Commons:Village pump/Archive/2017/11

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Mass download tool or script?

Hi everyone. Is there any tool or script that can be used to download all the images in a category at once? For instance, there are quite a few categories in Category:Featured pictures by creator, such as Category:Featured pictures by Arild Vågen, where I would like to download everything in the category with one or two clicks. I've been a long-time viewer and downloader of Commons images, so I understand how common.js is used, or if someone has a tool of their own for this, maybe a .jar tool. Thx for your help. JaneySamuelsMA (talk) 22:31, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Commons:Imker_(batch_download) --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 23:51, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
Thank you! JaneySamuelsMA (talk) 00:36, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Speravir 04:24, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

images removal

Can someone please delete this File:Dolo_briglia.jpg this File:Dolo_ponte.jpg and this File:Romanoropresbyteryandsaintbenedictchurchsideview.jpg ? Thank you --Sweetcorn (talk) 12:21, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

You've already created deletion requests for all of them. The best you can do now is to better explain (on each deletion request) why they should be deleted. --bjh21 (talk) 14:42, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
I don't see any valid reasons for deletion. Commons licenses are irrevocable. Ellin Beltz (talk) 00:20, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

November 01

What is this?

anyone knowing? --GeorgHH • talk   17:49, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you all. I've categorized the images in "Daphnis nerii (caterpillar)".

Could you also add a location category? A lot off people are interested in the general location and climate where this creature lives.Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:30, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

October 31

Proposal for volunteers to help noobs like myself

I propose some kind of community/category/area where noobs like myself can request some help/assistance for 15, 30 minutes or more. I've spend a considerable amount of time setting up a kettlebell page/gallery, making and uploading videos etc. some get deleted, sometimes I have no idea why. I understand everything is documented and I can read all info online. But the content is overwhelming to be honest, and the formatting doesn't really work for my brain either. So it would be great to get a more knowledgable contributor to help for 5 minutes or so. Someone who can say and ask:

- it's better this way - can you change that - why did you do this - to get attribution you need to do so and so - etc

I have a ton of content for what looks like is a very large but empty category, I'm willing to invest time and abide by the rules, but having things deleted and removed quite quickly makes me not want to do anything else. So, as above, my suggestion is an area where people can post the contributions they can make, then someone contacts them, and they work together for a bit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Taco fleur (talk • contribs) 10:10, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Hi,
We already have IRC and Commons:Help desk‎. Aren't these sufficient? Regards, Yann (talk) 10:43, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
The Help Desk should serve this purpose. If it isn't working, we should find out why and fix it rather than creating yet another venue. @Taco fleur: Did you have trouble finding the Help Desk? Or find it unhelpful? --bjh21 (talk) 15:27, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
no - they are not - please do not joke with the newbies. the editor is suggesting a teahouse. given the community's inability to fix broken processes, it becomes necessary to create a welcoming safe space to answer questions. you could adopt teahouse methods at help desk, but this community will not. and the user page critique is very amusing. maybe you should blank and admin lock? why waste time talking on his talk page? Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 17:01, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Image tagging (e.g. identify people)

Is there an easy way to tag items in an image in Wikimedia Commons, that is placing one or more rectangles over the image in user-chosen places so that names of the items (e.g. the names of people) can pop up when end-users hover over them. If not, I say this could be useful. For example for pictures such as File:Solvay conference 1927.jpg or File:President Tsai poses for a photo with a delegation led by Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare (26 September 2017) in Taipei, Taiwan.jpg. (Vincent Mia Edie Verheyen (talk) 08:29, 1 November 2017 (UTC))

Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator ? -- Asclepias (talk) 11:51, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Appenzeller Bahnen stations

I made a trip on the Appenzeller Bahnen network in 2009. Could someone identify the stations? From 'File:Appenzeller Bahnen 2009 1.jpg' to 'File:Appenzeller Bahnen 2009 7.jpg' The trip started from Sankt Gallen to Gossau.Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:39, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

25 million images from 14 art galleries to be put online

http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/25-million-images-from-14-art-institutions-to-be-digitized-put-online-in-one-huge-scholarly-archive.html —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:36, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I followed one link to this page that claims CC-BY-NC-4.0 for metadata and CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 for images. We can probably add some sort of {{Licensed-PD-Art|PD-old-100|CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0}} as a license but we would still have issues with metadata. Also many of the images I looked at are black and white low-resolution versions making them rather unappealing. --Jarekt (talk) 18:09, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
It's a shame that based on current contents, this is likely to be yet another aggregation site that fuels and supports blatant copyfraud. It makes those more noble institutions taking part who probably genuinely want to do good for open knowledge, look they are being taken in by flimflam and wasting their money and time. --Fæ (talk) 18:14, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
More links:
  • led me to a sculpture page. Image is medium size, but it has a watermark and CC-BY-NC-3.0 license, so we can not use it. We could not use it
  • Japanese print page. Image is medium size and I think we could use it.
So maybe there are some images we could use but it would take time to search through it. Also there might be an issue with metadata database rights if we decide to do mass uploads.--Jarekt (talk) 18:31, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

For the sake of clarity, "openculture.com" is owned by a limited company, presumably to make money for somebody. The site relies on making money from advertising, so traffic generated from, say, links on Commons hosted images with openculture.com as the source would create a commercial income. On the "donations" page it is stated as "Also note that we're not formally set up as a non-profit. So contributions aren't deductible at this time." It may or may not be their aim to run as a not for profit, but there is no system of governance, or guarantee, that this will be the case in the future.

It is a great pity that the WMF has no similar project to collate donations from GLAMs to Commons to the tune of 25m+ images. At least with the WMF doing this the licensing would be straight-forward and it would be run without advertising or making a potential profit for somebody. --Fæ (talk) 18:45, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I tried leaving a comment on that page about their use of intrusive pop-ups that are incessantly presented to visitors who use ad-blocking software. Unfortunately it has disappeared. MichaelMaggs (talk) 23:31, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Participate in Dispute Resolution Focus Group

The Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program is working with the Wikimedia Foundation to help communities develop tools to resolve disputes. You are invited to participate in a focus group aimed at identifying needs and developing possible solutions through collaborative design thinking.

If you are interested in participating, please add your name to the signup list on the Meta-Wiki page.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn from the Wikimedia community. We value all of your opinions and look forward to hearing from you. 140.247.0.131 22:07, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Connecting...

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T179122

When I click on "Good pictures", it often says "Connecting..." (which takes forever). Is this a common problem, and how do I fix it? Thanks ~ DanielTom (talk) 21:49, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

@DanielTom: You are not alone. I got the same result on Category:Mycalesis junonia, which contains the POTD. I have reported it in phab:T179122.   — Jeff G. ツ 21:59, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
I'm looking at it. --Dschwen (talk) 15:27, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

October 27

Double extensions - why does the system allow this?

Why does Commons allow double extensions? For example, someone uploaded a PNG but named it as .SVG and so the system just stuck on the correct extension: File:NumberLineIntegers-white.svg.png. However these all need to be renamed as maintenance, but it creates a tremendous amount of work to constantly move these files. @Dispenser: has created a list that is updated monthly - User:Dispenser/Double extension, with some 8,000 files. They have to all be moved one by one apparently (as far as I know, there are not any reliable mass rename tools available even to file movers). There are filemovers and editors trying to fix as many as possible, but judging by the dates, additional files with double extensions are just being added every day.

Some on the list flagged by Dispenser's script are not actually double extensions (ie File:A collection of engravings...midwifery Wellcome L0049598.jpg is listed because of the .mid extension), however, the majority are. There are many cases where people put in additional names/descriptions after the extension and the system adds another one, or they are being careless during group uploads and files end up with names like File:Holzheim - Neumarkt 012.jpg? Holzheim - Neumarkt 013.jpg. But surely the system could be modified to not allow users to upload or move files with double extensions, especially the ones that are very obviously duplicates, such as File:Innenraum.jpg.jpg. How can we get this fixed so upload rejects names like this? Pinging the dedicated @ShakespeareFan00: Thanks. — ʷiḳỉℳẚṅ₫¡₳ (talk) 16:59, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

For Upload Wizard ping @Matma Rex. — Speravir – 17:36, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
See COM:FR, renaming reason no. 6. Technically, your example is a PNG, so the last extension is right. As far as I know the magic number is checked and compared with the extension upon the uploading process. — Speravir – 17:31, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
It's not about wrong extensions but double extensions. A PNG named svg.png is a valid renaming criteria under maintenance, thus a tedious never-ending task. The system should recognize a double extension and return an error just as if a user tried to upload a file with an invalid character, such as / in the filename, or automatically fix it in the obvious cases ie filename.jpg.jpg. — ʷiḳỉℳẚṅ₫¡₳ (talk) 18:34, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
The system allows this because it is a valid page name. If you wish to disallow it, it can be done e.g. with title blacklist or with abuse filter. (@Speravir: I haven't touched UploadWizard since August and my last bigger contributions were in January [1].) Matma Rex (talk) 21:41, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
@Matma Rex: I pinged you because I thought you were the main developer. Is this actually wrong? — Speravir – 21:48, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
@Speravir: I used to work on UploadWizard, but now I mostly spend my time on VisualEditor and other page editing stuff. For UploadWizard problems, I recommend these guys: wmf:Staff and contractors#Multimedia (although Mark is on vacation right now). (And also, sending emails is better than on-wiki pings, not everyone has notifications enabled or checks the wikis daily – but WMF staff definitely check their WMF email every day.) Matma Rex (talk) 23:27, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Erandi Bermúdez Picture Deletion

Hi I want to know why you delete the image of Erandi Bermudez doesnot have a copyright we personally took it from him, Wait for you response — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maikdp (talk • contribs) 07:18, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I presume the deletion you're referring to is Commons:Deletion requests/File:Erandi Bermudez.jpg. Based on that, it seems that the picture was deleted because it was available elsewhere on the Internet without a free licence before it was uploaded to Commons. In these cases, Commons requires explicit permission from the copyright holder by some other route. One approach is to arrange for other sites to display it with the correct licensing details. The other is for the copyright owner to send permission to Commons by email. See COM:OTRS (available in multiple languages) for details of the procedure. --bjh21 (talk) 13:10, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
commons does not require it, but by all means memorialize the deletionist practice with some policy. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 16:54, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
That would explain why I couldn't find the policy in question, even though it's clearly common practice. I withdraw my previous comment. --bjh21 (talk) 17:17, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose This image has (or these images have) appeared on the Internet without a free license prior to being uploaded here (or appear(s) to have based on the small size and lack of EXIF metadata), and was (or were) thus deleted by an Administrator. Policy requires that the actual copyright holder, which is almost always the photographer or image designer, must send a free license directly using VRTS.  — Jeff G. ツ 03:49, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
citation needed. quote and link to the policy. did you mean that is your uncompromising interpretation of PRP? Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 03:35, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Tools for identifying images

Is there any online tool where I can submit a collection of links in order to find a certain type of images? For example if I submit the links to the images missing categories, the tool will identify drawings, paintings, trees, fruits, animals, roots etc. Or to find a specific type of images, for example drawings - which should't be hard at all to do: the majority of drawings are drawn in dark ink on white backgrounds. That would help a lot the categorization of images. -- Fructibus (talk) 14:13, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Its not a free service (although there is a free demo), and its concentrating on photos I think not drawing, but https://cloud.google.com/vision/ comes to mind. Bawolff (talk) 17:40, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Timed text for simple pronunciation files

I've seen some one-word pronunciation files such as File:GT Wikipedia BE.ogg which have TimedText. This seems pointless, and the caption box is visually unappealing. Should we delete these timed texts and discourage their creation? Guanaco (talk) 23:17, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

How is it pointless? It is in fact used on a number of Wikimedia projects. Ruslik (talk) 20:22, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
@Ruslik0: The files are used on Wikimedia projects, but I don't see how the TimedText is helpful. Can you explain? Guanaco (talk) 07:49, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
people are using them, therefore they are useful. could you provide some justification why you would delete files in use? if you think the design is unappealing, perhaps you could engage in some collaborative UX design? Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 12:45, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
@Ruslik0 and Slowking4: I believe Guanaco actually has TimedText:GT Wikipedia BE.ogg.en.srt in mind, which also in my opinion doesn't make much sense because TimedText for pronunciation files IMO should use IPA instead of Latin alphabet. --jdx Re: 14:23, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

October 29

Template:Efn

Does <ref group="lower-alpha"> not work like it does on enwiki? Right now it generates [lower-alpha 1] instead of [a]. Jc86035 (talk) 16:26, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, let’s see.[a] The wiki code is the same, cf. Template:Efn with en:Template:Efn. (Edit: Aah, it has very recently been imported on your request.) I do not know this certainly, but judging from German Wikipedia is writing out the group name the default MediaWiki behaviour in Commons,[a] so there must be a local adjustment in the English Wikipedia. — Speravir – 17:21, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
  1. ↑ a b test
This is due to lack of some system messages on Commons as explained on en:Help:Cite_link_labels. Ruslik (talk) 18:41, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
Made an import request at Commons:Administrators' noticeboard#Citation link system messages. Jc86035 (talk) 10:23, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Pages with maps category

Why is the hidden Pages with maps category stuffed with images that don't include a map? Does it include - as the text seems to suggest - all images that have a GPS location? That doesn't make a lot of sense. Is it of any use to anyone? MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:55, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it contains every page with a geolocation template. That's because the geolocation templates include maps, hidden behind the and icons. --bjh21 (talk) 00:41, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
PS: I think that's why it's "Pages with maps" and not "Files with maps": the maps are in the file description pages, not in the files themselves. --bjh21 (talk) 11:25, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

November 02

Commons:Photo challenge September results

Sundials: Entries • Votes • Scores
Rank 1 2 3
image
Title Skulptur mit Sonnenuhr im
Kurpark Bad Schlema in Sachsen.		 Sundial at the Luitpold school in Bamberg Ivory Portable Sundial dated 1524
- Poldi Pezzoli Museum (Milan)
Author Kora27 Ermell Prelvini
Score 14 13 12
Vacations: Entries • Votes • Scores
Rank 1 2 3
image
Title Light and shadows during a camel ride in Sahara
Desert (Erg Chebbi dunes, Morocco)		 Fishing by lighthouse at sunset (Adriatic Sea) Surf at Tenerife
Author Fbrandao.1963 PetarM Buiobuione
Score 21 14 12

Congratulations to Kora27, Ermell, Prelvini, Fbrandao.1963, PetarM and Buiobuione. -- Jarekt (talk) 03:03, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

By the way, 3 out of 6 winners are new users with less than 500 edits. Prelvini, Fbrandao.1963 and Buiobuione welcome to Commons. Those were great photographs and I am glad you are here, although that also means my photographs did not make it to the top 3. --Jarekt (talk) 19:16, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
Thank you Jarekt. It is a pleasure to participate in the community and I am honored by the votes received in this first participation. And congratulations to all other participants for the excellent photos presented. -- Fbrandao.1963 (talk) 20:47, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Category:Amsterdam

Hello co-hobbyfellows, This category is with 2964 pictures a bit full, if a few people can help a little bit with pushing to subcategories that would be wonderful. Maybe someone with knowlede of geocoding can split it into city parts, Kind regards, Rudolphous (talk) 12:54, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Directions in UploadWizard in the Arabic interface

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T179779
Menu is incomplete

Hello.Directions of languages in Special:UploadWizard in the Arabic interface are wrong.Please correct them.Thank you ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 10:33, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

@MarkTraceur: ^. Kaldari (talk) 23:00, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Advertising?

Hi, can someone take a look at these images. To me this looks like advertising . Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 15:13, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

  • I understand what you are driving at, but I think they are OK. If the images are in scope, Commons (unlike, say, the English-language Wikipedia) doesn't have any rule against an interested party uploading them. If you think they are out of scope you can nominate them for deletion, but I think (for example) File:AAAJCK®.jpg is fine (a well-shot picture of food). None of the images are very well described, but that's not a reason for deletion. - Jmabel ! talk 16:22, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
Okay, fine by me. Lotje (talk) 17:21, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
Looks like User:Ellin Beltz thinks they are copyvios, which is an entirely different matter. - Jmabel ! talk 00:09, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Essay on Medium about digital archives

This essay by William Owen raises some interesting issues about how to best use the digital resources of institutions which are far too often underexploited. I feel there is material here that experienced Commons hands can use in their efforts here. -- llywrch (talk) 21:42, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

November 05

Broken file pages

Does anyone know what's wrong with these two pages: File:Mjstuen2017efn.jpg and File:Stortinget2017efn.jpg? They sort of exist, but don't seem to have real file pages. There's a Create link instead of an Edit link at the top. --ghouston (talk) 23:50, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

All fine here. Reload without cache? Both are from today and from the same uploader. — Speravir – 03:13, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
Template:Ping:Speravir Are you saying you see text on the page? Because I see photos, but no text. - Jmabel ! talk 05:47, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
Ping didn’t work for obvious reasons, Jmabel :-). And I misunderstood ghoustons’s intentions, as it seems. I cannot check anymore, but I think, I saw blank pages, too. — Speravir – 04:35, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
Confirm problems for both pages, images exist but there is no text and I can't edit the pages - instead I get asked to create a new page. MKFI (talk) 07:24, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

I've created these pages and notified the uploader to fill in the information. It may be an upload wizard bug, so let's keep an eye out for more of the same. Guanaco (talk) 07:47, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T179884
@Guanaco: Here is one more, this time an audio file from a different user: File:DWCSJ Hymn.wav. --ghouston (talk) 23:06, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
Today's file is File:Ahora nos toca a nosotros, ovación.jpg. I've created a Phabricator task for it. --ghouston (talk) 00:01, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

November 03

SVG thumbnail generation seems to be broken for non-ASCII characters

On uploading a new version of File:comparison_azimuthal_projections.svg today, I noticed that minus signs (&#8722;) are not rendered, and degree symbols (&#176;) are rendered as "?" in Helvetica font (also happened in Arial font) – see below. It didn't happen on my previous uploads. Is this a known bug, and is there a workaround? Thanks, '⎆ 09:52, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Thumbnail should have "°" before "N" and "S", and "−" before numbers under "Gnomonic", "Stereographic" etc.
cmglee look at the revisions over at File:Test.svg. I have a upload there that renders correctly. Your file doesn't have a XML declaration, that is where your character encoding is supposed to be declared. So at this point without having that the renderer doesn't know what character encoding you're using. When you have problems with SVG rendering, first thing to do is to run the file through W3C Validator, that'll give you any pointers on if anything is wrong with the file which can end up leading to rendering issues. The SVG renderer does have its issues, but in this instance it was a problem with the SVG file. - Offnfopt(talk) 12:14, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
Many thanks, Offnfopt. I should have realised that it was still using the old-style DOCTYPE. It now works. Cheers, '⎆ 09:13, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

November 06

Tech News: 2017-45

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

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  • You will no longer see the patrol log on Special:Log unless you specifically select it. [2]

Changes later this week

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18:45, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Can people come to Template talk:Authority control and comment on merging the various templates that invoke Wikidata to display Authority Control identifiers for categories. There are too many and they look bad stacked on each other displaying the same data. A simple modification can allow them to be merged and people will just have remember one template to add. Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 02:33, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Richard, I think that in the long run we should have several templates that add standard Wikidata-based info for categories. Eventually it should be probably done in Lua but for now I cobbled together:
At the moment it is a single template that calls several other templates, but eventually they should be unified to provide more coherent look. --Jarekt (talk) 15:15, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
I don't see why they cannot be merged since "instance of" at Wikidata will tell in "human" or a location, or a taxon. Also not all biographical entries are creators (writers, artists, photographers), we will have to differentiate that somehow. Template:Authority control and Template:Wikidata can certainly be merged if Template:Authority control would display the Wikidata Q-number. Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 15:22, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
They can be merged but someone would have to write code to do it. Also they do have rather different content so it did not seem necessary. As for creator templates: we do create personalized creator templates for creators (writers, artists, photographers) and place them in "Creator" namespace. But we could also just call {{Creator|Wikidata=Q????}} to display the person infobox in category namespace. --Jarekt (talk) 16:18, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Facebook recruiting Australian users for pilot program to use image recognition to stop spread of users nude photos

Just saw this on the news. I couldn't have made this shit up! In its guise as the omniscient omnipotent watcher of all, Facebook is "asking users to send in their own nude photos." Their sacred AI angels will then track down "revenge porn" of the users wherever it appears. It may also inadvertently grow a conscience, collaborate with online trolls and anti-Semites, and decide to release its entire luscious archives to Wikileaks and Encyclopedia Dramatica, at which point all good and decent people on the Internet will take unadulterated lasting glee in humiliating the people who were dumb enough to participate in this scheme. But I digress.

The main point here is that unfortunately Commons could be facing a redefinition of "personally identifiable photos" from the Top Down, where what is willed must be. Facebook is coy about its divine powers but I assume that to match their matchless facial recognition they now do nipple recognition, ass recognition, and like the Porky's phys-ed teacher, they never forget an incriminating mole. So, now what? Wnt (talk) 20:22, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Please avoid posting in this style. The Village Pump is not the scramble seen at Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia talk page, where contributors are itching to throw around the f-word or c-word just to "prove" how much they love free speech, nor is it twitter to post passing reactions. I would rather not have fucking and shit pop up in my watchlist as a way to grab attention. If anything, using these words just means that I'm not interested in engaging with the point you were making, as the thread appears to inappropriately childish or trolling. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 21:49, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
I tend to get animated when thrown a ticking grenade. Anyway, I've told you about the story, so my job here may be done ... I'll hand this one off to you now. Wnt (talk) 22:27, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
(1) I don't see what this has to do with commons, (2) desperate times call for desperate measures. If you know someone is actively trying to spread a particular image of you, registering that image so image recognition can automatically remove such content has some validity. While one would prefer not to have to register such a image with a online service, it could be a better alternative than having your image spammed all across that service. - Offnfopt(talk) 22:57, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
Well, the first problem Commons has is what if someone uploaded an image of an anonymous body part for anatomical demonstrations, someone reposts it on Facebook, and their software flags it -- correctly or not, who knows? -- as a "revenge porn" image and tells the person who uploaded their picture, who now are coming saying we have something they didn't know about?
Second, what if someone claims all that but is lying?
Third, what about when Facebook starts saying "Look, all anyone needs to do to stop revenge porn is install our software, sign our Terms and agree to liability and no reverse engineering and so forth, and then the AI will magically make it go away" and Congress says that's a great idea and Commons ought to be forced to join into it?
Fourth, when Facebook starts selling the AI profiles they compiled from "volunteers" to recognize anonymous body parts as fairly short strings of digits, so that businesses can monitor whether any of their employees are damaging their image by posting self-porn (making them register to assist, of course), and they come after subjects for Commons articles.
I mean let's be clear, they're holding all the cards here and they're going to be dealing them at us for quite some time. Wnt (talk) 00:02, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
I don't think this system is based on image recognition. Some sites mention the recording of image hashes, which is likely a sort of perceptual hashing similar to en:PhotoDNA. --ghouston (talk) 00:17, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Image recognition is a broad subject, there are a lot of different methods it isn't just about trying to identify / recognize objects in a photo. A lot of times you don't even care to identify what is in the image, you just want to compare to other images. For instance a lot of reverse image searches use a images histogram for image recognition by comparing it to other images histograms. - Offnfopt(talk) 00:36, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Yes, in this case it would be designed to find matching instances of the same photo, even if they were somewhat modified, but wouldn't match different photos of the same subject. --ghouston (talk) 00:43, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

November 09

Large lag with categories

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T178840

I've noticed that Commons appears to be currently experiencing a large lag with Category propagation. Anyone else seeing this? —RP88 (talk) 20:28, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Possibly related, the Commons job queue has ~5.6 million entries (see [5]). —RP88 (talk) 20:33, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
@RP88: Yes. This appears to be why Category:Images from the Geograph British Isles project still has 1,653,715 files in it after 16 days.   — Jeff G. ツ 23:10, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
I wonder if it has something to do with 5M transclusions of Module:Wikidata label, which I was just fixing per phabricator:T173194. But maybe it is a coincidence. --Jarekt (talk) 20:32, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps... but if Jeff's > 16 day estimate above is accurate, the timing doesn't work out since your first attempt at a fix for T173194 was 10 days ago. Given that the Commons job queue has actually grown to ~5.8 million entries, rather than decreased, something else must also be involved since even if your edit was the trigger I"d expect the queue to shrink as the jobs were processed. —RP88 (talk) 02:06, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
Not neccesarily. Jobs aren't added all in one go. Many jobs are sort of "meta" jobs that get split into smaller jobs. So as a big job is processed the things in the job queue will go up because more jobs are added as part of the processing step. Bawolff (talk) 17:38, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
The lag with Categories appears to be ongoing and the Commons job queue has ~6.1 million entries, —RP88 (talk) 20:03, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
The job queue in now a much more reasonable ~0.5 million. However, while Category:Images from the Geograph British Isles project was slowly draining for a while the rate of decrease has nearly stopped; the category still is extremely lagged with 1,397,118 files in it. —RP88 (talk) 18:43, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

October 24

Structured Commons newsletter, October 25, 2017

Welcome to the newsletter for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons! You can update your subscription to the newsletter. Do inform others who you think will want to be involved in the project!

Community updates
Things to do / input and feedback requests
Presentations / Press / Events
Audience at Structured Commons design discussion, Wikimania 2017
Team updates
The Structured Commons team at Wikimania 2017

Two new people have been hired for the Structured Data on Commons team. We are now complete! :-)

  • Ramsey Isler is the new Product Manager of the Multimedia team.
  • Pamela Drouin was hired as User Interface Designer. She works at the Multimedia team as well, and her work will focus on the Structured Commons project.
Partners and allies
  • We are still welcoming (more) staff from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) to become part of our long-term focus group (phabricator task T174134). You will be kept in the loop of the project, and receive regular small surveys and requests for feedback. Get in touch with Sandra if you're interested - your input in helping to shape this project is highly valued!
Research

Design research is ongoing.

  • Jonathan Morgan and Niharika Ved have held interviews with various GLAM staff about their batch upload workflows and will finish and report on these in this quarter. (phabricator task T159495)
  • At this moment, there is also an online survey for GLAM staff, Wikimedians in Residence, and GLAM volunteers who upload media collections to Wikimedia Commons. The results will be used to understand how we can improve this experience. (phabricator task T175188)
  • Upcoming: interviews with Wikimedia volunteers who curate media on Commons (including tool developers), talking about activities and workflows. (phabricator task T175185)
Development

In Autumn 2017, the Structured Commons development team works on the following major tasks (see also the quarterly goals for the team):

  • Getting Multi-Content Revisions sufficiently ready, so that the Multimedia and Search Platform teams can start using it to test and prototype things.
  • Determine metrics and metrics baseline for Commons (phabricator task T174519).
  • The multimedia team at WMF is gaining expertise in Wikibase, and unblocking further development for Structured Commons, by completing the MediaInfo extension for Wikibase.
Stay up to date!

Warmly, your community liaison, SandraF (WMF) (talk)

Message sent by MediaWiki message delivery - 14:27, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Tuválkin Structured Commons is going to be Wikidata like storage for data stored currently on file description pages. Instead of text with information about author, date, license, etc. You will have properties of file items. Hopefully the output to the users will not change much, but the underlying storage will. Structured Commons will reside on Commons, instead of Wikidata site.--Jarekt (talk) 15:37, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
Hello Tuvalkin: what Jarekt says, indeed. Just one thing to make clear: with Structured Commons, structured data will be added as an addition to file pages on Wikimedia Commons. This is done by using the software Wikibase, the software that is also used for Wikidata. And you will be able to use Wikidata items and properties to describe files on Commons. This is integrated in Wikimedia Commons itself. I'd be interested to hear if the Frequently Asked Questions about Structured Commons make things clear, or if there should be more clarification. SandraF (WMF) (talk) 11:40, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the replies, @SandraF (WMF): and @Jarekt: . You seem to have replied about what Structured Commons is, not so much how it is supposed to integrate with Wikidata. A few PgUps from here we have a war going on about Wikidata siphoning off (and removing from) Commons hardcoded data contributed through volonteer work and disappeared into an opaque database. I cannot guess if having our own in-house Wikidata will improve that kind of thing or make it even worse. Back when Structured Commons was first ventilated, I saw it as a way to finally achieve true internationality in this project, by allowing categories to have names in more than one language, instead of being hardcoded into English. That seems to have never taken of, and all we have now is a hyped-up, over-funded GIGO machine. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 22:39, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
  • It should be very possible to create translated names for categories, if the Structured Data plan includes data pages for Categories, as well as data pages for files. Data pages for categories would also be very useful for describing in a structured way what the categories contain. @SandraF (WMF): Can you confirm that data pages for Categories are in the plan, ideally to be implemented as soon as possible? Jheald (talk) 15:27, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
  • No, data pages for categories are not in the plan. What is in the plan, is to 1) leave the category system intact as it is and 2) in addition, make sure that the information contained in categories (to which I also contributed quite a bit in my free time, long before being hired by WMF, so I definitely want that work to be useful ad infinitum!) can *also* be transferred to structured metadata, which will be fully multilingual, machine-readable, and fully integrated in the APIs. We also work on search functionality that makes sure that you will be able to find media via that way, in your own language. I'm preparing a FAQ question and answer with more clarification. SandraF (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
  • @SandraF (WMF): Well that is bloody silly. How do we go about changing the plan?
It would be very very easy to have data pages for categories -- essentially no extra work at all. Why is this not being done? Is it simply that the developers hate categories and want to see them die? If that is the case, they're being naive.
Categories and structured data are likely to continue side-by-side for many years to come. So why will the CommonsData project not make this small step to add huge value to the category system?
Data pages for categories would make it easy to store the information to:
  • internationalise category names
  • record in a Wikidata-item based way what the category represents (eg, for intersection categories)
  • record other valuable properties about the categories -- eg sort orders that make sense.
This would be extraordinarily easy to add, just by making it so that there is a data page attached to each category page. It will hugely help the gathering of information from categories, without which Structured Data's precious all-singing all-dancing multilingual search will be utterly utterly useless, because it will contain no information to drive it.
So why not do this one simple basic extraordinarily useful thing? Jheald (talk) 19:00, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
Jheald, My understanding is that we first focus on file namespace as that is the main product of Commons. Categories are important, but if I have to choose where to put our resources I would vote on Files first. If you would like to work on adding Wikidata info to categories you can do it already using Wikidata as great many are linked. By the way, I like CommonsData you mentioned, much better than Structured Data as the name of the project. --Jarekt (talk) 20:45, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
@Jarekt: It's a reasonable point, but I don't agree -- for two main reasons. Firstly, because the heavy development stuff required -- eg Federation, Multi-Content Revisions -- is now already done. Applying it to category-pages in addition to file-pages is a comparatively small addition. I don't believe it would significantly hold up the roll out of CommonsData for file pages, so I believe it's a false choice to see a competition for resources between the two. Secondly, perhaps even more importantly, I believe it will be far easier to make sure that CommonsData can support two different sorts of pages before it goes into its initial production release here, rather than to try to retro-fit that when there is a substantially populated live database already up and running, that each and every slightest data-structure change would require re-initialising. Much better to spend a couple of weeks now to make sure this is possible, rather than far more effort and difficulty later. (Or just to be dismissed out-of-hand later it's not possible, it's not what was designed, and the developers have moved on). If this is something that we think is going to be useful (and my view is that it is something that could turn out to be very useful), the time to insist on it is now.
On your second point, according to the numbers from September only 26.8% of categories on Commons can be identified to an item on Wikidata. For 73.2% there is currently no identifiable Wikidata item -- neither an article-type item, nor a category-type item. Many of these (but how many I don't know) are the famous "intersection categories", for which Wikidata does not wish to have any item. Yet these are exactly the categories that it would be most useful to have a machine-interpretable description of, eg via category combines topics (P971). In my opinion, (a) identifying and machine-describing this 73.2% of Commons categories is essential for acquiring the information that we will need to put into the CommonsData pages for files, that is required if Sandra's search is to have enough information to work; and (b) the obvious place to store such machine-descriptions of categories is on a CommonsData page associated with the category, that automatically comes into being when the category comes into being, automatically follows the category if the category is renamed, doesn't require a connection to be maintained with a Wikidata item, and is owned and editable directly as an integral part of Commons. Jheald (talk) 22:26, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata Notability will also prevent the conversion of a lot of categories into Wikidata items. It's easy to create a category for a random building, device, or sports person, but harder to find "serious and publicly available references" when they don't have Wikipedia articles. --ghouston (talk) 00:11, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
Another problem with this design (as I understand it) is that there will be duplication between the categories and data properties. It's unlikely that software will be able to keep them perfectly synchronized when people add or remove entries from one place or the other. --ghouston (talk) 00:28, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
@Ghouston: I'm not sure which design you're referring to as "this design" in the last sentence that would cause problems. But having machine descriptions of categories would at least give us a chance to harvest data from them to put into the data pages for files (perhaps marked as provisional and needing manual confirmation). It may not be brilliant, but at the moment it is the best metadata we have as to what files relate to. Jheald (talk) 09:50, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
--ghouston actually the notability policy of wikidata accept also that the item should have a structured role. We still could debate again if the structured data of commons fulfill such need exactly like a category author of wikinews or author item on wikisource. This is far from being really "structured" in the general vision of the community, IMHO. d:Wikidata:Project_chat#Other_sites_section_in_items
also, find "serious and publicly available references" is quite simple. Almost all countries have database for "everything". Even if they are scattered sometimes. The main problem I see is the geographical gap. it is much easier to find an ID for something in a continent and not in another, but not the lack of references per se. I can create 10000 structured item with enough IDs of scientists, all could have their image and their category on commons one day, and this would be easy in the end. Similarly, France has a very accurate database of sites of public interest and almost all German PhD students have an ID for their doctoral Thesis, Open Street Map has millions of information about "nodes" that are places, and so on. So in many cases associating IDs and structured information is not the most complicated step, it requires just a little bit of literacy. Integrating this in the workflow of avarage users with content-related need it is possible, I did many times with wikidata aspects for example. If you manage to tone down that snobby attitude of the "expert user" that has to be there to "teach you stuff" because "newbies are so delicate" (or whatever), and you find something that people really feel useful (improving gallery in a semiautomated way, expanding the multilanguage level, finding links to external databases, creating to-do lists) than it can work quite well.--Alexmar983 (talk) 07:16, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
Yes, in some cases it won't be too hard, it depends on the type of item and the geographical location. I'm not denying the potential benefits of structured data if it's implemented well. --ghouston (talk) 07:43, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
It is true that a strict reading of d:WD:N currently has that requirement. However, the underlying purpose of clause 2 is that an item should reflect a "clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity". A building that has a Commons category is very evidently a "a clearly identifiable material entity" -- regardless of whether we can find sources describing when the building was built or who has lived in it, etc, or an entry in an official record, or an identifier in a database. The Wikidata item is appropriate and needed to record verifiable information such as which town the building is in, and what its coordinates are. I would suggest that the real intention is to keep out items for "intersection categories", that are not considered clearly identifiable primary concepts.
It would probably be useful to suggest an update to d:WD:N, to reflect revised consensus that (i) Commons category <-> article-type item links are acceptable, removing the reference to the 2013 RfC (which IMO should be marked historical and superseded; and (ii) that it is acceptable for the only sitelink to be a Commons category -- so long as the category relates to an identifiable primary entity, not an "intersection".
But regardless of the above, that will leave a lot of categories that are intersection categories, that will not have a Wikidata item, that machine descriptions would be really useful to have stored for -- that it would be useful to have a CommonsData page for as a place to store those descriptions. Jheald (talk) 09:41, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
A couple of further points. In terms of the roadmap, it may well make very good sense to roll out CommonsData pages for categories before any Commons data pages for files. It would allow the impacts of the big heavy technical changes like Federation and Multi-Content revisions, and also the implementation of WDQS on Commons, to be tested for real and at scale in a much easier to implement environment than the File pages. I say "easier to implement" for a couple of reasons. Firstly the ontology is much easier -- simply with multilingual labels and with P971 "category combines topics" one could already do a lot of useful work. In contrast the ontology for file pages is going to be difficult -- how to represent significant contributors to a page; what different "types" of images should be identified; how to use "depicts" and "main subject" for images -- for files, all of this is going to need considerable negotiation, because it's really important to do some hard thinking about this before the data gets populated. Whereas for categories, we could basically be good to go now. Secondly the page design is much easier -- the information on CommonsData pages for files is going to be very much aimed at end users, and it's a big design challenge to think how one might present it, how one might integrate it with existing template-based presentation. It will require major design thought, followed by a major re-write of how the file presentation looks. In contrast, the integration of CommonsData pages for categories could be much more simple, direct, and rough-and-ready -- eg a very Wikidata-style section that was expandable/collapsible just above the category contents would be quite adequate. As information really only aimed at what User:SandraF (WMF) classifies as editors / curators, and then only those with a particular interest in this area, it doesn't need to look great, and indeed perhaps the expandable section might not be shown at all unless users had selected a particular CSS switch, eg by enabling a "beta feature", so most users wouldn't see it or be bothered by it at all. So that's why I think in terms of user experience (UX) work, CommonsData for categories could be implemented with really minimal work -- yet would provide a really useful target, rather than only being able to go straight to file pages, for evaluating and refining things like Federation and Multi-Content Revisions in the wild and at scale; and for adapting things like QuickStatements and WDQS to the Commons setting. Jheald (talk) 10:47, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi, I think Jheald has a point. Moreover, from the discussion we had in Wikimania in Montreal, I understood that categories will be moved to CommonsData first. Has this changed? Regards, Yann (talk) 11:11, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
Hello! I'm sorry about the distress this is causing :| ... I checked this with the team, with the argument that some community members really want us to work on a new item in the roadmap first, namely data pages for categories. I did not hear a clear no, but there is very, very big reluctance to work on this. What I hear as feedback is:
  1. Properly implementing this is more time-consuming than you think; making these properly editable is a larger engineering challenge than it seems at first sight, and it would also need to be integrated into APIs. Putting work in this, takes away effort from other things, and we already have quite limited time...
  2. With that limited time, we want to focus design and development energy on doing the core part - structured data on files - correctly.
  3. Please understand that we take into consideration that categories converted to Wikibase, with very different Wikidata-like workflows associated with that, might be something that, even when hidden and in beta, might equally confuse and upset many community members ;-|
A few more thoughts:
  • Perhaps one can indeed work with the intersected categories on Wikidata a la Russian artists (which I personally would not dedicate my volunteer time towards, see my next point).
  • From my own first encounters with categories in Wikimedia projects in the mid-2000s (?) I already found them a very imperfect way to tag the content we hold and improve its findability. They are the best organization tool we have at the moment, and I create and maintain them too. But frankly, structured data is so much better to describe media files properly here. Putting my volunteer hat on, I'd prefer to immediately dive into the inevitable, hard and complicated work on the data model for the files themselves, rather than first spending a lot of time on an in-between task (and knowing that the hard modelling work does not go away, right).
  • An approach that I think would lead to good results without category data items too: it is probably quite doable to develop small gamelike tools (a la Wikidata games) that would allow us to translate intersection categories to multiple structured data statements at a pretty quick tempo. I'm always amazed at how fast certain conversions and other mass edit tasks can happen with the help of focused community tools. I'm not a tool builder myself, but I definitely want to help think about good ways how to prepare for that.
Thanks, SandraF (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
@SandraF (WMF): Thanks for getting back on this issue. I have taken time to think about the points you make above. It is understandable that a project is likely to be initially resistant to external input. But after reflection, in the cold light of day, I do not think the arguments above stand up. In detail:
  • Time: the Structured Data project is going to take years. In the overall scheme of things a couple of weeks to make this possible is a drop in the ocean. And it's not as if it's going to need all the team's attention to make it possible. Yes, I appreciate that the project may already be running late, and that the delivery dates promised to funders appear very tough (probably impossible) to fulfill. But that doesn't make it a good idea to throw things out of the roadmap, if now is the sensible time to think about them and implement them.
  • User Interface: The project has already shown it's possible to present Wikitext content and editable Wikibase content together on the same page, as shown in the previous prototype page to this current one, featuring the lighthouse picture. Editing such Wikibase content is mature technology -- Wikidata has been live for five years now. All that is required is to create a page viewer that can slap the Wikibase editing area as a expandable/collapsible area in the middle of a category page, and then make that page viewer available either as an alternative skin or as an opt-in beta feature. It doesn't have to be beautiful or cute, it just has to be usable. Most information going into CommonsData category pages would be going in through QuickStatements or similar bulk or bot tools; most information coming out of the pages would be coming out in the form of query results from WDQS, or templates in the category wiki sections. The UI just needs to make it possible for those that want to to be able to manually check and edit the Wikibase content. But most users of the page will be able to do all normal business with the page, just as now, without ever being aware of it, and without presentation of the Wikibase section ever being enabled.
  • API. Yes, this does need some consideration, to make sure that the CommonsData wikibase can support category-page items tied directly to category pages, as well as media items tied directly to media pages. The data structure needs to be able to accommodate that, and calls need to be specified for how it is accessed. There may also be some wrinkles, such as: if a category page happens to be linked to both a local CommonsData item and a Wikidata item, how should templates specify which one should be preferred to access a property statement from. I suspect most of this will turn out to be minor tweaks of minor details, because for CommonsData category pages almost all of this should turn out to be a fairly straightforward implementation of a wikibase installation, with almost all of the API lifting already done in the shape of the exisiting wikibase specs. But making sure that the APIs have the flexibility to support CommonsData pages for categories is absolutely something that ought to be done now, because as a rule it's easy enough to do that thinking about an API before it goes into full volume production use, but a nightmare to adapt an API when it's been deployed into live high-volume mission-critical use. My worry would be that unless at least some thinking gets put in now to make sure the API will be reasonably easily able to support CommonsData category pages then "Not now" will de facto become "Not ever", and that is not acceptable.
  • The other point on this is that investing time now to support CommonsData category pages may well save time down the line (as suggested above), by decoupling the roll-out of Multi-Content revisions, Federation, CommonsData QuickStatements, and use of CommonsData data in WDQS from dependence on the file pages, in particular the significant challenges of the file page UI and the ontology issues of what statements we want to see on them. It won't hurt or hinder work in these areas, but it means that they won't be blockers either -- decoupling the two means that it should be possible to test the technologies above at scale in a live production environment earlier, and uncover and address unexpected issues sooner, than would be possible if all that had to wait for finalisation of all the issues around file pages to have to be resolved first. (A couple of asides. 1. I note that implementation and testing of WDQS seemingly doesn't appear to currently feature on the roadmap at all. It should -- it's vital. 2. Even the simplest thing that is proposed as the pilot property for media -- a multilingual caption -- is still has issues to consider: for example, should such captions be allowed to contain wikilinks, or formatting (eg italicisation, math markup) ? For simplicity and portability, I'm guessing probably not. But it also means they're likely to be less contextualised and end-user useful than descriptions we can currently show.) CommonsData category pages don't have these ontology issues to be resolved, and their UI doesn't need to be as polished; so it should be possible to get them up and running earlier, and get working on any issues that turn up with the technology sooner, than if we are blocked to have to wait until augmented file pages are ready to roll out.
  • CommonsData would scare Commons users (?). This seems rather a desperate argument, and also seems to misunderstand what is being suggested. Categories would not be "converted" to wikibase. Categories would continue exactly as they are at the moment, with exactly the same look and exactly the same workflow. But they would gain an attached CommonsData page, visible to those who chose to make it visible, where information about the category can be recorded -- information with all the advantages of wikibase: easy addition, using tools like QuickStatements, and easy queryability, using WDQS. Having an attached data page makes so many things so much easier and so much more accessible than eg having to rely on template parameters embedded in the wikitext of the main page. But the impact on ordinary category use for somebody that didn't have the data-viewer enabled would be nil. Such information might be e.g. a machine-description of the contents that the category is for; or an internationalisation of the name of the category, that a user-widget might e.g. use to show as a localised subtitle below the category name. Currently we have all sorts of information templates that sit on the top of categories (categories which do not all necessarily have links to wikidata) -- eg for coordinates, book numbers, heritage numbers, etc. A data page is a much better place for this kind of information to be (if the maintainers of the template are happy to put it there) -- it makes it much easier to access and review at scale, eg to identify what's there and what's missing, or what seems plausible and what seems dubious, and eg to compare against external resources. Perhaps the most important thing about CommonsData for categories is that it would be a recognition from the Structured Data project that category pages are seen as front-line fully first-class pages on Commons (putting to rest dark suspicions that have been voiced by a number of Commons editors), and a vote of confidence in their future. Making it easy to store data associated with a category page should open up all sorts of possibilities for templates and gadgets to make them a richer experience. If we have the possibility of enabling that now with a comparatively simple step, we should make sure to do so.
  • Russian artists may not be the best example of intersection category to have in mind, though it does show how contents can be machine-described using existing properties and items. Instead, consider that we have huge numbers of media-rich sub-categories, where only the parent category qualifies for a Wikidata item. I am thinking of categories like "Interior of Church X" or "Church X (stained glass)" -- see eg all the categories listed at Category:Stained glass windows in Hampshire or Category:Interiors of churches in Essex -- or the perennial "Topic Y in art" in the huge tree of categories under Category:Art by subject -- or any number of other families of examples where it is an intersection sub-category that contains most of the media.
By identifying families of categories of these kinds, it should be possible to machine-add machine-descriptions for such categories at a rate of hundreds or thousands at a time. Then, when we come to adding topic-tags for the structured data project, that should make it possible to directly machine-add corresponding topic tags (with their appropriate Wikidata identifiers) at a rate of tens of hundreds or tens of thousands at a time. Yes, GLAMs have shown that "what can you see in this picture" tagging games can generate a lot of tags. But experience with big collections such as Art UK or the British Library "mechanical curator" set show they do have their limitations, particularly when there are a lot of files to cover (and we have a lot of files). Also, it's hard to see just a tagging game identify the particular church that eg the images in Category:St Peter and Paul's church, Thruxton, Hampshire (stained glass) come from. So (IMO) it's critical to extract what we can from the data we have, and the more automatically or machine-assistedly we can do it the better.
Having CommonsData pages gives us somewhere we can start systematically putting these descriptions, letting us work together efficiently as a team, because we can see what anybody else has done; and use eg WDQS to identify further families of categories containing a lot of media, as yet without descriptions or linked Wikidata items. So it means that those that want to can get on with this as soon as those CommonsData pages become available, and see how much of the ground we can get covered by the time the CommonsData pages for files become available and it becomes possible to start writing topic-tags to the CommonsData file pages. (At which point the CommonsData category pages will also be a useful place to be able to record when the category has most recently been swept, and its files appropriately topic-tagged. Being able to easily record, and then to retrieve at scale with WDQS, this kind of auxiliary data is the kind of thing that attached wikibase data pages will really facilitate.) It's also a useful thing to do, to identify systematically and early as wide a range as possible of the different relationships that intersection categories currently combine, to identify the range of combinations of properties that the structured data system will need to be able to represent and access, if it is to be able to match what we can currently do.
Could we just use some kind of game tool for the category-processing above? -- eg randomly select a category with media and without a Wikidata item, get the user to identify the proper coding in terms of properties recognised by the topic-search system and appropriate Wikidata Q-numbers, getting them to confirm, Cat-a-lot style, which media in the category the tagging was appropriate for, then mark the category as 'done' in a private database belonging to the tool? Perhaps -- although I still believe it would be nice to try automate as much of that as possible.
But I think something very like a "category view" is likely to survive for a very long time, (i) to allow users to discover, in a browse-through way "what other images exist, that have some particular thing(s) in common with this"; (ii) to act as a landing page, from corresponding Wikipedia pages; (iii) to give a space where groups of images that have some thing(s) in common to be annotated with more information about the thing they have in common; (iv) to deliver all of the above in a hand-editable, hand-customisable way; including grouping the files to a manageable number, or ordering them in particular ways. I have no doubt that we will be able to improve on what we have at the moment (eg with gadgets that use some of the structured data to adjust category views, eg sorting by date created, or date depicted); and also that some of the above may be achieved by "virtual views" generated on-the-fly by the topic-search/refine application.
But I suspect that the existing categories with their hand-crafted content will continue to persist in parallel with that for a very long time to come; so I think the point remains, that it would be an utterly ill-conceived short-sighted false economy, if the opportunity was not taken now to safeguard the ability to have CommonsData pages associated with categories, just in order to save a couple of weeks of developer time. Now is the time that this will be decided, and I think it is something the Commons community should insist on. Jheald (talk) 18:04, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
(Discussion continuing by email). Jheald (talk) 18:32, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Soldier rooms

Have we got any category for this? There are some for soldiers and barracks, but the living rooms are rarely shown.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:49, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

@Smiley.toerist: It looks to me like an army barracks with a rifle rack.   — Jeff G. ツ 13:35, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Nothing for barracks interiors it seems. It would be something like Category:Dormitory rooms for Dormitories. --ghouston (talk) 22:42, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Commons App for iOS

The Commons App for iOS is not working on iOS11. Is there any plan to fix it? I think it is a 64-bit issue.--agr (talk) 17:52, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

According to Commons:Mobile_app the iOS app was removed from the store in June 2016. Currently it is not under active development. Ruslik (talk) 19:51, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Nderitu Murrithi

Can anyone share information about the above named person. Also known as Ndeshmo... Which sports club does he play for...and how old is he...which school does he attend if any..DOB...etc — Preceding unsigned comment was added by 41.89.224.2 (talk) 18:26, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

November 10

Help needed with mapping categories to Wikipedia articles

Lately I was working on cleaning some of the backlog of issues reported at d:Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P373. Those are issues with mapping between Commons categories and Wikipedia articles, like links to non-existing categories or links to multiple categories. Those links are critical for people coming from Wikipedias to land in correct categories. The links should be only between "exact" matches. I would appreciate is more people familiar with Commons category system could help, as correcting the issues often involve creating new categories or chasing down categories that were moved without redirects. If we could, bring down the backlog than it would be easier to correct new problems as they pop-up. --Jarekt (talk) 19:07, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

When WSC is over, I might help.--Alexmar983 (talk) 11:13, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

November 04

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum collection now online

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum recently completed a huge digitization project and now has 92% of the museum's collection available online (over 200,000 objects). For any objects with expired copyrights, they let you download the high-resolution image directly from their website (with no fees). Although the majority of the collection is still under copyright, there are thousands of high-quality images there that are public domain and available to transfer to Commons. Anyone interested in working on this? Kaldari (talk) 01:56, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes. --Fæ (talk) 14:58, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
@Fæ: Yay! Unfortunately, I haven't figured out any way to filter their collection by copyright status or year created, but there is https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/periods/. They have also published all of their metadata on GitHub under a CC0 license (with documentation even), which is pretty awesome! Kaldari (talk) 06:51, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
It's doable, perhaps just not being over reliant on their options. Objects seem to be either NCK or mention fair use. It's the type of collection that I would rather do a test set and take an agile approach. I suspect that copyright filtering will reduce the total significantly. Anyway, thankfully there is an API, so I'll investigate that to enable a smarter batch upload, rather than rely on scraping. By the way, their documentation shows lots of humour, that may or may not help considering I'm in the more reserved British headspace.
... The API is working nicely, so getting information like the largest image size is not an issue and dates appear in various ways which means some metadata mapping effort. Before running an upload I probably need to spend a bit of time working out some fallbacks on the data, probably do a little state machine to choose the best license even though has_no_known_copyright will be the default, and decide if there's mileage in forcing default Commons categories based on collection or donor. I'll make a project page when ready to lay out these choices. A few days time I'd guess. --Fæ (talk) 14:20, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Project page at User:Fæ/Project list/Cooper-Hewitt. Whitelisting requested on Phabricator. --Fæ (talk) 21:54, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Bundesarchiv - Bildarchiv

In a certain case I wrote to the above mentioned German authority and received this friendly, but rather worrying answer:

Sehr geehrter Herr Nodeland,

vielen Dank für Ihr Schreiben und Ihr Interesse an Bildern des Bundesarchivs.

Aufgrund des zahllosen Missbrauchs, der Verstoesse gegen die Bestimmungen der Lizenz Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 und insbesondere gegen das Urheberrechtsgesetz (§ 13 Nennung des Urhebers - zur Urhebernennung hat sich das Bundesarchiv vertraglich gegenüber den Urhebern verpflichtet) musste das Bundesarchiv die Kooperation mit Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. leider einstellen. Dies bedeutet, dass das Bundesarchiv keine weiteren Fotos fuer Wikimedia Commons zur Verfuegung stellt, auch nicht FOtos Heinz Trettner. Aus gegebenem Anlass muss ich Sie leider darauf hinweisen, dass das eigenmaechtige Hochladen von Bildern des Bundesarchivs durch Dritte und das Einstellen auf Wikimedia Commons nicht zulaessig ist! Diese Bilder werden auf Veranlassung des Bundesarchivs geloescht.

Ich bedaure Ihnen keine andere Mitteilung machen zu koennen.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen, i.A.

Dr. Oliver Sander

Does anywone know about this? --Trygve W Nodeland (talk) 14:59, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't know anything about it but one guess is maybe they dislike their watermark being cropped off the image(s). You can see a example of the watermark in this images revision history. - Offnfopt(talk) 15:11, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
(Edit conflict) Or third parties are sourcing the images from commons and not following the licensing terms (which is out of our control), so they figure they would rather not upload the images in the first place. The information provided is vague so you might try talking to your contact. - Offnfopt(talk) 15:28, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
They just don't want to lose control over the useage of their stuff. Alexpl (talk) 15:20, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
In the past I informally heard that they were unhappy that reusers were downloading images from Wikimedia Commons and then attributing them with something inappropriate like "Wikipedia", and I got the impression that they felt that as the host of the contributed images Wikimedia Commons should be doing more active policing and educating of reusers about their license obligations (and if we didn't have the resources to do that, then we shouldn't be hosting them). —RP88 (talk) 18:59, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

November 11

Danube river

The name of the river on media file for 17 November 2017 is Danube --Sirozha.ru (talk) 04:33, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

If you want to get a fix of write protected stuff like this you should leave a notice on Commons:Administrators' noticeboard. This time done by me, and I also added more information where to find the typo. — Speravir – 06:02, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: — Speravir – 06:02, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

UploadWizard can overwrite existing files uploaded in the same session before clicking "Upload more files"

I've had this bug before when using UploadWizard, but I couldn't reproduce it, so I left it there. I've just come across the same bug again, so here are the steps to reproduce it. 1) Upload an image and give it a file name "somename1.jpg" 2) When populating categories, enter a category that doesn't exist 3) Publish the page ignoring the warning pop-up by clicking OK 4) Click on "Upload more files" 5) Upload a different image 6) Give it (accidentally) the same name "somename1.jpg" Right there is the bug! UploadWizard does not recognize this file name as a duplicate. When you proceed to publish it, instead of reporting the error, the process continues and the second image overwrites the first image on the previously published page. --My-wiki-photos (talk) 00:33, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

@My-wiki-photos: If the problem is reproducible, it would be nice if somebody who has this issue could send the software bug to the 'Phabricator' bug tracker by following the instructions How to report a bug. This is to make developers of the software aware of the issue. If you have done so, please paste the number of the bug report (or the link) here, so others can also inform themselves about the bug's status. Thanks in advance! --Malyacko (talk) 09:21, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
@Malyacko: I've reproduced the bug using the steps described above, the result of which is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Upload-Wizard-Bug-Test_2017-11-07.jpg. I've also created a Phabricator task.
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T179967
Thanks! --My-wiki-photos (talk) 18:40, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

In a nutshell, the bug occurs during one upload session of multiple files with duplicate file names/titles. To replicate the bug follow these steps: 1) Upload an image 2) Give it a file name/title "somename1.jpg" 3) Publish the page 4) Click on "Upload more files" 5) Upload a different image 6) Give it (accidentally) the same file name/title "somename1.jpg" 7) Publish the page. Due to the bug, the second image overwrites the first image on the first published page. The second page is never published. --My-wiki-photos (talk) 21:02, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Parameter for audio descriptions on the Artwork template

Hi all. In the context of an education program I am currently running, students are audio describing paintings from a Brazilian museum, Museu Paulista. It'd be nice if there was a parameter for audio descriptions on the Artwork template. What do you think? --Joalpe (talk) 01:39, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

{{Artwork}} is protected. So, you need to propose an edit on Template_talk:Artwork using {{Edit request}} after testing it in the sandbox. Ruslik (talk) 20:22, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Upside down ?

Upside down?

Hi. I've got a problem with the image File:Bodleian Libraries, A map of the County of Oxford.jpg (right). The image on its image description page, and in the thumbnail to the right, appears to be the right way up. (i.e. with compass rose at the top left, and oval inscription in the top middle).

But the thumbnail in a category, eg Category:Old maps of Oxford, and in the upload record on the page, appears to be the wrong way up; as does the image in Media Viewer, and at original resolution (675 x 992 px) -- though lower resolutions show it correctly orientated.

Can anyone help ?

It seems the image has been messed around so much, it doesn't know which way is up anymore. 15:45, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Now seems to be right at full resolution and in MediaViewer; but the smallest-sized thumbnail, used eg in the table of uploads and in categories is still inverted. Perhaps this is some cacheing issue that will eventually resolve itself, though usually these thumbnails seem to update pretty much immediately. Jheald (talk) 18:28, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
I've checked it out, and all the versions are now correctly oriented. If you don't see it that way, then your browser cache is to blame, and you need to clear it. --My-wiki-photos (talk) 23:28, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Changes to the global ban policy

Hello. Some changes to the community global ban policy have been proposed. Your comments are welcome at m:Requests for comment/Improvement of global ban policy. Please translate this message to your language, if needed. Cordially. Matiia (Matiia) 00:34, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Save the fish

Every week I see a handful of what appear to be 100+ year old drawings of fish, uploaded several years ago, going up for deletion due to "no source". Does anyone have a clue which book or project these were harvested from?

  • Cetorhinus maximus 1887
    Cetorhinus maximus 1887
  • Etmopterus granulosus
    Etmopterus granulosus
  • Echinorhinus brucus jaw
    Echinorhinus brucus jaw
  • Pseudopentaceros richardsoni
    Pseudopentaceros richardsoni
  • Mustelus mustelus1
    Mustelus mustelus1
  • Mola mola 1887 - Undeleted
    Mola mola 1887 - Undeleted

If a pattern can be demonstrated, such as glitches when importing from archive.org, then many past deletions may be able to be restored. @Citron: --Fæ (talk) 16:30, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

The first image looks like it's from here, so EB images? Nthep (talk) 16:50, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
Me thinks, the fault lays with the uploader User:Citron not following the golden rule of giving the original source. Suggest we put this back into his/her court -for further clarification. Comments? P.g.champion (talk) 21:25, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
We did save the first fish, so that's a good outcome. Citron has not been active recently.
It's sad to loose etchings like File:Mola mola 1887.jpg, so if an admin wants to review past deletions, Citron's talk page has a useful list of past notices. --Fæ (talk) 22:56, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
Fæ based on google cache looks like this (alt) is the same image as that deleted one (File:Mola mola 1887.jpg). I didn't get to see it before deletion so having to guess based on cache. - Offnfopt(talk) 02:43, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
I've restored Mola mola image with your source. I'll look at some of his other deleted material. — Huntster (t @ c) 22:03, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
Fæ I've corrected the sources for the images you listed. - Offnfopt(talk) 03:59, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
Excellent work, thank you. :-) --Fæ (talk) 21:18, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
Good work on rescuing these images. I'd just like to point out that many of the "anonymous" historic illustrations are actually labelled in the source, and/or the artist can be identified with a little bit of detective work: e.g. the artist(s) may be named in the acknowledgements sections or prefaces. The source of File:Mola mola 1887.jpg for instance is signed "F.W.F", which is likely Frederick William Frohawk. A handy place to find illustrators (especially of works found in many government or mass published works that used "stock" images) is the Database of Scientific Illustrators (1450-1950). -Animalparty (talk) 01:44, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Also, it's important to note that the artist of scientific illustrations was often not the author of the publication: me not having taken Latin, I only recently learned that "del et lith" (as seen at the bottom left here) means "drawn and printed (by)" Thus, File:Natural history of Victoria (Plate 144) (6007971437).jpg was actually created by A. Bartholomew (likely Arthur Bartholomew), under the direction of Professor McCoy. -Animalparty (talk) 02:00, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

November 12

Template:PeopleYearbyCountry

I am using (and making) this template for related categories, but for some countries seems it's not fixed, like Category:People of Afghanistan in 2017 , the list of Asian countries don't show below the template. what is wrong?--Rafic.Mufid (talk) 07:40, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Should these photos be in this category?

File:Titan I engine.jpg, File:Titan I close up.JPG, and File:Titan I Cordele, GA.jpg were recently added to Category:Monuments and memorials of the Confederate States of America in Georgia (U.S. state). Is this appropriate? Bubba73 (talk) 01:05, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

I would say no; it was likely a mistake. I see User:Magnolia677 placed the photos into that category using Hotcat: sometimes I've inadvertently selected incorrect images when moving or adding large groups of files to categories. -Animalparty (talk) 01:21, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Not a mistake. File:Titan I Cordele, GA.jpg is in use at W:List of Confederate monuments and memorials. The appropriateness of adding the photo to that Wikipedia article was discussed on that article's talk page. It's odd that Bubba73 didn't mention this, as they participated in that discussion. The other photos are of the same monument. Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 02:32, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

3D model support coming soon to Commons

Animation of rotating a 3D model

Hello! Just a quick note to let you all know that support for 3D models is coming to Commons! The plan is to have the feature enabled by the end of November. There are a few technical items left to address. The feature will support the STL file format, one of the most common file formats for 3D models. You can see an example of how a 3D model will appear on the test wiki.

This feature has been discussed in the community for a long time. Most recently the feature was #11 on the 2015 Community Tech Wishlist and was previously discussed in April as development progressed. There will be a blog post on the Wikimedia Blog once the feature is enabled.

You can read more about the technical details of the feature and the help documentation on MediaWiki.org.

Thank you. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

Amazing, there are 10,000s of open license 3d models available online that will really improve Wikimedia projects. John Cummings (talk) 22:42, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
This sounds great, but I feel like that number definitely requires a license checking bot. Elisfkc (talk) 19:43, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. I have discussed this feature on the IRC channel a few times, and I'm really looking forward to it. Tom-L (talk) 22:20, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

November 08

Question about deleting selfies

Hello,

I was wondering if selfies uploaded to Commons should be nominated for deletion. Does anyone know?

Sincerely, NeoMeesje (talk) 22:35, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

That depends whether they are in scope. If a notable person, of which we have a Wikipedia article, sends us a selfie to illustrate the article, that could be great. Also active contributors to Wikimedia/Wikipedia are generally allowed to upload a small number of personal pictures. Jcb (talk) 22:46, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
The person on a selfie may be in 30 years important, we don't knew this. Why delete? If the license is correct, it's in scope. --Ralf Roleček 23:33, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
That's an excessively generous interpretation of "realistically useful". There are about 7,000,000,000 people in the world, and about 5,000,000 articles on English Wikipedia. Thus (with a rather large margin of error) about one person in 1,000 is interesting enough that we might care about their photo. A 1 in 1000 chance of being useful is not "realistically useful", and for that 0.1% there's always COM:UNDEL. --bjh21 (talk) 23:59, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
After a thorough reading of COM:SCOPE I found nothing about saving photos for potential hypothetical use in 30 years. Active contributors can upload a small amount of person photos ideally for use on their user page. Full Stop. We are not a Social Media site. -- Sixflashphoto (talk) 02:44, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
If somebody is keen to keep a particular selfie, they may be able to add it to a category like "men wearing brown shirts and green baseball caps backwards". Perhaps that would put it in scope. Scope bothers me a bit, because if random selfies are not in scope, then are photos of random buildings, aircraft or other species of animals also out of scope? Most buildings aren't notable, most species of large animals are already well covered in Commons, and one 747 looks much like another. --ghouston (talk) 10:11, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Commons is the base of free media, not the base of wikipedia. There are more projects than wikipedia in the world of wikimedia and also the files here are for all projects online and offline. The interpretation of com:scope is outdated. --Ralf Roleček 10:54, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Further to the above, we need to be able to illustrate articles like en:Selfie. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:50, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

If a photo of someone taking a selfie is necessary for illustrating an article or some other reasonable rational outside Wikipedia, we have plenty of photos of people taking selfies for those reasons that are here. We shouldn't delete every picture of a person who isn't "notable", active contributors should have the right to upload a small number of pictures of themselves, but we shouldn't become a depository for selfies of yourself, or vacation photos or the like. If you need a place to put them online that's what instagram is for. IMO there is no reason to change a policy that doesn't seem to be hurting or bothering anyone other than the uploader. -- Sixflashphoto (talk) 20:59, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
@ghouston: Whether a category of "men wearing brown shirts and green baseball caps backwards" will save your selfie depends on whether such a category is educationally useful. If it's the uniform of a political movement, or common dress in a particular region, then maybe it will (until we have enough pictures in that category). I don't think the scope applies any differently to buildings, aircraft, or animals: we don't need a photo of every house, or every horse, or every airliner in the world, any more than we need a photo of every person. We do need enough to show all the significant variations, though. --bjh21 (talk) 22:31, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

November 13

Works of this author will enter public domain on X date template

Hi. I know that we have NoUploads template and categories of files that should be undeleted when the work will be in the public domain. However, I think that it would be useful to create a template which would say something likeː "This author died in X year. His/her (or their) works will enter public domain in X year" and add the template to authors which have their own categories. The URAA also should be mentioned where applicable, such as "This author died in 1945 and his works are in the public domain in X (his home country) but please do not upload his works to Commons unless 95 years has passed since the work publication date because of the URAA". I'm not sure if it's possible though. Any thoughts?--Дима Г (talk) 08:01, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-46

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

  • The diff you see when you compare two different versions of a page has changed on MediaWiki.org and the test wiki. This is to make it easier to find a text change in a moved paragraph. It will hopefully soon come to more wikis. You can report bugs in Phabricator. [6]
  • A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [7]
  • Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences. [8]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:19, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

OTRS permissions

Can somebody, please, at last react on Commons:OTRS/Noticeboard#Check_for_letters.2C_please? No one pays attention there, and files get deleted failing to receive an approval from OTRS volunteer for already 3 months. --TohaomgTohaomg (talk) 22:29, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

November 14

Move an image back to English Wikipedia?

This section was archived on a request by: --Offnfopt(talk) 17:28, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

File:Hijiri88's postcard from Wikimedia Taiwan.jpg was uploaded by me for the sole purpose of transclusion on my English Wikipedia user page, and I don't why it was transferred to Commons. I am not comfortable with my username appearing in a Commons file name, and if outright deletion from Commons is not an option, I would like (a) an explanation why, and (b) the file name to be changed. Hijiri88 (talk) 09:14, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

By the way, please don't tell me that this is the wrong place for my request. I am already 90% certain of that being the case.
Thing is, I should not have to familiarize myself with the norms for Commons just because I engaged in activity on a separate Wikimedia project and someone else, without my consent, dragged me here. I'm not a regular Commons contributor and have no immediate intention of becoming one, so trying to independently familiarize myself with Commons processes rather than simply asking at the Village Pump (what this is) would be pointless.
Hijiri88 (talk) 09:23, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Concerning why it was transferred you can asked @Fastily: who transferred it. Concerning deletion, I do not see any problem, but I would just wait for some time (say a day) to see whether there are any motivated objections.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:16, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Correcting ping: @Fastily: --Ymblanter (talk) 10:17, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Every free file should be on Commons, not on some local Wikipedia, that's why it was transferred, just like many other files. This probably covers your concerns. Multichill (talk) 14:48, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
@Multichill: It's not a free file. I don't know if you know how to retrieve the file's original en.wiki history (I don't), but if I recall correctly: I wanted to use it on my en.wiki user page and the original upload said I wasn't sure about licensing but that I wanted to authorise myself to use it on my userpage. I was then coerced by a bot to give it a "proper licensing template", and in utter confusion I picked the first one I could find. But the image actually contained a tiny amount of "non-free content" that I was then asked to remove by another user who also changed the template by themselves, and when the image was ported over to Commons it was done so carelessly that the Commons version was the one that included the non-free content that I had been asked to remove, and this led to my user page also transcluding that version that I had already painstakingly edited. Had I known any of this would happen I would have likely been much more careful about the template I used (or rather indirectly authorised another user to use).
Heck, I probably never would have uploaded the image in the first place if I know uploading images of my personal property and en.wiki activity for use in my userpage was such a pain.
I apologize if I'm getting any of this wrong, but it was ten months ago and apparently the only still-live record of the file's early en.wiki history is on my user talk page.
At this point, I'd really rather just have the image deleted off both Commons and en.wiki and this whole incident just forgotten.
Hijiri88 (talk) 23:10, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Repinging User:Ronhjones. Hijiri88 (talk) 23:13, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Here is the original entry when first uploaded

== Summary ==

{{Information
|Description = A photo of the address side of a Taiwanese postcard.
The postcard was received by me ([[User:Hijiri88]]) on January 11, 2017, for contributions to [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Asian Month|Wikipedia Asian Month 2016]]. Not sure if it was for French or English Wikipedia, but still waiting on the the other one either way (another similar photo will be uploaded then).
I am not legitimately sure of the copyright status of the words written on the card, but it's probably fair use to put this photo on my user page either way.
(My personal information is blanked out, except for the first line of my address that I already revealed on-wiki [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Hijiri88&diff=676672931&oldid=676672756 here].)
|Source = I took the photo
|Author = Wikimedia Taiwan (portions edited out with sub-text by User:Hijiri88)
|Permission = '''Evidence:''' Will be provided on request.
}}

;Other information:
The following was entered into the boxes for "non-free" images because I was being super-careful but was not aware that filling in "User:Hijiri88" in the article-for-intended-use box would prevent me from uploading.

Wikimedia Taiwan (portions edited out by User:Hijiri88)

The photo is mine, but it contains text that was written to me by someone else. Not sure if that means it's copyrighted.

This will be used in my (Hijiri88's) user space as an illustration of contributions to Wikipedia Asian Month.

Umm... it is text alone. The non-text portion (the fact that it is a photograph) is mine.

I don't know. This almost certainly is not a non-free work. I only clicked that option to play it safe.

The only conceivable owner, if not me, is Wikimedia itself. I just don't know the copyright status of the non-public text included therein ("Hi, [...] 亞洲維基人愛你！ Wikiedia Asian Loves you! [...] We appreciate your contribution in Wikimedia(sic) Asian Month in 2016.").

(But if someone thinks the postage stamp is not covered, that too can be blanked out.)

I only intend to use it on [[User:Hijiri88]] and possibly [[User:Hijiri88/Articles I created or significantly contributed to]], but nowhere outside my own user space.

== Licensing ==

I think...?
{{Category ordered by date|Files licensed by third parties|2017|01|11}}

ImageTaggingBot tagged it as no license, it got changed to PD with the stamp blocked out, and then as a free file it got moved to commons. Without the stamp, it's just text and simple shapes, so PD-textlogo. The image has now been set to non-index, so it won't appear on any search engines. This is better than if it had just been left on en-wiki - google would index it just the same as commons. There is no advantage for the user just to have it on en-wiki. Ronhjones  (Talk) 00:40, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. Yes, I vaguely remember writing that.
It seems I'm not allowed have an image on my English Wikipedia user page unless I release it into the public domain and have it transferred to Commons? If that's the case, I'd rather just not have the image on my user page, so I've now removed it. It's good that the image no longer appears on search engines, but the file name still appears in the searches for the categories in which it is included.
I'd also still like it deleted. Now that it's no longer in use on any Wikimedia project I can't imagine that being a problem.
Hijiri88 (talk) 02:14, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
@Hijiri88: Addressing your first concern, that is correct. You can only have images on your userpage that are free for use elsewhere. Regarding the second concern, you can have it on English Wikipedia. You just have to tag the page with {{KeepLocal}}, which I have now done for you as a courtesy.[10] That said, there is literally no reason to do that. Regarding the third request, you can start a deletion request, and we will consider whether or not to delete as a courtesy. We don't have to, since you released the image under a free license. Magog the Ogre (talk) (contribs) 02:27, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
@Rohnjones: @Magog the Ogre: I have a reasonable-enough response to There is no advantage for the user just to have it on en-wiki. and That said, there is literally no reason to do that., and have emailed both of you. I don't want to send any more emails, so I would appreciate that point not being made by any more people (the only reason I emailed Magog was that their comment was posted while I was drafting the email to Rohnjones). Hijiri88 (talk) 03:05, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Looks like everything was deleted. Multichill (talk) 17:25, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Czech Republic, Czechia or Czechoslovakia ???

Hello.

I have a problem with those 3 cats... What's the diffrence?

In category:Musicians from Czechia we have category:Classical musicians from the Czech Republic or elsewhere category:Musicians from Czechoslovakia...

May we redirect or leave like that?

Thanks lol LW² \m/ (Lie ² me...) 04:40, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Redirect to Czech Republic, but some items may correctly go to Slovakia. --Fæ (talk) 04:53, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
Czechia and Czech Republic are interchangeable, and we really should settle on one or the other. But it seems presumptuous to say that (for example) that a musician whose entire career was in the former country of Czechoslovakia is a "musician of the Czech Republic", especially if you don't have the specific knowledge to sort out whether that person is Czech vs. Slovak. - Jmabel ! talk 07:51, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
So it should stay like this? I don't remember wich kind of musician's cat but I saw a redirect from Czech Rep. to Czechia so each time I had to creatae a cat I created it as "...from Czechia" but without knowing really if people was from one or the other... Generally, I use the country I find on Wikis or Internet.
I hope it's not too bad like this. Anyway I keep the mother cat's name when its exists because mainly I create only female/male cats.
If we have to choose, Czechia is shorter and easier to write, for me.
Thanks to all. lol LW² \m/ (Lie ² me...) 22:59, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
FYI, there is a related CfD at Commons:Categories for discussion/2016/12/Category:History of Czechia. The decision should be made based on what is standard English usage, not on what is shorter. --Auntof6 (talk) 01:16, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

Baidu as a source

Does anyone know Baidu well enough to know if we can trust images from there as being compatibly licensed for here? e.g. File:5646521s21d651s.jpg WereSpielChequers (talk) 11:54, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

It's as good as saying "source: Google". Marked example as no source. --Fæ (talk) 12:01, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Certainly not. Deleted. Yann (talk) 15:46, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Wikitribune has launched recently. The policy on copyright is at https://www.wikitribune.com/project/copyright/. It would seem sensible to upload all photographs meeting COM:L to Commons, perhaps automatically.

It's not clear to me how to check whether an image is being hosted on Wikitribune or where the license statement is. Could someone confirm what license this promotional photograph of Jimmy Wales is, and where it is hosted on Wikitribune? https://medium.com/wikitribune/hello-world-this-is-wikitribune-4b46ef829a9a

Thanks --Fæ (talk) 13:46, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

There are so many things wrong with that page on copyright. Rather garbled language wrt copyright and licences and confusion over whether text is CC BY or CC BY-SA, which is a huge difference. Looking throughout the site, I see images with no attribution (especially images that are thumbnail links to articles), images with incomplete attribution (doesn't say or link to where they got it, which is required by most CC licences), an image from Reuters which presumably had to be paid for and won't be free, and an image that claims the licence holder is the subject of the photo, which is often a dubious claim. They will be able to use certain non-free photos under a "fair use" claim, but which won't be permitted on Commons.
Right now, I'd say we shouldn't touch their photos with a barge pole, and wait till they get their act together. They could, for example, get sued by Reuters for using a very much all-rights-reserved photo, and Reuters then decided to go after a Commons user who uploaded the image here under the assumption "Images are generally CC-BY-SA 4.0" was accurate or useful. -- Colin (talk) 15:48, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Wikitribune is still work in progress. It requires experienced editors with knowledge of copyright (and journalism) to knock it into shape. Won't happen over-night. Just hang in there until Wikitribune has developed comprehensive policies. Then we can appear all knowing by suggesting you RTFM - which we haven't formulated much beyond the basics yet. Still, feel free to put your paddle into the cauldron and stir the pot. P.g.champion (talk) 19:17, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Well before one starts publishing pictures, I think there need to be a picture editor who knows a thing or two about copyright and licensing. I'm sceptical a newspaper or current-affairs journal can survive without taking agency photos. We want pictures with our news, and we want today's pictures. It becomes very tired very quickly if the only photos you can get e.g., of Theresa May is the official Downing St photo. Unless Wikitribune wants to hire its own photographers, it won't be a source of images for Commons. -- Colin (talk) 13:13, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
There was a time when newspapers didn't have the printing technology to publish images and they survived. Publications like the Times, once just printed factual content an allowed the reader to make his own mind up. Hopefully, we can get back to those halcyon days -for those that want to know the news and not read yet more chernalisum </rant> . P.g.champion (talk) 13:52, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
I don't think the presence of images has anything to do with churnalism, or of biased proprietors, sloppy journalists, fake news, etc. While early newspapers were indeed rather primitive, they've been illustrated since before photographs were invented. Indeed, until half-toning was invented, an engraver would make a copy of a photograph in order for it to be mass printed, such was the demand for illustrations. Look at any serious newspaper and you will struggle to find any article that is not illustrated with a photograph or artwork of some kind. The idea that one could launch an international news publication without access to current photojournalism is rather ridiculous imo. -- Colin (talk) 15:24, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey 2017

Hey everyone,

The Community Wishlist Survey is the process when the Wikimedia communities decide what the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team should work on over the next year.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can post technical proposals from now until November 20. The communities will vote on the proposals between November 28 and December 12. You can read more on the 2017 wishlist survey page. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 20:49, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

  • Tuválkin If you do not like the tools Community Tech team is focusing on than you should propose your own ideas at 2017 wishlist survey page or vote on ideas you like. If you do not vote or your opinion is in minority than you should not be sarcastic about what others decided the priorities should be. In my book some of the things created by tech team is truly awesome: quarry, Wikidata Query servise, cross-project notifications, Wikidata, Lua, Kartographer Map support, etc. come to mind. --Jarekt (talk) 14:50, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
  • Bitter sarcasm is the penultimate consolation of the defeated (the ultimate being to be able «I told you so» while scavenging the ruins of a once great civilization). In general, the WMF and a shockingly large group of enablers has never been about empowering «experienced Wikimedia editors», quite the opposite — not as a conspiracy, even, but out in the open. There is an obvious trend to dumb down everything the hoipolloi is allowed to do (down to “gamification” of Wikipedia editing!!) while driving a wedge between said hoipolloi and experienced editors. You mentioned LUA and Wikidata as a good thing: Well, even if/when they work flawlessly, in practice they mean that things that were previously done in wikitext now need a passable familiarity with JSON to be understood, let alone influenced. Wikitext presents a smooth learning curve, from merely entering text up to creating (and mantaining and improving) “esoteric” templates. Replacing wikitext is the current trend (as clearly stated; not a conspiracy) and that transforms the said sweet smooth curve into an unsurmountable learning cliff — aiding (along with other trends elsewhere) to halt the sociological movement that started off in the 1980s with the popularization of computing, a movement of which Wikimedia projects are one of the most impressive and positive results. Quarry is a great tool, sure, but most of the great tools that we use in Commons were not created by any WMF outfit, but by individual users: Created without any support from the WMF and often having to picked up in pieces after some WMF-sponsored change affects those tools. WMF’s forays into introducing tech novelties (under the name Community Tech or not) include widely dispised contraptions such as MediaViewer, Flow, the typographic update, VisualEditor, Wikidata as a whole, and more I’m fortunate to have momentarily forgotten. One or two good things Community Tech might have done matters little on the face of the wrong things that are done (and planned). And that’s the tally I’m counting. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 02:22, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
  • Man your life must suck. Having to deal with all those emotions every time your bank website changes, or when your phone has an update and stuff... luckily there is this place where you are allowed to give at least some input ! —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:45, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Tuvalkin -- I really would not group Wikidata in with some of those other things. It originated from a German group (not the narrow clique of WMF-employed programmers whose efforts sometimes yield strange results), and ordinary article-editors on the individual Wikipedias and ordinary image-uploaders on Commons barely notice it (which is the intention)... AnonMoos (talk) 06:24, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

November 07

Categories for photografic methods

I have created the Category:Romantic images of children. What kind of method is used to highligth the children? Is there a category for this?Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:53, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

IRC office hour about Structured Data on Commons next week

Hi everyone! I warmly welcome you to attend the next IRC office hour about Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons: next Tuesday 21 November at 18:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office webchat. Amanda, Ramsey and I will be there to talk about the work of the last months, and to explain what's coming. You can also ask us all your burning questions :-) The chat log will be published afterwards for those who could not attend. All the best! SandraF (WMF) (talk) 10:10, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

File:Wettern House.jpg

Hello, this image is not of Wettern House which was in Dingwall Road, Croydon on the western side of East Croydon Station. This image appears to be of the AIG Insurance Company building, which is to the southeast of the station and is located in Altyre Road, Croydon. It is still standing and is not part of the proposed development of the Ruskin Square / Wettern House site. This file is extracted from another, that being File:East Croydon Station looking south (geograph 1935542).jpg where the description is accurate. Should the mislabelled file (Wettern House) be deleted from Commons as it is incorrectly described but the original retained? Thank you. Eagleash (talk) 12:34, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

My mistake here, I thought I'd found a Commons-licenced photo of the building after comparing it to other photos online, but must have mixed things up. No objection to this image being deleted. --Gapfall (talk) 13:43, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Deleted as requested by Gapfall. --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 17:52, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. Eagleash (talk) 20:08, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

November 16

VFC (along with a few other scripts) is broken due to a removed deprecated dependency in last MediaWiki update

The error is: 

Error: Unknown dependency: jquery.placeholder
Stack trace:
sortDependencies@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/load.php?debug=true&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki%7Cmediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=1b46sjy:11984:12
resolve@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/load.php?debug=true&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki%7Cmediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=1b46sjy:12046:6
using@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/load.php?debug=true&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki%7Cmediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=1b46sjy:12888:22
mw.loader.using@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/load.php?debug=true&lang=en&modules=user&only=scripts&skin=vector&user=Zhuyifei1999&version=1xp08nu:10:11
@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:VisualFileChange.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:2001:1
mightThrow@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/load.php?debug=true&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki%7Cmediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=1b46sjy:3583:21
resolve/</process<@https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/load.php?debug=true&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki%7Cmediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=1b46sjy:3651:12

The dependency jquery.placeholder was removed in gerrit:386470. Up to 13 scripts may be affected and most likely needs fixing (of two I checked both use placeholder() call). CC @Perhelion, Jdforrester, and Krinkle, @Eurodyne, Josve05a, and Jon Kolbert. --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 06:58, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

I have reverted the jquery.placeholder and jquery.badge removal for now as temporary measure. I would like to remove them again in ~2 weeks - is that feasible? I'll do a broader announcement tomorrow, it's pretty late here. Legoktm (talk) 07:10, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Hello, is there a way to solve the problem temporary charging the VCF script in my .js user page? Anna (Cookie) (talk) 20:42, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Fixed all uses of jquery.placeholder on Wikimedia Commons. example. --Krinkle 21:52, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
@Krinkle: Legoktm mentioned 'jquery.badge' being removed. Could you fix those as well? --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 23:40, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Zhuyifei, given it is used as .badge here all appearances in Commons in relevant namespaces (User, Mediawiki and Module, the latter just to be safe): badge insource:/\.badge/. I do not know whether they all are instances of jquery.badge, though. — Speravir – 18:37, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
@Cookie: I don't understand your problem. Could you clarify? --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 23:00, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Sorry Zhuyifei1999, I meant if I could load a fixed script temporary in my .js user page. Silly question I'm afraid. Now I see it's working again, so thanks Krinkle :-) Anna (Cookie) (talk) 02:38, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
@Krinkle, Legoktm, Zhuyifei1999: this is happening again. I turned off my browser cache and turned on debug mode, still occurring. I see some scripts are still using jquery.badge.[11]

   ?debug=true:256 Error: Unknown dependency: jquery.badge Error: Unknown dependency: jquery.badge

Magog the Ogre (talk) (contribs) 04:23, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
Sorry, it got missed in the new deployment branch, it's been temporarily fixed but someone on Commons needs to fix the scripts that use it in 2 weeks, otherwise it's going to happen again. Legoktm (talk) 17:54, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm for a local copy of the badge module (as Legoktm mentioned on phab:T178450) as there seems no replacement for this. PS: It is/was also not tagged as deprecated on mw:ResourceLoader/Core modules -- User: Perhelion 03:31, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Two million free images of wildlife

https://www.flickr.com/search/?tags=bookcollectionbiodiversity —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:47, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Many of the images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library that are public domain or freely licensed have been uploaded to Commons. See Commons:Biodiversity Heritage Library and Category:Files from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. —RP88 (talk) 03:18, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
You could request a Flickr batch to be uploaded. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 11:18, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Looking for Numismatists with a desktop computer to help upload around 350 images from 3 batches

Fæ directed me to the Village Pump ⛽ to look for other Numismatists who are interested in uploading a few batches for me as (s)he only uploads larger batches and the batches I requested are too small for him/her, so I will be looking for anyone who owns a desktop computer 🖥 here to help me with these two (2) separate requests.

Commons:Batch uploading/Illustrations of Vietnamese cash coins from Ed Toda's "Annam and its minor currency".:

Currently I am planning on drafting a large inclusion of images into the article w:nl:Vietnamese văn and hope 🤞🏻 to use the illustrations from Eduardo Toda y Güell’s Annam and its Minor Currency for reference, though the historical accuracy of these images leave much to be desired they are great sources of information 🛈 nonetheless and the accompanying text was up until Dr. Barker's book the Western World's 🗺 primary source of the monetary history of Viet-Nam. For that reason I would like all of the illustrations from that book 📚 to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, however as I do not have a desktop computer 🖥 I am not able to use Commonist or the VicuñaUploader to upload this batch of around 300 pictures 📷.

If anyone has the time ⌚, then please click on the above link 🔗 and upload that batch. 🙇🏻

Commons:Batch uploading/Edo period coin collecting catalogues:

I don’t actually plan on using these for Wikipedia further than I have (which was as an inline citation), however there two (2) books hosted on the website of the University 🎓 of California at Santa Barbara have a great educational and historic value as they are coin collectors’ guides from Edo period Japan (the Tokugawa Shogunate) and could be used in many educational manners outside of Wikimedia projects, these files 📁 are all quite small so uploading them won't be difficult (please see the above batch request for more (sloppily formatted) information 🛈). 🧟🏻

So if there are any passionate numismatists around here then please use the VicuñaUploader or another tool that I can't use because of the technical limitations of mobile editing, and upload these images. As I am very busy please direct any questions regarding these respective uplaod-batches on the individual pages so I will know what tự answer, and where to answer them, if you're not interested in coins at all and just want an excuse to upload a few hundred images then you're welcome too, of-course. 😉

Note 📝: All of these requested images are in the public domain, and there’s no copyright © protection for any of them. However I do request that the source pages are properly linked for attribution out of respect for Dr. Luke Roberts and Sema (Pyvanet~commonswiki), and to make the original sources to be easily found. Also the text I wish 🌠 to be imported from the book 📚 “Annam and its Minor Currency” is also fully in the public domain.

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 11:17, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Category "Animals/Plants of..." or "Fauna/Flora of..."?

Hello. I am editing Category:Serra da Canastra National Park and would like to create smaller categories for the pictures of the animals and plants that exist there. I'd like to know if there is a guidance or consensus over if I should create "Plants of Serra da Canastra..." and "Animals of..." categories, or "Flora of..." and "Fauna of..." ones. It seems that people discussed this in 2008, but they don't seem to have reached a conclusion. Thanks a lot. Mateussf (talk) 18:21, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

A place for species identification on Commons?

Has this idea ever been put forward? A venue for people to post pictures that need identification and for other users to offer answers/suggestions? It seems like there are an awful lot of knowledgeable people here and an awful lot of people who like to identify subjects properly. I found the page Commons:Identifying organisms, but it's mainly about external resources. I typically put in some effort to identify an organism when I take a picture of it, but my knowledge is limited. I wound up creating a user category for my own images that still need identification. I went to the enwiki Reference Desk a with this a couple times before, but with very mixed results. I wonder if a dedicated forum might draw people in? To be clear, I'm not just posting this to solicit people to identify things in my pictures. :) — Rhododendrites talk |  07:13, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Reddit has some good communities for this type of request for both living and non-living subject matter. A example of some of these are:
What's this bug What's this bird Animal identification What's this plant Mushroom identification
What is this What is this painting What is this thing What's this rock Where is this
- Offnfopt(talk) 07:34, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
@Offnfopt: Would you say that the existence of these communities would make hosting the same sort of activity on Commons unnecessary? — Rhododendrites talk |  23:31, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
Rhododendrites I wouldn't say unnecessary, just there is already a lot of foot traffic to those groups on reddit. If it were me I'd prefer to use existing communities than trying to start a new one from scratch. But if that is something you want to tackle go for it and I wish you the best. - Offnfopt(talk) 01:34, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Having submitted a few images to /r/whatsthisplant, it does seem to work quite well. I see what you mean. No need to try to reproduce it. — Rhododendrites talk |  03:11, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
Edit: The image you have here File:Unidentified flowers in Central Park (81557).jpg looks like a variation of a Asiatic Lily. I did a quick search of Asiatic Lily variations and that looks very similar to the Lilium 'Dimension' Asiatic hybrid. - Offnfopt(talk) 07:46, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
Thanks! — Rhododendrites talk |  23:31, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
How is a category like you created more useful than putting them in an existing category like Category:Unidentified plants? Seems to me that it is more likely that someone knowledgeable would find them in the latter category. - Jmabel ! talk 16:35, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
I strongly recommend that one of the best uses of gallery pages would be to do the equivalent of what I did at Romanian Orthodox churches in Bucharest. Makes it easy to see the small differences in one place. I think it would be great if someone did that (for example) for various species in a gallery page at the genus level. - Jmabel ! talk 16:35, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
@Jmabel: To be clear, this wasn't about my category, but the reason I created it is so that I can go back to it to "finish the job". Sometimes I'll try to identify things that aren't my own uploads, too, but when I cannot identify my own images it bothers me, so I revisit that category from time to time. That does seem like a great use of a gallery, btw. — Rhododendrites talk |  23:31, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
@Rhododendrites: & if you plan to finish the job, that's a great use of a personal category. - Jmabel ! talk 00:30, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
On my experience, probability of identification is much higher on external resources, like Flickr for birds or http://bugguide.net for insects in USA. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:49, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Personally, I think a specific commons page or at least a gallery page is a great idea. A lot of the images in Category:Unidentified X are simply placed there because the image file doesn't specifically contain a name, not because it would be difficult to identify them. For images that users have actively tried to identify but failed, a specific forum would be quite useful. - Themightyquill (talk) 09:13, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 Agree Lotje (talk) 10:30, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Emoji display style

Is there a way to configure one’s prefferences so that all text characters are rendered in monochrome? Some characters started to show in “emoji” style lately, which is annoying for some users. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 00:53, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

  • What do you speak of? 1.) – 2.) :-) 3.) 🙂 … The first two are intentionally inserted by users, but if you think of the third variant, then is only dependent on your OS or browser and the used font, and I do not know, how to overcome this; see also en:Emoji#Implementation. — Speravir – 02:45, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
A bad hack that is working here in Firefox on Win7 is the following:
  1. Download the free font Symbola from its original source (Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts).
  2. Close Firefox. Go to Firefox program directory and into subdirectory fonts. Backup the existing font EmojiOneMozilla.ttf.
  3. Copy Symbola_hint.ttf into fonts and rename it to EmojiOneMozilla.ttf.
Check on e.g. en:Emoticons (Unicode block) before and after this hack. This has, of course, to be repeated on every update. — Speravir – 05:42, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
Ping forgotten – this was obviously meant for Tuvalkin.— Speravir – 05:44, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Suddenly I cannot create links from commonscats to wikidata anymore. For example if I click the links bottom left on this page: [12]. It doesn't open the dialog anymore. Does anyone have this problem also or know how I can fix this? Rudolphous (talk) 07:19, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

If I logout it opens a dialog, but the "create new page" dialog. This is also weird since the wikidata entry exists. See [13] Rudolphous (talk) 07:21, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
This is almost always caused by a conflict of javascripts that you use. You can try disabling some gadgets/scripts until the problem disappears. You need also to report the contents of your browser console as explained here. Ruslik (talk) 20:46, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
I had a similar problem reported today; a null edit helped.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:55, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

November 19

PNG thumbnails brightness

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T106516

I have uploaded two images about Roma people in Italy I have enhanced with the GIMP. The first one has a correct brightness/contrast balance; the second one is by far too bright, even if it looked perfect on my PC (and also here, the problem seems to affect thumbnails only). What can I do to solve this problem?

--Carnby (talk) 21:27, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

@Carnby: You could ask at the graphics lab for help. -> Commons:Graphic Lab/Photography workshop. They are able to save/repair almost anything you throw at them. --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 22:52, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
This is phab:T106516 --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 22:57, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
I added the Gamma value, but the second file is still quite bright. I've also edited the first image, but now it is bright, too. If you are not satisfied revert it. — Speravir – 03:04, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for your effort, but the first one looks worse and you have manipulated the wrong version of the second. I have asked the folks at the Photography workshop since I'm not able to solve the problem with the GIMP.--Carnby (talk) 12:42, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Just as remark:I intentionally used the first uploaded versions. — Speravir – 02:49, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
You need to add a PNG gamma chunk ("gAMA") with a value of around 0.45 to get around this bug, and the result will only be predictable if your PNG editing program does this and nothing else. If you have a binary editor, adding the 16 hex bytes 00 00 00 04 67 41 4D 41 00 00 B1 9E 61 4C 41 F7 at file position hex 0021 (after the IHDR chunk) should do the job... AnonMoos (talk) 05:55, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
I converted the adjusted image to jpg, uploaded it as File:Rom abruzzese in piedi sul cavallo.jpg and the editor is now using that one. Besides which jpg is really a better format for continuous tone images anyway. Ww2censor (talk) 12:25, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
I have tried to save gAMA with TweakPNG and manually with HexEd.it. No results.--Carnby (talk) 10:30, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

November 15

Graphics vs images

I proposed Category:Graphics for discussion at Commons:Categories for discussion/2016/02/Category:Graphics and Jeff G. urged me to bring the matter here.

The category description at Category:Graphics points to en:Graphics which defines graphics as "visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone to inform, illustrate, or entertain. (...) Examples are photographs, drawings, Line art, graphs, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, or other images." Unless I've missed something, that's all images. This category, however, is a sub-category of both Category:Illustrations and Category:Images. I'd either like a more specific definition, or a redirect to Category:Images. Otherwise we have a whole unclear/unnecessary layer of categorization. Thanks. - Themightyquill (talk) 09:02, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

I think a better definition would be to exclude photographs... AnonMoos (talk) 06:34, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Guinea pig with long ears

Guinea pig with long ears

Does anyone know what this guinea pig (?) with long ears is exactly? Have done a search but can't find anything exactly like this one.

Sardaka (talk) 08:31, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Qualifications for the new MP3 uploaders group

Resolved

Per the discussion above, a new MP3 uploaders user group has been created on Commons. (It still isn't possible to actually upload MP3s to Commons yet, but after we get this user group all set up and the abuse filter created, we can turn on MP3 uploading.) The next step is for us to decide what requirements are necessary for a person to be added to the MP3 uploaders group. Should there be a minimum number of edits? A minimum account age? Do they need to verify their familiarity with Commons' licensing policy and copyright law? Please express your opinions/ideas below. Kaldari (talk) 01:18, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

  1. Account at least 1 year old, active within the last 30 days, 2500 edits, no recent copyvios (3 or 6 months?). Somewhere along that line. My 2.5¢ --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 01:30, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
I think it should be very easy to acquire so long as it can be easily revoked. All that would be required is making a request that makes it clear the user has read and understood Commons:Copyright_rules_by_subject_matter#Music. The request could be handled at a new section of COM:RFR. —RP88 (talk) 02:48, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
That's where the request should be made. But there has to be a hurdle. Patrol, filemover, etc aren't given away for free either. --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 02:57, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm with Hedwig's suggestions except I think the account age shouldn't need to be longer then 3-6 months. Some time is necessary, showing you understand our copyright policy is necessary yes, but that can be shown through a history of 2500 edits without needing to have a designated account age that is as long as a year. -- Sixflashphoto (talk) 13:23, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Just let admins use their own judgement. A GLAM might need the right even if their account has zero edits because they want to donate material making Hedwig's proposal a bit unpracticle. Natuur12 (talk) 14:15, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

OK, so it sounds like we'll leave it up to admin discretion and use COM:RFR to handle the requests. Thanks for the input! Kaldari (talk) 04:12, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Problem with duplicate automated categorization template for cities

Hi, first of all I apologize for my approximate English... I found a problem with many templates in question, for example {{Veronayear}} vs {{Verona-year}}, and I would like to know a community opinion to find a standard to create one that can use in all cities, with exceptions for nations (as well as Italy...) that need further subcategories. For example, I've modified {{Veniceyear}} and {{Florenceyear}} to have automatic categorization by region of Italy and city so that it's easier to find and use them. Summing up, do we keep templates with what standard, with or without dash? Is there anybody with whom you can organize some kind of festival to optimize this type of templates? @Jbribeiro1: @J 1982: . --Threecharlie (talk) 10:15, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

It seems more common to have no dash. For the Verona templates, very few pages use them, so we could either delete the one we don't want, or make it a redirect. --Auntof6 (talk) 10:33, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
Similar problems in {{Venetoyear}} vs {{Veneto-year}}, the first generate the Category:Veneto in the 2010s (uncorrect for similar categories used in other nations, see {{Campaniayear}}), the second the standard Category:2010s in Veneto.--Threecharlie (talk) 10:42, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
Automatic categorization using templates for categories always sounds good, but turns out hard to work with. Besides that I don't like the whole splitting by year, it just makes it harder to find images. Multichill (talk) 17:29, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

directing emojis to plaintext titles?

On the English Wikipedia, emojis redirect to articles (for example 🦌 redirects to en:deer) but the Commons treats emojis as a bad title. Is there a way to fix this so redirects are allowed for emojis? This would help internationlizaion. WhisperToMe (talk) 10:56, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

These titles are blacklisted (for spam reasons), and only admins are allowed to create pages with non-"Basic Multilingual Plane" characters. I've started creating some of these redirects now. Feel free to poke me, or another admin, to create specific redirects. --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 11:40, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
Commons doesn't have articles, just galleries, so naturally not every imaginable search term is covered by pages or redirects in the main namespace. Having some emojis redirect to galleries and others to categories not only isn't exactly desirable from a usability perspective, it also goes against our principle to generally avoid cross-namespace redirects.    FDMS  4    20:26, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Adding emojis to Template:Translation table

Another emoji thing: I would like to see a parameter for emojis in Template:Translation table. If an emoji on ENwiki redirects to a particular topic, that same emoji could also be placed in the page or category's translation table. It may be necessary to have a similar field put on Wikidata entrries. If so I can open a discussion there too. WhisperToMe (talk) 16:41, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-47

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [14]
  • The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November. [15][16][17]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week. [18][19]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:18, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers

New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers

The Readers web team will be deploying a new feature this week to make it easier to download PDF versions of articles on the mobile website.

Providing better offline functionality was one of the highlighted areas from the research done by the New Readers team in Mexico, Nigeria, and India. The teams created a prototype for mobile PDFs which was evaluated by user research and community feedback. The prototype evaluation received positive feedback and results, so development continued.

For the initial deployment, the feature will be available to Google Chrome browsers on Android. Support for other mobile browsers to come in the future. For Chrome, the feature will use the native Android print functionality. Users can choose to download a webpage as a PDF. Mobile print styles will be used for these PDFs to ensure optimal readability for smaller screens.

The feature is available starting Wednesday, Nov 15. For more information, see the project page on MediaWiki.org.

Thank you!

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

We have a copyright history statement at Category:Time Magazine that covers the copyright history for that publication. Do we, or does anyone external to Wikimedia, have a centralized place where these statements are stored. The process of confirming renewals is time consuming, so she should not waste time duplicating work already completed. If we find contrary information we can always modify the statement. Ideally we should have a statement at the category of each publication of what is currently known, and have it worded in a standard template. Not duplicating work already completed would save a lot of time. RAN (talk) 23:33, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/firstperiod.html has much of this information. There's several periodical pages on the English Wikisource that list renewal information for the periodicals.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:48, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
Can you link me to an example of a Wikisource copyright notice? RAN (talk)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales and and https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact .--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:06, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

November 21

Need help translate text on photo - possibly Chinese language -

This is text on an old tombstone on a cemetary in The Hague, in what could very well be Chinese language. I'd like to find out what it says. --oSeveno (talk) 14:52, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

The top three characters in the right column are the name of the country of Japan (en:Nihon Koku). There are some numbers in the left column. That's as far as I can help... AnonMoos (talk) 17:15, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
(Edit conflict)The text looks to be a Japanese variant of the Chinese text, and written from top to bottom, right to left. I cannot fully read nor comprehend it, but transliterating it into simplified Chinese it is: "日本国临时代理公使 ?六位?五等樱田亲义之墓 明治十八年五月十五日平" (two unreadable characters marked with question marks). --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 17:21, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Google Translate says that is "Provisional Acting Minister of Japan? Sixth? Fifth Sakurada Yasukuni Meiji eighteen May 15 peace".   — Jeff G. ツ 20:05, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
It's not "Chinese" in the conventional sense, as everything written on it would normally be read in Japanese. I have personal problems worrying me at the moment so I don't have time to look into it, but "Meiji 18"=1885. The first unreadable character is from context either 正 (senior sixth rank) or 従 (junior sixth rank), and based on the appearance of the character almost certainly the latter former. The other unreadable character is clearly 勲, which appears to relate to some order in the Japanese honors system (he would be 5th class based on the following two charatcers). His name in Japanese is 櫻田親義 (Sakurada Chikayoshi -- no idea how Google got "Yasukuni", which would be somthing like 靖國) and according to this he was a Japanese diplomat in the Meiji era, and served in the Japanese consulate in Rome at some point. Hijiri88 (talk) 23:26, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
Sorry. Also, 公使 means "minister" in the sense of the leader of a diplomatic legation, since this wasn't clear from the Google Translate approximation given above. The Japanese for minister of state is 大臣. Hijiri88 (talk) 00:13, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
BTW, the last character doesn't really look like 平 as Zhuyifei transcribes it, and this is what leads to the nonsense translation "peace". 平 has neither a curve at the bottom nor a bit extending up at the top, as the character in the image appears to. 乎 would be my guess based on the curvature, but it's also not a perfect match, and I've actually only encountered this character in kanbun (classical Chinese) and man'yougana (phonetic transcription) text and don't really understand it off the top of my head. Will look a bit closer later. Hijiri88 (talk) 00:29, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
Thanks to you all, @AnonMoos: , @Zhuyifei1999: , @Jeff G.: , @Hijiri88: . I have been able to find out what this grave is about: In 1885 a Japanese diplomat with the rank of “Chargé d'affaires”, named Sakurada, was stationed in the city of The Hague, the Netherlands. He had a mistress from Belgium, who shot and killed him in a hotel in the city of Rotterdam. It was a crime of passion. He was then buried in The Hague. According to a newspaper of that time, Mr. Sakurada was of a family of “former daunio's”, but I have no idea what that could mean. The newspaper suggested it could be considered to be equal to some sort of Japanese nobility. It is probably written in phonetic and most likely misspelled. Anyone a clue? Anyway, my thanks to you all for your help. I am considering writing to the Japanese embassy to ask if they are aware of this grave of a former diplomat of their country. After all, it has cultural-historical value. Regards, --oSeveno (talk) 17:14, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
Additionally, it says Sakurada was the son of Kaisin Nakai and Towa Nakai, from Kita Ouwa Kori, province of Iyo, on the island of Shikoku. I just love the age of digitalization and online access to archives and old newspapers. --oSeveno (talk) 18:13, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
@OSeveno: It seems your source has a fair few misprints. "daunio" is most likely "daimyo" (see [20]), and I'm not exactly sure but English Wikipedia's article on Iyo Province gives "Kita Uwa Kori" (gun and kōri are the same word, and spacing is arbitrary). "Kaisin" is not a "misprint", per se, but most people would write it as "Kaishin". A brief Googling didn't bring up anything on his parentage in Japanese, though, so for all I know it could have been something completely different. Hijiri88 (talk) 22:36, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
@Hijiri88: You are right, in 1885, but most likely in the entire ninetienth century, journalists didn't have the resources to check for correct translation and spelling, of languages that do not use the Western alphabet. No Internet to aid them. I also noticed that the name Chikayoshi was not mentioned anywhere. They just wrote T. Sakurada, T. standing for Tsikayoshi, I'm sure, while everywhere else in newspapers they used the full names of people. --oSeveno (talk) 07:35, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
"Tsikayoshi" doesn't surprise me, as that at least has not changed since the nineteenth century. Most Japanese first learn the Roman alphabet as a cipher in which to write the Japanese language (nowadays it's for computer entry), and as a result frequently do not write their own names in the standard Hepburn system but in a hodgepodge. (These days, it's because it's easier to type "し" as "si" than as "shi", even though it is not pronounced as "si", while "ちょ" is just as easy to type as "cho" or "tyo".) I imagine in Sakurada's time and definitely place, English was not the standard for writing one's name in the roman alphabet, so "tsi" might have made more sense. Or maybe in his Iyo dialect ち actually is pronounced like "tsi" would be in English. But almost all Japanese today would pronounce his name as "Chikayoshi". All that said, "Tikayosi (not Tsikayoshi) Sakurada" is actually consistent with the most common non-Hepburn romanization systems (which happen to be easier for my 4th grade students to use when typing Japanese, and so when they get to 5th grade they instinctively write their names that way). Hijiri88 (talk) 06:31, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Downloading metadata of all files in a category

Hello! I want to download the author and license of all the files in a category, so it can be property reused in a project. But can't find a way to download this metadata. I found how to donwload the files, but this files are not downloaded with their info. Is there any option to do that? -Theklan (talk) 16:02, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

@Theklan: You can extract this using the MediaWiki API. Here's a link to the API Sandbox demonstrating it: [21] I used generator=categorymembers, gcmtype=file, and gcmlimit=max to get information about files in a category and prop=imageinfo with iiprop=extmetadata to get the machine-readable metadata extracted from the {{Information}} template. For a small category (at most 500 files) you can just use the URL produced by the API Sandbox. For larger categories you may have to understand how the API handles continuation. --bjh21 (talk) 17:21, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
PS: iiprop=extmetadata is implemented by the CommonsMetadata MediaWiki extension. --bjh21 (talk) 17:29, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
Thanks! -Theklan (talk) 17:39, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

@Theklan: Yesterday I was doing just that (reading author name) of all the files in a category. I was using a rudimentary but very reliable approach - using wget, grep and sed - which doesn't require learning SQL or API:

  • First, get the list of all the files in the category. AWB can do just that. Set the "Source" to "Category" and push the button "Make list" (In the bottom-left box). Then select all the items in the list (Ctrl + A) and then copy (Ctrl + C). Then copy the list into a text file.
  • Second, get the URL links of those files - for example the URL of this file - File:نراق.jpg - is actually https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D9%86%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%82.jpg.
    • Edit any page and copy the list of your files, with the "* [[:File" and "]]" prefix-suffix, push "Show preview" - you get a list like this - and then save the html page from the browser (don't push the "Publish changes" button).
    • Use grep to find all the links: cat in.htm | grep "<li><a href" | sed -e "s/. title=.*//" | sed -e "s/.*\x22//" | sed -e "s/\x25/\x25\x25/g" > out.txt
  • Third, download all the pages, using wget, like this: " wget --no-check-certificate -O "tmp.htm" "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D9%86%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%82.jpg" " - for each file.
    • Use grep to find the author name: cat tmp.htm | sed -e "s/<\/a>/<\/a>\n/g" | sed -e "s/<\/bdi>//g" | grep "title=.User:" | sed -e "s/<\/a>.*//" | sed -e "s/.*>//" | head -1 > user.txt
    • Do that for every file (you can make a script to download and to search author name for all of them)

If you know wget, grep and sed - or if you can get familiarized with them easily, this is quite a good way to do it. These are Linux tools but you can use them on Windows very easily, by downloading the GNUWin32 package and putting the executables somewhere in your %PATH%. Not very fast but very reliable. No 500 files limit. You can use it for categories containing 200,000 files without changing the script. -- Fructibus (talk) 20:51, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

It seems more difficult than looking at the API! But thanks for the solution, yes! -Theklan (talk) 20:57, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
It looks like a tangle-jungle of scripts, indeed. But grep (and also sed) is an essential text-processing tool that can help you in a vast amount of situations. And they are really addictive tools. Oldies but goldies. -- Fructibus (talk) 21:04, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

I have just uploaded File:Robin Hood Gardens (419050302).jpg, as part of a batch. It may breach copyright, or not, if de minimis applies Please take a look, and tag it for deletion if you think necessary. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:47, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: This is a map and as such is a "graphic work" which, in the United Kingdom, does not benefit from Freedom of Panorama. I also do not think that the de minimis principal applies - take away the map and you have nothing left. I will flag it for deletion accordingly. Martinvl (talk) 22:00, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
The GLC devolved in 1986. I suspect any rights in works went upwards, so are now government IP not local government. Not sure this case is worth the research time to answer definitively. --Fæ (talk) 22:09, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
@Fæ: I am not sure that I agree with you. I suspect that the map and its associated rights were transferred to the relevant local authority. My reason for saying this is that some years ago our Local History Society salvaged the bell that belonged to a cemetery when the chapel at the cemetery was demolished. Correspondence at the time indicated that the bell was the property of the district council (who maintained the cemetery), but the Local History Group were asked to look after the bell. About three years ago, our section of the district acquired parishes and the upkeep of the cemetery passed to the parish councils. I was involved with correspondence relating to the bell and the district council informed our society that ownership of the bell had passed to the parish council. Martinvl (talk) 22:22, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I'm sure we are uncertain. :-) --Fæ (talk) 22:46, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
I understand, of course, the copyright of maps and other graphic works. My question was about de minimis; especially given the large portion that is lost through damage. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:34, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

November 22

Stop deleting old pictures 📷

Something I find baffling here is how admins/sysops waste their time looking for “abandoned accounts” (Wikimedia (global) accounts that haven’t been used for more than 2 years) to delete all of their personal pictures 📷 (such as selfies, family pictures 📷, Etc. that they exclusively used for either their Wikipedia or Commonswiki or other wiki user pages), why? No serious, why? They themselves released it here and they chose to allow anyone to use it, I would argue that their educational value comes from the fact that they add a face to an educator (someone who edits Wikipedia), these people could've stopped editing for various reasons including having died 💀 in real life, imagine if someone like this dies and this is the only publicly available picture 📷 of them, they never bothered with the Facebook, after 9 months Microsoft/Google/Apple/Yahoo!/AOL wil delete all of your personal pictures, and no physical pictures 📷 of them exist, feel good about wanting to boast your deletion stats now? Well, anyhow I simply don't see the value in deleting those pictures, it doesn't save any server space nor does it benefit Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons in any way, in fact the only thing you're doing is “taking away the face of a contributor”, I say that we should adjust the policy to stop deleting old personal pictures 📷 of accounts that have been “abandoned” (heck, there might just as well be people that took a few year WikiBreak and come back to see this), I just really don’t see why there’s any rationale for deleting those pictures 📷.

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 11:17, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

@Donald Trung: The only admin I know who regularly did this is no longer here. I'd support restoring such images in most cases if you find them, and the person was once an active contributor. Most of what we delete nowadays are copyvios, self-promotion or throwaway selfie accounts. Guanaco (talk) 12:17, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
Please read Commons:Project scope. If personal photos are not used, why they should be uploaded at the first place? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:09, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
the deletionists rule, they have nothing better to do than destroy the work of others. but if you have a list, go send it to DRV and we can have some scope drama there, just like "50p for pants to throw at shakira". File:50p a pant (4746731770).jpg Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 04:35, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
The 50p for pants image still makes me smile. As evidence of drama, that particular set of DRs was very mild and mostly mellow. Compared to, other places, this project is not so awful you know. :-) --Fæ (talk) 13:01, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm not crazy over tagging personal pictures except for selfies that don't meet basic COM:EDUSE guidelines, but why should a policy be changed for no reason other than the need to put your personal pictures in every nook and cranny of the internet? -- Sixflashphoto (talk) 13:18, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
IMO, 90% to 95% of all pictures that have been or are being uploaded in Commons is useless trash. Do we need to have 50 pics of a specific section of Highway 17 in southwestern Kentucky? Or 150 pics of a particular village fest in some hamlet of Germany or Rumania? Or 300 pics of some local Jamboree meeting in god knows where? (Naturally, nearly all of them without any description).--Lubiesque (talk) 15:25, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
I think this is not a matter to handle with a policy or regarding the Commons scope. Do we have a policy about user pages? No. As a matter of fact, has been rejected. Why? Why most of the Wikis have no user page policies? Why in En Wikipedia, the most bureaucratic Wiki there is a page about user pages but it is not an official guideline but a content guideline to be used with common sense that allows sometimes occasional exceptions? Why there is on Meta a page like m:Friends of gays should not be allowed to edit articles that is manifestly out of scope? Because Commons like Wikipedias like Meta is first a community of flesh and blood people with feelings. This is not a matter about the Commons scope, this is about respect. We do not have official leaders or a hierarchical organization. We do not have official awards for the better users. Because this is an open project, here we are all equal, also a Steward in front of a newbie; and the few edits of a man that once a month runs 50 km to reach an internet point and give us an help have the same moral value of my 65000 edits made with hotcat. So we must have one only policy "never make relevant changes on a user page without a very serious motivation even if she/he did just one edit because every user deserves respect.".--Pierpao.lo (listening) 16:57, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

November 17

RFC: Which user groups should initially be allowed to upload mp3s?

Now that mp3s are no longer patent-encumbered, and WMF Legal has signed off on allowing mp3s on our projects, we need to decide how mp3 uploading will actually be implemented. There appears to be general consensus to enable mp3 uploading, but many people have expressed concerns about the potential for increases in copyvio uploads. A solution that has been proposed would be to limit mp3 uploads to particular user groups. Should we limit it to particular groups, and if so, which groups? Note that we already disallow all uploads of large audio files by newbie users through edit filters. Kaldari (talk) 22:22, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Note 'user groups' here refers to Commons:User access levels#User groups, not Category:Wikimedia user groups. ;-) --John Vandenberg (chat) 02:24, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
Would this apply to MP4 as well? --Don (talk) 00:25, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
@WPPilot: no. Both the video formats specified in the MP4 ISO Spec and the AAC format is still under certain patents. - Gacelperfinian (talk) 03:58, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

I figured as much, I have to say it (MP4) is a more production friendly format next to webx, my export time on this film, to be featured Monday was 24 hours, next to a hour or so for a 4k MP4, this makes it tough to dedicate that much time to one task:

J Class World Championship Newport Shipyard by D Ramey Logan

Limit to admins and higher

A special permission level

  • Create a special permission level that has to be explicitly requested by non-admins. Make it easy to ask for, and grant it readily to experienced users, but I think auto-confirmed is too low a bar. - Jmabel ! talk 22:57, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
  • The phased approach mentioned in the previous RFC would imply a "MP3 uploaders" group is created. That seemed to be the consensus of the last RFC. John Vandenberg (chat) 02:31, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Maybe we need a new level of general "Uploaders" that could be trusted to upload MP3 files, upload directly from Flickr using UploadWizard, have higher upload limit in UploadWizard, etc. A position of trust, which can be granted by the community, and removed if person is abusing those powers. --Jarekt (talk) 02:37, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I like the idea of a temporary "MP3 uploaders" group during the initial roll out (or a permanent "Trusted uploaders" group). I think we could probably also give the right to admins and image reviewers. Kaldari (talk) 03:27, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
  • It then can be lowered to autoconfirmed. Ruslik (talk) 20:13, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Limit to auto-confirmed and higher

Limit to license reviewers and higher

Don't limit by user group

Discussion

I'm quite confused about your RFC. It doesn't seem to me to accurately reflect the complexity of the previous discussions. The previous discussion mentioned a new user right, not user groups. If this is just a terminology issue, and you are talking about a new user right, why can't it be held by multiple existing user groups or even a new group? Where did the three options come from? Why just these three? Is your RFC intended as a replacement for the phased approach suggested by CKoerner (WMF)? It is not clear to me whether you are suggesting that this user group restriction, if any, is about the "Phase 0" testing phase that precedes the "everybody can upload MP3" phase that occurs after the tool intended to assist with patrolling MP3 uploads is developed. Or are you proposing some sort of indefinite restriction on mp3 uploads to particular user groups? —RP88 (talk) 23:11, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

If this RFC is about which user groups should be granted the "upload mp3" right during the "Phase 0" testing phase mentioned in the previous discussion, personally I think this hypothetical uploadmp3 user right should be held by "Image reviewers", "Administrators" and a new group "MP3 uploaders" that would be easy to acquire at COM:RFR and readily revoked if abused. After the tools are ready I think MP3 should be treated like other file types and the uploadmp3 right would then be added to all of the existing groups that currently have the upload right. —RP88 (talk) 23:25, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
@RP88: It could definitely be a new user right that was applied to various groups. I was just trying to simplify the discussion since some people get confused about how user rights work. Whether it's implemented through a new user right or not is just a technical implementation detail anyway. What really matters is which user groups are going to be given the capability. I started it with three options just as examples, but someone added a custom group choice as well, which is great. I think your suggestion for a new "MP3 uploaders" group during phase 0 is a good idea. Kaldari (talk) 03:24, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

 Question Do we need a new user right for this at all? If MP3 uploads are simply enabled, we can manage this via an abuse filter. In response to abuse or lack thereof, we can reconfigure the filters as needed. Guanaco (talk) 03:42, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

@Guanaco: No, we don't technically need a new user right, especially if it's going to be managed via an abuse filter. That's why I left user rights out of the discussion. We just need to figure out what groups should be able to upload mp3 and then we can figure out the technical implementation, which may or may not involve a new user right. Kaldari (talk) 05:25, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
 Support for using abuse-filter. Less bureaucracy. If we ever decide that everybody can upload .mp3, we can deactivate the filter with one click and done. --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 12:06, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Conclusions

No one's posted anything new for a week, so I'll assume this discussion has run its course. As in the previous discussion, there seems to be a roughly even split between folks who want to initially limit mp3 uploading to a special user group (along with some existing trusted groups) and those who want to open up mp3 uploading to everyone (but with some kind of warning or filtering mechanism). Typically when there is no clear consensus, we stick with the status quo, but in this case the status quo would be to not allow mp3 uploading at all, which almost no one supports (per the previous discussion). Between the options listed above, it seems that "A special permission level" is the best option to go with for now as it has the highest level of support and is fairly conservative. We can always open it up to more users later (by simply editing the abuse filter). Would anyone object to moving forward with that plan? Kaldari (talk) 21:22, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Just some questions: If MP3 format will be restricted to admins and editors with special user rights, what are your ideas of special permissions? Also, can non-free files in MP3 format be allowed in also local wikis? --George Ho (talk) 02:08, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
@George Ho: I was thinking: Create a new "Trusted uploaders" user group; Give it the following permissions to start with:
  • Not be affected by IP-based rate limits (autoconfirmed)
  • Upload files (upload)
  • Overwrite existing files (reupload)
Allow admins to assign users to the new user group; Then create an edit filter that limits mp3 uploads to users that are either admins or trusted uploaders. The answer to your second question depends on the consensus on other projects. Kaldari (talk) 01:07, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
"Trusted uploaders"? "Trusted" sounds too... I don't know what words to describe it, but I would neither use nor want to be a "trusted uploader". How about just "MP3 uploaders" or "audio uploaders" instead? --George Ho (talk) 01:35, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
@George Ho: "MP3 uploaders" is fine with me. Kaldari (talk) 03:47, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
We need some serious help with automatic mp3 copyvio identification. Otherwise we have the whole Top 500 here in no time flat; not to mention our Ghana-Facebook connection. Oh boy, that's gonna be fun. I assume we will delete ~90% of the uploads on sight, with a significant percentage of Com:PCP. Trusted uploader my knee. Even users with over 1,000 uploads give us copyvios on a regular basis. Either Admins and higher only or serious ammo for the abuse filter. If we have to have a new user right, let crats or stewards deal with it since admins often are too fast and generous with user rights (see filemover). What about xwiki uploads? Blocked for new users? Even when they are admins on another project Technically and legally possible doesn't mean lets do it and worry about the consequences later. Too much crap coming in as it is, we need to do this right and not hurry into it. Oh boy..... --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 02:24, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
@Hedwig in Washington: I think you're right so I created 2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Multimedia and Commons#Audio/video review tool (for mp3s especially). As far as the abuse filter, it will totally be under the control of the Commons community, so it can be adjusted as needed. You could even block the ability to upload mp3s from the "MP3 uploaders" group, although that might be a bit confusing for people :) Kaldari (talk) 03:58, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
That doesn't solve the problem that identifying a copyvio mp3 takes a lot more time than a photograph will ever take. Oh boy.... --Hedwig in Washington (mail?) 04:20, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
Somebody should look into the legal issues before implementing any sort of automatic mp3 copyvio identification. Wasn't there a recent case in the USA where a site lost its DMCA safe-harbor protection because it was moderating user submissions? Possibly Mavrix Photographs vs LiveJournal. --ghouston (talk) 04:49, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
That's an interesting case. It looks like the main problem was that the LiveJournal moderators were acting as agents for LiveJournal. LiveJournal selected the moderators, trained them, and basically had them enforcing copyright law on behalf of LiveJournal. In our case, it's almost the opposite. The WMF would be building a tool for the community to utilize as it saw fit to enforce community policies. The WMF would not be involved in selecting the reviewers, training them, or controlling what they did, so I think it's unlikely that a reasonable juror would conclude that an agency relationship existed between the WMF and the file reviewers, but IANAL. Kaldari (talk) 06:22, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T180002

I create a Phabricator task for setting up the user group. Kaldari (talk) 17:13, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: One doubt here: who should be able to revoke this right in case of mistake or abuse? Stewards? Bureaucrats? Admins? Or indef block only applies in such case? Ankry (talk) 14:16, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
@Ankry: Oops, looks like no one can revoke it currently. I'll change it so that admins can revoke it (since they can also add it). Kaldari (talk) 20:56, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
Fixed now. Kaldari (talk) 20:41, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

October 28

Help with English

Last Sunday we took some pics in Alboraia of (in Spanish) secaderos de calabazas. You can see one in this file. How should I call them in English? Thanks. B25es (talk) 19:10, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

According to Google Translate they are "pumpkins dryers". Ruslik (talk) 20:09, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
Though possibly "squash" rather than "pumpkin", depending on the species. - Jmabel ! talk 21:04, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
@B25es: I don't know if there is a technical term for this. How you describe it based on that phrase would be whether you want to describe the activity or the object? It is either the activity "drying pumpkins" or some sort of rack/structure with which one dries pumpkins. Of course "pumpkin" is a word we use in English quite imprecisely to mean any of a range of winter squashes. Perhaps "calabazas" works similarly, but "calabaza" is a specific type of squash, too, so it may be most appropriate to simply leave it as something like "drying calabazas". — Rhododendrites talk |  23:27, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
Another possible English term is "drying rack". Before I looked at the image, I was going to say "dehydrator", but that usually refers to a machine. --Auntof6 (talk) 01:09, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, people! I think that "Calabaza drying racks" will be fine. B25es (talk) 16:32, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
  • The Spanish Wikipedia's article es:Calabaza is about the winter squash/pumpkin. I hear that Wikipedia can be wrong sometimes :) but it seems not unreasonable to interpret "calabaza" as a pumpkin/winter squash (especially since that's what's in the image linked in the initial post).
Going off on a tangent a bit, there's some weird interlanguage linking stuff going on, though. The eswiki article "Calabaza" looks to be about winter squash/pumpkins broadly, but it's linked to enwiki en:Calabaza which is about a particular winter squash. Enwiki en:Pumpkin redirects to es:Calabaza gigante. (?) en:Calabash links to es:Lagenaria siceraria. Anyway, it seems the translation is not clear. In English, safest would be "squash" (or, informally, "pumpkin") probably, encompassing all of these. — Rhododendrites talk |  23:27, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you all! Finally it's Pumpkin drying racks in Alboraia. Well, you can move it if you know better. I've to admit that I'd never seen one such racks before (and it's just 5 km away from me). I always find many such simple artifacts are missing in Commons. B25es (talk) 17:57, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Proposed page on identifying art

I'm curious if there is interest and/or need to create an informative page on how to properly identify and credit the artist(s) in historic printed work (inspired by my comments at the bottom of this discussion). I'm most familiar with scientific illustration, of which we have many thousands thanks to Biodiversity Heritage Library, Internet Archive, Wellcome Images, etc. Many images from these sources do no explicitly identify the artist, even though they may be in public domain, and in many cases the artist of a print differs from the author of the book or journal article containing it. I'm thinking of a handy page that gives simple tips like "if from a book or publication, consult the original work, including acknowledgements or preface", "look for signatures, initials", etc. Also quite helpful would be a glossary of common terms such as del, lith, sc. (see more here and here), and conventions (e.g. artist name listed on lower left, engraver's name on lower right). External links to databases of illustrators and artists would also be helpful, e.g. Database of Scientific Illustrators. I'm thinking this page could be linked to from {{Unidentified header}}. As a practical example, this print bears two signatures (A.T.E and W.J.Welch), one of them alluded to in text and explicitly identified in contemporary advertisements (e.g. "Profusely illustrated by A. T. Elwes") but the other unnamed, but probably William James Welch. Accurately identifying artist(s) and/or engraver(s) not only adds valuable reference and research data, but may allow more works into the public domain, for instance prints in a book by a British author who died only 50 years ago might include prints from an author who died 71 years ago, and thus the art would be in Public Domain while the text of the book would not. Thoughts? Has this already been done? Animalparty (talk) 19:35, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

I suggest you compile an essay, along with handy case study examples and reliable external references. I can handle many older English phrases and use of Latin, but some abbreviations are obscure, or at least we only find them on certain periods of engravings or sketches. As a resource this would occasionally be handy if anyone doubts that drawing are, say, over 70 years old or over 120 years old. The recent example of Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2017/11#Save_the_fish might have been helped by such an essay. See User:Elcobbola/Stuffed Animals as an example of a good essay summarizing the legal cases for toys.
By the way, I'm currently uploading from Cooper-Hewitt and the drawings category is full of drawings with these sorts of inscriptions, including names of artists where the etching or drawing may be copied from their work but not actually be their work. Can be confusing and the catalogue often has no details or explanation. --Fæ (talk) 12:50, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
i would suggest collaborating with sum of all paintings and structured data on commons. we have an ocean of web 1.0 images in desperate need of some image curation. an essay would be a good first step towards a standard of practice. and you could try a maintenance category "illustrations needing review". however, i doubt the deletionist admins, who prefer "no license" curation by deletion, will be swayed by such a standard. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 23:30, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

November 24

What's the edit speed limit for a regular user?

I was using the "Cat-a-lot" (super)gadget yesterday and I tried to add a category to 10,000 files. Usually the users categorize maximum 200 files at once (the maximum number of files listed in a category page), but the gadget has a new feature to add/remove categories to the files in a gallery. I was using this new feature (my gallery is at User:Fructibus/A), but after categorizing 1,900 files (at a speed of probably more than 1,000 files per minute), the gadget hanged. Then I tried it again in another browser, and it hanged at 3,400 count. Then I tried in another browser and it hanged at 8,600. I suppose it hanged because there is a limit for how many edits per second can a user make.

And then my question is: what is the edit speed limit for a regular user? Is it documented anywhere? Thanks. -- Fructibus (talk) 21:04, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

(OT) @SandraF (WMF): You were asking in the chat for examples of how Commons users use tools. The above is worth noting, both the scale of what is being attempted in a fairly routine way, and the speed (1,000 files per second) at which users are accustomed to it executing. I was recently re-categorising 2500 files, and impressed that batches of 200 (of the kind Fructibus mentions) could be modified effectively instantaneously. This can be compared with QuickStatements on Wikidata, which is currently throttled to about 20 edits per user per second. If one was having to rely on QS operating at a similar rate to provide the corresponding back-end for adding or changing topic-tags for Structured Data, it would make for a process that would be rather more painful, and rather less engaging. Jheald (talk) 23:35, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
@Fructibus: It's just a guess, but the limit might be how much memory each browser makes readily available for a javascript tool. It's a completely different tool, but I find QuickStatements on Wikidata chokes, if I give it more than about 8000 edits to make in one batch. Jheald (talk) 23:42, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
@Jheald: - It chokes even at the throttled rate of 20 edits per second? There is no throttling done server-side (I mean on the server you make edits - WikiData in this case, because QuickStatements is also a server-based tool) in order to limit the speed of the user's editing? -- Fructibus (talk) 02:08, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
I think QS is throttled client-side by agreement with Magnus. But it's possible that that is all the per-user load the server ppl want to have to accommodate. Changing a category is just a single line in a single SQL table -> very fast. Making an edit on Wikidata I think is rather more involved. But the reason QS falls over, I think, is that it can no longer handle that amount of data client-side. Which might be very similar to what you are experiencing with CatALot. Jheald (talk) 10:59, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
Server side limits are 8 edits/min for logged out or non autoconfirmed users. I dont believe there are any limits on autoconfirmed users for editing. Making an edit on wikidata is a comparable amount of work as making a category change on commons except wikidata also has to purge all usages in client wikis. Bawolff (talk) 01:48, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
@Bawolff: Indeed, today I've found that the gadget hangs because of some browser limitation even when there is no edit on the server, so there was no server-side limitation. -- Fructibus (talk) 21:12, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
@Bawolff: 8 edits/min? Yann (talk) 21:54, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
From line 7762 of InitialiseSettings.php (Which basically copies line 5679 of includes/DefaultSettings.php)
'wgRateLimits' => [
        'default' => [
// ...
                'edit' => [
                        // 8 ed./min per each non-autoconfirmed, or group thereof from same IP
                        'ip' => [ 8, 60 ],
                        'newbie' => [ 8, 60 ],
                ],

Bawolff (talk) 22:28, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Is File:In Gupteshwor Cave.jpg a Quality Image?

Could someone verify this edit and revert it if it's not true? --jdx Re: 15:22, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

See Commons:Quality images candidates and if you click "What links here" you'll find Commons:Quality images candidates/Archives June 07 2017. - Offnfopt(talk) 15:47, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
OK, thanks. I didn't even think about this method. Anyway, it's a legit change. --jdx Re: 15:59, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
You can also see it in the right corner (top of the page) the quality image logo. :) Lotje (talk) 16:20, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Localization of categories?

Less than 1 in 4 persons in the world can understand basic English. So I develop an app that allows non-English speakers to upload pictures to Commons (with all of the necessary selfie/copyvio protections, yes).

The app lets them select categories for the uploaded picture, but unfortunately now these categories are all in English, so the users do not understand them, and more importantly the search bar does not return the right things, for instance typing "España" in my app's category search bar does not make the "Spain" category appear. Even more for languages with non-Latin alphabets (only 36% of the world population use the Latin alphabet).

Question: How to localize a category name?

My initial idea would be take the appropriate label from the category's Wikidata item, for instance "विकिपीडिया:श्रेणी" from https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6741108. Is it a good idea? Is there any better thing to do? Or do you think anyone with interesting pictures must learn English first before they are able to categorize? Cheers! Syced (talk) 11:17, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

It's well known issue almost from the beginning of Commons. See Commons:Structured data for direction where Commons is moving. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:55, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
@Syced: Not sure if I understood correctly what you meant, but the UploadWizard is translated in many many languages eg in Spanish (bar from the category selection, which is as Eugene said a long-standing issue). Jean-Fred (talk) 22:54, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
@Jean-Frédéric: Imagine that like most people on the planet you don't understand English, imagine for instance that you only know Spanish and have a good picture of a rare "gusano" (Spanish word for "worm"). Go to UploadWizard in Spanish, drop the file, write a Spanish name/description... and now you have to enter a category. Type "gusano": Nothing appears. Either give up or leave the media uncategorized. That's the problem. Syced (talk) 06:35, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
@Syced: Sure :) I guess I was unclear, I was not trying to minimize the issue of having English-only categories, but to be clear that except for the categories part (because it’s a Commons-wise issue), existing upload apps are translated. (It was a bit unclear from your first post − sorry for the confusion :) Jean-Fred (talk) 09:08, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
submit it on wishlist, as an upgrade to upload wizard, multi-language category using wikidata. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:29, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

File:Fmje-12.jpg

During the past few weeks (starting at October 14, 2017) the file description of File:Fmje-12.jpg was subject of multiple changes – see the version history of this file. Temporarily I tried to fix single changes.

Now I give up. I'm confused by the multiple changes and I can not recognize what I could improve. Maybe other users can see what might be appropriate.

--Hasenläufer 14:49, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

@Hasenläufer: Yeah, some time ago I noticed that something strange is going on there when I was patrolling recent changes. Anyway, I semi-protected the file for two months in order to get rid of those anonymous fu..."warriors". Feel free to clean the file description page. --jdx Re: 15:19, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
@Jdx: Thanks you for your attention and the protection! I'm not involved in the topic contentwise. In the past, I have tried to formally correct the file description. I can not and no longer want to contribute to this topic, because I'm unable to decide which content change is appropriate or not. Unfortunately I have no idea how we should proceed with this topic. There may not be anyone here who can rate the content changes. Do you have any other idea what can be done? --Hasenläufer 15:59, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

To illustrate my concerns a bit more: The main subject of interest of the file description of File:Fmje-12.jpg is: Who is the author of this logo? The multiple changes of the file description are confusing. Up to now, I couldn't detect a comprehensible and trustable statement, who might be the author of the logo. Anonymous contributions didn't help to clarify this question. --Hasenläufer 16:31, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

@Hasenläufer and Jdx: I think a split may be appropriate here, the images are that different from one another.   — Jeff G. ツ 22:47, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
Is the license even valid? The URL on the upload seems to be a Japanese advert. --ghouston (talk) 23:35, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
It looks like the owner of the domain changed. --Hasenläufer 19:38, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Using archive.org gives [22] which seems to give authorisation, in Spanish. I'm not sure how to establish that fmje.org is the copyright holder. --ghouston (talk) 23:43, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
@Ghouston: Thanks of providing us the link to archive.org! I added it at the "new, old file" File:Logo of 12th World Festival of Youth and Students.png. --Hasenläufer 19:38, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
@Jeff G.: Thanks for your hint! Yes, you're right, the two files should be splitted. I did so. --Hasenläufer 19:38, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
@Hasenläufer: You're welcome.   — Jeff G. ツ 19:50, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

November 26

Super Tiny Website Logos in SVG

Some of these icons - those that fall below the threshold of originality - may be if use. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:05, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

How to search for photos taken with a certain camera model

I want to search for the photos taken with DSC-WX70 for example. Only a small part of such files are included in the Category:Taken with Sony DSC-WX70. The Metadata of the files is not included in the Wikimedia Commons backup, so I can't use AWB database scanner. Is there any way to search for such files - other than typing "DSC-WX70 site:commons.wikimedia.org" in Google - and to do it in a manner that can create a list with all such files? Thanks. -- Fructibus (talk) 23:23, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Not ideal - but https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/23166 (Returning all of them was taking too long, so i set it to only return the first 200 alphabetically. Remove the LIMIT 200 to get all results.) Bawolff (talk) 08:50, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
@Bawolff: Thanks a lot, this is an awesome tool! It looks like it has a glitch when saving to a CSV file though - it will add extra double quotes, based on some strange criteria. For example in this list User:Fructibus/B - for example the position 379 - File:"(Antique_Building)_faceing_the_Iglesia_de_San_Francisco,_Centro_Histórico_de_Quito.JPG" - in reality the image is at File:(Antique Building) faceing the Iglesia de San Francisco, Centro Histórico de Quito.JPG. The next link (380) doesn't contain extra quotes. When saving in Wikitable format, the names are all ok. -- Fructibus (talk) 03:46, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
its because the filename contains a comma. If you parse the csv file with a proper csv parser it will remove the quotes. Bawolff (talk) 20:42, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
Please be conservative about how far to go with metadata analysis or publishing it on-wiki. Though the data is public and accessible, we don't want to be seen to be deliberately tracking individuals, just because they did not know how to anonymize their camera EXIF data. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 20:54, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
Compared to putting everyone's photo on a map based on GPS data (which we do), getting a list of people who used a specific camera seems minor. Bawolff (talk) 23:44, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
When a camera category contains thousand and tens of thousands of photos (for example Category:Taken with Canon EOS 700D), I think it's a good idea to split them by user (for the top users only, of course), because each user has their own artistic touch and their own particular set of things they are shooting, so it makes it easier to find similar pictures with the ones you liked. I did that for myself first: Category:Taken by Fructibus with Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) - because the Category:Taken with Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) was monopolized by my photos - and the reader doesn't want to see only my work. A few days ago I got the idea to do the same thing for other cameras too, after finding a nice image taken with Olympus E-PL6. First, I have to categorize the all images taken with that camera, and then maybe split them by user. I have no interest whatsoever in doing other things like localizing users.
@Bawolff: : Is it possible to use this tool to search only inside a certain category? For example photos taken using DSC-WX70 from the Category:Buildings in Aranda de Duero. And how can I extract the author name too? I tried "Select img_name, user_name" but I get the error "Unknown column 'user_name' in 'field list'". Sorry to bother you with so many questions. -- Fructibus (talk) 16:49, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
@Bawolff: The fact that others do badly thought out stuff, is not a rationale for doing more stuff that can conceivably cause harm. I stand by my statement. For what I thought were obvious reasons, I have no intention of talking examples of exactly how we can cause harm on-wiki, and recommend others think twice about analysis that has unintended consequences and can be avoided. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 17:01, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
Fructibus, I would also caution against collating information about users without their permission. There are laws governing this in many countries. Your desire to sub-categorise the camera category in some way, just reflects how broken our Commons category system is. There really should be no need/desire to combine heterogeneous categories other than at query time. Also, unless a camera or lens is unusual, categorising images that way isn't particularly enlightening. A huge number of photos uploaded to Commons lack meaningful EXIF, so any such categories will also be hopelessly incomplete. -- Colin (talk) 17:55, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
Sometimes it is enlightening. The readers who want to see the general quality of Samsung Galaxy A5, they want to see a variety of photos, made by various people, not to have their view monopolized by my photos with fruits and tools taken with that particular camera. But I think it would be very good to make a debate on this topic and to see more opinions. In any case, I haven't started yet such categorization (other than my photos) and I'm going to comply with your request. Many photos are missing the EXIF info but the majority have it, and for those it's probably useful to categorize by camera. -- Fructibus (talk) 18:26, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
@Colin: After thinking more about it, I don't understand how Category:Taken by Fructibus with Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) is any worse than Special:ListFiles/Fructibus. If one is illegal in a country, then the other should also be. I hope I'm not bothering with discussing too much about this topic. -- Fructibus (talk) 19:52, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
I'm not a lawyer. See this for WMF's privacy policy. You can see they have to spell out what they collect. Your upload log is part of the data WMF collect and is public (and isn't quite the same as the set of photos you took). But when you combine data together: Fructibus took that photo + This photo was taken by a Samsung Galaxy A5 => Frutibus took these photos with a Samsung Galaxy A5, you start uncovering patterns like ownership, wealth, interests. Sythensis is the combining of separate data points to produce new information that wasn't apparent. When that gets personal, then there may be a problem. And it really isn't worth it for such trivia as what camera someone used (if you want to know the quality of photos of a camera, read a review). -- Colin (talk) 21:05, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
@Colin: Thank you. But how about 100 or 200 years after? This question is a bit hilarious but I'm not trying to be ironic or to make fun at all: can such categories be made for an user that uploaded photos 100 years before? Or maybe the family members of the user should worry that exposing the camera models the user had can give clues about the wealth of the family? -- Fructibus (talk) 22:17, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

@Fructibus: https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/23209 This would only be images directly in the category. Its possible to do subcategories to a certain depth, but the query gets complicated for that. Bawolff (talk) 19:27, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

@Bawolff: That's an awesome query, thanks a lot! Do you know why the first script doesn't work for other camera models? It works for WX-60 or WX-80 but it doesn't work for WX-500 or WX-350. I just changed the name of the camera model. Those camera models exist, what am I doing wrong? -- Fructibus (talk) 20:04, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
I think I found it, I think the %s:5 and %s:8 specify the length of the string to search. I'm running the query again now. Thanks. -- Fructibus (talk) 20:10, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
Its because the metadata is stored as a serialized php blob, which is the worst format ever. Bawolff (talk) 20:26, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

November 20

Purging all SVG renders

Would it be possible to automatically purge the rendering of every SVG file on Commons? There is some inconsistent rendering as well as coloration differences on newer versions of Firefox due to changes to librsvg, and it would be nice for older files to be rendered consistently. Jc86035 (talk) 06:54, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

You should ask on Phabricator:. Ruslik (talk) 18:40, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Commons:Mobile access/Mobile upload needing check

Unrelated, but Commons:Mobile access/Mobile upload needing check ✅ is also listed as a Wikimedia Commons backlog but hasn't been updated since 2014 and most checks seem to be from 2015 (with none more recent), is this backlog or is it already pretty much done? Neglect seems to be a huge problem here. Or maybe if I bring attention ⚠ to it here someone with enough free time ⌚ on their hands would want to “finish 🏁” this list as well. 😉 --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 12:19, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

yes, the control issues of admin corps, (i.e. mp3; or mobile) means they reserve the right to review everything, but cannot actually do the work, resulting in growing numbers of growing backlogs. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:20, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Isn't there a "File reviewer" class of users that can do this? The backlog doesn't seem too great and someone with enough spare time on their hands might complete this within a week, plus I've seen plenty of IP's review files as well. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 10:25, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-48

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:30, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

November 29

Flag creation help

uploaded image

I would like to upload an incel flag with different shades of grey (https://www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1C1TEUA_enGB728GB728&biw=1366&bih=662&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=AGQYWqifKubWgAbtpIjACA&q=incel+flag+&oq=incel+flag+&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i30k1.154881.156558.0.156801.13.13.0.0.0.0.88.918.12.12.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..1.1.85....0.7hgbcGeoswI) but im not sure if any on google image are free. Alternative suggestions are welcome too. 92.2.67.111 18:33, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

  • The image being on Google just means they found it somewhere on the web and are reporting it in a search result so Google is completely irrelevant to the matter.
  • A simple pattern of equally sized vertical bars in various shades of gray is too simple to copyright, so you can create such an image and upload it as PD-ineligible. - Jmabel ! talk 23:29, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
Im completely amateur (never created a flag before) Could you help me create a flag? 92.2.67.111 03:18, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
Given that it is below the level of complexity for copyright eligibility, it doesn't matter whether you create it yourself or copy it frome elsewhere. - Jmabel ! talk 05:25, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

92.2.67.111 -- I uploaded a minimal SVG as File:Incel flag.svg. The more usual place to ask is Commons:Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop. Of course, you couldn't upload any kind of image until you log into an account here... AnonMoos (talk) 15:36, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

November 27

[[26]] The photo itself states, "All Rights reserved Arron's Planet" and on the photo's source page references Creative Commons 3.0. — Preceding unsigned comment added by A ri gi bod (talk • contribs)

  • The Panoramio page from which it comes clearly says "Attribution-Share Alike", so the contradiction is there on Panoramio. The page there belongs to "Aaron Zhu" and the watermark refers to "Aaron's Planet" so this is presumably a single person contradicting himself, not some sort of copyright washing. I checked a few more of his photos and they all seem to have this same issue. Someone might want to work out a way to get hold of him to sort this out. - Jmabel ! talk 16:24, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Don't think we have to contact Aaron Zhu. He did not upload them but a bot. What Zhu did do was make them irrevocably Attribution Share Alike. But they have unacceptable water marks for use here on WC. Currently the watermarks constituent spam. So simply delete them and all other bot uploads originating from him, even though they are very good. P.g.champion (talk) 18:24, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
note: not really a "Promotional watermarks, which go significantly beyond asserting authorship/copyright, for example to promote a website", but rather a "Visible watermarks are discouraged, as they detract from the usability of a work." which is merely discouraged. perhaps you would care to revise the "proposed" policy before deletion? and this photographer's work from 2008 is watermarked, but not 2011. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 23:35, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
It's quite common to use "all rights reserved" alongside a more permissive license. For instance, the standard licence notice on BSD source code begins "Copyright (c) [dates] The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved." I've always assumed that the explicit release of certain rights overrides the generic reservation.
As for the watermarks, those really aren't obtrusive enough to take the picture out of scope. At least on the image above, they could easily be cropped out to leave a thoroughly useful image. --bjh21 (talk) 19:18, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Transwiki of lua modules

Can someone help me how to use Commons lua modules in my wikipedia? I just tried {{#invoke:Commons:Countries/Africa}} but failed parsing says "Script error: You must specify a function to call". Thanks. --Mdmahir (talk) 02:53, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

@Mdmahir: That didn't work in your post, either, so I nowiki'd it. Different projects may use different lua modules, or no lua at all. What are you trying to achieve, where is that, and where does it work successfully?   — Jeff G. ツ 03:00, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
@Jeff G.: Module:Countries/Africa is commons module i want to use in english wiki (for example). I thought commons can be used for common modules used across all wikis (by passing language code as arguments?). I have created my own module in english/Tamil wiki and don't want to copy the same source code in multiple wiki. -- Mdmahir (talk) 03:10, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
@Mdmahir: If we could use modules like that, we wouldn't need Template:Convert/Transwiki guide.   — Jeff G. ツ 03:21, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

November 28

Openstreetmap uploads

There is a great template {{Openstreetmap}} that does everything I need.

{{OpenStreetMap |name=hierboven}} fills out all the metadata in every section for a map snippet cropped from an OSM.

All you need to do is add the Categories. It can just about be used with Commons Upload Wizard if you paste it in the information field, as can be seen here. This is less than satisfactory, as my creative effort was minimal and I need to add the wrong license to pass onto details page. The code I want it enter should be


== {{int:filedesc}} ==

{{Openstreetmap|name=Justus van Effen komplex}}
{{Location|51.915918|4.430625}}

[[Category:Justus van Effencomplex (Rotterdam)]]
[[Category:OpenStreetMap maps of the Netherlands]]

and not


== {{int:filedesc}} ==

{{Information
|description={{en|1={{Openstreetmap|name=Justus van Effen komplex}}}}
|date=2017-11-26
|source={{own}}
|author=[[User:ClemRutter|ClemRutter]]
|permission=
|other versions=
}}
{{Location|51.915918|4.430625}}

== {{int:license-header}} ==

{{self|cc-by-sa-4.0}}

[[Category:Justus van Effencomplex (Rotterdam)]]
[[Category:OpenStreetMap maps of the Netherlands]]

So is there a better way? Do we need to change the licensing page on Upload Wizard to include Openstreet map? Do we need to change t|Openstreet map to overwrite the unwelcome Wizard additions? --ClemRutter (talk) 22:20, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

@ClemRutter: You seem to know what you're doing, why not use the experienced version?   — Jeff G. ツ 00:05, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
yes the upload wizard team is resistant to adding more templates, (although you could add it to the 2017 wishlist) in the meantime, we can use old uploader one at a time, or commons:pattypan for multiples. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:17, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
@Jeff G.: Yes that is the solution. Have a look at File:OSM Hundred of Hoo Academy.png to see the result. Is the metadata sufficient in your opinion- I am happy with it. Adding a map to 10 000 or so school articles is a significant benefit to the project and a task that we can use in training sessions with new editors. I intend to write this up as a tutorial sheet, and add a help paragraph to multiple pages, maybe a template would be appropriate?. @Slowking4: I do like the idea of adding this to the 2017 wishlist (wherever that may be), simplicity is so important. --ClemRutter (talk) 09:50, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
@ClemRutter: It would be nice to include the bounding box for the map into OSM template data, if you're adding these systematically. Jheald (talk) 11:29, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Yes- I was thinking of that. Stage one was to get this working, stage two was to document it using very simple language, stage three was to implement and explain bounding boxed and stage four extensions I haven't discovered yet. --ClemRutter (talk) 22:57, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
wishlist window has closed - m:2017_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Multimedia_and_Commons; but maybe this one m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Multimedia and Commons/Improve UploadWizard campaigns -- Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 23:49, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
@ClemRutter: The page looks good, except I don't like the exposed underscores in "Hundred_of_Hoo_Academy".   — Jeff G. ツ 12:06, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
I have added a note to Template:OpenStreetMap/doc‎. @Jeff G.: That was careless but so easy to fix. Done. ClemRutter (talk) 13:55, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Huge backlog dating back almost a decade 😰

Hello 👋🏻 everyone,

Currently at Commons:Batch uploading there are batch requests dating all the way to October 17th, 2013 which is a huge backlog (even the OTRS backlog is less than 90 days), currently there a list of scripters with only 8 🎱 (or maybe 9?) members, in fact some requests like Commons:Batch uploading/Peter Parker's Lam Qua Paintings Collection have not even received any feedback in years (this one is from February 1st, 2015).

Personally I think 🤔 that Wikimedia Commons or some of its people should try to convince more people to become batch uploaders, I’ve seen Wikimedia projects with backlogs but I’ve never seen a backlog that goes back as far as that of Wikimedia Commons’ Batch uploading. So this post is mostly a shoutout to anyone who is potentially interested in joining as maybe some people aren’t aware as to how big the backlog is. If someone doesn't know which tools they could use there’s Commonist and the VicuñaUploader among others, I personally can’t join the uploaders because I'm on a wireless telephone 📞 which suck for uploading 😅, and I hope that there are plenty of volunteers here who would like to tackle this 9 (nine) year old backlog.

I can't wait for the day that there’s no to little backlog there are the archives are full while the requests are nearly empty, but in its current state very few requests get completed and it would be a shame to archive them solely because they were unanswered.

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 12:19, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

you would have to recruit a team to close the backlogs, and better yet, design processes that do not have backlogs. give people who want to do mass uploads, easy to use tools, i.e. Pattypan. use of work boards to get work done requires a functional friendly community. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:24, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
@Slowking4: What are you doing to promote "a functional friendly community"?   — Jeff G. ツ 00:28, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
i'm collaborating with the friendly people. turns out they are all off-wiki, i.e. smithsonian, only show up here to get work done. and organizing for some culture change by hostile takeover, i've basically given up on this community becoming friendly on its own. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:35, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
@Slowking4: I take that as an insult to those of us on-wiki.   — Jeff G. ツ 00:43, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
you realize how many new uploaders are greeted by a talk page wall of deletion notifications? when there is not even a teahouse to answer questions, and there is a widespread history of admin misbehavior. world class librarians know this place as a "cultural buzzsaw"; that is a fact. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:51, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Well, actually the first thing new users see is a welcome message with some handy links, I do agree that "a type of teahouse" would greatly benefit Wikimedia Commons but the help desk seems to be filling in for this at the time, not sure how practically different they are. Though I am an inclusionist on any other wiki, Wikimedia Commons should be weary about copyright © as it could take the whole project down, but yes, I can agree that the templates might look a bit unpersonal. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 10:29, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Still, anyone willing to help with this backlog? Last time I checked any registered user (who isn't exclusively on mobile) can help with batch uploads. 😉 --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 10:29, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
for example, a recent friendly welcome here User talk:Rashkeqamar. sorry no - not working the backlogs of others' broken processes. i have plenty of work to do helping friendly people, like SoaP and Rosie. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 03:20, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
I was involved in several batch uploads, and every time it is a huge undertaking to preserve most of the metadata and display it in a form which is accessible to widest range of users through internationalization (i18n), to properly categorize your uploads, and possibly to add new uploads to correct wikidata items or wikipedia articles. We have a few users that specialize in this task (User:Fæ comes to mind), but it is a steep learning curve. May be we should rewrite introduction to Commons:Batch uploading to say that in most cases people should do their own uploads. They can propose uploads at Commons:Batch uploading but in the end the most likely path to get mass upload done is to learn how to use tools which are available to most users. --Jarekt (talk) 19:40, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

name of Nuvola sovereign state flags

In Category:Nuvola sovereign state flags both adjective and noun are used, this is quite chaotic and time consuming when someone has to use different flags. Maybe we could agree on a standard.

I was fixing the wrong adjective in a flag name (Chilian instead of Chilean) and I though the noun was better because it is usually shorter and slightly less independent than the language, I am not even sure if sometimes an adjective is widely used for some minor or recent countries, but on a closer look I see than the majority of flags uses the adjective. Even when it is potentially ambiguous (Nuvola Chinese flag.svg). Also, sometimes categories names and flag names are different (see UK or Italy), and the upper level of the trees uses as with many other things the style category:flags of NOUN. So there is a global lack of coherence even on a "vertical" and not just "horizontal" direction.

So what should we do? can we agree on something after so many years? Am I the first person who noticed that?--Alexmar983 (talk) 08:12, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

First in Space!

The spoken voice of astronaut Paolo Nespoli, in English
The spoken voice of astronaut Paolo Nespoli, in Italian

The first content made specifically for Wikipedia & Wikimedia Commons, in space!

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/11/29/astronaut-spoken-voice/

-- Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:43, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Excellent work.
Anyone looking for the most recent space images, will want to know there is a daily 'slurp' of the latest ESA CC-BY-SA images to Commons. See ESA batch upload project for details. --Fæ (talk) 12:53, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Community Wishlist 2017 voting

Hey, just so you don't miss it – the voting for the m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey has started now. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:00, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Become a Tech Ambassador today

Hello. Please help translate to your language. Thank you! Do you have a passion for technology? Do you enjoy supporting this community in things like figuring out software changes and communicating with the developers, or maybe you would consider doing it, but you don't know where to start?

The Community Liaisons team at the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for active tech ambassadors in this community. We would like to help make this volunteer role an attractive and low-barrier contribution path in our movement. You can add your name to the table on Meta, or you can let me know about someone else who should really, really be in that list.

Please, do not assume that you are not "fit", that you lack the skills, or the experience etc. If you have doubts, questions, etc., let's chat. Thank you for your attention! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

November 30

Permission

Am i permitted to upload the following image to wikimedia commons? https://iori-komei.deviantart.com/art/Second-Largest-Religion-by-Country-2013-407960138 79.67.72.227 02:18, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

The license in there is not compatible with Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). See Commons:Licensing#Well-known_licenses. Also, that image is watermarked; you would need to PM the creator to use the unwatermarked image (which is highly unlikely given the fact this is from 2013). theinstantmatrix (talk) 02:24, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
Is that image even still up to date if it's from 2013? And in cases as this I would say that sources might be important as the reliability of the reports can be disputed (such as the fact that not every country uses the same methodology to collect information). --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 12:11, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
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