification, to avoid any possible further tangent or misunderstanding, WMF employees are most welcome to use their personal accounts on Commons to do whatever they want, so long as they are not making work-related edits. Examples might include uploading a photograph of your cat, using cat-a-lot to recategorize 1,000 images of cats or taking part in Commons policy discussions or !votes that are not "work-related", for example discussions about the taxonomy of Felis catus that have nothing specifically to do with the WMF (your employer); when they do, it is prudent and common-sense to use your designated WMF account. --Fæ (talk) 13:06, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
I think the confusion comes from treating this situation as if its a binary WMF vs non-WMF edit type of thing, where really its ternary. Edits can either be totally unrelated to WMF (how to categorize cats), Official actions/proclamations of the WMF (e.g. Things that people are literally being paid to say/do, such as office actions, super-protection, Fabrice's official response to media viewer rfc, etc), and the third in between category, where people are making an edit not as part of their job, but their opinions might be influenced by their job. For example, someone not on the multimedia team, but still working for the WMF voting on the multimedia viewer rfc. They would be allowed to vote any which way they want, but the fact they work for the same organization could influence them to support their co-workers. I think all three categories of edits are different, and that WMF accounts should only be used for the first case (My reading of Phillipe's comment was that WMF accounts applies to only the first case, and that they shouldn't be used for any other case. But I could be misunderstanding). However perhaps some other form of conflict of interest deceleration should be used for the last category. Bawolff (talk) 16:20, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
May be the threshold should be that if the discussion is on the subject that is directly related to your job, than you should use WMF account, but if you are voicing an opinion not related to the projects you are responsible for than you should use your volunteer account. So for example if your day job is upload wizard development and you are replying to comments about upload wizard, than it should be clear what is your role and WMF behind your username would be a great start (info on your user page would be great too). But if you are participating in the discussion about lets say wikidata development than I do not see a need to identify yourself as WMF employee. In general I do not share Fæ view about this being a big problem and as someone with regular and [[User:JarektBot|bot accounts] I found the process of switching between accounts quite annoying and troublesome. I assume it is similar with other multiple accounts. --Jarekt (talk) 17:43, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
Please try to avoid exaggerating my position, it causes unnecessary polarization. My words above included "confusion" but not "being a big problem". By the way, using Chrome as a browser is a very easy way to run multiple accounts at the same time (or you could use different types of browser), though this is never an issue for me as I do not log in as Faebot or Noaabot manually.
It would be useful if the Foundation clarified its own statement for the benefit of its employees. None of us unpaid volunteers can do that for them. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 13:09, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
For people who accept technical solutions for social problems we already have a "mark admins" gadget, which could easily be extended to mark foundation (or chapter) employees. Just throwing this out here. Personally I have not experienced a problem here, let alone the sensation of being shocked or the like. --Dschwen (talk) 13:40, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Not a bad idea, though perhaps more useful if anyone is to check back through history for a report. In practice, the simple move by the WMF to adding "(WMF)" to work account names removes most potential for confusion ([13]), such as when someone unfamiliar with specific WMF employee account names is reading through a long on-wiki discussion about a WMF roll-out problem. --Fæ (talk) 13:50, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
The Mechanical Curator project pages above list suggests how Flickr2Commons bot can be used to upload images book by book.
However, before we start that, it would probably be good to start thinking about creating similar ingestion templates, source templates, category pages, project pages etc to those used for the Mechanical Curator collection, to keep track of what IA images we've uploaded, and to appropriately credit them etc.
One difference was that the BL collection was a single batch release, whereas the IA collection is likely to grow with time. Does anyone know if there are already any good subject-based lists as to what is in the IA book collection ? Jheald (talk) 11:14, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
Nominate category for discussion, failure
The link to nominate a category for discussion fails if the category was created by a user with a protected Talk page. You get a dialogue, but it doesn't do anything useful regardless of which option you pick (retry, report, abort). I wanted to nominate Category:Gardens and parks as an unneeded duplication of Category:Gardens and Category:Parks. --ghouston (talk) 00:03, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
The whole "Categories for Discussion" process is extremely problematic from beginning to end, since as it is currently set up, you can have a lot of images that would be affected by a category change on your watchlist, but unless you have the actual category page on your watchlist, then you have no way of knowing that any discussion is even going on. This has led to the "Adolescent girls" category fiasco of a few years back, and several other questionable decisions... AnonMoos (talk) 06:51, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Before you start nominating things for deletion you might first want to discus why we have this extra tree in the first place. What is the distinction between the two? Where do you want to draw the line? Take for example the grounds around Elswout. It's now categorized as a park, but that might as well be garden. Multichill (talk) 09:59, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
I have thought about it, and I have no idea what it's for. A park is an area reserved for recreation or nature. A garden is artifically arranged plants. So they are completely different things, and may have different parents in the category tree. A park may contain a garden. I'm not sure what "Gardens and Parks" is supposed to contain. If it's a logical union, then it should have Category:Parks and Category:Gardens as subcategories, but it doesn't. If it's supposed to show gardens within parks, then it could be named better, and should be a subcategory of Parks and Gardens. --ghouston (talk) 10:55, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
OK, I see Gardens and Parks are actually subcategories, so the category is the union of the two. I was mistaken in that regard. --ghouston (talk) 10:58, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
I don't really want to officially announce it yet, but anyone interested in the nitty-gritty can look at the bugzilla ticket or have a look at the early test uploads.
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Green Giant (talk) 13:14, 1 August 2014 (UTC) 
No, see our filemoving criteria and files can only have one name. FDMS 4 04:44, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
Collapsed "Million Dollar Bridge", Alaska
Stained glass detail, Winchester House, California
Drawing of mercury float pedestal and clock case, Block Island Southeast Lighthouse, Rhode Island
Drawings of architectural details, Dr. James Tillary House, NY, demolished in 1935
Top of flume, Electron Hydroelectric Project
Cotton mill interior, Alabama
Golden Gate Bridge, taken from the top of the south tower, 1984.png)
I would welcome any insights or comparative trend statistics on the growth or decline in the number of active users on Commons. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 11:29, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
1. Why and why not use Commons? (Media survey 2009)
2. Number of Files uploaded?
3. Own works?
4. Why participate?
6. From which projects? (Referrers)
(with link to the commons file page) instead of this 
in the corner
or 
with link to the commons file page), next to the caption of thumbnails. Instead of this 
. And another icon, if the image is from a local Wikipedia file page. See Commons:Forum#de:WP:.3F.23Armeefilmsequenz für Katzenartikel and de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier/Archiv/2014/07#Vorschaubildchen_ohne_Gewand. This would greatly enhance the visibility of commons (visual connection of logo to WP images), give some info at first glance (commons image or not), lead readers and users to file page and full licence info with one click. (There could even be an mouse-over with attribution info in the distant future) And it would stop this either-or approach (either no mediaviewer at all - or no easy one-click to commons) and this MediaViewer preferenes feature creep. What do you think?
![[3]](http://stats.grok.se/commons.m/latest90/File:Tbbt%20apartment.jpg){kind=link}
![[4]](http://stats.grok.se/commons.m/latest90/File:M%C3%BCnchen%20Marienplatz%20Rathaus%20Frauenkirche%20Liebfrauendom.jpg){kind=link}
-2014-08-11T23:39:00.000Z-Notification_of_DMCA_takedown_demand_-_DMCA_Takedown-_File:Erbil_city_center.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
online.de and legoktm.wikipedia
.jpg&diff=132133392&oldid=132121765){kind=link}
Done --Fæ (talk) 10:28, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
.jpg){kind=link}
![[11]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:American_Indian_USC2000_PHS.svg&diff=2774091&oldid=2774089){kind=link}
