Commons:Village pump/Archive/2011/12

Public art photos

Over the years I have had a lot of my photos of public art and sculpture deleted as copyright violations. How is it that the images in Category:Mark di Suvero et al. survive? This photo of a Damien Hirst sculpture was deleted on Commons. It's very confusing how unevenly our standards are applied. It's not just di Suvero - there are examples too numerous to mention under Category:Sculptors_from_the_United_States. What is it that I'm not getting? --David Shankbone (talk) 05:47, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Offhand, those images in Category:Mark di Suvero look (at least those taken in the US) like copyright violations. Some are in Germany, which should be fine. Someone more familiar than I am with country-by-country freedom of panorama rules should go through these.

Yes, standards are applied unevenly. If nothing draws anyone's attention to a particular image, it is likely to sit here quite a while before being deleted, even if it is a copyvio. No one is able to keep up with every upload. I'd guess that at any given moment, 3-6% of what is on Commons should not be. - Jmabel ! talk 06:15, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, well, we need to work it out, because those of us who expend the the work on taking the photos, editing the photos and then uploading them only to have them deleted are getting annoyed. Let's leave aside the multitude of public art images that reside in the category I mention above; if our copyright paranoia is going to extend to Commons:Deletion requests/File:Day 12 Occupy Wall Street September 28 2011 Shankbone 31.JPG and like images then it will be the final straw for me. Very, very few outlets outside of Wikimedia take my photos from Commons because we have crap organization and crap search abilities (I've addressed this before to no avail), and it takes me six hours to upload here what takes me one hour to upload to Flickr, where people actually use my photos (search Google News for my name and see where those outlets find my images to verify). I'm growing tired of Commons and the 'all over the place, no rhyme nor reason' way it handles itself in its deletion of my photographs, that I am starting to think it's better to stick to Flickr where you all can pick and choose from my work. --David Shankbone (talk) 06:26, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Posting infringing derivative works on Flickr and claiming to license them under a free license just means that anyone who believes you and reuses the work unwittingly exposes themselves to liability for infringement. I post most of my works to Flickr (as well as a subset to Commons), and I even post infringing derivative works to Flickr sometimes at my own risk, but always mark them as "all rights reserved" to avoid this kind of harmful deception. Just because we don't systematically process every single upload at the time of upload doesn't mean that our criteria for inclusion are not systematic, it just means some images take longer to process than others. I don't think you'd like the alternative - a screening mechanism that could delay availability of new uploads for days or weeks. Dcoetzee (talk) 16:38, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

"Harmful deception" is too strong Derrick - it's a charge that there is a specific intent to circumvent copyright, which is not the case. What I am discussing here is that I disagree with the copyright paranoia in the project, the capricious way it is administered, against the work that goes into the laborious uploading on this site. It's bizarre that we have so many uploaded copyright infringements that have hung around here for years, but we focus on something that is not copyright infringement like a low quality protester's sign. The caprice in how we make our decisions is a problem for keeping contributors, a problem Wikimedia in general is having. And the alternative isn't an alternative. --David Shankbone (talk) 16:49, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

To be honest, David, I don't think we particularly need contributors who repeatedly photograph other people's copyrighted work, publishing it, and claim it as their own. - Jmabel ! talk 17:10, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

To be honest, Joe, I don't think we particularly need more contributors who photograph buildings and landscapes instead of going through the difficult work of getting access to major celebrities to produce high-value work that virtually no other photographer is willing to give up, but that's just my opinion. Nobody has claimed that the items in photographs are their work, no more than you are claiming that you erected this memorial, so that sounded silly. --David Shankbone (talk) 17:24, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Wow. Nothing I said was about your conduct, it was about "contributors who repeatedly photograph other people's copyrighted work". But apparently you felt a need to respond with a personal attack. I don't know why I'll bother to defend myself, but I will. So... photographing virtually every place listed on the NRHP or with local landmark status in three counties isn't welcome or useful? I'll file that under "cheap". By the way, if you think pictures of people are more useful than pictures of buildings, and therefore my contributions are useless, do have a look at User:Jmabel#And some people. I'd say that (for example) Asha Puthli, Krist Novoselic, Monique van de Ven, and Kathryn Bigelow, to name just a few, are not exactly small change. But that's neither here nor there. What I'm saying is that when users keep uploading photos a large percentage of which violates someone else's copyright, (1) we consume a lot of other people's time to sort the matter out and get rid of the photo from Commons and (2) in the meanwhile, in the interim, there is a significant chance that someone else reuses the image and accidentally violates those copyrights as well, with the incorrect assurance that they were using a "free" image. That's bad. When the same user does it over and over, it's a problem, and in my experience, most of the people who "don't get copyright" don't just upload one "bad" image, they churn them out and create a lot of needless work for other people. Gaining more contributors who need to be closely policed is not a big gain for Commons. Gaining people with a clue is. I presume that you fall in the latter category, so why the defensiveness? You obviously could look at this group of photos and see that they probably violated Commons scope, which is why you picked them as examples, no? - Jmabel ! talk 01:19, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Joe, you directly addressed me and then wrote '...we don't need...'; that I responded to you with the exact same phrasing and you took it as a personal attack should help you understand that the way you phrased your initial response would be taken the same way as you took that phrasing when it was addressed to you. When you look at my Talk page at the number of photos that have been nominated for deletion, vs the amount that were copyvios, it has been a pretty small amount out of the thousands and thousand of images I have uploaded. Some, like protest are unlikely ever to be an issue with anyone. In general, the ones that are deleted were uploaded years ago. But it is a little annoying to have items like the protest sign I mention above to consume everyone's time (and mine - this particular photo has now gone through six different noticeboards/talk pages on en.wiki/Commons), and then to be so easily able to find an entire category full of copyvios (I only clicked on one name). It's a relatively thankless task to contribute to Commons (probably for all of us, but esp. for those of us who simply don't have a lot of time to mingle and schmooze with the community), and I'm tired of the bot messages that are nitpicky (sorry Jean-Fred). I feel I have a right to be annoyed, esp. when terms like "harmful deception" are thrown at me after the extraordinary amount of work I've given this place. My work is primarily used editorially, and even if an inadvertent copyvio was used outside of editorial or educational re-use, the only people it harms are me and the re-user, and frankly that user is also responsible for doing their own due diligence into copyright use. Being rude to our high value contributors on behalf of some theoretical person we are trying to save isn't really the best way to keep those contributors. Mattbuck might not think my Tribeca, Time100 and Met Opera photos with all the logos aren't copyvios, but it's starting to feel like the exact opposite argument could be made on here and be successful, depending on whose voting. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. --David Shankbone (talk) 19:54, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay I shouldn't have said "harmful deception," but a better term would be "harmful negligence," since neglecting to consider the copyright status of works that you claim to release under a free license can expose others to legal risk (notwithstanding that many people routinely and unwittingly do this on the Internet). As for "capricious administration," this is the equivalent of "other stuff exists" arguments on Wikipedia. We delete copyright violations when we find them - no matter how severe. The fact that there are many worse violations that we haven't found yet makes no difference, as we can't delete things we haven't found yet. We do sometimes have inconsistent outcomes of deletion discussions depending on participants, but overall consistency is pretty good and guided by policy and precedent. I do agree that our search and category organization is problematic for users looking to find media to reuse, and would prefer something like a faceted search system. Dcoetzee (talk) 17:14, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Quote of the day: "Overall consistency"! NVO (talk) 02:29, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

« those of us who expend the the work on taking the photos, editing the photos and then uploading them only to have them deleted are getting annoyed. » And I’m getting tired by the seperation operated (and the implied hierarchy) between “The Photographers who do Actual Work and Spend their Precious Time for the Good of the Project" aka "The True Contributors™" vs. "The Pain in the Ass Overzealous Nitpicking Jerks who do not understand a thing" aka "The Fake Contributors". Really, this is somehow insulting, and not necessary for the (good but frankly not new) points you make otherwise. Jean-Fred (talk) 09:39, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

By the way, I've now nominated the U.S. pictures in Category:Mark di Suvero for deletion. As I understand it, the ones in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany are fine, due to different laws on freedom of panorama. - Jmabel ! talk 01:42, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

• and THAT (see above comment) is exactly what is wrong with the whole screwed-up (& selectively) copyright-paranoid MESS we have on commons. congratulations to the above user for demonstrating the fine art of unintentional irony! -__- Lx 121 (talk) 17:15, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

• Wikimedia is currently trying very hard to attract MORE new contributors and STOP LOSING established ones. the approach adopted here in terms of both policy/practices, & tone of "discussion", is unhelpful to that goalLx 121 (talk)

Deletion of image

Hello. Why was this image deleted? There is no obscenity, it was used in Wikipedia [1] for an educational purpose and has now had to be removed. Was privacy the reason? But the person in the photograph also uploaded it, and therefore clearly gave permission for it to be used. It is therefore in the public domain. So why has it been deleted? Peter Damian (talk) 09:50, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

User:Blurpeace said only "user requested." The user in question left Wikipedia this year following personal attacks, and I imagine the image was being used to attack them. I don't know where the user requested this, perhaps by e-mail. I personally would've opened a deletion request for a courtesy deletion of a long-standing image like this one - it's possible Blurpeace wished to avoid drawing attention to it. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:20, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

There seems to be evidence that the user in question still edits Wikipedia. If the image was used to attack them, how do we know? Wouldn't this normally go to a Request for Deletion? I would personally want the image deleted, fyi. I just find the out of process deletion odd. Ottava Rima (talk) 17:47, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

It is being used to attack a person who holds at least two Wiki-related positions of authority and who has active accounts here and in the broader project, the suggestion being that this person is the user who uploaded the picture. I don't know if the identified users are indeed the same individual but, given that certain people are at this instant aiming the shit at the fan, Wikimedia would benefit from a degree of due process being seen to be carried out as its opponents will seize on any evidence it is not. As the picture is already available on Wikipedia Review, I am not sure what the benefit is of precipitously deleting the copy here. BTW. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would support a proposal to group delete all the pictures in the article that PD has linked.--Peter cohen (talk) 16:53, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Update. I can no longer see the picture on WR and so some of my comment no longer applies. However, someone has now openly raised on the English Wikipedia the identity of the users and so the protection issues no longer apply in the same way.--Peter cohen (talk) 22:41, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

The claims that the image is used to "attack" is wrong. We have many images of celebrities that aren't the best and are used attached to negative articles, and yet you haven't bothered to address that issue. Once a person uploads an image here, it is no longer theirs. They should think about uploading images like that. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:26, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

I rather think that, if Ash had uploaded a picture of the non-celebrity being discussed in the negative WR thread doing something less "interesting", then the picture would not have been inserted into the thread. So "attack" is entirely appropriate. BTW, I see it is again visible there and elsewhere on the web. The WikiCommons stable seems to have been locked after the horse had bolted.) And the issue is whether prominent Wikimedians get treated differently from other people when it comes to deleting material that could lead to their later finding themselves in embarassing positions.--Peter cohen (talk) 18:55, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

I'll chalk it up to you having little experience with Commons. Commons is not Wikipedia. Notability does not have the power it does here. A sexual picture in particular has more of a chance of surviving than a normal picture regardless of the subject's notability. That is how Commons works. All admin here know that and know that you don't go around process. Blurpeace basically gave really good reason to be desysoped, which is unfortunate. Ottava Rima (talk) 19:18, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Hm, once an image is uploaded under the Creative Commons license, does the creator have the right to take it back? Tarc (talk) 04:23, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#What_if_I_change_my_mind.3F may help you. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 04:49, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

• Agree with deletion. However, for images of this type, we should, as a matter of course, extend the same courtesy to uploaders and image subjects who are not personally known to us, but whose situation may be directly analogous. Otherwise we're saying that we do the decent thing if it's one of us, but if it's anyone else, they can jump in the lake for all we care.
• If it's the right thing to do here, it's the right thing to do for anyone, just as a human courtesy. --JN466 11:52, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

That isn't how Commons works. Commons has a process. There are many people who wish their images to be deleted that don't get the images deleted. Just because this person has some admin friends who acted out of process doesn't mean it was right. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:26, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Then the process should be changed. Someone sending a mail to OTRS should get the same response. --JN466 17:10, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

November 28

Is an author the author of a photo

Looking at File:Brian Sibley.jpg it doesn’t seem to me to be the type a photo that someone would compose and take of themselves. Being an image of an 'author' (by trade) who uploaded it himself, I wonder if he assumes he he is the also the 'author' of somebody else's image because he is the subject. He doesn’t claim to be the author of the image either – just the up-loader. It seems odd. The image is used on the WP article about himself. --P.g.champion (talk) 18:57, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

The original upload log states:

• 2006-03-11 08:34 BrianSibley 783×1359×8 (485097 bytes) {{Information| |Description = Brian Sibley |Source = self-made Created 22. Feb. 2001

"self-made" seems a pretty clear claim. Dankarl (talk) 22:00, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

'Self made' was an automatic default label in the source field. I’ve never seen someone with a timer function on a camera, pose with people in the background for a self portrait. I have never seen a self-portrait like this – which is why I am queering it. We all know from experience on Wikimedia Commons, that the default 'Self made' is no guarantee for someone's one an' only up load . Also if someone with their own camera wanted to take as self-portrait for WP, wouldn't they take a contemporary one? The Metadata also doesn’t provide camera details. In other words, there is no evidence that he is the photographer but a lot of clues that he may not be. --P.g.champion (talk) 22:36, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

I sometimes take climbing photos, and sometimes ask friends to take photo of me climbing. Those photos are often done with my camera and I compose the picture, telling beforehand where to stand, where to aim, when to take it, and what to exclude. I consider such photos as having dual authorship. It seems like many photographers do it, just look through Category:Self-portrait photographs: I assume most are not done with timer. --Jarekt (talk) 04:36, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

---

Work for hire is legally pretty much the same as self-made (at least in the United States)... AnonMoos (talk) 17:32, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Commons_talk:Nudity#Proposed_addition

Please see Commons_talk:Nudity#Proposed_addition. Rd232 (talk) 03:43, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:Columbia (ship, 2001)

Couldn't find any information on this "ship" other than given here. Can anybody check the facts and perhaps add more information? --Stunteltje (talk) 13:44, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I hope it is not a hoax. Geo Swan (talk) 00:01, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Not a hoax (Disney's site), but not a ship either. NVO (talk) 02:58, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Advice needed: licence is wrong, but I don't know the real status

I sometimes use images of really old cyclists, and sometimes I see licences that can not be true. For example: File:1908vanhauwaert.jpg. This photo was taken in 1908, not in 2007. The person who gave it the CC attribution on Flickr is very unlikely to own the copyright to this image. This image is French (possibly Belgian), so if I understand correctly, to be in the public domain the photographer should have died before 1941. The image could be in the public domain, but that is not certain. The photographer could have been 20 years old when taking the picture, have lived until the age of 90 until the year 1978.

I don't know if this is a copyright problem ("the image should be removed") or a licence problem ("the image needs a different licence"). How to proceed with this? In the past, I simply removed the licence, hoping an automatic reaction by some bot would follow (File:Georget emile.jpg), I'm not sure if that is the right action, and the Help pages on commons did not help me... More images have the same problem (File:Hippolyte Aucouturier 1906.jpg, File:Pottier tdf06.jpg), so I ask here before I check all these images. --EdgeNavidad (talk) 20:58, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

It is problematic when people post stuff on Flickr without disclosing the source from where they copied it or the information about the author. In the case of File:1908vanhauwaert.jpg, it is a cropped version from the original postcard, of which we can find more faithful reproductions, like the one there, where we see the initials "C. M." in the lower right corner (that part is cropped out in the version of the Flickr user). If you can find the meaning of those initials, it could give you the answer. If in doubt, you can nominate the file for deletion and see where the discussion goes. -- Asclepias (talk) 21:38, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Idea.

What about a questions page that people may ask about an article, stemming off from the main page and that may answered by another? -- 10:09, 2 December 2011‎ 121.222.199.102

Are you sure you're on the right site? This is Commons, not Wikipedia itself, and we're more about images than articles. However, there are plenty of places to ask questions on Wikipedia -- click on the "Community portal" link... AnonMoos (talk) 13:32, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Problems with File:BSicon_uxgKRZo.svg

I have a problem with this image. I uploaded a corrected version on 8 Nov 2011, with blue vertical and green horizontal. en.Wikipedia continued to show the previous version with green vertical and blue horizontal. After about 8 days it eventually corrected itself, but now it seems to have reverted to the previous colour scheme. On en:Wikipedia, when it is displayed wrongly in a canal map, I can click on it and it shows the icon page, with the colours correct, but I cannot find any way to get it to display correctly in a map. Is this a Wikimedia problem or a Wikipedia problem? Thanks. Bob1960evens (talk) 13:58, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Probably a caching problem; you could try "purging"... AnonMoos (talk) 15:11, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

December 3

Locker room policy

Last Sunday I went to Sue Gardner's presentation on Women and Wikimedia. Her story with regard to complaints about users on Commons with user space galleries of sexual photos of girls that would make our women users see Commons as a "male locker room" was a very poor reflection on this project and used some strong words, such as misogyny, though this was countered as not being her personal experience. If we do not have an explicit COM:LOCKERROOM guide, perhaps we can create one and where complaints do arise we can take positive action. My opinion is that people can use their user space pages to help improve Commons, but unless the user is putting up a gallery of their own photos or otherwise using a gallery of sexual or glamour images as part of obvious Commons improvement (in line with COM:USER), such collection that results in any complaint is reasonable to remove immediately by an admin on the grounds of being disruptive. If anyone knows of past cases that Sue is referring to, I would appreciate a link to the related discussions.

If we do take action (or can point to action already taken), I would like Sue to be informed so she can add that story of corrective action to her presentations. --Fæ (talk) 10:25, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Oh hi Fæ, thanks for raising this here. Let me give a little background.

When I first started talking publicly about the gender gap issue in January 2011, it prompted a lot of media and blogosphere coverage about why women are less likely than men to participate in the projects. I did a blog post about the coverage, here.

Quoting from the post's section on sexualized environment:

From a comment on the Atlantic Monthly site from a female Wikipedia administrator: “Thankfully, I have never been harassed (much) based on my gender. But, for example, an editor with whom I frequently collaborate used to maintain a gallery of hot chicks in bikinis as a subpage of his userpage. It was ultimately deleted after a deletion discussion, but he was totally oblivious to the fact that things like that create an environment where women do not feel welcome.”

“For what it’s worth, I am offended by the existence of pornography, for a variety of reasons none of which involve my being squeamish about sex,” said a female Wikipedian on the Gender Gap mailing list. “I am not offended by including pornographic images on articles about those types of images. Indeed, I expect Wikipedia to have images illustrating articles whenever possible; I don’t see why we should make an exception for articles about sexuality.”

Another female editor: “In my personal experience, when I have come across material I found offensive I was discouraged from editing in the immediate area (or even commenting) and leaving my name in any way associated with the material. I personally would never generalize this discouragement to other areas of the wiki however. It hasn’t always been explicit material that I have found unpalatable. But I have always felt that there is level of material (of many varieties) on the wikis that I cannot not strongly object to as counter-mission that I wish to campaign for it’s deletion, but that I object to enough on a personal level that I will not do anything to help curate it. Certainly my participation in certain topical areas is discouraged by this. But I don’t know that this fact should be seen as problematic. Isn’t necessary that there be some pieces of material on the Wikimedia projects for every single individual to find objectionable and offensive?”

And another: “I do not find sexually explicit images offensive. There is nothing inherently unencyclopedic about an explicit image, and often they do a better job than a line drawing might (see Coital Alignment Technique, for example. If that line drawing actually gives you an idea of what’s going on, you have better x-ray vision than me. A photo would work far better).”

I would say that based on those comments, and also based on lots of conversations I've had over the years with female editors, that it's not possible to generalize about women's opinions about sexual imagery on the projects --- 1,000 women have 1,000 opinions. But I would say that at least some people find galleries of porn or sexy imagery on userpages create a kind of sexualized locker-room environment that makes them feel unwelcome. (If you're interested, here's a description of the sexualized environment issue on the Geek Feminism wiki.)

Just to be really clear, I'm not expressing a personal opinion here -- my personal opinion on this issue is no more meaningful or important than anyone else's. But I am glad that Fæ is raising it here, because given that we know it's an issue for some people, it's worth talking about. So thanks Fæ, for raising it :-) 109.174.139.132 11:58, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Oh bah, than was me: not logged in. Sue Gardner (talk) 12:01, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Well, whereas it might be reasonable to enforce such policy on Commons, I think it would have much greater impact if implemented on projects like big Wikipedias. I think it is clear that no images would be deleted from Commons just because they could be potentially used inappropriately on user pages in different projects.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:16, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

To clarify, we are not talking about deleting images, we are talking about how to handle user pages that may be seen as disruptive. --Fæ (talk) 12:26, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I got it. I just remarked that whereas this is going to be a useful discussion and will probably lead to a useful policy, it will not solve the issues Sue is talking about, since most of these issues are limited to English Wikipedia.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:32, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

 Comment I've never come across this, but I don't see why users should have userspace galleries of content of any type if it's not content they've contributed. If the gallery is justifiable in userspace, then it should be useful enough for mainspace, and moved there. I know this view contradicts Commons:PSP#User_pages.2C_galleries_and_categories, but maybe we could talk about changing the policy... because for me the essence of Commons:NOT#Commons_is_not_your_personal_free_web_host / Commons:NOT#Commons_is_not_a_social_network is what matters. Anyway, on the specific issue of sex, en.wp has a policy note at en:Wikipedia:User_pages#cite_note-1. Rd232 (talk) 12:36, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm disgusted by people who are enthusiastic about militaria and collect galleries of war and killing machinery on their user pages. I dislike people who publicly display their religious beliefs. I find people annoying who want to show off and put large galleries of their contributions on their user pages: "hey, look, what a great contributor I am!". I also roll my eyes on users that collect images of cute cats, beautiful butterflies, fancy flowers or French poetry on their user pages. I am generally displeased with anything that contradicts my own views, attitudes, interests and positions. But as anybody else I have to live with that. There are people out there that look at things differently.

If you want to put up an essay at COM:LOCKERROOM requesting people to be sensitive, okay. But any policy that forbids to be a sexist is just stupid censorship.

If you are worried of a sexualized environment, then rather ban sexualized comments. Sexualized comments on contributors arguably do harm, but a personal user gallery does not. --Slomox (talk) 14:25, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

You replied to me (according to the formatting), but didn't address my main point which is that userspace galleries of content not contributed by that user should be phased out. Galleries of content contributed by the user should be allowed of course, and I gather that there is not a particular problem with those, even if they happen to be sexual (as long as the images are useful enough to be kept on Commons). Rd232 (talk) 14:47, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I replied to the thread in general (and thus gave my post a level 1 indentation as a reply to the original post, but your level 0 indentation defuncted my intention).

I adressed your point. I said that user page galleries shouldn't be touched and of course not phased out. And I don't see why galleries of user contributions are "of course" exempt. There's nothing "of course" about that. If you see a user gallery you dislike you can internally make a note in your brain that you deem the user to be a jerk. And hate the guts out of him (or not). And never visit his user page again. But that should be all. It's a different thing if the user makes sexualized comments on you and thus forcefully exposes you to the sexualized content. That is probably sanctionable. --Slomox (talk) 15:12, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

You're taking the discussion in an irrelevant direction - sexualised comments are a completely different issue. Now to come back to the gallery issue: I've created {{User gallery}} for user galleries of images contributed by the user. Such galleries are of course different because it demonstrates that the user has contributed valid content, and wants to show it off; and that is what the overwhelming majority of user galleries are. Such user galleries also serve a certain function, in that they help users organise their contributions in a way that may make it easier to improve them or decide what else to upload. These considerations do not apply to galleries of images contributed by other users (any valid, constructive organisation of these should be in mainspace, or possibly project space); I do not see what purpose they serve, and I think they're mostly allowed on a historical basis because they're generally harmless. But when it comes down to it, such galleries are either useful, and should be in mainspace, or useless, and should be deleted. This approach would, by happy coincidence, take care of that small proportion of user galleries that cause "locker room" issues without having to identify and debate them individually. Rd232 (talk) 16:03, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Well, here are a few examples chapter query, slideshow purposes, collaborative pictures selection, sheer wiki humour we need more of.

Overall, I ma not convinced that actively policing user subpages is a good use of our time. Jean-Fred (talk) 17:42, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

If you set up a really clear and simple and well-communicated policy, along the lines I suggested, then policing effort should be low, and much of it self-policing. To take your examples: the first I don't see what the series of galleries is doing; the second should clearly be in Commons namespace, somewhere in Category:Pictures of the Year; the third should be in Commons namespace, as some form of WikiProject collaboration; the fourth, well I don't see the humour myself, but again, somewhere in Commons namespace should have a humour category. You see - it's not just a question of policing, it's also a question of ensuring that useful things are findable and not buried somewhere in userspace. Rd232 (talk) 18:00, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I am afraid we will not agree :-) I believe there is absolutely no harm in letting users create whatever galleries they want in the user space, as it does not interfere in any way with Commons mission & scope (and that is the current guideline too per COM:USER), and that restricting such usages will lead us nowhere. Jean-Fred (talk) 18:59, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Well you're looking at it from the point of "restriction" and see no advantage in that. How about addressing the general point I made, with reference to your examples, that a lot of the things which I'm saying shouldn't be in userspace should be moved to somewhere they are more accessible. (And in future, they should be created in Commons: or main namespace in the first place.) There is little real restriction involved in moving these things to a better place; and to pick up your phrase, having useful things in hard-to-find places does "interfere ... with Commons' mission".Rd232 (talk) 20:13, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

So you want to ban "images I like" kind of galleries? They are often nice, or something like User:Rocket000/Useful icon gallery, where a user may not want to subject something useful for them to edits by others, and maintain more personal control over it? Basically, I think you're trying to set up a generic rule which does more harm than good, to try to avoid censorship issues while really trying to quash a smaller problem which is otherwise tinged with censorship issues. We are an image repository; I find no harm in most galleries celebrating some good images according to some personally-set criteria (it gives a little bit of the personality of the user as well). w:Wikipedia:User pages#Excessive_unrelated_content is more-or-less a good guideline, where the emphasis is really more on an "excessive" situation -- huge galleries which go well beyond their relative contributions here, or advertising or advocacy stuff -- it is usually somewhat obvious when that happens. As you note, Commons:PSP#User_pages.2C_galleries_and_categories is the current policy, and I think a better one than your proposed rule. To me, it's basically saying we would rather completely disallow showing bits of your personality on your user page, rather than risk some people showing some unsavory personality traits. Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:37, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

• Agree with Fæ and Rd232 above. It's one thing if it's the user's own uploads, but "locker room" galleries don't help an educational project aiming to achieve gender balance. --JN466 12:05, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
  • The trouble is, it's quite difficult to formulate a policy that addresses those in a workable way. That's partly why I'm interested in whether it's feasible to simply ban personal galleries and categories of images not contributed by the user, because that's very simple. (And as I said above, any useful galleries/categories can be moved elsewhere, whilst useless ones fall foul of COM:NOT.) I do think the spirit of COM:PSP is the display of content contributed by that user. Rd232 (talk) 15:39, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
  • JN466: Perhaps, if current "gender balance" of locker rooms is unfair, "we" should balance it in a positive, constructive way. If the balance is skewed, favoring female images, than "we" can add 10,000 male pin-up galleries. If it's skewed in opposite way, "we" can add more female pin-ups. Just tell the world precisely, which way the "gender balance" should go! NVO (talk) 19:43, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
    • Perhaps we just need more Patsy's :) russavia (talk) 20:00, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
• Rd232: quote: "I don't see why users should have userspace galleries of content of any type if it's not content they've contributed"... - Good start, but why exclude user contributions? Why draw the line, at all? Do you presume that "own contributions" cannot be as "offending" as cherry-picked "locker rooms"? Aren't "we" dealing with people who just want being offended? NVO (talk) 19:43, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

  Aren't "we" dealing with people who just want being offended? - now that is unnecessary, and frankly rude. As to whether there is a real distinction in "lockerroom" terms, you'd have to ask someone who's actually bothered by these galleries. I've presumed a distinction because it would be useful content the user has contributed, and not just gratuituous. Rd232 (talk) 11:54, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

 Comment This could theoretically become a problem, but I don't think it's a major problem in actuality at the current moment (at least not in the form of user galleries), as far as I can tell. An indiscriminate blanket ban on all "Pics I find cool" pages (e.g. User:Jacopo Werther/Favourites etc.) would serve very little purpose... AnonMoos (talk) 08:05, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

• I've been more active on EN wikipedia than here over the years and I can remember one incident there where a userpage collection of favourite porn was deleted or removed due to law of least surprise. Plus scores of userpages that were deleted because they were actually attack pages. If you go to the article about a particular sexual practice you expect to see information about that topic, but visiting another users userpage you really don't expect to come across a porn stash. I don't know if Commons has taken a similar line but it would see reasonable to me. However you need to be careful to limit it to actually getting rid of offensive content, otherwise you risk empowering the petty minded to interfere with useful editors. Starting off with a load of userspace experimentation and practice certainly wasn't my learning style when I was a newbie, but we need to remember that it is a valid learning style and one that we should welcome, especially as it has the advantage of people making their newbie mistakes outside of mainspace. My personal preference is to start stuff in mainspace, but it is equally valid to do so in userspace, and there is of course no deadline. If someone has spent a couple of years collecting the images that they plan to use to write a particular article then we need to remember that that is what userspace is for, and if that person is carefully collecting the best images they can find rather than preferring to use images they themselves have taken then they should be commended not discouraged. One problem of setting tight rules as to what one can have in Userspace is that one person's idea of a random stash of images could easily be another person's idea of the perfect set of images to illustrate a future article on a renaissance scientist or a nineteenth century travel guide. Also we need to remember the analogy with real life office cubicles and personal effects policies, companies that want a cowed workforce of people who know they are considered expendable and easily replaceable may go for a very regimented "clean cubicle" or hotdesk policy. Companies who want their employees to feel motivated comfortable and loyal make sure they have some personal space which they can personalise. Since we don't pay our editors we have no choice but to use the latter strategy. So yes by all means have a tightly focussed policy of getting rid of clearly inappropriate stuff from userspace, but only if we can avoid the endless petty arguments as to whether someone can have inoffensive stuff on their userpage. WereSpielChequers (talk) 06:45, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

 Comment is there a distinction to be made between userspace subpage galleries, and userpage galleries? A user page is something that people look at expecting some kind of information, and "locker room" galleries there would be particularly surprising. If the user page merely contains a link to subpage "locker room" gallery, that's not quite the same effect, perhaps? Rd232 (talk) 12:51, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Probably yes, though I'd include subpages transcluded into the userpage as part of that page. WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:23, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes - that's a technical distinction, rather than a user experience one (a distinction that someone might try to exploit, of course...) Rd232 (talk) 21:36, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

• I'm all for a ban of user pages that show photos of naked individuals or photos of people in sexual activities. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:03, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

• I agree with intent of Ottava Rima proposal (rule of least astonishment), although in all my years here I never run into any such page. Can anybody provide current or past examples of "Locker room" type pages we are discussing here? I also agree with Rd232 that different rules should apply to content visible in user page and content in well hidden subpages. I for example often use user:jarekt/a, user:jarekt/b, etc. as scratch pads often containing galleries of images I am doing something with. Since I do not work much with sexual-explicit images in my case such temporary galleries would not shock anybody, but users maintaining sexual-explicit categories might run into trouble with any broad policies. --Jarekt (talk) 22:21, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

• COMMONS IS NOT CENSORED, & userspace IS NOT article space; if you go surfing through user's pages, you are in a "quasi-private" part of the wiki. different standards apply there.

with all due respect; if you feel that the commons' community should impose "stricter standards" for userpages, & a system of "regulation" for same, i invite you to draft a proposal and submit it for community debate... Lx 121 (talk) 17:21, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

All "Commons is not censored" means is that we don't delete content which is legal (according to the laws of the United States and Florida) just because somebody finds it to be offensive. It doesn't mean that we can't set standards, or decide which types of content are useful and in accord with our goals, and which are not (either absolutely or in some particular contexts). AnonMoos (talk) 17:39, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Actually, COM:PSP already states (almost at the very bottom), that non-allowable content includes Private image or other file collections of no wider educational value. The wording, which has been there since the page was created in August 2008, applies "of no wider educational value" to the collection, and therefore creates an additional requirement to the standard COM:D one that files have to have educational value in order not to be deleted. Therefore, we already have a policy against "locker room" collections, if we define such collections as ones which have no educational value. Rd232 (talk) 17:56, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

"Commons is Not Censored" is a sham and not real - "censorship" has no legitimate definition and the mere fact we have any deletions shows that there is some form of "censorship". As is, the reality makes it clear that we need to serve the public. There is no legitimate "serving" the public by hosting pointless user page galleries of sexual imagery. And private? No, they are tagged on everyone's posts. They are supposed to have information on the person you are talking to. I would go so far as to say anyone putting up the images on their user page should be banned for a major breach of civil, point, and every other disruption based policy. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:34, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Ottava Rima, Large number of users have images on their user pages, including you and me. Why do you think we should be banned "for a major breach of civil, point, and every other disruption based policy"? --Jarekt (talk) 19:02, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

I double checked, and I am 100% certain that there is no "sexual imagery" on my user page. Ottava Rima (talk) 19:10, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

No, just animal abuse. In fact, your page completely lacks information on the person we are talking to. I think waving around ban-hammers wildly is a completely inappropriate way to treat other people on the project.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:31, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

...Q.E.D. -- are we beginning to see how a "crackdown" on userspace pages could very easily work out very, very badly? :p Lx 121 (talk) 21:51, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Jarekt, you missed the the in Ottava's "the images", referring to the sexual images at issue. @Ottava - why the needless drama? If we actually find a real example of problematic images on a userpage (not userspace), we can discuss how to handle refusal to remove it if that actually happens. Waving big threats now, with implications of action without warning, is totally unhelpful to your cause, apart from anything else. Rd232 (talk) 23:19, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

did i miss something (in the discussion)? how are we differentiating "userpages" from "userspace" -- o__0 Lx 121 (talk) 23:59, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

See "22:21, 30 November 2011" above... AnonMoos (talk) 01:32, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, loose usage on my part may have confused you. Userspace, of course, = userpage + user subpages. I meant "userpage (not user subpage)". Rd232 (talk) 01:42, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Erotic image with a Muppet should be in Category:The Muppets?

Hi, please check this erotic image: File:Erotic image of woman in bed playing with toys.jpg and it's history, an user (User:TwoWings) is adding it constantly into the Category:The Muppets, just because there is a Muppet toy in the picture. Is this correct? Several times that change has been reverted. Sorry for my bad English. Greets. --UAwiki (talk) 19:43, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't know the answer to that, but I'm concerned it might fall under Commons:Deletion requests/Derivative works of Sesame Street puppets. Rd232 (talk) 20:41, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it is. Just strike the "erotic" in your sentence and ask yourself again if the image would belong in this category. Related: Commons:Categories for discussion/2011/10/Category:Nude or partially nude people with electric toothbrushes. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 20:47, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I think this merits wider discussion on the principle.

Rd232 (talk) 21:01, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Please read the discussion there for arguments. I'd rather not repeat. --Saibo (Δ) 21:13, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I'd rather avoid repetition as well; so I've hatted part of my comment. As I suggested in that DR, I think we need a sitewide discussion on how to handle such images. It may be that your preferred solution of not distinguishing such images is affirmed, but I think it's worth talking about. The "nude image" subcategory approach is better than the image filter, for instance, because it helps users interested in finding those images, rather than just helping the vast majority who are looking for other images. Rd232 (talk) 21:27, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I already had typed a reply/comment - but I do not want to a have a discussion here in VP which will duplicate the other discussion. We could also make a CfD page which could also be included in VPP, what about this? --Saibo (Δ) 22:25, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

The problem maybe is not the nudity, even if the girl was dressed, the muppet is something secondary, for example this image File:Felicia Fox 2.jpg is in Category:Benches just because there is a bench in the picture. Even if those women were not on a "erotic position" it's something cassual the presence of those objects. It's like a "loophole", and that user is just playing the wise guy. Again sorry for my bad English. --UAwiki (talk) 22:16, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I fail to see why the toys are something secondary - that is that the photo is about. --Saibo (Δ) 22:25, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

The way we've always dealt with this issue in practice is to create subcategories for explicit works, e.g. Category:Nude images including muppets. Such categories tend to be needlessly overspecialized, making them a minor concession, but they serve as an effective compromise. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:54, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Dcoetzee that this kind of subcategory solution is a pragmatic comprimise following the "thought" put forth by Rd232. --Slaunger (talk) 17:04, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I've removed the personal spam (or whatever it is) from Category:Benches, this commercial ad (or whatever it is) still is in about a dozen narrower categories. –Be..anyone (talk) 06:34, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Apologies, but what exactly is erotic about the image in question? Were it a topless man playing with toys, there'd be no controversy, I bet. Powers (talk) 16:14, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Powers: "Filth is in the mind of the beholder." I doubt anyone would have taken this particularly photos for reasons unrelated to finding it somehow sexy.

I agree with Dcoetzee on the subcategory approach. Principle of least astonishment: someone clicking on Category:Muppets does not expect to be in any danger of a "not safe for work" photo appearing on their screen. - Jmabel ! talk 18:19, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Powers: Ok, this is not the topic, I see a debate about the erotism, the cultures... I just wanted to know your opinion about what I called "secondary objects". So if the user changes again the category I will just let him, I just thought that his way to categorize lets to miss the order in Commons categories, and he is just a person playing the wise guy, maybe looking for nudism pictures and watching what objects does it have to add the pictures in every category, making them useless to find what really are people looking for. Greets. --UAwiki (talk) 18:23, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I agree that using a subcategory is a sensible approach to avoid offending and surprising viewers. The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation explicitly elevated the "principle of least astonishment" as applied to categories of media files in its controversial content Board resolution (foundation:Resolution:Controversial content): "We urge the Commons community to continue to practice rigorous active curation of content, including applying appropriate categorization, removing media that does not meet existing policies and guidelines for inclusion, and actively commissioning media that is deemed needed but missing. We urge the community to pay particular attention to curating all kinds of potentially controversial content, including determining whether it has a realistic educational use and applying the principle of least astonishment in categorization and placement." (Emphasis mine.) --Eloquence (talk) 11:21, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Leave the principle of least astonishment where it belongs to and may be valid for: User interface design of software. For more arguments against this see the filter discussions. We are talking about categories - a method to find content (not to hide)! I dislike having an image filter and the same applies for those phobia categories - which are forcefully switched on for all users and creates a category mess. Possibly a duplication of the whole category tree.

Jmabel: I do not what you do at work but I work at work. ;) And if a human appears on your screen you are fired? Really a nice employer. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 04:30, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

• Use a subcategory, per the board resolution. It's a no-brainer. --JN466 11:46, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Are Muppets under copyright? Jim.henderson (talk) 11:53, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

• Clearly copyrighted item, no fair use on Commons - it should have been deleted with the rest. Same with [2] and [3]. I hate when people think they can upload such things here instead. Sigh. Ottava Rima (talk) 19:23, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

•  Done Added to newly created subcategory, per discussion above, without prejudice to any outstanding copyright discussions. --JN466 17:24, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Proposal

See Commons_talk:Nudity#Proposed_addition. Rd232 (talk) 03:42, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Inform the photographer before any use of this image

There are several images with the usage condition Inform the photographer before any use of this image. What should we do with those? Nominate all for deletion? --Leyo 17:43, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Not impressed with that but (the ones I looked at) were quite old. Certainly I think it is an unreasonable clause BUT I doubt anyone would pay much attention to it? Worth the discussion though. --Herby ^{talk thyme} 17:48, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

"inform before seem to imply the photographer thinks he can deny permission for a use which would otherwise be compatible with the declared licensing. That's no good. I'm less sure if "inform of" would be a problem (notification of use only). Rd232 (talk) 18:13, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Great. Inform the user before using an out of focus image of his dessert. - Jmabel ! talk 23:21, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

• If these are all old images then the uploader/rights-holder deserves a long period to respond, but I think the rights holder either has to agree to change the liscense, or the images have to go, as the current precondition is not compatible with our liscensing policy.

  Are we talking about a dozen images? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Were they all uploaded by the same contributor(s)? Geo Swan (talk) 23:29, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

About 41 images. One of the uploaders considers the "inform..." to be merely a request: User talk:Okapi. The other gave no reply here: User_talk:Norero#Inform_the_photographer_before_any_use_of_this_image. --Kramer Associates (talk) 00:08, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

FYI: Commons:Deletion requests/Bad quality files with dubious reuse requirements by user:Norero Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 06:58, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Well guys, instead of only putting the standard message on his talkpage on a project where he had no edits since >1 year, it might have been a bit more considerate to notify the user on a project where he is currently active, such as here es:Usuario discusión:Norero. --Túrelio (talk) 08:06, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

I have a different take on the situation. If the files in question are otherwise properly licensed, perhaps we should not read too much into the requirement that the photographer be informed before the files are used. The photographer did not state that any separate consent was required from him before such reuse, so I feel the requirement can simply be regarded as a courtesy notification. If, after being notified, the photographer were to say "I forbid you to use the file", the user could simply respond that the photographer has already licensed her to do so and cannot revoke this licence. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 18:05, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

That was kinda what I meant when saying folk probably won't bother with it anyway. I guess at a fundamental level, were they (trying to) imposing a restriction on the license. --Herby ^{talk thyme} 18:12, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Disagree, strongly, but let's direct this discussion to Commons:Deletion requests/Bad quality files with dubious reuse requirements by user:Norero. Dcoetzee (talk) 03:48, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

December 1

Uploads by DiscountDoubleCheckFan

Hi. I'm not sure if or exactly how I should tag several photos uploaded by DiscountDoubleCheckFan. All have valid CC licenses on Flickr, but that (likely) may be a case of Flickrwashing. Most of the photos are of the Marquette University Law School, and they appear on Marquette's Website where it states "© 2011 Marquette University. The photos are shown here. Sounds like a simple case of copyvio.

However, the Flickr user account is "MU Architect", which could indicate that the Flickr user is the architect that designed the building. If the architect retained the copyright (which in a case of work for hire may be unlikely), s/he would have every right to license them under CC-BY. However, the account has no details other than the username, so it's impossible to tell if this is the actual architect's account on Flickr. Still, it seems like a pretty flimsy argument to keep the photos around.

I posted a request on DiscountDoubleCheckFan's talk page to request more info. I am not certain that any useful info will be forthcoming. DDCF also uploaded two versions (PNG and JPG) of a file from Flickr with metadata linking it back to the local newspaper, including a copyright notice. I've already flagged those two files for copyvio.

I found all of these photos in Category:Flickr images needing human review. I have already reviewed and verified the license on Flickr, but then I started wondering about the legitimacy of them all.

With so many photos having potential issues, it makes me question all the user's uploads. One photo is supposedly his/her own work, and shows a speaker at a forum. The way it shows the heads of other students, it looks potentially legitimate, but the cropping makes it look suspicious to me.

The final photo uploaded by the user is legitimately from the National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the U.S. Information Agency, but I don't think it has the correct template tag on it. I would appreciate the help of someone more familiar with the license tags for U.S. Government images to properly tag it.

This is more of a sanity check before I do something "wrong" and make more work for people. :-) My gut tells me to just flag all of the Law School photos (except for the two from the newspaper) with a regular deletion tag, explaining the circumstances, and then be done with it. I'm torn about the one where the user theoretically took the photo. Thanks for any feedback. —Willscrlt ( “Talk” • “w:en” • “m” ) 14:04, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

When in doubt, tag 'em. It's work, yes, but it's what we're here for. (Do put them all in one DR, though, if you could; it'd help a lot.) The Selig image appears legit to me; only tag it if you find similar (or identical) photos of the same event from another source. Powers (talk) 21:29, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Advice on Reliability of Image Source Please?

ResolvedDavoDavoDavo has apparently moved the discussion to en:Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard#HIV, which is a more appropriate forum. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 06:16, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

The image File:HIV Virion-en.png from HIV titled "Diagram of HIV" does not appear to meet the required standards for reliable sources - WP:IRS. WP:NOR states that "all material challenged or likely to be challenged, including quotations, needs a reliable source." One of the criteria for identifying reliable sources states that "Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" WP:IRS.

I submitted the file for deletion on this basis but the image has been kept. None of the people who opposed deletion addressed my primary reason for deletion - unreliable source. Instead their comments focused upon things like copyright and perceived usefulness of the image.

I'm pretty sure that my opposition to the use of this image has been misinterpreted as being politically motivated. The fact remains that it appears to be unreliably sourced. I have suggested that if there is a similar image available from a reliable source then that image should be used in place of the current image.

Am I wrong? Does the image actually have a reliable source?

None of those are Commons policies. Not to mention that File:HIV Virion-en.png is sourced to the National Institutes of Health.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:16, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Here is the exact source as it has been entered by the uploader- http://web.archive.org/web/20050531012945/http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/howhiv.htm and http://web.archive.org/web/20041119131214/http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/graphics/howhiv.jpg. They are currently dead links (effectively making the image without any source at all let alone a reliable one) but they did *not* point to NIH but instead to a site called Wayback Machine. If the image *can* be sourced to the NIH then how is Wayback Machine an acceptable reliable source?

Galleries

I think its unfortunate, but understandable, that galleries are badly underused on Commons. Their reputation isn't helped by fact that most are pretty useless, meaning it would be better to just point viewers at the associated category. As most maintainers occupy themselves with category work, galleries get forgotten too.

I've written a lengthy essay (here) as a different take on the limited guidance at Commons:Galleries. It may even be useable as the basis of Manual of Style-type guidance, as it provides concrete steps on how to create a decent gallery format (in my view).

I applied this to the gallery at Shaldon, a random UK village. One important factor in my choice is that the number of files in the category is in the 100-500 range, enough to have a broad selection but not so much it takes forever to trawl through the pics.

I'd appreciate thoughts on the essay and example gallery, as I would like to try and revitalise galleries, making them a genuinely useful resource. If used properly galleries may better serve the casual user better than categories.--Nilfanion (talk) 22:56, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

I have a few thoughts right off the bat - I've posted them at User talk:Nilfanion/Galleries. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 21:13, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I think this is excellent. Not perfect or complete, but a really good starting point for making better use of galleries. Thanks! Rd232 (talk) 09:07, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Commons not showing transparency anymore?

Why doesn't Commons use white and grey checkerboarding to show transparency and "nothing" on files? I just noticed. Wikipedia English stopped a couple days ago, but it atleast still shows the checkerboard when you move yoru mouse over the file, Commons isn't even doing that right now. I hope this isn't a permanent change. Fry1989 ^eh? 03:13, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Noticed the change on en.Wikipedia, but I still see white-and-gray checkerboarding behind transparent images here on Commons... AnonMoos (talk) 03:52, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah it's back! I'm so glad. I guess it was a hiccup. Fry1989 ^eh? 03:57, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

 Info: You might be interested in MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Image transparency on hover. Regards -- RE rillke questions? 12:19, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

View Wikimedia Commons in British English

Talk:Main Page#View Wikimedia Commons in British English. Seems to be a valid point.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:52, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Direction issue with File:Cyril and Methodius monument Sofia.jpg

The original size of the image is with the correct direction. The images in the other resolutions are rotated on 90 degrees clockwise. I tried "purging" the page, but the problem persists. --StanProg (talk) 18:52, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Public domain status of File:EdwinRushton.jpg?

I'm unclear as to whether File:EdwinRushton.jpg qualifies for {{PD-US}} or not. It's a photo clearly taken prior to 1904 (the year the subject died), but the photographer is unknown (and probably unknowable), and there is probably no way to know when or whether the photo was ever published or registered for copyright in the US. Thus, I'm unsure of whether the photo is in the public domain because any copyright it might have had has lapsed — or whether we must assume it's still copyrighted because the unknown photographer might possibly have died less than 70 years ago. Comments? Richwales (talk · contribs) 22:59, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Given that it's a family photo apparently uploaded by a descendant, I think it's probably on solid ground one way or another. Assuming it was not published before it was placed on Commons, the person who uploaded it would qualify as the publisher. This might be a better question for Commons:Village pump/Copyright, where the people with more expertise on copyright tend to weigh in. - Jmabel ! talk 04:29, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I've posted my question there. Richwales (talk · contribs) 05:07, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

December 4

Before I nominate 33 files for deletion

When categorizing images I came across images of artwork of Keith Coventry. I have put them all in a category. They are all uploaded by the same user. Many images are used on en:Keith Coventry. One image has already been deleted with the argument "copyrights violation, contemporary artist". Can I do the same for all the others? Wouter (talk) 15:22, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

A few of these are probably too simple for a photo of the work to violate any copyright, and some are pictures of the man himself. Also, the one of a gallery with his work quite small is probably fine. But the rest are probably deletion-worthy unless we can get OTRS from Coventry himself. - Jmabel ! talk

I nominated two images to start with, but I don't expect much activity from the user to get OTRS from Coventry himself. But we will see. Wouter (talk) 20:15, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Category Hot Keys

Does the Upload Wizard software allow for creation of a text file on a user's computer that would have hot key associations for categories? For example, entering "1" in the category box might place an upload in the Category:Christmas trees. Does anyone know how to create that kind of modification? Visitor7 (talk) 21:50, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

AutoHotkey, for example, could be programmed to make a key combination produce the text "Category:Christmas trees". Rd232 (talk) 22:40, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Categories for discussion

Why is nobody interested in discussions about categories? Some of them are open without any result for over 2 years (!), example: Commons:Categories for discussion/2009/10. --91.57.70.39 12:41, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Can non-admins close categories for discussion pages ? --Claritas (talk) 12:44, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

If there is clear consensus, yes. Otherwise probably not a good idea. - Jmabel ! talk 16:50, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

If you are interested in resolving/figuring out the result of a particular discussion, you can always ask an admin for help (I did that here, reply here). I agree that the current situation is quite off-putting for new users, though. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 01:15, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

We'd rather have experienced users closing them, admin or not. Even for admins, starting to venture into categorization by attempting to close discussions might not be a good idea. --  Docu  at 12:25, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

 Comment it's not ideal, but the reason is not hard to figure out: there's no pressing legal need to close these discussions (as there usually is with discussions about files), and these discussions tend not to come to clear conclusions, so anyone trying to close them risks merely imposing their own opinion, and annoying people. And if implemented and then challenged later, reversing these changes can be a lot more work than deleting/undeleting a file. We recently created {{DR proposed close}}; it might be helpful to try that on some of these old ones, and see if proposed closes are accepted. Rd232 (talk) 02:34, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

---

A very unfortunate feature of the current set-up is that there's no connection whatsoever between discussions of a category and the images categorized into that category -- so that you can be watching many images categorized into a particular category, yet have no idea that any discussion is going on until the classification of the images is negatively impacted by the results of a desultory conversation between two or three people on a very obscure and hard-to-find out-of-the-way sub-page. The most notorious case is the infamous "adolescent girls" debacle, where rampaging bots ran rampantly amok miscategorizing possibly thousands of images in a way that took years to adequately clean up (and still probably isn't fully cleaned up even today), based on a discussion which very few people even knew was going on until after the you-know-what had already hit the fan. A more recent example is when the rather useful category "Non-Nazi swastikas" was deleted -- you could have had most of the images in that category on your watchlist, and still have had no idea that any discussion about it was going on, until the deletion occurred. As long as there's no connection or link between category discussions and the actual images in the categories, then you'll continue to have the situation as it is today -- very few people participating in category discussions, and many other people resentful about changes negatively impacting image classifications based on discussions they didn't know were going on until after the changes were made... AnonMoos (talk) 10:29, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• "current setup" - are there any alternative setups in Mediawiki (apart from protecting all categories)? NVO (talk) 10:43, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't know, just that the current way of doing things in this area doesn't give good results in some cases, and most definitely does not lead to the wide participation in the relevant discussions of those whose work would be affected by specific proposed changes to category structure... AnonMoos (talk) 13:35, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• • I'm not sure there are any viable alternatives within MediaWiki, at present. However, there has to be some changes we can make to address the issue. I've created {{CfD proposed close}}, and I think that can be a start - it's certainly a way to try and move stale discussions forward. At the same time, it creates a viable hook we can use to broadcast a proposed close. There are a number of ways we might do that (perhaps depending on how significant the CfD is), but we should certainly be able to figure something out that's better than the status quo, which is either no closure or sudden closure in a relatively hidden corner of Commons. Example: we could make a "CfD proposed closes" page, which would exist solely to be a location people can watch for such announcements, for those who either don't follow CfD or might miss a proposed close. Perhaps we should move further discussion of ideas/proposals to COM:VPR. Rd232 (talk) 13:36, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
• "As long as there's no connection or link between category discussions and the actual images in the categories..." well in theory we could (I think) have a gadget script that transcludes a category's CfD notice (maybe in very short form) onto the bottom of every file page which is categorised there. I'm not sure how much work that would be, and because it wouldn't cause an edit it wouldn't bump the watchlist, but it would be better than nothing. Rd232 (talk) 13:41, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I think I remember seeing a discussion item about a gadget that would add changes in category contents to ones watchlist. If such a gadget exists, then the added step of adding each category discussion to the affected category would notify users of the gadget. Does anyone know such a gadget? Dankarl (talk) 02:19, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Off-wiki harassment

Is there a Commons policy on off-wiki harassment? A user started stalking me off-wiki.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:18, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Ymblanter, email me with details, and if another user has used WM software to engage in harrassment (e.g. by using email form), I won't hesitate to take immediate action. Harrassment of editors is not on, and I won't stand for it. russavia (talk) 20:22, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

No, it is purely off-wiki. Thanks anyway, I will e-mail the details right now.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:25, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Gadget Update: UserMessages

Dear user of Gadget UserMessages. In a few minutes, I will carry out the long advertised update. During updating you may encounter a loss of functionality. If this problem persists, please report it to MediaWiki talk:Gadget-UserMessages.js. Everything worth knowing about the new features will be available soon at Help:Gadget-UserMessages. Thank you to all testers! -- RE rillke questions? 11:49, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

 Done. You may discuss the new talk-summaries here. -- RE rillke questions? 16:52, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Need to be able to read more of the filename of images in categories

I believe this is easy to implement. Here is what was added to MediaWiki:Common.js in a Wikia wiki:

/* Longer image titles in categories */
 
$(function () {$('.gallerytext a').each(function() {this.innerHTML = this.title;});});

This shows the full name. It might be a good idea to set a limit since some filenames are very long. --Timeshifter (talk) 03:16, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Link to the Wikia wiki so we can see what it looks like? Also, this would have to be a gadget, not a universal setting. Rd232 (talk) 07:53, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Here is an example:

http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/Category:2011_Global_Marijuana_March_graphics

Why shouldn't everybody be able to figure out what images are about without clicking them? A gadget would only allow individuals to read the image filenames. The addition to Common.js allows everybody to see long filenames in the wiki:

http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js --Timeshifter (talk) 05:38, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Now that I've seen it, and compared it with Commons, it seems obviously better to be able to see full filenames. In fact I'm surprised MediaWiki doesn't provide this functionality (perhaps as a user preference) - this would be much better since the names would display in full immediately, and not have to wait for the page to finish loading the images (before the Javascript kicks in). Well, in the short term, I think this should be done with Javascript, but it should be possible to turn it off via a gadget (there's always some people who don't like this kind of change, and it's not that hard to avoid forcing it on them). In the longer term, we should file a bug and ask for MediaWiki to do it natively, controllable by user preference. Anyone else have thoughts on this? (PS the status quo here isn't quite as bad as you suggest: you don't need to click to see a full name, just hover over the link.) Rd232 (talk) 13:59, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

 Agree Teofilo (talk) 23:08, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

We can do it as a gadget - but more than the gadget should the bugfix in MW be pushed. --Saibo (Δ) 00:13, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

This seems to be bugzilla:17955 Show end of image names in categories. I've pushed a little. :) Rd232 (talk) 16:23, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Maybe a new bugzilla thread should be started. bugzilla:17955 is about showing the end of the filename. I want more of the first part of the filename to show. I think there is consensus to use the Javascript for now. It works, and is easy. If it needs to be tweaked further, the people in this Wikia forum thread may be able to help: Image titles in categories. Need CSS/JS fix to allow more than 20 characters. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:33, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

. I left a comment here: MediaWiki talk:Common.js#Length of image filenames visible in categories. --Timeshifter (talk) 11:00, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Now available under Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets -> Category tools -> Long Image Names in Categories. Shouldn't be on by default til it's been tested a bit and there is community agreement for it. Rd232 (talk) 16:32, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

In my preferences it is in the gadget section called "Interface: Files and categories". --Timeshifter (talk) 07:25, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, yes, I moved it. Everyone basically sees the same gadgets (except some gadgets are hidden if you can't use them, eg non-admins and deleting gadgets). Rd232 (talk) 17:07, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I have added it to my user preferences. Thanks. Teofilo (talk) 01:34, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Images of grainy quality

In the past couple of days, the server has refreshed the thumbnails for images (thumbnails and reduced-sized full versions, i.e. 1024 × 768) to be of very low, and very grainy quality. I hope this setting gets reverted because it looks awful. OSX (talk • contributions) 12:08, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• I didn't notice it. I browsed only contemporary photographs, and good ones looked as good as they should be. There was an atrocious lag (full-scale photos upload faster than reduced previews) but no added grain. NVO (talk) 12:23, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Examples? --Jarekt (talk) 19:14, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Take a look at Special:ListFiles/OSX. These images are quite grainy, especially the thumbnails. The images uploaded in November had much high-quality thumbnails when they were uploaded, but the server has refreshed them and now they look much worse. OSX (talk • contributions) 08:52, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I really can not see lower quality for thumbnails than usually. It is possible that server uses lower quality JPG compression, but I can not tell. Did you check different browsers may be yours for some reason re-sizes the thumbnails. --Jarekt (talk) 04:55, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

The problem seems to have be solved now. Last night I purged the cache again to refresh the thumbnails and large previews (1024 × 768). The quality improved instantly, so whatever change made seems to be fixed now. Thanks, OSX (talk • contributions) 07:54, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Football kits

Hi there! I created two football kits (here and here) for an article but I just couldn't bring them into the article. Could anybody help me out or explain me what I did wrong? Cheers! -Lemmy- (talk) 21:12, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I am afraid that does not have much to do with Commons and most people here would not know much about it. The files exist here and can be accessed from your article, that is where our domain knowledge ends, the rest is related to innerworkings of en wikipedia templates. --Jarekt (talk) 21:20, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I do know that in the article I have to overwrite the infobox syntax like that "pattern_b1=Frankfurt1112H" and that "pattern_b2=Frankfurt1112A", I'm aware of this. My problem is that the pattern is just not displayed. I think I made a compatibility error or something. -Lemmy- (talk) 21:57, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

en:WP:FOOTY can probably help. Powers (talk) 20:04, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

December 6

Flickr upload bot

Apologies if this in the wrong place, I was unsure where to post it. I may have broken the Flickr upload bot. I filled out the info correctly and the bot added the license info to File:Adrian Hodges.jpg, but it hasn't made another edit since I used it. Please tell me the problem can be fixed, I feel quite bad. - JuneGloom07 Talk? 00:31, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Appears to be working now, a hiccup of some sort, but your picture did not upload. Your options are to manually download and upload the image file, or to run the bot again with a modified file name, then speedy your original description page. Does anyone know if you can directly overwrite the old file with the bot? Dankarl (talk) 02:10, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

You can't break it, but glitches happen, often when the file's metadata contains some code that the bot doesn't like. See also User:Flickr upload bot#FAQ. -- Asclepias (talk) 02:13, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you both for your help. I'm glad the bot started working again! I've now uploaded the image under a new name and have requested the original description page to be deleted. - JuneGloom07 Talk? 00:26, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

When should we let our judgment over-ride that of the author of the original caption at the source page?

In response to this edit I responded at File talk:Dancing lesson, Iraq.jpg#When should we let our judgment over-ride that of the author of the original caption at the source page?

I see this as a common problem. On en.wiki over-riding the information on the source page would violate w:Wikipedia:No original research. But we have different rules here. A year or two ago I uploaded some images from the Baltic, or the coast of Norway, using the description of vessels provided by the tourist who uploaded them to flickr. A contributor here who seemed to be genuinely knowledgeable about water transport in the region was quite insistent everything should be revised, as different classes of vessels there had specific color schemes. Specifically what the tourist had identified as a small icebreaker, was in the color scheme used by a pilot boat. I eventually yielded to the contributor who seemed knowledgeable. But I don't think we should substitute our judgment over that on the source page in every single case.

I am curious as to what other contributors think of this general issue.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 23:32, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

I think that some time the original Flikr description can be junked completely. In any case, copying Flikr would violate w:Wikipedia:Reliable source, so six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.

Basically, the description should be the best we can offer. I've been corrected on the description of a couple of my photos. If there's some controversy over what the picture depicts, or we find the original description useful anyway, we should try and give a quick neutral description of the issue, say "It is disputed whether this is Opuntia basilaris or Opuntia rattus." And we should summarily delete any Israel/Palestine pictures. Err, I mean try for terse neutral description of even controversial issues. (Of course, images from that area of the world are among the most likely to have controversial or even openly hostile and problematic descriptions, so they often almost demand trying to substitute neutral description for the original.)--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:40, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

One could always use {{Original caption}}

In the sample Geo Swan mentions, the main problem seems to be that the category that was removed had actually nothing to do with the image (at least, according to its category description). --  Docu  at 05:52, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

• When a flickr uploader places an image under a free lisence, doesn't the free lisence also apply to whatever description they drafted? Geo Swan (talk) 07:48, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

• I don't see why, unless Flikr says so somewhere. Short, factual statements don't have much if any copyright protection, so I'm not really concerned about it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:27, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

• These cases pop up every frequently; my last one was at about 6 a.m. today. I unlinked the incorrectly used image from the article on wikipedia but, short of positive identification, left the commons description as it is (it's ambiguous but not certainly wrong). If I had positive identification, I wouldn't hesitate to rewrite original description on sight. It's simple: if you can correct what [you think] is incorrect, do it now. I like the idea of keeping {{Original caption}} for problematic cases of people and war, even for disputed Opuntia (taxonomy is quite fluid - oldtimey folks like yours truly still use Backeberg). But not for simpler cases with certain positive identification, like the name of the city. NVO (talk) 10:51, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I would encourage you to leave a note on the Commons discussion page, at least, as a possible warning to other reusers and so maybe someone can provide positive identification. In cases where the source of an image is a Commons editor, I don't like {{Original caption}}; we should make the best communal description we can instead of privileging one editor (except in ways where it makes sense; the photographer's impression of where it was taken and when certainly deserves a little weight, but species identification doesn't.)--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:15, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

resolved - 10 hours from first inquiry to correct answer. Curiously, I drive through that place every week, but the simple answer never came to me... NVO (talk) 14:54, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Ideally, the caption should not only indicate the subject of the photo but in case of any doubt, our degree of confidence that it is in fact that subject. If there really are multiple things it could be, according to reliable sources, we should indicate that too. In the art world there are endless scholarly debates about who certain paintings depict. I don't think original captions are worth preserving using {{Original caption}} unless they're from a reliable source. Dcoetzee (talk) 03:05, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

The degree of confidence issue raised here is something that imho should really be addressed. My grievances about this are mainly with the identification of life forms depicted on the images, but I can certainly see how this could apply to other areas as well. Additionally I feel strongly that the standard info template for uploads should provide a "Location" field (often mandatory info when trying to provide IDs and more often than not this info is missing completely - not even an indication of continent. Anyway, I would suggest adding Location and Reliability (or Confidence or whatever) fields to the standard template (under Date and Author) and maybe providing standardized values in a drop down menu or something. Pudding4brains (talk) 18:06, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks to everyone who voiced an opinion here! I wasn't familiar with {{Original caption}}. It will be useful. So, I think I can feel reassured that using our own judgment, in ways that would lapse from Wikipedia:No original research, can be in order here. Geo Swan (talk) 07:45, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

December 2

Category:Land extention in sea

I have added the projects I know of but there must be a lot more.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:56, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:Land extentions in sea to be complete. --Foroa (talk) 10:17, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I think it's spelled "extensions". Secondly... why would that be a subcat of artificial islands? Wouldn't that be the other way around (there are non-island types of land reclamation at sea), or even better parallel (there are artificial islands in waterways which are not seas)? Seems to me this should just be a subcat of Category:Land reclamation directly, and be called "Land reclamation in sea" (versus "Land reclamation in lakes" or "Land reclamation in rivers" or something like that I guess). Maybe I'm missing the point of the distinction made by this category though... Carl Lindberg (talk) 12:12, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree entirely. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 17:42, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I've made a request for the category to be renamed "Category:Land reclamation into seas". — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 04:02, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Barcelona Termino

I get confused: Is Estació de França the same thing as Barcelona Termino? Or is Termino the suburban part of Estació de França? On File:Barcelona Termino 1987.jpg it is clearly an official name.Smiley.toerist (talk) 23:54, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

December 8

Quality control

Can anyone read File:Butterhoffen.JPG? I am for preserving historic document whatever the quality, but this goes to far.Smiley.toerist (talk) 14:31, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

It is (ever so slightly) better than nothing, but no, this digitization is certainly illegible, and not very nice to look at. About all I can tell is that it is an old document (some of the letter shapes suggest calligraphy from that period). If you have any idea how to access a higher quality copy of this document to replace it, please let us know. Dcoetzee (talk) 15:21, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

It's in use, so leave it alone. And reading the article it's used on, the circular stain on the document is actually of historical interest, and the image does illustrate that. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:23, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Licence Historic documents

A lot of pictures of old documents are under Own license. Example: File:Lettres patentes Declaration droit hommes 1789 maitrier05125.jpg Should I add the license for old documents (more than 70 years old)? and remove the license "own work"?Smiley.toerist (talk) 14:49, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Some countries may allow a separate copyright on the photo of the document; best to leave such licenses so the situation is more clear in those countries. If possible, you could convert to the {{Licensed-PD-Art}} template if you can preserve all existing license information, but that template doesn't seem to make that possible in all situations (like the one you link to) as it only takes a single parameter for the photo license, doesn't support {{Self}}, etc. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:20, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

I've extended the template to handle this case. For this file, it should use {{Licensed-PD-Art|PD-old-100|rawphotolicense={{self|GFDL|cc-by-sa-all}} }}, and I've modified it to do so. Dcoetzee (talk) 15:30, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

"Category:Human anatomy in the United Kingdom‎" and its subcategories

I've just come across "Category:Human anatomy in the United Kingdom‎" and its extremely lengthy subcategory tree. Many of the subcategories appear to have been created this month. Not sure if the editor (Skinsmoke) is serious (seriously misguided?) or simply fooling around. In any case, it seems to be a massive case of miscategorization and/or overcategorization. For example, why is it necessary to have a category like "Category:Human anatomy in Greater Manchester"? Are human beings in Greater Manchester somehow different from those elsewhere? That particular category, in fact, appears twice in the same category tree. And if you trace the tree all the way down one of its branches, this is what you get:

• Human anatomy in the United Kingdom
• Human anatomy in England‎
• Human anatomy in Greater Manchester‎
• Neuroanatomy in Greater Manchester‎
• Brains in Greater Manchester‎
• Thinking in Greater Manchester‎
• Abstraction in Greater Manchester‎
• Logic in Greater Manchester‎
• Ontology in Greater Manchester‎
• Life in Greater Manchester‎
• Health in Greater Manchester‎
• Health sciences in Greater Manchester‎
• Medicine in Greater Manchester‎
• Medical specialties in Greater Manchester‎
• Internal medicine in Greater Manchester‎
• Gastroenterology in Greater Manchester‎
• Gastrointestinal tracts in Greater Manchester‎
• Mouths in Greater Manchester‎
• Eating in Greater Manchester‎
• Animals eating in Greater Manchester‎
• Animal food in Greater Manchester‎
• Fodder in Greater Manchester‎
• Fodder plants in Greater Manchester‎
• Grass in Greater Manchester‎
• Grasslands in Greater Manchester‎
• Montane grasslands and shrublands in Greater Manchester‎
• Moorlands in Greater Manchester‎

So, ultimately, "Category:Moorlands in Greater Manchester" is a (great-great-...grand)child category of "Category:Human anatomy in the United Kingdom"? Something is very wrong here. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 10:04, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

We've cleaned out already a couple of times such extremely deep and narrow categories. One might join the discussion in User_talk:Skinsmoke#Overcategorisation_2 to find similar cases. --Foroa (talk) 10:33, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

So what do we do about category trees like this one? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 10:45, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

The tree seems to have several issues: a lack of images, categories that might be related are subcategories of others, unrelated elements are combined, too many categories intersected with each other.

If actually find any images in it, you might add them somewhere else and delete the empty tree. --  Docu  at 11:48, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Agree. And Category:Human anatomy in the United Kingdom is useless. --Martin H. (talk) 12:14, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm not sure I even know where to start! — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 12:50, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Nuked, difficult to find out where to start. He added a new category to one existing category and created a category system of about 50 categories above this added category.

The above listing gives one path to Category:Moorlands in Greater Manchester, there was several other paths, including a few category loops due to bad implementation of his own logic. The logic is simple: if a category 'X' has a subcategory 'X in/by/of/.. Y' the supercategorization 'S' of 'X in/by/of/.. Y' must look the same as for 'X' with always added an 'S in/by/of/.. ' to the supercategory untill the two strings finaly come together in a supersupercategory (which ultimatively always will be Category:Topics). His logic however ignores that 1st) a fully developed category tree with the subcategories for a country (Category:United Kingdom) mirrored to those of a small town not makes sense if there is only a small number of media files to categorize 2nd) that not all combinations make sense for example the anatomy of the human body and 3rd) that in his category world with a strictly repeating and systematic approach all categories will contain 23 subcategories (thats the number of all topics we have at the moment. --Martin H. (talk) 13:40, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Apart from this issue, the category tree of "Category:Human anatomy" (and probably "Category:Anatomy") needs serious tidying up. My next project, perhaps. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 13:51, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

The problem this highlights is that there are certain category pairs that connect entirely seperate concepts. For instance, Category:Thinking is a subcategory of Category:Brain - that may be logical, but it results in absurdities if you consider the tree as a whole. Bots cannot tell that categories distantly related by such a divide are actually about entirely unrelated concepts.

As a practical issue, there is no need to copy the global tree to such level of detail. eg Category:Medicine in Greater Manchester is potentially a worthwhile category, but only if it contains pictures of hospitals, doctors and the like. It shouldn't be created merely because Medicine its a great-great... parent of Category:Moorland, otherwise people looking in that category will be very disappointed.

Unfortunately, Martin H.'s nuking has deleted a bunch of useful categories as well as all the bizarre ones - Category:Moorlands is an example there.--Nilfanion (talk) 22:34, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

I've recreated Category:Moorlands as a redirect to Category:Moorlands, bogs and swamps --Kramer Associates (talk) 23:53, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think we need to carefully reverse the changes that have been made. I noticed yesterday that while "Category:Metropolitan Borough of Tameside" had been "nuked", its contents had not been moved back to "Category:Tameside", which was still a redirect. (This has now been fixed – thanks, Foroa.) — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 07:41, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Problem with Bryan's upload tool

Hi.

I've uploaded today a few pictures from Flickr using Bryan's upload tool ([4]). 3 of the pictures have not been uploaded and I don't know how to add them to the empty description pages:

• File:Active House Eco 60.jpg
• File:Spartan Eco 60 (1).jpg
• File:Operon Racing Eco 60.jpg

Can anyone help me with this issue? Cheers. Badzil (talk) 23:21, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Its not a problem with the tool, its a problem with the files. The EXIF contains html, the mediawiki software not likes this. Download the files from flickr, remove that html tags from the EXIF and upload them by hand. --Martin H. (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your help. After stripping the IPTC metadata, the upload went fine. Badzil (talk) 14:39, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

December 9

My mistake with deleting categories

Using Cat-a-lot (if using is the right word), I've just managed to delete over 50 images from a category instead of deleting them from a different, selected category. Normally I'd use "Undo" but I don't seem to have one. Any ideas? Rodhullandemu (talk) 00:09, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I give you the rollbacker rights, then you can quickly rollback the accidental contribs in Special:Contributions/Rodhullandemu with opening the rollback link in new tabs or windows of your browser. --Martin H. (talk) 00:41, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Much obliged, hundreds of edits daily is much faster aided by tools but of course open to silly tired mistakes. I'll rollback the errors before I get too much more fatigued! Rodhullandemu (talk) 00:45, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Neve or Nave?

Can you Hebrew? Come and help decide here. Thanks, Orrling's talk 04:20, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

File:Mamata banerjee.jpg roteted.

File:Mamata banerjee.jpg this file was right orientation. Why this was rotated?. --Jayanta Nath (talk) 11:40, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Your question is already answered in several threads above. According to the file's metadata contains incorrect information about the file's orientation, probably because it was rotated by the uploader using a tool that did not correctly update the metadata. The latest Mediawiki software respects the file's own orientation information. The file has been tagged to have its orientation information corrected by a bot. Because there is a backlog of images, it may take some time before this is done. See Commons:Rotation for details. —LX (talk, contribs) 13:59, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Formatting

Does anyone know what the problem is? A number of files that are usually vertical have turned themselves horizontal. When you click on the image, it looks right, but on the page, it is wrong, and it is also wrong when you place it on a Wikipedia page. It only looks OK as an enlargement.

Here is an example. Since this has been used in an article, where it needs to be the right way up (vertical) it's important to get it fixed. This only seems to have been happening the past couple of days, But maybe I'm wrong about that.

I notice someone mentions the same problem, above, re Ss Cyril and Methodius. Amandajm (talk) 05:45, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

We're working on it: COM:ROTATEFIX. This particular image has been queued for fixing, but the backlog is substantial. Rd232 (talk) 11:37, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

This could be a long wait, if people are scanning the whole of Commons to see what needs fixing. Can priority be given to those files that are in use in articles?

Amandajm (talk) 07:16, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Currently not really - just by not requesting rotation for not-in-use images. In the already started mass-fix this was done. We have technical problems to deal with but we try as fast and good as possible. Thanks anyway for your suggestion. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 21:05, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

This means that someone who has uploaded 100 images, with only six of them in current use, will get their other unused 94 given the samenpriority as the images requested by someone who is carefully working through article on Wikipedia looking for images that require immediate attention. That is a bit of a nuisance! Amandajm (talk) 00:16, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Why has an image rotated without being told to do so?

I uploaded File:Water pollution in the Wairarapa.JPG in 2008. In recent months it has somehow rotated 90 deg to the right. Why? Apologies if this is the wrong forum. Alan Liefting (talk) 04:26, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

COM:Rotation. Rd232 (talk) 04:30, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• If I read COM:Rotation properly:

1. The mediawiki software now has (and perhaps always had) the facility to rotate images, based on some kind of information (what kind?) embedded in the images Exif data.
2. The occasional image that seems to be in the correct orientation on the source page, that seem to be in the correct orientation on our computers, render in the wrong orientation, once uploaded.
3. Since a recent change in the mediawiki software, all images will be rendered according to information about the correct orientation in its Exif data.
4. Some tools that help rotate already uploaded images will reset the Exif data.
5. Some tools that help rotate already uploaded images didn't or don't reset the Exif data.
6. Those who made the change in the mediawiki software were aware that the current implementation would rotate images that didn't need rotating when the exif data was incorrect.

I have uploaded about 6000 images. Only a few of them surprised me when they rendered with the wrong orientation, once uploaded. Recently, when I became aware of the {{Rotate}} tag, I used it. Previously I would use the rotate feature of software on my computer -- w:irfanview -- to prepare another version to upload. Less than 0.1 percent of my uploads needed to be rotated. But even if the mediawiki software is only going to improperly rotate a small fraction of our images that is still a large number of images that will need to have the software's inappropriate rotation reversed by human volunteers.

Wouldn't it have been possible to grandfather all images uploaded prior to the introduction of the most recent mediawiki suite, and to only have rendered based on the exif data for new images?

Wouldn't it have been possible to have run a bot that kicked out a list of all the images which the current suite would rotate?

How much thought was given to the human burden of leaving it up to ordinary users and contributors to notice when the bot improperly rotated images? In terms of the human burden perhaps it would have made more sense to have fixed all the images with misleading Exif data prior to authorizing the mediawiki software to act on the orientation in the exif data?

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 03:49, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Very strongly second Geo Swan's comments. I've uploaded many thousands of images; I've recently noticed more than a dozen of mine that have been right side up for 4 years, 6 years, etc are suddenly sideways. (If the few I've noticed over the past few days are a representative sample, the number of my own uploads alone is likely in 4 figures.) This is a major glitch. Expecting users to go through their old uploads one by one to "fix" things that hadn't been broken before this introduced bug is NOT a reasonable suggestion. -- Infrogmation (talk) 05:35, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

AFAIK there was not much community discussion before this was implemented by developers (Bugzilla: 6672), and it's not going to get reverted. We have to live with the transition consequences. Estimate is around 50k old images affected. It's unfortunate that our primary fixing tool (User:Rotatebot) can't cope with such a large volume of work, so there is a large backlog (see Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Maintenance_category_for_files_with_EXIF_rotation_other_than_0_degrees), so it may be a week or two before the transition is done. Rd232 (talk) 12:00, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I just went through my images and tagged few dozen for rotation. Very annoying. I am very grateful to people running rotate bot for undertaking huge task of fixing the problem, but I think it was very irresponsible for developers to add this "new functionality" without dealing with all the old images it will affect. Their action broke 50k images that people on Commons have to fix. --Jarekt (talk) 14:12, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

• Okay, assuming developers are going to be reluctant to agree to roll back the wikimedia software to remove or modify this feature, could the rest of us be offered more guidance?
  • COM:Rotation says that images rotated via {{Rotate}} will have the exif info changed -- if it was invoked with {{rotate|resetexif}}. Well, I have never used the resetexif option when I used {{Rotate}}. I wasn't aware it had this option. I never used this option.
  • I looked at User:rotatebot. User:Rotatebot's page seems to be saying it has only rotated 21,000 images. Did it mainain records as to when it reset the exif data? If there are really 50,000 images that will now have to be manually tagged for rotation, then, it seems to me that, 2/3rds of the time our uploaders were diligent, and had already used external tools to make sure the images they uploaded were at the proper rotation -- however, they innocently used tools that did not also reset the exif data.

    I am sorry, but it seems to me that the introduction of this feature will require more work than if it were not introduced.

  • COM:Rotation seems to be saying jpegtrans updates the exif data when instructed to rotate an image. Well, what about other popular programs? I use irfanview. Did it update the exif data? I hate that I already spent time addressing rotation, and innocently thought I had fixed problems that have re-occurred due to a fix to what seems to be an obscure feature of exif.
  • If, for the sake of argument, it is not practical to wind back this feature, I strongly urge developers to see this as a cautionary example of the dangers of introducing features that add a human burden, without prior warning, and without a clear explanation. I strongly suspect if the full human cost of addressing the images that will require human intervention were anticipated, this change would not have been introduced -- at least not without grandfathering images uploaded prior to the software change. Geo Swan (talk) 21:25, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
• I spent an hour or so going over my most recently uploaded images. I looked at over 2500 images before I noticed one that now required post-hoc rotation. I used {{rotate|degree=90|resetexif}}.
• Is this "resetexif" parameter necessary? If so then -- WHY ISN'T IT DOCUMENTED?
• I rotated two other images, since this issue came up. One was uploaded by someone else. The other I downloaded just yesterday. It looked OK on the source page.
• So, if that image looked OK on the source page why in darnation did it require rotation after this software fix? If the answer is that the rotation values in a random sample of image is untrustworthy, then why the heck was a feature that assumes the values are reliable introduced? Geo Swan (talk) 21:46, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

• As far as I understand resetexif is only needed for images containing multiple Exif orientation tags. Rotatebot will not automatically rotate images with multiple exif orientation tags but will also not automatically use the resetexif parameter then. And yes, I don't like the situation as well. This should have been properly tested prior to installation at auch a huge media platform. Especially images with conflicting exif orientation data should not be rotated at all (based on invalid information). --Denniss (talk) 22:05, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

File:Pioneer plaque man upper body as diagram template.png

What's wrong?

Any idea why the thumbnail and the image are different? Purging my cache seems to make no difference. I believe the image is correct, but the thumbnail is wrong. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 17:58, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Wrong how ? please try to be descriptive, or just take screenshots. TheDJ (talk) 20:37, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Update of thumbnails is not immediate. /Esquilo (talk) 08:44, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Strange, looks like the problem has gone away. When I viewed the thumbnail at "Category:Diagrams of the human body by Mikael Häggström" the image was showing the wrong thumbnail, which I thought was odd since the last time the image was updated was 26 October 2009. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 09:42, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Images getting deleted without reason

Many images used in the page Travancore are getting deleted regularly citing the reason "Media without a source", when both a source (book), the author's name, AND access to the source (link to a website with scanned pages of book, under PD) have all been provided. You can see more information here on the talk page, where you will notice multiple "nominated for deletion" notices by the bot. The latest file to nominated was this one, tagged as "Media without a source as of July 7 2011"; it is still present in the commons, but I can't find the July 7 category under the "Media without a source" listings (here).

Does the discussion regarding the file still exist? If so, where can I find it to point out the mistake? Also, Can I appeal undeletion for the deleted files? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikiraj121 (talk • contribs) 19:32, 9 December 2011‎ (UTC)

For File:Ayilyam Thirunal and Madhava Rao.JPG, it looks like the transfer to Commons nearly obliterated all source information -- very poor behavior by the transfer bot if that information existed on en-wiki (which it would have, unless an editor there removed it from the description page prior to transfer). A user then marked it as "no source". However, you can see in the original en-wiki upload log a source mentioned, which the speedy-nominating user failed to look at. Another user did catch it though, and restored the original source information, so the speedy-delete tag was removed and that image is now fine. If all the other images were in the same situation, you can list them at Commons:Undeletion requests with a mention of what the real source is. I can't see the deleted pages though to see if there really was a source mentioned prior to transfer from en-wiki. Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:43, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

(e/c)For that particular case, someone provided the correct sourcing after the file was nominated for deletion. Thus the file was kept as a result. For the other cases listed on en:Talk:Travancore, it indeed seems that the sourcing was not specific enough, incorrect, or fully lacking (also on en.wikipedia.org). So the conclusion is probably that people adding images to en:Travancore are not that good at sourcing their images, (possibly due to language limitations), there is no other reason than that. TheDJ (talk) 20:50, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, the specific case File:Ayilyam Thirunal and Madhava Rao.JPG was actually destroyed by the bot transfer. It seems the bot doesn't like cite templates... TheDJ (talk) 20:54, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

^ Exactly. So there's no way to know if the already-deleted files had a verifiable source or not. They're lost. Good to know that a source has already been provided in this case; thanks. Will keep an eye out for situations like this in the future. Wikiraj121 (talk) 02:33, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Admins can look at the deleted source pages to see if there was similar sourcing information, and also the original (now deleted) files on en-wiki to see what they looked like prior to transfer, and also possibly on first upload. Carl Lindberg (talk) 21:14, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I guess I wasn't very clear. I looked at the original uploads at en.wikipedia and they are NOT adhering to requirements. Their information was not mangled by a bottransfer or anything. TheDJ (talk) 10:04, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

December 10

DMCA Takedown

Please be aware that I have deleted File:Colliding Tori Fusion Reactor - CTFR.jpg pursuant to a takedown filed under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Information can be found at m:OFFICE, and the takedown as submitted is found at [5]. Editors are requested to please not recreate the image in question. Information on filing a counternotice is found at the office actions overview page. Thank you. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 04:43, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Problem with microformats in artwork template

There is a problem with the microformats emitted by, or example, File:Hals-Massa.png:

• There is an invalid ADR microformat (and another, which is valid, for Haarlem).
• There is an hCalendar event, whose start-date is 1582 (the artists birthdate), but which lacks the mandatory 'summary' property.
• It would appear that the hCalendar event refers to the creation of the artwork, whose date is rendered in <span class="dtstart">1626</span>

I am very familiar with microformats, but didn't implement those discussed above. Who can help me fix this? Andy Mabbett (talk) 16:17, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Probably best to talk about this at the talk pages of the relevant templates ({{Artwork}}, {{Creator}} & maybe more) and get user:Jarekt involved. I bet he has the templates on his watchlist so he'll probably get involved if you start a topic over there. Multichill (talk) 17:29, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

December 11

Image apparently rotated 180 degrees for no reason?

About two days ago, I requested an 180 degree image rotation http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camarillo_pumpkin_patch.jpg this image] which I had uploaded. The rotation was successful. Today, I noticed that another image of mine, this one, had somehow mysteriously rotated 180 degrees as well (whereas, unlike the other image, it did not need to be rotated in the first place). I checked the edit log to see if I had somehow erroneously requested an image rotation for both files, but there had been no activity on the image since July. Because of this, I was forced to request another image rotation to get the second image back to the way it was originally.

I do keep track of the second image frequently as it is at the top of this page, which I tend to oversee. --Jarekt (talk) 12:38, 9 December 2011 (UTC) Has anybody reported anything of this sort before? Keep in mind both images in question were uploaded by myself, though the edit log on the second image shows no activity since July and it definitely did not get rotated way back then. (As you can see, the edit log shows the most recent activity to have been my request to have the image rotated back to normal. There are no entries from the RotationBot or other such services.

-RedSoxFan274 (talk) 05:56, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

It's been asked a number of times here since Dec. 3rd (see above). AnonMoos (talk) 08:41, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I added this to FAQ. --Jarekt (talk) 13:42, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

The FAQ at that link doesn't address what I think most users will think are the most obvious questions: 1)Why was something implemented that would suddenly make many thousands of correctly oriented images in use in Wikipedia articles and other Wikimedia projects turn sideways? 2)How soon will this be fixed? -- Infrogmation (talk) 17:27, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Hehe. I'll ask a counter question. Why did you initially upload an image that contained broken metadata ? The developers implemented functionality, that functionality might have some unintended consequences for material that has broken metadata, but that doesn't make the new feature broken. It makes it that your broken file suddenly becomes visibly broken instead of invisibly broken. Just because you never received a ticket while driving 50 miles/hour above the speed limit, does not mean you should be surprised to get a ticket, and not knowing the speedlimit is not an excuse. Luckily, you don't get a ticket, you just have to wait for someone to helpfully re rotates the image for you. Just a few days of inconvenience. TheDJ (talk) 13:44, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

EXIF metadata is not easily visible to the average user. You can see images, rotate images, crop images and do many other operations without ever seeing EXIF matadata. On Windows platform I use more than 5 different tools for looking at and altering images, but did not see one yet that paid attention to obscure EXIF rotation tags. That includes all the tools that come with Microsoft Office or operating system, which are probably most commonly used. So blame Microsoft. --Jarekt (talk) 12:38, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

" I'll ask a counter question. Why did you initially upload an image that contained broken metadata ? " I made sure all my uploads displayed rightside up when I upload them. Please point me to any Wikimedia guideline in place which I might have violated at the time I uploaded them. I strongly object to creating ex-post-facto regulations and punishing all Wikimedia contributors who put honest effort into the project for years with careful attention to what the regulations at the time. -- Infrogmation (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Does this mean public domain?

"The papers of John D. Whiting, businessman, photographer, author, tour guide, and intelligence officer, were given to the Library of Congress by Wendy Whiting Blome and John F. Whiting in 2005-2006" and "No restrictions are known on publication or other forms of distribution of the images in the John D. Whiting Collection. Please cite the source of the image with the credit line: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-DIG-ppmsca-17414-00009]"[6] FunkMonk (talk) 09:33, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

That's Library of Congress speak for Public Domain per US law. It is some variation of {{PD-US}}; the LOC seldom gives a more specific reason. "Please cite the source of the image witht he credit line..." bit is a request for attribution (which seems reasonable and I think Commons should voluntarily comply with), but the attribution is not a legal requirement of the license. -- Infrogmation (talk) 20:24, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Nice, thanks! FunkMonk (talk) 10:16, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Tarzan by Charlton Comics

the first book in the Tarzan series, "Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs is in the public domain in 1964, Charlton Comics published a comic book series called "Jungle Tales of Tarzan", the publisher thought that with the death of Burroughs Tarzan was in the public domain, only that Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. claimed the rights to work, if this material was not renewed, it is in the public domain?Hyju (talk) 12:35, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow your question (the clauses are in a rather convoluted relation to one another), but in any case it might be better to ask at Commons:Village pump/Copyright, where the copyright experts tend to look in more. - Jmabel ! talk 21:25, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Neogotiation of terms for commercial use

Just stumbled on the license template used on File:Slater_rolled_up_for_wiki.jpg where the author requests additional negotiation of terms for commercial use. Strictly speaking this is okay, I suppose. If someone insists on paying or wants something special that should be okay of course, but - to me - the text seems to strongly suggest that the image could not be used commercially otherwise (contrary to the GFDL and CC-BY-SA double license), making me doubt somewhat if the author himself grasps the concept? Action required or has this been discussed before? Pudding4brains (talk) 15:54, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

I remember that this has been discussed before, but I don't know when. What I remember was that is was considered OK when the author uploads a lower resolution image and that you can negotiate about the price for a higher resolution version. On one hand this is good because Commons gets still good images, on the other hand - in extreme form - Commons can be used as a shop window to sell high quality images. Wouter (talk) 19:47, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Okay, thanks Wouter, I was just a bit worried that the text could be interpreted as a denial to use commercially without additional terms, but if it has been discussed before that's cool. Cheers! Pudding4brains (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Yeah it looks fine to me. Commercial users often wish to negotiate directly with the copyright holder, even when there is no need for them to do so. The "license of your choice" suggests also that some commercial users might want a more open license and paying a fee for that is fine. However, the bit at the top concerns me, as this is a dual-licensed image, yet he says it "must appear with a copy of, or full (hyperlinked) URL of the GFDL license". Dcoetzee (talk) 02:46, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

I imagine that was written before the license migration. These sort of notices don't bother me as much as the GFDL-1.2-only templates, which it looks like he switched to at some point. We really should deprecate that license one of these days. Kaldari (talk) 07:39, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

The formulation seems ok, even better than the one others use.

In regards to CC, it looks like this contributor's images might have been relicensed incorrectly. --  Docu  at 07:47, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Don't see why. They were licensed with GFDL, and uploaded well before the cutoff date. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:09, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:European Union heads of government

I just decided this category was useful. If you can help me to populate it, I'd love you. --Aʁsenjyʁdəgaljɔm¹¹⁶⁷¹ 20:16, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

• Looks like an unnecessary duplicate to me. All Presidents of the French Fifth Republic after a certain date are also heads of an EU country. Does this statement really need a category? NVO (talk) 21:08, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

No, it's not. Just look at the content. --Aʁsenjyʁdəgaljɔm¹¹⁶⁷¹ 21:30, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Woops, now I see the point - the explanation somewhat contradicts the name of the category. Can you suggest a definition clearer than "prominent function"? Eurobureaucracy has so many facets and levels, it needs some threshold cutoff. NVO (talk) 21:53, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Presidents of the French Republic (Category:Presidents of France) are categorized as heads of State (Category:Heads of state of France), not as heads of government (Category:Heads of government by country), which are the prime ministers of France (Category:Prime ministers of France). -- Asclepias (talk) 21:55, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Heads of government or state? Not necessarily the same thing. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 00:48, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Creative Commons wants your input on the 4.0 license process

Mindspillage sent this email to the Commons-l mailing list. I'm reposting it here so more people see it, but be advised that I (NeilK) have no special knowledge of this.

Creative Commons is beginning the process of revising their suite of licenses, with the goal of having a 4.0 version by the end of 2012:

https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/30676

They have a set of goals, including better internationalization, better interoperability with other licenses, and addressing the needs of new communities like governments and other public institutions in addition to the communities already using the licenses.

But this is the requirements gathering period--there is no draft yet. If you want your input considered, this is the best time to start thinking about what is and isn't working with the current version of the licenses.

There is a public wiki explaining more about the goals, timeline, considerations, and ways to participate:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0

Wikimedia wants the 4.0 licenses to be better for us and for the commons than the 3.0 versions, which most Wikimedia projects are currently using; CC has already reached out to us, wanting to come out with a version that the Wikimedia community will adopt, and we'll be trying to make sure everything is coordinated and communicated well throughout the revision process. But if you are interested, you should be participating directly. This is doubly true if you are in a jurisdiction with unusual requirements, or part of a group of users with particular wants that are not handled well by the current version.

Please pass this message on to other places where interested people will see it!

Cheers, Kat

Reposted by NeilK (talk) 22:47, 11 December 2011 (UTC).

December 12

Image rotation - I am desperate

Dear All,

I am desperate.

I just had a look on My uploads and I have noticed that about 1/3 of my more the 3,000 pictures needs a rotation by 270° or 90°.

I have asked manually for it for the first 6 instances. You will understand that I am not intended to spend hours for doing it for the other (presumably) abound 1,000 instances.

Is there another possibility for solving this issue?

Thank you for your appreciated help. --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 15:03, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this a major glitch. See discussion above. Thousands of images in use in Wikipedia articles and user pages are suddenly sideways. Again, expecting users to go through the many thousands of images one by one is not a practical "fix" to this artificially created emergency; this needs to be fixed as systematicallly as it was broken. -- Infrogmation (talk) 15:14, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

There are very hardworking users at COM:BR#Maintenance category for files with EXIF rotation other than 0 degrees. I think they will do it for you. If it is not done within 14 days, leave a message on this page, please. -- RE rillke questions? 15:27, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

This also needs a rotation. File:Christmas tree in Sweden.jpg J 1982 (talk) 21:26, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Requested at 2011-12-06T22:00:42‎ by Rosenzweig. --Saibo (Δ) 22:20, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Rillke, glad to know there's a team working on this problem. There are thousands of images in Wikipedia articles that have been right side up for years that are suddenly sideways; I hope any future software changes will be able to be made without creating this enormous glitch, and if there is any risk of something like this happening again that ample advance warning can be given prominently to all Wikimedia projects using Commons images. -- Infrogmation (talk) 17:30, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Just a note: the same happens at e.g. Wikipedia-local photos. Not only on Commons. --Saibo (Δ) 03:22, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Can we possibly take a broad view. User:Meneerke_bloem may be desparate about the state of 3,000 pictures that majority of which are not actually within articles. Can I suggest that the uploader goes through those 3,000 and prioritises them.

• Priority ought to be given to the pictures that are in use, not to the size of the cache uploaded. Basically, If I have requested 6 changes from articles that are currently disrupted by the error, I don't want to wait while thousands of pics that are not in use are fixed.
• Can I request that people check before requesting, in order to make the correction more efficient in terms of Wikipedia public.

Amandajm (talk) 00:23, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

I have checked 500 of my more than 3,000 pictures and asked for a rotation of about 100 of them, mostly by 270°, but sometimes by 90°. It took about one hour of my time, that I could not devote to other wikimedia issues. Please find a solution for the 800 to 900 others, which (I guess) have to be rotated too. Thanks, --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 17:51, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

• What percentage of images which were not individually tagged for re-rotation by users have been fixed so far? -- Infrogmation (talk) 20:15, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

• Cannot a bot predict if a picture will be wrong (by comparing the rendering of a picture with the old mediawiki version and with the new mediawiki version) ? Should not this sort of bot be run, and the list of wrong files be passed to rotatebot, instead of requesting users to call rotatebot manually by sticking the {{Rotate}} template ? Teofilo (talk) 19:03, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Perhaps we could assume that the visible orientations of all old images was correct, and run a bot to remove the EXIF orientation field (or set to 0 degrees) from any image that has a non-zero EXIF rotation and was uploaded before the software changed? Undoubtedly a few would be wrong, but that would be a much lesser number than what we have. The rotation tool is a great little widget, but it does seem as though a more systematic solution would be better as a first cut with coping with this sudden change. Carl Lindberg (talk) 19:11, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

I wrote the following on the foundation list : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-December/070803.html Teofilo (talk) 14:48, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Just get a bot to patch the exif rotation field in pictures that are loaded since more than 2 weeks. --Foroa (talk) 14:56, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

(teo: note: I do not read the mailinglist) @Foroa: not really (note: the exif rotation is active since 5 October). But you can be a bit more relaxed here. There are already users at it doing it systematically: Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Maintenance_category_for_files_with_EXIF_rotation_other_than_0_degrees. That would be the right place to continue any systematic ideas. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:34, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

December 7

Input Method tool

Hello, a new "Input Method" option is being shown on the top line of the screen left of my user name and user page link.

1. Why is the tool located there rather than in the edit box toolbar ? If the purpose is to have people use it in the search box, would it not be better to add a new tab close to the search box ?
2. Why is it optional ? If we are convinced that the users from those languages need the tool, why not enable it by default whenever people select these languages through the language selection tool on Commons' main page, left margin (unregistered users) ?
3. Why show the tool even to the users who have not selected those languages as their preferred language either with the main page's language select tool (unregistered users) or with their user preferences ?
4. Which is the reason why only a small selection of languages were added (mostly Indian languages) and not other languages, such as Chinese or Japanese ?
5. When I click on "More input methods", the list is nearly 1000 px high, and this might be too high for some users with a small screen, who might not be able to see the full list. I think the list should be made smaller, and a scrollbar should be added.
6. Could the help page Help:Typing be translated into English ?

Teofilo (talk) 12:43, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't see this box. Neither logged in with my bot account (default settings) nor logged in normal nor logged out. Not on the secure server and not while connecting with http. But I can see that box there. And there is no problem with the height. -- RE rillke questions? 13:11, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

 Info: The extension is called Narayam and is issued here on November 24 and on Bugzilla: 32619 -- RE rillke questions? 13:18, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

If it is "issued" here, which is the expected behavior ? Seeing it (like I do) or not seeing it, like you say is your case ? The tool on translatewiki is short for me too with only 4 languages. Here I am seeing a long list with 27 languages. Teofilo (talk) 13:49, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I suspected that the link only appears if your user interface is set to a compatible language. I changed my language to Assamese, and it appeared... but it's still there after switching back to English. I hope it'll go away eventually... :( PS it's true the full list of input methods is very long and doesn't scroll, and I can't see the bottom on my screen; but it's possible to reach the bottom if you can scroll the browser window via the keyboard. Rd232 (talk) 13:51, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Does it disappear after you log out ? Teofilo (talk) 13:58, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

No - still there after logging out, and after logging in again. Rd232 (talk) 14:00, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I assume you have to check or delete your cookies. -- RE rillke questions? 14:33, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Responses to Teofilo:

1. The interface is being redesigned. It is possible that it will move closer to the location of the text box, but it is not finalized.
2. Mostly, we don't want to force surprising behavior on people. People expect to write in their system keyboard. It may change however, after more testing.
3. This language selection tool is a local change on Commons and not very stable. A different language selection tool is being developed. Currently the tool is supposed to be shown to users whose language is supported. It may be shown to all users in the future.
4. It was originally developed for Malayalam and Hindi, because the keyboard mapping problem is especially acute there. More mappings are being added - for most languages it's very easy and very little knowledge about programming is needed. Japanese and Chinese may be tricky, however, because they are much more complex than other languages. On the other hand, common operating systems support Chinese and Japanese quite well, while the languages of India and Ethiopia are not supported everywhere.
5. This bug has already been fixed. The fix will be deployed in the near future.
6. Localized help pages for Narayam are being worked on. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:32, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Can something be done so that the cookie is automatically deleted as soon as the user switches back to English/French, etc. or logs out ? I have no idea how this function was set on my computer. I don't remember doing anything related to Indian languages. If the cookie had been automatically deleted, I would not have noticed it. Teofilo (talk) 23:23, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

It happened again yesterday, although I did nothing related to Indian languages. I was browsing the German wikipedia, while not being logged on Commons. I clicked on a link to a Commons category with the "&lang=de" url, looked at a few pictures in the category, and after a while it was there, with a german title. I erased all cookies to delete it. I tried to click on the same German wikipedia link again, but the bug did not happen again. Teofilo (talk) 13:24, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Hide option?

Hmm, is there any known possibility to hide/remove that link from the interface via user CSS or JS? The pop-up is pretty annoying, in monobook at least, and I don't need these options. --:bdk: 22:32, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing → Narayam... -- RE rillke questions? 22:50, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

aaaah, there it is, thanks! --:bdk: 23:01, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

The menu shows a (?) which links to Help:Typing where this essential info is after I had added it. Note: bug 32997 - if the script would only run for languages for which it is useful many could be saved from searching the checkbox to deactivate or from getting the screen cluttered (because they do not imagine that this can be switched off). Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:38, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Specifying license type in search criteria

Hi all,

Is there currently any way to filter image searches by license type?

If not, are there any plans to develop this in future?

I ask because I would personally find it useful to be able to search for public domain images only, to potentially avoid the need for attribution.

Regards Edd

If you use "Public Domain" as one of your search terms, it will do a pretty good job. - Jmabel ! talk 16:43, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

We just don't have any way of doing this yet. If all that indicates the copyright status is the template, this doesn't find it, nor does "PD" as a search term. —innotata 17:24, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Licence tags add hidden categories. -mattbuck (Talk) 01:08, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, "PD" and "Public Domain" don't find all the public domain images. —innotata 23:18, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

We can do it via Catscan2 - but that is not really accessible for the normal user. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:40, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

See also #Searching for PD images by keyword can be problematic. --  Docu  at 02:45, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Rotation

I'm still finding individual images that are in current use, and for which rotation has been requested, still the wrong way round. I am finding it very frustrating that priority is not being given to images that are in use! I request that uploaders take a broad view, and request the rotation of specific important and i-use images, rather than blanket reversals of large uploads.

Priority requests

• File:St Phillips Cathedral -Birmingham -UK.jpg
• File:Baptisteriumganz.jpg
• File:Cathedrale tourlanterne.jpg. This file has been apparently "fixed" but the formatting is still stuffed. It appears as a "landscape" format image, rather than "portrait" format, with the result that the content of the image is compressed. It needs fixing again. It is in use in two articles. You can see the effect by going to the listed article. It looks fine on the file page.
• File:Sarajevo cathedral 0 crop.jpg. The problem with this image is exactly the same as the one above. it is vertical within a horizontal format which is compressing the content.

Amandajm (talk) 00:46, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

If the file looks fine on the image page, then it's fixed. However, the image dimensions may be hard-coded on the cached HTML version of the wiki page itself, so the wikipedia article may need to be re-rendered to force it to change there. That can be done with a w:Wikipedia:Purge or a Help:dummy edit. Or a regular edit, if you need to fix something on the page ;-) I did it with two articles using File:Cathedrale tourlanterne.jpg. Carl Lindberg (talk) 01:11, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Note: I took the freedom to link your filenames. Current status: all fixed except File:Baptisteriumganz.jpg where no one had requested rotation until now (I did not. Will be rotated at about 14 December 2011 12:00. --Saibo (Δ) 02:48, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

 All done

File:Miranda de Miranda.jpg

}} This image was used without in the Hindustan Times without any attribution to its author. Is there any particular tag which can be added for it now? I recall seeing one a year ago.

• http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Goa/Cartoonist-Mario-Miranda-to-be-cremated-today/Article1-781191.aspx

Joyson Noel ^{Holla at me} 09:09, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

The photo is from flickr, where author requested that commercial users to contact him. It is possible that the newspaper did that. --Jarekt (talk) 12:54, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

• • I added a link to the image here on Commons. -Pete F (talk) 16:12, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

|}

Status of NOAA as possible providing free content

Are pictures from Noaa.gov available under a free license?

Question was triggerd by File:Maré vermelha.JPG that I found having one possible origin here:

[noaa.gov]

Groetjes --Neozoon (talk) 23:21, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

PD-US-gov, specifically {{PD-USGov-NOAA}}. Rd232 (talk) 23:40, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Also see Commons:Batch uploading/NOAA Photo Library. Multichill (talk) 18:01, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Images on this website are usually public domain, unless otherwise stated; this one is stated to be by the NOAA. —innotata 17:28, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

• However, bear in mind that some NOAA projects are performed by academics, operating under research grants. If I am not mistaken images taken by these individuals are not in the public domain, because their grants mean that they aren't employees of the Federal government. They are employees of whatever institution administered the grant. Geo Swan (talk) 06:53, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

December 5

Firefogg apparently doesn't work?

I want to upload a small AVI file and have firefogg magically convert it to OGV. Well for the life o' me I can not figure out how to make it work.

It is 2011-12-13.

• Windows 7, 64 bit, Service Pack 1
• Downloaded latest firefox from www.firefox.com
• Installed firefogg from www.firefogg.org
• Went to upload file page
• Select AVI from file list, and uploader returns error "can't do that file type".

Supposedly there is something to be enabled, but I don't see it and can't figure out what it is. This page Commons:Firefogg says:

Tip: Click the "enable mwEmbed gadget for all pages" button at the top of the page to enable firefogg gadget for all pages.

Is firefogg working or broken? DMahalko (talk) 01:57, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Further firefogg testing

Turns out the instructions are wrong, but it still doesn't work.

• • Preferences -> Gadgets Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets
  • Section Interface: Other
  • Multimedia beta support: Enables support for new multimedia tools: easier media uploads (including video encoding), and display and editing of video subtitles and video sequences.

(Note that this text has no mention of mwEmbed gadget.)

Enabling this has no effect on the "Upload file" page. It still rejects AVI as a choice.

To get to an AVI upload page requires instead randomly clicking the Edit tab for any page, and clicking on the third-to-the-left toolbar button for Add Media Wizard.

However, uploading an AVI causes a transcoding window to appear that just sits at 0% and does nothing.

the alternate non-wikimedia conversion method using firefogg is to go here:

[http://firefogg.org/make/]

This does actually work for me, except the ogv generator crashes just as the encoding finishes. Apparently the resulting OGV file works anyway. (???)

Needs some refinement, looks like. :-( DMahalko (talk) 05:32, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:Renewable energy in the Republic of Ireland

Please rename the Category:Renewable energy in the Republic of Ireland to Category:Renewable energy in Ireland and
Category:Wind power in the Republic of Ireland to Category:Wind power in Ireland
equal to Category:Energy in Ireland. Watti Renew (talk) 10:35, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Please place these requests at "User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands". Thanks. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 11:07, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

An additional bug?

Some images which have recently been rotated, e.g., File:Laserpitium_halleri001.jpg, File:Laserpitium_halleri002.jpg & File:Laserpitium_halleri003.jpg, are now well in the right direction.

However, there thumb in the gallery en:Meneerke_bloem/Photographic_Collection_3a is distorded, i.e, stretched in landscape instead of in portrait.

Please check and advise. --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 15:06, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

All 3 files look fine to me. Cache problem maybe? --Jarekt (talk) 15:41, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your quick reply.
I was checking other pictures on the same user page when the bot was rotating these pictures.
I have closed IE and checked it again. It's now OK. As you suggested, it was indeed a cache problem.
Best regards, --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 15:55, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Add new category for "Faded photographs", also definition of "Old photographs"

I am categorizing Ujkigyos.jpg which is a faded color photograph from the 1960s with a distinctive fading of red. I think there should be a category inside "Photographs" for faded photographs, or more specifically faded color photographs. Am I missing an existing category?

Also, I think the Category:Old photographs should have text at the top stating what dates this page includes (e.g., before 1920, before 1900). I suggest "before 1900". Comments, please.Downtowngal (talk) 17:04, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

I've added "Category:1968 in Hungary" to File:Ujkigyos.jpg as a chronology indicator. I'm not aware of any existing category for "faded photographs"; I have no strong opinion about if that might be useful. If you think there is something particularly 1960s about the photographic technique or process, there is a Category:1960s photographs. I agree that "Category:Old photographs" is very vague and without a definition of what "old" means in this context not particularly useful. For photographs before 1900, I suggest you use Category:19th century photographs or one of its subcategories. (Probably many of the files in "Category:Old photographs" should be moved to some more specific category.) -- Infrogmation (talk) 17:40, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

I have pocket-camera color photos from the early 1970s with less pronounced, but similar color fading. It's a distinctive look that I suppose could be mimicked by filters on a 'good' photograph, but perhaps these as-is photographs as a group could be useful to someone making a collage, mock advertisement, etc. from the period. I propose a subcategory of Photographs called "Faded color photographs". Downtowngal (talk) 18:20, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

December 15

Subst:ing vote templates (and other such subst: worthy ones)

I propose that I subst these once a month (1st of every month). Any objections? I will queue this task to such day and it will run automatically. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 17:21, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

There is a serious backlog (about 70K pages) though so I am going to be running the code to handle these right away on commons namespace to handle some of them. I noticed plenty of uses in other namespaces which I am filtering out until a consensus is reached. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 17:40, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Hmm... this is a problem. It seems like the vote templates are using nested templates. there are over 50K pages that use vote templates in the commons namespace alone. And mind you that is not 50k times. Some pages have tens of uses so the actual number of transclusions is a multiple of the numbers I mentioned.

My question is why is there a nested-template use for something that takes a word or two ({{Support}}, {{Oppose}}, etc.). It really is a strain on servers and granted it will not break the wiki but it does have an impact (with no benefit that I can see) we can avoid with trivial ease.

-- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 17:53, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

i18n ? Of course it is arguable whether simple one-word-templates should use i18n. Just look at the transclusion-list of {{Autotranslate}}. Amazing, isn't it? -- RE rillke questions? 18:07, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Given the translations (this is an international project), I'm not sure I see the worth in substing all of them, unless someone comes up with a better internationalization scheme. Was this something suggested by the developers, based on server load? Once discussions are archived, they shouldn't be altered, and should not cause additional load on the servers. If there is a technical need, maybe press harder, but I don't think this is as trivial as it would seem at first blush. Carl Lindberg (talk) 18:48, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

There are alternate ways to do this. Nested templates should be a last resort. Why not use {{int:}} for example. Indeed commons is not an English only club, however this is fine as the POINT of {{Support}} is it presenting the image/symbol of support/oppose and the word "Support" or "Oppose" (which could be in any language such as like this). -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 00:40, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Please don't. There is no point in substitution of these templates. You might want to read en:Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance. Multichill (talk) 18:43, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Seconded. Obvious and needless inefficiency in template design can be addressed, especially where improvements might lead to better maintainability or flexibility. Subst:ing lots of templates? No. Most uses are anyway on archive pages which generate few pageviews and are in any case rarely edited, so that caching means little server load. Rd232 (talk) 23:13, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Particularly in the area of template design, optimising server performance is important, and it's frequently done by users with a great amount of impact. It's not very hard. I've done it myself from time to time, but it's best done by people with a knowledge of the templates in question and the articles they serve.

Tim Starling, MediaWiki Release Manager wikitech-l, 12 January 2011

I have done this many times in the past. We aren't talking about a few transclusions here and there but tens of thousands that accumulated over time. Every time a template is modified (to add an optional translation for example) ever the template is transcluded on will be re-rendered. Performance isn't the only issue but also usability comes to mind. No one likes templates that takes billions of optional parameters (which can do all sorts of weirdness with a missing }).

Voting templates have a purpose and I do not oppose their existence (quite the contrary really). But they can and should be transcluded perhaps monthly to make sure their use is minimal. Also voting templates are used in archived pages for the most part so WHY do they need dynamically update-able templates? Isn't that the opposite of preserving the archives as they are? My main question is what is the point of having so many templtate transclusions?

-- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 00:40, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Internationalization, from the sounds of it. substing those templates sounds like it would have the effect of bloating the archive pages beyond belief, since you would be inserting many copies of the translation templates. Unless you feel that changing these to English-only is preferable to what is there currently, which looks like will display in the user's current language. If you have a simpler way of providing such inline translation services with simpler templates, by all means do that. The Starling quote is about template design, not transclusions exactly, and it's also referring to providing the same functionality with a simpler structure -- that does not sound like the case here. If you append uselang=fr to the URL, for example here, then you will see the word changes from "Support" to "Pour", and "Oppose" to "Contre". This does aid readability for people who speak other languages. I don't see how to support that with simpler templates, and substing will bloat pages terribly. If they were simple English-only templates, or you were doing this on en-wiki, I'm sure it'd be OK. But it sounds like the vote templates are a bit different here. Carl Lindberg (talk) 04:19, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

The template {{Support}} ( Support) would be replaced with "[[File:Symbol support vote.svg|15px|link=]] '''{{int:Support}}'''" ( Support). The reader would see it no differently than it is now (if not more internationalized). -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 06:36, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that would work the same way, and it would ignore the specific translations in the current template. I tried a page in the sandbox with int:support and a uselang=fr parameter to the page; it showed me the text in English (whereas the support template showed the French text). The int: stuff may respect a logged-in user's language, but I'm not sure it deals with situations where the language is specified as a URL parameter only. It is also theoretically possible to have things like {{Support|lang=fr}} to specify the French no matter what, though I doubt you'd see that much. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:53, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

int:support respects the URL parameter just fine; the problem is that the relevant MediaWiki message is not defined for French (compare MediaWiki:Support/de and MediaWiki:Support/fr). It works just fine, for example, for German. Now, maybe it would be a good idea to move all the vote translations from the vote templates into MediaWiki messages - maybe that would be more efficient, and it would certainly make subst:ing less implausible. Personally, I find the whole translatewiki thing which manages the MediaWiki message translation a bit impenetrable though, so I'm not volunteering to do it myself... Rd232 (talk) 18:42, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

This is something that can be addressed. I would prefer using mediawiki directly rather than a bloated parser function zillions of times. To me it is a serious problem when support/oppose votes are in so many languages in a mixture. I do not know if it is a strong support or a normal support and with int: they would all appear in the same language as user selection. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 19:46, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

"a bloated parser function..." - meaning what? And it ought to be more efficient using MediaWiki directly, yes - though it would be nice if there was some detail on how much of a difference it makes. Is there any documentation on transferring a localised template to translatewiki? This would be very helpful. Rd232 (talk) 20:28, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Parser functions and templates can slow down page load significantly. There are hard coded restrictions where template rendering is cut short prematurely. When support template has mere one or two dozen translations this isn't that big of a deal in the short term. But since the goal in commons is every language possible such a thing would eventually make pages like COM:DEL unloadable. Consider each use of the vote template pulling 255 translations. Another question is, why is the Support/Oppose templates protected? If issue is really trivial why is this necessary? -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 06:22, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I understand the general point about loading time, I was wondering if you had a specific parser function in mind, with your "bloated" comment. As to the protection - that is standard for templates that are widely used, due to the risk that vandalism could be highly disruptive to many pages. {{Edit request}} is available. Rd232 (talk) 10:14, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Oppose substing. Re-rendering of modified templates is opportunistic, when the pages they're used on are viewed. Deletion request pages are low-traffic, compared to file description pages. Substing will make the wiki source of these pages difficult to read, affecting usability, e.g. when copying comments from previous discussions to illustrate precedent. Dcoetzee (talk) 04:37, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Why would the source page would be less readable with this? All the "code" that would show up is listed above. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 06:39, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Arguably, if I was new to the project, I would never know that I could generate the code by typing {{Support}}. I would assume that the only way to create the icon and the word "Support" would be to type "[[File:Symbol support vote.svg|15px|link=]] '''{{int:Support}}'''". — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 08:53, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. You would still type {{Support}} and a bot would subst: it later. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 15:39, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Sure. But my point is that if the substitution takes place quite quickly, new users who click "Edit" might never actually see the use of {{Support}} and thus might not know that it is even possible to use the template in that way. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 16:35, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Idea is to subst: old pages, not hourly. subst: if last edit to page was 1 or 2 months ago for example. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 19:41, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Also good use of {{Nobots}} for ongoing discussions could be also considered. Bot wouldn't edit until the discussion is closed and template being removed. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 06:28, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

In that case, I have no objections to it. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 07:15, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

What would that point be to subst those templates? /Esquilo (talk) 09:39, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

• Don't we have other problems than discussing about stuff that isn't needed and has doubtful consequences? Please... --Saibo (Δ) 03:03, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
  • No-one's forcing you to be interested in this...! Your comment is a little bit rude towards those who are. Rd232 (talk) 10:18, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
    • Rd232, in fact, I am involved even if I will not do the replacements - due to the problems with it discussed above. Possible loss of translation and whatever. And on the other side we do not know how much gain (less server power used) we would have by substing them. So... of course everybody can do whatever he likes as long as it is useful. Hope you understand. --Saibo (Δ) 22:16, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

•  Comment OK, well as far as I'm concerned, this discussion can be closed for now, and re-opened once the relevant templates have been converted to MediaWiki internationalization (int: ). That will be useful in itself, regardless of whether subst:ing later happens. For now, we need to figure out how to pursue that MediaWiki internationalization. Anyone? Rd232 (talk) 10:21, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Generally agreed -- the underlying templates should be changed first, if that is desirable. Keep in mind, I think that only administrators at meta have the ability to edit the actual translations of those messages (the ones that int: use). As documented above, translations for many existing languages are missing, and I don't think "support" is an official system message, but rather one which does have some translations added at meta. I would hope that multiple inclusions of the same template would only cause the template to be fetched and evaluated once during page rendering; I do not recall these templates causing even large pages containing lots of votes to come anywhere near the limits (I don't think they make use of any expensive parser functions, which is where some of the the limits are). If you look at the HTML source of any page, the limits and how close the current page is are listed in an HTML comment. If these templates actually become a demostrated problem, then I'd be more aggressive about trying to find changes, but I'm not sure these really are. For example, here are the stats for Undeletion requests, which is a huge page with a number of vote templates present at any given time:

NewPP limit report

Preprocessor node count: 4136/1000000

Post-expand include size: 305294/2048000 bytes

Template argument size: 14767/2048000 bytes

Expensive parser function count: 14/500

• • • Meta has nothing to do with editing Commons' MediaWiki messages. There are the default MediaWiki messages, which are edited via translatewiki; and Commons' customization of some MediaWiki messages, which are edited locally on Commons. See Commons:Localization#MediaWiki. You're right that MediaWiki:Support is not currently in translatewiki; it is an unused message created in 2005 with a few subpages. Investigating that led me to this old discussion by the way! I suppose we do have a choice, whether to try to move the templates to translatewiki or to Commons' local MediaWiki messages. However, before we do that, we should try and get more info about performance effects. One issue that comes up here, which I don't know how it interacts exactly, is server cache fragmentation. It may be that with int: the server has to cache each language version of the page separately, whereas with a template it loads everything but only has to cache it once. We need to find someone who knows about these things. Rd232 (talk) 18:23, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

• • Templates can be a problem, true, but I'm not sure these in particular are a significant problem, at least to the point of losing the existing LangSwitch functionality. If the implementation of the template is changed to use int:, then it would be different, as that would be a simple subst. Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:19, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
    • Agreed and this is what I would prefer as an end result. I already have fair number of regex's to replace existing templates so I could run the bot when and if it is agreed upon. As for Template:Int:ification of vote templates, we may do that as I do not see any objections to that (so far). This problem isn't an urgent one but it is something we can solve before it becomes urgent. -- とある白い猫 ^ちぃ？ 17:49, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Free/Open data

Hi, I see a lot of maps and graphs which do not cite any sources, they are mostly "Own work" and sometimes refer to other Commons images. Sadly, most of the times they do not include the data used for processing in the Talk site as is suggested.

Another issue is maps that are derived from Public Domain maps, but only add very trivial data on top of it, sometimes very simple colouring of data points such as land areas without further modifications, but that's not the point of this topic... just as a side note.

For the vector graphs and maps, extraction of the data is still kind of cumbersome. Common, even obligatory royalty-free and open-standard machine-readable formats would be best, as they are in the spirit of the Wikimedia Commons, I hope?

I see very very few data sources on Wiki commons... -- btw. is there a category for them? -- so what about including raw data in the Commons? There are legal tools being developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation in the Open Data Commons project.

Another option of course, would be the CC0 or explicit PD license. Data in a specific format can be copyrighted in a lot of jurisdictions. The data itself mostly cannot.

Is anyone already committing to such efforts?

Cheers 217.187.30.74 18:23, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I should clarify that I mean that FACTS cannot be copyrighted in a lot of cases. Formatted data and even sometimes collections of facts, however, can be copyrighted. 217.187.30.74 18:28, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

A lot of maps on Commons are based on taking generic/blank PNG or SVG maps of the world, Europe, the U.S. etc. and manipulating them. In such cases, it's the original map whose status you should examine, if you feel it to be necessary. In the early days of Wikipedia, many maps were based on sources explicitly declared to be free of copyright (CIA World Factbook, Perry-Castaneda UTexas, etc.). AnonMoos (talk) 14:03, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Newton's papers - copyright of scans.

Cambridge University have recently uploaded high res scans/digital photos of Isaac Newton's manuscripts to their Digital Library. They claim that they can reserve all rights on the hi-res scans and that they have the right to release the low res scans under CC-BY-NC-3.0.

The manuscripts themselves are obviously in the public domain, as Newton died in 1727, so surely the Cambridge University scans are in the public domain globally too ? I've already uploaded several pictures using the PD-scan licensing template. I'm just unsure why Cambridge make a claim of copyright. --Claritas (talk) 09:54, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Agree. Mechanical reproduction of public domain material remains in the public domain. This remains the case despite the fact that some people who should know better sometimes slap copyright claims onto the public domain material. -- Infrogmation (talk) 10:43, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I'll treat all the reproductions as PD. Thanks. --Claritas (talk) 14:13, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Misrotated pictures

I have checked manually the more than 3,000 pictures of plants I have uploaded on Commons. About 700 of them were misrotated (mostly by 270°, sometiomes by 90°).
If this can help you, so far I could notice, all (?) misrotated pictures were uploaded during the first 9 months of 2011.
Hopefully I have not overlooked some of them and the rotation of the pictures is now permanently fixed! --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 13:04, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
PS: I have still to check some additional 300 pictures of locations, people, etc.

See Commons:Rotation. Rd232 (talk) 17:07, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

PNG/SVG file background

Hello ! Could someone convert the backround of this logo to transparent, and save a new version of the file as PNG or SVG, with no compression..

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laserdisc_logo.png

I tried it myself with XnView (set the transparency value to palette entry), but it didn't work for some reason.. I have no idea how to do it. Sincerely, Hoikka1 (talk) 15:59, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

You might get a response here, but you should really go to the Commons:Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop. Rd232 (talk) 17:11, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I posted there. Hoikka1 (talk) 18:09, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Identifying unidentified subjects

It quite often happens that images get transferred to Commons without proper descriptive captions or filenames, so that we have no idea of the identity of the person (or whatever) therein (and thus, we've got huge categories full of "unidentified people", etc). I'd like to point out that we do have a very good source of information in this area: namely, the use for which the image was originally uploaded.

We should know from which Wikipedia a given image originally came (do we have this data somewhere? Can it be more easily accessible?), and thus we should be able to check when it was originally uploaded (even if it's since been deleted), and by whom. And, by checking the edits made by the original uploader within minutes of the upload, we can (usually) see the use to which the image was put, the caption which described it, etc.

Unless the article in question has been deleted, of course. So we'd need people with admin access on the relevant Wikipedias (or, alternately, stewards) to check.

(Oh, and a good online translation tool would be helpful also.)

Comments? DS (talk) 14:39, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

• This is a problem, indeed; many of these orphan pics were moved without {{Information}}, or lost important text in process. But I would rather discourage attempts to identify unfamiliar subjects (do what you can do best and stay away from things that you don't know) and strongly discourage use of auto-translate tools.
• Another concern is that many of these pics (not blatant copyvios) also don't have proper author, date and source info. They often have incorrect or deprecated licenses. Should I fix description if I know that the file can be deleted at any time as "missing essential info"? Seems like a dead end: few people will ever touch it. And the backlog grows - "good" pics are fixed, "bad" ones stay.
• What commons should do is advertizing backlog tasks on relevant wikipedias: "Did you know that ... 8465 files used by Polish wikipedia still don't have proper categories?" etc. NVO (talk) 10:49, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Media of the Day

How do I nominate a file as media of the day?

SecretDisc 21:04, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Just pick a free date at Commons:Media of the day and add it. Multichill (talk) 21:13, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Crop request

I'm not familiar with Commons, so I'm asking here. Can someone crop out the whitespace in the bottom and right portions of File:Hurricane Debra plane.jpg? Thanks. Hurricanefan25 (talk) 22:49, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

•  Done - --Claritas (talk) 00:54, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

December 16

Flag of Denmark.svg

Someone please undo the edit done by SouthSudan without any explanation. Those aren't the right proportions. ElMa-sa (talk) 16:20, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Reverted. MKFI (talk) 16:33, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. ElMa-sa (talk) 16:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Special:ListFiles how to bugreport?

ok, there is a problem with my Special:ListFiles/Lx_121

it doesn't show all my recent uploads (there is at least 1 gap, with at least 1 upload listing absent; possibly more, but i haven't done a full checklist, i just see there is an item missing)

a) does anyone know about this problem

&

b) where do i go to report the bug?

thanks in advance for any helpful info :)

Lx 121 (talk) 00:58, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

• actually, it's missing most of my uploads, & there are multiple gaps in the sequence that is shown. Lx 121 (talk) 01:02, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Not a bug. Most of those are probably your files that were rotated by Rotatebot. (Example: File:Shinno (Shennong).inscribed.artist not identified.19th century.japanese.Wittig collection - painting 21.JPG.) Special:ListFiles lists the upload of the last version of a file. Thus, they would now be listed in Special:ListFiles/Rotatebot. -- Asclepias (talk) 01:58, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry. Please have a look at Gallery tool. -- RE rillke questions? 10:46, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

thanks @ both; i do know about the "gallery tool" :)

BUT you're saying that "my uploads" only lists items where your version is @ the top of the history stack!? o__0 is there some reason why that was considered desirable? 0__o

lol Lx 121 (talk) 20:43, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

It is how the software works. Search bugzilla: for the why. There is already a feature-request. -- RE rillke questions? 13:07, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Problem after rotation

I encounter the same problem as yesterday.

The images which have been rotated today, e.g., File:Alchemilla pentaphyllea.jpg & File:Narcissus bulbocodium close-up1.jpg are now well in the right direction, but there thumb in galleries en:Meneerke_bloem/Photographic_Collection_1 & en:Meneerke_bloem/Photographic_Collection_4, respectively, is distorded.

However, on the contrary to yesterday, the distorsion, which you called a "cache problem", is persisting after closing IE, and even after removing the temporary IE-files and rebooting the PC.

Please advise. --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 21:25, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

You purged your own computer's cache, but not Wikimedia's server cache. I've done that now (see Help:Purge and en:WP:Purge). Rd232 (talk) 21:40, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. One distorsion persisted: File:Peucedanum ostruthium002.jpg in gallery en:Meneerke_bloem/Photographic_Collection_4. I have added "?action=purge" to the url and press "enter". Nothing was changed... Please let me now why it was not working. --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 22:28, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

I also see this glitch - the thumbnail for the second (rotated) version has correct (rotated) aspect ratio, but its contents were not rotated, but squashed to fit new aspect ratio. NVO (talk) 22:37, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. I have opened all my galleries and purged them manually. Everything looks now OK.
I will do a last check today to see whether I have overlooked some pictures, that still should have to be rotated.
I lost nearly three full-days to review all my pictures one by one and to ask for rotation of approximately 700 of them - three days I could have devoted to other wikimedia issues. What about the probably thousands of pictures of other users, that have to be rotated?
Best regards, --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 09:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

During my last check yesterday I have found a few overlooked misrotations, which have been corrected in the meantime.
I have also seen that a rotation of two of my well-rotated pictures was asked by another user. Fortunately you did not do it.
Hopefully a template has been created in the meantime, so that misrotation never happens again in the future.
Best regards, --Réginald alias Meneerke bloem (To reply) 10:07, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

File:Aloha Airlines Logo.svg

There is something wrong in this file. When it is used, it looks like this.--94.22.116.61 19:52, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I edited it to remove the HTML comment, and remove the use of entities in the doctype, and it seems to be working now. You may also use the tool described at Commons:SVG Check to check uploads -- that would have helped here. The use of entities in the svg element are apparently not supported or correct, so MediaWiki refused to render it. Carl Lindberg (talk) 22:04, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

December 17

Changing an filename

Hello ! Can user change the filename of a photo/photos? Is it possible at all ? Sincerely, Hoikka1 (talk) 07:27, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this is possible. Take a look at the FAQ. Regards, --rimshot^talk 09:23, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Very good, thank you ! Hoikka1 (talk) 14:43, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject

I have a draft of a Wikiproject page at User:WhisperToMe/Commons:WikiProject United States - May I move it to the mainspace and declare the project started now? Or do I need to take steps first?

If/when it starts I would like to notify the English and Spanish Wikipedia projects (as well as some others) about the Commons project WhisperToMe (talk) 12:09, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

unwanted picture rotation

today to my surprise, i've found that some pictures of mine were rotated ninty degrees into a funny position. originally they were upright - sky up and earth down. now sky on the right and ground to the left. samples: Image:Onopordum cynarocephalum flower.JPG Image:Shabbat candlesticks.JPG Image:Papaver subpiriforme.JPG this is also causing a distortion of the photo, like happened here: http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Onopordum_cynarocephalum what can be doen to correct? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eitan f (talk • contribs) 13 December 2011, 13:20 (UTC)

See Commons:Rotation. Fixes requested for these 3 pictures - will take around 48 hours to be done. Rd232 (talk) 13:29, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) This is a known issue: see "Commons:Rotation". You need to tag the images for rotation using the button on the file description page. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 13:31, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Seriously-- are you expecting people to go back and tag every effected sideways image ONE BY ONE?!? Perhaps we should shut down all editing and uploading on Wikimedia for however long it takes to get this done with all human resources devoted to the project. (Or, again, can't the bug be fixed systematically, or at least something done to assume that images that have been in use in pages for at least a few months prior were right side up at the time?) Off hand, I have trouble thinking of any single act of vandalism we've ever suffered that rivals the amount of damage to Wikimedia done by this glitch suddenly turning tens of thousands of used images sideways across all projects. -- Infrogmation (talk) 14:33, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Vandalism? "We" call it usability initiative. Or optimization. Or improvement. Just live with it. But, seriously, it's amazing that this public fallout ("least astonishment", huh) continues for more than two months after 1.18 rollout. Sometimes I see a familiar photo rotated on its side, and yet I am confident that one week ago (well after the rollout) it looked normal. And now it's not. And it already has a string of rotate requests in history. It can go forever. NVO (talk) 14:52, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

It was an easy fix to avoid it too (I've already done this on some of my commercial wikis). Scan the images rendered for "before" and "after" (i.e. without and with EXIF) and make a list of those affected, i.e. those with different orientations. Then (as a reasonable default) auto-rotate any that had moved by a quarter-turn in either direction back to how they were before (this was probably right beforehand, and the EXIF was being unhelpful). If this gives a matching image, then it's probably done, so just display these images on a worklist for manual confirmation. Anything that doesn't seem to have an easy solution goes on a second worklist for manual fix. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:00, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

In case someone needs more background, this issue was discussed almost daily for over 2 months:

1. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Strange_rendering (October 2)
2. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Misaligned_picture (October 15)
3. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Rotatelink_on_filedescription-pages (October 16)
4. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#problem_with_rotation (October 18)
5. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#MediaWiki_1.18_deployment_to_Commons (October 25)
6. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Rotation_error (October 28)
7. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/11#New_autorotation_based_on_EXIF_data_problem (November 7)
8. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/11#Wrong_rotation_of_image_when_used_in_Wikipedia (November 16)
9. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/11#Image_orientation (November 27)
10. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/11#.22Request_rotation.22_link (November 27)
11. Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/12#Direction_issue_with_File:Cyril_and_Methodius_monument_Sofia.jpg (December 1)
12. Commons:Village_pump#Formatting (December 2)
13. Commons:Village_pump#Why_has_an_image_rotated_without_being_told_to_do_so.3F (December 5)
14. Commons:Village_pump#Image_apparently_rotated_180_degrees_for_no_reason.3F (December 6)
15. Commons:Village_pump#File:Mamata_banerjee.jpg_roteted. (December 9)
16. Commons:Village_pump#Rotation (December 10)
17. Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Maintenance_category_for_files_with_EXIF_rotation_other_than_0_degrees
18. and many many other locations.

I think everybody agrees that it was very irresponsible for someone to do a change in a software that broke over 50k images, many of them used on wikipedias, without coming up with strategy how to fix them (ideally prior to rollout of the new software). Thanks to great work done by a team running User:Rotatebot we are slowly catching up, but it is a case that people that broke the system are not the same ones who are spending a lot of time and effort fixing it. --Jarekt (talk) 19:10, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. There really should have been a strategy for dealing with this obviously predictable problem. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 11:09, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Note: If you ask for image rotation by adding the {{Rotate}} template manually, also remember to specify the number of degrees you want to rotate the image: {{α}} for α° clockwise, e.g. {{90}} if you want it rotated by 90°. I found some {{Rotate}} templates without any degree number. Instead of using the {{Rotate}} template, you can also click on the "request rotation" link below the image, but this link is only visible if you are logged in. --Stefan4 (talk) 22:36, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

December 14

Portraits flat on their faces

Looks like some (maybe more) portrait shaped pictures have been landscaped, without being edited. Tried fixing File:SAR Class 6E1 Series 9 E2007.jpg just now by unrotating and reloading but it remained horizontal. André Kritzinger (talk) 12:13, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Andre Kritzinger,

did you read the edit-notice?

Problems with image rotation? Please see Commons:Rotation and see if that answers your question, before posting here.

Helpdesk and Village-Pump + Archive is full of answers. Please search before posting. Thank you. -- RE rillke questions? 12:54, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, yes, saw that. After I posted..... André Kritzinger (talk) 22:07, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Dear bot... deletion notifications

When nominating for deletion a file uploaded by a bot, the "nominate for deletion" script sends a message to the bot (see User talk:Flickr upload bot - a battlefield between User:Nikbot and User:MiszaBot). Is it possible to fix the script, so that it pings the real uploader and not the bot? NVO (talk) 21:36, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Revision of User talk:Flickr upload bot - It was not the default-script. Either the user choose a private one or notified the bot himself. Reason: The talk-summary does not match. -- RE rillke questions? 22:02, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

But the battle between misza and nik could probably be stopped with a {{bots|deny=<botlist>}} ? -- RE rillke questions? 22:05, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Nikbot has no business there, at all - it should ping the real uploader. NVO (talk) 22:11, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Slow

For several days, it seems that loading any page is slow as thumbnails seems to take forever to generate. Is it just me or should a file a bug report at Bugzilla: ? --  Docu  at 09:05, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

It's not just you, but it's not "several days" either - months, at least. NVO (talk) 10:14, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

+1, since months, see also Commons:Forum#Bildladezeiten -- Niteshift (talk) 15:31, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

ARGOÑOS

Hello les gens,
Can someone explain me what happens with my changes to this picture : File:Ayuntamiento de Argonos 2 (Spain).JPG ?
I just added a transltion into french, and surprise ! There only remains the original sentence in english. We are not headed to succeed in building Europe, if it goes on this way ! Thanks in advance for your help. Hop ! Kikuyu3 (talk) 19:41, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

There is a language select on the page, it seems like your personal setting is "en" instead of "Show all". --Martin H. (talk) 19:52, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Images under U.K. Crown Copyright o.k. for Commons?

Do we consider images under U.K. Crown Copyright, such as File:Hugo Swire MP.jpg, as free enough for Commons? --Túrelio (talk) 07:28, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

No has been general consensus before, but that does seem surprisingly free. Though maybe the whole "don't be misleading" bit would be unfree. -mattbuck (Talk) 07:52, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Crown Copyright images cannot be uploaded to Commons because the license is restrictive of the derivative works which can be created from the images. --Claritas (talk) 11:05, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

The example given above is an Open Government license, which specifically allows reuse which may "adapt the Information", not the same thing as Crown Copyright. --Fæ (talk) 11:26, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

The NIO's copyright notice states "Crown copyright" not "Open Government Licence", but uses the language of the http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/ . Unfortunately, it does not mention the deriviative works clause specifically. It would be worth emailing the NIO to see if they mean the OGL applies, and if so to what content (everything not created by 3rd parties on their website?).

It wouldn't suprise me if other parts of the UK government are mangling use of the OGL, when they have decided to use it, but not clearly stating as much.--Nilfanion (talk) 11:41, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Add category: Art of the New York City Subways?

The main Category:New York City Subway does not have a subcategory in which to direct viewers to decorative elements within the stations. I realize that adding this would require every image of art that is currently categorized only under its station to have a category added, but I think it would be very useful. Am I missing an existing category? Downtowngal (talk) 17:52, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Tv Screenshoots

Are allowed? I.E. File:Screenshot of the TV series "Sports Technologies".jpg. Thanks a lot--Pierpao.lo (listening) 21:37, 18 December 2011 (UTC) And of course [in case]? :)--Pierpao.lo (listening) 21:40, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

• No, unless Commons:Permissions has received OTRS confirmation from the producing company verifying permission. The files should be uploaded locally as fair use at ru.wikipedia.org if they are actually needed. --Claritas (talk) 21:55, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

thanks a lot--Pierpao.lo (listening) 20:58, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Requesting deletion

This and this map are misleading so i want someone to delte it. Im new to wikimedia so im not sure how to do it. The problem is that it shades Oman as Sunni, even though Oman is 70% Ibadi. In short, the map should look more like this which is an accurate representation of islamic distribution. Can someone make the 2 deletion please? Thanks. PassaMethod (talk) 19:07, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

• You can initiate a discussion as to whether to delete the images by instantiating a {{Delete}} tag, and following its instructions. Merely seeming inaccurate however will not guarantee deletion of a map. We have had lots of maps which faithfully reproduced the POV of one side of an issue which were kept, even though those on the other side of a dispute regarded them as inaccurate. Arguments can be made to preserve maps of the canal of Mars, even though we now know Mars has no canals, or maps of the locations of the "lost continents" of Atlantis or Mu. If you request deletion of a map, on grounds of inaccuracy, and it is kept, anyhow, why not watch to see if it is used anywhere. Then go to the wiki where it was used, and explain there that you don't think it should be used because it is not accurate. Geo Swan (talk) 22:20, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

"Own work" washing

Is there a term, a help article, policy or template addressing the problem of people who upload a file, put "Own work" as the source and inadvertently passes through everybody's eyes as if the person had really made that image? Thanks! --Feen (talk) 20:17, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean copyvios, i.e. someone grabs another's work and claims it as your own? --Yikrazuul (talk) 20:21, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

• "Inadvertently" how? Sounds like fraud and copyright violation. When you see obvious cases tag them as {{Copyviol}}; if any doubt list them at Commons:Deletion requests. -- Infrogmation (talk) 02:08, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Some people think that if they've manipulated (cropped, lightened, etc.) an image in any way to produce a new image, then the new image is their "own work"... AnonMoos (talk) 03:00, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Indeed happends a lot, there's indeed two different cases: people who think it's their work, but it's not fully: the ones that wrongly tag them this way due to a lack of knowledge. On the other hand theres the people who on purpose tag images as own work they've stolen from others. What to do with it? I guess you just have to find this out every single case it happends, and then nominate images, and if the user does it on purpose and frequently maybe a block or something is also in the picture. Mvg, Basvb (talk) 11:56, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Commons:When to use the PD-signature tag

Hi! It would be nice if someone could help adding more countries to Commons:When to use the PD-signature tag. There must be someone out there who knows something. --MGA73 (talk) 23:05, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

December 20

Anonymous IP

Does Copyright Law provide for an anonymous person to hold (and then license) a copyright? http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.pdf This has to have come up before as some of our Editors use fictitious names. Doug youvan (talk) 22:12, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to think that copyright law requires authors to use their real names in conjunction with their works.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:30, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Quite certainly in the U.S. copyright does not require use of your real name. There might be countries where that is different. - Jmabel ! talk 07:16, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Berne Convention (which means almost any country) actually protects anonymous and pseudonymous works [7]. --M5 (talk) 07:50, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

If you look at my bio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Youvan you will see that I have been involved with the USPTO enough to suffer pain! I'd like to see the USC (and other countries) on pseudonymns. Somebody has to file a real name somewhere. I think our way "out" of this problem is estoppel, based on some time period after deposition of a figure here without claiming a valid copyright. Let's hope it isn't 70 years. I mean to be proactive. I love Commons. So, I will take this on as a job unless someone else is better qualified - like a patent attorney.Doug youvan (talk) 15:58, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

M5: Great reference! But USPTO is not WIPO, unless you see somewhere that USPTO adopted Berne. Also, don't you think some actual paperwork is needed? On a USPTO patent, it is name and city. If my name was "Jones" rather than "Youvan", there could still be name confusion that would have to be resolved by the paperwork filed. If you copyright as "M5" and wanted to inforce your copyrights, how would you prove your identity? I don't think you could file a suit, God forbid, such as "M5 versus Youvan" if I stole your work. I think you would have to make your identity known to the court. However, in the case of actions in the USA involving minors, as an analogy, the person is identified by DOB in public documents. Maybe that's how it is done with pseudonymns. In my experience, you actually have to go through one of these suits before you learn all the ropes. We need someone in this discussion that has experience in copyright infringement - they learn the applicable law, fast.Doug youvan (talk) 17:08, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know much about American law. Most probably pseudonymous author really would have to disclose his identity in court, but I don't see this is as much an issue since potential infringer doesn't know if the author is willing to go to court (and some author will). --M5 (talk) 18:29, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

The USPTO is about patents and trademarks -- not copyright (the U.S. Copyright Office, which handles copyright, is part of the Library of Congress). The U.S. joined the Berne Convention in 1989. The copyright law allows for protection for anonymous and pseudonymous works, just with a different term (95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first). Such person can make themselves known at any time during the period of copyright, and the term will revert to what it would be as a known author (70 years after death) -- that would not change anything about infringement though; an infringer is just as guilty whether or not the work was anonymous. For U.S. residents and citizens, filing a registration (proving copyright ownership) is a necessary prerequisite to a lawsuit. However, I think it's entirely possible that a publisher (or anyone else who has been given an interest in the copyright) could make that registration and file the lawsuit. Authors can transfer ownership of the copyright, and at that point, only the copyright owner really has standing to file the lawsuit, and they could be the ones to make the registration -- the name of the author is then only relevant to determine the term of copyright. This is an old reference to the issues; it seems to say that 1) a person can file a registration using a pseudonym, and 2) a publisher can file suit on behalf of an anonymous author. This also says that an author can file a registration using a pseudonym, and keep their actual identity private. This also says that an author can authorize an agent to act on their behalf (file a registration, presumably file a lawsuit, etc.). I don't think copyright has the same concept of failing to protect rights that trademark does -- the rights exist all the way through the term. It was once somewhat limited by the need to file renewals, but no longer (adhering to Berne eliminated that). There have been some efforts to define some sort of regime to allow the use of en:orphan works, but nothing has been resolved on that front. In general though, I don't think there is any real issue with only using pseudonyms. Carl Lindberg (talk) 23:09, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Carl. Your analysis, above, really should be saved somewhere visible and not just disappear into an archive! Doug youvan (talk) 14:15, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

December 19

DMCA Takedown

Pursuant to our obligations under the DMCA, I have removed a file from Wikimedia Commons, as described here. As usual, counter-notice is an option, and the takedown will be filed with Chilling Effects. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 20:54, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

The image was the only upload of the user. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:00, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

TinEye imagemap

I am quite confused, according to this site "To date we have added partner image collections from iStockphoto, Getty Images, Masterfile, Photoshelter, Wikipedia, F1 Online". Unfortunately it is typical that images from commons are not appearing in searches. Is it a problem with TinEye algorithm? Maybe somebody created imagemap of enwiki without preparing imagemap of commons (then it should be quite easy to fix it)? Bulwersator (talk) 10:04, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:Files moved from en.wikipedia to Commons requiring review

Is it OK to remove BotMoveToCommons template without recategorization? After checking copyright status and maybe fixing Information template. Like in this edit? Bulwersator (talk) 11:14, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

That edit was not OK. Source should be updated to say where the file came from before it was uploaded to Wikipedia. Author should say who made the image, not who uploaded the file to Wikipedia.
I don't think there were any obvious problems with categories in this case. In general it is good to also make sure categorisation looks reasonable when checking bot moves. But maybe not as important as fixing author and source information. /Ö 18:41, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Open Call for 2012 Wikimedia Fellowship Applicants

I apologize that you are receiving this message in English. Please help translate it.

• Do you want to help attract new contributors to Wikimedia projects?
• Do you want to improve retention of our existing editors?
• Do you want to strengthen our community by diversifying its base and increasing the overall number of excellent participants around the world?

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking Community Fellows and project ideas for the Community Fellowship Program. A Fellowship is a temporary position at the Wikimedia Foundation in order to work on a specific project or set of projects. Submissions for 2012 are encouraged to focus on the theme of improving editor retention and increasing participation in Wikimedia projects. If interested, please submit a project idea or apply to be a fellow by January 15, 2012. Please visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships for more information.

Thanks!

--Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships, Wikimedia Foundation 12:51, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Distributed via Global message delivery. (Wrong page? Fix here.)

Delete upload

Hello, How can I delete an upload? Please help me. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogeredwin (talk • contribs)

Help:Nominate for deletion or just add {{speedydelete|reason e.g. uploaded unintentionally}}. -- RE rillke questions? 14:14, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

YesWeScan

There is a petition to the US White House, proposing to investigate a strategy for large scale scanning of materials from US federal institutions, like: National Archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Government Printing Office, National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, National Technical Information Service, etc. I think this is vary much inline with our goals, and we should support it. See yeswescan.org. --Jarekt (talk) 18:48, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:Freedom of panorama

Hi ! I just created this category, I think it's useful (I hadn't created it otherwise).

But I have no idea where to categorize this category. Help for that would be useful. Thanks in advance. --Aʁsenjyʁdəgaljɔm¹¹⁶⁷¹ 19:11, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

How does this (or how should this) relate to Category:FOP? —LX (talk, contribs) 21:10, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Abuse of right to vanish?

I noticed that TCO had a redlink for his user talk. It was deleted under "right to vanish". Obviously, if he is editing he did not vanish. Instead, he has edited a lot. He asked to vanish here. He obviously came back or didn't vanish. What do we do in such situations? I would notify him, but having a red linked page like that makes it a strange situation. Ottava Rima (talk) 22:56, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Commons doesn't have a "right to vanish", so it's hard to say whether it was really abused. However, English Wikipedia's RTV clearly is intended only for users who (a) leave and (b) don't return. If they return, the vanishing is supposed to be undone. In addition, in this case the user talk page was deleted, and on English Wikipedia, that would not usually happen in RTV cases. What's really quite odd is that in the space of six weeks RTV seems to have been cited 3 times, leading 3 different admins to delete the user talk page. On the up side, there's nothing of particular interest in the deleted revisions; there's nothing being hidden that the community ought to know. Rd232 (talk) 23:32, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, my concern is mostly users claiming they are leaving and not leaving, and having a page deleted as if they were gone while clearly still being here. You are either here or not. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:48, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

People do change their minds... I've left him a message. Let's see what he says. Rd232 (talk) 08:38, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Sure, bring the page back. I'm not hiding anything and never was.

I left out of general disgust with the years-long history of intrigue and lies at Wiki. Them, not me. And really that disgust has not abated. I wonder what the fuck I'm doing here. I like writing the articles. And I like the chat interaction with users. But the whole place...all the way up to Jimbo/Garrard obfuscating to reporters and laughing about it...is really bizarrely up its own ass. With an institionalization of lying and control and physical cowardice. There is something bad there.

The articles are fucking cool though.

Keep this Ottava guy away from me. Don't like people sniffing my jockstrap.TCO (talk) 16:49, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Resolved

Rd232 (talk) 22:31, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Trying to help but often foiled

I sometimes search for files that need some clean-up. Most often bitmaps that would be better as vector images. When i have uploaded images (using derivativeFX) that I have redrawn or traced, they are sometimes removed because of licensing issues. I have been unable to penetrate the thicket of licences that could or should apply. I am loath to call the images "my own" because I have not done the original artwork/research. Is there a convenient licence to set (and where in the world should it be set) to cover vectorization/redrawings of images already in WikiCommons?

GregorDS (talk) 16:03, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Can you please give examples of your vectorized images that were "removed because of licensing issues", so we may get a hint of what were the issues in question? Without examples, one possible guess is that perhaps the licensing issues had to do with the original images. -- Asclepias (talk) 16:46, 21 December 2011 (UTC) P.S.: Looking at your upload log, it seems that none of your images were "removed". Are you talking about images uploaded with another username or to another Wikimedia website? -- Asclepias (talk) 23:04, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

This is not just an issue of license, it's an issue of attribution. You can use any license that is no more liberal than the original license (usually you will want to use the original license but, for example, you might want a more restrictive license on your own enhancement to PD work). You need to provide information about the source of the original image as well as your own work. For starters, when the original is already on the Commons, {{Derived from}} makes it clear what image you've used. And you would end up with an "author" line something like "Original PNG by en:user:somebody, vectorization by GregorDS". Just {{Own}} won't cut it. (Someone else may be able to add to this or make it clearer, I'm in a hurry right now.) - Jmabel ! talk 16:51, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

But derivativeFX should handle all of that... Jarry1250 (talk) 22:29, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Can I request clarification of the documentation for {{License Review}}?

I thought the tag was for requesting a third party review. I thought I filled it out correctly. But, when instantiated, it said the image had already been reviewed -- by me.

So I manually added the image to Category:License review needed.

This is an instance of an image taken by someone who died in 1925, where the organization who scanned the original photo is asserting they can control what happens to the scanned image. I think our policy is that these kinds of assertion have no legal standing. A complicating factor is that the image is from Australia, which follows the "sweat of the brow" theory for copyright, while the USA requires a spark of originality. Geo Swan (talk) 18:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I think there are two problems. 1) To request a license review, one should just insert the template on the page, without any parameter. The parameters are only to be filled by the reviewer when he reviews. 2) The other thing is about the notion of "license review". License review is requested when one wants to have a reviewer confirm if the license tag placed on the Commons page matches the licensing information available at the source. Nothing more. A request for license review is not for contesting the information available at the source or for requesting an opinion about if the source should have used a different license that the one it used. For those discussions and interpretations, one can start a discussion at the Village pump/Copyright. -- Asclepias (talk) 19:35, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

SVG not showing up?

On my firefox/IE svg images stopped showing up. Examples: File:Phenanthrene Clar rule.svg, File:Anthracene Clar rule.svg, File:Chrysene Clar rule.svg, File:Clar rule.svg which are used here. Materialscientist (talk) 00:50, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

→ Please discuss at Commons:Help desk#SVG not showing up? -- RE rillke questions? 01:29, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Dispute over map

(Note re context: This was copied verbatim by en.Wikipedia user Aridd from en.Wikipedia Mediation Cabal after being told that it ought to be raised at Commons for dispute resolution instead of being raised at en.Wikipedia.)—TransporterMan (talk) 02:52, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Hello. I'm here about the file Continental models.gif. There's been something of an edit dispute, and I would appreciate any help in mediating or reaching a broad consensus agreement. I first took this to the Mediation Cabal on the English Wikipedia, but was redirected here due to the file being on Commons. I'm pasting below what was said on the mediation page, by myself and by others. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks. Aridd (talk) 22:37, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

The editor you're having a "dispute" with is just trolling. New Zealand Papua New Guinea etc. are not parts of Australia. --Claritas (talk) 22:45, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, they clearly aren't. But since he keeps reverting back to his version and doesn't want to discuss it, it needs to be resolved. Aridd 09:01, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd just ask an admin to protect the file if he starts reverting again, or block him for edit-warring. --Claritas (talk) 11:32, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that Corticopious actually has a point. Most English usage names the continents as Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica and Australia. Those are the names that are used in the Continent article based on the sources used in that article. Any picture used to illustrate that article should match that usage. My question is why are the Pacific islands colored at all? They AREN'T part of any continent, so why color them as if they are? --Khajidha (talk) 15:11, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

All land masses are grouped into continents, including islands. "Australia" refers only to that specific island. No academic geography text will refer to the content which it is in as "Australia" rather than "Australasia" or "Oceania". --Claritas (talk) 19:04, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Islands on the same continental shelf are usually included as part of the mainland continent, but I've always seen oceanic islands left out of the definition of a continent. They may be grouped into sections for study with a nearby continent, but they aren't considered part of that continent in a physical sense.--Khajidha (talk) 23:00, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

I may be getting into something over my head here, but... the image appears to be dealing with Australia the continent (i.e. en:Australia (continent)), not the nation. That article seems to say that New Guinea and nearby islands are considered as being on that continent, but not New Zealand (which is instead part of en:Zealandia (continent)). While Oceania is I'm sure sometimes used as a the name for the continent, it more immediately brings to mind the more geopolitical use of the term, i.e. the one which includes Papua New Guinea but not the Indonesian part of the island, which I'm not sure makes much sense in terms of a continental aspect (and doesn't match the map coloring anyways). But, maybe that is the intended idea for the map (but perhaps New Guinea should be recolored in that case). The Continent article seems to use "Australia" most of the time. Perhaps the term "Australia/Oceania" could be used, as suggested by one of the sources -- I'm not sure I'd consider most island nations part of a continent exactly (as colored on the image discussed here), and if the author wants them colored, perhaps a wider term would be more appropriate. The images on the Commons gallery Continents do not seem to include the Pacific island nations for the most part. But as with anything in this area (indeed as the image itself tries to illustrate), and as mentioned by User:Multichill below, there are probably many ways you could look at it -- in which case, it's probably best to have multiple versions on Commons which illustrate each point of view, with local projects then getting to choose which is the more appropriate for them. Commons typically doesn't like to get into any argument over which is "best", as that is more a matter of perspective and can change depending on which project and article it is used on. If the issue is that contentious, then upload a version using another filename containing the alternate terms/colorings, then the discussion can move to the local project about which one is more appropriate on a given article. Carl Lindberg (talk) 19:16, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

You're quite right. The main problem is that the map is wrong to associate all that area in pink with the name "Australia". What we need, I think, is one of two things. Either a map which uses the name "Oceania" associated to that area (probably minus the Indonesian part of New Guinea) and clearly indicates that it's referring to a geopolitical rather than geological concept, or we need a map in which all islands which are not part of a geological continent (not just in the Pacific, if there are any elsewhere) are in grey rather than in any "continental" colour. Aridd (talk) 17:13, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

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What is the dispute?

Simply put, the disagreement is over whether the map should use the name "Australia" or "Oceania" (or arguably something else) to refer to the "continent"/region shaded in pink. Over previous years, users AlexCovarrubias and Corticopious reverted each other several times, and this year Corticopious and I have done the same.

My view, as I've stated when attempting to discuss the issue on the talk page, is that it's objectively incorrect to have a map that says or suggests that Polynesian and Micronesian countries are "part of Australia". Whatever the definition of Australia as a continent, there is none which includes countries such as Tonga or Samoa as being "part of Australia". I have said that the only valid word to refer to all the countries shaded pink on the map is "Oceania". The articles on the continent of Australia, on Australasia and on Oceania back this up.

Corticopious contends that "Australia" is a "common term in English" to refer not only to Australia (the country) but also to New Zealand, PNG, Fiji, Samoa, etc... I believe rather firmly that it is obviously not. I'll ask Corticopious to come to this page and explain his view in more detail.

What steps have you already taken to try and resolve the dispute? I explained my reasons when reverting. Corticopious's reverts always provided the same explanation ("common term in English"), seemingly not taking into account my point to the contrary. His most recent revert concluded with the comment "duh".

The recent edit explanations to the file are as follows:

• 1 March: AlexCovarrubias: "Most extended use "Oceania" not Australia"
• 22 March: Corticopious: "common use in English"
• 15 October: Aridd: "Nobody would say New Zealand, PNG and the Pacific Islands are part of "Australia". The only feasible term is "Oceania"."
• 30 October: Corticopious: "common term in English"
• 6 December: Aridd: "It's quite simply wrong to say that New Zealand or Fiji are "part of Australia". Nobody would say that. Please look up the definitions of "Oceania" and "Australia"."
• 12 December: Corticopious: "common term in English, and matches article lead - duh"

By which he presumably means that it "matches the lead" in the article "Continent". Which misses my point: I don't dispute that there is a continent called Australia; I'm pointing out that the continent Australia does not match the area presented as being "Australia" on the map. Thus the map is incorrect and misleading.

I've raised the issue on the talk page, but Corticopious has neither participated in the discussion nor responded to my points in any form so far. Which is why I'm bringing the matter here, to avoid a pointless continued edit war.

What issues needs to be addressed to help resolve the dispute? As I see it, either the map needs to be fundamentally rethought (with the islands adjacent to each continent shaded grey?), or there needs to be a mediated agreement as to what name is appropriate for the area shaded pink on the map.

Discussion

I have commented a few times in the discussion and have decided to reiterate and expand my points here: 1) Corticopious is right that the usual name of the continent in English is "Australia", 2) Aridd is right that the Pacific islands are not part of any continent, 3) I have tried to reconcile the dispute by adding the following comment to the file description: "Oceanic islands are colored to match the most commonly associated continental mainland. Note that when such islands are included with Australia, the terms "Australasia" or "Oceania" are used for the resulting region." I have to agree that the map needs to be redone. --Khajidha (talk) 02:39, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

IMPORTANT NOTE:

User Corticopious is a sockpuppet of an already blocked and banned user by the name Corticopia. He was blocked and banned for multiple cases of sockpuppetry and abuse of Wikipedia's policies. Please see [[8]] to see his multiple banned accounts, both registered and anonymous IP. He is known for his incivility, impossing of POV and most importantly for geography-related problems, Canada-related topics, Sci-Fi stuff (such as Star Trek and Issac Assimov stuff). That account should be immediatly banned accordingly with Wikipedia's policies. AlexCovarrubias ^{( Talk? )} 03:27, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

The real problem here is that this is really a Commons dispute, not an English Wikipedia dispute, so en.Wikipedia dispute resolution processes do not apply and, should administrator intervention be needed, a Commons administrator must provide it. It should probably be taken to the Commons Village Pump for advice on finding the proper forum there to deal with this. [...] — TransporterMan (TALK) 05:06, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
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The user is welcome to create File:Continental models Australia.gif. We just fork images and leave it up to the projects to decide which one they want to use. Multichill (talk) 22:14, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Done. As of when I write this, File:Continental models.gif uses the "Oceania" labels, while File:Continental models-Australia.gif uses the "Australia" labels. --Carnildo (talk) 01:34, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks... But the problem is that the latter map is still wrong. It labels various Pacific islands as part of Australia (the continent), whereas they aren't by any definition. Which means it's providing incorrect "information". On the second map, those islands would need to be in grey (for example). Aridd (talk) 17:13, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Not my problem. If you don't like it, you can try to establish consensus not to use it. --Carnildo (talk) 21:23, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Well thank you for being so courteous - not! I wasn't saying it was your "problem". Nor was I saying I "don't like it". I was pointing out that the map is objectively wrong. I wasn't even addressing you specifically - I was raising the matter here precisely in the hopes that a consensus can be reached to correct it! As I said, I'm grateful to you for forking the maps as a starting point, but don't be so rude, and don't assume the world revolves around you. Kindly learn some basic civility. Aridd (talk) 13:08, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah, forget it. Aridd (talk) 19:14, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Here then is my request. That anyone who has the technical know-how edit this map to make it geographically correct, by switching the Pacific islands (including New Zealand) from pink to grey, leaving only Australia (the whole of the country, including Tasmania) plus the whole of New Guinea (including the Indonesian part, but not the rest of Papua New Guinea) in pink. If Wikipedia wants to be taken seriously as an encyclopedia, it would be helpful if it didn't provide blatant errors. Aridd (talk) 13:21, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

December 18

Double space in filename

Occasionally I try to upload a file that has two consecutive spaces in its name. Special:Upload then gives me a page indicating the revised name with only single spaces, and presents me with three options, one of which offers to ignore the warning and save anyway. However, if I choose that, it brings me back to the original upload page. Is there a way to actually get it to ignore the warning and save anyway? - Jmabel ! talk 05:36, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

How would you link to such an image? The MediaWiki software collapses consecutive whitespaces to a single blank (or more precisely: underscore) in wikilinks anyway. Lupo 07:35, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Why is it necessary to have two consecutive spaces in these filenames? Can you give some examples? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 09:00, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

No, I don't intend the double space, it's there by mistake. This happens because I'm naming lots of similar files by a process that involves cutting and pasting filenames and I don't necessarily always notice a double space, especially when my own Windows Explorer folder renders it as a carriage return (exactly as it would with a single space). The Commons software offers the corrected name, offers to correct the error, but then does not proceed to upload and correct the error. If you can't imagine what the sequence looks like & want to understand, try making this particular mistake on purpose and check out the sequence of what occurs. - Jmabel ! talk 16:36, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Tick the "ignore" box right on the beginning before the first upload attempt. --Saibo (Δ) 15:36, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

If I knew in advance that I'd made a mistake, I wouldn't make the mistake in the first place, would I? - Jmabel ! talk 16:36, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Two thoughts: (1) Perhaps this is an issue that is better discussed at the Upload Wizard discussion page, wherever that is. (2) You could just locate and delete the accidental double space ... ;-) — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 16:44, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

@1: It is not about UW as you can see in Jmabel's second line. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 18:19, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

If you notice that you did a mistake use the back button in your browser, check ignore and try again. I mean.. it is rather seldom that something needs to be ignored - that awkward usability ensures that the warning isn't skipped to easy. ;) Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 18:19, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

So you think it is perfectly OK that we have a button that says something like "Ignore this warning and upload to revised file name" but which does nothing of the sort? - Jmabel ! talk 04:08, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Just to chime in, I've found that the "ignore" button doesn't always ignore and have found that frustrating as well. Killiondude (talk) 06:07, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

tool ?

is there a tool that shows which of my uploded pictures are used most (and where in wiki(p/m)edia)? -- 92.226.142.50 22:05, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

tools:~magnus/glamorous.php --Leyo 22:42, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

but how can i find out exactly which one of my pictures is the most used one? :-) 78.51.135.62 14:47, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

You can't afaik. But that's good, I think since it would ease targeted vandalism. BTW, why do you need such a tool? -- RE rillke questions? 15:03, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

December 22

etherpad + bugzilla + weblog Downtime again tonight

The maintenace for db9 was successfully completed but some followup maintenace is needed. As a result, you might have trouble with Wikimedia's Etherpad or Bugzilla or CiviCRM sites/services tonight. If interruption continues after 1820 PST please tell us in #wikimedia-tech (webchat link). — ☠MarkAHershberger☢(talk)☣ 15:30, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Could someone translate this to UTC please? PST is not really useful here. --Saibo (Δ) 18:03, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

That's Fri 23 Dec 2011 02:20 UTC. Prof. Professorson (talk) 01:34, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

It looks like the bugshyster included a link in his original posting so you could figure out the time in any time zone. A simple click would have answered your question. Unless you were being passive-aggressive. Killiondude (talk) 06:10, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Wrong licence

Hi. I found this file wich clearly says {{PD-AR-Anonymous}}, but the model was born in 1984, so is not possible picture has 50+ years of publication. What is procedure in this case? Cheers. --Andrea (talk) 22:32, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

• I'd say nominate for deletion, especially when considered in conjunction with the user's only other contribution. I've started that process. - Jmabel ! talk 01:56, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

December 23

Loriot Signature background

Hi all, You may recall that we recently removed an image of the signature of an artist, popular in Germany. The WMF did this as a result of a court order. Our general counsel, Geoff, has conducted a review and is looking for community input here. I'm not sure what the best format is to do that sort of thing on Commons, so I'm trusting that someone will come along and make it correct. Please do comment! Philippe (WMF) (talk) 02:19, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

• Have you estimated already - how many {{PD-German stamps}} (not just Germany, not just stamps) are a liability? NVO (talk) 02:37, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

@NVO, this thread is about the signature, not the stamps. --Túrelio (talk) 11:34, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

• Thank you. I will move it to the commons: - namespace and protect the introduction. -- RE rillke questions? 11:32, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

What happened with this file?

File:Krzysztof Radziwiłł (młodszy) (1585-1640), dark version.jpg? Purging changed nothing Bulwersator (talk) 11:53, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Could you please describe what you see? Thanks. -- RE rillke questions? 11:56, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Nothing - only text, without image. Thumbnail in file history is visible Bulwersator (talk) 12:08, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Do you see this one? -- RE rillke questions? 14:23, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes (ctrl+R refresh changed nothing). But as I see this problem is limited to my computer so it is not important (I though that commons helper failed to move file with a ł sign) Bulwersator (talk) 14:28, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Maybe an ad-blocker. -- RE rillke questions? 14:31, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. See COM:FAQ#Why can't I see some images?. Lupo 17:13, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Concerns about an administrator

I would like to raise a concern about an administrator's knowledge of copyrights and WMF policy. User:Jameslwoodward deleted File:W&J College tobacco silk.jpg, a faithful representation of a 2D items, because "Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. was about old master paintings and said nothing about textiles. (see Commons:Deletion requests/File:W&J College tobacco silk.png) Putting aside how incorrect that statement is, it clearly flies in the face of WMF policy that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain."

Two days after the image was unanimously undeleted (see Commons:Undeletion requests/Archive/2011-12 for the undeletion discussion), this administrator again tries to delete the image because "while Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. is WMF policy, it is not settled law in the United States." It would appear that this user was attempting to delete an image that he knew was well within WMF's scope. The DR was withdrawn after a number of keep !votes with the comment of "I was not aware that Commons policy goes significantly farther than Bridgeman," which is a lie because the DR opening clearly demonstrates knowledge that WMF policy allows this image. I have a concern both with this administrator's knowing disregard of WMF policy and ignorance of copyright rules.--GrapedApe (talk) 15:34, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

@GrapedApe, did you contact Jameslwoodward and communicate with him directly about your concerns before publicly and generally questioning his knowledge? --Túrelio (talk) 17:39, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

There was enough back and forth during the DR that I was reasonably sure that the admin was wholly mistaken/unaware/incorrectly stating this signifiant portion of settled commons policy.--GrapedApe (talk) 14:51, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

I have already apologized for wasting editors time on this matter. It was, as I said when I withdrew it, a mistake. Addressing several points raised above:

• " 'Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. was about old master paintings and said nothing about textiles.' ... Putting aside how incorrect that statement is"

In fact, the Bridgeman decision is exactly as I described it -- it covers only old master paintings that were in the Bridgeman Art Library, so the statement is correct.

• "while Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. is WMF policy" was what I thought was WMF policy -- the works covered by Bridgeman, nothing else. Bridgeman does not cover all 2D works, only old masters.

• " 'I was not aware that Commons policy goes significantly farther than Bridgeman,' which is a lie because the DR opening clearly demonstrates knowledge that WMF policy allows this image."

Accusing a colleague of a lie is a serious step. I suggest that those who believe I lied -- that is, that I said something that I knew was untrue at the time I said it, review the record. I did not, as I said above, know that Commons policy went beyond Bridgeman. That may seem naive, but consider how much we all must keep in mind here on Commons. Before this DR, I thought that WMF policy followed Bridgeman -- I did not realize that the policy includes far more material than Bridgeman.

In considering this accusation, please ask yourselves why I would be so dumb as to raise a new DR if I knew that the subject was covered by established Commons policy. Do you think I am that dumb? In fact, I thought that this textile fell outside of WMF policy because it clearly falls outside of Bridgeman. I have learned that the policy is much broader. That may or may not be a good thing, but as I also said in my closing comment, a single image is not the place to debate it.

If GrapedApe truly believes that I lied, then he or she should go straight to a Request for DeAdminship and a permanent banning from Commons -- if I'm a liar, then I have no place on Commons. If he or she does not take that step, then obviously he or she does not really believe I am a liar and should apologize.      Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 16:02, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Then, answer me this: why would you say in the DR nom that while Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. is WMF policy" and then say in the withdrawal that "I was not aware that Commons policy goes significantly farther than Bridgeman." Which statement is false, the first or the second? Did you know the official WMF policy or didn't you know?--GrapedApe (talk) 14:55, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Neither statement is false.

• Before the DR I thought, as I said, that Bridgeman was WMF policy -- no more and no less -- that old master paintings were PD-art. I thought that since the subject image was not an old master, it was not covered by WMF policy.
• As the DR made very clear to me, WMF policy goes well beyond Bridgeman in saying that all 2D works -- not just old master paintings, but drawings, etchings, wood block prints, some textiles, and all other 2D works -- are PD-art.

And yes, I have already admitted that until this DR, I misunderstood {{PD-art}}. I certainly understand it now.      Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 15:14, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd disagree with GrapedApes personal opinion "well within WMF's scope". It IS worth discussing whether this is a 2D work. The object is arguably an 3D object, flat but still 3D. IMO You have to cut the edge of the object to make this 2D. --Martin H. (talk) 16:04, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

• Can I ask if your concern isn't an instance of trying to be "more Catholic than the Pope". Isn't the reason we treat 2D images differently than 3D images because the photographer may have added their creative spark, entitling them to an IP right claim, through creative lighting, or photographing from a dramatic angle. This image used unexceptional lighting and an 90 degree photographic angle, so there is no zero credible claim the photographer added anything, even if we were to regard this flat textile as a 3d object. Geo Swan (talk) 21:18, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

• Bridgeman may specifically concern 2-D works by old masters, but there is widespread consensus among U.S. legal scholars that U.S. copyright protection only extends to works meeting a significant threshold of originality. The Bridgeman decision merely strengthened this existing consensus. U.S. Copyright law is the ultimate authority on this matter, regardless of Bridgeman, and the PD-Art policy is in full agreement with U.S. Copyright law, in my opinion. For images of pseudo-3D works, like textiles and coins there is disagreement about whether or not they can attract copyright protection.[9][10] Personally, I think such images should be decided on a case-by-case basis, as the amount of creativity involved can vary significantly. Kaldari (talk) 22:31, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

• If you look at the image, it is obvious that no copyright would be present in the scanning/photographing of the silk's edges, which would require some kind of originality or artistic expression. There is none there.--GrapedApe (talk) 14:51, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

• Would another admin please review Woodward's deletions to ensure that no other images were mistakenly deleted, in contravention of WMF policy? I think that would be the best way to clear this all up.--GrapedApe (talk) 14:59, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps you should look at the size of the task before you make such suggestions -- that's upwards of 34,000 items that you are asking our colleagues to examine. I am sure that I have made some mistakes in that number -- but I get reversed at UndR less that one in a thousand and recently it has been more likely that one of my keeps gets a second DR that has been closed as delete, but again, a very small percentage.      Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 16:09, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

I cant find the delete listing

I have nominated File:Línea 3 Metro Madrid (26).jpg for deletion, but I cant find the item in the 23/12/2011 deletion discussion list. What have I forgotten?Smiley.toerist (talk) 20:17, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. The header was missing from your request. — Huntster (t @ c) 21:25, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

VICbot

Commons:VIC currently has a large backlog of closed nominations, which the bot isn't sorting as normal. The tasks would require a long time to deal with manually. Any ideas ? I've tried to contact the operator with no success. --Claritas (talk) 20:51, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Interwikis from wikipedia to commons

There is a proposal at EN Wikipedia to allow interwikis (aka interlanguage links) from wikipedia to Commons. Please comment there. --Jarekt (talk) 21:24, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

FLAC uploads

Why aren't FLAC files permitted for upload? I understand that they can be large files, but surely the assessment of file size should be based on actual file size, not just potential. It is a free, open format and would be good for small, high quality recordings.

Lukys (talk) 21:40, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

FLAC uploading isn't allowed because the community hasn't asked for it. Same for WAV (which will be essentially patent-free by the end of the year, i.e. next week). There are bugs for adding playback support for both formats to TimedMediaHandler (so that MediaWiki can handle playback rather than relying completely on the browser): Bugzilla: 32103, Bugzilla: 32135. I would suggest doing an official proposal either here or on meta for allowing uploading of both FLAC and WAV. Even if TimedMediaHandler doesn't support them yet, there's no reason we can't start accepting the files. Kaldari (talk) 22:01, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

FLAC is allowed, but it must be used within ogg container. The native flac container format is not supported. See Commons:File types#Sound. MKFI (talk) 11:00, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

December 24

superseeded loop

File:Flag of Komi.svg
File:KomiFlag.svg
File:Flag of Komi 1991.svg

All of these files have the superseeded tag and link to one another. Which one of them is really superseeded?Gauravjuvekar (talk) 15:22, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

December 25

Redundant categories?

Hi,

I found Category:Cupolas in Canada and Category:Domes in Canada. IMO there is no need for two categories with different names. Any other opinions? --Wladyslaw (talk) 08:42, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

A cupola is not a dome. A cupola is often perched on a dome, and often crowned with another (smaller) dome - so the same photo qualifies for category:cupolas and category:domes (curiously, in yours and mine languages kuppel/kupol is precisely dome). NVO (talk) 12:18, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't see an architectural difference between a Cupola and a Dome, it is always the hollow upper half of a sphere. --Wladyslaw (talk) 08:41, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

If you look at [[File:Montefiascone_cupola.JPG]], the cupola is the small tower sitting on top of the large dome and under the smaller dome. --Khajidha (talk) 03:33, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Search oddity

Resolved

I know our search has never been perfect, but is it especially messed up at present? I find it very odd that http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=Alder+Dam&fulltext=Search wouldn't find File:Alder Dam.JPG. - Jmabel ! talk 06:43, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Interesting. That file is the first result for the search link you posted. Is it still not showing up on the search results for you? Killiondude (talk) 07:24, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah, now it's showing up for me. Before I got no matches. Must have been a transitory problem. So, yes, it was especially messed up at the time. - Jmabel ! talk 18:44, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Yet another odd rotation issue

File:St Marys, Halifax.JPG. What happened here? The thumbnail displays a sideways rotation (the church tower points to the left, not to the top) for this image, which when rotated that way is longer right to left than top to bottom. Like every other misrotated image that I can remember seeing, the full-size view of the image has similar proportions with left-right being longer than top-bottom, but unlike all others that I can remember, the picture is properly rotated, with the church tower pointing to the top. As a result, this very tall church building and the even-taller office building behind it are both absurdly short and stumpy. I've read Commons:Rotation, but I didn't see anything that would explain this unusual type of distortion. Nyttend (talk) 16:32, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

• Looks fine to me - I've seen this morphing glitch on other files, but not here. NVO (talk) 16:39, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Odd: the bot rotated the image to the proper orientation almost immediately after upload, but I got a cached version of the page that didn't show the proper rotation. Of the three thumbnails currently on the page, only the bottom and middle were visible when I went there, well after the top thumbnail was uploaded. Nyttend (talk) 16:52, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Template:Categorise and bots

Is it possible to receive automatic messages from bot listing my uploads inside categories with Categorise template (of course listing should include offending categories)? is providing similar messages but only about completely uncategorised images Bulwersator (talk) 19:00, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

December 26

El Cenit

Hi, i posted a article "el cenit" in the wikipedia english, about our university magazine, published and aprreciated by few reputable personalities of the unit. But my article has been deleted. And now i cant find any of its traces. I had also uploaded pictures for it which have also been deleted. I need some guidance here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Big101big (talk • contribs) 2.48 26 December 2011 (UTC)

On the article: this is Commons, not Wikipedia. But the answer is to be found at en:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/El Cenit (and any followups to that not here, please). On the image: File:El Cenit.jpg was deleted from Commons for lack of evidence that the cover is your own work. Rd232 (talk) 03:04, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

For the Common Good

There is a new tool (Windows application) to assist moving files to Commons. See en:User:This, that and the other/For the Common Good. Rd232 (talk) 02:55, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Faces without personality rights warning

Google Image search for faces on Commons without text from {{Personality rights}}. Dispenser (talk) 05:29, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Not sure why we should care. There is no policy to put a personality rights warning on every picture of a person, is there? - Jmabel ! talk 18:57, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

The above search is not specific. For some reason, it returns mostly images from the pages of other Wikimedia projects, so some of those files do have the personality rights warning in languages other than English and they're not excluded from the search by the -"personality rights" string. Also, other images are of people dead since a long time. -- Asclepias (talk) 20:27, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

UploadWizard in Walloon

I have spent a lot of time to translate UploadWizard in Walloon; and since some days, the program appears in French when I upload a file (although the other items are in Walloon). Why ?

--Lucyin (talk) 20:10, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I guess because only the UploadWizard was translated into that language, and when translation for "wa" are missing, they are displayed in French. See translatewiki:Special:LanguageStats/wa. Even of the 500 most often used messages in MediaWiki, only 67% is translated in Walloon. Lots of work to be done... I think you are the only translator for the language[11]. Ask some friends to help!? --Siebrand 20:55, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Google position mark replaces Wikimedia position mark

When I've changed position of File:2010 07 19100 6013 Chenggong Township, Highway 11, Hotels, Parks, Taiwan, Plants.JPG the wikimedia postionmark changed to Google positionmark.
I'm quite busy with positioning pics is exact as I can and add perfect headings. Thus I don't like when I see this mark.
What's going on. It looks like google starts to takeover pics from wikimedia or what?
I'm not really angry about this since we are using googlemaps, but it should not be like this. -- Lord Koxinga (talk) 20:14, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Rights management for magazine publishers

I'm sorry, I'm sure these question have been asked before but I can't find the releveant thread despite some searching.

I am an editor at non-profit print magazine, Film Comment. I noticed an image request on the Discussion page for the magazine's Wikipedia entry, so I uploaded a .jpg of a magazine cover (Film Comment magazine cover.jpg); this was quickly flagged for rights violation. I understand there is an email address for resolving particular issues; however, I would like to resolve this issue for the entire catalog of Film Comment covers through a unfied liscencing policy.)

Can copyrighted images liscenced for exclusively non-commercial use be uploaded to Wikipedia, or is this liscencing too restrictive? (I've read the liscencing policy page, but I'm still confused about free liscence versus multi-liscence.) Is there template language we could cut-and-paste into a public post on our own domain that would release these images for non-commercial use? --Paulbrunick

A related question, while I'm here. There are many "citation needed" prompts throughout the article, and I am able to provide the citations to those. Is it innappropriate for me, as a paid employee of the magazine, to offer this information? I want to respect the community guidelines while supplying as much assistance as I can. Thank you for clairfying.

Hi. Images licensed for exclusively non-commercial use cannot be uploaded to Wikipedia, because non-text media on Wikimedia Foundation projects must be available under "licenses that support the general goal of allowing unrestricted re-use and re-distribution" - (see Wikipedia's terms of use).

You are free to add citations to the article to improve, but you probably shouldn't contribute to the actual text of the article because you may be perceived to have a conflict of interest. Thanks. --Claritas (talk) 23:16, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. One follow-up question: is there template language we could post on our website that would make these images available under a free license? Or perhaps there is an entry explaining how to do this? --Paulbrunick 06:29, 26 December 2011 (EST)

The simplest way would be to add this Creative Commons template to your website, and removing any copyright notices. This license would allow commercial reuse, but prevent your works being misused by legally requiring attribution. Alternatively, you can e-mail permission to use particular images (if you do not want all your website content to be freely licensed) to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org, using the "Declaration of Consent" on Commons:OTRS. Commons:Choosing a license provides additional information. Thanks. --Claritas (talk) 23:48, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Couple of notes here... Wikimedia Commons (the media repository) is a separate projects from the the Wikipedias (and various other projects which are run by the Wikimedia Foundation). There are similar rules, but they are not always the same. As mentioned above, Commons only allows "free" media, which is either public domain material, or licensed in a way which allows everyone the irrevocable ability to use, create derivative works, and use commercially. We keep our interpretation of that to strictly the copyright; any trademarks etc. would not need to be licensed. It's also possible to license a lower-resolution version of a file only, while keeping full copyright on the larger image. Some projects (such as English Wikipedia) do allow images to be loaded directly to that project, and used with a fair use rationale -- those do not need to be licensed, but need to document why fair use covers it, and why it is relevant enough for the articles. See en:Wikipedia:Non-free content, en:Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline, possibly en:Wikipedia:Use rationale examples, and perhaps look for other magazine articles which use covers, and see what their image pages do. You posted the question on Commons though, so you may get better answers asking somewhere on Wikipedia, if you don't want to freely license such an image. Editing questions should probably be asked there as well, though provided the references you add count as en:Wikipedia:Reliable sources, anyone should be allowed to add citations. Adding factual info to your article should also be OK, but beyond that see en:Wikipedia:Conflict of interest.

As for the question on how to license something, as above, it would amount to specifying on your source website which license you want to use for the image in question (make sure it is obvious that you are scoping the license to a particular image, not the website or text on the page). You can use a license such as CC-BY or CC-BY-SA (see the http://creativecommons.org website for those; often webpages use their icons to link to the particular image you make). The "BY" means that all uses must be attributed, and the "SA" means that any derivative works are required to use the same CC-BY-SA license. Commons can not accept CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-ND licenses. You should not remove copyright notices contrary to the above -- the copyright is still quite valid, just liberally licensed, and the copyright notice can be the required form of attribution. Just don't say "All rights reserved", since that would longer would be true -- often you will see the term "Some rights reserved" used for CC licensed works. Also, as noted, emailed permission is possible if you don't want to change the source website; follow the instructions at COM:OTRS. Carl Lindberg (talk) 07:06, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

December 27

2-D PD art and German postcards

Does anybody know if German copyright law grants a new copyright if you photograph a PD painting, e.g. for a postcard? The postcard I've uploaded does not have a copyright sign in the description on its back, but maybe I should still upload this image to WP-EN instead of Commons? --Morn (talk) 00:30, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Per Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag it is ok to upload images like this (faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art ) to the Commons regardless of their country of origin. --Rosenzweig τ 00:38, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

The museum might send you an invoice. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 00:58, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

There is no information at all about the postcard? Photographer? Publisher? Source of the file? Just "postcard" in the source/photographer field is not much. Even where it doesn't get a copyright, information that you have can be useful, if only for clarity and full disclosure. And if there's any place where if might get a copyright, it's also useful if someone wants to contact the possible copyright holder. -- Asclepias (talk) 01:26, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

You should upload it to Commons, regardless of German law. However, Commons:Reuse_of_PD-Art_photographs#Germany indicates Germany does not give copyright to such images. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:01, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. I would think that the approach we took regarding the UK would apply to any other country - if the painting is in PD then we are allowing photographs of it that are direct and do not contain anything original/artistic/etc. (i.e. are mere photographs of the original painting). Ottava Rima (talk) 02:24, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Alright, so the consensus seems to be this is OK with German copyright law and can stay on Commons. I'll just add the photographer info then. Thanks everyone! --Morn (talk) 11:21, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

OLG Düsseldorf said that potos of drawings by Beuys were protected as Lichtbilder. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 11:42, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, having to remove Beuys' so-called art isn't a big loss for Wikimedia I think. I would call it an improvement in fact. :-) --Morn (talk) 20:33, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

a mystery

I initiated a discussion at Commons:Categories for discussion/2009/12/Category:Air tanker -- two years ago. Curiously this discussion remains open.

Two years is an awfully long time for a discussion to remain open. I would have liked to see this discussion closed. I think more of the few people who weighed in were convinced by my arguments than were convinced by the individual arguing for the opposite position. I think this is a specific instance of the general phenomenon that an unambiguous term, in this case "water bombers" should be preferred over a local term, like "air tanker", that is misleading to the uninitiated. "Air tanker" sounds like a term for the tanker aircraft the military uses for inflight refueling, when the category is for firefighting aircraft that bomb fires with water. Geo Swan (talk) 17:54, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that is a long time. However I note other than one comment, all of the discussion is from 2009. Perhaps relisting to get some fresh eyes might help. -- Infrogmation (talk) 00:26, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the "Categories for discussion" process is currently set up in a manner which is guaranteed to generate minimum interest and involvement when the discussion is still ongoing, and maximum surprise and startlement when people suddenly discover that categories of images that they care about have been abruptly changed due to a conversation that they had no idea was even taking place until that moment... Two years is actually not an extreme amount of time for a discussion to remain open in the current somewhat broken "Categories for discussion" process. AnonMoos (talk) 03:06, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Commons:WikiProject Dacia

I added a proposal for Commons:WikiProject Dacia to be created as a sister project of WP:DACIA and WP:DACIA , and be aimed to better organize, categorize and improve the quality of media and galleries related to ancient Dacia. There are already a large number of files that need such a project to coordinate their organization. Also, many Dacia-related articles are still in need of images and we hope this project will stimulate more contributions by the user community. --Codrin.B (talk) 17:57, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Just go ahead and create it, the Wikiproject Council seems dead. -mattbuck (Talk) 20:06, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Ok, thanks!--Codrin.B (talk) 10:11, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Personality rights

File:PaleterosGulfton0.JPG features a paletero (frozen treats vendor) cart in a Hispanic neighborhood in Houston. I remember that the man in the background was the person who operated the cart. Is it alright if I refer to him as the paletero himself? WhisperToMe (talk) 01:07, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I can't think of any reason why not. - Jmabel ! talk 03:16, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Image authors are free to include image information based on their own experience or any other source. There is no "no original research" on Commons, but others may alter the description if they have some reason to disbelieve your claim, in which case you'd want to talk it out with them. Dcoetzee (talk) 09:20, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Alright - thank you very much :)

WhisperToMe (talk) 17:52, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Citation needed template, and footnote guidelines?

Original images illustrating unsoucred statistics is a very common problem at Wikipedia. To start with, "citation needed" templates should be placed in the image description in each Wikipedia article where such an illustration appears. But this is mainly a Wikimedia commons problem. The person who originally uploaded the illustration to commons should provide the factual source - rather than the person who embedded the illustration in an article. We need some kind of {{Citation needed}} template to be used at wikimedia commons for requesting the factual source. A policy or guideline should be developed at Wikimedia commons. And a routine should be developed for where and how to place footnotes at Wikimedia commons, how to deal with sources in different language versions of an illustration, for importing citation templates from various language versions of Wikipedia to commons, etc. Are there any good examples of footnote usage at Commons today? Mange01 (talk) 14:12, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

I certainly think people uploading to Commons should be prompted for and supported in providing citations backing up details in any pictures they upload and tags available to mark that a graphic would be much better if such sourcing was available or for marking as citation wanted where the person wasn't sure it was wrong or generally would like to see a source. It wouldn't reduce the need for citation in Wikipedia but overall it would help to reduce problems and make graphics easier to reuse. Dmcq (talk) 16:37, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not in a position to dictate to Commons, just like they aren't in a position to dictate to us. But sources are good in my books, and we're already encouraging our editors to include them when they upload images. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:06, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

(The above discussion is moved from Wikipedia talk:No original research.)

Incomplete descriptions are a big weakness of a lot of files hosted here, making them harder to reuse. We do have several templates for tagging them, like {{References missing}} or {{Source code please}}, however I do not think we have any mechanisms for ensuring that references or source code is added. The only way to enforce proper documentation that I can think of, is to avoid using in Wikipedia articles poorly documented files with better documented alternatives. In extreme cases when lack of sources makes file unusable they can be deleted as Out of Scope. --Jarekt (talk) 16:59, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I think what would be nice is if people were not just asked for a description but that the bits of the description be more structured or that explicit requests be made for references. So for instance when I uploaded File:Origami Trisection of an angle.svg for instance I didn't just filling the description as "This shows how to trisect an angle by folding a piece of paper" but that a prompt came up something like 'Please cite some references which gives relevant details' and I'd try and find a place in a book or a website that described something similar. Dmcq (talk) 17:49, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree, that would be a good idea. I mostly focus on improving descriptions of 11M files we already have here, but we should not forget about the quality of the next 11M files that will be uploaded in the years to come. --Jarekt (talk) 18:34, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Commons:For Wikipedians

Having several years ago seen (and even contributed to) en:n:Wikinews:For Wikipedians, I thought that an equivalent on Commons could be useful. I've made a first draft of Commons:For Wikipedians, and invite comments and contributions (i.e., feel free to improve it). When we feel it's ready, we can mention it in appropriate places (like welcome templates), and later on translate it into other languages (which will also allow for some adaptations for comparing Commons with different language Wikipedias, since it's currently aimed at English Wikipedia). Comments? Rd232 (talk) 23:21, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

1. The guide should explain that on Wikipedia, a gallery is a group of images on a text page that are intended to illustrate that page, and on Commons, a gallery is a group of images with no text or minimal text, chosen as the best and most varied illustrations of their category.

2. A link to cheatsheat of frequently used tags should be provided. These are tags that an ordinary user might want to use, such as underexposed, copyvio, duplicate, personality rights. There should be a statement that users should add these tags to images if they feel they are necessary, and where they should be added (anywhere in the file? at the top of the page?)

3. The whole guide should be written in shorter sentences. It has too many commas.

4. The importance of writing image descriptions in clear language (that translates easily with an automatic translator) should be emphasized. Also, the descriptions should use key words. For example, today I classified an image of Capsicum anuum that did not contain the word "pepper" in the description.

5. The guide should show Commons users who find an image that seems to be perfect for a Wikipedia article a sample of the tag used to put it on the Wikipedia page. double bracket imagename|thumb|size px|right or left| etc.

6. The guide should also list the tag used to put a Commons category on a Wikipedia page.

7. The guide should state that users are allowed to add text to the top of a gallery or category page, and how to do so, but they should be VERY cautious about it.

8. The guide should state that even if you log in to Commons and you are supposed to be logged into all the wikis, you are NOT necessarily logged into Wikipedia (at least, I'm not.)

9. I'm not sure what I'm asking here. Let's just say that I find the redirect process on Commons hard to understand, and I don't know where to get the answer. Users should be able to create redirect pages from commonly used terms to the existing standard category, e.g., "Highways in the UK" to "Motorways in the UK". I created the page "Overhead walkways" with a redirect to "Elevated walkways", because in the U.S. "overhead walkways" is the standard term, and few people would know to look in the other category. The method of doing this correctly should be provided, as well as information on whether this can/should be done for other-language terms that don't quite fit the English term. I think this flexibility given by redirects is a really important issue in Commons's usability, and must be addressed by Commons administrators. Downtowngal (talk) 23:57, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

The dichotomy of "files for commons" and "files for wikipedia" needs a better presentation (and a separate explanation for each wikipedia, e.g. advice for en-wiki will not work for de-wiki ...). It sounds simple, but there are grey areas.

• The concept of free content, as declared by commons and upheld by commons admins, is counterintuitive and alien to most people. Just look at the numbers of unacceptable files uploaded by wikipedia admins. Don't just link to free content, provide examples. Not the whole variety of cases (it's what Commons:Image casebook is for) - just project the message that things are not as simple as they may seem.
• Think of a basic "how to upload" (e.g. how to bypass the default UploadWitch) - again, specific to this or that wiki.
• Disputes/deletions - "My photo was deleted and nobody even warned me!" - advice on how to get warned in advance, etc. Don't just list differences - provide to-do instructions. NVO (talk) 08:34, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I have no objections to the idea in theory, but one danger is that these instructions will become more and more detailed over time as editors add to them and they will start to mirror the existing guidelines and policies. Then there will be the problem of why there are so many similar help pages. Care will have to be exercised to make sure this doesn't happen. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 09:04, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I'm concerned about that. The aim of the page is not to be a how-to guide, but a broad-brush "what's different" guide, with links to other pages for detailed information. Some of the points made above might be mentioned there briefly, and gone into more detail on other pages, with links; others should be explained elsewhere (maybe they are already, maybe not). The most basic point I'd make is that the page is aimed at reasonably experienced users of Wikipedia - users who will be able to find specific help pages. The aim of the page is to (a) give a sense of things which aren't going to be written in general help pages, because it wouldn't make sense for the general user who may be a complete newcomer to Wikimedia; (b) point briefly at differences and where to get more info as needed. I'll come back to this when I can to respond to suggestions in more detail. I think discussing this can be an opportunity to look at other help pages as well and see if they can be improved. Rd232 (talk) 20:02, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Bump to prevent autoarchiving. I will come back to this... Rd232 (talk) 23:45, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

December 21

Hello

Is it wrong to upload pictures when you use adobe photoshop? I mean just using photoshop, makes an image unusable? --190.158.215.220 19:52, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

In general, no, it shouldn't affect the usability of the image. However, if you are thinking of using Photoshop, you should note that we do not accept uploads in Photoshop's default (and proprietary) .psd format. Instead, it is generally best to work on a .psd, then save a JPG or PNG copy as appropriate, and upload that. Jarry1250 (talk) 20:49, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Yay, so I can use inkscape and illustrator :) --190.158.215.220 19:00, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Original research

Is original research permitted on Commons? Some people say, it is possible only in the images. So may I have original research in descriptions, or in collecting images in the categories? Thank you.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 23:15, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

There is no blanket prohibition of original research. For example, you can use your own knowledge in captioning a photo or adding notes to clarify what it shows. However, your descriptions generally should not turn into essays, and if they are off-topic or it seems like you are writing quasi-encyclopedic content from your own idiosyncratic views, that will typically be removed. In short, the permission to do some original research is not blanket permission to put anything here that you like; common sense applies, and this remains a collectively developed wiki, so some degree of consensus applies.

For example, it's certainly OK to indicate without citations what year a building was built, or what job a photographed person holds, or whether a building in a 100-year-old photo is still standing today.

I'm not sure if there is a written policy on just how much original research is allowed in descriptions, but there is a pretty stable consensus on the boundaries, from what I've seen. If you are wandering into this terrain, don't be surprised if an admin or another contributor disagrees with where you are headed.

As for categories: it should be objectively determinable whether a particular picture belongs in a category. So, for example, you can have Category:Landmarks in Seattle based on an official city designation, but not a category for the buildings some Commons user happens to think are "important" vs. those that are not. - Jmabel ! talk 01:23, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Is the request or requirement for objective criteria for categories a recognized policy or guideline?Dankarl (talk) 03:32, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Can't point you to a formal policy/guideline, but I can tell you that at "Categories for discussion", impossibility of determining which pictures would belong in a category is regularly a reason to decide to get rid of a category. - Jmabel ! talk 16:33, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

PereslavlFoto -- One problem is that if Wikipedia articles were to copy the exact same maps, diagrams, and charts used in published books and papers, this would often be a copyright violation; and yet if different but functionally somewhat equivalent maps, diagrams, and charts are created, this will almost always involve, if not original research as such, then some degree of interpretation and "original synthesis". Also, if, say, you took a photo of an animal in the Cleveland Zoo, strict application of a "no original research" policy would forbid you from saying that it was a photo of the Celeveland Zoo unless there was some external published reliable source which said so, etc. AnonMoos (talk) 06:02, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

One trick I do to reassure people that a location is really where I say it is, is to include reference points, like street names, names of surrounding businesses, etc. and/or the name of the place itself (i.e. "Benavidez Elementary School" - File:BenavidezElementarySchoolHouston.JPG). For instance, in the palatero cart and palatero image (File:PaleterosGulfton0.JPG), you may see signs of a cartoon man. That man is the mascot of Unicomer, and the Unicomer outlet in Gulfton is one of two Unicomer USA stores in the United States (the other is in a different Houston neighborhood, and it looks different) - You can see the same cart in the shot of the Unicomer building, at File:UnicomerGulfton.jpg

WhisperToMe (talk) 09:40, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

December 29

Request for reupload

Could someone please reupload File:Intercourse.jpg (NSFW) per the outcome of its deletion request? Thanks. -mattbuck (Talk) 17:55, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

And how to comply with the licenses that both require attribution? -- RE rillke questions? 18:04, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Picture is not shown in Google maps

Position of "File:2010 07 18880 6057 Chenggong Township, Highway 11, Hotels, Parks, Taiwan.JPG" was added at 24 January 2011. Maps jumps to the added position (center of screen), but position is not shown. Moving the map to get rid of some pics does not help.
Adjacent pics are shown.
The same happens with a few more pics in that area.-- Lord Koxinga (talk) 13:47, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I've found a workaround:
Use original position (as provided e.g. from GPS-receiver) of an adjacent (visible) picture and add offset.
But that's a workaround, the original problem is still not solved. -- Lord Koxinga (talk) 12:58, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

New user-gallery

I just noticed that the "gallery" tab in one's "Special:Contributions" page is sending to "Special:ListFiles" (as it did briefly a few months ago) instead of to the much faster, useful and good looking toolserver gizmo (cannot remember its name!). I note that the small type link "uploads" under the title of one's "Special:Contributions" page already link to "Special:ListFiles", after its brief replacing of the toolserver list — so now we have two links to this newish uglish crashish thingy, and none to its slicker ancestor at toolserver. Can it be restored, please? -- Tuválkin ✉ 22:03, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

About two months ago, the toolserver was down for long periods, and we had people complaining that they couldn't view their uploaded files. You can always bookmark the toolserver URL: [12] -- AnonMoos (talk) 12:44, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Bookmarked, yay, thanks! Maybe have it linked in smallprint instead the second, smaller link to "Special:ListFiles"? -- Tuválkin ✉ 02:02, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Problem with File:SANvsNAS.svg

File:SANvsNAS.svg renders fine when viewed directly in Firefox (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/SANvsNAS.svg), but displays as a generic icon on the image description page. Anyone knows what's wrong? —Ruud 18:55, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Note in revision-history. -- RE rillke questions? 19:17, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! —Ruud 19:41, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

help - Li Xiannian

http://fototeca.iiccr.ro/picdetails.php?picid=37860X14X66

Hello, please, at this photo are Ceasescu and Li Xiannian ? --Teplice, Ústecko (talk) 22:20, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Hello, can you try asking your question again? I'm not sure what you are asking. Try asking in your native language, and be specific about what you need. — Huntster (t @ c) 23:06, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Scrieţi în limba româna, vă vom înţelege. - Jmabel ! talk 01:25, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

I think he/she wants to identify the guy who is on the photo (and who is not Ceasescu).--Ymblanter (talk) 07:22, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

yeah, at photo are TWO mens: Ceasescu and some Chinaperson. Who it that chinamen? --Teplice, Ústecko (talk) 08:25, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

.TIF file problem.

I can't see this file File:Miri I.tif. I don't know if this is a thumbnail problem or my browswer, and I can't even download it. Anyone else have the same problem and can offer any (polite) advice? Rodhullandemu (talk) 22:23, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

The file is larger than the maximum size for which a thumbnail is generated. You can download it by clicking on the (blank) thumbnail or the link "Full resolution‎". --rimshot^talk 23:09, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I've downloaded it, and will upload a PNG file so it can actually be used. — Huntster (t @ c) 23:17, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Much obliged to both of you. Rodhullandemu (talk) 23:21, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Should one-letter file-names be prevented or only some letters

E.g. File:X.jpg.

Please comment on COM:AN#[upload=sysop]. Thank you. -- RE rillke questions? 23:26, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

December 30

Using the Bohemian Rhapsody files from the en.Wiki in the pt.Wiki

Hello, I tried to search for the answer to this question in some of the FAQs and articles, but either I didn't find it, or I didn't understad while reading it. I understand that some images and sounds have copyright and that the English Wikipedia might upload some files under Fair Use. I would like to know how exactly do I decide if these files can be used in other wikipedias (for example, Portuguese wikipedia).

I'm translating the article from English to Portuguese, and when I try to add the images/sounds, they can't be found (because they're only uploaded to the English wiki). I don't know if I can/should upload them to the commons, and what information I should have, in case I am able to upload them.

I'm talking about images like File:BoRhap in Audacity.png (a waveform image of the song) File:Bohemian Rhapsody.png (the cover)

And clip sounds like File:QueenBohemianRhapsody Opera.ogg File:QueenBohemianRhapsody Mama.ogg

Thank you in advance.

Tschis (talk) 12:43, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Put simply, no you can't upload them here, as they are derivatives of a copyrighted work. The waveform... that's iffy, but the others are definite "no"s. -mattbuck (Talk) 12:52, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

That's what I don't understand. Why are some articles, like (pt) Somewhere back in time, allowed to have the cover pictures, but Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody isn't? Or are they also not allowed but noone has complained yet? Tschis (talk) 14:56, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

This is Commons - I can't speak to pt.wp rules, but I can tell you that at Commons we will not allow unfree images to be uploaded. You should check the policies regarding fair use at pt.wp. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:06, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

As always: IANAL(!) To the best of my knowledge images such as the cover can be used on en.wp because the USA have a legal loophole called "fair use" that makes it possible to use a thumbnail or some such. In European copyright law there is no true fair use clause, although some stuff can be used as a "citation" in a comparable manner. However, there are severe restrictions. You could theoretically use an image of the cover if your article discusses artistic properties or issues of the cover, but you would not be allowed to use it merely for illustration. There is a similar issue with screen shots of non-free software. As the content of articles changes all the time this quickly becomes tricky so most European-language wps (and many other?) have decided not to allow such images as a rule, even if theoretically in some cases it might be legal. I'm not sure how the en.wp figured that USA law made display of content that would be illegal in the UK okay for en.wp but it seems they did. No doubt there must be pages and pages of utterly unpleasant discussion about that somewhere in the catacombs on en.wp. As Commons caters to the world as a whole, there is no issue here: fair use cannot be allowed and usage as citation is impossible as we don't have articles/content that could possibly/maybe/iffyly discuss the image in a way that could allow usage of images under this legal loophole.

This is by no means an exact or comprehensive representation of the situation, but something along these lines is causing your confusion. Cheers Pudding4brains (talk) 02:20, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Joint Operations Graphic

HI,

I created the Category:Joint Operations Graphic , but it seems not to work. What is the error?. --Createaccount 23:25, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Now click the redlink and see the resulting page. Below the thumbnail images is an edit box. Add one or more categories to the edit box - categories your new category should be in. Then save the page. If you have problems, check for syntax and uniform capitalization. Dankarl (talk) 23:39, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Now it works, Thank you Dankarl. I added for now a joker as upper category. I will look for a good one later. --Createaccount 23:54, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

December 31

NARA on-wiki ExtravaSCANza participation

Please see en:User:The ed17/NARA to brainstorm ideas and a structure on how we can help make the National Archives ExtravaSCANza a success, in the hope that such events will continue in the future. Some of the high-quality media gleaned from this will end up at your Featured Picture process; this message is sent in the hopes that more will. Ed ^{[talk] [en:majestic titan]} 10:11, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

There is a problem in the catalan version with the user page

I use Commons with the Catalan language in preferences and the link to my user page is directed to the home of commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A0gina_principal instead of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cameta The problem is only with the catalan language in English all is OK. Cameta (talk) 18:36, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

"the link to my user page" - where is the link you're clicking on that does this? Rd232 (talk) 02:37, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

This link.Cameta (talk) 22:07, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Are you using the browser in full-screen-mode? I assume the Commons-Logo is overlapping the link. Please try to maximize your browser window an then click on the right corner of the user-page-link. Alternatively, you can turn off gadget myUploads in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets -- RE rillke questions? 22:21, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the Commons-Logo is overlapping the link. Cameta (talk) 22:44, 31 December 2011 (UTC)