Commons:Village pump/Archive/2009/06

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Citations: good or bad?

Often when uploading photos of buildings that lack Wikipedia articles, I've added some basic citations for the facts I state in the descriptions. Occasionally I've done this at the category level, when creating a category about a building. I note this recent edit removing two such citations and saying they don't belong on Commons.

My rationale has been that if someone wants to make use of the photos in Wikipedia (or elsewhere), they ought to have something citable to use, rather than just trusting my remarks as an uploader about (for example) architect or date of construction. I'm not sure what the rationale is supposed to be against such citations. Since the edit was made anonymously, I'm really in no position to ask the person who made the edit.

I actually don't know for sure what policy we have on this; if we have a policy against doing this, I'd be interested in the rationale. - Jmabel ! talk 06:31, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Commons policy is stated in Commons:What Commons is not and specifically for this subject in COM:PS#Excluded_educational_content. According to these policy documents, an encyclopedia article is out of scope. The same applies to files containing only text. However inclusion of short notes, facts or a couple of directly relevant links is not prohibited, if part of an image description, an image gallery or a category. Sv1xv (talk) 06:45, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
The category page links to the en.wikipedia article[1] so I see no reason to have a list External Links in the category. If people want to know more we should be directing them to the article rather than elsewhere, there is potential for EL to be seen as an endorsement by Commons of the information presented there. Gnangarra 08:42, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
Still there is no rule prohibiting it, and the thing was trivial. Sv1xv (talk) 08:49, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't notice that there was now a Wikipedia article. There wasn't when I created the category page. - Jmabel ! talk 17:25, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

You are correct, you created the category in February 2008 and the en-wiki article was created in July 2008. The interwiki link was added two days ago by an anonymous editor. I shall add a [[en:Seventh Church of Christ, Scientist (Seattle, Washington)]] style interwiki. Sv1xv (talk) 18:07, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
Going back to the basic question: Citations and references are necessary with many historical images to tell users where the information used to write description came from. I am not sure if they are needed at category level. A better solution would be to create wikipedia stub and link to that, however I would not be removing them. --Jarekt (talk) 04:40, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
All advice that says, “move to Wikipedia”, “create a stub on Wikipedia”, and similar treats this as a one language project where any language but English are at best second class citizens. That might not be the intention, but it is the result. This is a multi-language project, and that is a good reason to keep information here about the object of a picture, even when the description is solely in one language. Another reason to keep descriptions here is that here it is under control of this project. A stub created for documentation purpose of a picture here, might be determined to be irrelevant as an article on e.g. the German Wikipedia and thus deleted. The description kept here in the image page or category page is obviously relevant as long as the pictures are relevant. And if a description is relevant, the source of that information is relevant too, just as the source of the image itself is. I know I am not good enough in describing my pictures, but whenever someone makes a good description including relevant sources, at least let us keep it. Haros (talk) 07:32, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
I fully agree with Haros about image descriptions, but in general I am not sure about need for category/gallery pages elaborate enough to need their own references.--Jarekt (talk) 13:31, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Still, when we face similar issues, we should always check Commons Policy and use common sense. Current policy does not prohibit web links in category or gallery pages. And common sense tells that a brief description with a couple of web links does no harm, while a two page article with a long-ish reference list should normally go to Wikipedia. Sv1xv (talk) 13:47, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Alphabetical ordering of {{Departments of France}}

Hi all! There is a list of French departments at the top of many categories (like Category:Ain). This list follows a numerical ordering (Ain=01, ..., Territoire de Belfort=90), which for historical reasons and because of French collation rules, differs from the strict alphabetical ordering. Consequently, except if you are used to the numerical ordering, it's not obvious, for example, to find Paris (formerly the Seine department), between Seine-Maritime and Haute-Savoie, which itself follows Savoie... I'm volunteering to sort this list alphabetically. Before I'd like to have your opinion on this proposition. PS: I started a similar discussion on the French village pump — Xavier, 12:07, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

June 2

Proposal to phase out most GFDL options from the upload forms

Now that all Wikimedia projects are migrating to Creative Commons as the preferred licensing platform, I have proposed phasing out most of the GFDL options from the upload forms at MediaWiki talk:Licenses. Please note that this proposal is not about deprecating any licenses, it is simply about whether or not we still want to promote use of the GFDL license in our drop-down list on the upload form. Kaldari (talk) 16:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Commons page naming

Just some simple question, but is there a consensus about how translations of Commons pages should be named? Should they be named by the English pagename and have their language code after a "/", or should the page name be translated into the specific language? --The Evil IP address (talk) 16:32, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

"Commons:" pages should have their specific language names, see the language header of Commons:Licensing, Commons:Project scope and so on. To complete other namespaces: Galleries=Local, Categories=English, Templates=English/lang. --Martin H. (talk) 16:46, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Alright, thanks for the information. --The Evil IP address (talk) 16:52, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Uploading images not PD in the US

See Commons_talk:Licensing/Archive_18#Uploading_images_not_PD_in_the_US

Archive please Rich Farmbrough, 11:24 25 May 2009 (GMT). 11:24, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Final of the Commons Picture of the Year competition 2008. Voting is now open

The finalists have been selected! Vote in the 2008 Commons Picture of the Year competition.
The final voting round to select the 2008 Picture of the Year is open now. Voting closes 23:59 UTC 30 April (Thursday).

čeština | Deutsch | English | français | हिन्दी | italiano | 日本語 | 한국어 | Bahasa Melayu | русский | +/−

Archive please Rich Farmbrough, 11:24 25 May 2009 (GMT). 11:24, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

PD of other countries

After starting a discussion on public domain egyptian works on Commons_talk:Licensing/Archive_18#PD-Egypt it has turned into a confusing topic about whether PDs of other countries are relevant for Commons, as this only applies prior to URAA date (1996). Please if anyone can elaborate on this licensing trouble state your opinion on Commons_talk:Licensing/Archive_18#PD-Egypt.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Diaa abdelmoneim (talk • contribs) 16:08, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Archive please Rich Farmbrough, 11:24 25 May 2009 (GMT). 11:24, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

May 23

Size vs. Quality

There is a given portrait (well, actually I have many) that is in PD due to it's age. I have seen it in a museum, I have took photos, and uploaded it here. The photo is huge, more or less 1400 x 1000 pixels. However, the quality isn't as good as it may be desired: some parts get obscure and others have a gross light reflect (due to the ilumination itself of the museum), or the colours can't be seen as detailed as it may be desired. On the other hand, a good google search provide many captions of the same portrait, with highly better colour definition but hardly bigger than 400 x 200 pixels. Wich image should be uploaded? Or should both ones be uploaded? And wich one should be used in articles? Belgrano (talk) 04:32, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Upload both (or more); as you say they are both useful for different aspects and therefore are not redundant. I imagine that happens a lot with paintings; they can look really different depending on light and camera settings. As for which one should be used... that is an editorial decision of individual projects; Commons does not recommend, instead we try to provide all the options we can. Carl Lindberg (talk) 06:46, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
It's actually quite common to upload a higher resolution lower quality version and a lower resolution higher quality version of the same portrait. The higher quality one is generally used in articles and they're linked to each other in their "other versions" field. This does mean that the image might look pixellated in the PDF version of the article, but there isn't much we can do about this. Dcoetzee (talk) 06:51, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
And 1400 x 1000 pixels is not by any means huge. - Jmabel ! talk 16:51, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Also, only upload those you are allowed to upload: Files found via google search are not necessarily under a free licence and thus not allowed here on Commons. Esby (talk) 17:47, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
If the copyright to the original portrait has expired, and if the digital versions are faithful reproductions of it with no deliberate (and sufficiently creative) modifications, they'll qualify as {{PD-art}}. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:15, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Yes, if you can tell by visual inspection that an image is a faithful reproduction of a PD work, no other information is required. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:36, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Can we use this picture from Flickr? The photographer's license is ok but what about the possibly non-free image of Ahmed Shah Massoud on the poster? While on the one hand there is no freedom of panorama for 2D objects in Afghanistan, on the other hand the country doesn't seem to have a copyright at all. The same question applies to File:Massoud-Tomb01.JPEG and possibly File:Afgan_Ballot.jpg--Sommerkom (talk) 02:25, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

We do have {{PD-Afghan}}. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:41, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
I know, but does this really mean all pictures that were obviously taken in Afghanistan can be uploaded? I haven't really found any images with PD-Afghan tag here that wouldn't be free anyway. --Sommerkom (talk) 03:23, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
I think, it depends on where the image was first published. The poster is, I assume by the Logo on it, from the Massoud foundation. Their website hosts several images, http://www.masoudfoundation.org/EngGallery.aspx, but this images are by far not public domain, prominent 13.jpg in their gallery is from Reza Deghati, some others can be found with Getty - not a very reliable source. However, without exact information on the origin and publication of the photograph on the poster I would not transfer the image to Commons. Based on a short research I would furthermore say, that the image was taken at his 2001 visit to Europe. Of course this claim bases on clothing, mimic and headdress which is always very unchanging for Massoud. --Martin H. (talk) 04:15, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
See Commons:Deletion requests/File:Poster of Massoud.jpg and Commons:Deletion requests/File:Poster of Massoud, Intercontinental Hotel, Kabul, November 16, 2007.jpg. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 06:57, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Oh, thanks, I now found it too while looking at the version history of the wp article. The replacing painting is realy ugly and no replace for any photo. --Martin H. (talk) 15:55, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, so a picture only qualifies for PD-Afghan if we can prove that it was first published in Afghanistan - which might be practically impossible in most cases. I'd suggest the template's somewhat vague description be clarified. As for now, the template is only used for images that have been released into public domain by their rights owners (US gov), anyway, or for dubious Arabic or selfmade pictures with no obvious Afghan connection. This is highly misleading. IMHO we could just as well get rid of that template - I don't see a single useful picture that is actually based on PD-Afghan. --Sommerkom (talk) 09:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Identifying Bumblebees

Hello, Could you please help identifying this species of Bumblebees? Thanks, Yann (talk) 21:16, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

June 3

Rename?

File:Coat of Arms of the Kigdom of Italy (1870).svg would be better at File:Coat of Arms of the Kingdom of Italy (1870).svg.

Rich Farmbrough, 03:03 3 June 2009 (GMT).


File:Kigdomofcuscomap.JPG also would be better atFile:Kingdom of Cusco map.jpg. Rich Farmbrough, 11:19 3 June 2009 (GMT).

FYI, there is a {{Rename}} tag for requesting images renames. Wknight94 talk 11:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Does this image use right license?

It seems that this file is a copyright material (source from CENTAMAP), and its copyright is reserved by Survey and Mapping Office, Hong Kong Lands Department (see this proprietary right notice), but in licensing section of that file, the file is released to PD, I'm not sure if it is OK, and I don't know the process of stating copyright violation in commons. Ricky Lau(UTC) @ 2009-6-3 (Wed) 13:46 (UTC+8)

Sounds like a copyvio instead of wrong license. Chanueting (talk) 06:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I nominated it for deletion --Jarekt (talk) 12:30, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

"Templates used on this page"

Is there a way to disable the long list "Templates used on this page" shown when editing pages? Nillerdk (talk) 06:57, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

You can add the following line to your monobook.css. Pruneautalk 07:58, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
.templatesUsed {display : none}
Cool, thanks. Nillerdk (talk) 09:36, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

June 4

Convert sounds to .ogg format

When I record sounds on my mac (using Sound Recorder Mac), I can choose between formats like .mov, .wav, .wmv, .aif etc. But what do I need to make the .mov files become .ogg files? What programs can I use? Svenji (talk) 18:18, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

http://ffmpegx.com/ ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:28, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
See Help:Converting video for more options. There is also a specific page for Mac OS X on Vorbis website. — Xavier, 21:04, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

License migration: Should we allow users to opt-out their images?

The license migration announced by the Foundation will add CC-BY-SA to ~1.7 million images licensed GFDL 1.2 or later. Some authors feel that doing this to their works is unfair. Out of respect for these authors' concerns, the Foundation has given the communities the discretion to set opt-out criteria and exclude some works from the relicensing effort if the copyright holder explicitly requests it.

However, we can also choose not to permit any opt-out at all.

I'd like to gather the community's consensus on whether an opt-out provision should be allowed. Please participate in that discussion. Dragons flight (talk) 00:37, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

French and Portuguese descriptions needed for Air France 447 categories

All pages in the Category:Air France Flight 447 and Category:Search for Air France Flight 447 categories need text in English, Portuguese, and French.

  • English is essential for all pages on Commons
  • French is essential here as this was a French airliner
  • Portuguese is essential here due to the flight's origin in Rio de Janeiro.

Other languages are welcome; these three are essential. Headers need to be in all three languages. If an image's text is written in a fourth language, please include that one. Otherwise, keep it to these three in the header. All headers need to be == {{int:filedesc}} == WhisperToMe (talk) 06:18, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Portuguese descriptions needed for Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 and TAM Airlines 3054 category

Portuguese descriptions are needed for Category:Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 and Category:TAM Airlines Flight 3054 WhisperToMe (talk) 06:35, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Turkish and Dutch descriptions needed for Turkish Airlines 1951

Category:Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 needs descriptions in Turkish and Dutch. WhisperToMe (talk) 06:50, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Can someone with more experience than I check Edson Rosa (talk · contribs)'s uploads? I notice that several are logos - this makes me wonder if these and other uploads are really {{PD-self}} as claimed. This suspicion is amplified by the fact that I recently blocked (for 24 hours) the user at the English Wikipedia for violating copyright in the text he contributed. --Philosopher (talk) 07:41, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't appear to make any sense to tag images with a PD-self/GFDL-self/etc. as {{subst:npd}}. The npd tag says that permission hasn't been granted by the copyright holder, but if the uploader is the copyright holder, how is he expected to give himself permission? Stifle (talk) 09:28, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

An explaination for such cases (could you provide some?) might be that the reviewer simply didn't believe the claim of the uploader. In my experience, many copyvio-uploaders tag their uploads with "own work" and also don't hesitate at all to put it under WatheverLicense-self. --Túrelio (talk) 09:52, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, Túrelio is right: that's probably the reason. But you are right that we have one tag for two different cases, and that's confusing:
  1. The author mentioned is right, but the permission is missing,
  2. The author mentioned is wrong.
And it leads me to conclude that our upload form is not good enough. We need to make it clearer that "own work" is when the uploader is the photographer, not simply the person who made the scan/screenshot/etc. Yann (talk) 10:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
But Commons is not only about photographs, and "author" may mean much more than the creator of the uploaded image (so, I'm against the proposed change in the upload form, at least in this phrasing). The field can be used to reference the author of a depicted work, of which the photograph/image is a derivative work. In that case, npd can be justified. Also, even if the uploader is the copyright holder, if the image has been published elsewhere already, we may ask for an explicit permission. --Eusebius (talk) 10:52, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Well, I didn't propose (yet ;o) ) a change in the phrasing. But you are right about other possible explanations. Yann (talk) 11:08, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Some examples:
At enwiki, there is the NPD tag for case #1 (on Yann's numbering) and the possibly unfree files page for case #2.
Of course, whether or not to believe someone who says he created a work will be a matter for each separate case, if it has not been published elsewhere. Stifle (talk) 14:48, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
The use of problem tags on Commons clearly needs to be clarified in some way. I've been thinking about it for a while, maybe one day I'll have thought enough to propose something about it... --Eusebius (talk) 15:03, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I have started a discussion at Commons_talk:Licensing#Wikimedia_Chapter_Copyrights proposing that we extend the current exception for non-free images where the copyright is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation to also cover images whose copyright is owned by a recognised chapter. Please comment there. AndrewRT (talk) 17:02, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Establishments vs. Buildings category trees

Template {{Railcat}} automatically categorizes railway stations by the year in which they opened (e.g. Category:Railway stations opened in 1845). However, it places the railway station by year categories in the Category:Establishments by year category tree (i.e. Category:Railway stations opened in 1847 is a subcat of Category:1847 establishments). I would have thought that the establishment categories are for entities such as municipalities, organizations, etc., but that railway stations belong in the Category:Buildings by year of completion category tree along with other buildings.

I mentioned the issue to User:AnRo0002, who created the template (but did not do the original categorization), who suggested that he preferred the establishments category tree, because railway stations are often renovated or expanded (and, thus, it is presumably difficult to settle on one year in which they are built or completed). However, that's true of all types of building, and if we follow that logic, we should be collapsing Category:Establishments by year and Category:Buildings by year of completion into one category tree.

I just wanted to canvass everyone's thoughts. It would be nice if there was a consistent distinction between the two trees. --skeezix1000 (talk) 19:04, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

June 5

  • The "Wiki der Fakultät für Physik" - http://univie.ac.at/physikwiki has a collection of graphics and pictures with scientific / physical relevance. Most of them are licenced under CC oder GNU etc. I asked myself, if Wiki Commons can somehow benefit from these graphics, e.g. by inter wiki linking?

--Der buckelige (talk) 08:35, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Most of it seems to be restricted to non-commercial use, even something as simple as this. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 08:44, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Very few are CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, like this one: [3]. Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) media are not acceptable on Commons. Sv1xv (talk) 08:48, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
The licences should be the lesser problem, since we can change most of them easyly to "softer" licences. My question was more, if there is a simple technical solution - like inter wiki links - so that none of us has to ulpoad, licence etc. all those graphics. --Der buckelige (talk) 09:04, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
We cannot change the license, only the people from the University can. Also this is a completely separate project, outside of the Wikimedia Foundation, so I don't know how we could automatically link to their media. Sv1xv (talk) 09:41, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
With us i ment admins of that Wiki, respectively members of the University of Vienna. --Der buckelige (talk) 11:03, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Assuming that the University agrees to publish the images under a free license (preferably CC-BY or CC-BY-SA), the files must be copied here (Wikimedia Commons) so they are available for use in Wikipedia articles. Please don;t use the NC (non-commercial) and ND (non-derivative) CC licenses. Sv1xv (talk) 11:54, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

It would be very nice to get those svg-files here. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 19:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Curerntly I'm discussing the topic with my collegues; maybe we even have to make an "official" request at the university's legal department. Hold on ;) --Der buckelige (talk) 12:06, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Obama cairo speech

How can the Obama speech which addressed the islamic world be uploaded here? The video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BlqLwCKkeY It is however minimum 200 MB. Is there a way to upload this without chopping it into parts? If not can someone upload it (even in parts) cause I have a 256 kilo bit connection and would never get it on Commons in any way. Thank you.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 16:48, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Working on it. I exepct it should be possible to get it under 100 MiB by turning up the compression a bit. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:36, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Great what resolution would it be? And wasn't there a proposal for exceptional over 100MB uploading?
I don't see why there should be an exception. It's news, and will be on other sites indefinitely. No need for Wikimedia to store an additional video copy of speeches by prominent officials in whatever resolution or compresssion. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Okay, it's uploading now. Assuming nothing goes wrong, it'll be at File:President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo, Egypt.ogv any minute now. The resolution is 470x360, and by reducing the video bitrate to 189 kbps I got it to fit just under the 100 MB limit. While I'm at it, if anyone's interested, I thought I could also upload the full-bitrate version in two pieces (it's 144 MB total), and perhaps an audio only version for those who don't feel like downloading about 75 MB extra just to see Obama's face. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:05, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Audio would be great. Yann (talk) 20:10, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Okay, I'll upload that too. As it turns out, it seems the upload timed out, so I'll try again after SCPing the files over to a server with a faster connection. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:41, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Hmm, seems that the "just under 100 MB" file was so close to 100 MB that the overhead of the HTTP upload encoding actually pushed it over the hard PHP post_max_size limit. Or at least, that's the only explanation I can think of for the failure mode I observed (blank screen). It might be worth having the server admins bump that limit to 101 MB or something. Anyway, the audio is uploaded now, as are part 1 and part 2 of the full-bitrate video. I'm re-encoding the full video with a slightly lower bitrate yet, I'll upload it later when it's done. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:28, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks a lot and great work!--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 23:47, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
No problem. Anyway, I still haven't managed to upload the full-length video, and I suspect I'm bumping into a MediaWiki (or Wikimedia configuration) bug. I've filed a report as bugzilla:19082. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:04, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

File:Air France Flight 447 path-en.svg

Hello, This file is broken for me. Yann (talk) 16:49, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

The SVG file is indeed broken. It contains almost nothing but a reference to a PNG file on the uploader's hard drive. This will obviously not work. --rimshottalk 17:15, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
And it looks like the PNG is already uploaded at File:Air France Flight 447 path.png. No reason for an SVG wrapper (even if the PNG was properly embedded). Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:41, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Recently a series of medical ultrasound images of the womb of a pregnant woman ([4], [5], [6], [7]) were uploaded from a Flickr account, to where they had obviously been uploaded by the woman herself. (Even her name was still legible on some the images.) The license at Flickr was formally o.k. OSX then tagged the images for speedy deletion as of "Despite licensing, ultrasound images like this would be copyrighted". As (most of) this kind of images are made mainly by machines and without much or any creativity of the operator, I'm not so sure whether they merit copyright at all. Also I couldn't find anything explicite about that in the Case book or elsewhere. Therfore, I would like to collect some expert input (or at least more opinions) about that in general. To be clear, this discussion is not about possible privacy and/or personality rights violations associated with the use of such images.
So lets assume my doctor makes an x-ray of my broken ankle. He does this on (and as a part of) my behalf/"order" to heal me. The imaging procedure is paid either directly by myself (or by my health insurance). On my request, the doctor gives me a copy of the x-ray image. Is this image copyrighted and, if yes, who owns the copyright (operator, hospital, patient, health insurance)? --Túrelio (talk) 09:29, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

For the situation in Germany, it seems that as §72 of German copyright law such kind of images indeed qualify as sort of low-level photography (einfaches Lichtbild) and accordingly the doctor/operator[8] does indeed has copyright protection of 50 years after first publication or, if not published, 50 years after production. --Túrelio (talk) 09:47, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
There is a discussion of this issue at Commons:Patient images. Pruneautalk 09:48, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
See also: my talk page. As I have stated here, despite the almost zero creative input, I would assume these images to be protected by copyright in most Western countries—no differently to a randomly taken point-and-shoot photograph.
To quote User:Bidgee: "With X-Ray's and Ultrasound's the rights would be the operator or the organisation in were the it was taken even if it's a X-Ray or Ultrasound of yourself you don't hold the copyrights unless the operator or organisation agree in writing. So in short the same photography laws would apply (My view of the law)." OSX (talk • contributions) 01:10, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
In the US, it is quite clear that the creative input cannot be zero. If one takes a medical image whose composition and execution is identical to all comparable images (e.g. an x-ray of an arm taken in a standard position and with standard settings used for all such x-rays), then there is no creative input and the resulting work is {{PD-ineligible}}. However, some medical images probably do require creativity on the part of the operator, in which case the copyright probably rests with either the person who made the image or their employer (i.e. works made for hire). Not being an expert in medical technology and practice, I won't try to guess which imaging techniques require the operator's creative input and which are standardized to the point of being automatic. Dragons flight (talk) 01:42, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
There appears to be disagreement about this on Commons. I nominated an x-ray for deletion where it was clear that the organization did not give permission, at Commons:Deletion requests/File:Tutankhamunxray.gif, and it was kept without any discussion. Dcoetzee (talk) 06:55, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Therefore it makes sense to collect evidence, experiences and opinions about that problem for different countries. --Túrelio (talk) 07:19, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I would like to add that a similar issue exists for industrial radiography films, used to detect flaws in casts and welds. Sv1xv (talk) 07:25, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

¿Y qué hay de los derechos de personalidad? ¿Acaso el sujeto fotografiado ha cedido sus derechos de imagen? Suena un tanto ridículo.

En España, imagino que igual en la mayoría de los países, el DNI lleva una fotografía; fotografía que habitualmente se hace en un estudio, o en un fotomatón. Pagas por esa foto, y la pones en tu DNI. ¿Ese hecho viola los derechos de autor del estudio? ¿El estudio de fotógrafos podría demandar al Gobierno por hacer uso indebido de la foto que hizo? ¿Y también es aplicable al fotomatón? ¿Aunque sea una máquina automática? ¿No es esto igual que lo que ocurre en las pruebas clínicas?

Creo que se está juzgando de manera demasiado estricta el copyright.
⇒ (I'm not an english-speaker. Sorry for my bad english.)
What about personality rights? The mother has been "echographyed"?

Did she give permission to the doctor , to be the legal author of the image? It sounds ridiculous...

In Spain, and the same in other countries, we uses an identity document who has a personal photo. The photo is usually made in a photo-studio, or in a photo booth. You pay for the photo, and the Gobern uses it in your identity document. Does it violate the copyright? Could the photo-studio to demand the Govern for using the image he took? And the owner of the photo booth is the legal author of the all pics wich are made by his machine? Is not this like an x-ray or an ultrasound?

Para firmar tu intervención, añade a la plantilla este parámetro: « |signature=--~~~~ »

:--Rizome (talk) 10:22, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

As already noted above, these things can easily get complicated, but the photo booth case is simple: insofar as pictures from a photo booth are eligible for copyright at all, the copyright belongs to the subject, since they're the only one exercising any creative control on the result. (The only exception I can think of would be if the photo was taken against an artistic backdrop that was in itself eligible for copyright, making the photo a derivative work. But most photo booths, for practical reasons, seem to use simple featureless backgrounds.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:24, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Ilmari Karonen escribió: «[...] el copyright le pertenece al sujeto fotografiado, puesto que es el único encargado del control creativo del resultado » Pero... ¿Acaso tiene el operador de la ecografía o Rayos-X algún interés creativo? ¿Alguno más allá que el del sujeto, de ir bien peinado y bien vestido a la cita médica?
⇒ (I'm not an english-speaker. Sorry for my bad english.)
Ilmari Karonen said: «[...] the copyright belongs to the subject, since they're the only one exercising any creative control on the result » But... does the x-ray operator any artistic objetive? Something artistic objetive more than the "photographed person", who takes care of going well dressed?

Para firmar tu intervención, añade a la plantilla este parámetro: « |signature=--~~~~ »

:::Here is a list of the categories with ≈2000 images could be deleted --Rizome (talk) 19:56, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I remember discussing the copyrightability of X-ray images here before... ah, here it is: Commons:Village pump/Archive/2008Nov#Microphotographs of thin sections. Anyway, I do still believe that simple diagnostic X-rays, especially those taken with traditional non-digital methods, should not be considered eligible for copyright under most jurisdictions: the person taking the X-ray will generally not know what the result will look like, other than that it should show the body part being imaged, and thus, insofar as a diagnostic X-ray is predictable (and so potentially subject to creative control), it is unoriginal. (The U.K. may be an exception here, due to their higher emphasis on "skill and labour" rather than creativity as the qualification for copyright.)
In any case, the situation here still isn't quite as clear-cut as in the photo booth case, since even the most automated medical X-rays do involve additional people besides the patient who could at least potentially be exerting some creative control on the process — there are no "X-ray booths" in hospitals for patients to just step into and take their own X-rays. Also, the reasoning I gave above probably won't apply to ultrasound images, since the process of taking those is substantially different: the operator (as far as I know) sees a live image and can — and indeed generally must — adjust it to get the desired result, not entirely unlike a photographer looking through the viewfinder. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:06, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
There was also this discussion Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2007Sep#Non-photograph_images and discussion in deletion requests related to this discussion. As I recall the final verdict was to use {{PD-ineligible}} with all x-ray images. --Jarekt (talk) 04:34, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
BTW, just as a counterexample, I happened to come across some X-ray images that most definitely are eligible for copyright. (Note: Flash required. See this Google search for other sites with non-Flash versions.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:38, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Just an argument that they are not eligible for copyright. A person is a public domain work - no one can hold the copyright to a person, it's held by a combination of genetics and circumstance. Bone structure mostly genetics, which cannot hold a copyright. Thus x-rays, as faithful reproductions of a public domain work, cannot be eligible for copyright under our PD-ART policy. -mattbuck (Talk) 00:30, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
As nice as this argument is, it does suffer from the flaw that the human body is not two-dimensional, and thus, camera angle and framing do play a role in the production of X-rays and could potentially be creative (although I'd agree that, at least for diagnostic X-rays, they usually aren't). —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:28, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

May 31

User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands

Hello,

What do you think of Foroa's gesture, removing most of the requests and talks from User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands, and of his comment "This is not a discussion page" ?

What are we supposed to do then ? Simply forget about renaming categories ? Teofilo (talk) 19:13, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Thats ok. The first request is much to inconcrete, for renamings just please select the wrong categories from the by country category and propose renaming, the second section is a case for Commons:Categories for discussion if there is dispute. The commands page is for commands, not for discussion. I support Fororas cleanup here. --Martin H. (talk) 19:26, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, it is supposed to be a place for the most obvious moves. Anything else needs COM:CFD. Wknight94 talk 19:31, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Was about time, use Commons:Categories for discussion. Multichill (talk) 19:52, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Reading User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands#Warnings might clarify. --Foroa (talk) 22:06, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Foroa, you are the one who should read User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands#Warnings : move requests from/to proper names or English version names will only be executed when the source categories have Interwiki links to their related wikipedia articles.. On 1 June 2009, you deleted Category:Società Umanitaria in Milan after the move to Category:Società Umanitaria (Milan) had been performed by a bot, although no Wikipedia article with that name was linked. In the comment you deleted, I was pointing out that the Italian Wikipedia's related article was not bearing the city's name. So it appears that you deleted my comment mainly because you want to take liberties with the guideline of using the proper names used on Wikipedia articles. I also have the following suggestion : performed requests should be marked as performed, perhaps using <s></s> and the signature of the admin who performed the move and kept in a "done" section on the talk page. The purpose of this is to have a place to write "thank you" and to know the name of the person to whom the request makers could say thank you. Another suggestion : as said in this talk, try to leave something in the deletion log here so that people can find where the category went. Teofilo (talk) 10:53, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Teofilo, Forora is the one, who had written this sentence you now point him to read. However, Interwiki on Comons are not well established and maintained, so its not a good base to build a rule on it. --Martin H. (talk) 16:42, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Dear Teofilo, several answers.

  • Moves via the delinker are for moves that should be executed as fast as possible and should not be controversial. Even if a move is contested, you can change that via another move request or COM:CFD, not by changing it "on the flight".
  • The move to Category:Società Umanitaria (Milan) was requested by user:G.dallorto, the original author of the category, a user with an edit count of 227000. Although I am not always completely satisfied with some of his naming conventions, at least he managed to bring a consistent naming in Italy, which is now more consistent than in most other countries. His position is that a name should be predictable so he can type it in without checking or searching. Moreover, preemptive disambiguation is certainly the best solution in the long run; 20 % of the rename requests could have been avoided if people did foresee a bit more disambiguation. There is nothing that forbids disambiguation and in the end, there will be many more commons categories than there will be wikipedia articles, meaning that Commons will need more disambiguation than wikipedias.
  • user:G.dallorto used to request his move requests through formal {{Move}} requests. Handling his requests took initially most of my wiki time, so I am glad that he finally accepted to slip in his move requests through the delinker channel. Almost none of his moves have ever been contested or reverted. If we start to alter his requests on the delinker, which should normally never be done, he will move back to his formal request method with all the additional work for us.
  • The delinker page is a rolling page; last year I handled roughly 5000 moves through it. It makes no sense to make the procedure heavier, we can hardly handle it as it is while additional administration does not add value to this particular process. If you prefer a more formal procedure, they are available for you.
  • Concerning leaving a link behind: I explained already why I find inter-wiki category links a waste of time and energy, I proposed already several times bot improvements to assist in deletion and signalling where the category has been moved to, so I don't see why I should waste even more of my time (I don't have) documenting where badly named categories have been moved to. The last 10 months, I moved close to 10000 categories, so I am not really looking for unnecessary work. --Foroa (talk) 12:40, 3 June 2009 (UTC)


Before answering you I wanted to say that I have moved User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands to User:CommonsDelinker/commands/requests so that we can talk on User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands/requests without disturbing the main request page (It occured to me that you main concern was perhaps that the requests' page should remains undisturbed by talks). Teofilo (talk) 16:31, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

And I undid the move. We already have COM:CFD - which is not very much recognized. We realy dont need another place for category discussion and following complaints about missing administrators attention to this discussions. COM:CFD is the proper place, go there. --Martin H. (talk) 16:37, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I wrote a rule how to challenge requests as this seems to be the main issue. --Martin H. (talk) 16:56, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
You write in your new rule "If you challenge a request added here please simply remove it..." but this contradicts the idea expressed in en:Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines that editing other people's contributions is a bad behaviour. Censorship is one of the most severe forms of editing. en:Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines also says "Archive - do not delete". Then you write "...and kindly inform the requester about your reason", but you don't say where ! I was providing a page for the purpose of writing this sort kind information : User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands/requests but you deleted it ! Teofilo (talk) 18:07, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands is for people who can't edit User:CommonsDelinker/commands, nothing more nothing less. So please remove controversial move requests otherwise Siebrand will get flooded by complaints. Multichill (talk) 19:25, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Thinking that requests can easily (and uncontroversially! and permanently!) be divided into controversial requests on the one hand, and uncontroversial requests on the second hand, is a bit too simplistic. Actually, what happens in real situations is that a request is uncontroversial until someone raises an objection. Then it becomes what we could call a "controversial request". Teofilo (talk) 20:22, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
...and then you take it CFD. Simple!
Seriously, I don't see what's so objectionable about the Martin's rule — it seems to just reflect common sense. Above, you object to having to remove someone else's request, appearing to take "don't edit other people's comments" as some sort of holy writ. Seriously, it's not, and no-one's going to zap you with lightning just because you dared to move someone else's comment. (After all, we do that — or let bots do that — all the time when archiving talk pages.) All it means is that you shouldn't put words in someone else's mouth, take their comments out of essential context or otherwise make it look like someone said something they didn't. Or, if you do something that might risk seeming like that, leave a note saying what you've changed.
Anyway, User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands isn't really a normal talk page, so we shouldn't really expect normal talk page rules to apply exactly, either. Oh, and regarding your other question: the obvious place to notify a user about something is on their user talk page, which is what I presume Martin intended. We can add the words "on their user talk page" to the rule if that makes it clearer for you. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:38, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
"After all, we do that — or let bots do that — all the time when archiving talk pages" --> Yes but archiving happens only after keeping the comment one week or two. The new rule suggests removing the comment as soon as you see it, preventing other readers from reading it, because they won't be aware that it was ever written. This is untransparent. "We can add the words on their user talk page" : that would mean that most people won't be aware that a potentially good proposal to improve category names was ever made. Do you imagine the drastic change this would represent if this sort of rule was applied on all kinds of talk pages ? What would the village pump look like if people removed from the village pump the comments they dislike or disagree with ? And if controversies are scattered on private talk pages, one can worry that nobody will ever learn from these controversies and the same controversies will come up again and again. Asking people to move controversies to a far away place is a kind of ostrich policy, burrying one's head in the sand. Teofilo (talk) 00:46, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
If you realistically want COM:CFD to be used for this sort of issue (diff), where tens if not hundreds of categories are concerned at the same time, we should ask a developer to provide a new robot, for the purpose of adding {{subst:cfd}} on category pages and of warning editors (possibly all uploaders of images in the mentioned categories) on their talk pages. Teofilo (talk) 19:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Bot is not the way to solve this, but could be helpful in the future. The whole category nomination process is somewhat unclear and should probably be better structured and documented. Multichill (talk) 19:25, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Would a "nominate for category renaming" link, similar to the "nominate for deletion" link be easier to create than a bot ? Teofilo (talk) 20:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I am a bit sceptical concerning the concept of "preemptive disambiguation". If we embark on that idea, then let's rename Category:New York City into Category:New York City (America), just in case another New York city is built in Australia or on the Moon in the next century. Google does not find any "Società Umanitaria di Torino" and only one reference to "Società Umanitaria di Roma", so I doubt the Italian Wikipedia will soon have a "Società Umanitaria" article concerning a city different from Milan, or that Wikimedia Commons will soon provide pictures on a "Società Umanitaria" in a city different from Milan. Teofilo (talk) 19:28, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree in so far, as when somebody removes moving request from the delinker talk page, these moves are obviously not uncontroversial, should not be performed but rather discussed on the CfDs with the initiator reasoning for the move (I highly disapprove of performing moves that are objected). In principle the whole procedure should be abolished. It is very intransparent and leads to mistakes. Most editors here are not aware that this back door exists but are confronted with thousands of cat moves that have never been discussed. I also fail to see why the to existing ways (CfD and move template) are to bureaucratic. One offs can be delt with via the move template. Larger groups of categories can be put as a list on the CfDs and after discussion just c&p onto the delinker page. Which would be as easy as before.
The current procedure leads to bad quality moves. I have seen spelling mistakes, people changing their mind just before the move or couple of days after leading to another move. There are categories that have been moved three times [9], which would not have happened if these moves had been discussed before. Also every move here leads to a hundred common links in other wikis not working anymore. This should be bared in mind when people move categories back and forth. --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 17:30, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

The Wikimedia projects are wikis, works in progress. One should not expect people to perform a perfect work from the beginning. Perfection is something discovered collectively, and over the time. If change is stigmatized, people will be afraid of proposing anything. Teofilo (talk) 00:46, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Translation request

What is "Obras de contenção do deslizamento no Aeroporto de Congonhas" (Portuguese phrase) - In English? I need the translation for a TAM 3054 image, and automatic translators aren't clear on this. WhisperToMe (talk) 13:03, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

You might also try to ask that here: Commons:Esplanada. --Túrelio (talk) 14:13, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 18:05, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
It probably refer to the remedial work to the runway as described here.92.3.38.229 07:50, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

User-initiated animations

First, thanks for making available all the images that illustrate some of our entries.

At wikt:WT:BP#Animations policy we have been having a discussion stimulated by my use of a gif barber-pole animation. There was enough negative reaction to that particular animation and its low value to the entry to cause me to replace it with a photo. Of course, many other animations are useful and used, stroke order for example.

In the course of the discussion, it became clear that there is a strong feeling against animations that are not subject to some kind of user control. I understand that gif files can have a run-once mode, indeed a run-N-times mode, as well as a continuous mode. Is there a way that we can control that aspect of imported files in our links to Commons images? Our more technical types have mentioned that Java-enabled users can control such images, but not all users are so enabled. Any help or advice on this would appreciated. DCDuring (talk) 21:04, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Doubt it -- how many times to run the animation is specified statically in the "NETSCAPE2.0" extension to the GIF format. The way to stop the animated display of a GIF is to press the stop button in the browser -- though this will also stop the downloading of whatever is not fully downloaded.. AnonMoos (talk)
Thanks. This will probably mean we won't be using such animations as much. DCDuring (talk) 10:21, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
The stop button is not highlighted long enough for me to click it, if it is highlighted at all. DCDuring (talk) 10:32, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

June 6

template installation

I have started my own wiki page and I want to start posting things but I have run into a problem, there are no templates in my site. I am missing infobox's, citations, and what seems everthing else related to templates. Is there some way i can install a bunch or a pack of templates for starters? Jakesnake007 (talk) 04:34, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

This isn't really a Commons question, but your best bet is to extract them from a database download. I'm not aware of any existing generic template distribution - many of them are inextricably wiki-specific. This would be a good idea though. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:14, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Account deletion

Hi, sorry to take up space here, but I was wondering if anyone knows how to delete an account. I want to make a request to delete my own account, I no longer wish to be a user here. I have seen some people have deleted their accounts permanentally, I not only want to blank my pages, but wish that they don't exist anymore, can anyone help me?--Ariobarza (talk) 10:39, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, we can't delete accounts. It may be renamed to something unrecognizable, if you care about such things. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:34, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Strategy for RAWs

Now that I have a DSLR I'd ideally like to upload the RAWs for my photos so that others may, if they wish, create different JPEG versions based on them. Because they have no compression artifacts, a larger gamut, and more precision per pixel, they offer a lot more opportunities for creative derivative works. However, not only does Commons not accept RAW uploads, but as far as I'm aware there is no open-source common format for RAWs. What should our long-term strategy be in this area? As a first approximation, I'll note that the pixel data could probably be translated to and from 16-bit-per-channel PNG format. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:27, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

We have some problems here: Most browsers and graphics programs don't redily open raw files, of which there are many different formats and mostly undocumented. Camera manufacturers modify the specification a little with every new model. To import them in GIMP 2.0, I use UFraw [10], a free plug-in. Second problem is that RAW files are huge (10 MB) and not suitable for encyclopedic use, so if uploaded a JPEG companion file of smaller size should be available. A related problem is that some processing is required before it can be used as an illustration, also solved by the JPEG companion method. Sv1xv (talk) 05:43, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
Well, we routinely upload TIFFs and PNGs for archival purposes that are not used directly in articles (and yes, uploading a companion JPEG file is also typical and would be appropriate). The point of uploading them is so other users in the future can create better derivative works based on the original raw photos. The format proliferation issue is a big obstacle to long-term archival though. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:48, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
For archival purposes I prefer converting raw files to an open format, like PNG. I know that most people prefer TIFF, but it is not implemented the same way by all programmers. Sv1xv (talk) 07:58, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
TIFF files have EXIF information, unlike PNGs. →Diti the penguin — 08:28, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
It's not clear to me that a RAW file could be simply converted to a PNG or TIFF file - such a strategy assumes that only the pixel data is relevant and that it can be fully represented. Metadata could be migrated over as EXIF information in TIFF, but this information would require special interpretation and it would amount to an ad hoc standard (with very poor lossless compression). I think a better answer is still called for. Dcoetzee (talk) 07:05, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, I also wonder what I could do to upload RAW files over here, but I don't think it's possible yet… →Diti the penguin — 08:28, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
I was going to suggest that we ask for RAW upload support at Restoration.wikimedia.org, but apparently that project was nixed, or my memory of it ever existing is mistaken. -Andrew c (talk) 14:24, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

How about a new "Category redirect:" namespace ?

How about creating a new "category redirect" namespace, which would contain only very simple templates, always inserted in the newly named category likes this :

For example we have an old category with an old bad name, like [[Category:Rain in Spain]]. When this category is moved to the better name [[Category:Rains in Spain]], a file called [[Category redirect:Rains in Spain]] is created with only the following content 

[[:category:{{PAGENAME}}]]

another file called [[Category redirect:Rain in Spain]] is created too with the following content : 

#REDIRECT[[Category redirect:Rains in Spain]]

The old category is deleted and becomes a red link, but if you click on that red link the following code inserted in MediaWiki:Newarticletext informs the reader on the location of the new name : 

{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|Category|
{{#ifexist:Category redirect:{{PAGENAME}}
|This category has been moved to {{Category redirect:{{PAGENAME}}}}
}}
}}

Teofilo (talk) 08:45, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Alternatively, one could use something like "Category:{{PAGENAME}}/moved". But why not simply link to the new name in the deletion summary? I would've expected us to be doing that anyway. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 09:39, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
"Category:{{PAGENAME}}/moved" looks good because it would be more visible in the AJAX suggestions : this is useful for redirects consisting of translations in languages other than English. Why not simply link to the new name in the deletion summary ? This would allow non-admins to create redirects more easily. For example in their own non-English language, or when the administrator forgot to write it in the deletion summary, or when the name is changed twice or more. Teofilo (talk) 10:54, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
Another possibility is to create only [[Category redirect:Rain in Spain]] with #REDIRECT[[:Category:Rains in Spain]], and to insert <noinclude> at the top of [[:Category:Rains in Spain]], and </noinclude><includeonly>[[:category:Rains in Spain]]</includeonly> at the bottom. This can also be done in a similar fashion if we use Ilmari Karonen's idea to use "Category:{{PAGENAME}}/moved". Teofilo (talk) 10:54, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
What is status of category renaming in MediaWiki? Several months ago there was some progress. May be this feature just need to be enabled on Commons? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:36, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
Just idea... May be we need Commons link repair bot similar to User:MerlLinkBot? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:33, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to redirect {{Disputed}} to {{Npd}}

I recently came across {{Disputed}} - a template to say that you don't believe a licence. But it seems to me that it's not really used here - I've been an admin for over a year and had never encountered it before. I think we should simply redirect this to {{Npd}}. -mattbuck (Talk) 12:40, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I think it is not used because it is not included in the JS gadget. Yann (talk) 13:31, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
Some users have been using the NPD tag in that manner, but others do not. See the discussion above: here. I think this is a fine idea personally, but we may have admins that encounter such a tag and simply remove it because they don't feel it should be used in that manner (happened to me on en.wiki). But then again en.wiki has PUI for similar situations where we don't here. Just somethings to think about. I'd be fine with such a redirect, if we could all agree to put in writing that the NPD tag's scope has increased. -Andrew c (talk) 14:10, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

June 7

Let us play!

We have loads of images that need to be categorized...

So let us play a little and make it fun. Go to Category:Media needing categories as of 18 October 2008 (picked randomly). Start with images than has the same letter or number as the first one in your username (I should start with "M"). When they are done go to the next etc. (I should goto "G" next time). When no more images are left "in your name" you have won! Then you could help users with a longer name, more images or whatever. When the category is done we have all won.

If you thing I chose that category because it contains only af few M's, G's and A's etc. you can pick the next category :-D

But please try to find good categories - winning isen't all. --MGA73 (talk) 17:00, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

In Category:Other speedy deletions many movie screenshots have been tagged as speedy del because of lack of evidence that the copyright wasn't renewed. Is this common policy on commons? I though because fewer than 15% of all registered copyrights were renewed at that time, the contrary is the thing that should be proven.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 17:59, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I already noticed this, but as i was unable to say anything to the copyright i left them in the category. Please note, that all images are tagged by User:Klodl and that all uploads are made by User:Mutter Erde. I think ME is/was very familiar with copyrights, so I hope this is realy a copyright issue instead of some personal action. --Martin H. (talk) 20:41, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

June 8

Personal rights?

I am asked about "permission to grant personal rights" in Commons:Featured picture candidates. File:AmishRakingHay.jpg I have nothing from the subject and I am trying to find out if it is necessary.--JMSchneid (talk) 03:41, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

What the objector probably means, is "personality rights". --Túrelio (talk) 05:43, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


Translation Request

I am planning on nominating a number of images by the talented Mr. Böhringer for featured picture status. The trouble is, the descriptions of the images are in his mother language, German. As I am not fluent, and the internet translators I've tried deliver dodgy results at best, would there be anyone conversant in English and German willing to translate?

Sarcastic ShockwaveLover (talk) 07:49, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

These are the files in question:

  •  Done--~~~~
    ✓ Done--~~~~


How about putting this request in the German-language VP Commons:Forum‎? --Túrelio (talk) 07:51, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

copright old maps

I want to write an article in Wikipedia about the house of the painter Vermeer. I need therefore a detail of the cadastral map of Delft of 1832. Is this free of copyright because the map is almost 200 years old. Or because such maps are public domain anyhow? The map can be found in a book on the history of Delft. The map is in the possession of the Municipal Archives of Delft. A question like this might be of interest for other contributions of similar topics. What is your answer?

I think it is safe to upload 200 year old map with {{PD-old}} license. --Jarekt (talk) 18:37, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
Scan it (see Help:Scanning) and upload it with {{PD-old-100}}. Dcoetzee (talk) 18:44, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Images in Category:EliteXC

I've got a few questions, and hope this is the appropriate place:

All of the photos (save one, see below) in Category:EliteXC are taken by EliteXC itself (the promoter of the event where the fights took place), and the "permission" row reads "Released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license to Wikinews.org by John Beyrooty, EliteXC (Brener Zwinkel & Associates, Inc) (johnnybey@aol.com) on October 10, 2008.". I take it the uploader (Kamnet (talk · contribs), his last edit was in October 2008) emailed EliteXC and asked for permission for use on Wikinews, but (1) don't we need records of such through OTRS and (2) they might have though it would only be used on Wikinews and might not have realised what releasing them under CC meant. Is that OK?

The other photo in the category, File:Kimbo_Slice_1.jpg, gives CC-BY-SA but on Flickr it's listed as CC-BY-NC (thus not OK here). The image is uploaded by Cottonphotos on en.wiki though, which is probably the same cotton_man who uploaded the photo to Flickr. Is that situation OK? Do we need proof that the uploader really is the author? Thanks, --aktsu (t / c) 19:01, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

June 9

Request for a reopen of deletion

Hello Commons Community,

I would ask you to reopen the request of deletion for the following image: File:Alan dershowitz by Latuff.jpg in regard of the Board resolution about Biographies of Living People. In that resolution the board asks all communities (include the Commons) to "Ensuring that projects in all languages that describe living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles" and "Taking human dignity and respect for personal privacy into account when adding or removing information, especially in articles of ephemeral or marginal interest". I personally think that the said image violates both (it depicts something that is not verifiable and it violates human dignity). The last discussion was before the board resolution. So in the light of this new resolution a new discussion is valid.--84.58.60.196 08:17, 7 June 2009 (UTC) (Sorry, this was me, didn't noticed that I was not logged in)--Wing (talk) 09:04, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

The place for this would be Commons:Undeletion requests. Sorry, that would not be a good place. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:06, 7 June 2009 (UTC) --MichaelMaggs (talk) 09:07, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
I have no right to place a Request for Delete notice on that image. So I think it would be polite to ask here at first.--Wing (talk) 10:00, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Hmm. Technically you are right. But refering to the new WMF board resolution on BLP might merit a more broad discussion. --Túrelio (talk) 09:11, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
A discussion generally about Pictures or images or other documents about a living person would be appreciated.--Wing (talk) 10:27, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
However the drawing by Latiff is not a biography... M.Lahanas (talk) M.Lahanas (talk) 09:22, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
They are comments about a living person. They certainly fill in the scope of this resolution.--Wing (talk) 10:02, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Commons does not attempt to be "neutral" on an image-by-image basis: see COM:NPOV. We aim for a higher level of neutrality, namely that we accept images relating to all political, religious and moral standpoints provided they are realistically useful for an educational purpose and are otherwise in scope: COM:PS. There is nothing in the rationale of the WMF resolution that forces us to re-evaluate this image, even setting aside that it relates to bibliography biographies, which this image is not. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:14, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Commons is one of the Wikimedia projects so it surely should take the board resolution into account. The content of the image is not verified. It is defametary against a living person. It has nothing to do with bibliography, you are right, but it does comment the biography of a living person. The board resolution especially emphasizes that dealing with living Person should be careful and neutral. If the Commons neutrality rule doesn't fit this definition, it is Commons that should consider to change its rules, not the other way.--Wing (talk) 11:23, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
As per the request on the image's talk page, I have added an appropriate delete tag. I hadn't seen this discussion though at that point and I would agree that there is perhaps a wider discussion of foundation:Resolution:Biographies of living people and its implications for this project to be had. Adambro (talk) 12:21, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

However, we might reconsider the categorization of such images. As {{Commonscat}} links are quite common that point from the Wikipedia articles to the associated categories or galleries at Commons, we have some responsibility that a category or gallery does not get unbalanced in a way that hateful images overshadow regular pictures of the person. In this case, I would recommend to remove this image out of the category Category:Alan Dershowitz to conform to the WMF resolution which I support. --AFBorchert (talk) 13:11, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Categories are not for presenting balanced views, but for locating free illustrations. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 13:15, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
It is no problem to locate this caricature at Commons. But categories or galleries dedicated to a living person should not be out of balance as these pages are seen as extensions to the Wikipedia articles and, at times, belong to the first hits presented by Google when you search for the person's name. We cannot ignore this responsiblity and we shall not ignore the WMF resolution. --AFBorchert (talk) 13:29, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Should we delete most of user's categories because of WMF resolution? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:30, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't understand this question. Which "user's categories" do you mean? And generally, yes, if they are against the resolution, they MUST be deleted.--Wing (talk) 15:02, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
I did not suggest that, EugeneZelenko. But in some extreme cases like this image in this category representing Alan Dershowitz we should move towards a more balanced selection which would mean in this particular case to remove this person's category out of the list of categories for this caricature. Please note that this category is referenced by the corresponding en-wp article using a {{Commonscat}} link. However, Latuff and his caricature are nowhere shown nor refered to in the en-wp article (or any other Wikipedia article). He is notable as a lawyer who had some high-profile cases but he is otherwise a more private person. Shall we put any caricature that attacks any notable person in the corresponding person's category just because the caricaturist is notable? This would turn Commons into a platform that can be used for personal attacks against barely notable people who find these attacks just one click away from their Wikipedia article. I do not think that we want that and the WMF expresses clearly that we have a responsibility here:
As the popularity of the Wikimedia projects grows, so does the editing community's responsibility to ensure articles about living people are neutrally-written, accurate and well-sourced.
This is directed to all Wikimedia projects, not just Wikipedia. Given that, this includes, as I understand it, also our responsibility in regard to categories and galleries of living people. --AFBorchert (talk) 15:47, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Through the sentence "One area where this applies is when writing about living people" I see the resolution as specific for writing in Wikipedia articles and not commons in any way. It talks about creating articles with a not so much neutral tone and vandalism. Images on commons are not censored and deleting images based on neutrality would have a horrible impact on all of commons. A picture criticizing Bin Ladin would be deleted on this basis and many other critique and freedoms would be compromised. --Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 16:33, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
No problem if A picture criticizing Bin Ladin in the same manner as Dershowitz is "criticized" in the Latuff image is requested for deletion by the same rule. And yes, my/your "freedom" may end where it compromises the freedom of others. --Túrelio (talk) 17:19, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
AFBorchert's idea that we should categorise images in a way which fails to recognise that categories are merely tools for organising content is ridiculous. File:Alan dershowitz by Latuff.jpg, for example, is related to the subject of Category:Alan Dershowitz and so should be in that category, not Category:Images relating to Alan Dershowitz but which aren't completely complimentary to him or whatever. The way in which other projects link to Commons categories is of course up to them but they are not doing so under the illusion that all content would meet the approval of the article's subject, nor should they, and nor does the resolution require them. Starting to treat certain content differently because certain people are or might be offended by it is not a good idea. It would just be an invitation for the project to be distracted by constant battles as to whether certain content is offensive enough or not to merit special treatment. Adambro (talk) 17:24, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
May be, but in reality the simple fact that we host Latuffs products has already caused a loss of surely man-years of working time of users and admins. And it's not necessary to call other users ideas "ridiculous"; there are surely more civil expressions. --Túrelio (talk) 18:12, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
You had emphasized in many occasions that Commons is a repository to serve other project. And here you admit that one cannot await that other projects would know how Commons is organized and make links that probably would violate the board resolution. If the self-understanding of Commons is a service-project. This shows a very poor service-attitude.--Wing (talk) 20:23, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

If there is a category that presents an unbalanced POV on the subject, the best recourse is probably to create a gallery and link to that instead. Dcoetzee (talk) 19:26, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

✓ Done /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 19:58, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Different displays of categories according to language

Hello. I've noticed that when I switch from "french" to "english" in my preferences, I can see more information: e.g. in Category:Crosses in France: Calvaries in France: (1C, 22F) in english, (1) in french. The number of sub-categories shows up, but the number of files as well (I change nothing else in my preferences). Thus I prefer working in english. Any solution ? Thanks, Jack ma (talk) 06:23, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

You want to have a look at MediaWiki:Categorytree-member-num and MediaWiki:Categorytree-member-num/fr. I also had to change it for nl. Multichill (talk) 08:09, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks. Yes, if you can create MediaWiki:Categorytree-member-num/fr by duplication of the normal model, I would appreciate. ($1 C, $2 P, $3 F) looks fine in French, too (BTW, what does the P mean ?). Jack ma (talk) 09:00, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
I created the French page. P means "pages". Yann (talk) 09:19, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
I would like to create one in Polish too - but it seems to be one of those administrators-only pages, so can someone create it with ($1 K, $2 S, $3 P). In case anybody ask: K for kategorie, S for strony and P for pliki. --Jarekt (talk) 12:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
While someone is doing this for other languages, in MediaWiki:Categorytree-member-num/sv the letters should be ($1 k, $2 s, $3 f), and "empty" is "tom" (User:Väsk asked for this in december but it was archived before an admin made the change) /Ö 14:34, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
✓ Done. (BTW, generally the most reliable way to get a MediaWiki: page updated is to leave an {{Editprotected}} requested on the talk page. That way, someone will eventually notice and deal with it.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:24, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Wrong name

Please, could someone move the file A-Wing Scale Model - Star Wars en el Museo Artequín.jpg to something like Y-Wing Scale Model - Star Wars en el Museo Artequín.jpg? I made a mistake. Thanx in advance. - Al Lemos (talk) 14:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Upload the image again with the correct name and add the {{bad name}} template (Template:bad name) to the image with the ... bad name :-) --Aconcagua (talk) 14:34, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
Very simple :) Thanks a lot! - Al Lemos (talk) 13:41, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Image versions problem

Hello, something happened to this image File:Mahmud_and_Ayaz_and_Shah_Abbas_I.jpg so that now the colors are all wrong. How can I revert to the original? Nothing works, not revert, not undo. Haiduc (talk) 02:58, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

The current 486px thumbnail that displays on that page for me is the non-ultra-contrastified version. If you still see the ultra-contrastified version, it's probably due to cache persistence (at any of several levels). AnonMoos (talk) 08:22, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Media file problem

I am trying to download a music file to my Mac --- ultimately to my iTunes library or to my iPod or to just copy it on a cd. The file has a button to click for downloading,and when I do that, it downloads into my Mac download folder. However, nothing happens when I try to play the file, or when I try to add it to iTunes. It shows up in iTunes as a podcast, but, again, nothing happens when I try to play it. (I am a music student and am learning the piece --- this is the only rendition of it I can find and I need to be able to play it when I am not online.)

Can anyone tell me what to do to make it playable? This is a copy of the file name as it copies to my computer:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Julius_Weissenborn_-_Six_Trios_for_3_Bassoons_Op._4_-_1._Serenade.ogg -- 03:32, 9 June 2009 User:Billmvg

File discription page is File:Julius_Weissenborn_-_Six_Trios_for_3_Bassoons_Op._4_-_1._Serenade.ogg . The most basic first question to ask is whether your player software supports Ogg Vorbis formats? AnonMoos (talk) 08:28, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Changing the Village pump

I think with the new feature to search with Pages as prefix, a search box for searching within the Village pump archive will help resolve already discussed issues.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 14:34, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

If you're interested, you can look at the code I've used for my own: User:Diti/Templates/Talk page intro/en. →Diti the penguin — 16:13, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Js/interface problem

Since several month, I have this header displayed on every WM Commons page when I'm logged in:

  • TypeError: liveClock.node is null
     http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript (10)
  • TypeError: c1_div is null
     http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-Cat-a-lot.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript (48)

I don't want that error message all the time, besides, it forces me to scroll down every window. I have Java Standard Edition 1.6.0_11-b03 enabled, running under Mozila Firefox 3 in a MS Win XP 3 Home Edition v 5.1 SP 3 environment. What do I have to do? --Mattes (talk) 14:39, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Evidently you're not using the monobook skin but the standard (Classic) skin. Disable the two gadgets in your user preferences. And someone should fix them. They don't work in the old skins. Lupo 15:22, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
As a quick fix I've made these two gadgets not do anything on the older skins. But fixing them to work in all skins would be better. Lupo 15:28, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks! --Mattes (talk)

Linking to non-English Wikipedias in "file description"

Is there a way to link to Wikipedias in languages other than English? Currently I can only figure out how to link to English Wikipedia articles: [[w:foobar]] will link to the English Wikipedia article about "foobar". As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent way to link to other Wikipedias. Using the French Wikipedia as an example, I've tried [[fr:foobar]] as well a [[fr:w:foobar]], but neither works. In fact, nothing at all shows up when you type either of those.

← This is what shows up when you type [[fr:foobar]]
← This is what shows up when you type [[fr:w:foobar]]

Is there currently a way to do this? If not, can this function be added?

(I assume this is the best place to bring this up, but I'm not familiar with the back-end of Commons.) − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 14:22, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Try this: [[:fr:foobar]] → fr:foobar. --Aconcagua (talk) 14:31, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
In the left part of the window, bottom, under "Other languages", "French" and "English" should appear. The link is in blue, even if it doesn't exist (you must click on it to ensure of its existence, e.g. in Preview mode). Hope it helps, Jack ma (talk) 14:32, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
What you describe is an interwiki link. I think Twas is looking for an inline link to Wikipedias. For that you need to add a colon in front of the country code. --Aconcagua (talk) 14:37, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
I prefer the [[:fr:foobar|foobar]] foobar format of those links.--Jarekt (talk) 18:35, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
[[:fr:foobar|]] foobar seems to work nicely - notice the piped link. Man vyi (talk) 19:17, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 01:39, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

A small question

Hello, sorry to have to bother everyone with such a trivial question but: I have taken a photograph of a 'best before' date label on a food packet and am wondering if it is okay to upload it here at the Commons. The photograph is non-specific and contains nothing more than what is necessary to illustrate the concept (e.g. 'Best Before End:' and the date). However when I came to upload it I found the line 'Photographs of art, statues, commercial packaging' with a big stop sign rather concerning. Does this broad term 'commercial packaging' have any particular criteria? So long as I don't draw in corporate logos and such I can't see what the issue is... MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 21:13, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

If the image only shows the text of this common phrase, it should be okay, as {{PD-text}}. The restriction on commercial packaging is to prevent reproduction of copyrighted commercial artwork or design, which could be a copyright violation as derivative work. -- Infrogmation (talk) 21:53, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
The design of the can itself is functional, so it's fine - the only concern would be if you included significant artwork from the label. Your typical "best before" date is printed in boring text far from graphical elements, so you should be fine. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:04, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Oh that's great. Many thanks to you both. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 09:46, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

June 10

Last part of Category:Images from the German Federal Archive needing categories

Most of the Bundesarchiv uploads have been categorized, but we still have some images to categorize left. Please help with getting these last images in Category:Images from the German Federal Archive needing categories categorized. A lot of these images can probably be categorized in Category:Agriculture in the German Democratic Republic, Category:People of the German Democratic Republic or subcategories. Thank you, Multichill (talk) 17:08, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to enable uploads for DNG files

Following discussion at Commons:Village_pump#Strategy_for_RAWs

Currently Commons does not accept raw image files produced by prosumer and professional cameras, but it would be quite useful to do so because it would enable new collaborations: the greater precision and range, lack of compression artifacts, and control over postprocessing allowed by the format would allow different users to create new versions of the photo to improve on the original or emphasize different aspects. The reasoning is similar to the reasoning by which we often upload both PNGs and JPEGs of scans.

The main problem is that there are a dearth of standardized formats for camera raws, and there isn't really an open one. So for this reason I'm proposing that we allow uploads of Adobe DNG files. This is a royalty-free format that has been embraced by the open-source community, and is the closest thing to a standard format in existence today. Plain TIFF or PNG just won't cut it, because they don't store sufficient metadata for postprocessing (and adding that data in a systematic way would, effectively, amount to DNG anyway, which is TIFF-based). Some have suggested OpenEXR but it has never been used officially for this purpose. DPX is a standard but is normally used for film negatives, which are quite a different beast. Additionally, since DNG is a lossless format, it would be simple to migrate these files to another format in the future, as necessary.

I'm mainly interested in gauging support for this change. What do you all think? Dcoetzee (talk) 09:56, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

The proposal looks reasonable. Could you please list the tools (programs) that can read RAW formats and convert them into DNG? Can same tools read DNG and convert it to something like PNG or JPEG ? Sv1xv (talk) 10:12, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
But how open RAW file formats? What is situation with patents on them? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:10, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
Hmmm, I discovered that GIMP 2, which is free software, with UFRaw can read DNG. I still don't know how to convert other raw formats to DNG. Sv1xv (talk) 14:59, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Answers to questions above:

  • Converting various RAW formats to DNG:
  • Converting DNG to JPEG/PNG:
    • The dcraw tool is an established command-line tool that can convert DNG files to JPEG and is used as part of many OSS applications, including the UFRaw plugin for GIMP and ImageMagick.
    • Any tool that supports TIFF can also open a DNG file, albeit not with the level of support that dcraw offers.
    • Practically every RAW processing tool for Windows supports DNG, such as Lightroom, Paint Shop Pro, see here for more.
  • There are patents on some DNG technologies, but it's a royalty-free format (unlike, say, MP3).

If/when DNGs are allowed, I'll create a project page containing helpful links such as these. I'd be happy to answer any other questions. :-) Dcoetzee (talk) 17:37, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

  •  Support I see no problem in adding DNG in the supported formats. I still recommend saving both the DNG and a JPEG companion file of reasonable filesize. Some technical issues must be resolved (thumbnails, rendering etc), perhaps the JPEG companion solves them automagically. Sv1xv (talk) 18:22, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
  • Question Do web browsers view DNG files? I've never heard of DNG. So if such a file is uploaded, and used in an article, I'm assuming I'd be able to see the file? I think it's redundant to have so many versions that will basically show you the same thing.. PNG, SVG, JPG, GIF.. regardless, I'll still see the same subject in the picture. So what benefit does DNG add to the project other than "just another number"? - ALLST✰R▼echo wuz here @ 22:06, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
    • Raw image files cannot be displayed directly. They're essentially all the unprocessed data captured by the camera. See en:Raw image format. However, they are invaluable for creating and uploading new versions of a photo. For example, different versions of a photo may emphasize a different dynamic range of values, or have different postprocessing. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:53, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
      • Interesting but if they can't be viewed directly, what's the point in their existence on Commons? It seems to only be a technical file for use by photography people that has little or no use to the everyday user of images and film in articles. And don't take this wrong way, I'm trying to learn here, not being sarcastic or whatever. Like I said, I'd never even heard of DNG until now. I'm just trying to learn and understand how these files would benefit the everyday user of our projects while at the same time adding load to the servers. - ALLST✰R▼echo wuz here @ 23:09, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
        • No problem, here are a few simple examples:
          • User:A creates and uploads a photo. Later, User:B thinks the photo came out too dark. User:B downloads the DNG file, generates a brighter photo, and uploads it. Because DNG files store much more precision per pixel, the result will have considerably less noise, clipping at zero, and other artifacts compared to merely brightening the JPEG.
          • User:A may have over-processed the photo by applying too much sharpening, contrast, brightening to the point of overexposure, or not saving the JPEG at a high enough quality. These processes are all irreversible. Using the DNG, User:B can reverse and tone down these embellishments.
          • User:B may wish to crop out one person from a group portrait - but that person is standing in the shade, necessitating brightening. Again, use of the raw image decreases noise and artifacts. This case is interesting because User:A cannot have anticipated it.
        • Having raws becomes more important after the original uploader has departed, and cannot or will not fulfill requests for reprocessing. It also allows for novel collaborations between users who are good photographers with users who are good postprocessors of photos. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:31, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
          • So then the DNG file will be noted or tied to the PNG/GIF/JPG file some way, I'm assuming? How will a user know there's an accompanying DNG file for an image file they may be viewing? I'm thinking a similar template to the current "there's an SVG file" we use now on other files... but what if someone forgets to tag a file with its accompanying "there's a DNG file too and it's located here" template? Will we be left with unknown DNG files? Can the software be made to automatically add a DNG file to a certain Category such as well, Catgeory:DNG files, as soon as its been uploaded? - ALLST✰R▼echo wuz here @ 04:00, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
  • To play devil's advocate to myself a bit: DNG is not ideal in one additional way. Quoth Adobe, "the Adobe DNG Converter will not necessarily maintain all of the private metadata in certain camera-specific raw formats because this information is not publicly documented and therefore not available to Adobe. However, the Adobe DNG Converter will maintain all of the original image data as well as all of the metadata needed for a high-quality final conversion. [...] The DNG file offers greater assurance of longevity, but the camera-specific file may contain more metadata." My assertion is that in the context of Commons, it's acceptable to sacrifice a limited amount of undocumented metadata in exchange for assured long-term support. The alternative - supporting uploads of every manufacturer-specific RAW format under the sun - would rapidly become an administrative nightmare. This doesn't mean uploaders should go delete their original manufacturer-specific files, just that we don't really need them for the basic tasks we're concerned with. Dcoetzee (talk) 08:20, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
    Besides, that seems like a problem with a particular (if common) converter, not with the format. From what I read on their pages, digiKam for example at least tries to preserve all metadata, even the parts it doesn't understand. (Oh, and yeah,  Support.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:15, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
  •  Support: It goes without saying that if these hold more digital information then they are going to be bigger files in this format than in the current allowable formats. Also, because of the fact that there is more information to record as the image gets brighter, perhaps upmarket cameras might be getting close to or even exceed the maximum file size? I think we should be aware of the practical upper limit if only to advise dial-up modem users. Does anybody know what a pure white image at the WC maximum file size is in DNG?--P.g.champion (talk) 17:22, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
    The theoretical worst case, for an image consisting entirely of uncompressible random noise, should be something like six bytes per pixel. So the 100 MB upload limit should not be a problem for cameras with less than 16.7 Mpix, and in practice it shouldn't matter even for much higher pixel counts. FWIW, the .NEF files from my Nikon D70s tend to take a couple of megabytes each; I'd expect them to be about the same size in DNG format too. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:54, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
    Oh, wait, that should be two bytes per pixel, not six, since (at least for cameras with a Bayer sensor) a raw image only stores one color channel per pixel, not three. So make that 50 Mpix, not 16.7 Mpix. Looks like 100 MB should be enough for a while. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:00, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
    Regarding filesize, the 12MP 14-bit lossless raw images from my D300 are typically about 10-12MB in DNG format (about 10% larger in the original NEF). The high-res pro DSLRs can get up to about 20MP, which would double this. Dcoetzee (talk) 04:58, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
The raw image (CR2) from a EOS 5D MkII can be almost 30MB. Haros (talk) 05:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

This seems like a good thing. Perhaps not for uploading images and using them in articles or galleries as we are used to, but if they are free, within scope and may be useful for a purpose the other formats don't manage that well, then it should be allowed.

However, before going on with this, I would like some strong confirmation that this is indeed a free file format. Belgrano (talk) 03:13, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Trouble seeing images on wikimedia projects including wikimedia.org using Firefox

Hi beginning a hour ago I have not been able to see images from wikimedia projects using Firefox in linux. This includes wikimedia.org. But Firefox does see images in non-wikimedia wikis and other websites like BBC, MSNBC, Google, etc. However, I am able to see the images using Konqueror. Any advice?--130.215.96.89 21:32, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

The problem was apparently with some Firefox setting/configuration file being messed up. I deleted the .mozilla directory and relogged in to my account and now everything's fine.--130.215.96.89 21:51, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

NPG vs. LIFE

Who is the photographer?

Hello,

The National Portrait Gallery and LIFE do not agree on the name of the photographer: [11], [12]. For the NPG, it is Herbert Rose Barraud (1845-1896), for LIFE it is John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1813-1901). Both are quite possible: Which one should we believe? Yann (talk) 22:18, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Generally I'd trust NPG over LIFE when it comes to attribution. Nevertheless, as long as both are okay for copyright status (and they appear to be), I think the best thing is to just list both, noting the source for each. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:46, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
The LIFE entry claims the photo was taken in 1901. That was one year after the subject died, and the same year that Mayall died (on March 6, per here) at a very advanced age (some sources say Mayall was born in 1810, others 1813, and the freebmd entry says he was 91 when he died in March 1901). There is another copy of the photo here which appears to have a Barraud credit (and published by the Rotary Photo Co.). The LIFE information doesn't seem all that credible. It is possible that "Barraud" was just the studio and not the actual photographer, but it is hard to say. This page indicates the NPG has a collection of combined Barraud and Mayall photos; it is quite possible that something got mixed up at LIFE. Carl Lindberg (talk) 00:48, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
OK, thanks for your answers. Seeing that we have to independent attributions to Barraud, I will keep this one. The date mentioned in LIFE are very often wrong. There is no doubt that the photo was not taken in 1901. Yann (talk) 07:50, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Wrong picture in article

I am new to Wikipedia and need help. Someone put up a page about me (Diane Stanley) which is mostly accurate, but the picture is of somebody else. I have uploaded a correct picture to Wikimedia but don't know how to delete the current picture and its caption and put a correct picture in. Can someone help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dsvennema (talk • contribs) 18:14, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I've added the new picture you uploaded to the Diane Stanley article on Wikipedia. As for the old picture, you could tag it with {{Fact disputed}} or nominate it for deletion (since, after all, it's not much use if we don't know whom it really shows). —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:24, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
Hmm, as User:Dsvennema claims the image is about herself, we'll have to believe it. Otherwise I wouldn't be so sure about that, as the "original" image is said to be shot 19 years ago. --Túrelio (talk) 12:49, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

June 6

GFDL 1.3 relicensing notice (and translation request)

As the date set by the Wikimedia Foundation for the GFDL 1.3 -> CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensing update approaches, I've added a notice about the impending relicensing to {{GFDL}}. I'd now like to request the community's help in

Please also feel welcome spread this notice to village pumps in other languages. I'm planning to spam it across all of them (that haven't been notified yet) in a day or two, in order to reach as many potential translators as possible, but I'll start with this announcement here for now.

Also, the general coordination page for the license migration on Commons is at Commons:License Migration Task Force. Please join us there to help plan and implement further stages of the migration process. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:49, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

June 11

I uploaded a picture, but its orientation was wrong, so I rotated it using 

jpegtran -rotate 270 -copy all -perfect

and uploaded again. Now the picture seems to be OK, but the thumbnail in file history appears wrong. What should I do to fix this? I have several other images and I am afraid to run into the same problem again. --Marozols (talk) 12:09, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I managed to fix the problem using
jhead -autorot
Thanks. --Marozols (talk) 12:47, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
The thumbnail appearance problem was just cache persistence, and would have gone away on its own after a while (or you could have tried "purging" thumbnails, etc.). By the way, jpegtran rotates "losslesly" (within limitations), while general image editing applications don't (which can be important in some contexts). AnonMoos (talk) 16:31, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Library of Congress mass upload?

Hi everyone, did anyone ever do a mass upload of Library of Congress images? Did anyone ever try to contacting them? The have a huge collection of free images, would be nice to do a batch upload like we're doing with the Bundesarchiv and Deutsche Fotothek. Multichill (talk) 12:48, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

There was a discussion about it here. We already have set of PD licenses for LOC here. In the past I have seen a discussion saying that Commons is/was talking to LOC about mass upload and then I heard about mass transfer of images from LOC to flicker under "LOC is not aware of any copyright issues" license. I can not find those discussions now. I agree that a coordinated mass transfer, with or without help of LOC would be great. One challenge would be not duplicating about 20k images we already have from them. --Jarekt (talk) 13:59, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the pointers. I would like to get the images from LOC directly, the MARC records are very useful for metadata (example). I already wrote a tool to calculate the number of exact dupes (same hash) in a image set before upload. This can be used to prevent dupes or at least mark them. Multichill (talk) 15:22, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
AFaIR the LOC hosts images that are PD only in the US, not in their country of origin. If there is a mass upload, those images should be excluded. We also need a more detailed statement than "No known restrictions" or such, so we can tag the images with the correct licensing tags (PD-US, PD-USGov, PD-old etc.). Regards, -- ChrisiPK (Talk|Contribs) 15:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes. We have to be careful. We should probably just start with the really old works in the collection to be on the safe side. Multichill (talk) 13:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Do we need to focus on quantity ? Isn't this (and bundesarchiv, and pikiwiki etc...) sounding like a {{NUMBEROFFILES}}-worship ? Let's upload files little by little, when someone needs them, or feels they can be useful. Batch uploads are not nice. Mass uploads are useful only in one instance : when we know that the source website is going to collapse. But I don't think the Library of Congress is going to collapse soon. There is no emergency. Teofilo (talk) 10:54, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
It's not number of files worship. It's about improving the content of Commons. With a batch upload you can get a lot of nice images at once without too much effort. Multichill (talk) 13:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I agree with Multichill. I am big fan of mass uploads, since they can provide really great images. For example bundesarchiv collection of WWII images from Poland is very good and in Commons we can access them much more easily than from the original database( and without the annoying watermark). Many wikipedia contributors are not going to search through dozen of databases (which are often not cataloged by Google) and than evaluate copyrights for each image they need. Also if one measures ratio of number of images gained to number of copyvos that will have to be dealt with by admins, than mass uploads are likely much better than regular ones. --Jarekt (talk) 19:38, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I totally agree with Jarekt here. If we can do a mass upload of LOC images, we should do it. Yann (talk) 20:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Need help

I have uploaded an image It is an image file of a political party logo I have received a request from Wiki to add categories to it I cannot, for the life of me, work out how to do it despite Wiki telling me how easy it is. All I see are a never ending circle of interlinked pages, none of which give me a simple answer but instead refer to yet another round of interlinked pages I can't even find a list of categories

All I want to know is 1) how do I categorise this picture as a political party logo 2) how to I upload it to appear next to an article I uploaded about this political party?

Thank you

Chris Kelly

Edit the image page. Down the bottom, you'll find a selection of editing buttons in the toolbox. Click on [[Category:]] to insert the code and add in the title of the category you want - e.g. [[Category:Top hats]]. Then save. Man vyi (talk) 11:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Is the following license text compatible with Commons?

Hi all. A user of the Basque Wikipedia has asked me to help with an image that he wants to upload to Commons. It is this one. He has talked to the publishing house and got the authorization to use it. However, I doubt that the permission give by the publihers is compatible with Commons. He received the authorization by email, this is the text (translated using Google Translate):

Editorial XXX grants WIKIPEDIA the right to use the image with the sole purpose of illustrating the articles on their websites, while retaining full copyright of the image and the right to be recognized as an author under the terms of the license chosen for this work. Editorial XXX reserves the right to take legal action against anyone who uses this site to violate any other law, such as trademarks restrictions, libel or specific geographic restrictions. Editorial XXX recognizes that it can not withdraw this agreement, except by a three months' notice and that the picture may or may not be stored permanently on a Wikimedia Foundation project, if the purpose of the importation is authorized.

I don't want to use COM:OTRS, because I am almost sure that it is not compatible, but I wanted to have some advice before talking to the user. --Assar (talk) 14:28, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest that it gets uploaded to the Basque Wikipedia. A condition of WC is that an image has one of the 'free' copyright licences unless it is PD. This image clearly does not satisfy this basic condition. However, that should not stop it going on the Wikipedia but still send the OTRS to the Foundation. Wait till somebody confirms this. --P.g.champion (talk) 15:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't think that it is okay to upload it to Basque Wikipedia. Images on local projects also must be free to re-use. We allow fair use on some projects although fair use is not really free, but fair use at least allows re-use. Wikipedia-only doesn't. --Slomox (talk) 16:31, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
The Basque Wikipedia decided to not store any image and upload all of them to Commons, both to save space and to give other people facilities to use them in other Wikipedias, so that's not an option for us. Anyway, thank you both.--Assar (talk) 20:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Wrong information maps

See File talk:H1N1 Argentina Map .png ; If it is not deleted, shouldn't it be categorized? There's already a disclaimer on the image.70.29.212.226 10:16, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Of course it should be categorized. Every image should be categorized. Multichill (talk) 12:26, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
User:Dexxter says they should not be categorized, per the talk page, and removal of the categories that were added to the image... So, is there a document I can point to, to point this out to Dexxter? 70.29.212.226 13:04, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
If the information on the map is unanimous wrong, it should be deleted. Yann (talk) 17:18, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
There is one error on the map, an unconfirmed death is marked in black, otherwise the image is the same as the other Argentine map for that date. It should be confirmed deaths that are marked in black. 70.29.212.226 07:04, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

the strange case of the missing image

Hi all, anyone know why this image doesn't appear except as a direct link? - File:Australian Magpie - distribution.svg

The SVG validator gives warnings (but no errors). Try fixing that. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 21:14, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Erm, how do I do that? (I didn't make the image) Casliber (talk) 21:16, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I fixed it. The file linked to two other files. That is not allowed in SVGs on Commons. /Ö 21:48, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks! much appreciated. Casliber (talk) 21:51, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

File:Giuseppe gariballsi!.jpg Obviously false copyright claim. TreasuryTag (talk) 20:53, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

The copyright might be ok, depending on the age of the pictures. Deleted as out of scope. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:16, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

June 14

Deletion of picture of modern artwork

I uploaded this picture recently. I wasn't sure what it was, but an answer at en-Wikipedia's reference desk here, told me that it is a modern artwork created using old stone (in public view in the UK, unveiled 1997). I think it therefore needs to be deleted, for copyright reasons. Can I just request that here? I'll try not to upload unidentified stuff in future... Carcharoth (Commons) (talk) 16:45, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Its ok from UK, see COM:FOP#United Kingdom. "Freedom of Panorama" allow photograhic works based on someone elses, still copyright protected artwork. --Martin H. (talk) 16:52, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Oh, OK. Thanks. Now I need to work out if there are any articles that it can be used in. Carcharoth (Commons) (talk) 16:55, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
First of all you should add [[Category:Durham]] or [[Category:Prebends Bridge]] to the filepage to give the image a categorie. Maybe some subcategory of Category:Art of the United Kingdom would also be a good idea. --Martin H. (talk) 16:59, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

June 15

Categories/Keywords?

I'm absolutely in love with Wikimedia Commons. This is truly an internet tool that I've been looking for for years. Gush gush gush!

The problem is that I can't find what I really need. If you take any individual picture, it might have one or two categories assigned to it. But it is possible that 10, 25, or 50 would be more appropriate. How much leeway does one have in categorizing pictures? Can I add new categories and move others around at will? May I move Category: Smile underneath Category:Facial_expression? May I add Category: Smile to every such picture that I come across?

And then there's consistency issues:
The first image in Category:Facial_expression depicts a woman with "Décolleté". Why is this a separate category from Category:Cleavage_(breasts)? (No, I'm not breast obsessed; I was looking for facial expressions.) Should the categories relate to those used on Wikipedia for consistency? After all, Décolleté is defined at the top of the page as cleavage at Wikipedia.

The second image ironically enough depicts a man with a checked shirt; the first image is categorized under Category:Checkered clothing, but this second image is not. Go ahead and add this category to the second image? Should one add mustache, male, smile, etc. as categories?

Sorry if any of these seem obvious; from the stand point of "Stock" images, these things are easier to find later if there's greater consistency...so what limits do I have and is there a "central" authority to prevent this from all becoming unglued? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rustbelt Maps (talk • contribs) 17:06, 14. Jun. 2009 (UTC)

Rustbelt Maps (talk) 15:06, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

For an explaination of the categorization, see: Commons:Categories. --Túrelio (talk) 15:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
I would say: go and organize. We always need more people straightening up the categories. If you are unsure or think that some moves can be controversial than ask first on talk pages of given category (or here), but most of the time you will not hear back. Make sure you use cat-a-lot and hot cat tools (see my preferences / gadgets / Tools for categories) to be more efficient. --Jarekt (talk) 14:03, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Typo in GFDL/de template

There is a minor typo in the German version of the GFDL template. It links to "Kriterien zur Neulizensierung", but "Neulizenzierung" is written with two z and without s. I have already moved the page to Commons:GFDL 1.3 Kriterien zur Neulizenzierung, but I cannot change the template because it is locked. --Head (talk) 12:54, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Done. --Martin H. (talk) 13:06, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

New licensing messages for text

We seem to have new cc-by-sa & GFDL double license for text with another long this is not wikipedia notice below every edit box. Both messages take about 8 lines of text on my screen and force me to scroll each time I use one of the buttons on the bottom. I have read the messages and agree with them - now is there any way to acknowledge that and skip those messages in the future edits, or collapse them into a single line somehow? May be we can add an preference box (false by default) to allow one line version of those boxes. --Jarekt (talk) 14:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd also be interested in any opt-out mechanism... Can it be deactivated through JS or CSS, for instance? It's obviously a good thing that the messages are there, though. --Eusebius (talk) 16:06, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

This will suppress it entirely in personal CSS: 

div#editpage-copywarn {
  display: none;
}

If there is going to be a gadget I would prefer it be one that creates a show/hide box so that the information is not so far gone that people forget about it. Dragons flight (talk) 16:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. I'm not convinced it should be a gadget (I'm not convinced it should be TOO easy to hide). --Eusebius (talk) 16:32, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
that worked thanks --Jarekt (talk) 18:19, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Terms of use

Please see Commons:Terms of use, as adapted from m:Licensing update/Implementation. Although this is based more off the reference drafts, since as of right now we're saying that all edits as of today are CC-BY-SA/GFDL, it would be good to make sure this is implemented. We may also want to think about being able to merge Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia into it too. ViperSnake151 (talk) 19:08, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

June 16

I do not know much about copyrights, but I have a concern about a couple of pictures and do not know how to proceed. File:Big Red B-17 Photo.jpg and File:Big Red Crew.jpg were uploaded by User:CrayZatseA stating that the pictures are the work of the uploader. On his talk page on the english wikipedia he states that he is not the original creator. He says he was given copies by the original creator, is this a problem? A new name 2008 (talk) 01:51, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I think a permission is needed. You can open a deletion request. Yann (talk) 10:11, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice, I have opened deletion requests on them both. A new name 2008 (talk) 21:33, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for submerged bridge?

Hi, I am looking for some pics of the ancient en:Karamagara Bridge. Unfortunately, the bridge is sumberged since the 1970s and the image requests for the only two pics I found online (Panoramio I and Panoramio II) remained unanswered. There are some more pics in a scholarly work from the 1960s on the ancient road system in the region which show the bridge then. My question: Can I use the pics despite the lack of admission of the Panoramio users/scholars on the grounds that the briddge is today invisible (or perhaps even destroyed) and very likely to remain so for a long time? Does fair rationale use apply for this specific instance? Regards Gun Powder Ma (talk) 08:25, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

No, on Commons fair-use rationale is never applicable. However, if using the image for a specific purpose/article on :en, fair-use rationale may well be applicable. But that would require uploading the image locally. --Túrelio (talk) 08:49, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Carlos Latuff cartoons arbitration

Please see Commons:Categories for discussion/Current requests/2009/06/Carlos Latuff for a proposal as to how we might settle the long-running argument about the proper categorization of the Carlos Latuff images. It has wider implications for the categorization of files that disparage a living public figure. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 13:18, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Money-EU template change

I'd like to have some input on clarifying the {{money-EU}} template, and also the deletion of many files on Commons that use it. The issue is the presence on Commons of images bearing the national faces of Euro coins. The Money-EU template is not clear that the EU document setting out the copyright restrictions for images of Euro coins (CftC 2001/C 318/03, referenced by the template and viewable here) only refers to the European side, the "common face design", and not the national sides of the coins. Quoting from the document: "Reproduction of all or part of the common face design of the euro coins is authorised without recourse to a specific procedure in the following cases..." [emphasis mine]. For the national sides, see for example Template:Non-free currency-EU coin national on English Wikipedia. It seems that every national face of Euro coins is represented on Commons (see Euro), so either I'm somehow wrong or there's a lot of deleting to do. Thoughts? - Gump Stump (talk) 17:38, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm highly worried about this fact (national side). Additionally, I am worried about the common side as well (the relevant communication from the Commision explicitly require "faithful likeness" - which is conflicting our requirement of possibility of making derivate works). See (now dead) discussion at Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2009May#Common_side_of_euro_coin_and_faithful_likeness. I indeed think there is a lot of deletion to be done. Nillerdk (talk) 13:56, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
I'd like to keep the "common side" issue separate from this; previous discussions have obviously been spirited but not conclusive. The national sides being a violation of Commons policy is far less controversial, I think. - Gump Stump (talk) 17:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Sure, let us discuss the issues separately. How do you suggest we proceed? The {{Money-EU}} is obviously invalid as a license template for the national side of the Euro coin. Probably it would be a good idea to deprecate this template and replace it by {{Euro coin common side}}, {{Euro coin national side}} and {{Euro bank note}}. But before doing that we might discuss if any of those templates can be used a free license templates? I'm open for suggestions. Nillerdk (talk) 19:14, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
I think the {{Money-EU}} template could be modified to specify that only the common, European sides of the coins are applicable to that license template. But I do like your idea of splitting the templates, so that there is no ambiguity (and the "national coin" template could redirect to speedy deletion). The "common side" and "bank note" templates could be applied as the money-EU template is used now (if I may dodge the contentious free/non-free question raised about that template!). However, I don't have any experience with template creation/deletion, so splitting the templates may be a huge task. How would I proceed if I were to propose that? - Gump Stump (talk) 00:10, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 12

Crediting authors of OpenStreetMap maps

I don' think "Author:OpenStreetMap contributors" on {{OpenStreetMap}} (for example on File:Glasgow.png) is complying with the Creative Commons license requirement to credit authors. Crediting an author means providing this author's name. Writing "some unnamed author somewhere" is the same as giving no credit at all.

  • Is there an author list or history page on the source website ? If so, is it not possible to add the URL of the author list or history page ?
  • My understanding of that project is that internet users add names on a blank map provided by the website owner. Do we know the source of the original blank map ? This information should be written on the template.
    • Because the Creative Commons License requires us to credit all authors
    • Because we need to know when the blank map was created (the outline of coasts and river banks changes little by little over the years, or when a volcanic eruption occurs, or when a dam creates an artificial lake, when a marsh is dried, a port is built, etc...)
  • Are we sure that the original blank map is free ? Is not the original blank map copyrighted, while only the layer provided by internet users is free ?
  • Openstreetmap is a wiki. Is it reliable-enough ? Do they have a copyvio-deletion team ? Requests for deletion pages ? Wikipedia article en:OpenStreetMap says : "Use of unfree data is an especially severe problem for a map", which is quite enigmatic.

(I can't surf too much on OpenStreetmap myself, at this seems to freeze my computer)

Teofilo (talk) 10:29, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The perils of attributing such a map are comparable to those of attributing a Wikipedia article - Creative Commons may technically require attribution by name, but it may suffice to provide access to a list of names, such as via a URL. As for the original blank maps, I think they're okay, but I need someone who knows more to confirm this. My hope is that the blank maps are derived from US federal government data. Dcoetzee (talk) 11:20, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
The users do not only add names, but also draw the map using GPS devices. Some of the data comes from other sources under compatible licenses. --AVRS (talk) 18:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I think Wikimedia Commons' uploaders should give the details on the original source, and not merely credit "opensteetmap" as a source. Teofilo (talk) 21:10, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I participate in OpenStreetMap and asked the OSM developers (I think User:Firefishy) some time ago to create such a page with the list of all contributors. This attempt was then abandoned. The problem is that the creator of OSM (Steve Coast) had initially only a very superficial understanding of CC-BY-SA when he created the product (OSM map). He should have chosen that attribution to the project is enough (Copyright Openstreetmap under CC-BY-SA 2.0). He did not. So attribution to "OpenStreetMap contributors" is the only sensible choice at the moment. It could be possible to retrieve a list of all contributors from the database. But this until now was not a priority for OSM. Longbow4u (talk) 10:32, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
It seems to me that the easiest way is to provide the permanent link to the map, or the history page of that map directly. For example, the map of London has all its contributors listed on its history page. –Tryphon☂ 12:03, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, this is essentially what Wikipedia recommends for article attribution - so it should suffice here too. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:27, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

E-mail preference default setting

Hi all! Commons is one of the project that allows e-mail notifications to be sent out if one's talk page changes, and, as Wing points out in the section above, there are lot of users who are on Commons only while uploading their pictures and thus usually they get the different notices on their talk pages too late. I believe, if the e-mail notification was turned on as a default, it would be an improvement (with the unfortunate side effect that users would get an unnecessary e-mail about the automatic welcome bot on their talk page). What do you think? --Dami (talk) 15:19, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

AFAIR the "send email on watchlist change" feature has been disabled on most larger wikis (including dewiki, enwiki and probably some more) because it generates too much mail traffic. I think activating it by default might also generate a considerable amount of traffic. However, I generally like the idea, but we should ask the sysadmins whether this is feasible. Regards, -- ChrisiPK (Talk|Contribs) 18:35, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I think the suggestion is to send e-mails when the user's talk page is edited, not when any watched page is edited (the second tick box in the E-mail preferences, not the first one). If this isn't already the default, it should be, as it would help warn people that one of their images is up for deletion or is missing essential information. Pruneautalk 09:25, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I just checked: this is already the default. Pruneau (talk) 09:29, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
For new users maybe. Does anyone recall when this was enabled? We could also have this turned on for all current users. Multichill (talk) 12:34, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Some statistics:
  • Total users : 714,489
  • Users with talk-notify enabled : 620,715
  • Users with an authenticated emailaddress : 304,480
  • Users with talk-notify and an authenticated emailaddress : 256,991
So it looks like most users just have to authenticate their emailaddress to get it working. Multichill (talk) 13:06, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I only recall it was a long time ago, but commons memory is better than mine: 11 November 2006 :)
The problem with mass turning on is that there's no difference between no changing the default you were given (ok to change) and explicitely setting it (shouldn't be changed).
OTOH someone which authenticated its email address in the last three years probably doesn't mind having it enabled for him. Platonides (talk) 20:58, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
The email notification function for edited talk pages often doesn't work properly. I've had emails arrive more than a month after my talk page has been edited. When an image is deleted a week after tagging and you receive an email about it a month after tagging, you'd obviously be confused and displeased. Anrie (talk) 10:35, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 13

Images used, violating the license

I found one of my images that I published here under GFDL/CC-BY-SA is used on this web site. The site neither credits the image author, nor wikimedia, and there is no mention of the license, not to talk about a link to the license terms. I sent them a message, kindly asking them to use the image according to the license, but did not get any reply. What can I do? --Vesta (talk) 13:23, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

DMCA them, that'll stop it. IANAL ViperSnake151 (talk) 13:53, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
You can use the {{Published}} template with the "legal=no" parameter to indicate on the image description page that the image has been used in a noncompliant fashion, which helps to shame them. You also have the option of sending them a DMCA takedown notice - we don't currently have a page describing how to do this, but there's lots of related info out there if you just search on that. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:26, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Is this derivative enough to have no new copyrights?

Georges Cuvier drew File:Cuvier elephant jaw.jpg in 1798–99. Eric Buffetaut gave this image by courtesy to Michael Benton for publishing in Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record, 1st Edition.[13] The way I look at it, Buffetaut either scanned Cuvier's drawing or traced it, so he should have no copyright to the image, right? Can I upload Buffetaut's derivative work under {{PD-Old}} (and if so, should Buffetaut be mentioned as one of the authors, or just Cuvier alone)? Is there something I have overlooked? Jappalang (talk) 12:52, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I haven't looked at the external site, but the basic question is whether the newer image shows scope for individual creativity with respect to the older PD image... AnonMoos (talk) 15:28, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
A simple tracing that closely resembles the original would generally be considered a slavish reproduction. However, sometimes copiers introduce original variations, such as noticable changes in the background or shading, which would make it an original work. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:19, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Well, the outlines of the two diagrams are the same, even the lines of the shading. The reason I suspect it could be a scan, is because Huffetaut's version has eliminated some of the lighter shading. Is that enough to constitute originality for copyright? Jappalang (talk) 02:41, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi resolution portraits

By coincidence I laid my eyes on the picture File:C_Lundberg_Markow_1.JPG. I saw an attractive middle aged woman and I followed the link to the article referencing the photo to find out who she was, then I took a look at the photo in full detail.

The picture resolution is very high, 12.1 mega pixel (2912x4368 pixel). Although the woman has a pleasant look and a good makeup, it made me realize how unforgiving modern digital cameras are. Every little wrinkle, every pore, all thin down, every little imperfection can be studied in great detail in this photo.

This made me think about limiting image resolution for portraits on Wikipedia, just as a courtesy to the person being portraited. In this case I believe reducing picture resolution to 50% would suffice.

What do you Wikipedians think? Is my thoughtfulness just misguided?

/Klebom (talk) 17:18, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

In real life we can view our fellow humans in even higher resolution. If there is something shameful about the physical nature of human skin, perhaps we should wear masks. In my opinion, honesty is healthier than all the photo retouching, heavy makeup, careful lighting, etc., which the media use to brainwash people into thinking humans can and should be free of "flaws". Just my opinion. --Teratornis (talk) 18:54, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Largely agree with Teratornis. Images at Commons are intended for educational and informational use, to portray the subject as they are and not as they wish to be seen. Moreover, even though some people may find their appearance at full resolution objectionable, this is not a universal truth. Some people prefer to be portrayed in a more natural way. Also, any third party who wishes to reuse the image, including the subject, can modify it as they like - operations like blurring, downscaling, and "blemish removal" are generally straightforward but irreversible. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:16, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

'Details'

I am just questioning my own work. Does it make sense to upload slightly cut picture - basically without the maniscript text - as I did at Bellifortis? Gun Powder Ma (talk) 23:03, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's fine - the text doesn't add much at thumbnail size, so it's good to have a version without it. In some cases it'd be better to clone out the text, so that you can maintain a good composition. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:17, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 17

Pseudo namespaces

redirects to
COM: Commons:

Commons has amount of shortcut redirect. "COM:" and "CAT:" is the most used prefix. Now I propose to make psuedo-namespaces. We tend to use more shortened-redirects as Commons grows. I think psuedo-namespace would be useful and would make us convenient. Please comment about that. Thank you. Kwj2772 (msg) 11:52, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

If I remember well, COM is an ISO code the Commanche language. I don't know it that would be possible, in case a Commanche-speaking Wikipedia is created. →Diti the penguin — 13:36, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Wouldn't there be a clash anyway with the existing shortcuts? --Eusebius (talk) 13:42, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
If Connanche language wikipedia created, we cannot use even "COM:" prefix-redirecting method. When we enter "COM:L" in search box, software may redirect to http://com.wikipedia.org/wiki/L --Kwj2772 (msg) 14:31, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
For local pseudo name spaces and avoiding conflicts with global (wikiwide) name spaces, I would suggest special signs or lower case followed by a minimum of characters. This would be handy for searching things. Examples for category and galleries: "<c:" "<G:", "=c:" "=g", "cat:" "gal:", "µc:", "µg:" ...--Foroa (talk) 15:50, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
COM was formally rejected as a cross-wiki redirect to Commons on grounds of possible conflict with a Comanche wikipedia (if there ever is such a thing, which seems doubtful, but never mind). However CM is actually available, because there's no CM ISO639-1 code, and ISO639-1 is not supposed to be expanded. There was some brief flurry of interest in "CM" a year or two back, but I'm not sure anything ever came of it... AnonMoos (talk) 15:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Template editing

I want to tweak and update the text of Template:Animated SVG but I am not familiar with these newfangled auto thingies. What do I do, please? Globbet (talk) 15:22, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I guess you want to update the English version. You can find it here. Multichill (talk) 15:28, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Change delisted template

The current {{Delisted picture}} template doesn't link to why the picture was delisted, nor has a proper icon. Is there a way we could make this look better? --Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 12:42, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

This was formerly a featured picture on Wikimedia Commons.

čeština | dansk | Deutsch | English | español | eesti | suomi | magyar | italiano | 日本語 | lietuvių | македонски | മലയാളം | português | sicilianu | slovenščina | svenska | +/−

    • Here you go, [14], or {{DelistedPicture}}. Is that sort of what you were after? I borrowed the icon from the 'formerly featured articles'. Same thing, really. No autolanguage, as I didn't understand how that works, and I'm not game to try integrating it. Sarcastic ShockwaveLover (talk) 04:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

{{DelistedPicture}}

  •  Comment If there are any, more accomplished, coders present, they may wish to add the autolanguage feature, make the reason italicised and automatically add any pages with this template added to the 'Former featured pictures' category. Sarcastic ShockwaveLover (talk) 14:55, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Ripping and uploading a DVD of short videos

w:Nina Paley is releasing most of her historical art and video work under CC-SA. This includes a body of shorts which are currently on an out-of-production DVD. Is there a good place to post a link to source for ripping and uploading? Are there examples of commons projects that have done this before? Thanks, +sj + 03:16, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Pretty much anyone with access to the DVDs should be able to do this. Commons probably is not the best place to locate such a person. However, if someone else rips it and wants a Commoner to encode and upload it, that's another matter. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:21, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
My thought is we could use a place to post this sort of request (pointer to raw content, indication of size of task and # of pieces). Another example is the collection of ~1100 items in the new world digital library at wdl.org. Assuming that they post a metadata file to make writing a bulk import script easier, listing this as a distributable or claimable task and having a page listing ungathered free content would be handy. +sj + 07:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Protection of templates

Commons uses a lot of templates. Some of these templates are used a lot and should be protected. But which templates should be protected? And should these templates be full- or semi-protected? We don't want to leave heavy usage templates unprotected and on the other side we don't want it too hard for users to edit templates. The Template i18n added a lot of templates which were left unprotected. This is a proposal for protecting heavy usage templates.

Proposal

Main templates

Main templates are templates not containing a "/". Main templates used on more than 1000 pages should be semi-protected (semi threshold). Main templates used on more than 10.000 pages should be fully protected (full threshold). Of course the semi threshold and the full threshold could be raised or lowered. I just picked these numbers because the seem reasonable to me.

/layout templates

<main template>/layout templates are used a lot in autotranslated templates. These templates should have the same protection as the main template (for example {{GFDL}} and {{GFDL/layout}})

/lang templates

<main template>/lang templates are templates to move between the different language versions of a template. These should have the same protection as the main template if it's in use at the main template (that's not always the case, see for example ({{Information}}).

Language versions of templates

Once a template is autotranslated, templates are shown in different languages to different users. <main template>/en templates are the English language versions of templates and are shown to anonymous users, users from enwp and most logged in users. These templates should have the same protection as the main template. But what to do with the other language versions like <main template>/de or <main template>/nl? These versions are used by logged in users and Wikipedia's. I tried doing something based on a score per language, but that didn't seem to work very well so i'll keep it simple. <main template>/es, <main template>/fr, <main template>/de, <main template>/pt & <main template>/ja should be semi-protected if the main template is fully protected.

Tag these templates

All templates protected as heavily used should be tagged with {{Heavily used template}}. It would probably be nice to have two versions: One for semi-protected templates and one for fully protected templates (including how to use {{Editprotected}}).

Comments

Comments here please. Multichill (talk) 14:21, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, but we need to internationalize {{Heavily used template}} before applying it to so many places! Pruneautalk 16:23, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, that has to be done. I'm thinking about adding an option like protection=semi and protection=full to have some specific text show up so we only have to use one template. Multichill (talk) 18:19, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
  • I agree with the need to standardize protection of templates and system based on number of uses seems just fine. Is there an easy way to measure number of uses of each template?
    • Sure, query at the toolserver.
      • I will have to learn how to do it one day. May be we can have a system that automatically adjust this. I have seen in the past fully-protected unused templates where I needed to use {{Editprotected}} to nominate for deletion.
  • I do not like current protection levels used for templates: User requirements needed for editing semi-protected pages are very minimal. And the requirement that only admins can edit fully protected pages seems too high for most pages. As a non-admin frequently localizing and improving (hopefully) templates I do not like fully-protected pages or templates using Mediawiki namespace, since they are so hard to edit.
    • I assume good faith to a certain level. Only the most important templates are fully protected. Any edits to these templates should be discussed first anyway. Autoconfirmed users can vandalize a lot of templates, but not the most important ones. Which heavy usage templates (besides int:lang) use mediawiki namespace by the way?
      • Comment about mediawiki resulted from some fixes needed for {{Other date}} which required changes to {{Date}}, {{I18n month}} and many Mediawiki namespace pages . I worked with user:Slomox, who is always great to work with, but I would still prefer to do my own edits.
  • I would like to propose to create another group of users privileged to edit most of the templates (may be except for {{Information}} and few others). Kind of like the users trusted to rename files or Flicker reviewers. That would create 4 levels of protection: fully protected, trusted users only, semi-protected and unprotected.
    • I don't think an extra level will make all of this better. Implementing tages ages anyway (if it's ever going to be implemented)
  • There should be a minimal protection roadblocks for creating new translations of templates. That would mean minimal protection for /lang pages. I would propose one level lower than the main page. We can always change it if some crafty vandal discovers the weakness.
    • I already have a bot working on keep /lang templates up to date. I'll just have to finish it. Once it's done i'll tag all the protected /lang templates with a nice message explaining this.
      • That sounds great
  • I would also use one-level-lower protection for the translations of protected pages.
    • Why? Which language versions? All? Only /en or also the other once i mentioned?
      • I was imagining all non en versions. This was attempt to have a simple rule used for most of the templates.
--Jarekt (talk) 20:26, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Multichill (talk) 21:09, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
--Jarekt (talk) 16:40, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
  • For license tags, full protection should probably be used. To simplify translations, maybe protected revisions could be activated for template namespace. -- User:Docu/ - June 18, 2009

delete of file

I want to delete two of my files from wikipedia commons. How to do this? --Blueye (talk) 19:02, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

If one of the reasons for speedy deletion is given, add the appropriate template. Otherwise start a regular deletion request. If you are unsure what to do, just ask here again, stating why you want the images deleted. --rimshottalk 19:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 18

Unattributed schematic

The electronic schematic File:VCO.jpg was clearly taken from a source, but it is not identified. It is possibly taken from this book. I have tagged it with {{Source file please}} but I am not sure if that's all that needs doing, particularly GFDL concerns. Can someone take a look. Also there are errors in the schematic. SpinningSpark 11:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Some reflections about the governance of Commons

Hello Commons community:

As all of you know Commons is a very unique and very important project within all of our projects. Commons has virtually contact with all other projects because all other projects use materials that are collected on Commons. Users from all other projects would come to Commons in search of materials they can use for their project, or would upload materials onto Commons. From all Wikipedia language versions there is an upload link to Commons. Some user from other communities would visite Commons once or twice in their entire Wikimedia-project-life, others would do it once or twice a year. So Commons has the most versatile community of all our communities. Not only our users are using Commons, as many of you know, the Foundation and the chapters of the Foundation are actively propagating free content and persuading other institutions to give their content free and put them on Commons. So, the well being of Commons not only influences our other projects, but also the Foundation, its chapters and our mission. In this post I will raise a few issues about Commons. My intention here is not to critisize Commons or its community, but to show possible problems, or to dissolve my own misunderstanding, and to search for solutions for these problems, to make Commons better. I will also post a link to this post on foundation-l, commons-l and maybe ask SignPost and other community forums to post a link to this to get a most possibly broad coverage. I do this not to get "outsiders" in to disturb the Commons, but as I said before, because Commons has such an important and central role in our projects landscape. I will use some examples. By using these examples I want to plastiquely describe the problems I see, not to finger pointing at individual community members. I am myself a long year administrator in one of the more complicated community and I make failures myself (I am quite sure at least one in a week in average). Please keep in mind the examples are meant to point at certain processes or phenomenon, not to single community member. I would appreciate if during the discussion we keep this in mind. I will refer to a few different problems I see. They are all interlinked, but I am ok if the community think it is better to split them into individual discussions. Last but not least, this post is from a normal community member, and not from a board member. What I say or suggest here are my personal opinions. I am nothing special in any way from any other community member.

Commons is meant to be a commonly used repository of free media files for all other projects. So ideally ALL free media files should be uploaded on Commons, while the projects would only keep those media files that the individual community had agreed to keep. This is also the reason why on all our Wikipedia projects we have a link for upload to Commons. In the reality though we still have a lot of free media files on our individual projects. A lot of community members are reluctant to upload their files to Commons. Asked why they don't upload their images on Commons most these user answer because Commons are harsh and unfriendly, and because they have language problems with the administrators here. I want to use an example here to illustrate this problem. As I said before. It is not meant as a finger point to an administrator on Commons, but as an example for a phenomenon. I use this example because I made a failure here and take part of the blame, and because I think it illustrates what I said before: harshness, unfriendliness and language problem. A few days ago I found the following remark on my talk page: {{Speedywhat|File:Columbia 5pts aerial.jpg}} GFDL licensed images copied without the required attribution are copyright violations. (name omitted). The following exchange took place (TC is me, CA is a Commons Administrator):

TC: Hello, I have several questions about this deletion. The first question is that the reason named "GFDL licensed images copied without the required attribution are copyright violations." is not clear for me. What do you mean in this case, which attribution do you mean? I am one of the administrators on zh-wp who patrol through the files uploaded there from the users. Images that are released from the user as GFDL and which has certain quality are uploaded from me to Commons and then deleted on the local project. This is to my understand what Commons for. It is important for me to understand where here is the problem to avoid future problems because I totally agree with you that copyright issue is very important for Commons and at the same time it doesn't make sense to keep free images on several local projects. So a clarification would be appreciated.
CA: The GNU Free Documentation License is not the same as being PD. Preserving authorship credit is required. Copying a GFDL file without attribution breaks the license. In this case you neglected to give any credit to the creator of the file.
TC: I am not quite sure what you mean. I thought in the upload formular I had wrote the username of the original author? (Maybe I am wrong, it is some time back, I cannot remember every detail). Or do you mean I should keep the original image on zh-wp so that the authorship and history is granted? Again I need to understand this so that I would not make such a failure again. Thanks for the explaination.
CA: That particular image you transfered 2 years ago, and didn't give any attribution-- no mention of the photographer/original uploader at en:Wikipedia at all. When transfering images to Commons be sure to include the information from the description page; these are often deleted from the local Wiki after the image is availible on Commons. I restored the local copy on en:Wikipedia for this one. I see more recent transfers you've done that have given proper credit. Maybe you just forgot to add the info with that one. I wanted to alert you about it in case you didn't know GFDL licensed files needed to be attributed. Cheers,

There are two issues in this whole incident that I consider characteristic. The first is that in my opinion the explanation should be put in the delete notice, or at least after I had asked once. Actually I must ask twice and give by myself a longer explanation to get the answer. I know that a lot of users are not so patient as I was and they would probably break up and rather upload their files on their home project, and tell other people Commons is harsh and unfriendly. And if he happens doesn't speak enough good English he would even be lost with that explanation. If someone ask me what is a Wikimedia project, the first thing that I would answer is that it is a massive multilingual collaborative contribution system. I would especially emphasize the collaborative character of our projects. I am doing image file patrols on zh-wp myself. If I see that a user has made an obviouse technical failure (as is this case. The image itself is fully ok, I made a quite obvious error by uploading), I would very probably just fix the error by myself, like put the correct copyright mark on the image or link to the original image. I would not expect every administrator go such far, but I would at least expect that they give a hint of the problem that would be helpful for the user. On many other projects I know that there is such a rule: w:Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers. I don't know if there is such a rule on Commons too because there is no interwiki link for Commons. Personally I think a Commons administrator should be especially aware of this rule and always keep it in mind, because it is such an important project, because it's community is so versatile. Another project that is active on en-wp and de-wp is w:Wikipedia:Mentorship, I think it would also be very helpful to be implemented on Commons.

The second issue I see in this incident is the speed delete. On zh-wp such cases would be kept for seven days so that the user can get the chance to explain or to fix the failure. I take the speed delete is in accordance with the rules of Commons. But with such a speed delete the user is no more able to fix his error. In my case because it is a case of more than two years ago I even cannot remember what image it is. I thought it was an image I uploaded from zh-wp and felt really sick because I was not able to find it there. So I was not only not able to fix my error, I was even not able to know what I did. Personally I find a such a speed delete that doesn't give the user the chance to explain or fix his failure problematic and is another source for the image of Commons to be especially harsh and unfriendly.

Now I want to come to the next thing that I want to talk about. I was told that administrators on Commons are especially mighty. Also here I want to use an example. Again I want to remind that my intention is not to finger point at certain community member(s) but a systematic failure. I take that the community members did what is fully in accordance to the rules. The rules allow them do these things so if there is a problem, it is not that the community members handled wrong, but the rules are flawed.

The example I want to use is the reopening of the deletion request of an image. You can read the entire discussion here. I reopened the deletion request because I think through the board BLP resolution we should recheck the situation. After four days of discussion it was obvious for me that the majority of the community think that my concern is not correct. I summarized the discussion in this sense and said I accept the community decision and am ok with the close of the deletion request. The next morning I found with supprise that the file was deleted by an administrator. Now maybe you may think I should be happy with such an unexpected turn of event. Actually I am very shocked. I found it very disturbing that a single administrator can simply overturn the whole discussion and thus (for me a quite clear) community consensus. Normally when asked I always explain to other people that administrators are also only community members, their opinion have no more or less weight than any other community member. They have more power than users that are no administrators, but they are only allowed to use their power in accordance with the community consensus, with the rules and only if it is necessary and do things that simply must be done. I had always believed in this. The incident is especially disturbing for me because it reminds me of my presentation on the Alexandria Wikimania. I said there "There are Cabals". I said this to remind the experienced user to be careful with their power and their knowledge. I am very unhappy to find this to be true here. Two hours later two other administrators reversed the deletion. But what worries me is that if none of the administrators wanted to reverse the deletion the community can get what ever consensus they can simply be ignored. I find this really shocking. I find it is against almost the most fundamental of what I understand under a wikimedia project.

The third and last issue I want to raise is as I had already said at the beginning of my post. The Foundation and our chapters are encouraging other organizations to contribute free content and use Commons as a repository. We had the Bundesarchiv at the beginning of this process. There is a collaboration initiated from the chapter of netherlands and we have Pikiwiki from the israel chapter. The australian chapter is very active in persuading other organizations. The Pikiwiki project showed quite dramatically that such projects are not without risks. Personally I think the risk is even quite big, failed projects can even harm the reputation of the Foundation, of its chapters and even our mission. Just suppose a national museum of a land gives its content free (there is no such project that I am aware of, I take this just as an example), the project failed because of what ever reason. By the next time the director of the museum meets his colleagues on conferences, meetings or what ever occasions he would complain about how arrogant and mistrustful and unfriendly and harsh Wikimedia Foundation is. It could really set us back. That's the reason why I think we should be more careful and better prepared for any further such collaborations. I am sure this is not only an issue of Commons, but also of the Foundation and its chapters, who plan such projects. Especially we cannot handle people from a third party organization in the ways I discribed above. Let's take the example Pikiwiki. I think there are three major issues that caused the difficulties: The mistrust of the Commons community about the israeli copyright law and how it is handled by the Pikiwiki project; the copyrighted logo of the project and the technical failure of the bot. I think it is important for us to learn from the problems so that we can avoid them in the future. The solution I would suggest for these problems is: Whenever such a project is planned the Commons should build up a steering committee from the community member with the chapter who is in lead of the project. They should work through a checklist so that as much of the potential issues can be solved before the project actually starts. When the project is approved by the committee and bots or other technical utilities are involved in the project there should be a pilot phase where the utilities are tested and possible failures found and fixed. After that pilot phase the project can get the Go. And even after the project is started as long as the project is running the committee should be kept alife. If there are problems the committee should be called at first before any action be taken. The committee can then consult with the chapter and the third party organization to solve the problem. The committee should also record the problems that the project encountered and work them into the checklist for future projects.

I apology for this very long post. But I think the issues are important and thank you very much.--Wing (talk) 14:59, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Suppose we should answer these (in a friendly voice) in the order that they are asked :
  • Attribution. Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary. Noun. Singular 'attribution'; Plural 'attributions' 1. Gerund form of attribute; an explicit or formal acknowledgment of ownership or authorship. [15]. Therefore, this probably means in this case that the up-loader onto Commons needs to say who the original owner/creator (and source) of the image is (or was, if they are now dead). Is this bit clear so far ? How could we say it to make it clearer? Would a multi-linguale template message help? --P.g.champion (talk) 15:35, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
(ec) Issues #1 and #2 look like clear and unfortunate mistakes on behalf of administrators here. In #1, you put that the source of the image was en.wp and the image had been deleted there so the chain was indeed broken, but the deleting administrator here is also an administrator at en.wp and could have looked at the deleted content there to fix the chain. Perhaps a case of laziness? Regardless, you are also correct that speedy deletion was an overreaction. Speedy deleting any two-year-old upload is often a bad idea in my opinion. We do have {{Nsd}} and {{Npd}}, etc. here and those would have been better alternatives. The image was here for two years, how would another month or so cause any harm? For #2, the COM:DR closure was clearly premature and was reversed as such. For #3, the issue is less clear and is also playing out off-wiki, so I cannot offer much insight. The Pikiwiki situation seems to be fraught with overreaction on both sides and needs some cool heads to intervene - I have yet to see any cool heads on the Commons side, the Foundation side, or the Pikiwiki side in any of the correspondences I have seen.
My question is that you have done a good job summarizing some problems here and give good examples - do you have a suggestion on how to fix the problems? A better process perhaps? Some sort of governing committee or noticeboard? (You suggest a committee for Pikiwiki-type situations, but how about your #1 and #2?) Issues #1 and #2 especially highlight a problem that has existed at en.wp for a long time and apparently exists here as well - a lack of patience on the part of administrators. I get the feeling that many administrators feel the need to be the first to do something so they get some sort of credit or notice. Someone closing an important deletion request is likely to get into en:Wikipedia:News, so maybe they want to become quasi-famous? I don't really know. But you are right that lack of patience poisons both projects (and surely other projects that I am not involved in). Wknight94 talk 15:46, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Suggestion: Sort out the obvious problem first: People keep complaining on Village Pump that publications keep using WC images without giving any credits. The real problem is this: when a Picture Desk gets someone to quickly skim through WC, they do not see or recognise any ‘credit line’ or other terms they are expecting to see. I have had people argue with me that the summery box ‘stuff’ is to do with the article that the ‘Author’ has written on Wikipedia. Were it to refer to the ‘photo’ (they go onto explain) the information would be completed differently and state who was the photographer or artist or what ever ect., ect., ect. If we got the layout and terminology right then maybe non English speaking users would also be able to understand. After all, if native speaker of English don’t understand it - how can we expect anybody else too!--P.g.champion (talk) 16:16, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


#1 was an obvious error. It's not okay to speedy delete an image for missing attribution. A normal deletion request would have been the right thing.
#2 is a question of judgement. I would call it an error, but still it's judgement. Both #1 and #2 cannot be avoided, cause we are humans and we make errors. We can try to increase awareness and carefulness, but we cannot "solve" the problem.
@#3: I don't know the case Pikiwiki, but I have made some experiences with similar projects. The problem usually is a lack of communication. The Commons community often becomes aware of the project only when the uploading starts. And very often I think "Why didn't they talk with us Commons people? If they had, we would have helped them improve it." (I am especially interested in templates and often the templates created for such mass uploads have issues, that could have easily been fixed, if only it had been done _before_ the upload started). A checklist or a project assisting such projects would indeed help much. I'd say: Have a start. --Slomox (talk) 16:26, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I've no experience about admin jobs here, just an interesting experience as a user. I presently work into it.source, a "small" project where any active member is well known by other active users. Links among users are friendly, and highly cohoperative. I did some month ago the terrible mistake to invite a non-wiki friend into it.wiki, that is a large, busy, fast developing project. Her first contribution has been criticized with some warning templates (obviously the contribution was far from perfect, it was only a bold try!), that she misinterpreted as offensive. In a few minutes, while I was furiosly fixing the contribution of my friend, a terrible fight arose into the village pump. She made some more mistakes into thet hot discussion and she had been banned - I could not avoid it because while I was fixing into one page, something horrible was happening into another page... In conclusion: I - a moderately expert user - extremely frustrated, a new user banned, lost and very hungry against wiki in general, and the end of my will to invite any other friend into wiki.
I tried to discuss this serious and unhappy outcome just to find solutions... nothing to do, fight had been so furious that I too got some unpleasant comments and attacks... and I went back to my quiet it.source.
My suggestione had been to suggest to any new user to find a "tutor", an experienced user of the project (i.e., the user that posts the welcome message to new members), and to invite any admin and any user to address to the tutor, and not to the new user, any comment about new user work, so that the tutor can explain quietly and friendly to his "pupil" what has gone wrong, and why, and how fix the trouble. Wiki is a really complex application, and a number of severe mistakes are perfectly normal from a new (and from en expert one too) user, nor can be avoided with the best system of help pages and manuals. I observed that any experienced user forgot at all from a long time how wiki is difficult and exoteric, and when it forgets this, it's terribly easy to be offensive in his remarks - to say something that, for a new user, sounds like "You stupid, how you can't understand a so simple rule!!!???" --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 20:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
"Exoteric" is actually the opposite of "esoteric"! -- AnonMoos (talk) 09:00, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
For the record - the Pikiwiki project was introduced through the Meta. It seemed relevant to the entire Wikimedia community, and not only the Commons, so I placed the explanations there (I was in charge of informing the WM community). I also informed people who are involved in the Commons (I won't mentioned name, because I wouldn't like it to seem as pointing fingers). The project was also introduced in Wikimania and chapter meetings. It would have been best to get the Commons community involved from the first steps, but it is not a good thing that the Commons' regular users don't read messages on Meta, and are not in close contact with the chapters. The chapters have valuable information about local copyright statutes, about possible large contributions etc. The Commons' users should not wait until the chapters turn to them, but rather send questions and ask for updates from the chapters on a regular basis. Drork (talk) 07:15, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I have some additional remarks, if I may:
  1. In the pursuit to verify the legality of every upload, the Commons often act against the free content movement interests. In case the law is not 100% clear, we have every interest to create a status quo in favor of free content. This is perfectly legitimate. If someone appeals to a court of law asking to clarify an ambiguous legal term, I want the judge to say: "there is no use to rule against the status quo on the Wikimedia project", rather than: "even Wikimedia won't publish these images, why should I allow it?".
  2. Copyright statutes vary quite a bit among countries. It is very unwise to have long legal discussions about the legal situation in different countries, and try to interpret their laws. First of all, it is often impossible due to language and cultural barriers. Secondly, it puts the Commons in an unfavorable position should a lawsuit be filed somewhere. The best way in case of doubt is to ask a trusted person in the larger Wikimedia community, who can provide the relevant information. There is no use to initiate special inquiries - the Commons is not a court of law. Drork (talk) 07:28, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
@Drork: it is not a good thing that the Commons' regular users don't read messages on Meta Meta is a big heap of about 15,000 pages about all possible topics (and about 80% of them very outdated). Which pages do you recommend to the Commons users to get notice of?
The Commons' users should not wait until the chapters turn to them, but rather send questions and ask for updates from the chapters on a regular basis What kind of updates do you think about? About local copyright statutes? Then the chapters should notice Commons if they become aware of any changes. Or news about upcoming image upload projects? Then the chapters should notice Commons too. I don't think that asking "Any news on your side?" and getting the answer "No." on a monthly base is very meaningful. If the chapters have information relevant to Commons, they should speak to Commons.
About your additional remarks: That's not how Commons or Wikimedia work. We collect free content, but we don't try to create facts. --Slomox (talk) 13:14, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I am talking about pages like this meta:Israeli new copyright law, like this meta:Elef Millim project, like this meta:Wikimedia Israel free image collection project, and I suppose there are other pages from other chapters or Wikimedia communities. These pages are written for people to read them. I know it is hard to keep updated, but the least that can be expected is that people read this kind of pages once they learn there is a new project or once a problem arises, before taking any further steps. The Commons is part of the Wikimedia movement. It has an obligation, which is beyond any written rule, to cooperate with the interest of the entire movement. Saying "it's not how we work" is not really an answer to my concern. I know how the Commons works, and it should work differently. By collecting free content we create facts - we are not passive here, and we must not be passive. Drork (talk) 15:05, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Although some uploads from the Bundesarchiv have been deleted, I would believe that the Bundesarchiv is quite happy about the collaboration. In the same way, some Pikiwiki uploads have obvious problems with copyright, but the project's representatives have reacted with a "not an inch" attitude. Now Drork even wants to limit discussion of his interpretation of Israeli copyright, which indicates that he is not very confident that his interpretation is correct. I agree with him that commons does not always further the free-content movement, especially in many deletions where the precautionary principle is invoked overly cautiously, but commons does not influence the legal situation. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 09:12, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Commons *has* a community, though a small and vulnerable one, and regretfully declining community over the last years. Currently some twenty people contribute 100 edits or more a month, and some four hundred people contribute 5 edits or more a month, which is comparable to a "small" language Wikipedia. I thank Pieter Kuiper fully for admitting Commons isn't without it's own problems. I thank Ting Cheng, a community elected board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, for his lengthy elaboration recognizing an issue. I thank Dror for standing up. This Spring the WMF has initiated a year long strategy formation process asking input from all sides and parties involved around a series of questions concerning participation, reach and quality. (Strict) compliance with license(s) is considered a [[[quality]] issue by more than one regular contributor to Commons. Several image gathering projects do have several goals, most notably informing the public about free repositories of (for example) images which I will dub reach and hooking newcomers to become contributors of content, which I will dub participation. Initially dubbed governance of Commmons I would like to invite all participants in this discussion, and all participants in the massive upload conflicts to participate this year, just started, and ending summer 2010, in the overall Wikimedia Foundation strategy formation process. Help us all finding answers to all of "What should we do" and "How should we do" questions. In my belief all active participants to Commons should be give the time to reflect on the current issue, and give their opinion, if they want to, which can take a longer time than the wikibreak of Dror. Maybe it might be possible to generate a rough guideline in a year time about I started a project to have the public take images and upload them ultimately to Commons. How and when should I inform the community at commons about my project and under which conditions won't the community at Commons block all uploads from my project. After all, the Commons is a very special project. It has many more sysops than active contributors. And, as far as I know, a sysop is just a technical function, with the ability (some buttons) and not the authority to push them without 'community consent'. Governance at he commons and discussing about sysops might blur this a little bit. That might presuppose sysops having an organizational role or function they wouldn't have. And one last thing: Commons, like all projects, are independent of the WMF, the Board of the WMF can't impose anything on the project. So Ting showed a lot of courage by stepping into this discussion, and I thank him for that, again. Dedalus (talk) 16:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
I wonder whether those counts are based on "gallery" edits only (i.e. what would be article edits on a Wikipedia)? Tabulating only article edits makes sense on the wikipedias, but tabulating only gallery edits wouldn't have much meaning for Commons... AnonMoos (talk) 08:56, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Adminship on Commons, and how it might be seen from the other projects

I hope I am not too much off-topic here, but I'd like to react to something Wing has pointed out and which I think should be given more attention. It is more about adminship on Commons, feel free to raise the title level, should you want to totally separate the section from the existing debate (feel free to remove the title should you feel that the section belongs to the mainstream debate). Disclaimer: I'm a quite young Commons admin, with little experience. For users coming from the Wikipedias (for instance), admins have mostly technical duties and "cannot overturn community consensus". Regular Commoners know that it is quite different here when it comes to content deletion. Deletions on Commons are, in their majority, not based on consensus but on the understanding of the applicable copyright law (in the case of copyvio-based deletion requests). In those cases, no matter how many people "vote" in favour of an image, if the closing admin, on the basis of the given information, thinks that the image must be deleted, he has the right to do so (according to the rules). I think it is something not well taken by visiting users (I am not even talking of mistakes made by the closing admins). However, this kind of rule is necessary because of the subtleties handled on a daily basis on Commons and generally ignored by most users, and quite often also by non-Commons admins. For instance, I am a Frenchman and yet, it was only when I became interested in adminship on Commons that I understood the exact terms and implications of the quasi-absence of "freedom of panorama" in my own country. I remember a few deletion requests in which there was only one user requesting the deletion, with several users and sometimes admins against him, and yet these requests had to lead to deletion and did so, by the decision of the closing admin, based on facts (and interpretation), not on consensus. Of course, the issues here are so complex that a single person can only have thorough knowledge about few legal systems or circumstances. For the others, we must rely on the translations, interpretations and other digests provided on the wiki, and of course be very careful about it. The "careful" part is one of the weaknesses of the Commons admin community. We tend to become full of ourselves and of our "knowledge" and "experience", that other users don't have but must accept. This, added to the workload, can make admins harsh.

The quantity of work that the admins have to do is terrifying. There are hundreds of thousands of spotted problematic images, needing individual review (for various reasons: copyright/permission, categories, sourcing, scope inclusion, various requests and technical issues...), and probably much more unspotted ones. We are expected to address this huge backlog, this is presented as our primary task. If you want to be a "good" admin (or to do your job on the project), you have to take your share of pictures out of the backlog and either delete them or "clean" them. The fact that only deletion can be spotted, logged and counted (and that deleting is easier than cleaning) is a huge bias, and if you're not careful enough it can make you become more and more severe in your evaluations. In one's imagination, you would become more useful as an admin, and maybe a saviour for the project. When you spend time finding a reliable source for an apparently doomed image, when you find the alinea in the law that allows an image to stay, when you correct the deprecated license tag by finding out the actual status of an image instead of deleting it as requested by the tag itself, it doesn't count as an "admin action", and yet adminship experience does help a lot. I think admins need to take, from time to time, short breaks from the sysop tools (which is not incompatible with regular contributions), and maybe they should be told (nicely) when they need such breaks. I've tried those breaks, they're great. They give you back your old perspective about what Commons is and should be, what is valuable and what is not.

As I said, for these reasons admins can become harsh because they're "trained" to deal with content more than with users. You give a well-deserved warning template to this stupid contributor who doesn't know about copyright renewal rules in the US, but you've already forgotten that you didn't know much about them a few months/years ago. Another thing that doesn't help: Commons is a multi-language project, probably more than any other WMF project. Quite often, the user you're "dealing with" doesn't have a good English, or you don't even have a common language. Therefore, when you apply a "no source" tag about 50 or 100 times a day (I don't, but if you want, it's easy, the files are just out there...), you just rely on the auto-translated templates. It makes the process even colder and unfriendly for the newcomers (and indeed very few of them answer to the templates, although when they do it usually proves easy to solve the issue or to make the user improve its behaviour).

The thing that we need most on this project (in my opinion), and that has been suggested already in this conversation, is tutorship. When I came to Commons, I looked for such a procedure (as I knew it existed on my then home Wikipedia) and didn't find it. Later, as an admin, I have been asked once to become a tutor for somebody. There was no "official" tutorship project, but I accepted to review any single upload of a user and explain how and why it would be ok or not. Admins, if you want to feel useful, DO THAT. It's just great. Plus, it is something that could help us address our communication problem ("Commons is an unfriendly project, so I won't upload there"), for instance by systematically proposing tutorship in the welcome templates and in some chosen user message templates. However, it is more adapted to a Wikipedia than to Commons, because here users come with a few pictures, dump them and leave. There are exceptions of course (newcomers that become steady contributors), but usually, even when they show interest in what we do, they leave when they have done what they had to do. As it has been said, Commons is a home (or second home) project for a few users only. Anyway, I am much motivated by this idea of tutorship. I don't have the resources to launch such a subproject on my own right now (plus, it would benefit from the experience of the tutorship initiatives on other projects, and I'm only a Commoner), but if someone wants to do it as soon as someone wants to do it, I beg him to ping me so that I can help. That's the shameless non-proposal I've ever made...

Please accept my apologies for the length of this message. --Eusebius (talk) 22:41, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. The problem are not complicate copyright discussions or newby questions on copyright, they are very rare and noone is unfriendly. The problem here are simple copyvios: Pics from the internet under wrong self-made claims - claims I often refer to as lies. And there is no difference to Wikipedia except three:
1) On (most) Wikipedias the red warning "do not copy from other websites" is present - not on Commons.
2) If you copy&paste text from a website to Wikipedia and its clear that you are not the copyright holder you will get blocked if you repeat one time - on Commons it takes much more cases to reveive a final block.
3) The following is not intended to atack a project or their valuable administrators and volunteers. Experienced 50% of copyright violations are from es. Wikipedians, the most blatant copyvios and the ugliest "own work" claims are from spanish users. The number of their admins here is small (19x es-n) but the upload button on es.wikipedia directly leeds to the Commons upload form - without any instructions compared to pt.wiki which first shows a (too long) instruction page. de.Wikipedians can not upload the first 4 days localy and they probably dont find Commons in this time - the number of copyvios from de.wp is extremly small even the project is larger. The few copyvio uploaders from germany will get personal advice from one of the 54 de-n admins if someone noticed the problem or help is requested. Commons is not a home project, it depends on other projects and on good users who find their way to Commons at least understanding what "free" means and interested in the special scope. Some projects use Commons like one-click hosting, thats disadvantageous for Commons, dissapointing for the user from this Wiki project and thats bad for the wikis. Especially the Wikipedias without local upload must consider Commons more a part of their project and giving instructions on copyright basics a part of their local duties. --Martin H. (talk) 23:50, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I basically second what Eusebius said, disagree with MartinH, and would like to add a few more points. The main problem I observe is that the contributors do not know, whether the admin made a mistake because he intended to do so (like putting a pic on speedy delete because s/he knows something s/he didn't had the time to share), or just because s/he doesn't have enough time to check the facts (which results baseless nominations), or for some other reasons. Basically users only get a template telling something, and I guess most of the time it is relevant, enough and proper. In many cases, however, I have observed templates applied without care, with lack of reasons. And I have observed many times that the deletions were in fact speedy, so speedy that the submitter did not even have the change to react. Often the deletions do not have discussion. Some may think: "Yeah, submitter is ignorant and careless, why should we care then?" And I'd say: "Hey, maybe the submitted isn't even aware of what happening, let alone being able to discuss the problem."

What barriers do we have around?

  • Language barrier. While the templates are translated and work quite well, discussions aren't. There should be a globalised way to help non-English submitters to easily find people who can help them in discussions in English. I can imagine a link form every template, or from the discussion pages of the deletes, to point to the "You may try to ask these fellows to help you" page in their (or any) language.
  • Non-local editors. Since people from all over wikimedia projects use Commons, they do not come here regularly, and do not check their talk pages. (Which makes me note that it is completely unacceptable to submit anything to any kind of deletion without notifying the uploader!) As far as I know it's now default that the discussion page emails the owner, but only if they provided email address, and it may not be obvious for average contributors that they have to provide an email address to get notifications. I would be pretty interested in a stat about how many percent of Commons users do have a working email, and of those how many have talk page notification active. I'd guess a low percent, and this is an educational/informational problem (eg. users should be warned to provide email address if they want to get notifications).
  • Speedy admins. Sometimes admins do speedy deletions speedy in cases where the speedy criteria wasn't met. Even normal delete is pretty speedy considering the problems above, so care should be taken not to speedy delete anythnig with the slightest doubt.
  • Education. As it was mentioned, copyright laws are a large sad pool of fæces, and admins have knowledge average people may not. It is easier to accept a deletion if it is based on well defined explanations. Additionally, many people don't lie about licenses but misunderstand them. I had many cases of these (in Commons and well as through OTRS), and most of them was able to "fix" the problem by re-requesting the permission or choose the poper license. In these cases patience helps a lot.

Sidenote ends here. :-) --grin ✎ 09:43, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

These barriers are indeed problematic. I'm an admin at a small Wikipedia who encourages all our users to upload to Commons, rather than locally, but realise that a lot of them are new when it comes to copyright issues (and thus completely ignorant of copyright violation). Many of them are also quite new to Wiki-markup and it can be quite daunting to find the correct template for your licensing and know how to use it.
The email function for edited talk pages often doesn't work properly. I've had emails arrive more than a month after my talk page has been edited. Anrie (talk) 11:30, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

The workload of the admins is so heavy because they often take upon themselves work they should not do. Apparently quite a few admins try to understand the details of copyright statutes, rather then simply ask relevant people and trust their answers. I saw admins who get involved in endless discussions instead of assuming good faith and pass on to much more needed work. As long as some admins think they should act as inspectors and policemen and interrogate people in any case of doubt, the workload won't decrease. Drork (talk) 13:01, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Providing freely licensed content is the very core of Commons. Ensuring that a given status is ok, that we have enough info to convince reusers that the status is ok (because reusers are responsible for their actions and must be given the relevant info) is NOT something we "should not do". It is something absolutely necessary, and on Commons, admin candidateships are evaluated partly on this basis. If the current general debate leads to the conclusion that understanding copyright law (or trying to) and making related decisions is not the job of a Commons admin anymore (why not, after all), then we will have to find a new role to do this job. Trusting and assuming good faith from users is of course ok and necessary but, just like on OTRS, we need to trust only the party which is entitled to make the release and declarations. About trusting other people's analysis and interpretation of the laws, it is what we do everyday when referring to COM:L or improving it. It appears that sometimes the process becomes more difficult, though... --Eusebius (talk) 13:34, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
First of all, some admins on the Commons (and I won't mention names for the time being) see as part of their job promoting political ideas. They sometime use their adminship privileges to do that. If the administrator's job is to monitor copyvio, then these admins should be advised to give up political campaigns. Secondly, there is absolutely no way in which an admin from western Europe can read and understand all the details of a copyright statute from eastern Asia. If the admins try to do that, no wonder they feel frustrated. They are usually not lawyers, and even if they are, they cannot read east-Asian languages and the cannot understand all the authorized legal interpretations and regulations. The job of the administrator is to check if the upload seems "kosher" and if not, to ask for clarifications. That's about it. If you want all material on the Commons to be "kosher" with no single shred of doubt, you cannot allow users to upload images. You have to create a repository without the participation of outside users. Drork (talk) 15:09, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Translations of copyrights laws on other languages (including English) are existing. Sorry, but Piwiki can't usurp right to interpret Israel copyrights law. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:32, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
With SUL accounts, it should be possible to leave a notice also on a contributors home project. It might be a good idea to leave a bot note on talk pages of articles where an image is in use when it is tagged for something here. This would reach every who had the article on his/her watchlist. Unless there is an urgent reason like personal attacks or obvious copyright violations involving a litigious company, deletion requests should be left open for a week - not all obvious cases are all that obvious (recent case of incredibly fast deletion: the audio files of the recitation of the complete quran). /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 16:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Drork that some admins (and another users) at Commons defend their political, religious and ethnical interests in deletion request. I don't mention names but it was significant that many people from Hebrew Wikipedia wanted to delete Lautuff's images.

The way of making decisions at Commons is quite unfriendly for ordinary users. I think that it the reason why usually few people solve deletion requests, vote and comment the proposals. At Czech Wikipedia usually about 35 people solve deletion request. At Commons they know that their voice has not such value. It is understandable in cases of proven copyvios or wrong licences, but I saw also many problems in requests like "out of scope" where admins made queer decisions. Anoter controversial decisions were in request like "I think it is copyvio but a can't prove it".

Maybe it is time to discriminate reasons for deletion in deletion requests and increase position of community in some of them. --Dezidor (talk) 10:34, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

I have a feeling that this discussion leads nowhere. I don't see a point in continuing it. I think the Commons failed to function as a service to other projects, and as an international/inter-project forum, and it is better not to regard it as such anymore. Users should be advised that this project is intended for adults only and unlike other projects, it reflects the opinions of its administrators, and is not subject to the NPOV rules. I think other projects' users and contributers should be advised to upload images onto their respective projects rather than the Commons. The Commons' users could pick up picture they find in other projects and arrange them in categories and galleries to form a kind of gallery which will reflect their point of view. This will also solve the copyright issue. Drork (talk) 13:14, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Commons failed to function as a service to other projects mainly because FOP restrictions. People mainly from counteries of former Soviet Union or coutries like France, Italy... can't upload normal photos of houses or monuments. They can for example at Franch Wikipedia under special licence but it disrupts the function of Commons as service to these local projects.
Luckily I live in country, where is no problem with FOP, but if I were from Ukraine or France, i will run from Commons in few weeks because it would have no sence to find who is the architect of every ordinary house, small chapel or WW1 monument in every village, when it was built and when the architect died. --Dezidor (talk) 13:33, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

People should stop complaining when they are at fault when it comes to have their image upload being deleted by admins. Commons admins (and users) are not necessarily here to feed the essential missing information and are also not here to accept unverified or breaking copyright content. If you think commons boys are here to solve the project mistakes and to change the copyright laws of all the country of the world, then you were obviously in the wrong place to begin with... Nothing more to add on the subject. Nothing is perfect, sometimes there are errors, misunderstanding, etc. Anyway, you should stop mixing problems and issues. Esby (talk) 13:38, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Will Commons consider supporting XAML format?

Will Commons consider supporting XAML format? I think XAML seems to be an acceptable file format in Commons.--百楽兎 (talk) 23:14, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

June 19

Somebody with knowledge of Chinese

Could somebody with knowledge of Chinese language and culture check the description of File:孙文广.袭击.JPG and File:孙文广.袭击.3.JPG. They don't make sense to me. --Túrelio (talk) 09:11, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Related New York Times article. Teofilo (talk) 13:27, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Thank you. See: Category:Sun Wenguang. --Túrelio (talk) 13:42, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Category:国 is for what?

This category Category:国 is for what? Who can explain the purpose?--百楽兎 (talk) 13:08, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Check its parent category. I'd guess for . Not sure why the other images end up in there. -- User:Docu
It seems User:BotMultichill's mistakes.--百楽兎 (talk) 15:16, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Only 4 images should belong to this category. Others are just off by a mile (or even more than that) OhanaUnitedTalk page 04:20, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
This seems to be a very limited category... just for the Chinese character, which means "country". Jappalang (talk) 08:53, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Botmultichill seems to be working on the assumption that any file which is used in any article which has the character 国 in the title belongs in this category.KTo288 (talk) 22:15, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Make the licence info button clearer on the upload form

On the English Wikipedia upload form when you select a licence the template pops up so you can view the licence and click on links etc. This is very handy. At Commons there is an "info" button that does the same thing, but I did not notice it, it should be clearer. There are a couple of options:

  • Option 1: change the current button () to something else (eg ) and have an admin update the relevant pages. I think a yellow button will stand out from all of the blue help buttons.
  • Option 2: change the info icon to a "Licence preview" button (see a mockup). This would require localisation for different languages.
  • Option 3: make no change, or an alternate suggestion?

I think option 1 would be good. Is there consensus for a change?--Commander Keane (talk) 09:40, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe just lose the button all together and show the license. Rocket000 (talk) 22:29, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
That's horrid. Slap a full GFDL tag in the midst of this form, pushing the submit buttons and the rest all the way down. No thanks, that was the reason why I disabled it and came up with that button in the first place. I have seen no complaints about this change since the upload form script was enabled more than a year ago. It's all OK with me to make that button more prominent (by whatever means); it's just a minor configuration thing. But going back to the old ways would be a mistake in my opinion. Lupo 23:12, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Meh, I don't use that form anyway so don't listen to me. :-) Rocket000 (talk) 00:16, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Asking community permission for a categorization test (field: Pathology)

I tested into it.source an implementation of atomic keyword-like, multi-axis categorization; a brief description of that test into a personal sandbox page: User:Alex brollo/O_Categories.

Here am I to ask the community for its permission to do some tests into Pathology-related images; some years ago I worked into it (I am a pathologist and I posted some from the first microscopic images here), and I'll be happy to test my idea here, but I'd have to create new categories with new rules and some special code.

The goal is, to introduce a little of automation and to produce a set of categories, designed to be used with +incategory, t.i. category intersection.

For my tests, I presume that a dozen of categories, applied to perhaps 100 images, will be sufficient to give you a running idea of the trick. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 21:03, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

No thanks, this would pollute the category tree. http://test.wikipedia.org might be a more suitable place for testing things. Multichill (talk) 21:41, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
OK. I'll go on into it.source where a preliminary test is running. The aim was not to test the code, it was to let you see how it runs. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 22:05, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
That would be a lot of over-categorization. See COM:OVERCAT. The key is create a good category tree and only categorize the media in the most specific one. Things like "normal" and "microscopic" are terrible category names. Putting something in "benign epithelial tumor", "benign tumor", and "tumor" is completely ruining the purpose of subcategories.. Rocket000 (talk) 22:25, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
I already said that I'll NOT go on to implement this system. Nevertheless tell me please how you can have a list of all microscopic images of tumors of digestive system, all the images matching this three features, and no one other. Category intersection needs "over-categorization", or simply it doen't run, as it doesn't run presently. I know that this system breaks the principle "only categorize the media in the most specific one": this is why I was asking your permission to implement it, into a field that I know professionally and that is presently not so well categorized!
But - I don't want to waste your (and mine) time any more. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 22:59, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Um, why not just create a category called "microscopic images of tumors of digestive system"? Rocket000 (talk)
It was only an example.... if you want to create one specific category for any intersection of a 3-axial, 100x100x20 category and subcategory system, as I told in my sandbox page, you need 200.000 categories. If you use the +incategory tool and you use atomic, +incategory-oriented categorization, you need only 220. It's a long-lasting debate, but believe me, my suggestion is not so stupid as you could presume at a first glance. ;-) . But really, I see that Commons is too a busy and complex community to do this kind of tests. Much better to develop it and to test it deeply into a small, quiet community. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 07:57, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
tools:~escaladix/catcroiseur/ might work for this, but I keep getting a screen that seems to say 21 users are overloading it. -- User:Docu (talk) / en:User:Docu (talk) 09:36, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
Well, I told that this talk is not so useful in my opinion, but I have to go on, if any of you posts more comments.... it would be very unkind to leave the talk I opened, ignoring further comments.
First of all, I apologize for a math mistake - triaxial categorization 100x100x20 gives not 200.000 different compinations; any of you familiar with mathematics can give the exact result - but, for sure, they are MANY, much more then 220 atomic categories that are sufficient if you use a incategory approach.
Second, if you follow the rule "only categorize the media in the most specific one", category intersection becomes a terribly complex, recursive job since you have to follow the tree of any subcategory to collect all the items related to an intermediate level category. On the contrary, if you ignore that rule, the task is very simple: it is merely a search of a set of strings into a text (this is how +incategory works). Atomic categories behave just like keywords; this is why the few members of it.source that are discussing this issue call them "catwords", t.i. something half way from categories to keywords.
You are right, when you say that a similar categorization system will waste the "normal" category tree; this is why my suggestion would be - if my test would be approved by community - to prefix their name with a unique prefix (I'd suggest § caracter) to make it clear that they are "special", and to make easy to delete them from any page by a bot, if the test will go wrong. But - again - I see that contributors of this talk are very worried about, and my will to insist is fastly vanishing. I'd be happy if some of you will get the message: think about category transclusion.... it's a interesting field. Perhaps somebody can build something good with this idea. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 18:22, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Renaming a file

I have given a file a wrong name. File:Thormod Thorlæus.jpg should have been named File:Thormod Thorfæus.jpg. Where do I go to correct this? --Saddhiyama (talk) 21:34, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Just follow the instructions in Commons:File renaming. Another page, Commons:Help desk is the right place to ask if you have further questions. Cheers, --Slaunger (talk) 21:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
If its your own file all you have to do is upload the file again with the proper name, so that there are now two versions of the file, then tag the version with the wrong name with {{badname|File:Thormod Thorfæus.jpg}} or if its not your own file add the tag {{rename|Thormod Thorfæus.jpg|This file has been given the wrong name}}.KTo288 (talk) 22:05, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for your help. --Saddhiyama (talk) 19:57, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

June 20

June 21

File:Influenza A(H1N1) map of the Philippines as of 6 June 2009.png

File:Influenza A(H1N1) map of the Philippines as of 6 June 2009.png has a very strange update. It says it is no longer updated, but since it is a dated image specifying events of a specific date, it should never be updated, unless there was a mistake. Before it's 16 June update, it previously contained a color coded map. 70.29.212.226 05:48, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

I reverted the image to the 6 June 2009 version, and added {{Superseded}} on the page to inform users that a kept-up-to-date version exists. –Tryphon☂ 12:55, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Bold and italics characters for new upload form

I was uploading some cacti and I have found that there is no botton for bold and italics. Is it possible to ad in, that we botanists can set scientific taxa names to italics directly during the upload proces?--Juan de Vojníkov (talk) 07:23, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Standard wiki markup works during the upload just included it with in the description, ''' bold ''' ''italics'' '''''combined'''''. Gnangarra 12:23, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Why doesn't Commons accept FLASH files?

Why doesn't Commons accept FLASH files, such as *.swf and *.flv?--百楽兎 (talk) 13:49, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

I will venture a guess that the reason is that Flash is not free technology. Same reason we do not host .mpg files, etc. Wknight94 talk 14:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
Flash is non-free software. Any file created in it is non-free and cannot be hosted here. ViperSnake151 (talk) 14:47, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
See Commons:Project_scope#Must_be_an_allowable_free_file_format. The long explanation is that unfree file types place us at the whim and mercy of the producer of the proprietary viewer software, who may choose to not support certain platforms or to discontinue the format in favour of another one in the future. Dcoetzee (talk) 15:04, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
A suitable alternative free format would be animated SVG, e.g. these few samples, but unfortunately the format is not supported within Wikimedia (yet?). Globbet (talk) 22:15, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi. Does it exist anything like "Featured galleries" recognition? I think it would be a nice incentive to improve our chaotic and poor galleries. Emijrp (talk) 11:47, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

sound like a good idea, be bold put together a criteria and get some inout from there as to how to decide what is an FG. Gnangarra 12:21, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
See Commons talk:Featured galleries. Man vyi (talk) 21:48, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
There is also little forgotten Commons:Collections --Jarekt (talk) 14:55, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Image from Flickr to Commons

I have no experience with Flickr so somebody may give me a hint. I want to upload the image of James Douglass to Commons and use it in the English WP. What should I do to get the license right? Write a note to the contact of Birmingham Public Library? Thanks, Wouter (talk) 12:49, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

At the moment the image is licensed on Flickr "All rights reserved" thus is not free licensed. Yes, you should ask the library if they agree to change the license on Flickr to a free license (Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike) so that everyone can use this photo for every purpose including commercial use. Maybe Commons:Email templates is useful if you will ask them for permission to use this image without having the Flickr license changed. Some arguments are also in Commons:Welcome, Flickr users. --Martin H. (talk) 20:43, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

June 22

How to rename an image?

Sorry, but i've been searching for half an hour until now without any success: Where is the proper procedure to rename an image described? This image does not show Ulrike Sima but Sonja Wehsely. --Gnu1742 (talk) 12:29, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

OK, the actual problem. Nevertheless: Is there a page where templates like 'badname' are described and how do i find it starting at the community portal. --Gnu1742 (talk) 13:16, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
There's a template for renaming but I gave up waiting for it. It's much faster to upload the file again and ask for a deletion of the old version. See FAQ, How can I rename/move an image or other media file?. --Iotatau (talk) 13:19, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Problem with OTRS system

Hi!

My name is David, and i'm looking around Flickr pictures about Christina Aguilera. One day i found this pic and i think is so awesome for the articles related to Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man" song. So, i tell to the autor (the proof and the answer] and i send the picture above to OTRS. They don't answer me. I send a message saying "you have a bad nbad service"... And they answer me "no, is not bad" but they don't make me a solution for the picture. So, i tell to the autor (Michael Moser) something like "Wikipedia needs a request from you, as an autor". He sends this mail to wikipedia and to me, but since three days ago, as usual, we don't have answers. I need someone to give me solutions. So, could anybody...? --Daviddavid00 (talk) 14:31, 23 June 2009 (UTC) Of course i've uploaded the pic.

This is a very limited permission, insufficient for hosting the image here. Mr. Moser would need to agree to a free license for the image. See Commons:Email templates... Lupo 14:52, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Really? Emmm... Anyone from the OTRS system could send what you send to me to him? I think he is so upset with all this and i think he thinks i'm been annoying. So, please, help, i need the pic. Could YOU help me with that? Thank you. --190.29.159.217 15:38, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I need advise

Please read and leave your opinion on this subject: File talk:Sampson.IMGP5911.JPG. Avjoska (talk) 16:24, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

June 24

User contributions: User:Monarchians

Hi. I'm not sure if this is the right place for my question. If not, please show me the right direction.

I'm not sure what to do with contributions of User:Monarchians. He uploaded lots of old pictures of the Thai Royal Family. He claimes with the most recent ones to be the author of those works - which I doubt. While on older uploads he says about the author: "Unknown (It is assumed the author died more than 70 years ago.)", though some photos cannot be older than 60 years (e.g. this one).

On his talk page he was already warned: "Please do not remove problem tags" and has been blocked for 2 hours - so he's not so innocent?

What to do? Ignore? --hdamm (talk) 16:22, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Addendum: some of "his" photos even seem to be scans from books or magazines (File:Mom Sangwal with M.C. Galyani Vadhana.JPG) --hdamm (talk) 16:56, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
I've looked at some samples of his uploads. This all looks very dodgy, I'd be inclined to delete the whole thing. Haukurth (talk) 16:21, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Upload page - Category function

Hi all! I'm interested to embed the category chooser used on this wiki on the special upload page on my own wiki; question: Is a mediawiki extension or whatever? Do you know the name? Thanks a lot!--Fpiraneo (talk) 10:23, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I think it's derivative of MediaWiki:Gadget-HotCat.js. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:57, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

June 25

Photo notes: Beta testers wanted

Do you know the "photo notes" on Flickr? (Move your mouse over the image! Some more useful applications of this feature can be seen for instance here or here.)

Here at the Commons, we've had for some time a gadget called ImageBoxes that was supposed to offer similar functionality. Alas, it appears it never worked quite right, and it had a very limited user interface.

Enter ImageAnnotator. It's supposed to replace ImageBoxes, and it's supposed to fully implement something like "photo notes" here at the Commons, with integrated support for editing notes.

ImageAnnotator is in beta test phase. It has been tested successfully on quite a few browsers (see the compatibility info), but we need more testers.

We're looking for beta-testers using Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8 (or really old browsers, like IE 5.5) who would be willing to try out this script and to report back their experiences. Any volunteers? See the installation instructions at the very top of MediaWiki talk:Gadget-ImageAnnotator.js. About beta-testing, see MediaWiki talk:Gadget-ImageAnnotator.js#Beta testers needed.

Please report your experiences (positive or negative) at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-ImageAnnotator.js. For some images at the Commons already using this feature, see this list.

Lupo 09:25, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Noob looking for help

Hello, i am new on Common. I just want to upload a file for a wikipedia article (on wp.fr) and there is a problem. The png version of the file seems to don't work correctly. Look at File:CyclesW4.svg. The grey lines are visible in the svg version but not in the png version. How to fix the problem ? I am not a native speaker, sorry for my English. Btw, can I "preview" an upload ? Because I can make a mistake... Koko90 (talk) 13:44, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I have fixed the problem with some multiple purge. Koko90 (talk) 14:08, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
To get support in French, you've also Commons:Bistro. --Dereckson (talk) 14:44, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

June 26

German photos free for use on attribution?

Centralize on: Commons talk:Licensing#German photos free for use on attribution?

Does "Fotos honorarfrei bei Namensnennung" (Google translate: "Photos free of charge for Attribution") mean the photos can be uploaded per {{Attribution}}? Website in question: Jappalang (talk) 06:31, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

I strongly doubt it. And if you look at the subdirectory on the source server where these photos are found, it contains the string "presse" (http://www.operklosterneuburg.at/2004/presse/fotoh.htm) suggesting these are free only for press and PR purposes. --Túrelio (talk) 10:37, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
It does seem to imply what it says on the tin - however, I guess as we're not entirely sure it's best to play it safe. Aidan Biltner (talk) 01:30, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Unpopulated Category:Symmetry impressions

If you know non-trivial images that convey a distinct symmetry impression, please think about

More highly symmetric images can be refined into Category:Symmetry impressions and its subcats, such as

Such images are impossible to find with keywords and search engines. Regards 62.147.39.224 00:19, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I suggest you use a username and not an IP address. That makes discussions easier. Regards, Wouter (talk) 06:29, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
If you want, you can make Category:Triskelion be a subcategory of Category:Images with rotational symmetry (instead of just including the one image Manx_Triskelion.png) -- but I'm not sure that all images in Category:Triskelion satisfy your strict criteria). AnonMoos (talk) 19:42, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
Also, I presume you meant images with rotational symmmetry but without reflection symmetry (otherwise the category would be extremely comprehensive). AnonMoos (talk) 20:43, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
Interesting set of categories! Thanks for bringing this up. I added a few images to one of them. I'm not entirely sure which ones would be "trivial" though, e.g. the Nantes cathedral and Eiffel tower above could be, at least in thumbnail would. Symmetric images of symmetric buildings are frequent. Maybe a tool could analyze all commons images and assign some of the categories automatically. -- User:Docu (talk) / en:User:Docu (talk) at 16:46, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Autocategorize images per date

Hi. Is it possible and desirable to autocategorize images in categories like this Category:June 2009, using the {{Information}} date parameter (only when it is in YYYY-MM-DD format)? --Emijrp (talk) 13:14, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps, categories like Category:2009-06-22 would be nice for the bunch of images, and Category:2009-06 or Category:June 2009 only for the best and most representative images of that month. --Emijrp (talk) 13:14, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Example of the tree:

  •  Support I like the idea--Jarekt (talk) 14:50, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Automatic categorization doesn't sound nice at all (to me). Media related to an event, or for which the date is of importance, are (should be) already categorized on this basis. But I don't think we need to pollute date categories with our millions of snapshots. It would just kill the concept. --Eusebius (talk) 14:57, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
  •  Oppose while it makes sense for some cases, news events, people, and some scenery photographs. There are too many photographs where it doesnt have any significance of any kind as the date just happens to be when the person took the photograph this applies to objects, animals, plants, drawings, maps etc. The size of the categories would be such that they just wouldnt be very practical to use for searching. Gnangarra 15:47, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Technically possible but how would it serve those who use our images? Samulili (talk) 16:02, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
  •  Comment I was imagining to use it for categorizing historical images, for example with CatScan or AWB one can to populate categories like category:1931 in Poland, etc. May be we can use it for images older than 10 years? Or may be make it hidden category? --Jarekt (talk) 16:12, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
If there's no consensus for automatic categorization into the existing categories, alternatively it would be possible, to keep the current manually maintained categories and to create an additional set of categories, that is populated automatically. This would add the benefits of the solution and would allow tools and interested users to access the categories without polluting the existing ones. --Slomox (talk) 18:01, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
With _HIDDENCAT_ option. Emijrp (talk) 18:37, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
Just my two cents: could you elaborate a bit on why this would be desirable? Where images are related to historical events, it might be useful, but in many other cases I can't really see what use it would have. Of course I'm not opposed to cats containing images taken in a particular year/month/perhaps even date. But putting all images in such a cat (or perhaps, trying to do so) would, I think, result in having very bloated cats that would be quite hard to browse. I think that such cats would fail to serve their purpose. Regards, MartinD (talk) 11:37, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
There are two different schools in the way people look upon categories: one sees them as a tool to make browsable lists, the other sees them as mathematical sets, on which set operations can performed (which is not yet implemented in a _convenient_ tool for MediaWiki, but which is still possible [CatScan for example]). The first school is prevalent in our category system (with combinatory categories like Category:Lutheran churches in Bavaria [instead of separately indicating the three atomic properties "Lutheran", "church", and "Bavaria"]). That's mostly for historical reasons. I'm sure, if set operations for categories would have been available right from the start, today we would have a fully atomistic category system. But they weren't and so today most of the users are used to and familiar with combinatory categories and defend them.
The autocategorization proposal is more connected to the second school. For example, if I need an image of the Eiffel tower taken in August 2006, I am lost, cause there is no Category:Tour Eiffel in August 2006. I can only go to Category:Tour Eiffel and look at every single image in that category for when it was taken. That will take some time. If autocategorization would exist, I could just go to CatScan and perform a category intersection ([16]) and I would get the full list. That's much more convenient. Autocategorization in the existing categories would interfere with the browsable list school of thought, but a second set of categories would not and the advantages of both schools could be used. --Slomox (talk) 11:55, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
I think Slomox explained it very well. Having atomic categories like category:1931 (+ subcategories) and category:Poland (+ subcategories) one can perform category intersection using CatScan or AWB and fill categories like category:1931 in Poland. I assume that autocategorized year categories (especially from the last decade) would be so huge as to be impossible to browse. If that is a problem, one can make the autocategories hidden and call them category:Media from YYYY, so those categories do not interfere with the current structure. Autocategoring by year is not new, see for example Category:Images from the German Federal Archive by year where I thought it worked very well. --Jarekt (talk) 12:17, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Category:Images from the German Federal Archive by year is a bad example as it is a temporary category structure which will be nuked once all the images are categorized. Multichill (talk) 12:26, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
  •  Comment There are various elements to consider, I'm positive on some, negative or undecided on others:
    •  Support as many photos as possible should be searchable by year/month they were taken. This could allow to find images of a given area in a specific season or decade. It could allow to find images of a given category of objects in a specific decade.
    •  Comment current categories, like Category:2007 might not be ideal for this as they are not limited to images taken in a given year (it could be of a person born or dying that year)
    •  Comment categories by day may or may not be needed, break-down by month could be sufficient
    •  Support it doesn't really matter how many images are in a given category as long as tools can be used to intersect the category with other ones.
    •  Support it's preferable to do categorization by tools, rather than ask photographers to do even more things for images we are glad they decided to upload here.
    •  Comment the date field in {{Information}} may or may not be a good basis for this type of categorization
    •  Support a possible basis could also be an exif field completed by a camera. These could be placed in a separate hidden category.
    •  Support if the field value is valid, automatic categorization by template is good
    •  Oppose if the field value isn't helpful, automatic categorization by template (or indiscriminate tool) isn't useful
    •  Support if the category is entirely template based, it could be helpful to do it with a hidden category.
    • -- User:Docu (talk) / en:User:Docu (talk) at 17:47, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
    •  Support as Docu. I do not understand what is so evil about templates doing categorization in this manner. Agree with the set perspective. A pity we do not have better support for searching that way. --Slaunger (talk) 17:51, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Category moves

I tried to move Category:Asian girls from Category:Girls to the new category Category:Girls by continent. I did this by creating "Girls by continent" with the single line [[Category:Girls]], then editing "Asian girls" to change [[Category:Girls]] to [[Category:Girls by continent]].

Now neither category appears in the category "Girls". Purging doesn't help. What happened? Brian Jason Drake 03:22, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

It does appear - on page 2. Click on the "Next 200" link. Wknight94 talk 03:34, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
That's a known bug, not your fault. --Túrelio (talk) 06:08, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, it's filed as bug 1211. I can't believe this bug has been around since 2004, and they haven't even added a message to explain how it works. Everyone seems to agree that it's confusing at the moment. Brian Jason Drake 04:32, 26 June 2009 (UTC) [edited Brian Jason Drake 05:31, 26 June 2009 (UTC)]

Weird behavior from template {{Please link images}}. At User talk:Kbh3rd#Please link images, if you try and click the "edit" link for this section, it opens the template for editing instead of the section of the user's talk page. As the template is protected, I can't fix it. - ALLST✰R▼echo wuz here @ 04:18, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

And you wouldn't be able to fix it anyway. You can't edit the section of the user's talk page, because there isn't a section of the user's talk page to edit - if you look at the source of that page, you won't see a heading. The solution is to subst the template (i.e. type {{subst:Please link images}} instead of {{Please link images}}) - all new uses of this template should be subst'd, and there's talk of getting a bot to subst the template where it is currently transcluded. See the template's talk page. Brian Jason Drake 05:08, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
New usage of the template is substituted, see Special:Contributions/BotMultichillT. I'll kick one of my bots to do the substing of the old templates. Multichill (talk) 09:35, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks Brian and Multichill. Just for the record, I didn't place the template on the user's page. I should have looked at the source closer for a heading. - ALLST✰R▼echo wuz here @ 17:34, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

The sort of thing that makes me glad I'm not an admin here

File:Trickkubic.jpg

Found this one by hitting "random file": File:Trickkubic.jpg. Used in the German Wikipedia at de:Trick & Kubic. It's the only upload from the account, uploaded Octiber 2008. Very professional looking: if it's legitimate, it might even be featured picture level, it's a great photo. Claimed as "own work". No idea whether it is or not. What should we do here? Should someone email the user? The duo? Seems to me we'd want to make sure the rights on this really are OK (and, if so, I suggest nominating it as a featured picture). - Jmabel ! talk 16:55, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

We should employ Commons:Permission here and mark the image as {{subst:npd}}: No permission or no proof of permission. Copyright holder should send an release to OTRS. Thats not very promising because the uploader will never read the request possibly. However in this case its very possible a copyright violation, even if the uploader is a bandmember it is still a copyright violation, permission must come from the photographer (german band, assumed german photographer, no work for hire on germany - copyright remains with the person who made the photo) --Martin H. (talk) 17:14, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
(ec) Send an e-mail to the folks at blackfoxmusic.de and ask them for a declaration of consent, I'd say. Or maybe try the user first, since they do seem to have e-mail enabled. Want to do that, or should I? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:15, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Ok, I already wrote a text on the talkpage - i can do in german. --Martin H. (talk) 17:21, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
(ec) Oof. The user only made the one edit on de-wiki as well, adding this photo to an article there. There is an album of Trick & Kubic promo photographs on a myspace page here; this photo is there and the photographer is Michael Petersohn, who has a website (www.polarized.de) and a contact email address. However the upload is significantly higher resolution than can be found there. The image is also in this last.fm gallery (though again smaller) and was uploaded the same day there as the upload to Commons. Another smaller version is here with an upload date a month prior to Commons. The same username shows up in this posting on a forum; maybe they are a German music marketer. Dunno if they would have the rights to license it on Commons though. I'm not sure it is an obvious copyvio, but there are plenty of grounds for a DR, and I wouldn't nominate it for featured picture status unless we get some sort of confirmation from the photographer. Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:23, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

ad allowed?

Goodness, are advertisements like these allowed? Anrie (talk) 14:10, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

You can tag these kind of images with {{Watermark}} so someone can remove the advertisement part. Seems to be missing permission though.Multichill (talk) 14:36, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Blatant copyvio: All site contents and graphics are Copyright © 2009 Iconshock by Unusual Minds. All Rights Reserved. Yann (talk) 15:32, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
I guess you didn't check his other uploads Yann? I replaced it with no permission. Multichill (talk) 16:10, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
The user is tagging their more recent uploads with an OTRS tag. Someone with OTRS access could go and check the cited ticket and see if it applies. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:38, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
That's the problem with Commons. Some people seem to be more interested in getting stuff deleted than preserving images. Multichill (talk) 19:34, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Restored per this ticket. The OTRS tickets in the users other uploads should have been spotted and prompted users to consider the possibility of an OTRS ticket relating to this image also. Adambro (talk) 19:53, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
The blatant advertising text I think would be out of project scope, but if the images have been legitimately free licensed, we can presumably crop only the possibly useful icons and upload them with descriptive rather than advertising text. -- Infrogmation (talk) 20:10, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
I've put an {{Extract}} tag on it. Clearly the icons are more useful in isolation. Dcoetzee (talk) 20:14, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Opinions are needed

After a long debate, someone uploaded this picture to prove that it is safe to remain, and this is used as a standard case now. So, I think we need your opinions (on this picture). Jtm71 (talk) 22:36, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

You need the opinion of someone familiar with Southkorean copyright. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 22:40, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Photographs of the interior of commercial establishments

(United States) I may not have looked hard enough, but I really don't see any. Is this because they are a copyright violation or is it just that no one does it? Thanks! - Richfife (talk) 01:53, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

I know we have some interiors of restaurants, grocery stores, and at least a few other shops in the USA. We need to be cautions of photos that show commercial displays, advertising, or similar things that that might be Commons:Derivative works. Other than that, I'm not aware of any specific restriction. -- Infrogmation (talk) 02:00, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

flickr fotos that dont exist there anymore...

hey yo! what about these pictures: File:Wrestling falconfrenzy079.jpg + File:Wrestling states005 edit.jpg? they seem to show minors in clothes that r not appropriate in common public (like on the street)... and furthermore flickr doesnt show them anymore (maybe for license reasons?)... should they be deleted? r there no adults (preferably not so greek-statue-looking) who wear such clothes? bye... --Homer Landskirty (talk) 21:17, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

In regard to licensing they are o.k. because they were Flickr-reviewed. --Túrelio (talk) 21:21, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
even though they have been withdrawn in the meantime? i mean since the last review... --Homer Landskirty (talk) 22:04, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
You only need to review once. Creative Commons licences are non-revocable - you can stop distributing them, but you can't stop others distributing it under that licence. There's no issue here as regards licences - we care that they were free at time of upload, not what they are on flickr now. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:22, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
ok - i c... --Homer Landskirty (talk) 22:40, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

and regarding the content? why minors? why not adults or puppets or sketches? --Homer Landskirty (talk) 22:40, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

There is no license issue; moreover, there is no Commons:Photographs of identifiable people issue. These photos were taken in a public place and clearly aren't intended to be lascivious, any more than a picture of a female teenager whose breasts create a visible impression. Removing photos of teenagers with visible "bulges" strays deep into paranoia. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:46, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
heh heh - public place: they both show one single minor in the foreground in light clothes in quite high resolution, which might be the reason, why flickr doesnt show them anymore... --Homer Landskirty (talk) 07:06, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for caring about that. However, these two image were obviously taken at a public event and the presentation does not seem to be embarrassing for the depicted. --Túrelio (talk) 06:12, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Do you mean "does not seem"? Samulili (talk) 06:58, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
i ask the same... --Homer Landskirty (talk) 07:06, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Of course not. Sorry for typo. --07:07, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
public or not... when i take high resolution fotos of good looking muscled men at a public beach they dont like it, i would guess... i cant c that the guys agreed in being shown in public internet (which is more public than an almost private school event with mothers and fathers and well known teachers)... --Homer Landskirty (talk) 07:06, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
That would be valid if the image had been taken in Germany. But in the US there is less protection even for non-notable persons. And again, I can't see that the images might do any harm to the depicted. --Túrelio (talk) 07:11, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
In addition to the explanations that have been given about how the pictures do not conflict with the guidelines, I would like to say that if the depicted individuals (or their parents, but not a third party) come to us and say that these pictures are actually harmful for them, we would consider that, of course. --Eusebius (talk) 07:16, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

oki doke - i just wanted to be sure, that we don't break rules by publishing those (on several levels extraordinary) pictures... --Homer Landskirty (talk) 07:33, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I removed the redundant licensing information (i.e. identical tags included twice) and added {{Personality rights}} to both images. Brian Jason Drake 03:18, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

June 23

Protected Archive?

Editing User talk:Rodhullandemu/Archive states it's protected, but nothing shows in the history for this. Is this normal? Thanks. Rodhullandemu (talk) 15:53, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the page User talk:Rodhullandemu/Archive is not protected. Where does it state it's protected? Pruneautalk 16:18, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
Maybe you klicked on the last headline to edit? The last headline (Please link images) is from a template which is protected. --Martin H. (talk) 16:25, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
That's what it was. BotMultichillT didn't subst: the template. It's fixed now. - ALLST✰R▼echo wuz here @ 16:43, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
Much obliged to you. Rodhullandemu (talk) 17:28, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

June 28

Categories

Hi, I uploaded some pictures, and a robot asked me to add categories. I have tried to find what categories there are to add the right one. I cannot find a list of authorized categories. Sarcyn (talk) 09:12, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

There are no such lists. There is CommonSense, but a better strategy is to search commons to see how similar images are categorized. If you have a bunch of images that do not really fit a category, it is best to create a new category. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 09:24, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Vandal

Hello. Please could someone ban Special:Contributions/TarackaChetowaIkonoka for vandalism ? Thanks, Jack ma (talk) 09:08, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

✓ Done and reported to COM:AN/B. Jastrow (Λέγετε) 09:23, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

en.wikipedia

Looking through administrator attention things on here, and more generally "issues", coats of arms seem to be a recurrent theme. I'd like to suggest that where expert opinion is required, one option for people to consider is the Heraldry and vexillology WikiProject on en.wikipedia, and in a more limited capacity other languages. You may be able to find help there when you can't here, and we'll normally try to help, the usual exceptions permitting. The Project page is here and talk here. Thanks, Jarry1250 (talk) 13:32, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Creative Commons Contradiction Share-Alike

On IRC (our IRC, and the CC IRC), we've been discussing the legalities of redirecting {{CC-BY-SA-2.5,2.0,1.0}} to {{CC-BY-SA-3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0}} (and other similar templates, adding 3.0 to them), for consistency with our recent migration. But, unlike the GFDL, the CC licenses do not specifically have a licensing update clause, the closest thing we got in the BY-SA 2.5 license is this:

You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License.

Basically saying we can only do this to derivatives, or to images licensed under the GFDL that were posted here and got added to the licensing update mess. This is a bizarre and slightly wonky wording. If anyone wishes to help us get some clarification or any other things related to this ironed out, be my guest. Some have suggested we bring this up on their mailing list too. ViperSnake151 (talk) 23:05, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

To be honest, in the lack of a specific update clause, I'd not do the redirect. There's no harm in having a few more license tags. You may also want to solicit opinions on Commons talk:Licensing. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:20, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

June 27

David Shankbone Raw

Hey guys - just FYI: ever come across one of my shots and think you could edit the original better? You're probably right. If you would ever like the original, unedited shot to crop and shop yourself, email me the link and I'll reply with the raw. NOTE: all images from 2006 and 2007, and many from 2008, are on a crashed hard drive I need to have repaired. Until I do, they are unavailable - but if you ask I'll note it and send when available. --David Shankbone (talk) 01:59, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Funny subsection title. Sounds like a Professional Wrestling event. :P Cirt (talk) 02:15, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
Depends on what type of raw you're talk about though! ;) I know what it's like to have a crashed HDD (Infact I've lost images from 2005, 2006, 2007 and some of 2008), which is unable to be repaired unless I pay $$$ to send it overseas. Bidgee (talk) 02:33, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
FYI, there's currently support in the works for DNG uploads at Commons, for exactly this reason. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:59, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

NYPL images

FYI, I've started a very large batch upload of about 84000 public domain stereogram images from the New York Public Library as described at Commons:Batch_uploading/NYPL_Digital_Gallery. It'll take about 7 weeks and occupy about 500 GB, and uploads are under my own user account. Recently I've received cooperation from the NYPL on this, and this is just the first large batch upload from them. Each high-resolution image includes both a PNG and JPEG converted from the original MrSID file, and has a template {{NYPL-image-full}} populated with metadata from the source website. If there are any issues, please inform me. As with the Bundesarchive uploads, the most difficult challenge will be categorizing these images and placing them in suitable articles, a process that I reasonably expect to take many years. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:54, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

You probably should upload them under a bot-flagged account. Platonides (talk) 23:20, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
Probably, but I don't have one, and don't know how to request one. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:57, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Delay of full text search index update?

Hi, can anyone confirm that there is a two-week delay until images can be found using description words in a full text search? Example:

-- Iotatau (talk) 13:32, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Update: one day later the index update delay has shrunk to one day. All my latest uploads except those of today are accessible by full text search with strings only contained in the description, not the file name. The wonders of Wikimedia. --Iotatau (talk) 21:30, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Categorize books (Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition)

Category:Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition has 776 files that are difficult for me to categorize with only the autowikibrowser as a tool. Could someone create a bot that putts all images in the category into subcategories according to name? The bot would check the name of the file and add the category accordingly. The category is the name of the file before the number.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 19:30, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

I uploaded these files, and probably should've subcategorized them properly in the first place. I don't think I'll have time to look at this soon though... Dcoetzee (talk) 00:00, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Done Platonides (talk) 00:03, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

June 29

Media of the Day

I think it's kinda funny that in the Summer, we have a Christmas song featured... --77.4.34.139 01:31, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Please use the correct heading level (there is only a level 1 heading above, so this should be a level 2 heading. It doesn't look like "Summer" here in Australia... Brian Jason Drake 03:48, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
But it isn't any closer to Christmas! - Jmabel ! talk 21:21, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Which Christmas song? Assuming this refers to June, the only music I can see in any way associated with Christmas is Handel's Messiah - and that's no closer to Christmas than an Australian Winter. Man vyi (talk) 21:35, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Just in case no one got my point, here it is explicitly: a lot of people make silly assumptions about seasons, date formats, time zones, etc., without even thinking about it. In other cases, it can lead to information being misinterpreted without anyone noticing (even if they should know better). I was therefore trying to bring this to people's attention. (I don't really have time to try to download June's media on my crappy connection.) Brian Jason Drake 03:46, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

How to start a new page

How do you start a new page?? I am new and very confused..

First of all you're on the wrong wiki. You probably want to write a Wikipedia article on the English-language Wikipedia. To do this, go here: en:Help:Starting a new page. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:18, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Actually we do technically have pages here, but we call them galleries, and as the name suggests they should be predominantly of pictures. The easiest way to create a gallery is to enter the title you want to use in the search box and search. This will give you a list of images, pages and categories with names and text similar to your title. This is a good opportunity to see if your new page is really needed, is there another page with an ambit the same or similar to what you intend. If you still think that your intended page is needed, look at the very top of the search results page, you should see a red link, click on the redlink and by editing the resulting blank page and saving it you should be able to create your page, remember to add categories, maybe a short intro and interwikis. Since you are new perhaps the best thing to do is to first experiment in the sandbox, you can also create a personal sandbox to experiment in by following the procedure outlined above but with somthing like Username's sandbox/title of page as the search term. Hope this helps.KTo288 (talk) 10:08, 30 June 2009 (UTC)


June 18

Submit your (good) images to the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

Ubuntu Linux distributes a few images and audio/video files with each release to highlight the things the Free Culture movement can produce:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase

The submissions page has always been a bit barren, and it would be really great if some content creators from Commons submitted their quality photos/diagrams/video/audio to the Ubuntu contest for consideration there.

If you win, your work will be installed by default on millions of computers in the Examples folder, which is clearly visible on each user's Desktop.  ;)

Make sure you read the terms at the bottom of the page (they're more restrictive of content and license than Commons), and submit your work by July 16th (one month!)

(Also, remember that they do this every six months, so you don't need to inundate them.)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.224.66.218 (talk • contribs) 02:50, 18 June 2009 (UTC) - 02:50, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Dummy comment with fake timestamp to enable archiving, placed 2009-07-14. Lupo 07:40, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

How do we handle books?

For example: Category:Insectenfressende Pflanzen (Darwin). Should all the pages be merged into a djvu file and then deleted? With of course all images as standalone files? And is PDF better in this case?--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 07:16, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I would imagine djvu is the preferred format for future uploads of this sort, but I'm not really a wikisource participant. We will host any media which wikisource needs though. As for existing ones, I'd just leave them alone (this one seems to be from 2006), unless de-wikisource wants to change things. They are all in use (see s:de:Index:Insectenfressende Pflanzen), so there should be no deletion or altering while that usage is in place. Uploading a separate .djvu should be no problem though. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:30, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Generally, if a page contains illustrations that may have some independent usage, I upload those as separate image files. Often {{Extract}} tags are appropriate for these. Things like covers or frontispieces may also be uploaded separately, as they're often used to illustrate articles on the book. Most pages - especially text-only pages - should only be uploaded as part of a DJVU. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Technical suggestion to developers: large GIF files should have small thumbnails

Category:Stratz - Die Körperpflege der Frau used an extremely large amount of memory and crashed Firefox on my computer.

Category:Female anatomy used more than 600 MB of memory and caused Windows to resize my page file, but did not crash Firefox.

The thumbnails of the GIF files on these pages are not actual thumbnails but the original files (which are unusually large; perhaps the uploader should have used PNG instead), scaled to a small size by the browser.

I was running Firefox with 256 MB of RAM, with no extensions, and with plugins disabled. You can check the memory cache device by typing about:cache in the location bar. IE6 fared better but still the pages were fairly slow to load and used a lot of memory. --Keith111 (talk) 07:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I have Firefox and have no problem with them (although I have 6GB of RAM too). May someone can write a bot to convert and upload PNGs of all these. This category is even worse. Rocket000 (talk) 07:51, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
I think this is often discussed long standing problem with no easy solution. In general most or all non-animated GIF's should be converted to PNG's or SVG's. --Jarekt (talk) 15:15, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Unfortunately, there have been long-standing issues with PNG thumbnailing, which is not really very good, and often creates PNG thumbnails with file sizes which are much larger than they should be. Back when GIF thumbnailing was supprted, it actually typically gave better results than PNG thumbnailing does for greyscales and images with 256 colors or fewer, which encouraged some people to upload GIFs instead of PNGs. The way to really encourage a switch from GIF to PNG (without resorting to crude compulsion) is to finally improve the quality of PNG thumbnailing (as some people have been requesting for years). AnonMoos (talk) 17:37, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I actually got a nasty message from the Bugzzilla develpment team saying they had no intention of applying sharpening, and what was this restoration stuff you refer to? In short, total stonewall. Adam Cuerden (talk) 19:02, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm not all that sure what "sharpening" has to do with it, but there are some measures which would improve PNG thumbnailing (such as not including an alpha channel in the thumbnail if the original PNG has no alpha or transparency, generating a grayscale thumbnail of if the original PNG is grayscale, etc.) which have been extremely s-l-o-w to be implemented, if at all, despite the fact that the lack of these features contributes to inefficency and bloated bandwidth... 01:50, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Server side GIF thumbnailing was disabled due to a problem with certain animated GIFs crashing the server when the thumbnailer tried to process them. This is a known issue and people intend to fix it, but it hasn't been gotten to yet. Dragons flight (talk) 02:53, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I assume that there is nothing wrong with the GIFs, just the thumbnailer? Otherwise it seems irresponsible to dump them on unsuspecting users.
Isn't there any way to run the thumbnailer in a separate process, so even if it does crash, the only problem will be the lack of a thumbnail? Brian Jason Drake 03:54, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Well, there's nothing wrong with the GIF itself (in terms of quality, PNG or JPEG may be better, but that's a different issue). The problem is that's it's just a lot of stuff to load because they're the full size images, not thumbnails.
What I meant was: Is there anything wrong with the GIF that's causing the thumbnailer to crash, or is it just a bug in the thumbnailer? If there's something wrong with the GIFs, then it's irresponsible to let users download them without a warning, but if it's just a bug, then no urgent action needs to be taken. (Your comment makes it sound like the second option is the correct one.) Brian Jason Drake 11:10, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
No, GIFs are perfectly fine to download (that's outside of MediaWiki and no different that getting GIFs from anywhere else). The server just couldn't handle generating animations for some reason. And like many issues in MediaWiki we sometimes have to work with what we got instead waiting around for the software to improve. Rocket000 (talk) 18:57, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
We can add a template to these problem categories which produces a javascript button to switch __NOGALLERY__ on and off. Rocket000 (talk) 01:58, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
How exactly would this work? JavaScript works on the client side, but surely works on the server side? Brian Jason Drake 11:10, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
It would have to be done via MediaWiki:Common.js. Instead of a template, it could be a preference/gadget (something like User:Rocket000/togglegallery.js). Rocket000 (talk) 18:45, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Undo edits

Is it possible to undo/revert edits (change of categories)? The problem in questions is explained here. bamse (talk) 08:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Do I need to manually enter the categories back in after another editor messed up the categories? bamse (talk) 18:28, 3 July 2009 (UTC)


Contributors to WC can forget about having their work credited

Based on the response to Jan513’s question on 19 May 2009 [17] and other comments I have read else where,suggests that there is (at present), an un-bridgeable gulf between the belief and reality, that any of the works here on WC will be credited -in the UK at least. The only exceptions I am aware of to this are the BBC and the Guardian newspaper, both of which appear to be very good at crediting WC. This same omittance may also, (in practice) apply in many other countries too ( although adding some Exif and IPTC data I think would be very helpful in mitigating this). A step in the right direction would be to redesign the ambiguous and thus misleading images file page. It needs to be made intelligible to potential second users who are quickly flitting through WC plus a lot of other photo sources at the same time.

The strong impression I have gained from listening to people talking about WP & WC is that summary box below the image is “just some notes that the author of the WP article (sic) has put down. These can be ignored (sic) because as my children's teachers says: WC & WP is ALL FREE CONTENT (sic) . Thus no ‘credit line’ is necessary (sic). If a credit line was needed, then it would ‘clearly’ say so; like on ALL the other picture libraries.”

So I say: Our summary box really needs a redesign. To expect someone, who is hunting down a suitable photo for the Picture Desk, to suddenly be psychic and change gear on reaching WC and start hunting around to understand how to use WC images, is wishful thinking. Busy people work on auto-pilot – “this image on WC looks OK! No credit-line: even better! well use this!” Period.

Here is another (and current) example of the confusion the Summary Box creates:
A new contributor has been uploading his really informative images of some surgical procedures.
Example: File:Abdominoplasty umbilicus (belly button) reconstruction.jpg
He has gone to a lot of effort to get a OTRS from the surgeon to allow the images to be released on CC licencee's and to have this reflected on the licences website.

All electronic video, imagery, and text contributed to Wikimedia Commons and/or Wikipedia is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License and is free to copy, distribute, and transmit, or to adapt the work under the conditions that: a) the work must be attributed by specifying the licensor as Michael S. Schwartz, M.D., with a link to the Website (http://www.drmichaelschwartz.com/); and b) if the work is altered, transformed, or built upon, the resulting work may only be distributed under the same, similar, or a compatible license. Please review the terms and conditions of this license at the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License webpage. (emphasis added) http://www.drmichaelschwartz.com/terms.html

Now the way I would 'like to' credit that is:

Michael S. Schwartz / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-3.0

but according to the CC conditions above, it appears to require: 

Michael S. Schwartz M.D. / http://www.drmichaelschwartz.com/  /CC-BY-3.0

You’ll notice that the second version does not comply with the WC credit line requirements either. Don't even look right. So what does it mean? Also, whilst I think it is right and proper to place a URL address in the meta-data, to do so as above is like creating a new CC licence. I.e., one that come with free advertising ( not forgetting that domain names can and have been sold on for profit to gambling and porno sites). Moreover, one has some protection from problems any future owner of the URL creates if it resides in the meta-data only, as the month and year will be recorded along with it. Also, it is a legal offence in many countries to remove credit and rights information from meta data.

These surgical images plus the contributors early attempts at writing articles has caused some debate on WP Project Spam: [18] I think all this could have be made a lot easier, if there were clear examples for new contributor to follow, using unambiguous and reader friendly summary boxes providing image information in a form that is familiar. --P.g.champion (talk) 15:04, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Part of this is just the pervasive issue of people thinking all images on the web are free, and nothing we can do will prevent a certain amount of noncompliance. On the other hand, it's not very clear just looking at an image description page what needs to be done for compliant reuse. There is a usability problem here and one that may be resolved by more prominently featuring an example of how it ought to be done. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:56, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Further comments:
I think it would be fair to say that most commercial users have had minimum training and are only likely to be getting the minimum wage, so they have little motivation to think any harder about what they are doing than they have to. Here are some examples of photo libraries which I think are clear and easy to understand at a glance. You’ll notice that they leave no doubt as to what the credit line should be. On images which are photographs they leave no room for doubt by referring to the creator a ‘photographer’ on painting and sketches they use the term ‘Artist’.

http://pro.corbis.com/Enlargement/Enlargement.aspx?id=42-22753430&caller=search

[19]

[20]

In this example the image page explicitly states in capitals that:CREDIT MUST BE GIVEN IN FULL [21]

We can encourage greater use of WC by showing at a glance whether the Picture Editor will likely accept or reject it because of any ‘Restrictions’. This should be easy to do because we can default a summary box to the most restrictive norm. Such information is important to the would be user, as people wont keep looking through a library if they constantly feel too uncertain about every image they inspect – that’s down to human psychology. They also know the will get the Picture Editor p***** off if they keep placing too many unsuitable images in his/her in tray. We can use to advantage their tendency to work on auto-pilot. We can use it to educate them by including a line titled something like ‘Fee for use: free BUT THE LEGAL COPYRIGHT REQUIRMENTS FOR THIS IMAGE REQUIRES CREDIT TO .... etc., etc. If it’s spelt out here, then there can be no excuse on behalf of the user for leaving these things out. Some photo libraries plaster the credit line in several place on the image page just to make it easier to see. We could at the very least have it first appear above the image and again in the ‘Fee for use’ line and again in the ‘Credit Line:’. I am not being pedantic for the sake of it, rather that WC and most other open source enterprises tend to be driven by people who’s main talents are geeky rather than sales and marketing orientated (which is why I suppose Microsoft is always playing catch up on the technology side of things, yet have the major share of the market). To some long established companies that often need images for publication, WC looks too amateurish and therefore likely too be too problem prone to even consider using any hosted images. They direct their staff to use the sites that are easiest to use because their employee get more work done that way – why is WC being so off putting now that it now has such very large stock of images? Finally: As very young people can also use WC and if we are truly claiming to be ‘educational’ don’t we owe it to them to provide a clear and informative layout which assist learning about how to use copyrighted images. At the moment, it is almost as though we are encouraging them to ignore copyright issues by making it too difficult to know how to comply!--P.g.champion (talk) 10:53, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree that it should be easier to figure out required credit line. As a test I added a credit line field to one of my images. Can / should we write a bot to do the same to all the other images on Commons? If the answer is yes one could add an permanent optional field to {{Information}} instead of temporary field I used and have different style of credit line for every license. I think that would be the clearest solution. --Jarekt (talk) 18:50, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Your test credit line field is a very interesting/good idea. --Túrelio (talk) 19:11, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I hope I fixed now. In general I have no idea what a proper credit line should look like, but I am sure someone does, and we can probably write a bot to do it automatically for most of the images. --Jarekt (talk) 21:01, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Here is a proposal or sort of instruction for re-user how to credit an image; however, as of yet it's only in German language. --Túrelio (talk) 21:06, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I too welcome the idea of a credit line warmly. The CC license leaves the author quite many possibilities. The credit line is the right place to show what he/she wants. We just have to be careful not to undermine the text in the license though. It reads "The credit required by this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner". We have to think it well through so we don't imply any unneccesary restrictions!Nillerdk (talk) 21:04, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I totally agree. We should make the reuse requirements as clear as possible, and a “credit line” field that can be copied more or less verbatim is clearly a good idea. --Kjetil_r 21:45, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I'd support modifying the Information template to include a credit line field - however, because many images specify their license outside of the information template, and because many specify "own work" rather than the author's actual name (or even username), it may be problematic to update them all to display this field correctly. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:05, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
For those cases there would be possibility to write (see below), as we also do with the permission field. --Túrelio (talk) 06:10, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
Actually, after thinking about it some more, it'd be great if we could get the credit line to go right below the image, where everybody expects it to be. Is there some way we can do that? Dcoetzee (talk) 02:14, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
It seems to me we will need to decide a some issues:
  • What to write - the precise format of credit line. We could start a page (maybe at Commons:Credit Line ?) which would have tables of examples for different licenses, and sources.
  • Were to write - I envisioned modifying the Information template, but if possible I like Dcoetzee idea of placing credit line directly under an image even better.
  • How to write in case of old and new images. I suggested a bot that would alter descriptions of images. That can be done in batches for each license type. Other possibility is to write a template which can handle most of the cases based on passed parameters.
--Jarekt (talk) 11:15, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
That I agree that immediately under the image would be an ideal place for the credit line to appear. An ideal solution but one that might be difficult to accomplish, is to have a wizard that places the credit line into the image’s EXIF meta data and then have the image page display that line of meta data. I don’t think this would be practical though without a wizard, since hardly anyone uploads images with the credit line filled in. It was suggest a short while back that maybe Phil Harvey’s ExifTool could be adapted to do this but it all comes down to priorities. Also, we must not forget to run these proposed changes past those folks that have done a brilliant job of making the upload page more user friendly. Commons:Redesigning_the_upload_form A project page sounds like a good idea but I also think that the line "Original source: Own work by uploader” is a ambiguous mystery to new users. Some take to mean mean “Yes, I scanned in this picture that daddy took all by myself!” But dad’s name does not get a mention. Or “I am not up-loading this on behalf of anyone else, so it is all my work.” I think it would be better if the ‘source’ were defined by the common usage of the term where it means the copyright owner. For images from government libraries and the like, having an additional line “Image obtained from:” would also be of help to make the image's provenance clearer. Its meaning is clear. It makes it easier for other editors checking the image. It also prompts the upload to add this this information.Having the one line to do two jobs makes for confusion. --P.g.champion (talk) 12:02, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm reading. Once you guys know where that credit info is to go, the upload form script can be adapted to deal with it. If it's an addition parameter to {{Information}}, all the better. But keep in mind that people might multi-license, and a particular credit might apply only to a particular license, or that people might want to specify different credit lines depending on the medium or kind of re-use. The upload script cannot add parameters to licenses; that might require a somewhat more elaborate setup.
As to splitting the source field into copyright owner and source (where the image was obtained from): I'm not sure that'd help much. We already have the author field. Someone who argues "Yes, I scanned this picture, so it's my own work" would just fill out "Copyright owner: myself", "Source: Own scan" (or "Image obtained from: my scanner"—I've seen enough uploads with "Source: my computer"...). Possibly it might help not to auto-fill the "Author" field on the ownwork upload forms, but do so only if the user configured that explicitly. By the time a new user has figured out how to do that, I guess he's also learned that scanning something doesn't make it his own work. :-) Lupo 14:56, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
I created a stub for Commons:Credit Line and also discovered Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia page. Help would be needed at writing Commons:Credit Line page. --Jarekt (talk) 14:02, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Ok, while we're talking about this, we seriously need to get away from that "own work" stuff. What the hell does that mean on a public page (a public page "that anyone can edit" nonetheless)? Sure, we know it means the uploader(s) but it's so unprofessional. Don't even get me started on that useless {{Self}} template... It normally goes like "I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons..." Wow, we sound smart. Not only does it make inappropriate use of "I" (which is also wrong in many cases), but it's continuously used as counting as a valid source (then users tag it with {{Nsd}} or delete it because the source field is blank). I still am waiting to here the purpose of it. Rocket000 (talk) 03:56, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

The first point could be fixed easily by making {{Own}} evaluate to a more reasonable string:
I have never understood why the people who set up this {{Own}}-template did not take the lead already set by MediaWiki:UploadFormOwnWorkLabel (which already existed and already had lots of translations at the time {{Own}} was created) and just used these already existing texts. (Or were you objecting to the use of "own work" in general? In that case, we could change it to "Work created by the uploader" or some such.)
The second point about {{Self}} could be fixed easily enough by making the template not use "I" but "The uploader".
Your third point about {{Self}} (use of "I" not only inappropriate but also wrong in many cases) seems to refer to the case when the template is used for works that are, in fact, not the uploader's own works. I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about that by template magic. This can only be rectified by checking new uploads and educating uploaders who use it wrongly. Lupo 06:13, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
I purposed changing {{Own}} to "Created by uploader" (right before reading this actually). The self template would be much better that way but I still don't see the point. It's just clutter. It's redundant with the the source field (the "I" part) and whatever license it contains (the "released under" part). The "hereby" part is and unnecessary and sometimes incorrect. When I said the "I" part is many times wrong, I was referring to the collaboration nature of wikis where many images have multiple authors and the "I" is grammatically incorrect. Rocket000 (talk) 06:56, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
Because of this problem, I've started to add the following text in the permission field, using User:Samulili/Credit:
English: You can use this image if you credit it like this:
© Samuli Lintula / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Suomi: Voit käyttää tätä kuvaa, jos lisäät kuvan yhteyteen seuraavat tiedot:
© Samuli Lintula / Creative Commons Nimi mainittava-Sama lisenssi 3.0
Samulili (talk) 17:21, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Please note that it isn't enough to mention the CC-license. You have to put a link on it --Historiograf (talk) 21:33, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
If that's true, then our own re-user instructions are partly wrong (and should be corrected accordingly). --Túrelio (talk) 21:52, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Yes, they can add a link, if they want to strictly follow cc-by-sa. However, If I'm not mistaken, I can give permission not to add the link, can't I? Samulili (talk) 06:55, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
What I think the CC is saying is that they consider it ‘good practice’ to have a link back to the licence template and to your website (if you have one) or email but it is not obligatory.
I very much like Samulili's suggestion to use {{subst:User:User Name/Credit}} to insert one’s preferred copyright formate into the permission field. However, I would rather have the summary box modified to show a credit line field as the first line and put the subst: there; because ‘Credit Line’ is a keyword that many media users are looking out for and understand. Having sub-pages would be especially useful for uploaders who would like to use many different formates to suit different types of media files and to suit different publication media. Maybe the project financed by the Ford Foundation award can be persuaded to automate this to include generating html code, so that the user can cut and past when the image is destined for a website. Picture researchers tend to return to site they find easy to use, so there is a good reason I think to go to this extra trouble.--P.g.champion (talk) 09:46, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

June 30

{{Own}}

Could the upload form embed the template {{Own}} for own works and in this way enable automatic translations of the indication? --Petrus Adamus (talk) 08:20, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

It could, but especially on the default upload form (the one with the many input fields that automatically constructs a {{Information}} template), I wonder if users would not be confused by having something in squiggly braces in the "author" field. But if people want that, it's a simple configuration change. See MediaWiki talk:UploadForm.js/Archive01#Own work by uploader. Lupo 08:26, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Leastways for the form Upload your own work. Nevertheless, is there a problem to write something human-readable in the form but embed the template, so as the license field does (one elects Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 but {{Cc-by-sa-3.0}} is embedded.) --Petrus Adamus (talk) 08:50, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Of course only on the ownwork upload forms. To do this reliably: yes, there is a problem. Consider the basic upload form (single large input textarea prefilled with an {{Information}} template). First, the script would have to extract the "|Author=" line. Then it would have to understand what's written there. It may prefill it with sensible text, but the user can change it in any way he or she likes: "me", "Me", "{{User:Foo/Me}}", "[[User:Foo|Foo]]", "[[User:SomeoneElse]]" (if the uploader just chose the wrong form and then realizes it's not his or her own picture), "own work", "self-made work", or whatever. And that's just considering English... One can make the upload script replace the field by "{{own}}" if it is left unmodified, but that's rather hacky. Instead of adding all this complexity, I'd rather try putting "{{own}}" there in the first place, despite the squiggly braces. And that can be done without code changes; it's a simple matter of configuration. If there's consensus for it, any admin can do it. Lupo 09:00, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I have to confess I only use basic form but I assumed that {{Own}} template was written for Upload your own work form, and Own work by uploader is automatically replaced by {{Own}}. I  Agree that Upload your own work form should use {{Own}} template. --Jarekt (talk) 12:21, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
At the moment the template {{Parse source}} is used in {{Information}} to look for the strings inserted by the upload form for own works and calls {{Own}} if that's the case.
We could save this extra template call if the upload form would insert {{Own}} instead of the content of "MediaWiki:UploadFormOwnWorkLabel/xx" by default. Changing the default should be enough. I don't think it's necessary to cover cases like human-inserted "me". That can be done by bots afterwards (just like User:Slobot is doing right at the moment).
Whether we show the content of "MediaWiki:UploadFormOwnWorkLabel/xx" to the user in the upload form and change it to {{Own}} on submit or whether we directly show the user "{{Own}}", it's both fine with me. Although I'd prefer the first, the latter is good enough.
(I too only use basic upload form.) --Slomox (talk) 12:36, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Is there any voting needed to introduce such change, or who decides about these affairs? --Petrus Adamus (talk) 15:39, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps we should transfer all the above comments over to Commons:Requests for comment/Template:Own and follow Wikipedia:Requests for comment. Then formaly ask see how many support the proposal. We will also have a permanent record of this debate too.--P.g.champion (talk) 11:07, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Exif data not grabbed from flickr

The file File:2009 Viareggio train explosion 01.jpg contains on Flickr exif data which isn't now available on commons.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 13:19, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

The EXIF data is available in the metadata section at Flickr, but not stored in the actual image. Is this the normal behaviour of Flickr? --Slomox (talk) 14:57, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Does flickr allow to set the maximum available photo size? Looks like he uploàded the full size but only thumbnails are provided.
The image is now CC-by-nc-sa, since it was uploaded here yesterday and to flickr just two days ago. The cc-by-sa licenseing was probably a mistake from the author and we should delete it (or Flickr2Commons license checking is broken). It's quite used, though. Can someone ask rabendeviaregia for permission?
Platonides (talk) 11:52, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
I asked him to send a permission to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org It was cc-by-sa when I uploaded it.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 14:19, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
He relicensed the images as cc-by-sa.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 22:30, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

unusable images

Do we have some kind of warning template that says something like "Do not use this file. The file is valid to be hosted on Commons, but it cannot be used for official Wikimedia content in a meaningful way."?

To give an example, where this would be needed: File:Heelnederland.png shows a map of a potential union of the three countries Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. But the subdivisions of that new country seem to be based on the uploader's personal fantasy. And the subdivions are not even documented in the image description. In this form the file cannot be used in Wikipedia articles (or any other Wikimedia content that is bound to policies like NPOV, no original research etc.). But the image still has survived a deletion request. So there should be a warning not to include the image in articles. That a warning like that is necessary is shown by the fact, that I found the image used in three different Wikipedia articles, from which I removed it. --Slomox (talk) 15:35, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

The statement "The file is valid to be hosted on Commons, but it cannot be used for official Wikimedia content ..." should be a Contradictio in terminis, but then there's reality ...
In addition, I am too missing a problem-tag "unsourced", not in our regular copyright-focused meaning (no source of the file provided), but in the wikipedia-meaning, i.e. no source provided for the statements or data contained or expressed in the image. --Túrelio (talk) 15:44, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
What articles did you remove it from? /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 15:46, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
en:Greater Netherlands and the Portuguese and Russian equivalents, which seem to be translations (or partial translations) of the English one. --Slomox (talk) 19:59, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

We have a Template:Fictitious flag for "special or fictional flag" images, but not a fictitious map template, as far as I know... AnonMoos (talk) 17:57, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I think {{Disputed diagram}}, {{Doubt}} or {{Fact disputed}} problem-tags should be used. --Jarekt (talk) 18:25, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
These are not specific in regard to "missing source" (as explained above), but already assume that the image is wrong. --Túrelio (talk) 18:54, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
Read the deletion review. One person says, "it has it uses illustrating the pan-dutch movement, whatever you might think of it." So all it needs is an accurate description of what it represents. The description may contain any suitable warning. Images that have no conceivable use would not be kept. Dcoetzee (talk) 18:57, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I'm Dutch, and I can assure the reader that this is completely the product of fantasy of a handful of people. This map incorporates the Grand-Duchy of Luxemburg and a chunck of France, but I really don't think that the Luxemburg and French armed forces need to mobilise. An invasion led by the proponents of this idea could easily be stoppped by the local brigade of the Gendarmerie. As to a merger of Belgium and the Netherlands: we've been on peaceful terms since 1839, and we'd like to keep it that way. MartinD (talk) 10:12, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm Flemish, and I wholeheartedly agree with my Dutch colleague MartinD. Lycaon (talk) 22:00, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
In light of the above opinions I move that the image be renominated for deletion, so you can all have a voice in it. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:06, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
Before doing that, I'd recommend making sure that the image really is unused and appears to be staying so; that way the nomination will be much more likely to pass. As of this writing, for example, the image seems to have been reinstated to ru:Великие Нидерланды. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 09:24, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
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