This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
I've recently created this. I'm trying to get the photos just right, so I cropped the images of the XL-R and Z-R at the bottom of the page. However, now they appear "stretched" in the thumb, which is bad.
I suspected the images would keep their aspect ratio after this change, appearing the same width in pixels, but being slightly taller. Is that understanding not correct?
Following on from #Proposed changes to PD tags above: I would like to propose a review of materials tagged {{PD-old}}, {{PD-old-70}}, etc. up to {{PD-old-100}} for works that may be in copyright in the U.S. because they were published 1923 or later and were in copyright in their country of first publication on the URAA date. Even in the case of PD-old-100 this is possible if the work was first published posthumously. To help organize this, I think it would be helpful to have a category Category:Files requiring U.S. copyright review listing all unreviewed files with these tags, similar to e.g. Category:Flickr review needed. All files that use {{PD-two}} or {{PD-Art-two}} would be excluded from review, as would any using the combined tags {{PD-old-70-1923}}, etc. All files that already include PD-US-*/PD-1923/PD-1996 tags could be reviewed automatically by a bot. A very (very) large backlog is expected, but that's okay. If you think this isn't the best way to proceed, I'd be interested in hearing alternative proposals for review.
I tried to do this unilaterally before and made some pretty serious mistakes - I assure discussants that this time no action will be taken until the discussion is over and has been closed by a neutral party (and we have also heard from the WMF regarding the URAA). Dcoetzee (talk) 02:20, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
Oppose It would be nice to have information for every country for each file in a machine readable form. However, this proposal here is only for US. The proposed license tags are overly complicated (remember that uploaders even have problems to understand the meaning of "70 years pma" (which does not require more than 70 years after creation but after death) and nearly no-one will understand this system; especially if it uses some template parameters which need to be set. I saw the file pages you created in your last bot run (which you have reverted): much more than one screen page full of public domain (we are not talking of license templates with restrictions...) tags? Ugly and scaring away everybody who looks at (probably the reaction: they are crazy). If you require non-US works to have a US-copyright clearance for being uploaded here that is a clear bias towards US (US-centrism) and we are no "US Commons". The reason that WMF is based in US is their problem, not ours. Your proposal: No, that is not Commons. So, in essence: we do not need that review which only helps US but not other countries and which leads in the end to more needless deletions of content copyrighted in the US (but PD in most other countries!) than without this review. Furthermore: why can't you just wait until at least the WMF has said a first word? --Saibo (Δ) 02:59, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
A small note: I didn't actually add any tags to any files in my last run, only modified existing tags (there are files with lots of crazy PD tags out there, but they were already like that). Part of the reason the {{PD-old-70-1923}}, etc. tags were created (by User:Jusjih, I think?) is that they're much more compact than {{PD-old-70}}{{PD-1923}} or {{PD-two|PD-old-70|PD-1923}}. I agree about the cryptic template parameter - I think a simpler way to do it is to simply add the review category to the affected files, and remove it when done. User education is a difficult issue - we can't expect all uploaders to understand the intricacies of both the source country and US copyright. But in many cases {{PD-old-70-1923}} will apply, and in other cases I think a simple {{PD-old}} tag and a review category would be sufficient.
It don't see why you are in such a rush. If WMF sees it the same way as you see it (US-centrisic mass deletions of carefully uploaded and maintained public domain content and crazy copyright tag requirements) then they have simply failed their mission - okay, failureisnothingsurprising for WMF. ;-) But maybe they surprise by choosing a decision according to their mission. --Saibo (Δ) 06:12, 22 January 2012 (UTC) +1 link 16:23, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
I suppose it's insane to hope that we might one day be able to write {{Super Magic PD template|type|publication date|creation date|country of first publication|author death date}}, and the template spits out what applies?? (And a wizard/gadget with dropdowns which helps uploaders fill in the parameters?) Rd232 (talk) 05:02, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
Well we have {{PD-old-auto}}, {{PD-old-auto-1923}}, and {{PD-art-auto}}, which is a start. Presumably if we had a template that allows you to specify important factors like the media type, death year of the author, year of first publication, and country of first publication, it could in many cases figure out whether it's PD or not and the appropriate reason. However, this doesn't address cases like {{PD-US-no notice}}, {{PD-US-not renewed}}; it may ask for information that isn't actually needed like the death date of author for US works pre 1923; and doesn't address cases where we don't precisely know all the information (e.g. perhaps we only know a range of dates, or have a guess, like saying an 1860 work is probably PD-old-70). I think a more viable strategy would be a "PD wizard" that asks you a bunch of questions until it figures out the right answer, then gives you the template(s) to paste in (or an explanation of why the file is not allowed). Dcoetzee (talk) 05:08, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I was imagining a super-template plus wizard, but I suppose you could just put the "super logic" in the wizard and use simple(ish) templates. Downside, perhaps, might be maintainability, since Javascript expertise is more scarce than template expertise. Rd232 (talk) 05:13, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
If the work was first published (posthumously after 1923) in both the source country and US simultaneously, and the work was registered and renewed, it could still be in copyright in the US (without the aid of the URAA). This doesn't seem unlikely for posthumous works of great commercial value. It will also matter in the future: starting in 2017, some Columbian works will be PD-old-100 which in 1996 were still under copyright in Columbia. In 2027 this will expand to most other countries (for works published 1932 or later). Better to start tagging sooner than have to sort it out later. I was going to say the work might have been first published in Mexico, but I just learned that Mexico was only life+75 in 1996. Maybe there are also other possibilities I'm not aware of. Dcoetzee (talk) 07:54, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
Any work, no matter where it was published, which managed to follow U.S. formalities could still be under copyright if published since 1923. Any unpublished work could still be under copyright, as well. Things created before 1978 but published from 1978 through 2002 will still have copyright until at least 2048, no matter when the author died. All of this is without the aid of the URAA. Also, starting in 2019, old published works will start expiring in the U.S. again; copyright on restored works won't last forever. By 2027, the line should be works published in 1931 and earlier. One note on Mexico -- they really weren't even life+75. The extension from 50 to 75 happened in 1994, but it wasn't retroactive (though did extend existing copyrights). And the 1982 extension from 30 to 50 pma was also not retroactive, meaning the line is (at most) authors who died in 1952 and later, and that only if the 1982 change extended existing copyrights (not sure on that one, just as I'm not sure if the 100 pma change altered existing copyright terms). Mexico also had a registration requirement for works published before January 14, 1948. Carl Lindberg (talk) 13:37, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
Support Copyright status in the US is relevant information about files and this information should be checked. Any categories, lists or templates that could help us to check it are welcome. A few reasons:
We can eventually be forced to delete or to move away files that are not free in the US, or even files not justified to be free in the US. Then, tagging the files that actually are free in the US wil help us to save those files and would ease the work of moving the other ones (if it is possible to move instead of deleting).
WMF inability to host unfree files may be its problem, according to WMF views or according to US courts, but if WMF decides (or is forced to) solve its problem by deleting, it will be our problem. It will be our problem even if we are not concerned with WMF problems but concerned with our projects.
As Saibo noted, " It would be nice to have information for every country for each file in a machine readable form." I support any serious proposal to tag copyright status in any other country, just as I support Dcoetzee's proposal for the US.
We can't expect all uploaders to be able to tell copyright status of every work in the US. In fact, a lot of uploaders just don't mind about copyright status. This is a good reason to organize files to be reviewed.
I don't like complicated templates, but the facts license templates describe are complicated. Having double templates seems a good idea, since simpler templates can be used separately or complex double templates can be used more efficiently, leaving the choice to reviewers.--Pere prlpz (talk) 12:33, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
Support in principle, but how is it to be organised in practice? Perhaps this is another case for a Request for Comment, eg Commons:Requests for comment/reviewing PD tags. I would allow the scope to be a bit broader, because I echo Pere prlpz's point that as far as possible, we should try to be clear about copyright status in as many countries as possible. (I also think we could be clearer in COM:REUSE about what the implications are for reusers when copyright statuses are different in different countries.) Rd232 (talk) 16:12, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
I'm still getting used to us having an RfC, that sounds appropriate :-) I would definitely be amenable to a plan that clarifies not only US copyright status (which is essential to whether we can host files) but also copyright status in other nations (which is essential to whether content reusers in those nations can reuse files). We have little notes for other countries in e.g. the {{PD-old-70}} tag, but that's about as far as things go at the moment. It would be neat if we had like, some kind of drop down list of countries that could give you info about a work's copyright status in any given nation. I think any review proposal should also include more information about effective prioritization, considering the enormous size of the backlog. For the RfC, do you think we should move this discussion there and revise it as we go, or start a new one based on the feedback received so far? Dcoetzee (talk) 01:11, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
Some more thoughts: I think one way to get started on this would be to start documenting copyright-essential metadata about each PD image with a machine-readable template. Think something like enwp's persondata. It might look something like this (based on your super-template from before):
{{copyright data
|publication date=
|creation date=
|country of first publication=
|author death date=
|(possibly other fields)
}}
Any fields that aren't known would be left blank. With a template like this, it would be possible for a bot to reliably, automatically add appropriate license templates in many (but not all) cases, while putting other cases on manual review (just as we do for Flickr review). It would also facilitate tools (e.g. on Toolserver or using Javascript) to provide copyright status in many different countries and explanations, just by examining the machine-readable data and producing appropriate info for the desired country. The info could also potentially be useful for automatic categorization, and for other analyses. I am aware it would not cover all cases, e.g. {{PD-US-no notice}}, but those could still be described using tags as is currently done. Thoughts? Dcoetzee (talk) 02:07, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
I think that's a potentially very fruitful avenue to explore. I'll just quickly point out that the persondata approach is not unique to en.wp: there are 10 interwiki links from de:Vorlage:Personendaten, the equivalent on de.wp [and 20 interwiki links from the en.wp template, in fact]. Jarekt points out overlap with Creator templates and others; I'm not sure if there's any elegant way to reuse that data; but duplication might be a price worth paying. Rd232 (talk) 03:27, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
Dunno. You would need type of work as well (and the variants between all the countries is pretty daunting). Government work vs corporate work vs personal work. If multiple authors, needs to be the last death date, but that may be OK. You could start with using Commons:Hirtle chart, File:Canadian Public Domain.svg, and a UK chart (non-Crown copyright only) for an idea of the questions you need to answer, and the data you need up front to answer it. It might be possible, at least for many situations, but it would probably be quite difficult. Some countries would definitely be easier than others. There actually is an online public domain calculator for many EU countries -- you could see many of the needed questions there as well. Carl Lindberg (talk) 05:38, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
Strong support for an autotemplate/metadata system (in theory, at least): it can start off with common permissions issues, and let itself be over ridable. Then, over time, the niches can be incorporated. I think it's the only long term solution to making copyright user friendly. Happy to help! Jarry1250 (talk) 17:15, 25 January 2012 (UTC)
I have started writing an autotemplate for France (but I am far from being finished). To give you a taste, try the following
{{copyright data France
|the work is a musical composition=no
|country of first publication=France
|date of first publication=1926
|date of author death=1928
|author died for France=no
}}
This is an interesting approach, having copyright data metadata templates for various countries, including data relevant for status in those countries. That way we wouldn't end up with one giant template with way too many fields. The way I imagine it, rather than just picking one, you could add many metadata templates for different countries. To avoid redundancy, the general {{Copyright data}} template could include information that is relevant in many countries, like the data I listed above. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:38, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
I was thinking the general {{Copyright data}} would be a switch containing only a few lines of codes starting with " #switch:{{{country of first publication}}} ", switching to each country-specific template. If we are sure that two country have exactly the same rules we could merge them, but in that case it would be as simple to duplicate the template and just change the country name. Teofilo (talk) 04:07, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
Well the issue is that the country of first publication is not the only relevant one. In particular the copyright status of the work in the US is relevant to us, even if not the country of first publication. The copyright status in yet another, third country may be relevant to content reusers in that country, and it may differ if the work was also published concurrently in that country. So... the easiest way to support many countries seems like it would be more than one template. Dcoetzee (talk) 08:03, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
The "copyright data France" solution would be very useful in most situations in that it could automatically produce {{PD-old-70}}, {{PD-old-100}} and similar tags as appropriate and also update them at the end of each year so that the templates help reusers in a maximal way. I think that this might be the best option. However, there might be other odd situations which need to be covered somehow. For example, I have recently looked at categories of British signatures on Commons to confirm licence validity. In many cases, I found that the signature was at least {{PD-old-70}}, but I could not find any proof of any publication, or they might not have been published before 1923. In this case, the licence tag for the source country is {{PD-old-70}} whereas the licence tag for the United States is {{PD-signature}}. There might be other situations which are not covered by the template above. For these odd situations, it might be necessary to offer the possibility to take a US licence template as an argument. Also note that "author died long before 1996" doesn't imply {{PD-1996}} since the works nevertheless get 95 years from publication copyright if all US copyright formalities were fulfilled (including copyright notices in all US and foreign publications of the work). --Stefan4 (talk) 15:28, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
Comment It should be noted that most if not all translations of {{PD-old}}, and {{PD-old-auto}} have a license text that reads: "This includes the USA and all countries with a copyright term of 70 years...". And there are generally no warnings that a PD-70 license alone is not sufficient. We might want to fix that. De728631 (talk) 18:42, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
I have now removed the United States from the templates in a few languages (Nordic, Dutch, French, Spanish and CJK) and translated the warning about US copyright tags into Swedish. I wouldn't dare to try to fix the other languages since I might mess up grammar or something if I try to remove a country name. --Stefan4 (talk) 22:14, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
This is expanding from the original thread title, but I think it flows naturally from it, and we could use a concrete proposal. I suggest we launch Commons:Requests for comment/PD license tags to discuss the broader issue of how we organise license PD tags, with some of the ideas from above. I'd like some quick input on whether that's a good idea, and if so on what the scope and aims of the RFC should be. Rd232 (talk) 03:27, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
I think this is a good idea. I think the discussion should center around two main problems: 1. how should information relevant to the copyright status of a PD image be represented and displayed on file description pages; 2. should there be a review process for PD images to research this information, and how will it work? An RfC could support a series of proposals on these topics. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:05, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the notes. Purge helps after they fixed it. But hopefully they will find the underlying problem for this.--Codrin.B (talk) 16:15, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
to WP Commons and entered it into a WP aticle. For some reason it has come up rotated 90 degrees and I don't know how to rotate it back so the image can be seen properly. I wonder if anyone could do this job for ame please and/or let me know how to do it myself? Many thanks John E. Hill (talk) 23:47, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
I have added a rotation request to that page. This means that the image will be rotated by a bot in less than an hour. In the future, try to save the image in the correct orientation on your computer. Some programs, and in particular most Microsoft programs, often display images with the wrong orientation. As a rule of thumb, if it looks correct in your digital camera but incorrect in any Microsoft image program, do not attempt to rotate the image. The image is already correct and the fact that it looks wrong in the Microsoft image program is due to a bug in the Microsoft image program. There is more information about this at COM:ROTATEFIX if you want to know more about it. --Stefan4 (talk) 23:59, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
Thank you so much. The image was correctly rotated on my computer so I just assumed it would be O.K. after uploading. Looks like I have more to learn. But thanks again and all best wishes, John E. Hill (talk) 03:30, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes, adding an interwiki to a Wikipedia category is abviously okay. Adding an interwiki to a Wikipedia article is also convenient and seems to be standard practice. The more controversial case seems to be adding the same links in both the article page and the gallery page (see for example Taipei and category:Taipei). (as far as I am concerned I like to have interwikis in categories as often as possible, just because I use categories much more often than galleries (many galleries are badly maintained and not really useful).--Zolo (talk) 11:58, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
It's not always a perfect match but where it is it s best to pair galleries here with articles, and categories with categories. So for example with Taipei. The article en:Taipei at wikipedia should be paired with the gallery Taipei here, and the Category Category: Taipei here with en:category:Taipei there. Where there isn't an exact match I add the interwiki to which ever seems the most appropriate, be that the article or category.--KTo288 (talk) 14:57, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
"thumbtime=2.1"Still yet there is no way to select another thumbnail on file pages. However on other pages (on commons or wikipedia) you may create your preferred thumbnail by using the thumbtime parameter. --Pristurus (talk) 23:24, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Request for comments about some changes in template:Information
A few days ago, some changes were made to {{Information}} and they were reverted due to a lack of consensus. Some of the proposed changes have already been discussed before, but I sum it up here so that we can get a clear community view. --Zolo (talk) 11:46, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Support I do not like "see below" - I thinks is not necessary and it clutters the screen. If "permission" is used than the template works as it does now. --Jarekt (talk) 03:40, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
Question Will the field be hidden, or show no-license-warning? If hidden, Support, but if we show warning I Oppose. – Kwj2772 (msg) 07:19, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
Add an option "other fields 1" between description and date
This parameter will probably not be used very often? It adds a new customizable field to the template just like the already existing "other fields" , but at a different place: between description and date rather that at the end of the template. A similar result can be achieved by directly adding {{Information field}} to the "description" field.
Support As I said here the new proposed parameter Other_field_1 similar to Other_field and the same as {{Artwork}}'s Other_field_1. The purpose of it would be to allow adding other fields below Description field rather than the bottom of the template. See the code in {{Information/sandbox}} and test in Template:Information/testcases#Test_Other_field_1. This would allow us to rewrite {{Infobox aircraft image}}, {{Bus-Information}}, {{Rolling Stock-Information}} and possibly many others to use {{Information}} as their basis and simplify maintenance of those templates. It would also allow users to add additional description fields in more logical location. See for example File:Kyushu Electric tram 3.jpg with additional "location" field located on the bottom. The change will not affect any files currently using the template. Finally this proposed change is mostly meant to make wiki code more clear since once achieve the same effect without this field, see here. --Jarekt (talk) 04:17, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
Support I don't understand all the details of this issue, but from Jarekt's description, it sounds sensible. Rd232 (talk) 11:06, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
Parse source automatically converts texts like "Obra pròpia (own work)" to {{Own work}}.
Weak support. {{Information}} was designed to appear simple and without much "magic" feel, the automatic conversion of exotic strings may be a bit confusing (all the more as it works for " Eigenes Werk (own work)" but not for "eigenes Werk". Hopefully, more and more uploading tools will use the correct {{Own}} making {{Parse source}} unnecessary. On the other hand, a bot should convert existing pages so that internationalization is not lost.--Zolo (talk) 11:46, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Oppose I did not notice that template before, and did not see that this edit removed it. Although I would prefer a robotic substitution of the texts to {{Own work}}, I do not see the reason to change current version. --Jarekt (talk) 03:44, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
Support removing fancyness. That is very unobvious that the info template does that. It should display what the user put in - nothing more or less. Could lead to confusion at this important info field. --Saibo (Δ) 23:49, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Align the content to the same line as the headers (now it is lower)
Description is now lower than the title Description, proper date lower than the title date etc.
To be able to use Wikipedia as an acredited source....
I'm enrolled in a class in my local community college( don't really know if that makes a difference).My professor makes it very clear that we are not to use this site as a basis of any knowledge for our paper that we wil have to turn in at the end of March. I personally, go on here for a lot of different info. Is there any way to make a case in which to provide necceasry information to use this site as being accredited. — Preceding unsigned comment was added by 169.139.222.5 (talk) 17:47, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Encyclopaedias, Wikipedia or any other, are not a basis of knowledge. They merely digest and organize the information that is available from many sources. So, your professor may tell you not to use encyclopaedias "as a basis of knowledge", to force you to dig more deeply into the sources and read them directly. Then the idea would be to verify where the information came from in the first place, instead of using only the encyclopaedias where the information is reused. You can use Wikipedia or other encyclopaedias to get a personal overview of the topic and to find a list of sources that were used to write the article and other references. Then you can select and read directly the sources and references that you consider relevant for your paper and cite those readings in your paper. -- Asclepias (talk) 21:37, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
can someone edit out the first few seconds in my file File:Burping.ogg so there is one second before the burping starts — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.172.30.3 (talk • contribs) 30 January 2012 19:20 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. 01:17, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
Language issue on Special:Upload&uselang=daownwork (and others) and auto-add category on upload from Danish language upload form
On the Danish Wikipedia there currently is a suggestion to replace the current 'Upload file'-link in the sidebar with a link to either Commons:Upload/da or Danish language own work. This has thrown off two issues, which I'm not quite sure where to address:
It has been proposed that files uploaded using the Commons:Upload/da, the Danish language own work or a new custom form, have a special category (alternatively a template - i.e. similar to {{ImageUpload|basic}} when using the basic upload form previously) added. I would have assumed Commons:Redesigning the upload form or User:Pfctdayelise/Manual:Uselang hack would describe that - but again I didn't manage to find anything :( Is this possible somehow?
The first was a wrong configuration; I have fixed it now. It may take up to 24h until the fix becomes effective due to the way the MediaWiki software caches its interface texts. The second is currently not possible. However, why would you want to have such a marker category at all? Maybe an alternative approach might be a specially configured upload wizard? Maybe it's possible to use the "upload campaign" feature to customize the wizard in ways that might be acceptable to your needs? Lupo20:41, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
First: Thank you for fixing the configuration-error :)
Second: As I'm not an administrator on Commons, I don't know if upload campaign could work, but I'll encourage someone on DaWiki, who is also an administrator on Commons, to look into this so thank you for the suggestion :) The reasoning for this, is that most of the files uploaded "vetted" by someone with Danish language-skills, as they have a high error-rate (lack of license, copyvio's etc.). Of the current last 20 uploads (covering the time back to 17 January 2012, 11 have been deleted for being clear copyright violations, and of the remain 9, for 3 of the files, the uploaders are currently being "helped" so that they have correct and sufficient information. By adding them to a special category, it would be easier for Danish speaking wikipedians to identify and correct the issues in a helpful and leaning manner. In kind regards heb [TCE] 07:53, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
Miscoded Region locations in Geocoding templates
My mistake, I didn't realise that the "region" field used ISO-3166 in these templates, so some of them have "region:UK" instead of the correct "region:GB". There may be a few hundred but is there a bot that could go though and substitute these for the correct version? Cheers. Rodhullandemu (talk) 00:19, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
Maybe I'm being dense, but how would the bot distinguish your errors from places that are actually in Ukraine? - Jmabel ! talk01:15, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
Because the ISO 3166 code for Ukraine is UA, not UK. I've classified very few images from Ukraine, in fact none that I can remember. Rodhullandemu (talk) 01:43, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
They aren't my uploads, they are category maintainance. Paradoxically, when I was an Admin on en:WP, I probably considered more requests for AWB use than any other admin over a year or so, without using AWB myself- it looks like I may now have to look at that as an option. Thanks. Rodhullandemu (talk) 02:31, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
I would recommend against adding such a thing to HotCat: the functionality desired is completely different, and Commons-specific. HotCat is for changing and adding categories, and it's being used on many wikis, even on non-WMF projects. This new functionality is a special-purpose hack for one template existing only here at the Commons, and the desired functionality is just removing the template in one click. That's completely unrelated to what HotCat does; the desired functionality could be implemented easily in a completely separate script. Lupo20:13, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
I uploaded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:D._W._Reeves.jpg to en, and tagged it PD, as it was a lithograph from a photo of someone who died in 1900. The source I got it from, though, doesn't indicate the actual publication date. It's since been tagged as a candidate to transfer here -- should I untag it, or is it likely ok? Thanks. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 18:49, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
Is there any category we can give to either smaller versions or alternate formats of the same file? I know it's a derivative, but that's not very specific.
I recently needed a PNG thumbnail for a JPEG so that the white background could be removed, as is typical usage on the English Wikipedia--said images are usually tagged {{Should Be PNG}}.
--Trlkly (talk) 18:26, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
Does somebody know if that is a bug or a feature? http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:AaatestSonnepalmenstrand-portrait_new.jpg&action=history The page is upload=sysop protected and it works (I cannot upload with my test account). But the testaccount can revert to another file version. This is pretty stupid since I thought it isn't enough at upload edit wars to upload protect (COM:P should be adjusted then)... Also that is a bad choice for high-visibility files which have more than one version. Mediawiki displays the reverts as "uploads" - but apparently doesn't apply the protection status. I would have assumed that it protects against that reverts. First because it is useful, second because mediawiki titles the reverts as uploads in the logs Asked in Wikimedia tech channel on IRC but got no answer. --Saibo (Δ) 00:54, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
Try reverting File:Testfile-bidgee.jpg in your test account. If it allows you to move it in the test account, try the Edit protection. If all fails then someone needs to fix it as it is a rather big problem that revert wars can continue. Bidgee (talk) 01:18, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
As a native speaker, they are exactly equally correct. There is one subtle difference, in that when one is talking about the structure of a particular American university, one speaks of its "school of arts and sciences", "school of engineering", etc. and in that context one would almost always say "school of medicine" because of the parallelism. Conversely, one would say "he went to medical school at the University of Washington", but not "he went to the school of medicine at..." (though this doesn't apply to "he graduated from" or "he attended", which can use either). But that's about it. Equally valid article/category names. - Jmabel ! talk09:20, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
I developed a Webapplication which displays the current POTD from commons in a (imho) bautifull way. I designed it especially for tablets, it supports iPad, Android and any other recent browser. It tries to embedd nicely into the browsers on these devices by supporting swiping. The whole application is open source and non commercial. I wrote it mainly for myself, but is there a place where such applications can be promoted? URL is http://potd.dbruhn.de. On the IRC-Channel someone suggested adding it next to our current "by email"/"RSS feed". Perhaps someone wants to discuss this issue! Thanks! -- Theomega (talk) 19:30, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
This RfC proposes a specific copyright review process for public domain works, in order to ensure our works are in the public domain in both the US and their source country as required by Commons:Licensing. Feedback welcome - please respond at the RfC. Dcoetzee (talk) 14:03, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
Hard to tell without knowing more about them than I can discern from the images. Maybe en:Sidewalk cafe? They don't look like en:Beer gardens from the photos, although there's certainly beer drinking happening. Could be en:Patio, although in the US at least that tends to carry more of a residential connotation. cmadler (talk) 15:00, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
It is very common on the continent and certainly in warmer countries for restaurants, bar and other drinking places to have seats and tables on the street. On warm sunny days, clients dont want to be inside. In most countries such places have pay extra taxes to use the street for tables and chairs. Smiley.toerist (talk) 19:15, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
I think you are correct, so I removed the metatemplate from Template:Monthbyyear. Month categories can be further divided by date, by country, or by something else. But it is not neccessary to always do that. And I think there may be files that does not fit into such subdivisions. /Ö10:24, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
I understand that it was a US military satellite. So yes, it is a work of the US government, and therefore, in the public domain. Regards, Yann (talk) 19:47, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
This week (Monday through Thursday), I will be switching over the backend system that hosts thumbnails (scaled images) for all wikis from our existing server to Swift, a clustered object store. This move gets us ready to be able to dramatically increase the amount of data we can hold in Commons and the other wiki projects.
As with all new systems, though it has been tested, the possibility exists that something will go wrong. I would like your help testing and reporting any issues. There are two main methods available to report issues:
Today, only files that contain "/a/a2/" in the URL are be affected. More files will be affected throughout the week following a gradual rollout schedule. Though I will take bug reports on other issues, they're less likely to be related to the change I'm making.
Is there a common category for all images that will be deleted? That contains all images from cats like 'Deletion requests November 2011', 'Media without a license as of 26 January 2012', 'Media missing permission as of 23 January 2012', etc.
Hey guys, i would like to add the following video to the Pat Condell as it is currently licensed under CC Attribution. However, it is not specifically mentioned as to which license it was released and so i would like to know whether it can be uploaded on Commons and if so, then under which license must it be uploaded. Thanks.
Adding multilingual descriptions to categories/galleries automatically
To alleviate multilingual issues and have the categories searchable in multiple languages, I've been using Sum-it-up to add descriptions and interwiki links to categories (see for example Category:Dacia). But I find the task terribly redundant and repetitive. Can bots like User:MerlIwBot and User:JarektBot do this for each category and gallery, since articles and their leads in multiple languages appear/change all the time? It currently does it for interwiki links which are also followed and generated by Sum-it-up. I think it would be a tremendous feature, and should be basically part of the same process. Note that I started initially this conversation at User talk:MerlIwBot#Adding also multilingual descriptions but then I realized that JarektBot also has similar capabilities, and this is more of a global discussion.--Codrin.B (talk) 19:27, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
I see that more and more people start to see the interest and are following. Before adding text descriptions by bot, we have to define a collapse rule. Categories with an intro in 270 languages is not very practical. A more elegant and maintenance-free solution would be the display of the initial paragraphs(s) when hovering over the interwiki links on the left. It would be great if the search engine would include the category IWs in its search, which it doesn't for the moment. --Foroa (talk) 07:09, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
I am not sure based on which settings, but in my system Category:Dacia displays a pull down box for the languages using Meta:Language select. It doesn't display descriptions in all languages unless you select "Show all" in the pull down box. This seems sufficient to me. I am missing something? --Codrin.B (talk) 15:17, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
For me is the main purpose of the explaining text to know what subject is covered by the category. I don't need all the links in the often long text generated by Sum-it-up. Without shows a "cleaner" text. If people want more information they can use the interwiki links on the left. Wouter (talk) 16:09, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
To me, Category:Dacia shows all texts in all languages, which is probably a bug or maybe related to a show all that I used on a previous selection and that stays on. Anyway, I think that in all cases, the English reference text should always be displayed for reference and the description in the local languages(s) where applicable. Nowadays, I bother rarely to include texts in more than 2 or 3 languages, except where there are many terms in many languages, such as in Category:Mbira and Category:Pedal cars so that they are included in the search engine database (category interwikis are never included in the search). --Foroa (talk) 18:19, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
I am curious to know what setting enables/disables (or rather collapses) the other languages. If you find out, please let us know. I looked in my preferences but couldn't find it. For me it is always collapsed, showing English. Sum-it-up can indeed sometimes generate longer descriptions, but id depends on the leads that people create. Over time, the source articles get copy edited and end up with better leads. A reason why we need a bot to run this on a schedule. And yes, sometimes I had to shorten the generated descriptions myself. But overall, I think it is highly valuable to have that multilingual text since it empowers users to find the information with search engines. You can click on the links to the left, but someone searching in Japanese will never find an English named category, unless these descriptions are added. And if we can reliably collapse all languages and show English by default, it is all we need for a nice solution.--Codrin.B (talk) 18:03, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
I've been using sum-it-up for quite some time (do check out the gadget). I even used it for batch created categories. Some improvements:
Such improvements would be nice - as would fixing the annoyance that the tl.wp doesn't translate to template:tl, but to template:tgl, which sum-it-up doesn't know! But really, if we're going for improvements, one thing which would be worth thinking about is whether we couldn't persuade the source Wikipedias to provide a custom 1 or 2 line summary (like persondata), stripped of ref tags and images which don't translate to the Commons summary, and hopefully more stable. (If the custom summary isn't available, the bot/script can always fall back to the status quo.) Rd232 (talk) 18:18, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
Well, perhaps that's not worth the complexity. Just a script that does better cleanup (stripping ref tags and images) would do. Rd232 (talk) 02:14, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
That one category is changed with hotcat does not mean that all the categories are checked. So Template:Check categories should not be removed just because of that.
A "categories are ok" link is better, since one can look at all the categories together and can say that thery are OK. /Ö19:47, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
That looks a good idea provided one can filter out the ones with only generic categories such as men, woman, people, people by name, paintings, art, ... Same for the HotCat check removal. We might need a template to indicate "generic" categories. --Foroa (talk) 07:12, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
I'd go with option 2 as an easy way to remove the template; option 1 doesn't sound quite right. I'd also suggest an option 3: on pages where the template exists, if you use the "edit multiple categories" option of HotCat, then by default the template is struck through, and if the user saves, it's removed. That way, the user can prevent the template removal by clicking the little X to cancel the template change; but the assumption is that usually when editing multiple categories, template removal will be reasonable. Makes sense? Rd232 (talk) 02:10, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
I know that it is OK to have file names in many languages on Commons, but what is the recommended approach for naming categories? I've been working a lot to organize media around the Romanian history and archaeology topics and noticed for example that Category:Museums in Romania by city has a big mix of Romanian and English names for the sub-categories. For example Category:Muzeul Național al Hărților și Cărții Vechi vs Category:History and Archeology Museum Piatra Neamț. Looking at institutions, most of them are in English (not all) and point ideally to categories with the same name. A similar situation happens with Category:Fortresses in Romania and many such similar categories. Now I understand Romanian but I would imagine that it would be hard for someone who doesn't to either properly categorize their own contributions (say they took a picture of the Alba Carolina Fortress while visiting Alba Iulia) or to find media related to a certain topic/category if there is no English name for it. Ideally, it would be great to have both categories, one in English and one in Romanian, and possibly redirect the Romanian-named category to the English one, but I know there are issues with the redirects in Commons. My approach would be to have everything in English (acknowledging that this is a multilingual project), to increase exposure and achieve consistency. What are your suggestions and opinions about this? Thanks--Codrin.B (talk) 21:35, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
The real category names should usually be in English (see Commons:Language policy, and Commons:Categories#Category_names). If there is no real English alternative, the foreign names are often fine I'd guess, if in a Latin script. It's unfortunate as a multilingual project, but the actual category name used in the File: pages has to be all the same so that users of all languages can find the content; category redirects do not work on that level. You can certainly leave a category soft redirect (i.e. use {{Category redirect}}) with the existing Romanian name, which should cause bots to move images placed in the Romanian one, to the English one. Putting the Romanian name in the category description is also a good idea. Carl Lindberg (talk) 22:30, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
As Carl mentioned all the category names should be in English, or should be in form most commonly used in English literature (if any exist). In practice it is a challenge with no good solution, since often in case of places little known outside their country local language names are used, which often creates disastrous names using mix of English and local language which is not readable by neither English speaking nor local users. I sometimes use counts of Google hits to try different possible variants of English names which can be used. Also EN wiki is a good guide if they have an article. Finally {{Category redirect}}s, interwiki links and native spelling listed in the category will help native speakers find the category. --Jarekt (talk) 14:23, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
Thanks guys, that is my view as well but wondering what is the general idea. I think there are English names at least for all those museums and castles that I used in the example, even though not all of them have corresponding en WP article yet. I am actually actively involved in creating such articles but will take time. To alleviate multilingual issues and have the categories searchable in multiple languages, I've been using Sum-it-up to add descriptions and interwiki links to categories (see for example Category:Dacia). But I find the task terribly redundant and repetitive. Can bots like User:MerlIwBot do this for each category and gallery, since articles and their leads in multiple languages appear/change all the time? It currently does it for interwiki links which are also followed and generated by Sum-it-up.--Codrin.B (talk) 15:53, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
I personally find this guidance to be a major problem in making Commons truly multilingual. We have several contributors on ro.wp which say they don't use commons for pictures because they don't speak English. When you try to open up to more people, like it happened for Wiki Loves Monuments, this problem becomes much more visible.
I believe that each user should be free to use whatever language he wants for categories, just like it happens for galleries, with the local language prefered. The category-redirect method Carl described should work just as well from English to Romanian as it does the other way around.
I urge you to consider changing this guidance even before MediaWiki has support for this (as fixing that bug could take years)--Strainu (talk) 11:05, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
But that doesn't work. There are many cases where languages use the same word to mean different things; is Category:Magazine about supermarkets or periodicals? what about Category:Cat?--Prosfilaes (talk) 12:43, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
Strainu, I wish we could, but as Prosfilaes said, that is not feasible on the large scale. To some degree we already do it on a small scale: we do have about 60k category redirects, and many of them contain alternative spelling often used in different counties. However we can not mix all the languages and be able to maintain our category system, it is hard enough in English alone. As for people who do not speak English: we put a lot of effort into internationalization of our templates and ideally all categories would have interwikis and description in many languages. That way people without English skills can at least use search to identify existing categories. They can also use Galleries written in their language and they can find links from their wikipedias to Commons categories. It is unfortunate that although Commons have interwiki links to Wikipedia, wikipedia do not have interwiki links to Commons, and have to rely on templates like en:template:Commons category. The problem with those templates is that each section of an article can have such template (so there is no guarantee of 1 to 1 relationship) and that those templates are not maintained by the mw:Manual:Pywikipediabot/interwiki.py which is used for maintaining interwiki links. --Jarekt (talk) 03:02, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Chinese Wikipedia displays category names in either Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese depending on settings. For example, zh:分類:美國 and zh:分类:美国 both mean the same thing and so they go to the same page. How they are displayed depends on your choice in a dropdown list. Wouldn't it be possible to do something similar with Commons? I assume that many categories would have overlapping names, but wouldn't it still be possible to fix something with the categories which don't overlap? Chinese Wikipedia mainly converts things algorithmically, but I think that there also is some way to specify a variant manually if the automatic handling doesn't work. --Stefan4 (talk) 12:50, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Strainu -- I agree with Prosfilaes. Allowing multilingual categories (other than limited endonym use) without a very radical and fundamental change in the basic software setup would be far more likely to cause numerous disputes such as that which resulted in Category:Mélusines in heraldry being set up in opposition to Category:Melusines in heraldry, rather than leading to some utopia of internationalization. AnonMoos (talk) 17:09, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
And don't forget that for the many cities, border areas and countries that have 2 to 4 languages, the English rule is a blessing. --Foroa (talk) 06:55, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
For popes, emperors, gods, saints and some rulers, we tend to use the original latin name as the root category as those are more "international universal". --Foroa (talk) 06:53, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
I'd like to add a comment on choice of forum:
The question is about the most controversial category of language choices on Commons. This village pump is read mostly by those that have no problem working in English (others use village pumps in other languages) and I think answers here will be somewhat biased.
If the question had been asked on Commons talk:Language policy, on the other hand, it would have been answered by people interested in language use of Commons, and support for using local names would probably have been stronger (still with a bias, as policy is mainly written and discussed in English).
For categories about things, yes we use English when there is an established English word. For local names, especially less known places, some use a local language, some use English. There is no policy or even guideline discussing the border line cases - because there is no consensus.
The arguments Prosfilaes put up do not sound insurmountable. First of all, the number of conflicts does not seem that big. Even then, I think that keeping just a few hundred generic categories in English and naming all the rest (like names of places, names of people) in the local language would work just fine. Only when several official names exist for a place and there is no consensus should English be used.--Strainu (talk) 15:10, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
LPfi, that is a good point. I didn't know about the Commons talk:Language policy. I will make a note about this conversation. I also found the Commons:Naming categories proposal and Commons:Categories#Category names. But suggest English for most usage but also mention exceptions and that consensus was not reached. I think we do have to find the best compromise and finalize the proposal. Above all, I think that consistency and search-ability are the most important aspects.--Codrin.B (talk) 20:41, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
January 31
$10,000 Donation to the WMF, if ...
File deleted as an emergency request on the Admin Noticeboard by me. I got worried about banking laws on copying checks! Better safe than sorry. Doug youvan (talk) 19:25, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
I resent any implication that there's a connection. I don't know who Kraaiennest is, nor have I been influenced by him at all. I haven't asked for source code at Pi.tif.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:28, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
I am sorry; it was a coincidence. I was very upset that File:Tasting_a_condom.jpg survives deletion, while I am being deleted here at Commons, and Kraaiennest/Crowsnest has erased the past 10 years of my work (3 e-books) in my biography at .en, while there, I am banned from editing, indefinitely. Doug youvan (talk) 16:47, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
The economic potential is enormous, see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/business/global/21iht-renwave.html?pagewanted=all, and I think the main point of my comment is that Commons needs to set policy for depositing images that have no source code in the PD. We are not talking Photoshop, folks. These are custom programs designed to produce one (possibly a few) images, and it is the programmers, not the Uploader, whose work has been used without attribution. Worse yet, without source code the image (simulation) might be completely wrong. It then goes into the encyclopedia and evades NOR. Doug youvan (talk) 16:41, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Walter. Thank you. I will do exactly as you say. Would you please start the discussion as to what we should do with images (simulations) that lack computer code? One explanation from some of these Uploaders is that the equations are published and referenced. However, if you have ever coded to simulate a physical system, it is almost always the case that parameters arise which must be set in a logical, but somewhat arbitrary, manner. I've started to recode the simulation in question, and such parameters have arisen immediately. (I can outline those problems somewhere else if anyone is interested.) But the upshot is that the current image / simulation is irreproducible. I do similar work and I always put the code into the PD. I see no other way to show that the image is correct - or at least check it and improve it. So, I will place my efforts into re-coding File:Deep water wave.gif. That image is, in fact, beautiful and informative for people interested in such things. However, if you look deeper, you begin wondering how it was done and how particular parameters were set. This is quite analogous to a "trade secret". BTW, you will be hard pressed to find any legal threat from Noncanonical, a colleague of mine using this same IP address.. That's just a gang that wants us off the encyclopedia because of my religious views. After all, Wikipedia is the atheist's bible, and I need to learn how to show proper respect to this other religion. That is my fault, and as a Christian, I do recognized that I have sinned, and I ask for forgiveness from anyone I might have hurt.
That was not the incident that got me kicked off (a long time ago). That was Hrafn, Aunt Entropy, and Filll over the Young Earth Creationist Article. Some guy in Australia made a physical threat in an edit tag and I reacted. Doug youvan (talk) 19:55, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
I for one don't think Doug youvan has $25000, much less is willing to donate it. He's upset that User_talk:Kraaiennest would not release the source code used to produce File:Deep water wave.gif. The user is under no obligation to do so. If you believe that an image derived from source code not owned by the uploader could make this an illegal derivative work, then by all means nominate it for deletion, but there's no need to dramatically call attention to it here. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:30, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
The graphic image is not derivative of the source code; they are independent works. Depending on the circumstances, the graphic image may or may not be copyrightable (if it is purely the result of an algorithm, with no human authorship of the actual graphic part, it may not be copyrightable at all). But the computer program copyright is in how the program is structured, its actual text, and that kind of thing, none of which is present in the resulting graphic. They are unrelated copyright-wise (no shared expression at all). Even if an author does make two works, one of which is derivative of the other, it is entirely up to an author whether they want to license the original, the derivative, or both. Even if they released the original under a CC-BY-SA license, they are not under any obligation to release their own derivative work that way. Obviously, we'd appreciate as much material as the author would like to license, but it's the author's prerogative in the end. If you think it would be more appropriate to only use illustrations like this on en-wiki which also have backing source code, then discuss it there -- that is a project policy decision. When you bring up something on Commons though, we are mostly concerned about copyright only. Carl Lindberg (talk) 23:33, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Carl, Thank you. Do you mean Commons will use an image that has violated a license agreement for the use of the underlying program? Or do you mean that if a team of people write some code that produces an image, it is OK for one of them to donate the image here as "author's own work"? Can't be! What about the Industrial Espionage Act of 1996? Has it expired?Doug youvan (talk) 23:58, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
In the case of multiple authors, yes, any one author can do what they want, usually. The other authors are entitled to their share of money made, but beyond that not much. This is spelled out in the copyright law. That would only apply though if some other people were responsible for the appearance of the resulting image itself -- it would not matter if some other code author supplied utility routines which were merely used for the image; I don't think they are an author of the image itself. If someone violated a license agreement by simply using such code, that is their problem. I'm sure we'd delete upon request from the uploader/author if it turned out such an image got them into unexpected legal trouble.
I don't believe that they're independent works. XPM is a image file format that is also valid C code. Surely that must be a derivative of the image. When I'm working on a POV-Ray file, the artistic description that goes into the code is what comes out in the image. It strikes me as like the book/movie divide, where literary expression can be infringed by the visual images.
You say that "if it is purely the result of an algorithm, with no human authorship of the actual graphic part". If what you mean is post-processing, then I disagree as above. Senso stricto, it's false; all images can be produced algorithmically. In reality, I can see a judge using that rule of thumb, but I can also see a judge granting copyright to a CG tornado if it was used in Twister 2, but denying it to the exact same tornado if the meteorology department that produced the simulation sued. I'm not sure where the line is.
I don't think a book can be infringed by visual images -- can you point to a case? Obviously, a movie can be derivative if it makes use of dialogue, the plot, or characters from a book. The visual images are added expression, unique to the movie. XPM is probably a special case -- since there is really only one or limited ways to write the program to generate a specific image, I'm not sure there is a separate copyright in that type of program. In any event, the image comes first in that case, and the C program would be derivative (or a copy, really). But I'm sure in many cases such as the one under discussion, you could write a completely different program (separate copyright) which produces the same, or very similar, output image. If the program source contains graphics themselves which get placed in the output, that is when you might get into derivative works for me. But if an author is using a program as a tool to generate their desired output image... of course the output should be their own copyrightable work (which I think is the case here, easily). The result is still human authorship, no matter how they went about it. Just not derivative, copyright-wise, of the actual code, which is utterly different expression. You have to identify the actual expression from the original in a derivative work. If you can't, it's not derivative. What I meant by algorithm is... say, take an arbitrary input image and apply some algorithmic transformation to it, like scaling, or slanting. I don't see how there is human authorship in the result, since all expression is really coming from the input image. I don't think the program author can claim any copyright ownership of such images -- it's a mechanical processing of other images, with no human decision-making with regards to a specific image. They may have a terms of use which may act like a contract, but I don't think they could use copyright to enforce it. I suppose there may be examples along those lines which are different, if the processing adds some identifiable expression. But I'm more thinking of these sections from the Compendium: The term "authorship" implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable. [...] To be an original work of authorship, the work must not be a mere computation based upon a concept or formula, or be the mere extrapolation or application of an idea or system, which would always produce substantially the same result whenever done correctly by anyone. For example, the computation of interest based upon a particular rate is not copyrightable, nor is the mere transposition of music from one key to another. In the current case, I have no doubt the resulting image is copyrightable, but I'm guessing it does not contain any expression from the source code (the text, or at least program structure, etc.), so I think there are two separate copyrights. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:04, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
Let me inject some ethics to see if it copesthetic with copyright law: If you touch it in a significant manner, your name goes on it. As a staffer at LBNL and Cold Spring Harbor Lab, as a Professor at MIT, and as the CEO and CSO of a Silicon Valley company, I put everyone's name on scientific papers and patents. There is a caveat on patents, but I was generous so that the criterion of writing at least one claim was fulfilled. Now, if I see an image on Commons, I expect that everyone who contributed to that image receives attribution. If we are talking software, that would be a programmer, not someone using Photoshop. Do you get my point? Always make all attributions to all that helped with the final product, in this case, an image. How do these ethics fit into your discussion of copyright law? Do we have the same ethical standards? Doug youvan (talk) 03:21, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
I think we are (probably all) in agreement with your ethical principal that if you touch it in a significant manner, your name goes on it; the question is what constitutes a "significant manner". We now have on Commons a finished work, but there were many steps that went into creating it. You (Doug youvan) seem to be asserting (forgive me if I misunderstand the technical aspects, which is not my area of expertise) that the creator of a program that is used to make an image has some degree of ownership/creatorship in that image. It seems to me that is analagous to suggesting that a weaver who makes a canvas is a co-creater with the actual painter? cmadler (talk) 14:24, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
"Credit" is not the same thing as "authorship" or "copyright ownership". Everyone appreciates credit, of course, so your ethical approach is sound. For a scientific paper, I'm sure anyone involved in the research would want some credit. In general, I would follow that approach. However, a website which scans old public domain photos and makes them available online also wants credit -- they put forth effort and spent money to make things available -- but they are not an author. They are a source, but have no ownership interest in the copyright, and cannot use copyright to enforce licenses or anything like that. We are especially interested in the author for a couple reasons. First, many countries require the author, specifically, to be named via their "moral rights" laws (which often last longer than the economic rights, sometimes being of infinite duration, and usually cannot be transferred or waived). Second, the author is usually the copyright owner, and they are the only entity which has the authority to license the copyright, and we are heavily concerned about that license -- so we want a clear indication of who has the rights to make the license. I.e., the same person or entity which would be named in a U.S. copyright notice. For a corporate work, this would be the company, even if they may or may not separately give credit to individual employees. For your more general "credit", sure, we want to mention any relevant information like that if we can, but really only the uploader really has an idea of who really touched it "in a significant manner", so almost always we will just let the uploader decide. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:32, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
I can't point to a case where an image infringed on a book, but I can imagine it for a sufficiently complex word-picture. I'm having trouble with your distinction between the code and the output of the code. An MP3 or JPEG are in some sense just code for a specialized interpreter. I can't imagine a program that played a copyrighted song or displayed copyrighted artwork would get treated as contributory infringement; they would treat it is a direct copy. I don't know how someone could have a copyright on the output of a program and yet have no copyright on the program, so that anyone can pass it around.--Prosfilaes (talk) 09:30, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
An MP3 or JPEG is really just data, at that level -- there are no instructions in the sense of it being a computer program, and no real human authorship. Two programmers can write separate programs to perform the same task; the copyright is not based on the task it performs but rather each programmer's expression in the way they did it -- it's tied to the actual text, or slightly more abstractly in how they order and group the instructions, i.e. the structure of the program. The BSD Unix systems were able to be released under their license because they gradually rewrote the entire codebase of the original, proprietary Unix system they started with -- even though it performed the exact same function, the code itself had been completely re-written, such that Berkeley was now the sole author and copyright owner, despite the fact that AT&T wrote the original code. To me, graphic images and a literary-based copyright are utterly different types of expression, and it's difficult to me to think of a situation where one could be derivative of the other -- a paragraph can describe an idea, but someone else can write a different paragraph to describe the same idea, and that second paragraph is not derivative of the first. The copyright is in the expression, i.e. the specific words and phrases chosen. Someone making an image depicting the same idea would seem to be even more removed from the original copyright than someone writing a different paragraph. I'm really not familiar with how much coding goes into an image like this, but it sounds like it's enough to carry its own copyright. Someone else could write their own program to generate the same image, and that program would not infringe the copyright on the first (unless they copied the actual text of the code, or something very close to it). But, if the output is also copyrightable (the choice of colors, the specific way they illustrated the idea), the output image of the second program could still infringe on the output image of the first program -- the second person is at that point copying the expression seen in the first image, when they make theirs. If there is really only one way or limited ways to write a program to generate a particular output image, then the program itself may not be separately copyrightable -- that may be a merger doctrine issue. In your example above, you would have to copy the data/expression from the song or artwork in order to embed it into your program in the first place. Image viewer software has its own copyright, of course, and other people can write other image viewers without infringing the first. An image viewer to display a particular, copyrighted image is substantially the same program, except of course they would have to copy the image data into the program instead of being given an arbitrary source, and that part would be infringement, of course. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:32, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
I would state the analogy as being more like a painter and a photographer. You spend months painting a beautiful picture (the software) and I walk in one day and photograph your work with a digital camera (the image). I upload on Commons as "my own work". Obviously, that is very unfair to you. And again, this software is not Photoshop. It might be called "sole-purpose" software. It was written to produce a few images, perhaps even just one, or a single animation. This is often the case when we write programs to simulate a physical phenomenon. I think I would be correct in saying that most of the examples on www.youvan.com are "sole-purpose" programs - so, I am incredibly sensitive to this issue of attribution when I think I see a photographer ripping off an artist. Thanks for making me think in understandable terms. I am often terse and get people mad! Doug youvan (talk) 14:40, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
That is a straightforward derivative work (at best) and copyright infringement -- the photograph is subject to the copyright of the painting, as it uses the painting's expression, and we would delete such a photo unless 1) we also had permission from the painter, or 2) the copyright in the painting has expired. It's even possible, if the photo is basically a reproduction of the painting (i.e. a {{PD-Art}} situation), that the photographer is not even an author -- it amounts to a copy of the painting, so they added no copyrightable expression to the end result. Someone writing a separate program to perform the same general task as one of yours is not necessarily the same thing, at all. You may have given them the idea, or maybe both were inspired by a third source, but unless they copied some specific, identifiable, expression, there is no issue under copyright law, which does not protect ideas. If you are saying someone took your program to produce an animation, tweaked it a bit to produce a similar but slightly different output, maybe there is an issue -- it wound depend on many specific details, and I'm not familiar with the level of coding in this area, so I really can't say. But if you are writing a program to reproduce a physical phenomenon, you have no ownership over the phenomenon itself, and it stands to reason that an independent program would produce a somewhat similar image to illustrate the same phenomenon. There have even been cases, I'm pretty sure, where completely independent creation which resulted in substantially the same work were deemed separate, independent, non-derivative copyrights. If other people contributed code to their program, the program itself would be a derivative work and would need permission from that other person to post the source code, but I'd think only if that other person contributed code which directly resulted in creating part of the expression seen in the eventual image (and the code was supplied with that intention), would that person also be considered an "author" of the produced image. If someone supplied utility code which, while helpful, has no bearing on the actual expression in the eventual output image, then no, I would not consider them an author of the image, and maybe not deserving of credit (otherwise, why wouldn't you credit all the authors of Photoshop, if you used that program to help produce an image?). The authorship of the program itself, that's different. Thus, posting the source code may require a different set of permissions than the image alone. There are a lot of fuzzy boundary issues in copyright law, and this gets into some of them to be sure. But either way, it would be incumbent on the people whose actual work is involved to make the complaint. Are you saying that some of your work is infringed by this other image? Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:34, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
Carl, No I am not being infringed, but you did hit on one of the scenarios: "If other people contributed code to their program, the program itself would be a derivative work and would need permission from that other person to post the source code, but I'd think only if that other person contributed code which directly resulted in creating part of the expression seen in the eventual image (and the code was supplied with that intention), would that person also be considered an "author" of the produced image." Quoting from from User_talk:Kraaiennest / Crowsnest: "Dear Doug Youvan, I do not intent to make the code available, since it is (in part) the property of others." Now, let me try to reduce your sentence to a shorter one for this specific situation:
If other people contributed code which directly resulted in creating part of the expression seen in the eventual image that person also (must) be considered an "author" of the produced image. Carl - Please tell me if I got that right.
Hypothetically, consider that shorter italic sentence to be true in the case of Kraaiennest for File:Deep water wave.gif, so my questions is now: Did he need permission from the other authors to deposit this file?
If there were more than one person working on producing the final image, then yes, there are probably multiple authors, and it's a joint work. I think they had to intend to produce the image together. Any one of the authors usually can license the work (at least on a non-exclusive basis) without asking any of the other authors, I'm pretty sure, at least in the U.S. Some info from William Patry here. Also, contributions to the computer program itself do not necessarily mean they are an author of the eventual image -- that would depend very much on the nature of their contributions. Really, the only case where he may have needed someone else's permission is if the image contains copyrightable expression present in some pre-existing work (i.e. another image or graphic work), and is therefore derivative. It seems rather unlikely that such an image would be derivative of another. The computer program is a separate copyright, and if chunks of code from other programs were used, then indeed that may not be able to be uploaded without additional permission. I don't see any reason at all to think there's any kind of an issue here. Carl Lindberg (talk) 04:36, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
I do not understand why this all creates such a fuzz. The physics behind the animation are computed with a program I am licensed to use, but of which I am not the copyright holder (and so cannot place it in the PD). There are many programs and methods around which can produce effectively the same physics data for the wave dynamics. Further, the software to create the images underlying the animation I programmed myself, and I used a series of open-source tools to create the animation from the images. So all the "creative work" in making the animation as it looks is my own.
Why not ask me first, instead of starting this section at the VP (without informing me) insinuating the animation is not my own work, and waving with money? -- Kraaiennest (talk) 07:49, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
Dear Crow, Even funnier: I put up the first image without voiding the check and then had to ask for an emergency deletion! I don't know how to attribute the check, and now that it is in the mail to the WMF its even more complicated.
In reply to your other comments: Your Talk Page has a 3-week long discussion on this topic that ended the day before this discussion started when you said: "Hello Doug, good luck and fun with your project! Regards, Kraaiennest (talk) 14:25, 5 February 2012 (UTC)".However, I will now give you credit for anything good that has come of our interactions, and I will take the full blame for everything else. I ask you to forgive me for my bad behavior, and let's move on. The parameters I need to re-do File:Deep water wave.gif will themselves be redone and all code will be published. If I am in gross error, you can point it out if you want.
I think the main point of the current discussion here on the Pump is how we should be depositing graphics (particularly animations) that are generated by customized programs of the type you and I use. The WMF has stomped on the toe of the giant textbook industry, and I am afraid some of what we are doing is going to come under attack. We just saw law change extending the copyright of certain materials that caused hundreds of images here on Commons to be threatened with deletion. I can see how the textbook industry could cry foul over over a 5+ million article encyclopedia with figures of questionable origin. You know that I have been through rough litigation on intellectual property. I have an idea of what kind of attack they would mount. I trust the GC / Foundation is aware of this potential problem and some new plan for graphics deposition is being made. What you have deposited would be some of the easiest to attack, while my contributions would be difficult to attack. You use a pseudonym, and I use a real name. You maintain code as secret, and I publish code. You have no contact information (email), but I do. We are relying on your reading of an undisclosed "open software" license, while I clearly use Mathematica and its well known license for nonprofit work. My resume is published, yours is not. Please be aware that I am not criticizing you, I am just pointing out our weak spots if an attempt is made to shut us down. Doug youvan (talk) 15:43, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
I think this commons deletion request and other like it are likely to be filled with rhetoric, as the guidelines at COM:SCOPE contain too many exceptions - you could drive a wagon and horses through this policy. Following on from the debate about what is and what is not within Commons' scope at Commons:Deletion requests/File:British lion and Union flag.jpg, my complaint is that there isn't any clear defintion as to what images fall within the scope of Commons or outside, whether they be education, political or otherwise. Current policy is too wishy-washy, and provides no clear guidance, so participating in debates is almost pointless, as you are sure to come up against another editors whose views are entirely opposed to yours, yet they can still point to the same policy for justification of their views as you can. --Gavin Collins (talk) 17:19, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
There are some batch task tools. I'm not sure about whether they are available to everyone (I'm an admin, & I have these for myself, but it's not something I know a lot about). Rillke (talk·contribs) maintains them, so he'd know the details. - Jmabel ! talk05:01, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
I just noticed that an edit I made was tagged with "manual deletion request by new user" as if that is something to be alarmed about. I have a couple questions about this:
Do I meet the definition of a new user here? I registered nearly two years ago and have made several hundred edits and uploads.
There was a speedy deletion tag on the image, I followed the directions on the tag itself for how to contest a deletion, and found that the software tried to get me to do it the automatic way anyway, and then I got tagged as if it was a problem. Shouldn't that be fixed? Isn't there some way to integrate that functionality into the template so it is more user friendly and doing what it says to do doesn't bring up all these bells and whistles?
It is something to be alarmed about. You did it wrong; you failed to list the DR properly on the deletion request page. It's not something to be ashamed about, but it's the reason the automated procedure was made and doesn't happen when it's used.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:04, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
That's because we don't have filters that can detect a manual deletion not done correctly. We apparently have filters that can detect a manual deletion request by a new user. I'm not sure we can always trust an old user to do it correctly, but manual deletion is frequently used in mass deletions, and flooding this message was probably not considered wise.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:22, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, but I don't know what you mean by "flooding this message." And if manually adding deletion notices is a bad thing (I readily admit I screwed it up, I got called into work in the middle and of doing it and didn't follow through with some of the steps) then why does the speedy deletion template tell you to do it? I may not be new, but I admit I don't edit here that often other than just making uploads, so I don't know all the jargon used here. As a matter of fact, the image in question has now been deleted with the rationale that it was "clearly DW." I don't know what that is supposed to mean either so it's not very helpful. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:31, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
There are some people trying to categorize old uncat files (including me), but it's a long way. There are thousands of images with unclear rights and sources, not to talk about all those pics and diagrams and portraits which only the uploader may know details about. I guess most of them could go to DR without bothering, but that would also mean a big overhead and admins work. And there are always some pearls in the trash that can be used in wp articles, worth to be sorted out manually. OK, you can go the fast way and do one category per image, like "Unidentified ..." or "Diagrams in ..." to get it categorized, but that's not really satisfying at all, because those categories should also be cleaned, not filled up. I really don't know what the best solution should look like, to get rid of those uncat images. I did about 10k old files in the last months, but with each stone you take away from the bottom, 10 new grow on top.--Funfood␌08:44, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
It would be already a great help if a bot could categorise them per subject or country. It is much more efficient to categorise in a limited context and people tend to be more motivated to discover images pertaining to their country or area of interest. Even categorisation per language would already help. Frankly, if I have to process tens of images described in Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, ..., it takes much more time and one gives up quicker. --Foroa (talk) 11:44, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
I try to find a few hours per week to assist in reducing the number of uncategorized files, but it's not easy. In many cases, you just have no clue as to what it's about... I don't know whether a bot would be helpful. Perhaps we should consider "weeding out" the collection of uncategorized images: images of poor technical quality, no description, not in use in any project and uploaded months ago if not years ago, could be deleted safely IMHO. Regards, MartinD (talk) 14:33, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
List view as an optional alternative to the default thumbnail view of categories?
Would it be possible to have an alternative list view for categories? For instance, some categories consist almost entirely of audio files, so the thumbnails are all the same, and the file names are often truncated, omitting important distinguishing information (for an example, see Category:Audio files of classical music by Martha Goldstein). If there were a list view without thumbnails which did not truncate file names, I think it would be an improvement. (Actually, I think this might be a useful option for all image categories.) I am thinking of something like the different views available in Apple Macintosh Finder windows, where one can easily switch between viewing a file directory as icons or as names in a list. --Robert.Allen (talk) 20:55, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
You could use the API :-) But I agree, would be great to have such an option for the user. There is only __NOGALLERY__ which affects all users. There is also a gadget for full file-names. -- RE rillkequestions?22:59, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
I see an editor added __NOGALLERY__ to the example I mentioned, but obviously that only solves the problem for this one particular category. And not many users will know about "gadgets". --Robert.Allen (talk) 00:55, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. If you refer to the diacritics issue, i.e. Ș and Ț vs Ş and Ţ that indeed is a problem. It is addressed on ro Wiki but not on en Wiki and probably not on Commons. I will take this item and work with those involved on ro Wiki to figure out some guidelines and solutions. Thanks for pointing it out.--Codrin.B (talk) 21:49, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
As Commons uses English names first, then falls back to local names I recommend use of Ș and Ț for categories with Romanian names. None of Ș, Ț, Ş or Ţ appear in English, AFAIK. Just my 2p though. There was mention on en wiki of a bot for making the change over, but the author is taking a wikibreak. Railwayfan2005 (talk) 20:30, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Commons categories are mostly in English, but place names are a possible exception. I think using English names for bigger towns but local names for smaller towns (or the like) creates confusion that is totally unnecessary. The search engine will find the categories regardless of diacritics. I think more Romanian speakers than English speakers will upload images from Romania, which means correct local spelling will result in fewer red category links having to be corrected. --LPfi (talk) 10:49, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
February 8
Ta-dam! Come help rename
Hallo all,
Following the blessed spree of category-cleanup sessions around Commons we started about a month ago, it would be great if you find the spare moment to come - as many of you as poss - to voice your support or dissupport for the rename proposals all made with much sense & vital care for the consistancy across Wiki's cats (meow!). The pages you may want to start with are, to date, Category talk:Victims of war (Proposed: War fatalities) and Category talk:Slavic people (Slavic people by country or Slavic people by region). So... See you there loud! ;) Orrlingtalk13:03, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
I've noticed that the Flickr2Commons upload tool has been unusually unreliable and slow in the past several days. Magnus has posted a note there: "Some of my tools are currently not fully operational due to a broken database server (affecting commons and ru.wp, amongst others)."
Is there a guesstimate of when this problem might be fixed?
Is there a long-term problem with the Toolserver? Both upload tools run slow (or stop dead) pretty regularly. TIA, Tillman (talk) 23:39, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
There was a report of intermittent hardware problems on the Toolserver on 8 February - it was impacting Steward election eligibility checker as well. The notices about that problem seem to have disappeared so I would presume the problem is now fixed QUTalkQu22:11, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Some template like {{Information}} and {{Creator}} rely on translatewiki for internationalization. This allows to get many translations, but the process is not well documented. It would be convenient if we could add new messages there (for instance for the new "authority control" paramater of {{Creator}}) but I dont know how to do it. So two questions:
Agree We need some documentation of how to introduce new translatewiki parameters and how to make them work on Commons. To my knowledge at the moment only User:Multichill knows the process. --Jarekt (talk) 12:51, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
Downloading tile sets for very high resolution files
A few dozen of my largest uploads (e.g. File:In the Conservatory.jpg) had to be downscaled in order to upload at Commons, due to the 100 MB limit and due to the fact that the largest size is so huge that it can only be represented (or usefully manipulated) as a set of JPEG tiles, rather than a single image. I'd like to distribute the tile sets too, but there's no way to do that through Commons, so I've set up a seedbox and I'm linking the files on Commons to it using the new template {{Tile set download}}. Here's an example:
Template:Tile set download
I'm also listing them at Commons:Very high-resolution file downloads. I realise this is less than ideal, but don't see an alternative - I'd appreciate any feedback on this approach. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:11, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Interesting. Can you add some documentation please? The template says "Special software is needed to view and process images stored in this form." and implies more info at Commons:Very high-resolution file downloads - but there's none to be found there. And: I'm unconvinced about relying on an external website in this way. Fine as proof of concept, but it's surely not a long-term solution. Rd232 (talk) 02:38, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
I would prefer not to rely on an external website (or pay for it) - what I'd really like is to persuade WMF to host it. I hope if it's established as a useful feature that people use, they'll consider taking them on. I'll add some documentation, but unfortunately the software to process images stored in this form is currently, well, nonexistent. The metadata file info.xml is a (very simple) nonstandard XML format used by Google. I'll paste my notes from README.txt - the most I can say about it is "I have a fairly good idea how it could be done," and I have a prototype of a viewer but it's not ready. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:43, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Hm! I see, thanks. Well I'll have a look in bugzilla tomorrow if there's any existing bugs that are relevant. Clearly this "very high resolution" stuff does fit within the Commons scheme of things; it's just a question of when the 100MB limit will be lifted, which depends on ... something techy (I forget what). Rd232 (talk) 03:06, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Well, even if there were no upload limit, Commons still wouldn't permit upload of ZIP files (for security reasons). So I'd either need some kind of special exemption, or the server would have to open up the ZIP and see that it only contains JPG and XML files. Additionally, it can be quite challenging for people with unreliable connections to download multi-gigabyte files over HTTP, which is why I'm setting up the BitTorrent option (with web seeding). Dcoetzee (talk) 03:40, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Office hours on the new "Legal and Community Advocacy" department
Hi, guys. Some of you may already know that the WMF is carving out a new department, promoting User:Philippe (WMF) to Director of Community Advocacy working under General Counsel Geoff Brigham. As community liaison, answering to Philippe, I'm tagging along as well. :) As per meta:Legal and Community Advocacy/LCA Announcement, "This new alignment will carry forward the Foundation’s goals of advocating for the community in new ways, ranging from fighting for content online, to facilitating community discussions about critical WMF initiatives that affect the community, to better supporting Wikimedia administrators and functionaries, to providing information about legislative initiatives worldwide that impact online content and censorship."
I understand that there is some confusion about what the department is meant to do, and I wanted to be sure that as many people as possible know that office hours are being held today in about 2 hours on IRC to discuss things. (See meta:IRC office hours if you need to know more about how to participate in that. If you can't participate in it, a transcript will be posted after.) I'd really hope to see good turn out there, because I'm honestly pretty excited about the possibilities. Being still an active editor (at least on weekends!), I'm a shameless cheerleader for community, and I'd love to see high participation in making this department function well to serve community needs. :) Even if you can't participate in the office hours, there are plenty of ways you can help shape this department at its ground level. Please read meta:Legal and Community Advocacy/LCA Announcement and play a part! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Watermark policy
The Commons policy on watermarks (specifically attribution watermarks) is weak, ambiguous and troublesome. The basic problem is this: an uploader puts a visible credit in the image figuring that's his right of attribution. This however conflicts with the watermark template and Commons:EXIF which says in effect that a visible watermark in the image is "discouraged" and a non-watermarked image should be uploaded in its place. This sets up a conflict between an editor removing the watermark and the original uploader attempting to keep it in. Here is a recent example of such a conflict.
There is a proposed Watermarks policy that attempts to address this issue (along with assorted other topics). While the need for some of it is debatable, the following paragraph would go a long way towards putting the attribution issue to rest...
Authors who are concerned about attribution will often be alarmed when visible watermarks are removed from their images. In the past, some of them have claimed that Creative Commons licenses forbid the removal of these watermarks, since they are a form of attribution. The community has explicitly rejected this interpretation of the license, adopting instead the interpretation that attribution statements can and should be re-located to the image description page and/or image metadata while remaining in compliance with the license. See Commons:Deletion requests/Template:CC-Dont-Remove Watermark.
I would like to add the above statement to Commons:EXIF#Watermark after the bulleted paragraph that begins "Personal tags impede..." We should have a clear guideline that watermarks are an unaccepted form of attribution and may be removed. Use of ambiguous terms like "discouraged" should be avoided.
I wrote that paragraph so of course I'd agree with making it more prominent. :-) I think the deletion request already expresses a consensus on the issue. On the other hand, I would be very careful not to imply that "if your image is watermarked, we will not accept it." Rather the message should be "if you upload a file with a visible watermark, it will be removed - so don't bother." Dcoetzee (talk) 23:23, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Actually, I changed the wording of your paragraph slightly. And I agree with your comment except for "so don't bother". That's a little harsh (even for me). While I'm interested in discouraging the upload of watermarked images, I'm MORE concerned with being able to remove them and having firm ground to stand on while doing so. Jbarta (talk) 23:30, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
I considered that as well. This is how I arrived at my proposed insertion point — A section of official guidelines is Commons:Image guidelines. At the bottom of that page it says "See Commons:EXIF for EXIF metadata guidelines." I would assume that too is part of Commons official guidelines. It's on that page that I would like to add the proposed paragraph. Is that not an official guideline and suitable insertion point? Jbarta (talk) 01:09, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Aha, thanks for the explanation. I've fixed that "see also" - COM:EXIF is just a help page, and I think has never been intended to be more than that. It was just a loose usage of "guideline" by the person who added the see also. So we have to try again to find a policy/guideline to put this paragraph. Rd232 (talk) 02:28, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Jbarta -- The word "discouraged" was used because while watermarks can freely be removed, there's no requirement that they be removed... AnonMoos (talk) 04:36, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Hmmm, they both look like IPAC-en to me: Alabama has this code: {{IPAc-en|audio=en-us-Alabama.ogg|ˌ|æ|l|ə|ˈ|b|æ|m|ə}} ; Etobicoke has this: {{IPAc-en|audio=etobicoke.ogg|ɛ|ˈ|t|oʊ|b|ɨ|k|oʊ}} . What am I missing? I made a test post at w:en:Template talk:IPAc-en#Global file usage and IPAC-en but the usage for etobicoke.ogg is still showing nothing. -84user (talk) 17:40, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
You don't, you just do it yourself :) If it's a substantial crop, better upload it under a new name, but if you just crop a little bit (to remove a border for instance) without significantly altering the composition, you can upload it over the existing image. Prof. Professorson (talk) 10:45, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
The direct NOAA source is here, where they just say "Flying With NOAA Collection". The NOAA operates weather planes, so I imagine it has something to do with that type of specialized equipment, but beyond that I don't know. Hm, from this page that would be from one of their WP-3D Orion weather research planes. Not sure which instruments though. By this page, that might be the dropsonde deployment mechanism, but not sure. The photo at the very bottom of this page does show that the item on the right side of this photograph is the dropsonde deployment mechanism, but not necessarily the one showing being used in this photo -- that may be something different. Carl Lindberg (talk) 19:03, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Ooh -- this image shows that same bit of equipment being used to deploy an "air-launched probe". I think that was during operations after the Deepwater Horizon thing to determine where ocean currents might push the oil. So, that may be for probes meant to relay water conditions. Some info on NOAA probes is here; they mention several different types and no clue what this one is. Carl Lindberg (talk) 19:24, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
My guess is similar: He is releasing a probe. On the other photos on flickr you see a NALC (Navy. Ammunitions Logistics Code) 8W59, thats for shallow probes. Produced by Sippican Ocean Systems Inc. Probe is released from the aircraft, drop 300-1000 m to the water surface and transmit data when sinking to the ocean ground. See AXBT Observations or en:Expendable bathythermograph. --Martin H. (talk) 19:50, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Can anyone on advise on this image File:Dux Russian ID.jpg please? It was tagged as {{CC-zero}} but the authorship was given as "Russian government" and it's a scan of an identity card from 1989. I can't believe it should be licensed cc-zero, but I'm not sure from the information in Commons:Licensing what is appropriate for Russian stuff of this era... Thanks QUTalkQu20:50, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I have cerently uploaded following files. I used the classification Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh How ever all files are showing as unclassified. Can someone please help me to classify?
Not sure what you did wrong, but I have now categorised all of them. However, I think that you should read COM:FOP#India and COM:DW. For example, photos of other photos don't seem to be allowed. --Stefan4 (talk) 23:46, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
When using the upload wizard today, I'm getting either "The server did not respond within the expected time.", "http error" or "unknown error". When the upload does occasionally go through, I'm getting a message like "still checking the image for uniqueness" and it just hangs.
Anyone else seeing similar problems? Everthing was OK for me yesterday and also earlier today. This just started happening in the last 10 minutes or so. Thanks for any possible info. Rept0n1x (talk) 08:25, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
Also, I noticed in "Latest Files" that images are still being uploaded to commons. I just managed to upload an image myself, using the conventional "upload form" rather than the wizard. Although it was very slow to upload and also I'm finding HotCat.js to be unresponsive with "504 gateway timeout" errors. So I think something is still not right. I will leave it for now, and check the site again sometime later. Rept0n1x (talk) 09:16, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
I just tried it again and the upload wizard is working fine for me now. Although, I'm finding that HotCat remains slow and unresponsive for the time being. Rept0n1x (talk) 10:05, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
(Apologies if this message isn't in your language.) The Wikimedia Foundation is planning to upgrade MediaWiki (the software powering this wiki) to its latest version this month. You can help to test it before it is enabled, to avoid disruption and breakage. More information is available in the full announcement. Thank you for your understanding.
I succeeded in moving it to the categories page. But there is no source of the image, so I think it has to go to DR.--Funfood␌23:31, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for fixing this file, but I'm more concerned about how this happened and whether there other files that whose category tags are not being recognized. --agr (talk) 15:17, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
I added the description-header-tag and removed an empty line below the categories, that did the trick - to prove if there are more files afflicted with this issue I think there has to be set up a bot that searches files for similar errors in their description.--Funfood␌15:46, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
Can the category Category:21st-century photographers from Russia include the category with photos made by XXI-century photographer from Russian town? The answer is not obvious, because User:A.Savin removes it from such a category explaining as «not notable». See the edit
[4]. Please help me to clear the question and to understand, if I need to prove myself being a photographer with some governmental license or what WikiCommons need for this. Thanks.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 05:50, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
Pretty much, go by Wikipedia notability standards. If they don't merit a Wikipedia article, they probably don't merit a category as a photographer. You can always create something like I suggested, and if later it becomes clear that the person is more famous than we thought, we can fix the matter by fixing that category. - 15:52, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
Hello, Could you please help identify these beasts? There are huge: 20 to 25 cm long! I added geocoding. Thanks, Yann (talk) 20:41, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
A Wikipedia website (File:Friesian Stallion.jpg) has a picture of a trotting Friesian stallion. How can I find the name of this particular horse and any other specific information; e.g., statistics, location, etc.? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.128.228.91 (talk • contribs)
Really, you can't, other than if you can track down the photographer and ask her. But there's a fair chance that the owner of the horse would prefer not to tell an anonymous stranger where to find his horse. - Jmabel ! talk22:30, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
LOL, I don't know why it is so funny to me that someone is requesting personal info on a horse, but it is. I'm not posting anything here but Google-stalking should give you all the info you need. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja (talk / en) 22:38, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
Apology to the community
Recently I've come to realize that some uploads I'd added relating to the donkey punch phenomenon were not directly related and therefore not applicable to the topic or in scope. I'm glad the community voiced its opinion at related deletion discussions with regard to these images, and I've taken that feedback onboard and deleted them as self-requested by uploader (myself). I acknowledge the concerns of the community, and I thank you for the civil and polite way in which these concerns were brought to my attention by the majority of those that raised them.
I am tired of not being able to use wikipedia for school work. I suggest that wikipedia opens up a branch that can only be edited by employees. This information is collected from the employees from regular wikipedia and then the correct info is posted onto "academicwikipedia.org" which would allow people to use as a reliable source. This is just an idea, but i think it could be very successful for wikipedia if done properly.
Wikimedia is short on funds as it is, and also rather short on people. And if you would open up this position to volunteers then chances are your school would still disallow the use of the material from there as they'd not see it as 'creadible' enough. VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 08:06, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
108.38.207.154 This is not quite the right place for your suggestion (Commons is just a repository for media used by other wikimedia projects). But may I suggest that the problem is not the accuracy or otherwise of an encyclopedia, but how you use it. If you want to cut-and-paste information from an encyclodedia into your project then you get caught out by errors and omissions (even classics like Britanica have those). You can use an encyclopedia as a place to start, somewhere to get an overview, then follow up the references (that point to where the information came from). If those sources look good you can quote those sources directly in your work. If there are no sources for the information, then it may be suspect, time to look elsewhere. If there are sources listed, check them out and evaluate whether they are primary/authorative sources - or does it look like they've taken their information from elsewhere. --Tony Wills (talk) 08:10, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
If I understand correctly the proposal is to create a team of professional experts whose job is to maintain an error-proof academic wikipedia, so that lazy students can copy and paste even more confortably from their sofas. Wow! I fully agree with Tony Wills (who is much more mellow than me) in that it is the student's responsability to evaluate the credibility of the sources. Wow again! -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 10:42, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
Hey I think you're jumping on the kid way too hard. Why do you think he simply wants to copy? I've heard of schools where a citation to Wikipedia earns an automatic F on a paper. 108.38.207.154 I don't think a professionally edited encyclopedia is going to come out of Wikipedia, but there are a lot of people concerned with quality. You could try asking about the credibility/reliability issue on the Wikipedia Village Pump (different from this page, which is for commons); you may get some useful answers.Dankarl (talk) 13:19, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
Maybe I was harsh in the way I expressed myself but not in the message I wanted to pass. Wikipedia should be the beginning of an academic research, not its end. And I'm not assuming that 108.38.207.154 is a kid. On the contrary he/she is most probably a college student giving the first steps in serious research. And the worst message that we can transmit to a college student is that there is some kind of warehouse where error-proof scientific information is waiting for us. That will help killing their skepticism and growing their laziness. Alvesgaspar (talk) 18:19, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
You can actually use Wikipedia for school work, just not in the way youu expect. Text from Wikipedia articles are free to use, but your school may not accept Wikipedia as a reliable source. That's why most articles have citations for all important facts with links to their original sources. Articles that does not have citations are not to be considered trustworthy and should not be used for academic work. /Esquilo (talk) 15:42, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
Probably a transient caching problem -- such caching difficulties can occur at a number of locations (on the Wikimedia server, in your local computer's browser, or somewhere between)... AnonMoos (talk) 04:07, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
Only administrators have the rigths to delete a file. This happens after a delete procedure, after community discussion. You can nominate a file for deletion by placing the {{delete}} tag. Read the instructions that you see by placing the tag. (incomplete request) Smiley.toerist (talk) 20:49, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm wondering if there's a bot that can search out file usage, but instead of deleting the reference (like CommonsDelinker), it simply changes it to a new filename, useful for vector versions of files (and for updating names of SVGs). If so, assuming this would be an admin privilege, are there any admins willing to perform this action regularly for the Graphics Lab? It'd be a great help if this was semi-automated. NikNakstalk - gallery - wikipedia16:17, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
Changing .png/.jpg/.gif files to .svg is rather controversial and should not be automated. Technically the replace could do this, but we disabled this on purpose. Multichill (talk) 16:36, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
Where the image is a faithful recreation of a raster, or even a superior version of a simple diagram, most uploaders (like myself) routinely make the changes manually. I understand that with something like this, where the vector is highly simplified and stylised, a routine bot change would be controversial. However, with a little discretion, I don't see why using a bot would be a problem. NikNakstalk - gallery - wikipedia17:40, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
Bots don't do it to avoid getting blamed in the event of a dispute. I think the right solution is an automatic or semiautomatic tool that a user can run under their own global account that does the same thing. Dcoetzee (talk) 01:23, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
It would be even more helpful if it were possible to know all the independent wikis which use any given file, so that if a file is renamed or deleted then a message can be sent to that wiki or a bot triggered. You could not expect an independent wiki to put a note on every file it uses (there would be many millions) but if Commons held a list of frequent external users, on which list a wiki could lodge its contact details, then it might be possible to detect a listed wiki's use of any Commons file as we do WP usage and send a message. I do not know the technical requirements to have such a system or if it is at all possible. Hogweard (talk) 13:56, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Files on Commons list any usage in the WikiMedia family, but that is not quite "universal"; Commons cannot know where a file is used elsewhere, on an independent wiki. Any wiki with an up to date copy of MediaWiki (or the right extension) can import a Commons file: on Wikishire, for example, every image is a Commons file and direct uploads are blocked. More wikis should be encouraged to do that, to encourage users to build Commons up for everyone.
It is a one-way traffic, so there is no way for Commons to spot use by an independent wiki, unless there were some "come and look here" list. Hogweard (talk) 14:13, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
How can you update files? With the old update procedures this was no problem: you uploaded the same file, got an error that the file already exist and then you instruct the procedure to ignore the warning. The system has now no problem with to files under the same name: File:Roma Fiuggi hillside.jpgSmiley.toerist (talk) 11:01, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
No, the issue is resolved. I should apply te same renames as applied to wikipedia to my PC files. When a rename happened on wikipedia I inadvertantly "updated" the file with the old name and created a new file. Other than that we could discus ways to scan discoloured old slides. It is not a simple colour correction. Smiley.toerist (talk) 23:35, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Jmabel ! talk 01:18, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Request: delete a category on a protected image
This image (NSFW) seems inappropriate for Category:Nails, which it doesn't really fit (the nails are even out of focus). Having the image not listed there would probably go a long way from quelling future controversies about this image (3 deletion requests since 2008), since people viewing any of the other categories are less likely to take offense to this specific image. I'd have deleted the category myself, but the image is protected. If an admin could delete the Nails category on my behalf, that'd be great. (If this is the wrong place to ask, I'd appreciate a pointer to the right place.) --91.97.106.21723:12, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
I don't think that NSFW or not should determine categories, but the point with the image doesn't seem to be the nails, so I think that it is misleading to categorise it as "nails". --Stefan4 (talk) 23:15, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
This should be a central metacategory for about a half of Commons, but we see it severely underused. Go to bind various topical photographs’ categories to the centre, folks! Incnis Mrsi (talk) 18:01, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
Please use restraint when creating subcategories in this part of the category tree. As mentioned in Category:Photographs, this should be primarily be used for special kinds of photographs (such as aerial photographs). A very large portion of the files on Commons are photographs, and adding one more layer below every topic category in the category tree would usually leave an empty parent category without really making it any easier to find content. —LX (talk, contribs)21:03, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
I don't understand what this proposal is about. When we open the main page we see the whole hierarchical system of categories under 'Content'. For example, for finding a certain species of animal we start at Nature, go to Animalia, etc.. Why create a parallel system? -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 22:05, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
It's not parallel, it's orthogonal, because our categorization is not a simple hierarchy but a matrix. Sorting by what is depicted is one way to categorize, but not the only; it's equally legitimate to sort by medium (photograph, drawing, etc.). This metacategory is part of the intersection of these distinct categorization techniques. cmadler (talk) 13:36, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Intersecting but hardly orthogonal. As soon as you put "by topic" in you wind up in most cases paralleling the existing net. Dankarl (talk) 13:41, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Oh dear. How much better if the system could could allow searching or filtering, to avoid creating these sorts of duplicatory issues... Do we really want to duplicate the entire topic structure for Photographs, Paintings, Drawings, Videos, Sounds, etc...? Rd232 (talk) 15:15, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
I got an error when I tried to use it, and then I noticed that, right at the top, it says, Due to database server issues, some projects (Commons, ru.wikipedia, and others) don not work at the moment. How do you make it work for Commons? cmadler (talk) 20:04, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
That i a temporary error that occures from time to time for all Wikimedia projects. Just wait until the database lock is released. It usually doesn't take more than a few minutes. /Esquilo (talk) 10:22, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
Nah, there was a bigger issue this time (corrupted database or something), so the tool was temporarily unusable (hence the warning). To use it, just put "commons" as the language and "wikimedia" as the project, like in this example. Jean-Fred (talk) 21:13, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
Sounds reasonable, but to enjoy any such "filtering" each image must have some tag, identifying its nature. What set of tags to use? Photographs and drawings are not all we have. There are also screenshots, scans, computer generated landscapes, and also various retouched and montaged images. Some heavily retouched images look like technical drawings, but other look like photographs. There are drawings, which technically are scans, and there are scanned analogue photographs. It is not easy to make a good classification of millions of pictures. Categories have an advantage that the technology is already in use. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 19:34, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
View the code of a Template
Hi there, i had the Template:Talkback on my talkpage and i like the small photo with the rolled document. So i wanted to know which image that this. I tried to click on it to come to the commons page of the photo as it works usually. But I had to learn that this doesn't work in the case of a template. So i went to the the Template:Talkback page to view the code. But here I neather could see the code/source. I'm in the Matrix, help, help....:) How can I see the "real" code of the template with the name of the inserted image?? Thanks a lot!! --W like wiki (talk) 12:11, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
It must be me, I seem to have problems getting to use the website. I do have a problem getting a listing of the maps in a area. There doesnt seem de to be search function. For example south Belgium. How do I get there on the website? Why not zoom in to a particular area? Smiley.toerist (talk) 21:55, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Problems with adding description in another (4th) language
Concerning: File:Pseudorhabdosynochus_morrhua.jpg.
Could somebody explain to me why I cannot add a fourth language to the description of a file? The page is good with three languages (English, French, Italian). I uploaded with two languages and then added later the third (by editing the code) without problem. But when I add a fourth language (Czech) then only English is visible! Is that a bug or did I miss something? I tried several times with minor changes but the 'show preview' button always shows only English. Thank you for your help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeanloujustine (talk • contribs) 18:01, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
That's normal and MediaWiki:Multilingual description.js is responsible for this. The user can pick a language from the select directly below the image. The default language is determined by the script from your settings or your browser so a Czech user would see only Czech. This behavior prevents cluttering the file page and presents the relevant information to the user. See also: {{Mld}} (javascript solution), {{Langswitch}} (server side switch of languages). -- RE rillkequestions?18:10, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
Thank you, I understand now. Finally I discovered that Firefox shows me only the English text while Google allows me to see all the five versions. However, both are set to fr-fr, I suppose.Jeanloujustine (talk) 20:38, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
It depends. The script also saves what you choose last in a cookie. If you want to see all, simply select "show all" in the language-select directly below the image. -- RE rillkequestions?14:16, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
Nice. But for some reason when language=de for example (anything other than en), we get edit links for both de and en. I don't think we should have edit links in the feed, and I don't see why en description should be linked if the specified language is available. Rd232 (talk) 00:57, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
Well, that's how those templates work - I've tweaked them[6][7] not to show edit links if requested. If someone thinks that the "Problems playing the file?" link in MOTD feeds is also inappropriate, they can add |nohelp=1here. Max Semenik (talk) 10:04, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for your work. In alterate languages the dates is not i18n (eg in French "Image du jour de Wikimedia Commons pour le 8 February"), any way to fix this ? Jean-Fred (talk) 11:30, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
Great. Whether we want the links in the sidebar, I'm not sure - it's already quite crowded. But we definitely want to update Commons:Feeds and the RSS links from COM:POTD and COM:MOTD. The existing Toolserver RSS tool allows different sizes of images; if the Extension doesn't, we'll need to provide both options. Any volunteers to do the update? :) Rd232 (talk) 22:33, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
I've added the above Sister Links template to Category:Freedom of speech, as a way of coordinating Crosswiki sister Wikimedia projects together along the topic. If anyone knows of any other Sister Wiki site links in other languages, and/or other websites, that aren't yet included, please feel free to suggest them at Category talk:Freedom of speech.
I'd be most appreciated to anyone interested in this topic who'd like to help out!
Is there a tool around to find out how many unused images (that is, that do not appear in any wiki) are there on commons or in a certain category?--Strainu (talk) 10:24, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
No. Only usage on Wikimedia wikis is logged, so it is impossible to prove that an image is unused. Proving that an image is used is sometimes possible, though. --Stefan4 (talk) 10:36, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
To review the usage of single categories in Wikimedia wikis you can use glamorous: example (you need to be lucky to have a working toolserver...). --Saibo (Δ) 01:14, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
WW2 US government funded cartoons
Are cartoons such as this[8] in the public domain? The animation studios were hired by the US government to make them, yet on this page[9], a still is included only as fair use. FunkMonk (talk) 13:37, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
The issue is whether the person making these became an employee of the government or not. If there was some "propaganda officer" position, then they would be in public domain, however, if it was a contract to create these or if they were created and then bought, then the government will have copyright of them. VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 13:55, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
The specific cartoon you point to clearly says COPYRIGHT MCMXLII / WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS / ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 25 seconds into the movie. However, I would be stunned if there was a copyright renewal on these.--Prosfilaes (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Probably PD due to lack of renewal; can't be anything else really. Contract situation are case-by-case; some are effectively works of hire, but many are not (doubt this would be). However, if the video contains any of Disney's copyrighted characters, those frames or clips would generally be considered derivative works, so those should not be uploaded here. Carl Lindberg (talk) 19:16, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Where am I to look on that site? Only specific years? And regarding copyrighted characters, isn't most of the stuff in this[10] category problematic? FunkMonk (talk) 01:20, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Dr. Macro publicity stills without specific evidence of no notice/non-renewal
Wikimedia counsel has stated, in response to a query about early publicity stills, "It is essential to confirm that the exact image uploaded to Common was released without a copyright notice." (see w:Wikipedia:CCI#Attorney_reply). In view of this, what are people's feelings about a batch deletion request for Dr. Macro images (and potentially other publicity images) with no specific evidence of no notice/no renewal? There are a ton of questionable images that have been uploaded (generally with a generic statement that any pre-XXXX publicity still is PD) by a handful of users. See e.g. File:Swanson-portrait.jpg. This obviously would not apply to images that have the complete front and back scanned, and it is clear that there is no copyright notice. Calliopejen1 (talk) 04:46, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Two files with same filename?
I think there are two files with the name "Lybia edmondsoni.jpg" . The one I observe when I look at category "Lybia" in Commons is a small crab on a gravelly sea floor. The one I get when I use this filename in the article I am writing in Wikipedia is a small crab resting on an outstretched hand. Can anyone help, please?Cwmhiraeth (talk) 19:49, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Kind of, yes. File:Lybia_edmondsoni.jpg is the Commons version, and shows the sea floor. However, the English Wikipedia has a separate image at en:File:Lybia_edmondsoni.jpg, which is the other one you mention. The local projects can have images uploaded directly on their projects, and those will "override" the Commons version for any use of that name on their project. That one should be moved to Commons as well so that both are available for all projects, though obviously one or the other will have to be renamed. I'm not sure it's possible to reference the Commons version on en-wiki while the other one exists... Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:13, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
After a considerable amount of work, I've created a new template where a user can simply input the known values, and it will output the copyright status for a multitude of nations.
I think this should assist end-users in determining if material is free in their country of origin. While I realize it would be difficult to tag every image with this template, we probably should tag high-volume images with it.
It is not perfect: it only works with years in round numbers, so it will miss some subtleties (e.g., any works published in 1917 are treated published in the USSR, although it is actually only after works October 1917), there are many countries which haven't been added yet, and it still probably has coding bugs.
Also, I realize it could use some formatting (e.g., making it collapsible, making the list of countries i18n-able). I'd certainly like to listen to suggestions on how to do it if people have any. Magog the Ogre (talk) 00:34, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Looks useful. I found something which I think is a bug: the comments in the code state that Spain is 80, 60 or 70 years p.m.a. depending on the year of death of the author. As far as I've understood, EU rules changed the 60 years p.m.a. works to 70 years p.m.a. so that it's 80 years p.m.a. until 6 December 1987 and 70 years p.m.a. since 7 December 1987. The template doesn't seem to implement all possible exceptions related to the rule of the shorter term either. --Stefan4 (talk) 01:14, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
That's not what w:List of countries' copyright length says about Spain's copyright length. As for the shorter term rule, I'm not even sure how it works: do US formalities factor into it, or are they ignored because they're not duration based? Are things like PD-USGov and freedom of panorama factored into other country's assessments? I'd need to understand more about how it works before I factor in more logic. Also, there is a ton of stuff dealing with copyright, and it just wasn't very high on my priority list. Magog the Ogre (talk) 03:17, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm also wondering how formalities work in relation to the rule of the shorter term. The Berne Convention says that copyright terms may not be based on fulfilment of formalities, but at the same time, another section in the Berne Convention states that countries do not have to offer protection for a longer term than the one in the source country. Here it sounds as if the Berne Convention contradicts itself, so I'm not sure what happens. In a discussion, I learnt that Mexico used to have copyright formalities and that fulfilment appears to affects the eligibility for URAA restoration.
I was in fact thinking of some other aspects of the rule of the shorter term. The Berne Convention does, as far as I have understood, state that if a work is first published in a foreign country and then published domestically within 30 days, it is to be treated as first having been published domestically. I can't find a clause stating exactly this, so I guess that it would be the result of the combination of several different clauses. that it is a combination of several different clauses. My understanding is that this 30-day rule disables URAA restoration and the rule of the shorter term for specific works, so it would be necessary to know in which countries it was published domestically within 30 days. Finding recent prints in various countries would probably take way too much time to be useful in most cases. Probably too complex to implement, but I see that you have already implemented the 30-day rule in the US case.
Some countries apply the rule of the shorter term on certain countries but not on other countries. en:rule of the shorter term#Situation in the European Union explains the complex in EU countries. For example, Germany doesn't apply the rule of the shorter term on EU countries, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein or the United States, but does apply the rule of the shorter term on all other countries. Fully implementing this would probably be too complex. --Stefan4 (talk) 17:23, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
I could implement Germany and Canada (Canada observes shorter term unless it is the US or Mexico - i.e., NAFTA) pretty easily; we could change the PD_home variable from a boolean to instead "first published in X country", and insist that X is a two or three letter acronym for the country. Then the page could check that. Still, there would be occurrences where the template wouldn't read it perfectly: for example, if it was published in the US on January 1, then Philippines on January 21, then Australia on February 22. Australia would check if it's PD in the US, but the Philippines would not, because it was published in the Philippines within 30 days. Magog the Ogre (talk) 22:15, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Actually, it's more complex, because for Australia, the country of origin is determined as the country of the shortest term out of those where it was published within 30 days. Let's assume that it's published in the United States on 1 January, then in Canada on 21 January and then in Germany on 22 February. Germany would check this:
Is the US term (95 years since publication) shorter than Canada's term (life+50 years)? → First published in the US, so the rule of the shorter term doesn't apply and the standard life+70 years applies instead.
Is the Canadian term shorter than the US term? → First published in Canada, so life+50 years applies per the rule of the shorter term.
Are the US and Canadian terms equally long? → No idea what happens.
Honestly it's reaching a place where the complexity is getting pretty heavy, and it might be better to just fork it out into a sitewide Javascript which could read the template's parameters directly (in the same way as PERSONDATA works at English Wikipedia). This would have five advantages:
the processing is done much more quickly using a functional programming language rather than template logic, so the long page loads we're getting wouldn't exist
we could set a cookie on the user's machine stating their home nation, should they want to specify one (much like we already do with language preference, if I'm not mistaken)
the nature of JavaScript would make it much easier to write complex explanations like "Fell out of the public domain in the US due to failure to renew copyright" or "Still copyrighted in Germany until 2034 (70 years after the author's death) because Germany doesn't recognize rule of the shorter term for US-based works" or "Author's date of death is unknown, so this work's status is unknown".
the page could load the information only after the user has clicked the "is this free?" box, so we wouldn't even have to waste processing time for a template that a lot of people wouldn't even look at.
the page could implement the more complex logic for things like PD_home with barely any effort and without a large increase in load time.
But it would have one disadvantage: people without JS enabled could not view the information - but this is already a problem for the language preference, and it hasn't caused a lot of problems. I'm leaning towards the JS option. Magog the Ogre (talk) 22:28, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
I think that the JS option would be a good idea. Most people are mainly interested in the copyright status in their own country and it would be nice if that country could be identified and presented at the top. --Stefan4 (talk) 23:45, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm amazed that you managed what you did using templates without ending up in a straight-jacket! However, in the long term, I think it has to be JS to be maintainable. Using JS, it would be possible (I think?) to design a way that the copyright logic is separate in a way that is understandable and updatable by people who don't know much JS. Whereas the templates are already nearly-impenetrable even to relatively experienced template editors. And if the JS can extract existing data (rather than relying on processing a template), so much the fantastically better... By the way, I think a rather important part of the functionality needs to be explaining how the template/script reaches its conclusion: data relied on (i.e. parameters like publication date used), and copyright logic employed. Once again, though, an amazing first effort for what is potentially an incredibly valuable tool. Rd232 (talk) 22:38, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Not JS -- Lua ;-) I agree, once that feature arrives, this type of thing will be infinitely more doable. That is a pretty darn impressive undertaking; even with a language backing, the blizzard of needed information may almost be too much. It really should be able to deal with missing information. For example, someone may not know a creation year or publication year, but would know it had to have happened before the critical X date because of some other pertinent information. Or, marking some information as "presumed" (i.e. was something published during an author's lifetime, and not posthumous). But it would be great, eventually, to have stuff like this where we could ask for pertinent information up front, and have a much more consistent set of tags and licensing. Carl Lindberg (talk) 23:04, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Posthumous: I assume that you mean determining US copyright status for PD-old-100 and UA copyright status for PD-old-70, [...], PD-old-99. Probably useful.
Another thought: let's assume that Nisshin Foods gets the idea of writing the words "CUP NOODLE" in a standard font on a cup and let's assume that the Tokyo High Court rules the cup as not being copyrightable,[11] what would then happen in the UK? Would a UK court then decide that this cup with the words "CUP NOODLE" written in a very artistic font, way above the threshold of originality, isn't copyrighted in the UK because the term in the country of origin (0 years since creation) already has expired? --Stefan4 (talk) 23:45, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Several countries give a term of X years from publication, if a work is published after death. For example, just discussing the Ukraine recently, they have a term of 70 years from publication if something is first published in the 30 years after the author dies -- which is longer than 70pma. India I think has a 60 year from publication term, if first published up to 60 years after the author dies. The UK had an infinite copyright for unpublished works until 1989 (photographs are mostly exempt from that, but otherwise, 2039 is the earliest an unpublished work from before 1989 can expire in the UK, no matter the 70pma). The EU has a 25-year publication right from first publication, no matter when the author died. Those can be derived from the existing parameters as given, but it can take time to get it right -- even the Hirtle chart for the U.S. still gets corrections. Some countries make terms based on "making available to the public", which is often a distinct concept from publication (e.g., exhibition I think would come under that, even if not considered publication). This stuff gets exceedingly complex; there are going to be holes. I think I would ignore complications about the threshold of originality; this is going to be hard enough as it is. Other things I don't see are possibilities for different terms for government works (e.g. Crown Copyright) -- maybe change the USGov parameter to just be "government_work", and pass in the country of origin (or country of first publication, which would also eliminate the need for a separate "US_published_first"). Also, there seem to be inputs like PD_Home, PD-NZ, PD_Poland, PD_URAA, which basically mean that people have to navigate the complexities themselves to come up with those values -- ideally, those are things which could be determined internally, since otherwise that seems to require the user to determine an awful lot, which is what we are trying to avoid by having these templates. User:Teofilo was attempting to write a template to determine the French status based on parameters (including the different types of wartime extensions, and musical compositions potentially have a different term) -- it was pretty complex itself. I sort of liked his idea of having a template for each country, possibly implementing both "current" and "on URAA date" determinations (and some other countries have their own versions of URAA dates); at that point perhaps we could join together those templates into something like this one. Still, we have to start somewhere -- so major props regardless :-) A bit odd on the "general EU" section in the example -- since those countries usually apply the rule of the shorter term, why wouldn't that one be green? Carl Lindberg (talk) 01:11, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
@Rd232: explaining how the script comes up with a determination is doable but would require adding a level of complexity which would make the head swim of the most experienced programmer, and which would probably place a burder on the server resources which is unacceptable (i.e., adding this template to the page would mean it takes 20 seconds to render; this is not a viable solution for mass tagging). It would require duplicate logic, or a template calling itself and returning different data types depending on whether the template is calling itself or if it is being called from the outside.
@Stefan4: One step at a time. In my years of programming, I've learned that if you try to put in everything at first, then you'll never get done. Instead, you make the code functional, and then you add on bit-by-bit. In a template logic system, this is probably too hard anyway.
@Clindberg 1: I haven't implemented a lot of the shorter term logic yet. I condensed all of the EU countries into one line because the template was taking upwards 10-15 seconds to load; we're now down to 5 or 6 (which is still unacceptably high IMHO).
@Clindberg 2: Look at PD-NZ: it is a very specific scenario and it nearly impossible to get the user to input otherwise. It is this: Was this first published abroad (and not published in New Zealand within 30 days), and public domain in its home country on 15 Dec 1994? Using template logic, it would require unthinkable distortions of code to come up with that information on its own. If we had hundreds of manhours, it might be doable, but it would be a severe drain on the server and it would involve a lot of duplication. Template logic just isn't a good enough programming language. The same goes for other things, like crown copyright - which is different in every country; fortunately, the anon variable covers that well enough, as they can have the same timeframe.
@Everyone: what sort of timeframe are we talking about in terms of Lua? Because I can throw together a JS system in a month or so (depending on my free time), but who knows if I'll be around to program this in 2.5 years when/if they finally implement Lua. Magog the Ogre (talk) 01:35, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
One other note -- Europeana has published a bunch of research, in the form of flowcharts, for a lot of countries at http://outofcopyright.eu/media.html . Those could certainly help, as they were used to implement other calculators.
This is really cool. I agree with Carl that we'll want to eventually make it Lua-based (for performance/maintainability) and customised automatically to a logged-in user's country, but most of our readers still aren't logged in and this is a great first step we can start using right away on files whose copyright status varies widely between nations. I'd also like to discuss the impact this will have on the proposed systematic review of PD files at Commons:Requests for comment/PD review. Dcoetzee (talk) 07:28, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm one of the more experienced administrators on the English Wiktionary. Due to a community decisionpinyin entries should only have the minimum of information to get to the Chinese characters form of the word/phrase. There's a bot called DerthBot which adds pronunciation files based on the language code (zh in this case) and the PAGENAME. In my experience, these files are only used on Wiktionary. Ergo what I would like to do is move all of these files to the hanzi form so the bot adds them to the Chinese characters form, not the pinyin. NB I don't propose a way of doing this, given the number of files involved, I just want to know that if I or another editor does this, there are no objections. Thank you, Mglovesfun (talk) 12:57, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Interesting point. I wonder, though, why someone would license an academic article using a Creative Commons licence. Presumably the writer would not mind people distributing it as is, but why would they want anyone "remixing" it, which a CC-BY licence allows? — Cheers, JackLee–talk–15:56, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
I upload photographs to the Commons and license them under CC-BY-SA-3.0 because I don't mind others reusing and modifying them so long as I'm attributed as the original author. If I wrote an academic article, I might not mind if it was freely distributed, but I'm not so sure I would want people to mix-and-match bits of it with other material. Anyway, just my view. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–18:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Reusing an academic article just takes a little creativity. :-) People reuse charts and diagrams from previous articles all the time, and background/related work sections can also be valuable for encyclopedia articles and background sections of future papers. Even summaries of papers which follow the original too closely may be a copyright violation if derivative works are not explicitly allowed, and paper summaries are published all the time in major magazines, etc. Dcoetzee (talk) 07:32, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Note that I have removed the advert. Histo, if you want to discuss copyright with direct implications to Commons you are welcome to do it e.g. at COM:VPC. But please do not just throw-in links to your blog everywhere. --Saibo (Δ) 17:45, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Besides, this is not really an issue with the CC-BY licence. The issue described on the blog is an issue with someone not following the licence and that's a copyright violation. That's no different from using an "all rights reserved" work without permission. --Stefan4 (talk) 18:03, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
Probably has to do with the large MB size of the files in such categories? I can't get a search page to display a large number of them (ex. search "Revue des Deux Mondes" with limit=250). -- Asclepias (talk) 03:42, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
User:67.70.147.72 in Centre Étienne Desmarteau
Bonjour at the male ice hockey players and male supporters [12]
Caution:User talk:67.70.147.72 These 3 computers ( 2 in first floor and one computers in the second floor in the office of direction) are connected in the en:Centre Étienne Desmarteau at Montreal , Canada: it means that several users can write on these computers. I do not want to be implied and involved with this IP community address. In the pass , I have some very big problems with many people in the same IP im Centre Étienne Desmarteau ( see french wiki http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Genevieve2 )
Bonjour aux hockeyeurs masculins et aux supporteurs masculins [13]
Attention: l'adresse IP 67.70.147.72 est une adresse communautaire de 3 ordinateurs. Ces 3 ordinateurs ( 2 sont situés au première étage dans les vestiaires des équipes et un ordinateur est situé au deuxième étage dans le bureau de la coordination de l'aréna) sont reliés au fr:Centre Étienne Desmarteau : Cela signifie que plusieurs utilisateurs peuvent écrire sur ces ordinateurs. Je ne veux pas être impliquée avec cette adresse communautaire. J'ai eu suffisamment de problèmes dans le Wiki francophone avec l'utilisation communataire d'une même adresse IP du Centre Étienne Desmarteau par plusieurs utilisateurs (Faux-nez http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Genevieve2).
--Cordialement féministe ♀ Cordially feminist Geneviève (talk) 22:48, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
You might more usefully leave this message at User talk:67.70.147.72. But I'm not at all sure why you think you are being associated with this address (you haven't clarified that here, and there are no edits to Commons attributed to that address). In any case, if you are using those computers and are logged in, you will be readily distinguished from any non-logged-in users at the same computers. - Jmabel ! talk03:18, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
February 20
Triggertrap
Hi,
I uploaded three pictures on Wikimedia to use on a Wikipedia page named Triggertrap. They were not my work, but the author and designer of those pictures and the inventor of the device gave me permission to publish them in written. I e-mailed the written permission to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org. Now all the three pictures have been deleted. May I ask what is the problem now? Inlandmamba (talk) 19:18, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Did you receive a ticket-number, yet? What is it? If you've sent permission, you can add {{subst:OP}} to your images in future preventing their immediate deletion before the e-Mail is processed. -- RE rillkequestions?23:11, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Related question copied from Commons:Help desk:
Hi all,
I am facing two problems here on Wikimedia. I have contributed 3 pictures on one topic and 12 other on the other one. Basically, I had contributed 3 pictures on a device called triggertrap. They were deleted from Wikimedia. I had sent the written permission to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org for the three pictures of triggertrap. I created this article on Wikipedia and then asked the owner of the pictures and the inventor of the device for their permission to use those pictures on Wikimedia and Wikipedia. But they have been deleted.
Secondly, I have uploaded 12 pictures on TodiCastle. I have re written the whole page on Wikipedia because it needed a lot of improvement. I have even taken permission from the owner and sent an email of the permission to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org, but still I got the same message. I really don't understand why the pictures are now being deleted even after I have sent the permission to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org for both the topics. I really need help. Can anyone please guide me? I have seen the instructions on the guidelines and have added categories to the pictures but I don't understand why are they being deleted. Help Needed !!! Thank you Inlandmamba (talk) 07:28, 10 February 2012 (UTC) END copied from Commons:Help desk - Jmabel ! talk01:45, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for the help. My problem has been resolved. I am really thankful to all the community and the people who helped me in this problem. Inlandmamba (talk) 15:24, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Jmabel ! talk 07:03, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Global licensing policy enforcement
In connection with Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by ZogSokoli, it's come to my attention that the Shqip (Albanian) Wikipedia edition is by and large ignoring any and all responsibilities when it comes to image copyrights. The project currently allows local uploads without any copyright information at all, and many users who do add copyright information appear to rely heavily on very liberally applied fair use claims, despite the fact that the project does not have the required Exemption Doctrine Policy in place. I'm sure this is in no way unique. It's probably a common situation at several small Wikimedia projects.
This problem spills over onto Commons when files are transferred here, and large-scale copyright infringement on any Wikimedia project reflects poorly on us all. As a result of this situation, I have a few questions that I have not been able to find answers to:
What procedures exist for enforcing the global licensing policy?
Who has the authority and responsibility to enforce the global licensing policy?
Is it possible to forcibly disable local uploads for projects that are unable or unwilling to adhere to the global licensing policy?
For new Wikimedia projects, what considerations are made to determine whether or not local uploads should be enabled?
What's worse is that I have not been able to find out whom to ask. I've looked around at the Foundation wiki and Meta without success. Any ideas or answers?
I believe these these things are up to the local project (and most of that should stay on that level, for example it's the local project should be deciding whether or not to enable local uploads). However, we should have some sort of a transfer policy on Commons, which says that if some source is violating copyrights way too often, it should be excluded. Just like currently some uploaders to Flickr are not mirrored here regardless of the licence they put on some image. VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 18:13, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
There is no point in the Foundation enacting global policies if local projects are entirely free to ignore them at their own will. It can't be up to the local projects to inform themselves about policies that they don't know about, nor can local projects be expected to sanction themselves if they fail to live up to their responsibilities as a project. —LX (talk, contribs)20:41, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
I agree with you that several small wikis have a poor record regarding copyright issues. I have seen this on several Indian languages Wikipedia. I don't know what is the solution for existing wikis other than direct forced deletions, but I would suggest to disable local uploads for new wikis until they have a community able to manage copyright issues. Just my 2 Rs. Yann (talk) 18:23, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
I have seen issues with this myself too. For example, a few months ago, I remember a discussion on English Wikipedia about a possibly unfree file. It was deleted on English Wikipedia, but I could also find it on many other language versions of Wikipedia, sometimes with nothing on the file information page. I don't think that Commons should block moves from any Wikimedia project entirely, but if a project has bad records, it would definitely be necessary to check things more carefully, unless it is known that the original uploader is reliable. It could maybe also be an idea to block tools such as Commons Helper and en:WP:FTCG from moving files from those projects. --Stefan4 (talk) 20:14, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Blocking transfers from the wiki to here shouldn't be used, but restricted so that only users that know what they are doing can do. Ebe123 (talk) 02:02, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
Can't we just block the TUSC account of anyone who is blocked on Commons? That way Commons admins have a way of blocking automatic transfers by particular problematic users. Dcoetzee (talk) 11:48, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea (blocking Commons Helper and other TUSC-based services). And en:WP:FTCG is blocked if the uploader is blocked since the uploads are made from the users' own accounts. --Stefan4 (talk) 12:36, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Yann that in the case of a community that lacks the expertise to manage its own copyright issues, local uploads should be forcibly disabled by the Foundation. They will have to make do with Commons. That may lead to more of them uploading directly here, but we can block individual users if they upload copyvios and are unable to learn. With any luck, some of them will start to develop expertise by interacting with the Commons community. Dcoetzee (talk) 01:58, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Please do, and let us know where on Meta you do it. I couldn't find any Foundation staff members responsible either for practical copyright issues (as opposed to legal advice) or global policy compliance. I also couldn't find any pages on Meta devoted to coordination of such matters. That was really my main question: where should I have taken my concerns? (But while we're sharing war stories, I just came across another example, this time involving the Ukraine Wikipedia accepting uploads with no license and no fair use claim.) I also appreciate the suggestions for how to limit the damage here on Commons. —LX (talk, contribs)17:54, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
It seems like there are a few people on the Spanish Wikipedia can't locally upload, so they try to illicitly upload nonfree logos on the Commons so they can be used on the Spanish Wikipedia.
Local uploads are disabled on some projects, including the Spanish Wikipedia. I frequently find copyvios here, often with Spanish descriptions (and used only on Spanish Wikipedia). Just mark as copyvio or request deletion if you feel that a file is illegal. --Stefan4 (talk) 10:35, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Also I would ask the Spanish Wikipedia to put up a notice to the effect of "Don't upload logos to the Commons to circumvent the ban, as your images will be deleted there" WhisperToMe (talk) 16:33, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
In that sense, I think that sv:Special:Upload is better designed than es:Special:Upload. Neither project allows local uploads, but the Swedish upload page has a simplified explanation of what you may upload (including specific notes on freedom of panorama and similar for Sweden and Finland) whereas the Spanish page only has a notice saying that you must upload the images to Commons. --Stefan4 (talk) 17:16, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Do you want me to post about this in the Spanish Wikipedia cafe? I would have to have a way for your comments to be translated into Spanish. WhisperToMe (talk) 18:54, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I´m very concious this is a serious problem. I send to delete every logo or suspicious picture I find. However, as I already says, in es:WP not only are banned nonfree pictures, but all pictures since upload locally option is not operational since 2004. Cheers. --Andrea (talk) 20:36, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes. Stefan4 suggests adding "a simplified explanation of what you may upload (including specific notes on freedom of panorama and similar for Sweden and Finland)" - So on the notice saying "upload to the Commons" you can add something stating what the Commons permits and does not permit. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:11, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
(Outdent) Just an observation. en.wikibooks disabled local uploads (it's granted to a limited number of contributors working on books that require fair use material) a while back. One of the reasons given was to take advantage of the greater knowledge and experience of Commons contributors re. copyright. I did wonder at the time if we were just passing the buck to someone else who would then have to clear up "our" mess. Looking at the number of bits of media going through for deletion every day, the backlog on categorisation, etc., I feel we have added extra load to an already overloaded project. Sorry! QUTalkQu21:23, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
@WhisperToMe:To do that I need more info. How and where should be added? I'm admin in es:WP, but my knowledge on software is limitated. --Andrea (talk) 23:36, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
Ok, thanks for replay. I think best is to put a message in es:WP Village because text you suggest it´s not just an adjustment but a hole redesign. I can add one line or two explaining pictures should be free licence and logos are mostly not free, but not take that decision on my own. I let you know about community's decision. Cheers. --Andrea (talk) 00:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
I don't get this. When clicking on "Subir archivo" (upload file) at eswiki, you just get redirected to the upload wizard here, and it is suposed to do the same thing that this message would be intended for. Why should we repeat the information? Lobo(howl?) 00:38, 17 February 2012 (UTC) EDIT:Ok, my mistake, it just redirect now to the simple upload form. Why don't we redirect to the upload wizard then?
Oh! Now I see it is in "SpecialPage" space. Is not possible edited, only by a very few users (one or two, actually) so I´m not sure if we could do any change, no matter what. --Andrea (talk) 10:22, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
One thing about the new upload form: Is there an easy way to link to freedom of panorama policy listings from that form? Or on ES the upload page could mention the policies of various countries, including Spain, Spanish speaking countries in the Americas, the United States (for residents of the 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico), and/or Equatorial Guinea WhisperToMe (talk) 03:54, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
“More friendly”, you mean, Andrea! I agree with that suggestion, since the Upload Wizard already has a (translated to Spanish) image explaining what kind of images are allowed here, and avoiding duplication of explanations, like in svwiki’s page. —Fitoschido[shouttrack] @ 20 February, 2012; 08:26
Hi, again. Fitoschido put bug 34566 requesting change the side bar link from Commons:Upload/es to UploadWizard. Meanwhile, I changed the text of the template to remarks is not allowed to upload files in es:WP and linked to Commons Licences. Cheers. --Andrea (talk) 17:10, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
I have a dilemma. I have a number of photos from museums, but I am currently pressed for time, too pressed to transfer descriptions from captions I took to the images themselves (those days I barely find time to categorize them). I was thinking of uploading the photos of captions alongside the images I took, so that I or another editor can transfer them when they have time. However, after I uploaded a series of such photos (museum artifacts, each followed by a photo of the accompanying caption), they were deleted as out-of-scope, and the deleting admin criticized me for "trying to transfer work to other editors", and noting that the uploader is required to "provide adequate descriptions". I am puzzled and somewhat offended, as I thought this is a collaborative project, where helping another editor to add/improve captions is normal. Collaboration, in my book, means that everybody does what they can, and while we of course prefer that an uploaded image is perfect in all forms, there is no requirement for uploaders to provide all that information. In other words, it is better to have a poorly described image to no image at all. I am saying this as a person who provided extensive descriptions on thousands of photos in my past uploads, when I had more time, and also as en editor involved in various large scale projects related to improving/translating descriptions, category fixing and such). Given the above, I have the following question to the community about relevant policy and encouraged behavior.
If an uploader has no time (or will...) to add descriptive captions to the image, but is in the possession of photos of captions with such a description, should the uploader:
upload both the image and caption photos, expecting that either s/he or (in a spirit of collaboration) another editor will transfer the text from the caption photos to the primary image, upon which the caption photos can be deleted as no longer of any use;
upload just the images, without sufficient description, and hope that s/he will find time in the future to add captions, or somebody else will, without the aid of caption photos, as the out-of-scope argument against caption outweights their potential usefulness for improving description of accompanying artifacts?
refrain from uploading images at all till such a time that s/he has time to upload images with proper descriptions him/herself, as uploading images without proper description is more damaging than helpful?
Did you discuss this with the original administrator? Also, could you let them know you've started this thread please in case they don't notice it.
I'm no expert here, but one way to approach this might be to discuss in advance what you plan to do so an informal "mini project" can be set-up around it. That is, raise it here and get some other contributors to "sign up" to help out. That way the community knows what's going on and there's no chance of your efforts being wasted. I'm sure there are better ideas out there QUTalkQu22:29, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
A general problem is that captions that go beyond plainly stating what is on display may be copyrighted, and thus photos of them should not be posted here. An example would be File:New York by Piotrus 056.JPG.
As an aside, of those images I spot-checked, many were very blurry. An extreme case being File:New York by Piotrus 207.JPG, where I really can't read anything at all.
Furthermore, how would a volunteer who wanted to rescue some of these descriptions know which description belonged to which item? You said yourself at the DR that File:New York by Piotrus 096.JPG (BTW, one of those with a copyright problem) gave the description for File:New York by Piotrus 097.JPG, but unless I'm completely off the rails, that's some kind of camel, not a Bodhisattva. I'm puzzled...
So, for copyright reasons, you can't copy the whole description anyway. A link between the image file of the item and the corresponding image of its description would be needed also. But adding such a link and uploading the photo of the description is hardly less work than writing a brief one-line textual description and not uploading the description image at all. And it would go a long away to avoid the copyright problem.
Maybe a better approach, if you really don't have the time to write one-line descriptions, would have been to post a zip or rar archive of the descriptions at RapidShare or elsewhere, containing the descriptions for image *_0123.JPG in file *_0123_desc.JPG, and then just ask for help at the village pump, including a link to the zip/rar file.
Sadly, copyright makes undeletion of these photos impossible. Use some photo-hosting (that do not limit resolution of uploads) or file sharing site. However, I understand why you can be offended -- I completely disagree with deletion of these pictures as out of scope, and unnecessarily harsh words. One more thing -- do something with blur. I understand that you are doing your photographs indoors, using a point&shoot camera, etc., but e.g. File:New York by Piotrus 208.JPG has ISO 100 and 0,6s shutter speed, of course it's _extremely_ blurry. If it's not possible to use better camera, you should use shutter speed priority mode or something to not allow to your cam to set such ridiculous shutter speed. See wikiversity:Museum photography guideline. Trycatch (talk) 00:33, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
I seem to often have the some problem. I take much more photos than have time to upload. But the result is that I try to upload images which are of the best quality and have the most complete descriptions. --Jarekt (talk) 13:50, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
Quality, gentlemen. Quality is the essence here. Photos which lack information about what they depicts is not of much use. They wont be found by someone who need them, and if someone find them they wont be used. /Esquilo (talk) 10:28, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
If you have lack of time, upload less photos but with a good description. Better 10 good quality photos with a good description than 200 photos without description. Wouter (talk) 20:43, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
My strategy with images like these has been to first upload them to Flickr, marking the ones containing captions as hidden, then use them to fill out descriptions when I transfer the Flickr images to Commons with flickr2commons. Plaques and signs containing extensive text are not permitted here because they are copyright violations. See my essay at Commons:Images containing text. Dcoetzee (talk) 09:03, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
I don't think uploads should be encouraged that "need work." If it is an "important" upload, the uploader can find the time. The point being that there is a LOT of work to be done on the Commons in terms of categorization, captioning, etc such that doing that for other people tends to be the unpopular job while the number of uploads is what most see as giving themselves bragging rights. I believe a sense of craftsmanship means not putting unfinished work on display. I believe Commons' reputation is more determined by its quality and usability than its sheer size.--Brian Dell (talk) 09:20, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
February 16
Palestinian people, or "People of Palestine"?
Hi! Come and help push forward a principal discussion, one that without your participation is doomed to crash charged with politically-inclined motives and stay forever inconcluded. We need to deal with a basic question: Should a category's name be kept "People of Palestine" or rather updated to "Palestinians", or equally good "Palestinian people" - noting the fact that some half of Palestinian persons are diaspora-born-and-based and a "People of Palestine" tag is less suitable hence? The proposed rename will make things easier than they are now: Once moved to Category:Palestinian people, this category can be neatly categorized under People by descent, just like is done with Czechs, Ethiopians and Brits and virtually all other nationality-defined groups – which stand in contrary to Country-defined groups which is, as is well known, not the case when concerning Mandate and Ottoman Palestine whatsoevr. Currently, "Category:People of Palestine" is swaying in space parentwise, and, more substantially, is an open door for deceptive and/or mistaken information to stem from the unclear name. Altogether, the coin "People of Palestine" is ill-formulated as one is supposed to know whether it lists the people from the histiric region of Palestine (which was a Turkish and then British colony) or those living in the modern-day Palestinian territories, which are OK to be referred to also as Palestine. If a productive and positive-oriented change can be made, why continue confusing readers? The issue is in fact so simple when you approach it devoid of non-topical, non-encyclopedic residues; People from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip obviously merit the tag People of the Palestinian territories, which can be concluded at the newly-titled Category:Palestinian people side-by-side with items related to people who originated in the broader, Pre-'48 region, that is: Palestinian people.
* Alternatively - if it's preferred to understand the term "People of Palestine" as including not only the Palestinian Arabs but also the Pre-state Jews and whichever national that lived there at that time, it might be wise titled Category:People of Ottoman and mandate Palestine.
Scotland only has one Geographic/territorial meaning. So does France. At the same time, a firm perception of what-and-where is Palestine is, to date, absent. That's why a "People of Ottoman and mandate Palestine"-solution is proposed. Equally good is "Palestinian people", because it makes clear that we speak to a dispersed national group that contains many individuals that are actually not from Palestine. In this way it can keep the definition of a cultural/national/ethnic group with less regard of the question whether a person is from a given place or just has family roots in it. This resembles ppl of scottish descent, whom you won't categorize at "People of Scotland" (as they questionably ever have been in Scotland) but rather at Category:People of Scottish descent. And see Kurdish people vs People of Kurdistan. "People of Palestine" must go because it is used for mass-bias in the shelter of defending "naming conventions". Orrlingtalk23:57, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
Orrling -- That seems to have more to do with metaphysics than with practical considerations of improving Wikipedia category structure. Some would say that there wasn't actually much of a consolidated separatist nationalist Palestine self-identity until the early 1960's (before that time, many assumed that whichever Arab country was successful in taking the leading role in destroying Israel would naturally annex most or all of old British Mandate Palestine, and they weren't necessarily too upset by the prospect, since it could be considered a step towards pan-Arab unification). "People of Palestine" simplifies and renders irrelevant most of the philosophical and historical issues raised by "Palestinian people". AnonMoos (talk) 00:47, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
I Support the move. Palestinian people term has one meaning in en Wiki while term "People of Palestine" primarily means people from the "geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River" which currently "comprises the country of Israel and the Palestinian territories" and historically meant something else every few hundred years, see en:Time periods in the Palestine region. I know "Palestinian people" vs. 'People of Palestine" means the same to most people (including me before I started searching) and differentiating them sounds like metaphysics, however the first term seem to be a little less ambiguous. --Jarekt (talk) 13:32, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
February 19
PD review RfC again
The deletion request at Commons:Deletion requests/All files copyrighted in the US under the URAA was just closed indicating the broad consensus that our public domain files need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis to determine which are still in copyright in the US. However, because most affected files are not currently tagged and need to be located amidst our millions of PD files, this is a daunting task that will require a systematic approach. A while ago I opened Commons:Requests for comment/PD review to discuss how this would be done. If you haven't already, please visit it. Even a brief support or oppose for the proposed approach would be very helpful. We also haven't yet discussed the role the new template {{PD-in}} will play in this process. Thank you! Dcoetzee (talk) 07:09, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
"broad consensus that our public domain files need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis" - not true, like your initial suggestion that all need to be mass/bot deleted. Read the DR (and its closure) again and look at he broad consensus. ;-) --Saibo (Δ) 04:31, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
No fewer than 16 users supported this strategy, along with the WMF, far outweighing proponents of other strategies, and this was reflected directly by the closure. You're welcome to pursue the adoption of local exemption doctrine policies for images affected by this on your home project. Dcoetzee (talk) 18:32, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
I found that in Special:Contributions/Einer3088 all the images from former politicians of Colombia (photographs and paintings) are declared own work. Even if they may be free because of age, they should be tagged in a suitable way. I am not sure which licenses may apply, so if someone please could have a look.
The images are of historic interest and used in wikipedia articles. (Be careful watching at work - the occasional male genitalia is not missing in users contributions, too)--Funfood␌11:01, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
User seems to be uploading many images with blatantly false claims of creation, source, and copyright. I suggest listing all uploads by this user for deletion in bulk. -- Infrogmation (talk) 02:44, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Error: Script error.
Every time I open a page, category, or gallery, it loads OK, but then 2 or 3 seconds later, a message "Error: Script error." pops up at the top of the page. This has been happening for the last 3 or 4 days now. It's a bit tedious, as the page content suddenly jumps down when the message appears, making clicking on links etc., slow and difficult. Screenshot showing the message right.
Which browser do you use? Does it happen in other browsers? Try to open the JS error console (Ctrl+Shift+J in Firefox), filter to "errors" only, clear it, open a page. Is there any address which gives a hint which script is causing that error? Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 16:37, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Firefox; I tried what you say, but it hasn't made any difference. "Is there any address which gives a hint which script is causing that error?" - sorry, no idea! - MPF (talk) 17:16, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Checked that JS error console again, and these appear after emptying it before:
Error: aRequest.URI is undefined
Source File: chrome://y2layers/content/overlay.js
Line: 270
"chrome://y2layers/content/overlay.js" is probably from a addon in your browser. Regarding the other error: Could you please open the page you saw that error again but append "?debug=true" (without thw quotes) at the end of the URL? Then the error message will hopefully be more descriptive... I use Firefox, too - but do not have this error. It is probably from one of the gadgets you have enabled (since you do not have any user scripts). --Saibo (Δ) 17:52, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
That gives this: /* No modules requested. Max made me put this here */
Interesting - I've had a similar issue for about 6 months now iirc. I've tried deleting .css, .js etc and in the end I just ignore it. Nice to know I'm not alone though :) --Herbytalk thyme18:31, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
(unindent) "Please go to the page where it occurs ..." – sorry, not sure which page you mean; nor what you mean by "report the error in your error-console" (what is an "error-console", have I got one, and if so, where can I find it???). I get the "Error: Script error." tag at the top of both the German Main Page links you give there. - MPF (talk) 23:04, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
"error-console" is the thing which you open by Ctrl+Shift+J in Firefox and which you used to copy us the error in your comment from 17:30. "Error: Script error." Does not help us. So we need the (full) error from the error console with debug=true. In case someone wonders, afaik the errors do only show up on top of pages (like in the screen shot) for sysops - non-sysops see them only in the error console (and may notice that something is not working). Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 03:34, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
But then still DelReqHandler is undefined. Did this code ever work? Also some other parts of it are outdated. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 14:15, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
So how can I get rid of this "Error: Script error.", I'm still getting it on every page . . . use simple non-technical instructions with no jargon, please, I'm not a computing wizard! - MPF (talk) 10:15, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Just tried that, and it's not made any difference! Have I really put the right stuff in the sandbox page? - MPF (talk) 15:02, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
You did make it right - the sandbox was just to enable us (Rillke) to debug. Do you have the firefox addon BestVideoDownloader in your firefox addons (Ctrl + Shift + A)? That may cause the "y2layers" error. Or don't you addons listed there at all? --Saibo (Δ) 15:12, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks! I found the list of add-ons there; I don't have that one, but do have a (presumably similar?) video downloader called "Easy YouTube Video Downloader 5.9". Should I get rid of it? - MPF (talk) 15:46, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Try to just "disable" (not remove) it, restart firefox and see if at least that y2 error vanishes then. --Saibo (Δ) 16:18, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Do you mean the error message on top of each page? Yes, I guessed that. My suggestion was just regarding the y2layers error in your error console. I will wait if Rillke can say anything to the code you posted at "sandbox". In the meantime: could you please go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and write down which checkboxes are ticked? You can also try to uncheck them and have a look if the error disappears. But we need to know the ticked gadgets to know which one caused the problem. --Saibo (Δ) 18:29, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks again! "Do you mean the error message on top of each page?" Yes! Ticked gadgets: the items I have ticked are:
UploadWizard: Upload Wizard. Especially useful for new users.
MyUploads: Link to your uploads next to the My contributions link
RotateLink: Link for requesting an image-rotation displayed on file-pages
StockPhoto: Add buttons to file description pages that make it easier to reuse, share and attribute images. (Vector and monobook only)
ExtraTabs2: Adds tabs with links to useful Toolserver tools and related Special pages
Targeted Watchlist Notice: Used to prevent spamming of all users; instead this allows to target messages to certain users
Thanks for your patience. It seems to be impossible to find the cause of this error with appropriate efforts. Would you like to simply hide the message? -- RE rillkequestions?23:08, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Per your request I have inserted the hiding code in your User:MPF/common.css. To see the message again simply delete everything in there. Be aware that the fact that you saw an error means that something is wrong. Something may not work or may work wrong. Sadly we cannot easily find out what currently. --Saibo (Δ) 01:05, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Many thanks! I have not noticed anything malfunctioning, so am happy just to be rid of that error message kicking the page down after it has otherwise finished loading. - MPF (talk) 21:43, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
this is undefined
I get a script error, too. It occurs when I open a page for editing:
Fehler: this is undefined
Quelldatei: http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=de&modules=jquery.client%2Ccookie%2CmessageBox%2CmwExtension%7Cmediawiki.legacy.ajax%2Cwikibits%7Cmediawiki.page.startup%7Cmediawiki.util&skin=monobook&version=20120224T021826Z&*
Zeile: 28
Is there something I should know to allowing me to help you as fast as possible? E.g. Do you have a clue whether it comes from a gadget (you asked about cat-a-lot)? -- RE rillkequestions?14:40, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
No, unfortunately I do not. The error is independent of the skin chosen. Hence, the problem is not in monobook.js or vector.js. --Leyo15:47, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Do you know the ASL question from chatrooms? ;) So: Browser, version, skin, language (okay, seems to be German and Monobook guessing from the error msg)? Tried in other browsers? That would be helpful. :-) I (FF10.0.2, monobook, German) don't get this error. Could you please try logged-out? Did you notice this error before the 1.19 deployment, too? Do you also see the error message on top of each page like MBF? --Saibo (Δ) 16:22, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
The file renaming tool timed out on a few occasions when I was using it just now, though when I reloaded each file in question I found that it had been properly renamed. However, the tool failed to remove the {{Rename}} tag. Don't know if this is related to the software roll-out. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–19:23, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
The servers are not touched until now. We are still on 1.18. So that should not be a 1.19 problem. Maybe someone did make a change in common.js or similar? --Saibo (Δ) 21:04, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
This is not a js-error. It is a server-error. JS just displays that it received an error from the server. The problem in this case is that retry does not work because the file is indeed moved but the server didn't send a success-message so the tool would retry to move the file and not continuing with the next task. I should include an "ignore & continue" or — more intelligent — a contribs/log-check whether the last action succeeded. -- RE rillkequestions?21:11, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Ah, no success message (the action was done) from server - yes - I noticed that since some days, too. Deletion and uploading.(←That is not API however, similar) Just an hour ago I saw duplicate DRs made with the deletion script. Probably due to the same... Have given the techies a preliminary notice, however I guess they are all more than busy at fixing 1.19 bugs. --Saibo (Δ) 21:24, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
February 21
How to handle a complaint from someone with a rare name that happens to be the same as an uploader of sexually graphic images
I have an OTRS email from someone who is in the unfortunate position of appearing to be the only person in the USA (though not the only person in the world) with a certain real name that happens to be identical to the account name of an uploader of sexually graphic amateur photographs (and nothing else). Further, the account name is repeated in the titles of many of these photographs. As an easy solution, I have emailed the uploader asking if they might be prepared to voluntarily change their account name to something more anonymous but there is no guarantee I will get a reply. I find the OTRS complainant credible and unlikely to be the same person as the uploader. The images are within scope and some have been kept after a deletion request, so this would not be a suitable action to take on the images, though changing image titles may help.
Though not a direct COM:IDENT issue, it is apparent that the complainant may be suffering damage when anyone searches for them on the internet and finds their unusual name against explicit photos. For confidentiality reasons I would prefer not to draw attention to the particular images, but can anyone point me either to existing policy or previous similar cases where accounts have been renamed non-voluntarily to protect the reputation of others? On Wikipedia WP:REALNAME applies, but I am not sure if there is a recognized equivalent in use on Commons. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 01:17, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
The en. policy you quote says `Do not register a username that includes the name of an identifiable living person unless it is your real name`.
I have sent a follow-up with that question, though as the user is not very active, it may well be that the email they use is not often checked. Part of my intention of posting here is to judge whether the Wikipedia policy would be the one we might default to on Commons, it seems commonsense but that is no guarantee it can be working practice here. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 01:49, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Particularly given SUL, where usernames cross all projects and so aren't the "property" of any one project, I'd say we default to that policy. If that is the uploader's real name... it is kinda sticky. If not, it seems like a valid argument to rename -- could easily be a personality rights violation. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:45, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Would you tell the same if the user would upload photos of pig meat (you know, a no-go in islam)? What if someone in the big big world outside has the name "Saibo"? Am I the looser then? I mean, em.. human names are known not to be unique - so unless we know it is the intention of the user to impersonate someone else I would not think a forced rename is the right thing. I see a parallel to the recent "speedy should be instant delete for OTRS complains" issue. OTRS is not god. --Saibo (Δ) 03:25, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
If someone was intentionally using someone else's name? Yes, quite possibly, even if no harm was meant -- harm can still happen. There is a reason for the en-wiki policy on usernames. If it is legitimately same name as the uploader, well, that is different. Carl Lindberg (talk) 06:09, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
(To Saibo) I am not fishing to make OTRS god and I don't pretend to be any god's representative on Earth. The fact that I am openly asking for a clarification of process on Commons rather than going behind the scenes on IRC to find one compliant admin to take action, might demonstrate that I am attempting to avoid making the situation worse for the complainant whilst meeting our shared values of openness. If this case does eventually mean that admin action is taken, then I will go back to the complainant to check if they mind me raising their real name on AN or if they feel this would cause them unnecessary damage, I would appeal for a review by an admin or 'crat with OTRS access to check the correspondence and make a final determination. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 09:46, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I think knowingly using the name of a specific other person should not be allowed, not for uploading pig meat, not for taking part in a discussion, not even for read only use. On the other hand we do not want to be checking id cards. Lacking policy we have to use common sense. ("Saibo" can hardly be the name identifying anybody other than as a pseudonym or in small circles, so that comparison is a straw man.)
If the user is using the name legitimately, then our problem is that of names generally - there are a lot of John Smiths and the Chinese equivalents, although only one may be known in a particular community. The name may also be a legitimate pseudonym, which complicates matters further.
We could make links from the author name to the user page and put a notice there stating the user should not be confused with the person by the same name in the USA. If the user is using his or her own name, then giving enough information to avoid confusion seems unproblematic. Not everyone recognizing the name will follow the link, but at least those that do will know.
I think we could rename the images regardless. Few uploaders put their own names in the image titles and I even think such practice could be forbidden (no consensus at Commons talk:File naming though, if my memory serves). The image title is arguable a matter for the Commons community.
I do well know that "Saibo" is probably no real name (at least no full name) - that was intentional. You might insert any other user name instead of Saibo. You choose a user name and by chance you hit a real name somewhere in the world. Hmm.. --Saibo (Δ) 13:52, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I adree with Carl Lindberg that in general due to SUL and usernames crossing all projects and since we do not have official Commons:Username policy (only proposed policy that do not address this issue) in this case we should fall back onto Wikipedia policy. Although that is not always the case since there are types of names (like this or this) which we allow and Wikipedia prohibits. --Jarekt (talk) 12:36, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I am not sure we should fall back on "Wikipedia" policy. There are two hundred and some Wikipedias (and we should not forget the other projects, such as Wikinews and Wikibooks). If I had a username regarded as unproblematic on my "home" Wikipedia and was refused to use it here because of a rule on en-wp I would be quite upset. What we can do is use common sense. --LPfi (talk) 14:58, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I think the point is that the larger Wikipedias are big enough and busy enough that this sort of thing has come up before, and so they have a documented best practice for it, so we can adapt it for our needs if we prefer, rather than inventing a new policy from scratch. NB, I'm just lurking out of curiosity, I'm not familiar with the specifics of this case. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 15:27, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
For SUL reasons, I think that it would be better if a global policy could be established so that we won't have a situation where it turns out that users can use their accounts on some projects but not on some other projects. --Stefan4 (talk) 15:35, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I think it is clear that if the images were uploaded for the purpose of attacking the person with that name, then the required action is clear. But if there is simply a co-incidence of names, then it would set a terrible precedence to force a rename of account here. If the user is not active here anymore, it may be quite reasonable to rename the files, perhaps just leave their initials in the filenames.
As an aside, I do not see any reason that 'Saibo' could not be someones real name (are people assuming that peoples names have to conform to some template? A persons name can be whatever they like, a sound, a single letter etc (no requirement for family name to be included), there might be problems transliterating it into some alphabets or registering it in some jurisdictions - your name is your own, it does not belong to any authority. --Tony Wills (talk) 21:36, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
If the purpose of an account is to hurt some person or organisation, it may be appropriate to block the and rename the user. However, I don't think that there should be any forced renames if the names are equal by coincidence. --Stefan4 (talk) 00:26, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
I don't see a problematic precedent following from a forced rename here. It's likely to be rare if usernames are chosen for good reasons and if I'd registered Dell.com before the large corporation did I'd still have to give up the domain name eventually in recognition of the public interest despite any pleas on my part that it's "my name too."--Brian Dell (talk) 09:32, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
It seems that the Upload Wizard has been broken for several weeks. I filed a Bugzilla report #34387 On Feb 14, but so far I haven't heard of anything from anyone. I am aware that there are numerous problems with this gadget for many users, and I was wondering why can't it be restored to an earlier working version? I have hundreds of images waiting to upload. Does anyone know what is happening? I am crossposting this to the Wizard talk page as well. - Ineuw talk page on en.ws 08:44, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Upload wizard is poorly designed in this area. (I assume because it multi-selection was not an initial part of it.) Instead of checking the capabilities of a browser it uses fixed metrics about a browser whether it should do it this or another way. For Firefox 10 there is an ongoing fix, I've proposed. FF<5 might be still affected by this problem after the devs have passed that patch that does itself not better. -- RE rillkequestions?09:28, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
The old upload form isn't working either. With a great deal of persistence, I can get an upload done with the new form. For the most part, it isn't working, and the old one isn't uploading anything either. I just get a perpetually spinning wheel of futility in the middle of my screen... OttawaAC (talk) 21:39, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Are you sure that it is not just a very big file you are trying to upload over a slow connection? Also could you please mention as exactly as possible your browser name and version and the URLs of the specific upload forms (we have so many here...). Oh, and which language you use. And if possible report JavaScript errors from your error console (see the description in #MW1.19 how to find the error console. --Saibo (Δ) 23:51, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi Saibo. Don't think your reply applies to my Upload Wizard problem. The problem is not related to MW1.19 since it occurred at the beginning of February, and JavaScript is a requirement for UW. After using the wizard to upload thousands of images since it was made available, this time it's been broken for over a week, since I am aware of it. Why can't it be rolled back to an earlier working version until the problem is fixed? I still have thousands of images to upload for the Popular Science Monthly project of Wikisource and I am falling further and further behind. Uploading file by file is really not an option at this point. - Ineuw talk page on en.ws 02:37, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
I know it is not related to 1.19 - I just pointed to there since there is a description of how you open the JavaScript error console. We cannot do anything with Upload Wizard - only Wikimedia can and they seem to have abandoned Upload Wizard's development. We can post a error report to them - but we need to know what fails exactly. Please answer my questions from my last comment and try to copy and paste the error(s) from the error console. :-) --Saibo (Δ) 03:05, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Saibo, My apologies. I wasn't sure whom you were responding to. Also, I posted all the relevant info on Bugzilla #34387 along with several images.
[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard] is the link I used for the Wizard.
The file sizes are anywhere between 15KB to 1MB. Grayscale .PNG images.
I am using a fresh install of Firefox v10.0.2 American English. Installed about an hour ago.
The OS is Windows XP SP3 American English.
I attempted the upload of 4 images, using the wizard and before uploading, this was the only error message on the Java console:
The following is an archived debate. Please do not modify it.
Error: this.console.appendItem is not a function
Source File: chrome://global/content/consoleBindings.xml
Line: 83
After the failed upload attempt, I copied one of each of the error messages from the Java error console.
Warning: Error in parsing value for 'background-image'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.google.ca/
Line: 10
Warning: XUL box for _moz_generated_content_after element contained an inline #text child, forcing all its children to be wrapped in a block.
Source File: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Line: 0
Error: this.console.appendItem is not a function
Source File: chrome://global/content/consoleBindings.xml
Line: 83
Warning: Unknown property 'speak'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=site&only=styles&skin=vector&*
Line: 1
Warning: Unknown property 'zoom'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.wikihiero%7Cmediawiki.legacy.commonPrint%2Cshared%7Cskins.vector&only=styles&skin=vector&*
Line: 1
Warning: Expected declaration but found '*'. Skipped to next declaration.
Source File: http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.wikihiero%7Cmediawiki.legacy.commonPrint%2Cshared%7Cskins.vector&only=styles&skin=vector&*
Line: 1
Warning: Expected 'important' but found 'ie'. Expected ';' or '}' to terminate declaration but found 'ie'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.wikihiero%7Cmediawiki.legacy.commonPrint%2Cshared%7Cskins.vector&only=styles&skin=vector&*
Line: 1
Warning: Error in parsing value for 'list-style-type'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.wikihiero%7Cmediawiki.legacy.commonPrint%2Cshared%7Cskins.vector&only=styles&skin=vector&*
Line: 1
Warning: Expected 'important' but found 'ie'. Expected ';' or '}' to terminate declaration but found 'ie'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
Line: 1
Warning: Error in parsing value for 'filter'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
Line: 1
Warning: Expected declaration but found 'url(//commons.wikimedia.org/w/resources-1.18/resources/jquery.ui/themes/vector/images/ui-bg_inset-hard_100_f0f0f0_1x100.png?2011-09-19T16:13:20Z)'. Skipped to next declaration.
Source File: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
Line: 1
Warning: Expected declaration but found '*'. Skipped to next declaration.
Source File: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
Line: 1
Warning: XUL box for _moz_generated_content_after element contained an inline #text child, forcing all its children to be wrapped in a block.
Source File: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Line: 0
All the "Warning" messages are not needed - just the "error" messages. commented in your bug report. I guess you used the selection of multiple files at once (in one file selection window) - that does not work currently (as mentioned by Rillke above). Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 14:23, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi Saibo. That's what I did. It worked fine for the past months. Thanks for your help. - Ineuw talk page on en.ws 18:02, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Okay, sorry, so you have to wait until the fix is deployed. Selecting the files one after one probably works. --Saibo (Δ) 18:51, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Resolved
Reedy deployed the fix for bug 34333 to Commons. Works for me with FF 10.0.2 on Linux now (selected two files via holding the Shift key down). Please try now. --Saibo (Δ) 00:01, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
FWIW, I'm using a Mac version 10.6.8, with Safari 5.1.2, and haven't yet figured out how to get the JavaScript console set up to see the error log. I don't receive an error message on the Upload page anyway. I select a file, press the Upload button, and then get the spinning wheel, and that's it. It's been going on for a few days. File sizes are photos from 176 to 550 KB. Language is English. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard I guess I'll try again when the fix is going. OttawaAC (talk) 23:24, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm probably blind, but I can't seem to be able to find out how to upload a newer version of an image. Specifically, I've edited Windows_8_Logo.svg to have the correct font, kerning, and added perspective to the inner lines of the window (which were just horisontal before). Or I could just forget it because the logo is already close enough that nobody would notice. Simoneister (talk) 10:40, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi Simoneister, welcome to Commmons! Per default, only users registered for more than 4 days can upload new versions (under the same name). You have registered here on 2012-02-20. If your edit makes the logo closer to the original, please upload it. I have assigned you the permission manually now. You will find the "upload a new version" link in section filehistory below the previous version table. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 13:38, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm making this proposal which is related to a recent discussion in Wikipedia ANI. New users, for the purpose of vandalism and disruptive edits, frequently upload nude/sexually explicit images in Commons (most of which are fake, copyrighted) and transclude it in Wikipedia pages. Since Wikipedia prohibits uploading by new users, they do it in Commons. For reducing vandalism, I think Commons should implement some features. I am not sure about any particular idea, probably new users should be prohibited from uploading images who don't have at least some constructive edits, or something else. --SupernovaExplosion (talk) 12:53, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I think the reason you do not want inexperienced users to upload images has to do with fair use: one has to have a grasp about what images are available on Commons and what can be uploaded here before one knows a fair use image is needed. One also has to understand when and how a fair use image is allowed. Anything but fair use images should probably be uploaded here instead.
We are in an other situation. We do want also inexperienced users to upload images. Many of us do nothing but find or make and upload images. I had used Commons for quite some time before I did anything here but uploaded images.
So I think we cannot do what you suggest. What we have to do is to identify those images and delete them as copyright violations. They are often easy to find because they are lacking necessary information.
Commons has a lot of disturbing images. Your problem cannot be solved by forbidding new images, as the old images - even important ones - are quite enough (though not necessarily found by any newcommer). You do not want massacre images, sexually explicit images or the like appearing in unrelated articles. But we want to have them here.
Well, the only constructive contributions a newbie can do on Commons is to upload files, which leads us to a nice little "Catch 22". /Esquilo (talk) 13:19, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
As an en:wp admin and a frequent local uploader, I have to agree with Esquilo: unlike Wikipedia, where the primary type of page (text) can easily be improved after the original pages are created, our primary type of page here (files) can't easily be improved after creation, so there's really no good way to start participating without being able to upload. Nyttend (talk) 01:48, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
If we require people to do so many edits before upload that will do two things: 1) Users who are honestly interested in contributing will go away (to Flickr or Picassa) 2) Users who are interested in vandalism will begin vandalising Commons to get the set number of edits to upload and then vandalise Wikipedia. As such implementing such a policy would only increase the proportion of vandalism to real uploads. VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 05:05, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Group accounts: permitted in Commons?
Please examine User:AtelierJoly. Such a joint account would not be permitted in the English-language Wikipedia, and would be blocked out of hand both because it is a group account and because it is a name advertising a business or organization, Atelier Joly. Is it permitted under the rules of Commons? --165.189.32.416:12, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
As long as one individual actually handles the account, I believe it is OK that the name of their business or organization is used as the account name. Is there a rule against that that I'm unaware of? - Jmabel ! talk16:56, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Ah, I see in this case it is a couple. I suspect that is technically against the rules. I also suspect that situation is by no means unique. - Jmabel ! talk16:58, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
Many institutions have official accounts like User:BrooklynMuseum or User:Bundesarchiv-B6 traditionally they have been allowed. Apparently some institutions have rules that prohibits use of personal or anonymous accounts wen speaking on behalf of the institutions. As long as the account is controlled by a single person this is OK. Even on the Wikipedia some are allowed like en:User:Qm museum bot with the backing of the Wikimedia foundation (see talk page). --Jarekt (talk) 17:21, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
The important thing from our perspective is that the person making the uploads has the capacity to act as an agent for the organization and license their works. If they are not, OTRS is needed, and I think the use of the corporation's name falsely suggests that it isn't needed. So I would propose prohibiting the use of the organization name in such a case. Dcoetzee (talk) 16:26, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
I think there's a big difference between User:CompanyName and User:BestShoes.com or User:Call1900SUCKDIK, the latter two are advertisements, while the former is just a user name which happened to be similar to the company's name. The former should only be forced to rename or deleted if it's used for vandalism or uploading copyvio using that name as a shield. VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 05:09, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Oh I wasn't even considering that case. Of course if the user is not uploading works produced by the company in question, then it's just a coincidence. Dcoetzee (talk) 19:02, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
The proposed policy is at COM:UPOLICY. It seems to be stable, but has not yet been approved. "Using Commons for promotion of a company or group is not permitted and accounts that do this will be blocked. Use of a company or group name as a username is also prohibited." --Walter Siegmund(talk)22:03, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
green/blue ≠ yellow/blue, at least I think this is true. ;-) But, yes red/green blindness is not the justification for this gadget anymore. Now it is blue–yellow color blindness! So since we have this acessibility help already available I would keep it. Also for those people who just don't like blue/yellow. --Saibo (Δ) 23:40, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Damn it. ;-) Well, so what is about the people who just like those colors more? Not really that costly to have this gadget, hm? --Saibo (Δ) 01:07, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes each gadget for itself is not costly. The problem is that tomorrow we have not >60 gadgets but >120. Until there is an improved display method for them, it's just a jungle for newbies. -- RE rillkequestions?01:19, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Well, I do not need it. If you think it is a net benefit to remove it - do it. I won't stop you. :) --Saibo (Δ) 23:08, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
got disabled since it is old, unmaintained code that furthermore was loaded via http (insecure) also when the user was on https (secure). The gadget could also be enabled via the "withJS" URL parameter by just a click. Probably the server (prototype.…) will get shut down too at some time. By the way: the subtitle player does not work since some months anyway. --Saibo (Δ) 22:55, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
I was able to upload images by selecting them one at the time but I am also getting the error message [api-error-internal_api_error_UploadStashFileNotFoundException]. Can someone explain what am I doing wrong? Thanks. - Ineuw talk page on en.ws 23:46, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
No, have no clue. Could you please try again? There were two UW updates in the last hour(?). Maybe you just hit one of them. See also my answer at you in the thread above. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 00:12, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi Saibo. Thanks again for your help. I read the above post. In this case when I tried to upload the failed uploads, they have already existed, which means the messages were false. Now, I will wait for a couple hours and see if others have problems like mine. At least I know that it mostly works. - Ineuw talk page on en.ws 00:18, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
There is a a couple known problems with upload wizard:
bug 34601 - "Drop media file to donate here" sometimes silently fails. Hitting reload should fix this. We're still working out the correct fix for this problem.
Sometimes the "Learn", "Upload", "Release rights", "Describe", and "Use" labels at the top are poorly styled. Once again, reload fixes this. We seem to have general CSS style loading issues that we're sorting out.
Saibo, Uploaded some 70 images with the multiselect files feature and all went well. Many thanks for helping me through these issues. - Ineuw talk page on en.ws 04:50, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
You need to remember to add {{subst:OP}} to images whenever you send anything to OTRS or else the images are likely to be deleted before the e-mail sent to OTRS has been handled. --Stefan4 (talk) 00:54, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Done. There is currently a significant backlog at permissions-commons. If you want a request expedited, OTRS/Noticeboard is probably the way to go. Magog the Ogre (talk) 05:17, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Proposal - complete unified login for all eligible accounts
I have created a proposal at Meta, to complete unified login for all eligible accounts. Unified login is a relatively new feature to the WMF wikis, allowing each user to have a single combined account in every project. Users that only have an account on one wiki would extend that to all wikis, and users that already have accounts on multiple wikis would have them combined. It was initially an opt-in for existing users, but it is now done by default for all new users. This leaves us with three groups of users: those with UL, those that cannot complete UL because of a naming conflict on another wiki, and those with no conflict that have simply not completed the process. I am proposing that account unification be completed for all eligible accounts without requiring the user to take any additional steps. This would make UL the rule rather than the exception that it currently is, and bring us closer to the goals of universal watchlists, recent changes, interwiki page moves, etc. This would be especially helpful on Commons, which has so many images that were originally uploaded at another WMF wiki, enabling better attribution without interwiki links. I propose that it be carried out as a one-time process rather than a continuous automatic software process, allowing users to still adjust ULs as they see fit.
I've been tidying up the "unidentified birds" category, and I've just got to a batch where they need to be moved to a different name. The items I've just started on have a meaningless original name, but, unlike en-wiki, I can't see an option to move without a redirect. I'd like to sort this before I go any further. I might have missed something obvious, if not, I'll tag the redirects for deletion, but that just makes work for someone else. Apologies if this gets asked every day Jimfbleak (talk) 13:17, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, a misunderstanding. That is an option only available for administrators as those images could be used in various Commons clients. --Foroa (talk) 14:07, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Only admins can move without a redirect. I have deleted the unused redirects. Thank you very much for identifying those birds! Thats really important work, hope you will keep it up. Just give me a shout if there are some redirects to be cleared. Cheers, Amada44talk to me15:00, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
If the file is not just new uploaded and if the redirect is not wrong (e.g. a wrong species) then it should stay for the reason Foroa mentioned. --Saibo (Δ) 15:48, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for replies. I'll follow Amada's kind offer when I get enough to do. I'm only moving the pages if the old name gives no clue. It's mildly irritating not being able to do here what I can do on en-wiki, but that's life (: Jimfbleak (talk) 19:04, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
TIFF uploads by new user
I'm working with a GLAM project, trying to help a museum IT guy upload images from the Museum. I believe the images are all PD this time,
but we've gone thru a trial run with OTRS on a jpg file before.
He surprised me by uploading a TIF file, and says it doesn't display - see Trout Fishing.tif
Under "metadata" is :
"warning wrong data type 7 for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored."
File:Trout Fishing.tif (← I like that name ;-) ) is a really big (max size here is 100 MB and this is 95) 48 bit color depth RGB, uncompressed, tiff. Great for archival purposes - maybe we want to have a tiff and jpeg upload (but both must be linked with each other by using wiki links - (non-optimal) example)? If he just wants to upload one file per image he needs to upload jpeg. By the way: LZW compression is supported for thumbnailing, as far as I know. The metadata of this tiff has a wrong tag, yes (this is also reported by GIMP) - but I do not know if that breaks the thumbnailing here. I guess not. He could also upload the hight quality tiff and upload a lower quality (24 bit) as a new version.
And: please use the {{Creator}} template for the artist field. And use {{Artwork}} for the description.
Furthermore: this example image is not PD. The artist died 1933 according to his category. It has two years to wait.
The image contains 3D elements (frame) and may attract copyright therefore. Please get a {{PD-self}} and(?) {{CC-zero}} release from the photographer .. just in case. I am not sure if it needs to be attached to all the images - but just in case. If there is unclarity later on this would help. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 18:17, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
OK, my take away here is that jpegs are better for the basic purposes I'd envisioned, but maybe a tif could be also added. The templates and categories, etc. will probably be added by GLAM participants. Actually the painting appears to have been first published in 1919 in "Outdoor Nova Scotia" and displayed as a painting in 1921 so I think we have the copyright straight (at least I've been informing them that we're pretty strict about that here). I'd hope nobody gets carried away about the plain board frame with a few notches in it, please don't bite the newbies! It's my impression that the photographs are all works-for-hire owned by the museum, so PD-self should be easy enough, but I don't want to pile on requirements. Smallbones (talk) 19:06, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Smallbones I am not sure what is the volume of your upload but please do not assume that any "GLAM participants" will be willing or capable of adding templates and basic categories. Those need to be added by a bot and those things are much easier to do correctly before the upload and really hard to do afterwards. The problem is that once the image is uploaded you no longer control what other do to it and it is very hard to write bots smart enough to merge user edits with your data. I am not sure what metadata you have available for each image but you should use {{Artwork}}, Creator templates (create new ones if needed), Institution template(s), {{Technique}}, {{Other date}} (if needed), etc. If you need help I can assist (time permitting). I can also share upload codes etc from this upload --Jarekt (talk) 19:45, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
That is not about "biteing newbies" - when if not now should this get straight? If you refer to US copyright then you need to add a US copyright template and not the one which is currently on the file page. {{PD-art|PD-1923}}. What is the expected about of files? I am really with Jarekt - better invest time before upload than fixing up later and still have a inferior result (compared to a good preparation before upload). Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 20:29, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Smallbones -- On the technical side, TIFF is not really an image file format as such, but rather a loose collection of a whole lot of different file formats. Therefore it's almost impossible for any software to guarantee (or come close to guaranteeing) display of any and all theoretically-"valid" TIFF files without devoting large resources and years of testing to such a project (not to mention programs generating technically-invalid TIFF output which other programs have chosen to work with, creating de-facto unofficial quasi-standards in addition to the galaxy of official TIFF sub-format standards, etc.). In short, TIFF is something of a morass... AnonMoos (talk) 14:11, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Minority languages are marginalized in upload wizard
If they are really under CC-BY-SA licence then you can just transfer them here. The creator of the illustration has released them under a free licence, that is specifically designed for redistribution. However, when you upload them here, link back to the original page where the licence is visible in the "source" section of the description. VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 10:50, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
I agree, this is a job for batch uploading. Such a large number of images requires a systematic transfer, with a custom template and a plan for categorization. Automatically updating description pages as new descriptions appear is more challenging due to the issue of merging with manual edits. Dcoetzee (talk) 18:59, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
So, the Distant Shores Media contactperson that I emailed replied and basically said that the correct attribution should go to www.sweetpublishing.com (which doesn't host the images), they signed an aggrement for the images to be released under CC-BY-SA, and they didn't have the name of the original illustrator. Should that pose a problem? Bennylin (yes?) 21:34, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Has that illustrator done the work as "job for hire". If so, then having that person's name is only of interest to have more information on the images, not to comply with the licence. However, if that was a contract job, then ... i'm not sure. VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 04:54, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
I've created some pages. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Going from a comment added by user WeLu and the image itself, this depiction of the Yazidi god, Melek taus was made by an artist of the name "L. Nabo" in 1990 who lives in Germany. (WeLu's comment translates as, "This image is made by Nabo, he lives in Germany. It should not be used without his consent.")
Is there some way to verify his consent? There is no evidence that this image is in the public domain except for dubious anecdote. Is someone here savvy enough to find the artist's contact information? This image is a highly incorporated element in articles on the Yazidi faith.
--132.161.208.17900:08, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
If the image was copyright of "L. Nabo" then it has been re-used extensively. Not least on book covers and blogs all over the internet. There's a photograph of an object that looks like a depiction of the original source here. To be honest, this looks like an "art work" that's an identical copy of an original ancient piece of art and therefore may not be capable of being copyright which is also implied by the original email trail pasted into the image description. Can't find any contact details for an L Nabo. QUTalkQu14:22, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
It appears that a complete .svg image was uploaded, but something is wrong with the display. The only fix I can think of is to screen-capture one of the undamaged images and then upload it as a .png file. But there should be a way to use it as an .svg file. Thanks. HowardMorland (talk) 16:21, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
This might be due to a Swift bug. When such images occur they should be purged. (use the purge tab next to "view history" on file pages or click edit (on a affected file description page) and replace "action=edit" with "action=purge" in the address bar and hit enter.) -- RE rillkequestions?16:36, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Only purging won't work sometimes. Type ?action=purge at the end in the address bar, hit enter and reload bypassing your cache after purging.--Gauravjuvekar (talk) 16:54, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Ah, yes forgot about Please purge your browser’s cache or enable JavaScript in your Browser's settings. (You only need to do it once.)
Over on the English Wikipedia, we are experimenting with a new upload system at en:Wikipedia:File Upload Wizard (not the Commons UploadWizard, but a different script). This script has an option of letting the user assemble a set of description/source/licensing data and then, if it's a free file, forwarding that data to Commons Special:Upload in the form of a pre-loaded description so that the user can make the upload here. The script tries its best at having those description pages pre-formatted correctly according to Commons conventions.
Would people be interested in reviewing the script and letting us know if there's anthing that needs to be improved?
Also, would it be useful and okay to create a tag, perhaps with a category, here on Commons to track the files that are sent here through this channel? Fut.Perf.☼19:18, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
I upload all my stuff under Free Art License, and for some reason it's not an option there. I didn't continue with the test after that, since this would basically make this script useless for me (but then again i prefer just plain old select file and type in text box approach). VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 19:34, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Once I selected an upload to Commons it took me to Special:Upload where I had to browse again for the file. I think it would be great to automatically upload to commons without an intermediary form or at least push the file name to the Special:Upload. I am not sure if you need scripts like Commons Helper to accomplish an automatic upload.
This would be a little tricky, but it would be really great for the template to default to {{Artwork}} instead of {{Information}} if the "type of work" is selected as art, creative, sculpture etc. (i.e. the first 3 options in the form). It is more rich in options and fits better
I like the fact that the information was automatically internationalized
Thanks for this review. About the thing with the filename input, that was unfortunately unavoidable because of browser security issues. The file selection element cannot be programmed through Javascript. The option of having the whole upload done automatically seemed to be impossible for similar browser security issues (see Same origin policy). As for the Artwork template, I'm afraid that would require restructuring the whole questionnaire for those cases, wouldn't it? Fut.Perf.☼20:42, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I thought the missing file might have to do with security. However, to actually upload directly to Commons, I am sure all of that could be coded on the server side (not using JavaScript) and avoiding security limitations of client scripts. Regarding {{Artwork}}, no, I don't think it will require any restructuring in this phase. As long as you select the option "This is a photograph or other reproduction of a painting, drawing, poster,..." or the other two similar to it, the code could simply replace {{Information with {{subst:Artwork/subst. The {{Information}} fields like description will be carried over to the {{Artwork}} format, while the {{Artwork}}-specific fields will be empty requiring the uploader to fill them manually. In a latter phase, yes, you could have a sophisticated form to enter all fields related to artworks/museum objects.--Codrin.B (talk) 03:02, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I do not like that it displays something - useless (no offense intended - your idea (the script) is good) clutter on file pages. What about doing it like {{subst:Custom license marker added by UW}} or simply a hidden category (like it is done for all UW uploads? Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 23:55, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
For the moment, I actually like the fact that the template's "whatlinkshere" shows the files in chronological order of upload, which makes tracking easier, but I don't know if that will still apply when the list has become much larger, as it likely will, or whether it might become a performance issue in some way. Shall we go for an invisible category wrapped in the template, for now? If people here decide they want to get rid of the template some day, we can easily change the code over on en.wp to insert the bare category code instead. Thanks for the helpful advice. Fut.Perf.☼16:54, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes, the temporary info could be nice to have. So let's make it like the custom license marker tag. One template which needs to be substed (on upload) and one template which then gets yea, month, day passed to make a new to old sorting in the category (see Category:UW_uploads_using_a_custom_license - the most recent uploads are first). I can do it if you want... If we want to get rid of any template or category we need to remove it via a bot run probably... Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 17:47, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
Du kennst dich da ja offenbar gut aus, daher wär ich dankbar, wenn du so einen Mechanismus einrichten könntest. Sag mir dann nur Bescheid, wenn du Veränderungen am Input-Wikitext brauchst. Das kann ich leicht im Skript anpassen. Fut.Perf.☼19:04, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
Lasse dies vom Script einfügen: {{subst:Upload marker added by en.wp UW}}. Mit der Sortierung innerhalb eines Tages klappt es noch nicht so ganz.. mal sehen. Aber das ist ja nur eine Template-Sache. Die alte Vorlage kann vorerst einfach so bleiben. Viele Grüße --Saibo (Δ) 23:55, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
Das Tag würde ich auch direkt unter die Informations-Vorlage einfügen (nicht darüber - darüber sollte == {{int:filedesc}} ==). Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 12:38, 27 February 2012 (UTC) Example. --Saibo (Δ) 12:43, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
Disambiguation
Can someone please explain how to disambiguate Categories Britomartis and Britomartis (Lycaenidae) so that the categories can be kept separate? Thanks. ACCassidy (talk) 19:27, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Paperquest (talk·contribs) has uploaded lots of PNG versions of JPEG images and added "superseded" tags to the JPEG images' file info pages apparently using ImageAnnotator, so the superseded template only shows up when hovering over a specific area of the image. On the 2 of the images that I have checked so far, the user simply resaved the JPEG image as a PNG and reuploaded it. Comparing the JPEG and PNG versions shows that they are exactly the same. I havenominated 2 images so far for deletion and undone the changes to the JPEG versions' image description pages. I left a note on Paperquest's talk page, but this probably requires someone more familiar with Commons policy and procedure. —danhash (talk) 21:30, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
The source links look rather spammy to me (he hasn't listed the original image as source, instead some random websites). I suggest a block and rollback is in order. --Tony Wills (talk) 11:22, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
February 28
Increasing rankings in a Commons search?
w:User:JN466 mentioned on Jimbo Wales' page on en.wiki that searching for "tolling bells" here delivers an unexpected result. [17] I'm not a great fan of the "principle of least astonishment" but I do believe that if you search for a bell you should get a picture of a bell as the top hit. So I'm thinking that we should have a template "{{incl|bell}}" that when added to a picture that has an actual bell in it makes it come up higher in the search results than one which uses the term more figuratively. I made a crude attempt at this at User:Wnt/Templates/incl, but alas (when added to the second result)... it does nothing to the results. How are they being generated? Why does that image come up at the top of the list? And what can be done to mess with the rankings? Wnt (talk) 06:53, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps that image appears first because it happens to be the only one with both "tolling" and "bells" in the description? A better question is probably "Why is this search organized the way it is?" Note that even if you could reorder the results, the NSFW image in question would still appear on the first page. --Kramer Associates (talk) 08:10, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Search results should certainly be better but I am very skeptical about simple "Search engine optimization" solutions in the spirit of User:Wnt/Templates/incl. It sounds hardly scalable and potentially spammy. A more promising (but very demanding) line of work may be to revamp the category scheme and include some semantics in it. -Zolo (talk) 09:11, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
/me just wonders what all the Americans do during "work" ... ;-) Regarding the real topic: The search should probably make better use of the category system (I suspect it is not used at all). Oh, and your template will not work since I strongly doubt our search searches on the rendered pages (instead it searches the wikitext). It may affect e.g. google - but google is not stupid and will filter out such simple manipulation attempts and maybe even kick out that image or rate it down instead of up. --Saibo (Δ) 14:21, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Sorry - I should have been clearer. I want to use "SEO" on Commons results when you type in "tolling bells" at our search bar. I'm not concerned about Google at the moment. Wnt (talk) 15:47, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I can't figure it out. Even substing my spammy template into that Navy bell photo to introduce multiple "bell"s into the Wikitext, it still comes up second. I see somebody even renamed it - not a resolution I prefer - and it still comes up just from the redirect. I can't figure out what's in the "ding-dong" file that makes it a better hit than all those others. Wnt (talk) 16:00, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Search results are cached. Another note: for users who do not have the background color white the text will show up. ;-) I know, just a test. Renaming for this reason (and for the claimed reason to remove a "neologism) is not compliant to COM:RENAME and now it has an awfully generic name instead of the previous well describing one. Fæ what is your comment? --Saibo (Δ) 16:24, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
So how long do we have to wait to see a change in ranking? And can you tell me what will affect ranking? Agreed that white text wasn't my first choice - "display:none" should be better, if it works. Wnt (talk) 16:29, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I do not know the exact caching times. In the past it was roughly(!) one day. No, I do not know what affects ranking. By the way: instead of trying to "cheat" you could have put the correct categories to the image (I have done that now) - maybe that is enough to get it a better position. --Saibo (Δ) 16:50, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
To be clear, I support moving the ding-dong photo back to its original name, which appears to be somehow descriptive. This isn't the way to fix our search problem - and will you follow up by striking all "tolling of the bells" from the text also? No, we need a way to make the good results rise. Wnt (talk) 16:37, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
(ec) The search database is only rebuilt a couple of times per week, maybe once a day by now; nobody seems to know that precisely. It includes interwikis but not the ones of the categories. I am under the impression that it uses the following sorting order (test with "street Berlin" and "streets Berlin" that give different results):
almost perfect match of the search words in the same order of the item name (order File-Gallery-File (TBC))
almost perfect match of the search words in the same order of the item body (order File-Gallery-File (TBC))
Assuming this masturbation technique is actually specifically called "tolling of the bells," someone searching for it would use those terms and expect to find it. If it is a neologism, it should instead use a descriptive subtitle like "penis swinging forwards and backwards". The shortened filename is absurdly generic and does not effectively distinguish the image from all other male masturbation techniques in Category:Male_masturbation_(animated) (the rename is also pointless because the description still contains the search terms, and it will still lead the search results). All of our media of actual tolling bells, e.g. File:Church_Bells_ringing_at_All_Saints'_Church_-_geograph.org.uk_-_531713.jpg, are captioned/titled as "ringing" bells, rather than tolling. We can and should add additional keywords to these other files, rather than try to hide results from searchers trying to find it to avoid offense to others. Dcoetzee (talk) 17:02, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I have attempted to move some much complained about images with what I feel are highly misleading file titles. These particular file-names have the direct outcome that the public are constantly complaining about how Commons is full of porn. I am *not* arguing for deletion, merely sensible names that fairly reflect the subject of these images. I am aware of COM:RENAME but this does not mean that we can never change the uploader's initial title if it is misleading or misdirecting people to silly matches to sexually graphic photographs when searching Commons.
Fortunately Saibo has been scrutinizing my activities and has been reverting my moves, in the process accusing me of subverting NOTCENSORED, pushing POLA and threatening to remove my ability to move files. Hence I am coming to the village pump to see if an consensus on these or alternative helpful file moves can be reached.
Moving File:Labret phallic coddling.jpg → File:Overdrive blowjob.jpg - "Overdrive" is the source Flickr account, we have no idea who "Labret" is and "phallic coddling" is far less accurate than "blowjob" to describe the activity actually going on in this image and for anyone searching for it.
Moving File:Underwater bondage.jpg → File:Bathtub bondage.jpg - the woman in the image is in a bathtub, in fact the bathtub fills the image, she is not fully submerged underwater, so the filename is misleading.
1. This title is needed to distinguish the image from those featuring other sorts of improvised vibrators with other characteristics. Masturbation with toothbrushes, as opposed to other household objects, is a common phenomenon worthy of independent documentation. The image will still appear in the search results as long as the description mentions electric toothbrushes, which it must (it's a prominently featured object in the photo). 2. Besides the fact that "blowjob" is an informal term, this photo does not depict oral sex. The woman is merely pressing the penis against her face. I don't know what you'd call that to be objective. 3. Agree. 4. As I noted above, File:Masturbation Techniques - tolling of the bells (animated).gif is one among over a dozen male masturbation methods illustrated by Commons, and some kind of more detailed description is needed to distinguish it. If "tolling of the bells" is indeed a neologism and not a recognised term, it should be replaced with something descriptive like "swinging penis front to back". More generally, I would admonish Fæ not to make controversial moves without a prior discussion, and to use Commons:Requested moves instead. Dcoetzee (talk) 17:21, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
1. Many things can be a modified vibrator, from a toothbrush, an actual brush, carrots, etc. So in this case, this filename works and any move would cause a lot of overwriting. 2. Labret is a kind of piercing and some do have a fetish of wanting those and tongue rings to give oral sex, so this is something very specific. 3. Move was already done and I completely agree with it. 4. Dcoetzee has already said my view on this. User:Zscout370(Return fire)17:27, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
As said on your talk page: Renaming should be used sparsely since it breaks links and more! Underwater is not wrong. Renaming should not be done just because you had used better (in your opinion) names than the uploader has used. Also I fail to see why we should not allow "neologisms" (I am not sure that it is one)? This is not Wikipedia here. --Saibo (Δ) 17:31, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Under your argument, if someone uploaded a masturbation image and called it "Masturbation technique: User:Fae special", you would have to argue to keep it and not rename it, even if they made up the slang term on the spur of the moment. Justifying this under Commons:File renaming just seems to open a door for endless mischievous abuse of Wikimedia Commons. --Fæ (talk) 18:19, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
It has been pointed out that if we wanted to insult anyone searching for "toothbrush" or "tolling the bells" then the current filenames are ideally chosen to be offensive. Unfortunately "Labret" is not uncommon as a surname, and that filename may cause issues for some people. --Fæ (talk) 18:32, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
"Labret" is a perfectly normal English word which accurately describes an object on that photo. We can't avoid using specific nouns just because they happen to coincide with personal names. As a different example, the Swedish word for "porn" (porr) appears to be perfectly normal German surname. Do you mean that Commons images displaying pornography wouldn't be allowed to have Swedish names or that Swedish descriptions would be banned from such images? --Stefan4 (talk) 19:04, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Because of COM:NOTCENSORED, I don't see any reason to rename any of the files. Some people don't like some files, but there is no way to prevent that, since there will always be something that someone somewhere in the world doesn't like. In the underwater/bathtube case, the new name is more descriptive, so I see no problem in moving that file, but I oppose moving files in the other three cases since the new names are less descriptive. Besides, it cases a lot of trouble for reusers if files change names. --Stefan4 (talk) 18:15, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Sensible naming is not censorship, we are not deleting files only making sure they are accurately represented. You are stretching the guideline too far. --Fæ (talk) 18:19, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
The current names are more sensible than the ones you proposed, though. For example, it would be confusing to leave out the word toothbrush from the file name. --Stefan4 (talk) 18:22, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
It is appropriate to rename images that have no connection with a word in the title. In this case, I think the German annotation suggests that "tolling of the bells" is actually a description of some kind of actual (auto)sexual practice. If you think it's purely a figurative analogy by one person rather than a well known term then some kind of "masturbation by swinging the penis backward and forward" description might be appropriate. As vulgar i.e. common as this image is, it is still educational to people e.g. women who don't have penises, or don't have quite the same physical parameters. Actually, I found the notion that people would actually masturbate this way to be quite surprising; we should make sure people can find it. But still, "backward" and "forward" would then yield this from a search... Wnt (talk) 20:23, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I should followup by saying I found what is probably another instance, definitely a different video and I think a different butt [18] (to play video there's some rigamorale, which I'd scarcely put up with even in English, but it looks like the right initial pose) Wnt (talk) 20:33, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I can understand renaming to avoid misleading titles, but all of those images have words in their titles which give a pretty clear indication of what the content is. The renames seem to attempt to avoid common non-sexual terms in titles of images which contain sexual content, even when they are accurately describing the picture, possibly to minimize them showing up in search results. The proposed new names seem worse to me, honestly. Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:47, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I've noticed that, as far as I can tell, the picture of the day RSS is no longer updating (last update on February 16), is this a general problem or something on my end?
The webpage https://toolserver.org/~daniel/potd/potd.php also seems to be broken.
Thanks, That's exactly what I was looking for. I had a little automator script that would change my desktop each day, so I noticed when my desktop stopped updating. However, I think I've worked the new RSS format into it, so everything should be up and running. Kind of annoying to have it suddenly change without any notice, I'm sure I'm not the only one who had this problem.
A file that I uploaded to wikimedia commons, File:Temple_Scroll.png, is used on the Hebrew Wikipedia article מגילת_המקדש. However, it uses a thumbnail (hosted on commons): [19] that is missing a part of the image at the bottom. I don't know how these thumbnails are generated, but it's been this way for some time now, does anyone know how to fix this? Thanks in advance. -- Lindert (talk) 09:50, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
Purge the cache of the image (use the purge tab or click edit on the affected image description page on Commons and replace action=edit with action=purge in the URL. (I've done this already)
Navigate to the place (this case the article) with the corrupt thumbnail and Please purge your browser’s cache or enable JavaScript in your Browser's settings. (You only need to do it once.)
AjaxQuickDelete - Nominate for deletion - Move & Replace - Process Duplicates - No permission - Interruption for a few minutes
While maintaining the script, it is possible that the links disappear or they behave strange. This should only happen for a few minutes. After this is done, everything should work. If not - please let me know. Thank you. -- RE rillkequestions?11:18, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
Errors? Please purge your browser’s cache or enable JavaScript in your Browser's settings. (You only need to do it once.)
Catfood: Since I use Monobook I do see this script for the first time. Not really a up-to-date script... no protocol relative URL, encodeURIComponent shouldn't be used, wgTitle without prepended mw object. Should be a gadget - discuss-able if default or not... I use a similar script. ;-)
Wikiminiatlas, never seen. Now seen and judged inferior (due to the map quality) to the OSM link. Can be a non-default gadget in my opinion. --Saibo (Δ) 16:22, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
If it would be RL-compatible it would be packed together with the others anway, so it would not matter if it is just 3 lines. No true? Gadget = possible to opt-out (if it is decided that this should be default). --Saibo (Δ) 18:24, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
Currently it is an extra-script. If it would be RL-compatible it could be packed as a gadget, right, but since it currently has no opt-out and I don't think that people will be annoyed by a simple link on category-pages, let's do not clutter our gadget-list further. -- RE rillkequestions?19:40, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
Oppose It would be nice to have information for every country for each file in a machine readable form. However, this proposal here is only for US. The proposed license tags are overly complicated (remember that uploaders even have problems to understand the meaning of "70 years pma" (which does not require more than 70 years after creation but after death) and nearly no-one will understand this system; especially if it uses some template parameters which need to be set. I saw the file pages you created in your last bot run (which you have reverted): much more than one screen page full of public domain (we are not talking of license templates with restrictions...) tags? Ugly and scaring away everybody who looks at (probably the reaction: they are crazy). 
Support Copyright status in the US is relevant information about files and this information should be checked. Any categories, lists or templates that could help us to check it are welcome. A few reasons:
Comment It should be noted that most if not all translations of {{PD-old}}, and {{PD-old-auto}} have a license text that reads: "This includes the USA and all countries with a copyright term of 70 years...". And there are generally no warnings that a PD-70 license alone is not sufficient. We might want to fix that. De728631 (talk) 18:42, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
Question Will the field be hidden, or show no-license-warning? If hidden, 
Info It would be hidden, like other versions now. --Petrus Adamus (talk) 10:25, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
Weak support. {{Information}} was designed to appear simple and without much "magic" feel, the automatic conversion of exotic strings may be a bit confusing (all the more as it works for " Eigenes Werk (own work)" but not for "eigenes Werk". Hopefully, more and more uploading tools will use the correct {{Own}} making {{Parse source}} unnecessary. On the other hand, a bot should convert existing pages so that internationalization is not lost.--Zolo (talk) 11:46, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Done Also cleaned noise, normalized, etc. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:22, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. 01:17, 3 February 2012 (UTC) .png)
Agree We need some documentation of how to introduce new translatewiki parameters and how to make them work on Commons. To my knowledge at the moment only User:Multichill knows the process. --Jarekt (talk) 12:51, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
)
Giant Wood Spider (Nephila Maculata)
Giant Wood Spider (Nephila Maculata)
Wikipedia
Resolved
POTD Atom feed, images with 300px width. Rd232 (talk) 02:28, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
![[16]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/One-Point_Safety_Test.svg/558px-One-Point_Safety_Test.svg.png){kind=link}
,_Lt._Cmdr._Stan_Nicholls,_conducts_roll_call_by_tolling_the_bell_in_memory_for_each_submarine_lost_during_World_War_II.jpg){kind=link}
.gif){kind=link}
![[19]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Temple_Scroll.png/250px-Temple_Scroll.png){kind=link}
deleted (used on 4 pages, and can cause serious confusion and is not done for all skins and users with JS disabled) and the JS-code removed from MediaWiki:Vector.js. -- RE rillke questions? 17:40, 29 February 2012 (UTC)