Commons:Village pump/Archive/2014/06

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Serbia / Kosovo again

Could someone of the admins revert this page/file back to ins original (i cnt coz its locked)...arguments are found on the talk page of the file...things are clear and obvious...--Ivan VA (talk) 00:48, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

I second this. OAlexander (talk) 11:21, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
 Not done The protection is there because the map is disputed. You need to create a new map to show your point of view and upload it here under a different name. --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 16:12, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
OMG, its not about a point of view, and its not AGAIN!....the map is clearly false (READ THE DISCUSSION PAGE, i just explained)...these maps (like for other countries in these matters) are based on STATE/Constitutional LAW and the map is not showing that(again read the discussion page!...im getting tired!)....every lawyer/ law/ polt. sciences student would agree with me (its not a matter of politics but of LAW!)....
Und wenn du schon mir keine andere plausibele Erklaerung gegen die aenderung des jetzigen zustandes aufweist, wuerde ich dich bitten die mappe in den originalzustand zu revertieren...Schoenne Gruesse :)--Ivan VA (talk) 16:48, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
Of course it is again. We had this discussion many times before. Since this section of the map is disputed, there's a need for two maps. Pretty simple. It has nothing to do with international law. --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 18:14, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
No, its not again....and we didn't have the discussion before...we had discussions before on geographical/political maps...but not on the administrative ones....the political ones are the disputed ones coz they are a matter of politics and the ongoing dispute...but not this (administrative) one/ones!...this 1 is sourced on Serbian internal law ONLY which is very clear and devides Serbia administrativly into some regions...(this law is in tune with the constitution (just in case to mention that))...and when that law (legal act) precisely mentions the regions which it defines and organizes (and i quted the pages on the disc. page), which this map uses as as THE SOURCE, u cannot come with some scissors and say that part of the law (passed by all lawmaking institutions, completely legitimate ) of admin. organiz. is politicaly disputed, cut the disputed regions out the map, make 2, 3,10 maps....
The law on this matter is very precise and it defines the Districts of Serbia on which the map is made...nothing is dispute...everything is precise and clear...and u are absolutely right, international law hasn't anything to do with this, is a matter of INTERNAL LAW in tune with the constitution....and if the serbian law, by the unique legal system, described by the constitution, makes the rest of Europe as a part of its admin. organization u have to make the map according to that, no matter how disputed it seems (...making it bit ridiculously now to make a point...)...( i made the example of Russia at the talk page, i can also add some examples from history, there are a lot)
So, yes, the map is incorrect and wrong....--Ivan VA (talk) 18:56, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
The geographical/political map is disputed (you agreed above) Therefore the administrative map must be disputed as well, because this map is based on the geographical / political maps. You seem to be able to create maps, so please do it and don't waste volunteer time by discussing the same point over and over again. --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 20:38, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
These maps are disputed when it comes to international stuff, the ongoing political conflict/nagotiations about the status of Kosovo (or w/e) and the encyclopedical need to show and describe that the positions are disputed there (not just by text but also through maps)...but when it comes to the view (ONLY) of the Serbian state/cunstitutional law, by which the map is made (calling on the appropriate state legal act), there is absolutely no doubt that Kosovo is a part of the Republic (just read the preambule of the constit.), therefore all laws, as the law on the terit. organization, are in tune with the constit....so u cannot scissor/change any part of the map, coz then, ur deliberately putting false and incorrect information in it (not in accordance with the source)....
Or, lets just go the way around...the map calls on the serbian law on terit. administration....thats the way it was drawn...if u go with the current map to the source and read from the source, then u won't again draw the same map u came with....
On the admin board u said that my arguments are „against common sense“...thats maybe true, coz for the stuff we are discussing here u have to have a certain legal logic and understanding of the legal hierarchies, which is not accordant to common sense, like in most sciences, scientific thinking differs from common sense....
And no, this is not a kindergarden, where if you dont like some game, you go make yourself an other game.....this is a PRECISE SCIENCE, an the facts here are pretty clear....there are no 2, 3 or 10 right maps, there is ONLY 1 RIGHT MAP, all the others are FALSE!...we're writing here an encyclopedia for Christ's sake....so be reasonable unlock and revert the map, i think i have made enough arguments....the current map is FALSE, and false informations are now standing in all other branches of the encyclopedia...there is only 1 right map not 10!--Ivan VA (talk) 21:38, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
You need to get acquainted with the “precise science” of Comment Indenting. -- Tuválkin 05:39, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
I meant legal sciences..in this case its clear--Ivan VA (talk) 15:04, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Several countries include in their internal laws territorial administrative provisions over territory they do not control and which is internationally recognized to belong to some other subject of international law. Serbia is not the only case — Venezuela, Georgia, India, and China (both) come to mind. It is encyclopedic to be able to identifiy those territories on a map. -- Tuválkin 05:39, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Yes, It's encyclopedic, but its done one political maps, and political maps are drawn that way (coz they base themselves on both sources (sources of the disputed sides)...that praxis is widely used here and thats pretty (and encyclopedicly) correct....but when it comes to administrative devisions, these maps are based on internal law of the countries ONLY...and the internal/constit. law of these countries, by a unique legal system, does not detect the parts of the countries territory as disputed (even if its realisticly not so, as u said)...(they pass laws looking at the constitution and whats written in it and not on the political dispute)...thats why there are terms like de facto and de jure.

Administrative maps are sourced on internal laws of countries, and these laws are explicit and clear, and the map is based on them...presenting smth. others on the map which isn't in tune with the source is a simple violation of the source it recalls on...(i explained in the above comment.)...

So, you're absolutely right, but that's the case with political maps, coz they call on both sources of the desputed sides in the conflict, but the admin. maps are calling only on internal laws (on one of the sides), and thats what only matters, showing smth. others is violation of source and incorrect presentation...

On the other side, when it comes to the Republic of Kosovo, in that article on admin. devisions. u show only the map of admin. devisions based on the RKS internal law (or UN made, im not sure hows the situation there atm) (which ofc wholly differs from the serbian ones, and hasnt anything to do with it)....and when it comes on the article Kosovo(region), for example, on en wiki, there u show both, the serbian and the RKS ones...pretty simple....--Ivan VA (talk) 14:58, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

If you have the flag of Russia like this File:Russian Federation (orthographic projection) - Crimea disputed.svg you have to even handed. -- OAlexander (talk) 08:00, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
I disagree, there is only 1 correct map, thats the whole point of the discussion above, and on the disc. page of the map...--Ivan VA (talk) 15:00, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Trying to make up a solution that might solve all problems: The map could show that the area we are talking about is disputed. Instead of solid color there could be a stripe pattern or another color (not my favorite) and a text stating currently disputed. Would that solve the issue properly? We would keep everything within one map, no renames, no confusion. @Ivan VA: What do you think? --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 19:33, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Our maps should be accurate. If anybody wants an inaccurate map in order to suit some nationalist fantasy, I'm open to the possibility that they could upload a new image, as long as the title and description make it clear that (a) it isn't an actual map, and (b) where to find another more accurate map. To do otherwise would be incompatible with Commons' educational mission.
  • Renaming of the current map to File:Districts_of_Serbia (without Kosovo).png is probably not an improvement.
  • Ivan VA's arguments are doubly false; first of all, maps shouldn't be changed to suit politicians' fantasies, and secondly, the constitutional argument is contradicted by Serbia's own contemporary constitution as well as by more recent treaties.
  • Considering that Kosovo has since declared independence, and it's recognised by most countries, and Serbia's legal challenge failed miserably (although the ethnic-cleansing approach was brutally successful for a while), we should not show Kosovo as part of Serbia by default. Maps should reflect reality, and the reality is that Kosovo is independent. It's probably appropriate to have some alternate maps which do show Belgrade's perspective, as long as it's made clear in the title and in accompanying text that the map does not reflect reality "on the ground". Every so often, though, users on sr.wiki are canvassed to come over here and change maps to suit a revisionist Serbian-nationalist perspective. Cross-wiki canvassing is a recurrent problem. bobrayner (talk) 20:08, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
  • I don't understand why this is even an issue in Commons. There's plenty of space here for versions of the map that represent all possible viewpoints. Individual files shouldn't be the subject of revert wars. Even when boundaries change without dispute, old maps are still useful in historical context. Solution: revert the map to its original state and protect it that way, and let the arguments about which map to use take place elsewhere. --ghouston (talk) 05:30, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Suggestion: Usage of two shades or colors would be the proper way to handle this territory dispute. Google Maps uses a dashed line, so making the disputed border extra thick here doesn't make sense. Also, the northern district line shouldn't be thicker than the external border either, since international borders are of greater significance than internal ones. The map at its current state is quite bad at conveying the geographical state of affairs, it needs a re-make instead of continued ethnic disputes. - Anonimski (talk) 20:44, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Malaysia Coat of arms

Is the Malaysia coat of arms can be used now in the English Wikipedia? I see there is a modification also on 1965, 1982 and 1988. Because when we see the Malaysian copyright template, the copyright will stay for 50 years after the publishment. If that so, that means as the last modified on 1988, we should wait for another 24 years without any coat of arms on the Malaysia article? I'm a bit confused now. Can someone who professional on this matter to give us some suggestion based on this discussion on the English Wikipedia? Thanks! — ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ʙᴏʀᴇᴅ ʜᴜʜ? 00:58, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

  • I'm not sure anyone here on Commons can tell you what can be done in a different wiki, the English Wikipedia, and the only "professional" advice here would be from a lawyer, who is unlikely to give it for free on a public forum. - Jmabel ! talk 19:11, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
  • +1 - The English Wikipedia not only allows Fair Use as a rationale for images but also interprets copyright law more weakly than the norm is on Commons. You may find Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files a suitable place to ask your question. -- (talk) 19:19, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Problems with "Photographs taken on 20xx-xx-xx" categories

I tried to apply them (via my personal file description template) to my uploads; the category appears, as it should, at the bottom along with all other categories; but the file is still missing when you go to the category. Example: File:Moscow 05-2012 Mokhovaya 05.jpg with Category:Photographs taken on 2012-05-25. Purging / using other browser: doesn't help. --A.Savin 18:21, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

I believe this is transclusion lag. It will appear eventually, I don't know how to work out the time it takes. Personally, I feel that transcluding categories by "hiding" them inside templates is something to avoid due to these and other problems, though I know the community has mixed views on this as a practice for personal credit templates. If you don't substitute this template, you probably ought to considering that the norm would be to include a small credit template within an information template, rather than the reverse. -- (talk) 18:29, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. --A.Savin 20:34, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
if you get tired of waiting, null editing (as opposed to purging, unless you do it with the api and a special option) will force the categories the page is in to be reevaluated. However problem should fix itself after a couple days if everything is currently working right with job queue. Bawolff (talk) 01:34, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

June 02

minimis in Video

I was here think about bring videos to here, but I was think ok, what I can bring or not. My idea was bring "reviews" (films , games, cameras...) based in WP articles. But most of that have copyright restrictions...

So a start to think with my self, in one short review video of 15 min, pass 30s of one film of 120 min, is a minimis? Because with if think 30s of 15 min, is ~3% of the final art, if we transport that to a picture, 3% of picture is a minimis.

And I don't think in size of the frame, because, we can pass a whole move in 5% of the total screen size, but people would get the whole film idea, and history.

I can't find a documentation about it, and the appointment here don't cover my thoughts. Any idea? Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 07:02, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that is what de minimis is about. Another term for de minimis is incidental inclusion. That term is even used in several of the laws quoted at COM:DM. An example in a video would be: you're shooting an interview on a sidewalk in a city, and in the background a bus with a huge advertisement passes by, or a car stops at a red light in the street, the driver listening full blast to some CD, and the music is audible in your video's audio track. The case you present is different, the inclusion of the film excerpt would be deliberate, not incidental. You could argue "fair use" in the U.S., or maybe invoke one of the "news reporting" or other fair-use-alike provisions in other countries, but neither is allowed at the Commons. De minimis is not only concerned with how much of a work is used, but also with the intent behind the use. (A completely unrelated problem with your idea is that one wonders how "reviews" of anything would fit in with NPOV.) Lupo 16:05, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
NPOV it's not a problem here...
Well, I already read this, but "De minimis use of a copyrighted work is such a trivial use that the consent of the copyright owner is not required.".
Lets change my question, how much in a video is a trivial use? How much is a fair use? And when this start to be a copyright infringement.
Because I can image tons of scenarios in videos that we can cheat, i.e., a new film coming out, we put some one telling about the film in the middle of one big avenue that has a billboard displaying the trailer, we will have 3 times more images of the film, comparing to showing 30s...
Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 18:17, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
I don't think "reviews" are in the scope of Commons or Wikipedia, otherwise we could also host vlogs or similiar stuff.    FDMS  4    18:20, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
Rodrigo, you do that, and it's a copyvio. I didn't say de minimis did not consider amount, but it doesn't consider only amount. If you're unlucky and that bus with the advertisement doesn't pass by but stops at the red light and remains there and prominently visible in your footage for the rest of your interview, you may have to re-shoot your interview. (Normal news reporting doesn't care, they can rely on fair use or fair-use-like provisions. But if you want to license your interview under a free license and mustn't rely on fair use stuff, you do need to care.) And if you place the interview in front of a billboard, you do so intentionally and it isn't incidental inclusion anymore anyway. Lupo 19:12, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
Yeah, vblog... ¬¬
This still not answer me.
how much in a video is a trivial use? How much is a fair use? And when this start to be a copyright infringement..
Keep to this point. Forget the rest.
Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 22:57, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
Commons:De minimis.    FDMS  4    00:53, 29 May 2014 (UTC)
@Rodrigo.Argenton: - this archived discussion might also be of interest. Green Giant (talk) 01:40, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

@Green Giant: Thanks, but I already read that, and I still don't have my answer Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 02:42, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Your answer is irrelevant to Commons and quite complex, so it's not something that we're going to spend much time worrying about.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:02, 29 May 2014 (UTC)
A good way to think about de minimis is to ask yourself: if I removed the infringing inclusion entirely, would it make a meaningful change to my work? If it doesn't, the infringement is probably de minimis. --Carnildo (talk) 00:24, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
Prosfilaes how this is irrelevant to Commons? More and more we will receive videos, without some basic definitions, we cannot handle properly.
Carnildo this is good step, thanks. Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 06:00, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
We have some basic definitions, and if this does become a problem, we'll build up some case law on the subject. The question is simply not ripe, and the problem too big to be handled this way.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:27, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

May 29

The Upload name filter has gone completely mad

Among the file names it is now rejecting, wanting them to be "more meaningful" are:

  • DSCF9176 British museum room 41 fittings from Taplow New display from 2014 This Commons filter is rubbish sfgrdfh fddtghjjjkju
  • DSCF9176 Brit Mus room 41 Taplow burial mounts that's enough jsdfe ddghg
  • DSCF9176 Brit Mus room 41, A-S brooch not that's eenuf ffhtdcb sddfhjumdsdsw more random letters this is ridu (and mo*re I can't copy)
  • DSCF9176 Brit Mus room 41 poorNew display from 2014New display from 2014 gold glass

This is crazy - who is going to upload if you have to write an essay in the file title? This must be changed. Johnbod (talk) 16:02, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Are you being totally blocked from uploading with those names, or just warned in a way that you can override with "ignore all warnings"? The problem is that the filename prefix is listed in MediaWiki:Filename-prefix-blacklist. If it's just warning people and letting them override, that's one thing; if it's blocking uploads and not letting users override it, I would say that block needs to be fixed. (MediaWiki:Titleblacklist is the appropriate list for names that are truly blocked.) --Closeapple (talk) 17:00, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it seems the Upload Wizard is not able to ignore warnings. (bugzilla:46741) --McZusatz (talk) 17:47, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
Related change: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/136546/ --McZusatz (talk) 17:47, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the comments. I can see the problem arose because I foolishly failed to override the default copying the file title to the whole batch, adding a number at the end. Hence what should have been my own system's:DSCF9176 / 77 / 78 .... all stayed the same as DSCF9176, but "Room 41" (in the British Museum, which should have stayed the same) at the end of the file name became Room 41 / 42/ 43 .... Aargh! Really this rather dangerous option in the feature should not be the default - it is very often likely to lead to serious difficulties with the filter. But very many uploaders might want to start all their file names in a batch with the same sequence for entirely valid reasons, and if you do that the filter pretty much ignores all subsequent variation in titles until you insert something random at the start of the filename. This is highly disruptive, even destructive, of proper indexing. One should not have to waste time devising ways to fool an over-active filter. If one starts the file name with sequential DSCF9176 / 77 / 78 .... it is more accepting. Johnbod (talk) 19:39, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
MediaWiki:Filename-prefix-blacklist should complain on any file starting with DSCF, no matter what you do to the following numbers. I think you've misidentified the problem.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:41, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi everyone, this bot was still running on the Toolserver and was extremely broken. Moved everything to Toollabs and enabled as much functionality as possible. The main thing that is still missing right now is the recategorization. I didn't enable that because that relies on http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CommonSense.php . I have to wait for User:Duesentrieb to fix that. Multichill (talk) 15:22, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for update. Hopefully both tools will be up and running soon. --Jarekt (talk) 23:50, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Pt-br stuffs

I'm tired to have to handle with two pages all the time that I'm doing maintenance. And sysops and some volunteers here are doing this job worst, i.e. Commons:Deletion requests/Commons:Licensing/pt-br (2), this page was already deleted, and two pt speakers asked to deleted, and the sysop ignored that; recently one volunteer asked pt-br translation for a thing already translated in pt...

Why we have pt-br? We don't have pt-br WP, and just a feel volunteers defend the secession (normally with a xenophobic speech). This is not a dialect, this is not a clear variable of Portuguese, Brazil is huge, and Southern do not express like Northern, what is the next step? Have pt-br-sp, pt-br-rj, ...?

We don't have here es-ar, es-mx, es-ch, es-es..., and we don't have en-us, en-uk, en-au... why pt speakers are the only one that have to handle with this problem? And in result of that, we have tons of out-date pages, or pages in some variety perfect and other total incompletely. And most of times the pt variety was written in pt-br, or is a mix. A clear example of all that: Commons:Licensing/pt, this is a clear pt/pt-br mess, the pt-br one (that asked to be delete) is out-dated, and not completely translated...

And every time and time, we need to discuss that, normally we remove pt-br, but without a decision for the whole things, we need to solve that. So what is the justification for keep pt-br?

Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 06:39, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

However, we do have {{Arz}} (Egyptian Arabic)... AnonMoos (talk) 12:35, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
Please start a formal RfC process and make sure a representative number of Brazilian Portuguese speakers share their opinion on it. This is helpful if there are suddenly editors who decide starting new pt-br translation pages. And it would be required for disallowing pt-br in the translate extension. -- Rillke(q?) 13:20, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Metropolitan police images

I've been in correspondence with the Metropolitan Police (the police service for London, England) over the last few months, discussing the possibility of them open-licensing some of their images - not least the scenic (as opposed to scene-of-crime) pictures taken from their helicopters, and/ or images posted to their social media accounts.

They have decided that they so not wish to do so on a blanket basis, but say that they are willing to consider requests to do so for images in an individual basis. You may send requests to: DMC-Mailbox-.PressBureau-DMC@met.pnn.police.uk Andy Mabbett (talk) 16:38, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

June 04

Search engine is down

Files uploaded and categories created during the last 72 hours are not displayed and search word related counts are stuck. --Edelseider (talk) 11:11, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

For what its worth, issue does not seem to affect people with the "new search" beta feature checked. Bawolff (talk) 15:56, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
According to bugzilla:66011, its still working, just very delayed and will hopefully fix itself (I think that's what is being said on the bug anyways). Bawolff (talk) 16:41, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
There was actually some pretty bad failures with the indexer. The old search engine should start updating again soon. ^demon (talk) 23:55, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Time for Cirrus as primary?

With the old search engine barely limping along at this point I'm wondering if Commons is ready for the new search to be set as primary for all users. We'd still keep the old search online for power users (it's useful for comparing things for bug reporting) but hopefully the vast majority of people would get an improved experience. ^demon (talk) 17:31, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

June 05

Categorization of old Jerusalem photos, and move help request

Hi

I have been filling Category:Jerusalem photographs by Lehnert & Landrock with images that I have scanned, along with eBay photos of the missing ones in the series. Can anyone help with categorizing them? I am not familiar with the topic.

There are also two indexing issues that I need admin help with, due to some mistakes I made:

Thanks in advance - Anonimski (talk) 20:31, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

June 06

Try out Special:Nearby, which is working now. --Jarekt (talk) 03:41, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Export massive watchlist?

Sooo I have a watchlist, it has a LOT of items I insist on keeping there (so no emptying for me), but it really needs to be cut down drastically. The problem is, the list is 39 thousand items and Commons seems to faint at any request I make at editing it in any mode ("Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem."). Cleaning up stuff that shows up edited for two weeks has helped me cut the list from 41 thousand manually, but that's kind of insane. So, any idea how to export my watchlist? --Pitke (talk) 15:48, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Does https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=watchlistraw&gwrlimit=max&prop=info&inprop=url help you? (It will only give the first 500 results. You can get the next page by adding &grwcontinue=<Whatever the continue parameter at the beginning of the page is> to the end of the url). Bawolff (talk) 19:56, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
Well that does seem to work but unfortunately what I get is a bunch of code and I'd have to know a script to parse anything useful out of it (read: list of pages and files in the watchlist raw format)... --Pitke (talk) 01:01, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=watchlistraw&gwrlimit=max gives a much more concise format (closer to watchlist raw format) but all the entries that aren't deleted have their page ids in there which keeps me tightly in the "need a parser" land... Unless I can get block selection working on gedit or something. --Pitke (talk) 01:19, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
yeah. Its really not user friendly. I gave that one because it had clickable links. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=watchlistraw&wrlimit=max&format=json is much more concise. Bawolff (talk) 01:53, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

UGH!! Special:EditWatchlist/clear fails?! What do?! *siiiggghhhh* I guess it's time to go bother the sysadmins. --Pitke (talk) 19:13, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

For those whom it may concern:
--Pitke (talk) 20:01, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
I stopped trying to edit my raw watchlist when it had 10K entries. Now it has 215K entries, but only 100 changes per day so nothing to worry about. What Im supposed to do with a raw list of all 215K entries? Nothing. More helpful would be an "unwatch" button directly in the watchlist to help me manage the daylie activites on the list, especially when someone is reorganizing/categorizing large numbers of files that appear on my watchlist. --Martin H. (talk) 15:07, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
My initial plan for a raw list for my watched items was to trim items I can easily recognise as mass recats (tons of same format in file names) and certain namespaces where pretty much every entry is of no interest to me. (The api lists are actually pretty helpful as an extended raw form since they seem to indicate whether a watched item exists or not). I actually did the manual trim (going from 41K to 6K very easily) and planned to first clear my watchlist and then edit in raw to restore the items I wanted to keep. So that's why I wanted the raw list. That having been said, I have filed a bug report but since it's specific to a small group of users and creating a huge watchlist is kind of a pain (unless someone fixes up a lil' script to add foo entries automatically) it'd be super helpful if @Martin H. (or any other person with a looong watchlist) could pop by the bug entry and comment with info on whether the bug repeats for them, and if yes, how. --Pitke (talk) 16:46, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Free videos covering 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine

British journalist Graham Phillips has shared some of his videos using CC license (to illustrate topics on 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine).

Sloviansk, Kramatorsk 12.04-16.04

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMbGeHQNqqg
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxEElr9OSmk
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5NNmXyI6mY
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTo70JE_mwM
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-4btHgfuFM
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpoQYbQPrjI
  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuvOHZ2CVJc

Sloviansk, Kramatorsk 16.04-25.04

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4XQ4ZGO6Ps
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stePpL-myT8
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcbbxiw-qGc
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY8Y7DtcvPk
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMD1osnoaKo

Donetsk 8.04-9.04

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwciNKdpuJA
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkC85Dhu9YA
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S43Tq3zrLKI
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1jEpNHzuss
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONwwlQexmGg

Lugansk 10.04-25.04:

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqNy8H7wcCo
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XZ5OQB_b4A
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztGQjrND-qw
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oav5-M7RrYw
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0G2ygQMTGw

I've started Category:Photos by Graham Phillips and Category:Videos by Graham Phillips here. First three videos are uploaded alredy.--Fastboy (talk) 16:57, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Keep in mind to {{LicenceReview}} them. You may also use Help:Youtube2mediawiki to take care of the upload and file description. --McZusatz (talk) 09:07, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
Help:Youtube2mediawiki is too hard for me. I'll add {{LicenceReview}}.--Fastboy (talk) 20:04, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
✓ Done the upload. (I will replace the 360p with HQ ones later.) --McZusatz (talk) 16:41, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
Thank you! --Fastboy (talk) 19:32, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
Fantastic stuff, I contacted Graham a couple of weeks ago asking him if he would consider CC licencing some of his videos. Great to see that he has made some available, either as a result of my request, or as a result of requests by others. russavia (talk) 09:39, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
Probably, he was earlier too busy. Now he has more free time.--Fastboy (talk) 20:04, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

10 more for Wikipedia (Sloviansk):

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FshMKeXKbLU
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbBSdm3FI8k
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xpEaFUwVyQ
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj8Pycv2G1g
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVgqY7ci3KU
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf1BNntiBwQ
  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKy1rJyKfr4
  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihpo8Y1ozag
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcIN_u7fL4w
  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlqdcRXrkfE - Lugansk, April 2

--Fastboy (talk) 14:21, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

May 30

File:Gumerdiginwoman.jpg

File:Gumerdiginwoman.jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Hello. This photo is taken by me years ago. The person in the photo told me she does not want her picture in the internet. I want the image to be deleted as soon as possible. Thank you. Özgür Mülazımoğlu

i made it private in flickr... how may i start the normal deletion request process? Thank you.95.10.65.208 19:22, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Unfortunately this image of an identifiable person was made in a public place and is generally unobjectionable. Such image may not be deleted from commons unless it is continued to be used on any Wikimedia project. Ruslik (talk) 19:35, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
this person is my aunt, it was shot at her home and she does not want her image to be used in wikipedia projects. pls delete it as soon as possible. 95.10.65.208 19:44, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Please raise a deletion request as suggested, or ask here for someone to raise it on your behalf but you should make a clear statement that this was in a private location and the subject never gave consent to publication. Given such a statement, then there are reasonable grounds to consider deletion. I suggest you include a reference to Article 20 of the Turkish Constitution which appears to cover this photograph if the subject never gave consent.[1] -- (talk) 09:25, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
'Update Ah, I see a DR has been created at Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Gumerdiginwoman.jpg, I shall add a comment there. -- (talk) 09:28, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

June 07

Subcategories generally (Ben Nevis in particular)

Hi! Seems I've done something wrong because when I created two categories for the North Face of Ben Nevis (Scotland), I followed the Commons:Categories instructions by writing:[[Category:Ben Nevis]] in the edit window, expecting this to suffice for creating the subcategory relationship, but this hasn't worked. Please could someone take a quick look at this before I go through the 141 existing images and sort them appropriately. Munrogue (talk) 10:21, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Right idea, but you had {{Category:Ben Nevis}} instead of [[Category:Ben Nevis]]. --ghouston (talk) 10:41, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
If only I hadn't climbed it yesterday I might not have made that mistake! Thank you. Well, 141 ain't sooo many but I don't suppose there's zippy way of, say, tickboxing all the files from a parent category that match a new subcategory? Just a thought.. Thanks again. Munrogue (talk) 11:33, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
There are several ways to do that. One is with cat-a-lot (which I don't use but I gather a lot of people do) and the other is with VisualFileChange.js: among its many capabilities is formal text substitution, which can be used to change one category to another. - Jmabel ! talk 16:53, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

RfC for Media Viewer

Opinions are needed at RfC about Media Viewer being the default image viewer. Please help in the effort and pass this notice on. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 20:23, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

June 08

Notification of a proposal to update CC license tags. Jee 13:25, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Languages of Indonesia

Article(s): Languages of Indonesia

Request:

Please add province boundary in Indonesia Ethnic Groups Map. --Kaiyr (talk) 14:12, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Think you need to go to Commons:Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop‎... -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:36, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Year categories railtransport Greece

I created category:1992 in rail transport in Greece with the template Railtransportyear-Greece (copied from Italy). Could someone check the template? (What is Greece in Finnish?). Any help in creating the other year categories (and connected ones) is appreciated.Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:19, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Select pictures template

Hey guys, I was doing things around here, but I didn't find a template that can be used in several scenarios here, the n:Template:Picture select, that produces this. What you think? We can import that here? (this require more than a wiki text, that's the reason that I'm here). Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 16:18, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm, isn't that why we have galleries? --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 20:34, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Can you not see any difference between a gallery and this template?
How about the size? How about the possibility to put more photos in a table?
So, answering your question, it is not. Galleries expose all photos at the same time, and occupy a big amount of space. This template I can fit 10 photos in just one box, for example, we can't put more then one photo per day, or, put more then one example of pictures of the year in the Main page, with this, we can. (this is just a silly example).
Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 22:24, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
This looks incredibly ugly and broken on mobile, so I rather oppose using it over here.    FDMS  4    23:43, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
And no one can fix that? Puff... Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 08:31, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I guess we're not importing a template just to fix it, and I don't think it's really beautiful or useful (the buttons are very small) on desktop either.    FDMS  4    08:41, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

For me is important, especial to do a tutorial thing, what's the problem to import? Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 13:18, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

RfC for Media Viewer 2

By now it would seem most editors have experienced the (now default) viewer i.e. Media Viewer, which doesn't allow the general public to view an image in its full resolution. Editors who've created quality high resolution photos for Picture of the day should be concerned, because as of a few days ago, people can no longer view these images in full resolution. Opinions are needed at RfC about Media Viewer being the default image viewer. Please help in the effort to gather opinions and pass this notice on. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 05:02, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Am I missing something? I have just looked at one of my own pictures while logged off and I can still see it at its highest resolution. LynwoodF (talk) 09:48, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
That's strange. I just logged off, returned to the main page, clicked on 'Picture of the day' and the 'Media Viewer' came up and presented the image in one size that filled the screen (vertically). There was no provision (i.e.no magnify icon/pointer) to see the image in its max resolution. This has been one of the major complaints in the discussions on the Media Viewer talk page. Anyone else? -- Gwillhickers (talk) 16:33, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
I am still confused. I see nothing I would describe as a magnify icon when logged on, but I have three opportunities to magnify. When I log off, one of these disappears, but I can still go to the file page by clicking on "Learn more".
That said, I think the new system is an irritating waste of time. I liked it how it was. I reckon that if it ain't broke you don't fix it. LynwoodF (talk) 18:41, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Moved from here. --Steinsplitter (talk) 18:48, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

This Media Viewer sucks, special for us, this don't give a clear link to Commons, as before, and we gonna need to fix all galleries, because we cant only click to go to the images... Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 20:17, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Personally, I think not sending people directly to Commons is a great improvement. When readers click on an image, 99% of the time they just want to see a larger version of the image, not be taken to a completely different website. Viewing images at larger than screen-size is also an edge case, IMO. Sure it makes life harder for us Commonists, but we aren't the majority of media users. Kaldari (talk) 20:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I almost fully agree with you, but often filedesc pages aren't really welcoming to new users anyway. Also, users can get to categories directly from MV, which they can't from Wikipedia filedesc copies.    FDMS  4    22:00, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

June 09

Note to license reviewers

There are over 500 files pending for license review at Category:License review needed. That category needs attention to avoid issues that commonly happens with flickr files, missing source or author changed license. I may increase the number of files in there also (warning in advance). Regards, FlávR (talk) 13:17, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

June 10

Orson Welles image

Could someone more in-the-know take a look at this image of Orson Welles? It's been uploaded as public domain because it was published between 1923 and 1977 without copyright notice — but this particular print (from the A&E Network) is dated 1994. I've also seen this image on the cover of the paperback edition of Simon Callow's The Road to Xanadu, with credit given to the Everett Collection. It doesn't seem to be in the public domain. — WFinch (talk) 23:51, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

This particular image is dated 05:45, 17 August 2013; it's first publication that matters, not last. Credit given to the Everett Collection is completely irrelevant; they're more then willing to provide images like this, completely ignoring the niceties of whether copyright exists in the file and sometimes whether or not they're the proper owner. Then again, I don't see any proof that it is in the public domain, either.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:37, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
Yes, the file presents no evidence that the image itself was published between 1923 and 1977 without copyright notice. The scan that's provided doesn't do that. There's a statement that it is a film still and that those are not typically copyrighted; but it's not a film still, it's a publicity portrait, and however it's defined RKO (that's the "studio" that's generically credited as the author) was quite scrupulous about printing a copyright notice on the reverse side of the images they released. I've never nominated a file for deletion but maybe I'll figure out how to do that. Thanks for your response. — WFinch (talk) 17:43, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Maybe this resource could be of help. Husky (talk to me) 13:32, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

May 31

Massacre revisionism/denialism in edits to file summaries

Currently at File:8-2earthquake-kanto.jpg I am involved in a dispute with another editor, and would like to seek a third, external opinion on the matter. Per Commons policy, file descriptions should describe how the source describes the file, and add appropriate explanations where necessary. User:Tomotadara has been involved in historical revisionism in the past on the English Wikipedia, and is attempting to discredit any "evidence" that a massacre of Koreans took place in 1923. This user previously attempted to delete the file at Commons:Deletion requests/File:8-2earthquake-kanto.jpg, and right now he is attempting to modify the file description to make it seem as if KBS (the image source) has fabricated the photograph of the killing of a Korean. User:Tomotadara's argument is that the image is a hoax used by the Korean media, is "sensationalism", and that since the word of KBS (Korean Broadcasting System, a South Korean broadcaster) cannot be trusted, saying that the image depicts the killing of a Korean is "original research" and therefore is prohibited (despite that Wikipedia policies have never applied to Commons). What should be done here? For the record, I am neither Korean nor Japanese. --benlisquareTalkContribs 17:20, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

I added [verification needed] and [citation needed]. And I added the detailed explanatory note about a picture. Restoration operation from the deletion act which does not have a note discussion. Benlisquare repeated the deletion act, without waiting for the argument and result in a note. Why did he repeat the deletion act, without waiting for an argument with a note? He disliked detailed explanation, crushed verifiability and continued the deletion act.
Tomotadara (talk) 18:34, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Other quotation origin is not shown about this cut-off picture. Time photography person filming site photographic subject and quotation origin does not explain. Would you like to make Wikipedia into a means to tell a user demagogue and yellow journalism? He should present the same photograph and incidental information from other sauce. Verifiability is required. Is aiding the deletion act which disregarded the process that an administrator carries out? Tomotadara (talk) 18:56, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
I have no idea what on earth you are trying to say. I've told you before that if you cannot speak English, do so in Japanese and someone can help you from there. Your machine-translated English makes little sense.

The file description should describe the image, and shouldn't be the location of dispute discussion. If there is a content dispute, it belongs on either the file talk page, or on a Wikipedia article talk page. The source describes the image as one of the vigilante killings following the 1923 Kanto Earthquake, and therefore that's naturally what the file description says. If you dispute that this picture depicts a vigilante killing, discuss why on the talk page, and not within the file description.

Up until now, until I've essentially forced you to come here to discuss, you've completely avoided a proper discussion and have resorted only to reverting, which is plainly disruptive. As someone who intends to change the status quo, you have the responsibility to explain to everyone on the talk page why you believe that the image is problematic, or is incorrect. You have not bothered discussing with everyone and attempting to gain community consensus on the matter at all. --benlisquareTalkContribs 19:15, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

An important point is that KBS source does not explain this photograph. A report called the Korean murder by a vigilant committee without the display of a time place. And attachment of unsigned Photo Trimming. Description of a photographing day, a photographic subject, and the place does not exist in a printing trimming photograph. Photograph explanation called a date, a vigilant committee, a Korean, and a slaughter is dependent on original research of benlisquare. It is the rhetoric which deceives readers. Time, a place, and photographic subject information do not exist. Duty to tell it to readers. Or you should wait for discovery of an original photograph and multiple mainstream sources. Any exceptional claim requires multiple high-quality sources. KBS source fulfills conditions as reliable sources of information. It is not a problem whether the picture is wrong. The explanatory note and tag deletion act without a note Discussion result by benlisquare are a problem. The one administrator ignored it. He applied the sanction against me who added explanation and continued the restoration after deletion several times. Tomotadara (talk) 11:16, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
1. As I've told you before, Commons is not Wikipedia, and Wikipedia policies and guidelines do not apply to Commons. See Commons:Project scope/Neutral point of view and Commons:What Commons is not for further information. You keep mentioning, quoting and linking to Wikipedia policies, however none of these matter here. You cannot make modifications that are against standard procedure to file descriptions of files hosted on Commons based on what you perceive to be how Wikipedia policies are to be interpreted. File descriptions describe the file without any personal analysis and discussion, and all discussion belongs on the file talk page. When you add the line "KBS does not explain any relationship of a Korean victim and a photograph" to the file description, you are adding your own personal synthesis to the file description, and this belongs on the talk page.

2. When you say "Any exceptional claim requires multiple high-quality sources", assuming that you're referring to the English Wikipedia article (and not anything on Commons), the statement mentioning that mass killings of Koreans occurred following the earthquake is well cited on the en:1923 Great Kantō earthquake article—there are multiple citations from various reliable sources there, all affirming that mass killings did take place. If a statement is well backed up within prose paragraph, then it is disruptive of you to add citation needed tags to image captions which state the same thing, when the image serves to illustrate the prose. If you dispute the current use of sources on that article, you are more than welcome to discuss their usage on the article talk page, per standard procedure. On Wikipedia there is a "bold-revert-discuss" cycle, where users are expected to participate in community discussion if there is a disagreement.

3. You keep implying repeatedly that Korean Broadcasting System is unreliable. A recurring statement from you is that because the image is sourced from KBS, it cannot be trusted. Do you have any evidence to back up such claims? KBS is a major media outlet in South Korea, and its reliability is on par with CNN in the United States, and DW in Germany. As one of the largest media outlets in South Korea, KBS is a well-respected organization there, and is not like a tabloid newspaper akin to the Daily Mail in the UK, like you are implying. If you question the reliability of KBS, provide rational arguments as to why KBS should be doubted; you cannot just make a bold statement like that without elaborating any further. --benlisquareTalkContribs 05:55, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Uploader working horribly

Hi, I'm struggling to upload my pictures to Wikimedia but I'm met with an awful lot of errors. Time-outs while writing descriptions, files forever stuck at "Submitting details and publishing...", "<api-error-unknownerror>", errors like "another file on Wikimedia already has the same name" appearing during upload, with no option of resubmitting with the text I've already written, etc. On average half of my uploads seem to fail because of unknown errors! It's rather frustrating indeed. I've never run into problems like this on flickr, Facebook, twitter, you name it, so I doubt the problem really is on my end. Is this a known issue? Are there any work-arounds? I hardly dare spend the time on doing big batches of uploads when half of the work seems to be in vain... doing individual uploads of over 100+ pictures of course takes way too long! Marcus/JPNEX (talk) 05:54, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

UploadWizard is known to be very buggy. I don't use it unless I really have to. There is software like VicuñaUploader available for batch uploads, which works far better. darkweasel94 09:32, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
Marcus/JPNEX, the scenario you are describing would be very frustrating. I do a lot of uploads using the default UploadWizard and in most cases I prefer it over alternatives, like old upload tool or external upload tools like VicuñaUploader or Commonist. May be the issue is with the connection, either way you should report it at Commons:Upload Wizard feedback. --Jarekt (talk) 15:49, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
What Japanexperterna.se is describing sounds very much like my own frustrations in bugzilla:65696. I'd honestly suggest avoiding UploadWizard unless it's necessary for WLM, WLE or chunked uploads. I can see no advantages over Special:Upload for individual files or VicuñaUploader for batch uploads. darkweasel94 16:17, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Deleted images on Wikidata

Hi, since recently Wikidata is around and when a wiki article has an image a claim is added to the wikidata page that these projectpages have images. When an image is deleted on Commons the image is deleted on Wiki articles but not on Wikidata. Could this be added to your deletion bots? Sincerely, Taketa (talk) 21:05, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata doesn't report file usage, so bots just don't aware abut it. See bugzilla:46358. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 04:11, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

June 11

The limits of "The Burden of Proof" and over-precautionary principle

Some 1940's and 1950's photos (partial list here) were recently deleted because a proof was not provided that the photos were published before 1989 (and therefore were supposedly never PD in the US), under COM:EVID and COM:PRP. Most of these photos are from The National Photo Collection of Israel and all are PD in Israel. Noting that these are all photos previously deleted under URAA and were later restored, this strongly smells like an attempt to bypass the community's decision.

However, the issue here is relevant not only to this particular case. Should we ask for a "proof" every time a user uploads an image with {{own}}? Should we require a copy of an ID from people providing OTRS permissions by email? What if this copy is a fake? There is no limit to the doubts and concerns that one can raise regarding each and every file uploaded to commons.

Commons cannot be a repository, if any file could be deleted on a whim of an arbitrary user, just because "a doubt was raised". The doubt should be based on something other then the doubt itself and should be significant, and the demanded proof should be reasonable, as policy indicates.

For those who are concerned about possible legal implications to the WMF, I would like to remind you of the position posted by the legal team, advising not to delete content simply because of general concern, which is obviously relevant not only to URAA. • Yael (Meronim)12:07, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Yael. I am an OTRS volunteer, I receive all the time an OTRS permission from person who declare "I am the copyright holder's" I check the best I can but I do not ask for legal document from a lawyer, and I am sure that other volunteers also do not ask for such a document. Look for example of File:Aharon Hoter Yishai.JPG this is the picture of Aharon Hoter-Yishai that served as Military Advocate General in IDF between 1948-1950. You can see the picture on Military Advocate General of Israel site. You can see on the picture his unit. Users here demand that we show the a formal publication that was published in hard copy before 1989. How do they expect a user to provide the evidence? Scan old magazines to show the files were published there? go to archives and get the print day of them? I am sure they know it dose not make any sense. This picture dose not appear suddenly after march 1989 after 39 years after Hoter-Yishai left IDF. I am sure that the Military Advocate General of Israel use this picture because this is the picture they have in IDF magazine probably in Bamahane. There enough real copyvio here, I also asked many time for the deletion of pictures with real copy right violation. But there is no problem with the pictures that were deleted by Fastily because all of the are in Public domain. There is no real damage here only users that want to be more righteous than the Pope. Hanay (talk) 14:24, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
In democratic countries in judicial system, one is considered innocent until proven guilty. But in Commons there are users that adopted another judicial system: picture is considered guilty until proven innocent. I think that is very sad. Hanay (talk) 15:42, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
This action of massive deletion is sheer barbarism. Surely, the position posted by the legal team should be implemented as a rule here. Users who act otherwise should be treated according to the Terms of Use and their account or access should be blocked "for actions violating these Terms of Use".Sima shimony (talk) 21:35, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
You mean we don't need to provide any evidence that something is public domain? That's great; turns out that every picture from WWII and the Vietnam War was published in a magazine in the US without copyright notice. What, you expect me to come up with scans of the magazine?--Prosfilaes (talk) 19:19, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
  • @Meronim: How many places do you what to have this discussion ? This is the third different location in less than 48 hours. As explained before but I will repeat:
    Neither US copyright law or Commons works under the rule of shorter term while that is the case and while Commons requires files to be free in both the US and source country, images that are PD in their source country will continue to be deleted because they are not PD in the US.
@Hanay: The images are PD in Israel and any country that adopts the rule of shorter term but they are not necessarily PD in countries that use the date of death of the author and crucially for commons not in the US which basis copyright duration on a complicated mix of publication as well as death of the author. It is clear you don't like this state of affairs but you need to direct your anger not at commons users and admins but rather you should lobby the US congress to change US law to adopt the rule of shorter term. LGA talkedits 23:55, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
  • @LGA: There is no way for a non USA citizen to be involved in your internal affairs. Instead of bullying the Commons why don't you take the position posted by the legal team and do the necessary lobbying in your congress?Sima shimony (talk) 06:18, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
  • @LGA: This is a completely meaningless link, sir. It is no fun talking to you. Sorry. All I am saying is that this community needs to be protected, and your reactions prove my point. Sima shimony (talk) 11:58, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Were these files published? If they weren't, then they are in copyright in the US, and as COM:L has said for over a half a decade, "Wikimedia Commons only accepts media ... that are in the public domain in at least the United States and in the source country of the work." Half a decade, right up top. It's not more holy then the Pope to make a rule and then follow it. If you can't even make a claim that they were published, then we have no reason to think they're PD.--Prosfilaes (talk) 19:26, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
"So WMF does not see a reason to delete content simply because of general concern about the URAA. If we receive a valid takedown notice or get actual knowledge of infringement, we will do a full legal analysis of the work based on all the relevant information that is presented in that notice and vigorously resist any invalid notices." Who is this "we" that decides and then acts otherwise? Sima shimony (talk) 20:16, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
We is the Commons Community. That's been part of COM:L since at least 2007. Note also that that statement you linked to does not say that we should delete works that are in copyright in their source nation; that's also a rule that the Commons community decided upon.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:34, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
And mind you, this has nothing to do with the URAA. Zero. Zilch. The issue with these files is that the US government has always provided the same rights to Israeli citizens as US citizens get in this area.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:36, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
1. Do you believe that these files are not PD in their own source nation? 2. If not URAA then what caused this enthusiastic massive deletion? And last but not least: 3. The Commons Community performs valuable educational mission, and the deletion is not part of this goal. Therefore you do not represent the Commons Community at all. Sima shimony (talk) 21:10, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
  1. The images are PD in Israel, however they are NOT PD in the US.
  2. The Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 is the reason why the images are copyright in the US and not the URAA.
  3. To achieve that goal it requires us to adhere to the policy set out at Commons:Project scope#Must be freely licensed or public domain. LGA talkedits 22:41, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
I don't know if these images have ever been published, and thus I don't know if they have a country of origin as the Berne Convention would phrase it. If they were first published on the Internet, there have been court cases that have ruled they were published in all nations simultaneously, though I understand it's not a settled issue whether putting images on the net necessarily counts as publication.
I think you confuse the Commons with the Pirate Bay if you think that deletion is not part of Commons goals. COM:L has been policy for almost a decade. Sneers and insults won't change that.--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:36, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
I agree with Yael. There is no problem with the pictures that were deleted by Fastily because all of the are in Public domain. Ovedc (talk) 05:47, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
It seems that users here forgot the meaning of the Copyright: it is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution. When we are using these pictures we have 2 sides:
  1. We have here for example the state of Israel that says: all pictures that were taken until December 31, 1963 are in public domain. I am as a state happy that you are using those picture for free knowledge
  2. The other side is the Wikimedia Foundation that said very clear that they do not have any problem to upload these pictures to Commons.
So I am asking all the users that are pushing all the time for deletion: Who you are realy try to protect here? The laws of USA? The federal goverment of USA? do they need your protection? Some aliens that maybe will come in the future very angry and will demand to delete those pictures? I ask you all to look in to you heart and remember why you joint this project. I hope it was for free knowledge not for looking all the time under the stones seeking for troubles in places that there are none.
In USA all federal pictures are in public domain from day one. So USA government understand what is right, but from obscure reasons USA have some unclear laws that maybe try to protect other governments from themself like they are children that need protection, and users here with no real knowledge use it to delete many important pictures. There are so much to do here, so I ask you to focus on improving Commons instead of putting your all effort to delete picture with no real copy right problems. Hanay (talk) 09:01, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
That is a very rosy view of copyright, the reality is much, much more complicated; each country has it's own rules and those rules only apply in that country. While you are right that photographs in Israel are protected for 50 years, however take that same picture to Argentina and the protection can be as short as only 25 years. Even the US federal government exploits this, though works of the US government are not afforded copyright protection in the US the US government claims copyright to works outside the US - see here. LGA talkedits 09:49, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
I joined this project to make a free archive. If I wanted to work on an archive of pirate material, I'd work on uploading stuff to the Pirate Bay. Furthermore, an honest finger in the face of the law beats claiming to be Free and twisting the law where ever we want.
Agree. Freedom and liberty, please. :) EM Che (talk) 22:02, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
Why should the US government take rights from Israeli citizens that they would have if they were American citizens? Why should a US court facing a million pages of law and previous court decisions, presume that it is in the least competent to interpret another country's million pages of law and previous court decisions, probably written in a language other then English? Why should we encourage megacorps to barter off copyright extensions--part of the motivation for extending copyrights in the US was so they would last long in rule of the shorter term countries?--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:10, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Pictures with {{PD-Israel}} are not pirate material. You can not steal if the previous owner says to the world: this picture is free for every one to use it. You are so occupied with looking for pirate material, that you lost the focus what is pirate and what is not. For example if you put a desk on the street in Israel, so every one who want's it can take it, suddenly if you send the desk to USA it is consider as a stealing if someone will take it? As I said before, do not worry about USA government that does not need your help. Be a part of the free knowledge movement that look for a way how to add free knowledge with out hurting the owner copyright as the owner wants and decided. Keep the owner rights to decide for himself what is good for him, do not act in paternalism. Hanay (talk) 14:55, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Commons accepts photos where the previous owners have said "this picture is free for everyone to use." That is not under question at all. We've generally demanded a nation explicitly release its claim to works it owns world-wide, like the UK has, but whether works owned by the state of Israel that are out of copyright under Israeli law should be treated as PD worldwide is a different discussion. However, PD-Israel also covers works that aren't owned by the government of Israel, and hence the owner may not have said to the world that this picture is free for every one to use it. There's cases where owners have made it clear in courts that despite e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories being PD in the UK, that didn't mean that they were okay with Americans reusing features distinct to the stories that are still in copyright in the US. There is no more reason we should presume the previous owner is okay with using an Israeli photo that is 50 years old then we should presume that an owner of a 50-year-old US or French photo is okay with us using it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:37, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
Pay attention that all the pictures that were deleted by Fastily belong originaly to the state of Israel. The source is The National Photo Collection of Israel and IDF. Hanay (talk) 08:25, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
It is quite clear that there is no need for publication to be {{PD-Israel}}, so these nominations and deletions are pure vandalism. Yann (talk) 09:29, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
There's no need for the author to be dead 70 years for PD-US, so are all the European art deletions vandalism? We have no Picasso collection, despite the fact that no law binding on Commons says that we must delete early Picassos.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:10, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

This conversation is going to remain pretty sterile unless people are prepared to focus less on passionate argument and more on how Commons policy can be changed to avoid these issues constantly causing us problems. We need less anger and more collaborative problem solving at the policy level.

Anyone is free to propose a practical way forward, of course, but I'd just like to remind editors of the RFC on a Review of the Precautionary principle which has been under way for some time. Currently, discussion has stalled, but new eyes and ideas there would be good.

The RFC is based on the proposition that Commons should aim to host more files that are public domain in their home country even if there is some agreed level of risk that they might still be copyright-protected in the US, and that we should review the wording of the Precautionary Principle to try to achieve that. We currently use "significant doubt" as the basis for deletion, but the WMF would allow us to go closer to the allowable limit of US law (in theory up to, but not including, "actual knowledge"). Changing the Precautionary Principle should allow us to host more material - perhaps like that under discussion here - while still ensuring that we keep within the requirements of US law.

There may be other ways forward, and if there are I would support them, but at the moment there are no other definite proposals on the table that attempt to improve policy so we can put these arguments behind us. Community arguments on individual files will not get us very far; collaborative discussion on improving our policies will. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:01, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Raising serious issue about my work being deleted.. I'm in tears

Dear BrightRaven (talk, and Natuur12 (talk),

I logged on to a different page from my hackerspace wiki, and my blog, and the references to the images I posted here were deleted! These are not only my art, these are DESIGNS, and INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, INVENTIONS that were released to the Commons. I am in tears... these were ALL educational materials about a very up-and-coming topic of free lifestyle hacks and were very demonstrative. Because of the nature of the adventure, there is no way to get them back. These pictures were once-in-a-lifetime art of a person who has given their life to the commons. I want an apology... the reasons cited were even TOTALLY WHAT THEY WERE. Again, I want an apology and, if there is any way to get the pictures back, ...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_uploaded_by_EM_Che — Preceding unsigned comment added by EM Che (talk • contribs)

Hi EM Che,
to reassure you, the files can easily be restored for you to copy them, if you don't have them on your local PC.
While I wasn't involved in the process, after looking at the deleted images (which is possible for admins), I would probably have come to the same conclusion as BrightRaven and Natuur12. All these images were of rather low resolution and of not very good technical quality. Also, all were unused, otherwise they wouldn't have been deleted. I wonder why you didn't object/comment at Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by EM Che, which was open for 8 days. However, I am bit sceptical about hosting them on Commons. But that should be discussed. --Túrelio (talk) 07:03, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
EM Che< I will second Túrelio description; your uploads were not a good match to Wikipedia needs. For those files you can try Flickr or some other image hosting site. Some files were your handwriting and drawings: the only artworks we host are by notable artists or (well) illustrating notable subjects. you also had some photos of self-made s which were not easily recognized as such. We can not use them in or any other article. But you should not get discouraged, if you use good or regular quality camera and upload full resolution images and pick more encyclopedic subjects, like places of interest around you. We will much more likely be able to use your images. --Jarekt (talk) 15:21, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Hier wird doch auch sonst nahezu jeder Scheiß behalten und auch das 666. suicide girls foto importiert... -- Smial (talk) 12:08, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
This is specifically instructional content for modern alchemy, as well as alternative living from capitalism. The zinebook is an invention, and all art is proprietary. The files are linked together neatly in one of the files, which is the hack alchemy art and design for your life (painting, acrylic on paper), all on the topic of that. The files WERE used on both a hackerspace wiki (https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Alchemy) and on a blog, art and material [dot] wordpress [dot] com. This is good art (which is a living creative entity, not static artists of the past - education being that same way) and design, which can be a good focus and is called for currently in the community portal. I release these to the public domain, and appreciate the creative commons protection here, thus making my work an ideal candidate under https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope. Enjoy them, if anything!
I don't really want to talk about this any more, I really want my work back, Túrelio if you can. ./bows EM Che (talk) 21:53, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Spanish translation request

Could someone create a Spanish translation of the {{FoP-Belize}} template? Thanks! Kaldari (talk) 02:57, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Done. Simon Burchell (talk) 12:48, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
Just the interlanguage link isn't working for some reason. Simon Burchell (talk) 14:14, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Conflicting categories re Hyde Park (Leeds vs. London)

While working to diffuse Category:Leeds, I came across some files with both that category and Category:Hyde Park, London. That looks like a conflict to me. I suspect that most of them belong in Category:Hyde Park, Leeds, but I'm not sure. One was in Hyde Park, London, but it showed a musical group from Leeds, so I diffused the Leeds category. Could someone with knowledge of the area(s) take a look and help fix this as needed? I put a list at User:Auntof6/sandbox. There are 33 of them. Thanks. --Auntof6 (talk) 22:22, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

✓ Done Not the first bunch of mis-categorised Flickr uploads I've seen recently. Could people doing this take some care, please? Rodhullandemu (talk) 23:36, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
That was quick -- thanks! Were they all for the one in Leeds? The other miscategorization I'm seeing is putting things in Category:Leeds when they should be in Category:Leeds, Kent. At least most of those that I've seen so far are in both, so I've just deleted the one for West Yorkshire. --Auntof6 (talk) 02:12, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
@Rodhullandemu: That's probably somehow related to Category:Hyde Park being a redirect to Category:Hyde Park, London. For example, if you try to add Category:Hyde Park to a file using HotCat, it is automatically changed to Category:Hyde Park, London – and you might not even notice. Maybe the Flickr-import through UploadWizard suffers from similar behavior when trying do convert Flickr-tags to Categories? --El Grafo (talk) 11:29, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
I know the one in London is by far the best known, but maybe Category:Hyde Park should be a disambiguation category instead of a redirect-- this shows more than a dozen categories for places called just Hyde Park, and a couple of dozen more that start with "Hyde Park". --Auntof6 (talk) 08:05, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
Something like Category:Caerphilly? Probably better than automatically dumping everything in the London Category… --El Grafo (talk) 08:47, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
Having gone through the Category:Hyde Park, London several times to relocate such misplaced files I support the proposal to make Category:Hyde Park a disambiguation category. Oxyman (talk) 14:54, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
Well, I don't see a reason not to, so I think I'll make the change. It's not like Wikipedia, where they want people to land at the one they are most likely to be looking for: in this case, categories get assigned, sometime incorrectly. --Auntof6 (talk) 05:51, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

June 12

Leaflet For Wikimedia Commons At Wikimania 2014

Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:
Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (talk) 09:40, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

June 13

Files with conflicting categories

Is there a template or other method for flagging files that have conflicting categories? I recently asked here about a group of such files, but sometimes I find individual ones (such as this one) and it would be good to have a way to tag them. So is there a way? --Auntof6 (talk) 02:05, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Nothing I'm aware of, but it would be nice to create a template {{Contradict}} that would have a parameter that would let you indicate the nature of the contradiction and would also place the image in a category. This could cover contradictions in both categories & descriptions (possibly even dates). - Jmabel ! talk 19:51, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
The example given above isn't that uncommon- an object is in a location in county X but the nearest categorised settlement to it is in county Y- or there are multiple locations as bots or editors have added locations without removing the less precise ones. Fixing that is down to taking a close look at the map and if necessary creating a new category; the effort in doing that isn't that much greater, I think, than adding a template (which cannot be done in Catalot or HotCat), which then requires someone else to come along and fix it. Rodhullandemu (talk) 21:01, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
Are you saying that we categorize things by what the nearest settlement is? I never put a settlement category on something that isn't actually in the setttlement. In any case, a template such as I'm thinking of could be used if the person finding the issue can't fix it themselves. Yes, someone else would have to fix it, but the tag would help people find where fixes are needed. --Auntof6 (talk) 22:08, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
I'm not saying "we" categorise like that, but bots certainly seem to, largely based on any tags attached to the image. The problem with not assigning a settlement to an image is that it ends up in, e.g. a county category, leaving several thousand images in a top-level category. This is less than helpful, because you can't put them on a map if there are more than 200 of them. In the case of Scotland, we have "Hamlets in X" (or will have) and "Farms in Y" (which I use for farmsteadings) and with the ppproriate structure to these categories, they can be easily navigated. But yes, such a template might be of assistance; the problem is finding someone with the time and the will to take on the work. At present I'm fully committed to Category:Scotland, so I have neither at present. Rodhullandemu (talk) 23:26, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Bots should be well-behaved and should use meaningful edit summaries

I think bots should be well-behaved and should use meaningful edit summaries. One should be able to look at the edit summary, and find enough clues in it to trace why someone thought the bot should perform the action, who that someone was, and what policy or discussion they thought authorized the action.

This issue, or related issues has come up before. Hazard-bot is creating new categories, and moving the elements of old categories, into the categories it just created. But, when doing so:

  1. Hazard-bot did not include a link to the discussion or policy that someone thought authorized the creation of the new category, or the deprecation of the old category;
  2. Hazard-bot did not state who thought this was a good idea;
  3. If a policy, or discussion, really did authorize the deprecation of an existing category, then it is a disruptive failure for the bot to fail to turn the deprecated category into a category redirect.

Hazard-bot's actions are particular disruptive since it leaves the existing categories empty. Some administrators routinely delete empty categories. Deleting empty categories, that were once in use, is disruptive, when the explicit URL of the now empty category may be linked from other WMF projects and from non-WMF projects.

Hazard-bot's edit summary, in this particular case, was ((Bot: Replaced category Category:Construction of Toronto's Berczy Apartments with Category:Construction of The Berczy (given reason: 'consistent with parent category, possessive forms not used for disambiguation')) It may be that there are insiders, with inside knowledge of Hazard-bot's internals, for whom this edit summary is sufficient for them to determine who authorized the bot's actions. I question whether that is sufficient. I understand that there are very occasional instances where WMF project's operations can't be totally open and transparent. But when legal issues, or serious issues of privacy, don't require opaque operation, then the edit summaries shouldn't be so opaque only insiders can figure out what is going on.

In my opinion this bot should no longer work on categories until the edit summaries it leaves are fully open and transparent. Geo Swan (talk) 09:39, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Have you discussed this with the bot owner? Ruslik (talk) 11:57, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

June 14

Posible duplicate categories

Could someone tell me if there is a difference in these two categories?

Thanks. --Auntof6 (talk) 02:45, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

They look like duplicates, but what is the preferred name? At the country level, they are all "Skylines in <country>", while for US cities they tend to be "<city> skylines". --ghouston (talk) 23:52, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, that's what I think, too. I've redirected the second one to the first, and moved all the files. --Auntof6 (talk) 02:43, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

"Houses by association"

[2], [3], etc. (there were hundreds): I fully agree that "Category:Houses of famous people in the United States" was a bad category (who's to decide who is "famous"?) but "Category:Houses by association in the United States which has replaced it is sounds like it ought to be a meta-category; it makes no sense at all as a category for individual buildings. - Jmabel ! talk 17:04, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

It sounds like that category is about Housing associations, That said I can't think of a better title. Oxyman (talk) 19:16, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
What about just "Houses of named people in the United States"? — Cheers, JackLee talk 19:32, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
"Houses of named people in the United States" etc, sounds fine to me Oxyman (talk) 20:33, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Japanese art from the Rijksmuseum

Images from the Rijksmuseum: 6,867R
Project page Commons:Batch uploading/Art of Japan in the Rijksmuseum

I am pleased to announce the completed upload of 2,496 delightfully high quality images of artworks from Japan. These include ancient artefacts through to the 1910s. This was managed in discussion with David Haskiya from Europeana (who has a passion for Japanese art) and relied on the Rijksmuseum's excellent API, which is provided by them for the public good and provided all the metadata on the image pages. Note that this is an independent volunteer initiative with no funding, and deployed using the GLAMwiki Toolset which is available for volunteer projects.

This was a first tranche of uploads, with the plan to set up further themed uploads so that all public domain images from the Rijksmuseum are available on Commons with reasonable starting categorization. There are an estimated 100,000 images to work through; so it may take a while. :-)

How you can help
  • Add, refine or create appropriate categories, such as those relating to the period, artist or describing the content of artworks.
  • Use the images on Wikipedia articles about Japanese history or the specific artist/historic artefact.
  • Add a translation of the description or title, many are in Dutch only, or add a transcription of some of the poetry that appears on some of the prints.
  • Link together connected images, such as those in the same series, alternatives of the same wood-cut print, or scans from the same book, using the other version field.
  • Enjoy browsing through the collection and pick one for a wallpaper, there's some great eye-candy in this set.

If you are coming to Wikimania or the Hackathon in August, ask me about my upload projects and put your name down to come to my (speedy) talk about using the GLAMwiki tool, but hurry, it seems to be getting booked up quite quickly :-).

PS I've been nominated at UK Wikimedian of the Year, which seems very amusing. You may want to vote for Andy Mabbett, he's run some interesting Commons-related projects this year. -- (talk) 06:30, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Oscar Copyright?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives the Oscar award, claims that the statuette is copyrighted, see http://www.oscars.org/legal/.

However, it was first given in 1929 and would, therefore, have required renewal in 1957. I searched the renewals for 1956, 1957, and 1958 and found nothing.

Here, http://articles.latimes.com/1995-01-22/entertainment/ca-23138_1_oscar-statuette, we are told that the copyright was registered in 1975. I searched the 1975 record for the words "Academy" and, separately, for "AMPAS", and got no relevant hits. Also,of course, if they attempted to register the copyright in the statuette in 1975, it could not happen because it would have been long PD. Only a new version of the statuette would have been registerable in 1975.

I'm asking specifically because of Commons:Deletion requests/File:Oscar 2014-06-05 02-23.jpg, but note that we have a variety of images of the statuette. If it is still, somehow, under copyright, then all of them must go. I note, by the way, that we have an image of one belonging to Cate Blanchett on permanent display in Australia. While Australian FOP would cover the use in Australia, this is a case where the US copyright (if there is one) would prevent us from keeping the image on Commons. .     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 13:53, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

[4]. -- Asclepias (talk) 14:30, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
Thank you. My reading of the 1991 court decision is that the appeals court decided then that the Oscar has a valid copyright registration from 1941 and is therefore still under copyright. .     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 11:14, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

House of lords

I accidentaly created the category "House of lords of the United Kingdom". This distinction seems not be necessary as before the act of union the Scottisch parlement was a single chamber and therefore had no house of Lords. Where there any other "House of lords" in other countries? There where in pre-evolution France institutions reserved for the nobility. (one mayor cause of the revolution was the refusal of the nobility to be taxed). Should we move "House of lords" files tot "House of lords of the United Kingdom"? or delete "House of lords of the United Kingdom"?

I think we should create a separate category for old newspaper articles or original documents over the House of Commons/Lords as in File:Journal de Bruxelles nr 136 1800 (364, 365).png.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:22, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

request

Please delete files downloaded me the World Cup last 17 [5]. When loading has not paid attention to the fact that they are authored by AP despite the fact that posted on the site with a free license: ( JukoFF (talk) 13:35, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

June 16

Proposed alternative paid contribution disclosure policy for Commons

TL;DR: See Commons:Requests for comment/Alternative paid contribution disclosure policy

Hi! As you might have already seen (through the CentralNotice banners), the Wikimedia Foundation have amended their Terms of Use earlier today, in a way that requires disclosure from users who receive compensation for their contributions. Given that Terms of Use apply to all Wikimedia projects, and that the wording of the amendment ("contributions", not just "edits") applies also to uploading files, I proposed an alternative paid contribution disclosure policy for Commons.

Please take the time to read the suggested policy (it's really short!), and to inform other users who might want to speak their minds about the issue at hand. Thank you! odder (talk) 17:02, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

June 18

Categorization request for batch of 1920s Jerusalem photos

Here's the link: Category:Jerusalem photographs by Lehnert & Landrock

I tried to post about this at Wikiproject Israel, but nobody seemed to have taken on themselves the task. Can anybody here help with adding relevant tags to the photos? - Anonimski (talk) 21:33, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

June 19

Can you help categorize 6,000 photographs (photochrome) taken in the 19th-century?

Photochrom prints collection: 20

A family group of Sami people, 1890s.
TIFF format, 3,381 × 2,501 pixels, 24 MB

I am just over half-way through uploading the Library of Congress' collection of photochrome/fotochrom prints and hope to complete the collection in about a week's time. These were taken between 1890 to 1900 and were created using a process of putting a high quality black and white photograph as a base for colour lithograph printing. Colours were added by hand and several layers were used (more than six). The high quality cards were incredibly popular at the time as gifts to send by post, and are mostly of famous locations around the world, or of people in their national dress. Images are being uploaded in both tif and jpg versions, and I am adding sub-categories by country (Algeria, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, UK) to make it easier to find particular photographs.

These are high quality scans, the tifs being over 3,000 pixels on the longest side, and represent some of the best and most popular photographs of the 1890s. Please enjoy browsing the files, and consider helping with a bit of categorization or reuse to illustrate Wikipedia articles of these notable locations. -- (talk) 09:12, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Wow! Interesting. Jee 09:17, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
As mentioned on irc: Great upload, but please just upload the tiffs. We should push to get bugzilla:45212 fixed instead of applying workarounds that put an extra strain on our community. Multichill (talk) 16:26, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
I doubt this will be my last Library of Congress upload, particularly now I understand their API, so I'll reconsider this aspect for the next project. BTW, Nederlanders may be interested in my 'beta test' population of Images from the Rijksmuseum, which is starting this weekend. -- (talk) 16:31, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Illustration of the thumbnail problem, and why jpgs and tifs are uploaded

TIFF JPEG
Bowder Stone, Lake District, 1890s
At 200px a large TIFF seems blurry.
A JPEG compresses more sharply and is useful at this resolution, especially on Wikipedia articles.
At 400px the image starts to look better, though still blurry.
The JPEG compression is less favourable, being over-sharpened.

-- (talk) 08:52, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

It would be useful to compare how eg ImageMagick performs on this test image, to identify what it is in the Commons resizing/filtering that is giving these results, and what other alternatives there might be.
Commons's current resizing methods can be very bad for jpegs of some engravings -- for example the aliasing on this at 600px. Jheald (talk) 17:33, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
For a whole other set of thumbnail worms, take a gander at Fellows animations; though I suspect this is a much better way of handling these. -- (talk) 17:42, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I think that the current quality of the Mediawiki/Commons resizing shouldn't be a deciding factor in this. Uncompressed TIFF is offering a far better raw material quality than JPEG, and we should try to get the resizing quality improved, not "applying workarounds that put an extra strain on our community", I agree with Multichill on that. Doubling the upload with JPEGs just because of a current technical issue seems to be a waste of resources to me. From the TIFFs, re-users can generate any size and quality of JPEGs or other formats they want. Gestumblindi (talk) 19:51, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Please note that using a nifty bit of file processing, all the jpeg files in this collection of prints are being "upgraded" to a resolution that matches the tiffs. For example, the Bowder Stone photograph above has been upgraded from 1,024 × 748 pixels to 3,691 × 2,695 pixels (along with a filesize increase of more than ten times). This is not lossless, so the tiff should be used for derivatives, however the excessive sharpness seen in the original Library of Congress jpeg has been corrected. -- (talk) 09:31, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

(Script error)

Hi, I noticed that now every image i.e. tagged with {{No license since}} shows a red bold (Script error) message instead of the date when the tag was set - i.e. here. There must be something wrong in some sub-sub-sub-templates or similar, but I was not able to find it. Anyboy any idea where to search or how to fix it? --JuTa 05:04, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

The problem might be the recent changes to {{Date}} by User:Jarekt. A date using a name for the month is failing, i.e. {{Date|2014|June|19|en}} gives "19 June 2014" while {{Date|2014|6|19|en}} gives "19 June 2014". The template {{Nld}} (substed template for "No license since") is using the month name variant (i.e. CURRENTMONTHNAME). A possible immediate fix for the issue would probably be to change {{Nld}} to use CURRENTMONTH, but a more proper fix might be to update {{Date}} to support month names, as this change may have broken uses other than {{No license since}}. —RP88 05:26, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
Seems to work now. I reverted a few edits by Jarekt. Hope he doesn't mind too much. :) --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 05:38, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for watching the shop. Using name for the month instead of a number was never a documented feature, so I am surprised that it worked, but under closer inspection I can see that it was designed like that from the begging (although it produced wrong machine-readable data). So I updated Module:Date and Module talk:Date/testcases so they can handle named months and changed {{Time}} to use it. By the way, this is just a step one of the process of retiring unmanageable {{ISOdate}} template. The next steps will be:
  • Changing {{ISOdate}}, which is called from {{Information}} template. {{Information/sandbox}} and Template:Information/testcases are already using the Lua version of the date parsing, so please try to break it.
  • Expanding the range of the allowed date formats from YYYY-MM-DD to possibly formats like "19 June 2014" or "June 19, 2014", etc. We will also have an option to allow more friendly interface to {{Other date}}: maybe "c. 1520" or "~1520" can be automatically changed to {{other date|ca|1520}}. All those changes are much more doable with Lua than with the old templates.
--Jarekt (talk) 16:36, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Max animated GIF sizes for thumbnails to work?

Could someone advise as to how to calculate the largest possible GIF size so that thumbnail generation will handle the animations? I have created a set of GIF animations from 360° views at Category:Fellows animations which are greater than 1,000 px on a side, but could generate a parallel set that are scaled back to work within the limitations that the Foundation places on Wikimedia Commons files. I have searched around, but this information does not appear in any obvious place. Thanks -- (talk) 02:30, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Hmm, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:MAXSIZE doesn't cover this? I'd say that's the place where it should be. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
Nope, it says GIFs should be less that 23MP, which all these are; I think the guidelines relate to static GIFs rather than animations. If I can calculate what the image resolution should be, I could create alternatives. Without a way of working this out, I would have to just use trial and error which seems a bit naff and would probably give sub-optimal results.
Update Ah, following the footnote eventually gets to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgMaxAnimatedGifArea#Explanation which has a formula in it. I'll try this out, maybe tomorrow. -- (talk) 12:55, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
For reference, $wgMaxAnimatedGifArea is currently 50MP, which means if the width * height * number of frames > 5*107, MediaWiki will only show the first frame. Bawolff (talk) 18:11, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
File:MONTEGA - a gentleman's wrist watch. Fellows-1444-226-A.gif
Fellows animation
Thanks for that. Due to spending so much time discussing the rejection of my UK Chapter membership renewal payment, I have not had time today to get back to this, so I'm glad to have the larger size to play with. -- (talk) 22:22, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
@Bawolff: Do you mind taking a look at the example on the right? I have tried uploading at sub-50MP total size and 23MP total. Neither seems to be giving successful results when displayed on the image page or as a thumbnail in the category, though the sub-23MP size did display as a thumbnail here (at the time of writing the test image is at sub-50MP; i.e. 1339 height x 1339 width x 24 frames = 43MP).
Update, after a bit of a lag, I note that the sub-23MP version now has an animated thumbnail in the file history. It may be that in practice, the sub-23MP level is still a requirement for getting animated gifs to work on Commons. -- (talk) 06:34, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
Another bug: Your animation shows this good. The contour shadows of the previews frames are still present. I know there are much better examples for this bug (as it is a long time known bug). But is this bug documented? I found nothing.Perhelion     17:38, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
To clarify, the 23 MP limit is not an actual limit. We have a limit that the program that shrinks images is not allowed to use more than 400 mb of memory (If this limit is reached, it often presents as just a link to the thumbnail, with the link saying Error code: 137. 137 being the bash return code for last process executed recieving SIGKILL). Memory usage and megapixels are not exactly correlated. Whomever wrote the 23 MP thing on the help page presumably came to that value by experimentation. Its probably approximate and perhaps varries depending on image. We also have a hard limit, where we won't even render the first frame, when the width*height is > 50 MP. Bawolff (talk) 21:41, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
Re Perhelion: I'm not sure I know what you're referring to. Can you be more explicit about what's wrong in the thumbnail? Bawolff (talk) 21:45, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
RE Bawolff You see on the white background (better on the big thumb) the shadows (of the outlines) of the previous frame, more and more (which get only removed) until the animation begins new.Perhelion     21:54, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
You're right. I see it now. Bawolff (talk) 21:57, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
I've more examples, but it seems the animation scaling is much improved now.File:ANIMvasicomunicanti.gif If I purge the cache the thumbs appears much better. File:Cam-disc-3_3D_animated.gif, File:Animiertes Prinzip mechan-Hobelmaschine-3D.gif (thumb only)Perhelion     22:17, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
@Bawolff: Thanks for the clarification. I am 're-compiling' my GIFs for the Fellows collection to maximize their size and fit under the 23MP rule of thumb. After a bit of debugging, it seems to be working out and the results look smart. See Fellows animations -- (talk) 16:24, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

@Perhelion: Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. The artifacts you see are the result of using -fuzz 5% -layers optimizeTransparency options to image magick. It makes smaller image sizes, but can result in "shadows" of the previous frame if it changes the colour by less than 5%. See [6] and bugzilla:11822 for background. Bawolff (talk) 13:39, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Video transcoding on commons down?

It seems that the creation of the derivative (smaller) files is not working on commons since 13:51 h, 2014-06-13. Can anybody confirm this finding? --Pristurus (talk) 19:26, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I agree that it appears to not be working. transcodes I just reset are not being transcoded, and the ganglia graphs for those servers seem to be pretty flat starting at about midnight thursday. Filed as bugzilla:66627 Bawolff (talk) 22:09, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
✓ Done fixed by Giuseppe. Bawolff (talk) 17:27, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
For those curious what happened, see wikitech:Incident_documentation/20140613-Videoscalers. Bawolff (talk) 13:31, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

June 15

Translation of a picture and uploading

Hi, can anyone walk me through: I want to translate an image's content to Greek with the svg translate tool, and upload the new version. This tool gives a code, how I go from there to uploading the new “translated” picture”? For example, file Map of Lydia ancient times-en.svg. Thanks! Wolfymoza (talk) 07:53, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

If you're on windows, open notepad (important that its notepad, not wordpad and not word). Dump the svg contents in there. Click the "save as" button. In the save dialog, make sure the Save as type selector is set to All files (*.*), and the encoding is set to UTF-8. Then save it with a name ending in .svg . Bawolff (talk) 13:27, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

personal page

Can I also create a page on my own. If yes, how do I do it. -- 11:04, 20 June 2014 Nishantsingh 2007

A user page? Yes, try this link: User:Nishantsingh_2007 --ghouston (talk) 11:15, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

USA history in high quality panoramic photographs

Library of Congress panoramic photographs collection: 0R
I am delighted to announce the upload of a significant number of early panoramic photographs of the USA from the Library of Congress collection. These are uploaded as high quality tiffs. Follow the above link and have a browse. :-)

Example photographs (thumbnail size)

1st International Congress of Working Women, 1919

Lexington Fire Department, 1921
Detail crop from "Land of Flowers" (1920), at 50% original resolution, almost impossible to make out on the original image page.
Detail crop from "Land of Flowers" (1920), at 50% original resolution, almost impossible to make out on the original image page.
How you can help
  • Add categories for the area and topics. Many have had a default location category added, based on Library metadata, but this may be overly high level.
  • Use the photographs in Wikipedia. There are historic events such as group photos at meetings, photographs after floods and earthquakes, as well as unique early photographs of regions and cityscapes. In the English Wikipedia, the template panorama may be helpful to show the image in a scrollable window, see my edit to 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
  • A few of the files are over 50,000,000 pixels in size, and so too large for Commons to provide thumbnails for. Please create a jpeg format at the same resolution and upload using the same data from the tiff image page, don't forget to use the "other versions" parameter to link the files to each other.
  • Add information to the description, such as where the image has been {{Published}} or background to notable or historic events in the photo.
  • Create derivatives. A number of photographs have excessive borders which can be cropped off without losing educational value. Some photographs are very large indeed, and extracted crops created as new files may help to illustrate detail, such as notable people within a shot, or notable buildings within a city panorama.
  • Enjoy looking and reuse anything you find! :-)

I have been creating these uploads as an unsupported independent volunteer using the GWToolset. The background is explained on the project page. If you are coming to Wikimania in August, you can signup for my talk here and you will be able to find me, Wittylama (now working for Europeana), and others helping out with advice about these types of GLAM uploads.

-- (talk) 14:09, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

They are great, but what is the deal with {{Creator:{{unknown|1=author}}}} for an author? Is it GWToolset issue? See example. --Jarekt (talk) 18:53, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it's a GWT default, to add creator templates to the author field. This would not be my preference and I'm housekeeping post-upload to trim these unless the creator exists. Unfortunately in the specific case of the panoramas collection, where copyright holders are named, this is done is a set of notes that seem inconsistent, and so impossible to automate. In the future we hope to add an option for user custom templates to GWT, so uploader will not have to rely on post-upload trickery. -- (talk) 22:47, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

I personally don't mind if this superseded image gets deleted, but please point images to the new file before you do. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.81.0 (talk • contribs)

June 21

Closure of the review of precautionary principle RfC

Hi! This is just to inform you that I have now closed the review of precautionary principle discussion that was started by Michael at the beginning of April. Comments are welcome just about anywhere. Thanks, odder (talk) 17:36, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

June 22

YouTube Upload Tool

Hi all, I'm considering writing a labs tool which would, on behalf of a user, upload videos from YouTube to Commons via the OAuth extension (e.g. the workflow would be similar to CropTool). Before I do that though, I was hoping to get a show of hands, is this something that a lot of people would find useful? -FASTILY 09:15, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

The question is whether there is a relevant amount of content on YouTube that fits our project scope. TBH I have never really searched YouTube for CC/PD material but from my impression there is not a lot that could be useful for us. Regards, --ChrisiPK (Talk|Contribs) 11:57, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

 Support - There are quite a few educational videos with a CC-BY 3.0 license, although not all of the ones marked as "educational" would fit Commons scope. That said, I think it would be useful to have a tool to help with uploads. Green Giant (talk) 17:41, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

 Support That sounds good. I do not know if it is easy to search YouTube content by license (the way you can search flickr). Can your bot review the license as well? --Jarekt (talk) 17:48, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
It's possible to search for CC content - see here. I initially considered automating license review, but I have ultimately decided against it because YouTube has been rather lax about:
  • CC roll-out - little public awareness, and virtually no explanations on how to use CC and the legal implications involved. I find non-free derivatives inappropriately flagged as CC on YouTube all too frequently.
  • Consistency - videos uploaded prior to 2011 (when CC was added as an option) may correctly declare a video to be freely licensed in the description, even though it's tagged with the default 'YouTube Standard License'.
  • Enforcement - Blatant copyvios can stay up for months even after they're reported.
Given all the numerous variables involved, I think license review of videos from YouTube should be carried out manually by a trusted administrator or reviewer. What do you all think? -FASTILY 21:03, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
This is probably a good idea. The closest existing user right is the "upload_by_url" user right which is currently held by Image reviewers, GWToolset users, and Administrators. The upload-by-URL feature is currently enabled for files from Flickr through the UploadWizard and for about 15 other domains through the GLAM-Wiki Toolset special page. I think it would be fine if your tool confirmed that the operator of your tool has that user right before performing the transfer from YouTube (this would have the benefit of making the tool useable by anyone belonging to any future user group trusted with the power to perform direct uploads). —RP88 22:13, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
[7] "The ability to mark uploaded videos with a Creative Commons license is only available to users whose accounts are in good standing. " So I think it is better to automate the license review. License given only on the description may me more copyvios. Jee 15:09, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
good standing means no strikes in the last 6 months and less than two worldwide content id matches per month which are both very weak conditions. --McZusatz (talk) 18:40, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
Agreed, and another scenario: what if videos were uploaded with "YouTube Standard License" but are specified as PD/CC in the description? This would cause the bot to inappropriately fail the license review -FASTILY 22:35, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
 Support That sounds good :). --Steinsplitter (talk) 22:43, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
 Support, this sounds fantastic. This will greatly simplify the process of transferring NASA videos for me. I also support RP88's suggestion of polling userrights to confirm the trusted status of a user. As Fastily points out, while freely licensed and public domain videos exist on YouTube, it is not always apparent. Huntster (t @ c) 23:12, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
 Support Great! −ebraminiotalk 06:58, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
 Support. Will it support uploading 4k VP9 with audio or just the default 360p WebM? --McZusatz (talk) 11:37, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
4k VP9 videos of course don't work on commons (yet. Here's to hoping the situation will change sometime in the next 2 months). Bawolff (talk) 13:28, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
They don't even fully work on YouTube yet but it seems this is planned as one of the next steps by google. (Popular, short videos already enjoy an additional VP9 transcode.) For example I had to transfer the default 360p WebM first and then download the VP9 + audio, merge them and finally upload manually. --McZusatz (talk) 14:00, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
Wouldn't that be nice? As of now I'm only considering grabbing the highest quality webm (<= 720p afaik) copy available for any given video. If this tool grows in popularity, and if the operators of labs are okay with it, then doing on the fly conversions with ffmpeg/ffmpeg2theora/etc could be looked into. -FASTILY 22:33, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
No conversion needed:
ffmpeg -i dash-videoplayback -i dash-audioplayback -c:v copy -c:a copy outFile.webm
is enough. --McZusatz (talk) 10:16, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Sorry, I guess I should clarify - I made the above reference to videos with a resolution of 1080p or higher, which do not have a 1080p+ webm equivalent. As far as I can tell, such resolutions are only available from Google in mp4 (h264/aac), which would then require a very CPU intensive transcode to webm/ogv to suit our purposes. What tool(s) are you using to download/convert videos? -FASTILY 10:55, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
youtube2mediawiki does a good job at transferring files and youtube-dl or yt.js do a good job in finding HD VP9 (if available)
$ youtube-dl -F jlucyyHVXes | grep webm
171         webm      audio only  DASH audio , audio@ 48k (worst)
242         webm      240p        DASH video , video only
243         webm      360p        DASH video , video only
244         webm      480p        DASH video , video only
247         webm      720p        DASH video , video only
43          webm      640x360
--McZusatz (talk) 11:22, 21 June 2014 (UTC)


It does sound like a good idea (for template fans:  Support), but I think we should first have a YouTube license (cc-by) review bot, or we'll (when the tool is ready) be having masses of unreviewed videos that are potential future {{Npd}}s, not to mention that manual reviewing is probably legally riskier than bot reviewing. (I uploaded some YouTube videos a week ago and they haven't been reviewed yet.) darkweasel94 21:21, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
Considering the concerns raised above, a simple (non-review) template would be the best choice for a bot to place. This template confirms that the license was valid at the date of upload/time of review and an approved license reviewer will still have to check the video for YouTube-Washing/DW/... prior to final license review. --McZusatz (talk) 21:37, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
I'm afraid I don't understand the difference between Flickr (where we've been doing it with a bot for ages) and YouTube in that regard. darkweasel94 21:45, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
YouTube offers two licenses:
  • YouTube Standard License - aka All Rights Reserved
  • CC - aka cc-by-sa-3.0.
The problem is, that when YouTube added the option to include a CC license in 2011, they retroactively applied "YouTube Standard License" to *all* videos ever uploaded. To make matters complicated, video authors who uploaded prior to 2011 sometimes indicated that their videos were freely licensed in the video description sections. To make matters *even* more complicated, there are an obscene number of copyright violations on YouTube, which may or may not be tagged CC. An automated process cannot be expected to make any of the aforementioned distinctions, much less verify that it isn't uploading copyrighted clips from the latest World Cup game. -FASTILY 22:26, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
It's true that there can be (both on Flickr and on YouTube) free files that are marked as such only in the description, not in a machine-readable format. That's however not a reason not to have a review bot that catches those that are released as cc-by (not cc-by-sa!) machine-readably; it is however a good reason to allow the automated tool to upload "standard YT license" files, which should then be tagged differently. It's true that there might be YT-washing, but again, why is that different from Flickr? YouTube even allows machine-readable cc-by tags only from users who have never uploaded anything someone has DMCAed), I'm not aware of Flickr doing that, so logically the danger from Flickr should be considered larger. darkweasel94 22:49, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
This was already covered by McZusatz above. The bottom line is that YouTube contains many copyright violations and they're not very good at detecting them (the automated detection system is weak and can be easily bypassed - will not be elaborating on how per w:WP:BEANS) or taking them down for that matter (in my experience copyright violations stay up for weeks to months even after being reported). -FASTILY 23:00, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
What do you think about appending a comment like [Uploaded with YouTube Upload Tool; CC-BY-3.0 confirmed at the time of upload] to the upload summary? Considering the backlog, reviewers will have it easier to approve without visiting YouTube in most cases. Also the license may be changed in the meantime... --McZusatz (talk) 10:16, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Upload summaries can be easily set to anything one likes using the API. darkweasel94 10:50, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I think a tool like this would be very useful. However, since downloading videos from YouTube violates their Terms of Service, would this tool, too? Rock drum (talkcontribs) 05:38, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
No, you never agreed on the terms (only when creating an account) and transferring files can be done without a google account. (Not to mention that this section is invalid anyway) --McZusatz (talk) 10:09, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
 Support Indeed, that would be really helpful! Gyrostat (talk) 11:17, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

June 20

No need for image source?

I uploaded this photograph, found here, without having to specify where I found it. In fact, I don't think there even was a source field to fill in. Have there been some changes that I am unaware of? Surtsicna (talk) 17:01, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Source info is less essential for {{PD-Art}} stuff obviously dating from the mid-19th century or earlier, or for material which by its nature would have been published in the U.S. before 1923, but that would not apply to photographs of Felipe VI (a name which seems inconsistent with how the previous monarch of the same name is referred to in English, as "Phillip V", by the way...). AnonMoos (talk) 17:23, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
Fixed. Jee 17:39, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

June 23

… are confused by our default gadgets that unnecessary ornamentation is just that—unnecessary. Still, I think removing them without any prior note is a poor decision.

So what links from the "more section" are gone that were default before:

  • On file description pages:
    • checkusage (Global usage link)
    • categorize (WikiSense - CommonSense)
    • log (Special:Log)
    • purge (&action=purge)
  • On user pages:
    • gallery (Special:ListFiles)
    • orphans (WikiSense - OrphanImages)
    • untagged (WikiSense - UntaggedImages)
    • GLAMorous (Global usage of uploaded files)
  • In categories:
    • catscan (WikiSense - CategoryIntersect)
    • catscan2
    • catdown (Download all images from a category)
    • glamorous (Global usage of category members)

What's gone from the old upload form:

  • Separate fields for Original source, Author(s), Date of the work, Description, Other versions, Permission, Additional info, Categories.
  • Help for everything as a tooltip!

IMHO it's a big loss for everyone who cannot use UploadWizard because it's not working for them.

What's gone from below the file description page (restored for now):

IMHO the link should be move to the tools section in the sidebar. -- Rillke(q?) 11:46, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Was there any discussion about removing those? If so, where? Lupo 14:05, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
I think this is a discussion (assuming from this). Jee 15:37, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
No, there wasn't. Also too tired to start one. -- Rillke(q?) 16:49, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
I think removing MediaWiki:Gadget-ImprovedUploadForm.js from being on by default is going to confuse users more than it will help them. If the goal here is increasing page load time, should probably do profiling - premature optimization being the root of all evil and all that. Bawolff (talk) 20:39, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
I concur. I've re-enabled that one. Lupo 07:18, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Please help! Upload issue/possible deletion

So I uploaded a few articles to wikipedia, and they said they were successfully uploaded, but when I went to check on them none of them were uploaded. I then realized that I was not logged in (as I had stopped for the night and then uploaded them in the morning). And now the articles are nowhere to be found in my profile or on wikipedia. I think they were never uploaded. I wrote the text directly into Wikipedia, so I don't have another copy. Where are they??? Please help me! Thank you! Stephaniejnam (talk) 16:18, 24 June 2014 (UTC) Upload failure/possible deletion So I uploaded a few articles to wikipedia, and they said they were successfully uploaded, but when I went to check on them none of them were uploaded. I then realized that I was not logged in (as I had stopped for the night and then uploaded them in the morning). And now the articles are nowhere to be found in my profile or on wikipedia. I think they were never uploaded. I wrote the text directly into Wikipedia, so I don't have another copy. Where are they??? Please help me! Thank you! Stephaniejnam (talk) 16:20, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Commons is not the same as any of the Wikipedias, and "uploading" refers to the process of transferring binary image files, not to typing in text. You need to ask at the appropriate Wikipedia. AnonMoos (talk) 17:57, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
Are you asking about one of the following (all on the English-language Wikipedia), or something else?
(By the way, it is not at all obvious to me that any of these, except perhaps the last, are notable enough to merit Wikipedia articles. These are likely to be deleted, so if you want this content, I suggest you copy it and save it elsewhere.)
- Jmabel ! talk 20:11, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

June 25

Category:Art by subject - what is it for?

No really, I'm serious. What Commons content should be placed in the Category:Art by subject tree? IMO its its grossly underpopulated. My concern becomes apparent if you focus on a sub-category like Category:United Kingdom in art. The category basically contains:

  1. Paintings and drawings
  2. Engravings, lithograms, etchings
  3. Stamps

These are mostly landscapes, but also includes images of buildings and portraits.

The trouble is that's missing every other form of artwork, especially photography. Why should the UK in art contain Constable landscapes, but not FP landscapes by Wikimedians? One is a painting, the other is a photo, but both are artworks that a gallery might choose to display. Artistic merit is in the eye of the beholder...

This suggests that the art tree should be expanded to include all forms of art, with the photography tree added, and paintings moved to a sub-cat. It goes without saying that every sub-cat of Category:Photographs by country is underpopulated itself, but that's a different issue...--Nilfanion (talk) 11:07, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

  • In general, the "default" on Commons is a photograph, and within that a color photograph. So we tag non-photographic images as "art" and we also tag "black and white photographs" as such. Yes, photography can be art rather than just documentary, but it's not how we generally use the term here. - Jmabel ! talk 17:43, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
My concern is that even a typical holiday snapshot is a form of art, protected by copyright as a work of art. It might have little artistic merit, but we aren't meant to make value judgements in categorisation. On the flip side, Ansel Adams was a hugely influential artist, yet his work is excluded from Category:California in art by the current structure. I can't see a consistent way to include Ansel Adams, and exclude all the modern snapshots that imitate him.
If the art tree is meant exclude photography (I can see value in that - to mark the image as "unusual"), then it is poorly named. Should it just be redirected to the paintings tree? After all isn't that what most people mean by "art", and the subcats seem to basically be just paintings plus a eclectic mix of other less significant artforms? Including photography means Category:California in art would be broadly the same as Category:California, which is useless in a different way.
There might be value in a bot run to do a mass tagging of photos, to explicitly mark them as such, but that's a different thing.--Nilfanion (talk) 21:05, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
Where you have a painting, a photograph of the painting isn't the artwork itself. So it seems fine to have a category for these. Photos can also be like this, since a digital scan of a photo print isn't identical to the photo itself. On the other hand, digital photographs can be uploaded directly to commons, as not a representation of the art but the art in its own right. For this latter case there's no point in tagging these photographs as art. Perhaps the best you can do is place a note in the "art" category pointing out that every photo in Commons can be considered to be either art in its own right, or art as a reinterpretion of other art (the photo scan etc.) However you can also have categories for the subset of photos that have been recognised by the art establishment in some way, e.g., by winning awards or by being displayed in a gallery, or just because they were made by somebody recognised by the art establishment as a leading artist (through the winning of awards etc.) --ghouston (talk) 23:30, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
Disagree there, its co-opting the category into being something else - you are talking about "Digital conversions of artwork showing X" rather than "Artwork showing X" (but still a useful concept to track). If a digital photo is displayed in a real-life art gallery - is the artwork the RAW image, the post-processed JPG, or the print hanging on the wall? Why would a scanned film photo be categorised in the same way as a scanned painting, and not a direct-to-commons digital photo? With regards to the cats, I'd expect California in art to contain those files containing "art" showing "California" (in some medium). I think my problem here is the X in art cats are being used to segregate out paintings (and some other things) from everything else (eg photos, music, video) when just about everything in the category is ultimately an artwork.--Nilfanion (talk) 00:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
You may be right about scans vs originals. But if you want California in art to include every photo you may as well redirect California in art to California, since most of the files in that category can be interpreted as "art", and relate somehow to California. --ghouston (talk) 01:37, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
Maybe a tweak gets to the real point: What's the subject of this file? Is it the painting by da Vinci, or the painting's unknown subject? In such a case, its the artwork (not the subject of the artwork) that is being categorised - regardless of its medium. Furthermore, we normally only care about the artwork itself (as opposed to its subject) when its by a known artist. California is for "images showing California", California in art is for "images showing artworks (by known artists), that depict California" - California is a subordinate concept. Something like "Art depicting California" might be better than the status quo as it puts the primary concept first.--Nilfanion (talk) 22:03, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
Fair enough, and it seems like something that should be written in the description of Category:Art. --ghouston (talk) 22:58, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
By this argument, categories such as Category:Diagrams shouldn't be part of the Art category tree? --ghouston (talk) 23:03, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
I don't think Category:Art has such a big problem (which has both photography and diagrams as 2nd level subcats). Its only really Category:Art ''by subject'' where I see difficulty - I've started a CFD on that cat now.
I agree diagrams aren't normally art (though I could see a contemporary artist displaying a circuit diagram as an "artwork"). That said Category:Diagrams probably should stay in the art tree, due to the usual 2nd order effects that happen in the category tree.--Nilfanion (talk) 10:54, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
I always assumed that this category was for "Fine art", which would include photographs by Ansel Adams but excludes anything I take a picture of (or paint, or sketch, or engrave, or whatever). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:56, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Cherry blossom, Cherry Blossom, Sakura

We have the following three categories that I think need some attention:

  • Category:Cherry Blossom -- contains pictures of trees and closeups of blossoms
  • Category:Cherry blossom -- contains only the subcat Category:Sakura
  • Category:Sakura -- supposedly the ornamental tree and its blossoms, but it's a subcat of "Cherry blossom" -- shouldn't that either be the other way around, or not be in the same category branch at all (assuming that there are cherry blossoms other than that specific species of tree)?

I would propose:

On the other hand, maybe we should remove all these categories and just put the files in taxonomic categories. I don't know, so I'm looking for more input here. --Auntof6 (talk) 11:08, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

I agree with rename Category:Cherry Blossom to Category:Cherry blossoms and delete Category:Cherry blossom. I think Category:Sakura should be retained (or replaced with Category:Hanami) for activities relating to cherry blossom festivals, etc. We could use Category:Cherry blossom festivals, but it's a little too narrow: for example, an image like the one at right belongs in Category:Sakura or Category:Hanami (or a subcat), but is not a festival as such. We don't have an English word quite equivalent to hanami, and sakura has passed into English a more than hanami has. - Jmabel ! talk 14:25, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

✓ Done Category:Cherry Blossom and Category:Cherry blossom are bad names. I put all files and the cat "Sakura" in the correct Category:Cherry blossoms, and I ask to delete the wrong categories. --DenghiùComm (talk) 08:22, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

International/languages display issue

At File:1562 Americæ Gutiérrez.JPG I'm seeing an odd problem. In the Summary section I'm seeing all of the language descriptions not just one, a side effect of which is the table is too wide, just wider than my display. I can't read the text without scrolling even if the window is 1920px wide. I think that's a problem with a the Arabic language block, which I wouldn't attempt to fix. But the broader problem is that it's showing me all of them and not just the one, English (my language is set to British English). The edit that seems to have caused this is this one. Revisions before this look fine, i.e. just show me English description and other Summary text.--JohnBlackburne (talk) 15:25, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Some of the Arabic text lines had a space as their 1st character, which causes in wikicode (not only in Arabic and other furriner squiggles, but even in HM’s English) that line to be rendered as monospaced and non-breakable. Fixed now. -- Tuválkin 15:54, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, it's no longer 1920ish pixels wide. But I'm still seeing all of the languages, and need to hunt for a second for the English, while previously I saw only English.--JohnBlackburne (talk) 16:44, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
Many (including myself), actually prefer to show all languages all the time, but there should be a little language select box immediately below the "other resolutions" listing... AnonMoos (talk) 18:01, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

I think I've worked out what the problem is: my language is set to British English, and this seems to be confusing it. If I set or force the language to English the problem goes away. Compare e.g. force English and force British English. As noted this was working before, i.e. if I look at the version before this change I see English with my language set to British English.

It should still work. British English/en-GB should be treated as English 99% of the time. The only time there's need to respect the British/GB is when alternative content, such as with variant spellings, is provided for British readers. But that's not the case here, and I imagine never happens on file pages; few enough pages have more than one or two languages. Now I've seen it I can fix it myself but I'm probably not the only editor who's chosen the 'British English' option, or some other local option, in the language settings not realising the problems it might cause.--JohnBlackburne (talk) 19:12, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

June 24

Guidance for corporate editors

This section has been moved to Commons talk:Guidance for paid editors. Thanks to everyone who participated! LX (talk, contribs) 15:49, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Replace sidebar links from Commons category pages to Wikipedia article pages with a sidebar link to Wikidata category item

Hello. I have some problems with relatively newly-registered User:Tamawashi (but who apparently already has some experience, at least on Wikidata). Aside from the mess he/she left renaming perfectly fine categories (still not resolved, criticism on his/her talk page has been reverted), he/she blindly removes all Wikipedia links from the sidebar in categories claiming that they come from Wikidata (like here), which I find wrong as only links to categories come from Wikidata and in many cases there are only a few related Wikipedia categories but many more related Wikipedia articles. I've found some chat about that here but there's no consensus about removing all links. What I prefer to do is keep/add links to WP articles when there are no WP categories (by the way I don't use Template:On Wikipedia as I find it visually very ugly: it clutters the screen top, occupies several lines and shows full article names making it difficult to browse, aside from duplicating the sidebar functionality).

So my question is: as there's no consensus about deleting Wikipedia article links on Commons categories (i.e. all links since the category links come from Wikidata anyway), can those edits be reverted safely? Or is everyone right and one should let contributors waste each other time doing/undoing sidebar edits? — Bjung (talk) 16:28, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

It seems like it's a Wikidata contributor trying to enforce Wikidata policies on Commons without agreement. — Bjung (talk) 16:53, 26 June 2014 (UTC)
I removed the attacks that the user:Bjung on my talk page and pointed him already to Category_talk:Category_redirects#Categories_not_showing_up_in_Non-empty_category_redirects. Calling my work a mess, while not showing that I did something wrong is not helpful either. I wait for User:Bjung to cool down. For the sidebars:
  1. if a page in es-WP is linked from Commons then a category from es-WP linked in Wikidata will not show up
  2. the sidebar links are misleading, if on a category page they lead to article pages for some Wikipedias. The category description can be used for direct links to articles. Tamawashi (talk) 21:15, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Tamawashi, there is no consensus here on Commons to go this way, and so far Wikidata has ignored our widely expressed concern that typically a Commons category (unless it is rather "meta") should link to a Wikipedia article rather than a Wikipedia category. Please don't make these edits without (or, worse, against) consensus. - Jmabel ! talk 00:09, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

I fully agree with Jmabel. Futhermore, Tamawashi’s contributions should carefully analyzed and undone where they have been harmful for Commons. -- Tuválkin 03:06, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
@User:Tuvalkin: That should be done with everyone's edits, not? Let's have a look at Category:Ruente:
Was this harmful?
Now look at Category:Bárcena de Cicero,
  • 2009‎-10-27 in esWP
  • 2010-09-20 in Commons - no page link
  • 2013‎-11-17 in itWP and linked in Wikidata with esWP, not linked with Commons, this will last until 2014-06-27
  • 2014-06-27 a) Commons linked with Wikidata item in sidebar, b) Wikidata item linked with Wikidata article item, which links to 23 Wikipedia article pages
Was this harmful? Now think about, will you really want to manually have page links duplicated hardcoded in Commons? Or do you better use templates and Wikidata queries to display page links on Category pages? Tamawashi (talk) 04:07, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
@User:Jmabel: The Wikipedia articles can be linked with Wikimedia category items via category's main topic which is a reverse of topic's main category. So the links are there, see the Bárcena de Cicero example above. Commons just needs to find a way to display them. Maybe look for a user that can program a template, I think Lua is the technology used for this kind of queries. Tamawashi (talk) 04:30, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
  • "...Commons just needs to find a way to display them...": perhaps. But until that is sorted out, it is premature to change Commons' content. - Jmabel ! talk 04:47, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
The other way around, it is urgent that this is done, I gave examples of already, another one follows. One can already today, without a special way of display do this: just click Data item in the sidebar and find correct connections, or use "add links" to establish such connections. The current article links block users and contributors to do this. See errors at Category:San Vicente de la Barquera - it links to articles, but no single link goes to the category or the Wikidata item. Furthermore, there is no Add links link, because the erroneous links block it. Then see San Vicente de la Barquera - there are all the links again, but via Wikidata and an additional Data item link. Then from the data item one can go to the category Wikidata item, and only from there the correct links to categories in other Wikipedias are shown. Tamawashi (talk) 08:12, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
@Tamawashi: I think that current Wikidata policy doesn't fit what is needed for Commons, despite concerns voiced by many contributors. Until a solution is found, many people, including me, will link categories to articles, and articles to categories. Regards, Yann (talk) 10:52, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
+1 --Steinsplitter (talk) 10:55, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
@Yann: @Steinsplitter: - what can be learned from the fact that "Wikidata policy doesn't fit what is needed for Commons"? Does this support position A or does it support position B? "despite concerns voiced by many contributors" - probably there are more concerns raised by other contributors? What would you do? enWP-art1 -link to- commons-cat1 AND enWP-cat1 -link to- ??? What does Wikidata say about plain links in Commons to Wikipedia articles? Maybe nothing? That means that one can have plain links like "en:Earth" instead of interwiki links and thus end the blocking of the Data item link and "add link"-link? Tamawashi (talk) 12:13, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

June 27

This announcement caught my eye. As we already know many of Flickr's images are set to NC use only but it is interesting Flickr continues to foster CC licensing. Saffron Blaze (talk) 03:22, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

As of 2014-06-27 Category:Santander has hardcoded interwiki links to categories in esWP and euWP. But these already exist in the linked Wikidata item. Can a bot clean this up? Tamawashi (talk) 04:22, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Ask at COM:BWR. -- Rillke(q?) 11:02, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
m:User:Addbot (unfortunately inactive) should be the best choice. --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 11:42, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Categorized images remain in Category:All media needing categories as of 2014

There are images in Category:All media needing categories as of 2014 that have already been categorized. (Here is one which I removed manually from the metacategory.) How can we rectify this problem? --Jonund (talk) 09:11, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Surely you wanted to show this diff. Removing the {{Uncategorized}} template should do the job. Are you suggesting a bot-run? COM:BWR. -- Rillke(q?) 11:01, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
Actually; I meant the diff I mentioned, to show an example of a categorization which failed to remove the metacategory, although I mentioned that I had later removed the metacategory.
When I use HotCat, the metacategory is automatically removed, but evidently, that is not the case for all editors. If the feature could be activated for all editors, it would solve the problem, to the extent that HotCat is used. --Jonund (talk) 11:56, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
It works the other way around too, with images that aren't in the "uncategorised" categories, e.g., File:Estadio_de_softball.jpg. --ghouston (talk) 23:06, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
Is it technically possible to have the Category:All media etc removed automatically when a category is added with HotCat, while making exceptions for certain categories like Category:Black and white photographs or Category:Unidentified people? --Jonund (talk) 10:49, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
Yes, the easiest way would be to mark them as hidden categories. There would be some justification, since Black and white photographs is a technical criterion similar to JPEG files, and Unidentified people could also be considered a maintenance category. --ghouston (talk) 23:59, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
I suppose once the template has been removed, it will never get added back automatically, even if the file has no non-hidden categories? There's no bot that periodically checks the entire database for uncategorised files? --ghouston (talk) 00:02, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Disputes relating to URAA, policy, Israeli images, and behaviour

Please see Commons:Administrators' noticeboard#Disputes relating to URAA, policy, Israeli images, and behaviour. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 15:25, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

June 29

Wrong connection

In the Category:Sascha Schneider when we clic on the interwiki "Italian", we don't arrive at the page of the artist, but at the page of "Radebeul", a german municipality. Where is the problem, and how can we correct this mistake? Thank you at all for your help. Cheers, --DenghiùComm (talk) 07:55, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm guessing this was the problem. LX (talk, contribs) 09:27, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
Thank you so much! --DenghiùComm (talk) 10:31, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Charinsert

The Charinsert extension is installed but I can't find its management in the Gadgets. In Wikipedia and Wikisource, I added a row of "User" characters and strings but here it doesn't seem to work. User:Ineuw/common.js -- 01:28, 21 June 2014 (UTC) User:Ineuw