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This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:11, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:56, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
In September 2024, 1 sysop and 1 bureaucrat were elected; 5 sysops and 1 oversighter were removed. Currently, there are 179 sysops, 7 bureaucrats and 3 oversighters.
The last 15 or more requests on the above page are displayed as being archived, although they are not yet so. Somebody pleae fix it. --トトト (talk) 23:20, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:25, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Cat-a-lot is slow
Very slow, about 1 edit per second. Up until recently and since “forever” it was lightning fast, able to edit all 200 files in a cat page in a couple seconds. To whom or what should we thank for this improvment, and what reasons were given for that thankfulness? -- Tuválkin✉✇00:48, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
I was wondering why it's been slow lately. Totally handicapping it just because the site crashed once seems a little ridiculous though. --Adamant1 (talk) 05:03, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
According to a comment from a WMF worker it brought the site down more than ten times and was causing problems consistently. A comment from a different volunteer pointed out it brought down all Wikis for 10-30 minutes at a time. The current state of Cat-a-lot is the result of an emergency fix, but whatever improved version takes it place will have to abide by the API guidelines that it previously ignored. ReneeWrites (talk) 09:40, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
I stand corrected. I thought I had read that it took the site down once in August. Ten times for that long isn't great. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:19, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
Hi everyone, if we use the template concerned, there are automatically in the Category:Cosplay by event the different years for each event, which is duplicated with the sub-templates. Is it possible to modify the main template to limit the number of categories? Ellicrum{bablute [...]}22:37, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
I've seen a number of images similar to these pop up while attempting to categorize new uploads - they appear to be stylized representations of a name, but I'm not sure what that's called. Is there a standard name and/or category for this type of image? Omphalographer (talk) 20:40, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
I mean the seals in particular. While those categories do contain a number of images of this type, they're general to all Arabic calligraphy, not this specific form. Omphalographer (talk) 02:11, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Invitation to Participate in Wiki Loves Ramadan Community Engagement Survey
Dear all,
We are excited to announce the upcoming Wiki Loves Ramadan event, a global initiative aimed at celebrating Ramadan by enriching Wikipedia and its sister projects with content related to this significant time of year. As we plan to organize this event globally, your insights and experiences are crucial in shaping the best possible participation experience for the community.
To ensure that Wiki Loves Ramadan is engaging, inclusive, and impactful, we kindly invite you to participate in our community engagement survey. Your feedback will help us understand the needs of the community, set the event's focus, and guide our strategies for organizing this global event.
Probably not. If I had my way there would just be flat lists or metacats of actors and actresses by name. Minus the whole "by birth" thing since it's totally pointless trivia. More so with "by decade of birth." I'd almost argue the same for "by nationality" to BTW. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:17, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
It doesn't make it easier to find someone, it makes it more difficult, unless accompanied by a flat list that contains all the entries. If we made searching in Wikidata easier, we would not need these intersection lists. --RAN (talk) 23:22, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
A commercial databank, wouldn't go to this level. We actually only need the Actors name here, Equity demands that names are unique, as it is.
Other websites do it better. Wikipedia is where people are going to look for this kind of info, not here. I suppose computers search progs will use Wikidata. Wikidata gives us a detailed infox already.
Main cats are flat cats, by definition. In this case the name of the actor. As an aside, I would be in favour of a rule that states we shouldn’t have more than 4 levels to any main cat. In this case the main cat being People. Broichmore (talk) 13:49, 4 October 2024 (UTC)
4 levels seems a little extreme but it's a good suggestion in general. There's some pretty cavernous category structures out there and most of this stuff is better off in infoboxes or otherwise stored on Wikidata's end anyway. With people specifically, most of the time we already know the person's gender from their first name. So it seems kind of pointless to have categories for it. Plus there's a risk of it getting really pointless and obscure depending on the situation. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:48, 4 October 2024 (UTC)
Separate issue, but how do you feel about categories for other biographical metadata like Category:Births by location (e.g. Category:Births in Fairbanks, Alaska) or Category:Deaths by year? These, too, feel like situations where Commons categories are being misused as a sort of Wikidata-lite to describe people, rather than classifying media. For instance, the aforementioned "Births in Fairbanks, Alaska" contains categories of images of people who were born in Fairbanks, not images of people being born in Fairbanks. Omphalographer (talk) 22:59, 4 October 2024 (UTC)
I've always thought it was weird that categories for "births" contain images of and categories for people who have already been born. I assume a lot of them are added through templates though. So I'm not really sure there's anything that can be done to fix the issue. That's assuming there would even be a consensus to deal with it to begin with. But if it were me I'd confine categories for "births" to actual images of the birthing process and/or babies being born. But then who knows where the sub-categories would go in that case. "People by birth location" maybe? Or just completely ditch the whole scheme as meaningless trivia outright. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:13, 4 October 2024 (UTC)
"So fix it" = existing in a vacuum. I wouldn't even mention it if it weren't representative of a much bigger problem. As I hinted in the other discussion, I really hate mentioning examples because it ALWAYS provides an excuse for the other person to dwell on the example and ignore the big picture. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 02:57, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Strongly agree with Omphalographer. We should minimize time and effort required as well as deduplicate work. For example, I think there could be a bot that suggests categories for Commons categories if the cats differ between WMC and WP so both are in sync (they don't have to be the same but often cats here miss some valid useful cats). Just saying "So fix it" would indeed be a case of existing in a vacuum, it would be a good point but that's not all the user said and elaboration of what the "much bigger problem" would be is missing. I could make an actual argument there for your case but I don't know if that's what you mean(?): Wikidata items may have inaccurate data and its items are less well maintained in the sense of watched for vandalism or flawed edits. An argument against that is that people here can see this flawed cat in the category page, they don't see the change in their Watchlist, but they can edit the Wikidata item if they notice it's flawed and also inaccurate data in the few (imo too few) fields that the infobox auto-adds to categories aren't that common. The main argument against this point is a potential solution: scripts that check for difference that likely need manual checking such as when a (surname) category set on an item differs from the category's first word, or items that have "Miss (surname)" where the first word differs and so on [a comprehensive ruleset could be developed]. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:06, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Uploading photos taken in a commercial establishment
I took these photos of an old Heidelberg printing press at a commercial establishment. Removed any identification of the location, but didn't ask for permission. I want to upload them as PD, but unsure of their copyright status.
I'm not an expert on this, but my assumption is that it's fine to post these. The focus of these images is the printing press, which isn't copyrighted, and the commercial establishment it's placed in would fall under de minimis as it's barely visible. I would not post the third picture however, and I would crop out the sign at the top of the first. You can use the information on that sign (by paraphrasing or summarizing) but I assume the text itself is copyrighted and can't be copied or posted in full. ReneeWrites (talk) 09:51, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Also as a non-expert, maybe you could be concerned that the text in some of these is copyright-able, so you may want to crop that out. Seems like a pretty small concern, but better safe than sorry. Edit conflict-y: I agree with Renee—Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯09:59, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for all the comments. I also noticed the first photo with some possible identification. But, I doubt that the establishment would object to the promotion. My concern is acceptability on the Commons. BTW, I already removed a lot of identifying information. As for location details, what does that mean? The 3rd photo with the 1985 date is meaningless. It's when the company folded.— Ineuw talk12:51, 8 October 2024 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:04, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 1932
Hi, I am looking for the catalog of the exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, 1932, by the Group f/64, or at least a list of artworks. Any idea? In newspaper reports? This would help finding copyright status for these notable pictures. Thanks, Yann (talk) 14:03, 8 October 2024 (UTC)
Hi, I just learned that Internet Archive has been attacked, and suffered a security breach: [1]. :((( We rely a lot on IA for various reasons, and that's very sad. Yann (talk) 10:36, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Yes, earthquakes in San Francisco area, a concern that I have expressed several times here, is only one of the risks that may affect Internet Archive. Fortunately, as Prototyperspective said, it seems that contents weren't affected, but if, as their only publicly available information says, they only have 2 production copies of each file (and no proper backups), some attack could possibly delete information completely (Archive stores so many files that a complete destruction due to an attack seems highly unlikely, though). I hope this event will help them to greatly improve their infrastructure, and to get the money they would need for that. I hope that the recent Archive's partnership with Google also helps with this. MGeog2022 (talk) 20:04, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
By the way, while WMF has much better resources and infrastructure than Internet Archive, absolute security does not exist, so this is a reminder that Commons media dumps are a real need (as well as true offline backups ready to be restored, both for media and for text content in all WMF wikis). MGeog2022 (talk) 20:26, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Category slideshows
Does anyone understand why the UI to start a category slideshow uses such "mystery meat" navigation? Nothing obvious about the symbol at all. - Jmabel ! talk14:32, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
In the Upload Wizard there are separate fields for "Main subjects visible in this work" and "Category" (which possibly should read "Categories"). I wonder why it is necessary to have both. In what case would (or could) a "main subject visible" NOT be a category? ITookSomePhotos (talk) 17:59, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Agree, it's duplication of work. I think categories should automatically sync to structured data if SD is to be used at all. However, note that a file may not depict some things that are in a category...however people also add depict statements for such things (e.g. when a video is only about sth but not depicting it) and there's also categories that are not about the contents in terms of what is being depicted such as Category:Videos without audio. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:50, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Concur with Andy Mabbett. Ditto for an event at the building where it is mainly a photo of people, probably for a floor plan, certainly for a building permit, etc. - Jmabel ! talk14:08, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
It makes sense and I don't want to argue against it...I'd just like to leave a note about four things to consider:
people often set SD for depicts: the building (using that example)
when it has some depicts statements set the main thing depicted (door handle using that example) may not be in the SD while it's in the cats if cats are set in ca >95% of cases
the category could (often should) have a dedicated subcategory for pictures like that
the depicted thing can be inferred from the combination of categories set (e.g. close-up photos of door handles + building xy + other cats = pic depicts door handle of that building)
Note that I deliberately asked how a "main subject visible" would or could not be a category, and not the other way around. In the case of the door handle, still, my point holds. We would have to specify "door handle" twice, once as a category, and once as a depicted object, apparently redundantly. ITookSomePhotos (talk) 17:25, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Though I guess the way things are set up now, if we only specified the categories, "door handle" and "building X", and no separate "subjects visible" information, then we would lose the information that "building X" is NOT visible. If this is important to capture, then I suppose in an ideal world we would specify visible objects once, and then have another field for "other categories". ITookSomePhotos (talk) 17:54, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Red fruits or flowers?
On a closer look it looks like to be flowers. Google Lens does not help me much. It shows a lot of commercial results with red things and little certainty. I got one Commons result, File:Ilex serrata7.jpg but this is not it.Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:28, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
I suggest you use another plant identification tool instead of asking humans here. These tools could also be useful for suggesting categories and I think several work better for plants than Google Lens but I don't know if there's any that is free software. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:48, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
As it is becoming evident that some submitted files do infringe on sculptural copyrights due to lack of FoP in their countries (I nominated some myself), is it appropriate to create tracking categories of deletion requests concerning WLM-2024-related files?
In this way, organizers may be able to reassess their rules for future competitions and some may even try the stepping stones to reform their copyright laws. We may no longer be able to categorize those of past contests due to the deleted files not being visible to non-sysops like me.
@Adamant1@GPSLeo on a second thought, I think it won't help much. With little to no initiatives of various Wikimedia chapters and local user groups as well as unwillingness of several countries to permit full exposure of their public spaces in commercially-available media, I don't think we can expect improvements in copyright laws very soon. Even the U.S. architectural FoP is not immune to criticism, albeit from a small sector composed of some architects and lawyers who are critical of the 1990 AWCPA as having deprived architects the right to control the U.S. public's images of U.S. buildings. Expect some "unsurprising surprises" on FoP statuses of some countries. Withdrawing my categorization proposal, to reduce some stress on my part. JWilz12345(Talk|Contrib's.)06:24, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
Wikidata infobox forcing Wikidata based DEFAULTSORT
The {{Wikidata Infobox}} template seems to impose an (anglosaxonic?) DEFAULTSORT ordering on categories of people based on Wikidata, without broad discussion with the community and completely messing up a number of categories. Example: Category:Male politicians of São Paulo, try to find Category:Professor Fernando there, even if you know his real full name. It's impossible. Not only he is not know by his full name, and we are expecting an A-Z order of category names, but even if you happen to know his full name, someone added a surname on Wikidata that doesn't even exist in Portuguese. Shouldn't this Wikidata DEFAULTSORT imposition be removed or at least "opt-in" for that template? Pinging @Mike Peel: , who develops the tool.DarwinAhoy!14:16, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
Pinging @Animalparty: who also noticed this problem some years ago. This situation seems to be lingering here for long, I wonder why it hasn't been fixed yet with a simple opt-in policy for that automatic Wikidata based DEFAULTSORT ordering, instead of forcing it everywhere and causing a mess.--DarwinAhoy!14:36, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
You can disable its DEFAULTSORT.
wdib is used millions of times. obviously its practical solution is going by "opt out" instead of "opt in". RoyZuo (talk) 14:50, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
You can just add defaultsort and the bot then de-activates the infobox based sorting. That the default is English comes from category names being in English. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 14:51, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
Yes, it was incorrectly set up in Wikidata, that's why it was barely findable in that system. Now that I fixed it adding his surname Pieri he is impossible to find there, unless you know that rather obscure information. And please stop picking singular cases among the almost 100 which are there, obviously some of them would be correct, while many others will not. That one you brought now has the sorting key "Pires", so it's not even an appropiate example as it's not using that automated DEFAULTSORT. DEFAULTSORT key is the name the person is generally known for, in that case "Pires do Rio". There's no general rule related to using given names, surnames or pseudonyms for teh defaultsort. DarwinAhoy!15:53, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
If there is no rule, it never should have been implemented by default, instead of bringing this additional burden to the community here. 🙄 DarwinAhoy!17:12, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
Fun fact: the infobox is designed in such a way that it can be replaced by a new system when that becomes necessary - e.g., if infoboxes could be built into MediaWiki, or we migrate away from the category structure, since it's just a way of displaying the relevant information from Wikidata. With this issue, it's been great to see the discussion here, it seems no change is needed for now. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:15, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
I've had a lot of issues with DEFAULTSORT myself. It really shouldn't be the default, but then that would kind of defeat the purpose of the whole thing. So maybe it should just be axed? There's no reason people can't, or shouldn't, sort categories whatever way they want to without it being imposed on them through a template though. --Adamant1 (talk) 20:47, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
If adding the DEFAULTSORT template manually overrides the Infobox's DEFAULTSORT, I don't really see what the issue is. Most casual or novice editors won't think to add the template themselves (and even experienced editors sometimes forget to, i.e. me). In the vast majority of cases it does its job correctly and the few instances where it didn't it can be fixed manually. The alternative is having to add it manually to all categories. ReneeWrites (talk) 09:28, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
It seems to me entirely natural that the Wikidata rule that, given the right data, is correct well upwards of 95% of the time (98% would not surprise me), is used by default. Just so long as we can override, which we can, that's fine. - Jmabel ! talk09:42, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Sinigh and I disagree about dashes in category names, especially for dates. I favor the ISO/IEC 646 character known as the hyphen-minus. He favors "–" (which I copy-pasted here, I'm not certain of the code point and I'm headed out the door in about 2 minutes). Our discussion so far can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Sinigh&oldid=934116270. Probably further discussion should continue here, not there. Other opinions sought, because we each have a decent rationale, but are unlikely to convince the other. - Jmabel ! talk06:00, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
En dash indicates a range, so 1800–1885 would be correct. This is as far as I can tell the norm on Commons for both category and file names. The universal hyphen/minus sign is used in category names that don't indicate a date range, see for example every entry here: Category:Days by day. ReneeWrites (talk) 06:31, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Category names should use hyphen/minus sign, not en/em dashes. Per Commons:Categories#Category names policy "Basic English characters (ISO/IEC 646) are preferred over national variants or extension character sets (for instance, 'straight' apostrophes over 'curly'), where reasonable." Category names should be something that can normally be typed with a keyboard and should not use extension characters where there is no need. Hyphen is perfectly understandable range sign. MKFI (talk) 06:37, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
The policy says "where reasonable", which affords flexibility, and its use for ranges is not only completely reasonable but also grammatically correct. The en dash serves a specific purpose that is universally recognized and does not introduce ambiguity, which is why most English-language style guides will call for the en dash to be used in this way. That it can't be found on most keyboards seems to be the only real argument against it, and I find it completely unconvincing. ReneeWrites (talk) 09:25, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
I agree, especially since it's very common to use Commons:HotCat for categorizing, so the optimal solution is "Title with en dash" and "Category redirect with hyphen". I appreciate that it is somewhat cumbersome to input en dashes, but they are typographically and semantically correct and while HotCat or similar tools are certainly not mandatory, they can easily resolve the issue for those who really care. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯09:34, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
I just wish to point out that I believe typeability is generally a valid concern, so I don't take issue with the basic premise of the discussion. But I only agree to the extent that I'm certain this could have been a real problem. My main objection, however, is that it seems very unlikely that the range dash (or hyphen) will ever be typed. To clarify, the original examples were Category:Hendrik Koolwijk (1800–1885) and Category:Iraqi Army in the Gulf War (1990–1991), which made me wonder: When is anyone ever going to type full category titles like those? And if they were to, when would they actually have to?
If typeability is indeed relevant here, I don't see why it is only considered important when it comes to the dash, while diacritics and language-specific characters derived from the Latin alphabet are preferred. Don't they, more often than not, cause an arguably worse version of same perceived problem?
"Title with en dash" and "Category redirect with hyphen" sounds like good strategy, and hopefully it's also an acceptable compromise. From that point of view, it's actually quite convenient that categories with range hyphens often already exist.
I hope this will be accepted as a compromise too. I know Commons isn't Wikipedia and we do our own thing here, but I do find it useful to look at how things are done on Wikipedia when an issue like this crops up (one that's not Commons-specific, I mean) on how they've dealt with it, and "Title with en dash, redirect with hyphen" is the compromise they settled on as well. ReneeWrites (talk) 10:12, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
If I understand it correctly the short summary of what this is about is whether the - or – character should be used. If there is some decision either way I think this should be in some guidance page where it's also clarified where each character is to be used as well as a bot/script that automatically moves categories accordingly. Additionally, it would be best if not needed that a technical change is implemented that makes HotCat autocompletes with – show up when using the more common minus - character. This is a broad subject and also affects for example Wikipedia lists which sometimes intermingle both. If there is a code issue or proposal about the autocompletes showing up, please link it here. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:57, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Agreed on documentation and to be clear, HotCat will correct/autocomplete any category redirect, either those that use standard MediaWiki syntax (i.e. "#redirect[[:Category:Foo]]") or by using {{Catredirect}}. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯12:07, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
To clarify: I meant that it should show the autocomplete without requiring there to be a redirect with the same name but a different hyphen character. E.g. always whenever there is a – between numbers show this cat in the autocompletes even if the user entered a minus - despite of there not being a redirect. Maybe it's not really needed because that character usually comes only near the end of a cat title, this would be needed if sometimes this is near the start of a cat title. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:13, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
That would still be a brilliant addition, though. Would it even be possible to automatically redirect searches whenever someone (understandably) types a hyphen where the dash goes? I mean, sort of like the way searches aren't case sensitive, could they also not be hyphen/dash sensitive? Only when needed, of course, i.e. if there actually is a category with a dash where the person types a hyphen. Sinigh (talk) 13:34, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
It is possible, the question is how difficult it would be and what the best way to implement it would be. In any case, it probably needs a code issue for HotCat. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:11, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Thats the best solution, the hyphen. Juts because Wikipedia has a preference for en dash) does not need to apply to us. I keep on saying we're a databank, names of cats should be as simple as possible and contain easily available on the keyboard. No need for affectations. Broichmore (talk) 12:40, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia's preference is not and has never been the main argument here; ReneeWrites only told us how they solved it over there and pointed out that "we do our own thing here." As for the keyboard layout, everyone already knows that the hyphen is easier to type. That argument has been addressed in several ways, yet noone seems to have anything to say in response to those objections. Simply reiterating the original argument obviously isn't going to convince anyone. Sinigh (talk) 13:06, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
When using the deepcategory search operator it should detect self-categorization so it doesn't break. Until that is implemented, fixing self-categorization is especially needed (e.g. to enable it to always show results phab:T376440) but it's also a general problem if categories contain themselves (in these cases directly).
The report was empty / out of date for a long time but now MZMcBride (talk·contribs) updated it – thanks for that!
I worked on it until Ludwig_August_Fallon (default sorting not alphabetic sorting) except for year_in_India cats. Fixing these problems is usually quite simple – removing that category or replacing a template that sets the category with the categories. Sometimes one also needs to add other categories such as some taxonomic category. I requested on the talk page that it (a separate page / report) also shows categories that include themselves somewhere in their subcategories.
If this is done and with the two other reports announced above there would then be reports for nearly all issues with categories. After these have been solved to some extent what would remain are the issue of categories with just 1 file (debatable whether that's preferable over just categorizing the file like the cat), empty categories (see Quarry:query/7200 and many/most of them should be deleted), and mismatches between WMC and WP (mainly ENWP) categories which often means some cats of the WMC cat are missing and just need to be synced with WP.
--Prototyperspective (talk) 14:59, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
That would be great. It would only fail for categories that have themselves set via templates. If you neither create such a bot nor request one, I'll sooner or later propose one at Commons:Bots/Work requests. Some of these cats may benefit from human checking (because they lack cats) but that's not worth the time required and may get addressed via the mentioned category-mismatch detection that could implemented at some point. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:36, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! I don't know what the query for it is and hope MZMcBride updates it again at some point. Categories that contain themselves in some subcategory are just as much of a problem (e.g. cause deepcategory to fail and are logically contradictory) but aren't included there. If somebody is interested in these or can adjust the query (which is it?) to also scan several layers of subcategories, please see the report's talk page. When it comes to templates I suggest people who added the template are pinged or it's asked about at the template's talk page – often the best solution is to comment out or remove the template and replace it with the categories that it automatically sets except of the self-categorizing cat. Prototyperspective (talk) 09:27, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Not sure, maybe the templates can be fixed to do it more selectively.
Not sure if loops can be avoided entirely, but we could try to identify the categories where the parent category is also a subcategory. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 12:15, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the link, I've seen it before but don't know where I found the link and forgot about it – however, that's just some code without any info on how to run it. Can it be run in the Quarry tool? Loops can be avoided by putting all the scanned categories in an array and the checking whether the category currently checked is in that array. If so, it would not look into subcategories of that category and show it as one of the categories that contain themselves. This way it would scan layer by layer and the number of layers to scan could be increased over time. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:20, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
All direct inclusions should be fixed now (if my regex missed some, please tell me).
This means that the remaining cases would be template based (151 categories), Some template talk pages have notes about the problem: [2]. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 07:44, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
FastCCI's cat path exampleGreat! So this is already solved? Could you please put that in a separate query instead of just in some revision of a query about something else and then put that in some report?
Putting it in a report on Commons is also useful for people here to find that query, not just for accessing the results and working on fixing the issues. When it comes to fixing the issues what is still needed is showing a categorization path per each item showing why the second category is located somewhere in the former like in the attached image. Do you think it would be possible to add a column for that in the query? It would also be relevant to this request for a new tool/gadget and this issue for petscan. Such is one of the most needed functionalities to improve categorizations and petscan often shows files that do not belong into categories without a way to find out why (examples in the two links). Prototyperspective (talk) 13:17, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
If you won't forget about it and keep track of all the relevant info and the query then that may be a good idea. I don't think there's an issue with putting it into a report if nobody finds it anyway. A categorization path is also needed for e.g. the two other things I linked and maybe that could be used there. Didn't you say the number of self-categorizations is way down now and the remaining ones are due to templates? In that case it seems like the problem is already solved: making template creators/writers aware of the problem on the template talk pages so the problem gets fixed at the template and/or simply commenting out the template on the respective pages to replace them with the other cats. If you mean the 7500 cats that contain themselves somewhere, I don't think a bot could correct [many of] these self-categorizations – it does need quick human checking and that is best done by enabling users to only need very little time per correction (quick succession editing) including displaying the necessary info of the categorization path. The optimal solution would be displaying the categorization path with each cat having an x button to remove the cat that caused the self-categorization but requiring the user to click the cat and remove it with a second click is also good. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:21, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
They are all pairs as the sample above (Category:(26)_Proserpina_symbols + Category:Persephone_symbols). Longer chains are not include (e.g. grandparent = child).
Oh too bad, I thought I checked some and it was not a direct self-categorization and also I don't understand then why the query shows so many results while the report only has a few hundred or so or 151 remaining ones. In that case maybe it does need a report with two columns with a button to directly remove the problematic cat on either cat directly, maybe this can can be done with some specific URL and the URL could be attached next to each wikilink. No other idea, e.g. I think even for your example case where it's quite obvious to a human it would be difficult to a bot (one that has some chance of getting developed). Prototyperspective (talk) 17:50, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
The 150 are just the ones that are self-categorizations (1 category involved, as your report above).
i believe we have enough images that represents what QR codes looks like. and also there is many more redundant files. right now, 358 files. i believe we should do something about this. Category:Raster quick response codes. we should make DR'd these redundant files. and, i didnt check, also, i believe there is plenty of advertisements out there. modern_primatඞඞඞ ----TALK17:58, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Support. I'll go through these and open a batch DR later today. FWIW, you can decode most of these by pasting the image URL into Zxing - much easier than scanning them off the computer screen. Omphalographer (talk) 19:03, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
I uploaded a logo and it is stored locally on the English Wikipedia (en:File:Linpra logo.png).
I'd like to upload it to Commons with the same rationale as logos from Volvo, Ikea, Saab and others.
How do I upload it to Commons?
I don't see any documentation of the threshold of originality for Lithuania. Does someone have something? For the U.S. it should be OK. - Jmabel ! talk16:20, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
From a technical point of view, of course you could, but that doesn't make the copyright status in Lithuania any clearer. - Jmabel ! talk20:11, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
Changing the name of Category:Ivory Coast into Category:Côte d'Ivoire
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. ReneeWrites (talk) 11:29, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
First of all, I apologize for changing the name of a few categories, I didn't realize there were hundreds of them.
Since April 1986, the government declared that Côte d'Ivoire would be its formal name and has since officially refused to recognize any translations from French to other languages in its international dealings. So we have to change the name for all categories that include the name "Ivory Coast". Like we don't call Birmania anymore, or unlike Costa Rica which has never been translated into "Rich Coast", Côte d'Ivoire has an incredible number of different names. Ivory Coast (English), Costa de Marfil (Spanish), Elfenbeinküste (German), Boli Kosta (Basque), Obala Slonovače (Croatian), Ranná Bóga (Irish), Kotu di Bivora (Galician), Bregu i Elefantit (Albanian) and so on. -- Zorion eko 22:29, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
There is no Freedom of Panorama for sounds Does somebody have info on that? Videos of live music would be useful often and also there are several/many videos of such which if they aren't free would need to be deleted (example). I am trying to find wich music band was playing Use the Wayback Machine when it's functional – if they don't have the relevant page archived and other archival websites like archive.today and the Google Cache don't have neither and Web search engines don't show anything for relevant searches then you're probably out of luck but I don't see any problem with that since it's unlikely to be a very notable band where a photo is much needed and I think most such bands already have some photos on WMC. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:22, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
A band playing not permanent and therefore definitely not covered by FOP in most regions as FOP requires works to be permanent in public space. For cases like bell installations it could be a difficult question. GPSLeo (talk) 11:22, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. I wonder about the music but I think it can't be copyrighted if it's played in a public space. Nevertheless, I don't know if a concert etc is a public space in regards to whether videos of the live music can be uploaded under CCBY. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:45, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
The video ends with the arrival in a small train stop. A have been checking the stations in the en:Kyūdai Main Line article, but not finding it. Nearly all the bigger stations have a footbridge and this one does not. There is a Japanese text, but I am not certain that this the station name. Is there a handy way the extract an image from a video? I can do a print screen, but I am not certain this is the best way. (I am not used to working with videos). Is there an Japanese/English speaking forum, where I can ask the question? Unfortunatly OpenRailmap does not have an translate function. Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:29, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
Is there a handy way the extract an image from a video? In Firefox you can simply do what is described in Category:Still images from videos by Terra X. Alternatively, you can open the video locally and press shift+s (or ctrl+s?). A tool to directly upload stills from videos on WMC would be handy (especially for the linked cat). Prototyperspective (talk) 10:11, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
Note: It will be lower resolution than the video if one does not click Original file first as described in the cat. This may be irrelevant in many cases but when uploading stills to WMC the stills shouldn't be lower-quality than the video. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:10, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
If you like specifying train stations, this video (among several others) shows many of them. Maybe some of the places and villages shown could also be identified but I wonder about which use-cases that has, at least in the current form. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:27, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
I used the last modified time parameter of the original MP4 file, to add the correct time. I have added the start location. Is there a format to indicate the start and end location of a video? I have experimented with timetext in Dutch. Can I add the English text or is a completely different timetext necessary?Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:42, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
It does not work for the start position. You have to use a predifined location (item), not dump location coordinates. The destination point use gives a warning. Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:37, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
With this usable photo, the description is pure advertising. This is something I come across more often. What to do? Leave it as it is or reduce the text in this case to “Machu Picchu”? Wouter (talk) 17:43, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
This is common in YouTube video descriptions which are abused for all kinds of spam and junk as well. Ranked:
A meaningful description "Tourists posing on steps at Machu Picchu in 2023"
I often do photo editing on low-quality images and upload better versions (corrected exposure, etc). For example, File:Admiralty Centre Tower 2 (adjusted).jpg Is there an easy way to do this? Its a pain to have to manually go through the upload wizard, copy over the original author, license, description, generate a new file name with "(adjusted)" stuffed into the original name, etc. It seems like some bit of javascript could do all of this with one click. Does such a thing exist? — Preceding unsigned comment added by RoySmith (talk • contribs) 19:52, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
Others might be able to point you to a better tool, but the Basic Upload Form in Special:Upload might be useful for you. You can copy the entire description from one file and paste it here. This should almost definitely save you some clicks. Rubýñ(Scold)20:25, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.
Copyright question regarding document from "Memory of the People" (pamyat-naroda.ru)
Hi all,
I've uploaded a PDF document to Wikimedia Commons that I downloaded from the Russian "Memory of the People" website (pamyat-naroda.ru). This document details the World War II service record of my grandfather, Georgiy Pavlovich Osipov, and includes information about his unit, awards, and activities during the Siege of Leningrad.
The "Memory of the People" website states the following copyright information:
Правообладателем ИС «Память народа», включая входящие в ее состав программы для ЭВМ, электронные банки (базы) данных, включающие электронные копии архивных документов, является Российская Федерация в лице Министерства обороны Российской Федерации (далее – Правообладатель).
Собственниками архивных документов, электронные копии которых размещены в ИС «Память народа», является Российская Федерация (в части документов, предоставленных российскими государственными архивами, государственными органами и организациями), а также иностранные государственные архивы и иные организации, предоставившие электронные копии этих документов.
Правообладателями аудиовизуальных произведений, предоставленных Российским государственным архивом кинофотодокументов и размещенных на сайтах ИС «Память народа», являются авторы этих произведений.
Оператором сайтов ИС «Память народа» (далее – Оператор) является Министерство обороны Российской Федерации, либо уполномоченная им организация.
Все сервисы, а также информационный контент, предоставляемые сайтами ИС «Память народа», являются государственными информационными услугами, оказываемыми бесплатно.
Обязательным условием использования документов с сайта в изданиях, связанных с историей Великой Отечественной войны, является ссылка на сайт.
English Translation:
Legal Information
The copyright holder of the "Memory of the People" information system, including the computer programs, electronic data banks (databases) containing electronic copies of archival documents, is the Russian Federation, represented by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (hereinafter referred to as the Copyright Holder).
The owners of the archival documents, electronic copies of which are posted in the "Memory of the People" information system, are the Russian Federation (with respect to documents provided by Russian state archives, state bodies, and organizations), as well as foreign state archives and other organizations that provided electronic copies of these documents.
The copyright holders of audiovisual works provided by the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents and posted on the websites of the "Memory of the People" information system are the authors of these works.
The operator of the websites of the "Memory of the People" information system (hereinafter referred to as the Operator) is the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation or an organization authorized by it.
All services, as well as information content provided by the websites of the "Memory of the People" information system, are state information services provided free of charge.
A mandatory condition for the use of documents from the website in publications related to the history of the Great Patriotic War is a reference to the website.
My understanding is that the website considers its services and content to be state-provided information freely available, but requires attribution.
Could someone please advise on the most appropriate license to use? At this point of time, I gave it CC-BY-4.0. I want to ensure full compliance with copyright law and Wikimedia Commons guidelines. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
These documents were created during Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), so Creative Commons licenses did not exist at that time. Since Russia is heir of Soviet Union, general rules for government-created documents are applicable. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:34, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
Change in editing behaviour for keyboard shortcuts?
I've probably missed an announcement, but now if I try to copy something with command-C I get ''Italic text'', and if I paste something with command-V I get <sup>Superscript text</sup> - any pointers to where this changed, and how to disable it? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:10, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
With more investigation, this seems to be related to my keyboard overlay - if I switch to querty, it works fine, but with dvorak, it isn't. Weird. (I becomes C and > becomes V with dvorak, so the keyboard shortcuts then make sense...) Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 16:44, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
Is there any Help/Commons page about empty categories? I'd like to ask if these are noindexed and if not propose that they are made noindexed. Moreover, at some point it may be good to discuss what to do about empty categories created over e.g. 2 years ago of which there seem to be many. --Prototyperspective (talk) 11:14, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
The web inspector should be able to tell you if a page has the noindex command in the head of the page. I personally think noindex is overused and breaks the way google updates their indexes to a degree that makes if very difficult to change the page back to being indexed, and as such should not be used on pages that frequently change and where people have an expectation that the page should show up in indexes quickly once the no index command is removed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:26, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
Okay but then there is a problem with the many empty categories. I doubt that is a reason why Google (and DuckDuckGo) barely index category pages (and media) of WMC but I think we should leave them as little plausible reason as possible. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:34, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
I just found many categories with only infobox categories are either:
What is best done there? Should anything be done about the former? If not I wonder why there are only so few of these – do they maybe miss a cat for disambiguation pages? Is something needed or existing that adds an image automatically to a category if it's added to the corresponding Wikidata item if it's not in any subcat of it? I don't know how these images were added to the items, if people add them directly to the items via upload, maybe that tool needs a change so it's also categorized. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:10, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Disambiguation categories are fine. An infobox may be a bit excessive there, but the interwiki link from Wikidata is important, so it is linked to parallel disambiguations in other WMF wikis.
For the ones with an image in the Infobox, my first thought is, "So why the hell isn't this image (and possibly others) in the category?" I'd probably see whether the category can be filled in with some content. And given appropriate parent categories. - Jmabel ! talk19:18, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Some of the empty cats with images in infobox have the image in some equivalent category, for example in the same cat that is not misspelled. Other than that, it could be a good subject for discussion whether it would be better to have the image added to create a 1-image-category (over-categorization?) or just leave the image in the cats it's in and delete the empty cat for the time being (or if it varies when to do what). Here a separate report may also be best but one could also leave the main report unchanged and check the remaining bluelinked empty categories so people can see what's best case by case. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:25, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Moving from one data item to another in SDC
I created in Wikidata a new item d:Q130530281 as a subclass of d:Q117075694. I wil use the SDC script to move Commons files to the new item. However there are files such as File:Tramway de Gand - Enmarchement de la rame PCC 34 (6034).JPG where d:Q117075694 was used. Can I later check for files with both tram and train items?Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:57, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
I am creating an open-source app for browsing OpenStreetMap – the OsmAPP. You can access it at osmapp.org. One of main features of OsmAPP is showing a side panel with information on any clicked map feature or POI. This includes showing photos from many available sources, which is mainly from connected Wikipedia articles, Wikidata entries and directly linked Wikimedia Commons images (see eg. this page).
This connection naturally led me to think about making upload possible as well, as this could benefit both projects – supply Commons with real world images under correct license, and add photos to various map features in OpenStreetMap.
After a year of effort (the wiki api is quite challenging 😃), I have the upload script ready. I asked for the permission to make a test run, which succeeded (OsmappBot contributions). Now I would like to ask broader public about your opinions, and ideas how to make the most of it for Wikimedia Commons.
Regarding Freedom of panorama – the Upload dialog would warn users if the specifc country forbids public photos of buildings etc. I can't add the specific {{FoP-country}} templates programatically (that would need a AI object recongnition), but I will review uploaded images manually and add it if needed. OsmAPP doesn't have many users, I expect only handful of uploads per month. Mind that, this is not an import bot, it rather uploads images on behalf of logged in OSM users, any change I make to the bot will only affect future uploads.
Standard upload dialog
FoP in effect when uploading in countries from this list
Interesting. I suggest you create a video demonstrating its features and put it on YouTube and also upload it here. Please enable users to add one or several categories with autocomplete similar to the Upload Wizard on this site (maybe the HotCat script could be used for that). Prototyperspective (talk) 16:21, 9 October 2024 (UTC)
I would recommend rewriting Public photography is forbidden in this country. to Public photography is restricted in this country. as all but five countries with freedom of panorama provisions grant permission for some works but not others. For example, the United States has freedom of panorama for architecture but not sculpture. JohnCWiesenthal (talk) 19:20, 9 October 2024 (UTC)
Looks very interesting and promising! Thank you for the work! It would be a nice addition if login and upload with Wikimedia account would be possible. That would also relieve you from the responsibility at least for uploads done through that way. --Marsupium (talk) 06:42, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
@Prototyperspective – Thanks for the feedback. I think I could design a TextField with Commons category search. It will take some time though. Also good idea with the video. I will do it once I have the redesigned dialog ready :-)
@Marsupium – Thanks for the kind words. I think for Wikimedia users, I can provide a link to the official upload tool, there is already an option in OsmAPP to add wikimedia_commons photo in the Edit section of any feature, eg. here: https://osmapp.org/way/7645354/edit .. the upload dialog makes it only easier for OSM users to contribute to Commons. Zbytovsky (talk) 08:15, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
Need Help Add Image to Page
This page requested cropped images, which I created from the source image. However, the system penalizes if I try to add the new images to the page.
Below are the source image and cropped images:
Love American Style cast 1973.JPG - Wikimedia Commons
Love American Style cast 1973.middle.jpg
Love American Style cast 1973.1.jpg
For the last image, I uploaded several versions which you can see at my uploads.
@Starlighsky: You don't say what page (or even what website) you want these added to. The latter two are not very good photos, they are tiny, I would certainly hesitate to add them to (for example) a Wikipedia article. And "the system penalizes" is unclear. Is this something you were asked not to do? If so, you certainly should not encourage someone else to do it on your behalf. - Jmabel ! talk05:21, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
Here is the site: File:Love American Style cast 1973.JPG - Wikimedia Commons
There is a proposal to test if requiring anon users to confirm their edits by clicking the edit button again and showing a warning to avoid accidental edits can reduce the amount of bad edits. There is currently a consensus to test this but with only three people involved Commons:Village pump/Proposals#Simple edit confirmation. There was also the question on numbers of bad edits. I created a tool that shows how many edits are marked as reverted also compared to the patrolled edits that shows the potential high numbers of unseen bad edits [3]. GPSLeo (talk) 16:55, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
Seeking volunteers to join several of the movement’s committees
Each year, typically from October through December, several of the movement’s committees seek new volunteers.
Read more about the committees on their Meta-wiki pages:
Applications for the committees open on 16 October 2024. Applications for the Affiliations Committee close on 18 November 2024, and applications for the Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee close on 2 December 2024. Learn how to apply by visiting the appointment page on Meta-wiki. Post to the talk page or email cst@wikimedia.org with any questions you may have.
We use reverse image searches pretty often, mainly for determining if a new upload exists elsewhere on the web, but also for looking for 3rd party usage of the files we host. It looks like Google is deprecating its reverse image search in favor of Lens. What are people using as a substitute? I never got particularly good results with TinEye... — Rhododendritestalk | 14:08, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
I get good results with TinEye and use a browser extension so that one only needs to right click the image to reverse search it. I think it would be better if bots/scripts did the reverse searches. Don't know what you mean with the Google issue – it can still reverse search, maybe click on "Find image source" at the top. I don't think there are other options – they would be on https://imgops.com/. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:40, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
If I am performing a due diligence search to see if anyone is claiming to be the creator, or if a for profit archive like Getty is claiming an active copyright on an image I use both. I like that Tineye tells how many images it searched. --RAN (talk) 14:39, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
Automatic detection of potentially problematic domains in UploadWizard
Mockup of a potential message for problematic external source
You are encouraged to take a look at the project page, and to evaluate the current workflow.
We have also a request for feedback for you: we are considering adding a user alert during the upload process if a problematic external source is detected in the file. On the right, we are sharing some potential designs for the alert. We welcome community feedback about how it is phrased and whether it may be useful.
I did the requested cropping for File:Love American Style cast 1973.JPG - Wikimedia Commons
The cropped images are in the links for the respective images requested on the file page.
If someone has access to the technology to improve the cropped images, that would be great. Starlighsky (talk) 00:44, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
@Starlighsky: There is no way to "improve" a low-res image. AI can use it as a basis for something that is essentially fictional, but that is no longer a documentary image. - Jmabel ! talk08:31, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
Which Commons has plenty of, there's no rule against uploading upscaled versions of historical photos here. But the English Wikipedia would not allow such an image to be used to illustrate an article (per en:MOS:IMAGES), if that was Starlighsky's intention. Belbury (talk) 08:43, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
Of course, it's doubtful that people will want to have this discussion, but I'm going to try anyway. If Commons is truly a separate website and not simply subservient to Wikidata or Wikipedia, why should we host extremely low-res files solely to satisfy a POV held by Wikidata and/or Wikipedia editors that subjects be illustrated in isolation rather than in the context of uploaded photos? The default resolution on Wikipedia is 220 pixels wide. It doesn't take a PhD to figure out that when you crop an image to a lesser resolution, it's absolutely going to look like shit. Yet, that's been going on for years. Should we establish a deletion criteria for these crops when suitable replacements are uploaded and they become practically useless? RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 17:57, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
Commons has two roles: as a public-facing media repository in its own right, and as the shared media repository for WMF sister projects. Probably half the content we host makes sense only for the first purpose (e.g. no sister project is ever going to care what a particular streetcorner in Seattle looked like in 1894), 5-10% makes sense only for the second (e.g. Wikidata needs an illustration for an item, but no really good photo is available; someone has a chart that makes sense only in the context of a particular WikiBooks article), and the remainder at least potentially makes sense for both. The second role is why we have the rule that any file that is legitimately in use on any sister project is automatically in scope, and should be deleted only if there is an issue about rights. - Jmabel ! talk07:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
Genuine historical images relegated to art
This is one of my pet peeves. We have images, which pre-date publication of clear and informative printed photographs. IMO, they're correctly catted as Category:History of El Callao.
They could as easily have been put into a new, and perhaps superfluous category, of Historical images of El Callao. Instead, they have been transferred into a new category, entitled El Callao in art.
Apparently, it’s been decided to do away with such cats, as Historical images of El Callao, in favour of ‘’History of El Callao’’. I’ve no idea, how, that came about.
Surely it's simple to understand that only an image, by for example Van Gogh or any other abstract artist, of a location, is appropriate to put in an art cat. Whereas, views of buildings, battle scenes, or anything before useable photographs, are not art as such, they were never made as art pieces by the artist/s (sic) at the time. These images, in the main. were copied by from sketches made on the spot, or early Daguerreotypes.
Not a single image in El Callao in art is actually ‘’art’’, as opposed to a historical record (of the time)!
This is, as faulty as our habit of, creating a category such as USS Foo (ship, 2024), where ship is mentioned twice in the same cat name. We need to change the policy on both. Broichmore (talk) 13:38, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
I agree that many of the images in "El Callao in art" serve as important historical records, but they also hold artistic value, even if they weren't created as artistic pieces in the way we use that phrase today. Rather than debating whether they count as art, it might be more practical to categorize them in both "El Callao in art" and "El Callao in the xth century" categories, rather than getting into the weeds with a debate that is going to involve a lot more images than just the ones in that category. If someone gives you trouble for that (like by removing the "xth century" categories) you can argue that they count as historical records, but the "art" debate is a completely separate matter from that. ReneeWrites (talk) 14:40, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
AF-n Audio File Babel Boxes
It looks like the old BG-n babel boxes were moved to bitmap-n to solve the collision with the language code for Bulgarian when using {{#babel}}, but the same was never done for the AF-n audio file babel boxes and their collision with Afrikaans.
I thought I was being smart by creating redirects, e.g. Audio-4 as a template that redirects to AF-4, and it looked like I was. It now displays just fine if you use {{#babel|audio-4}}!
Then I realized I might've made a huge error in doing so...because it didn't add the categories, but then I realized that neither {{Babel}}nor{{#babel}} will add you to any of the "file format" categories that aren't a spoken language in the first place!
It seems every user page I checked under Category:Audio file editors either had the category manually added or used a tool like HotCat or AWB when BG→bitmap happened.
It looks like Category:Audio file editors was last edited before the BG-n -> bitmap-n move was made, and it (erroneously) recommends using {{Babel|BG-n}} over {{#babel|BG-n}} when {{#babel|bitmap-n}} will work fine now.
And {{Babel}}'s own page says that it is deprecated and {{#babel}} should be used instead...
¯\_ ⍨⃝_/¯
Although there are only six users total in the AF-n categories and I could likely implement any change entirely by hand in a few minutes, I don't want to make a mess of things, at least without asking for input first. -αβοοδ (talk) 19:25, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
Has this image been reversed?
Before I change it, perhaps someone else could offer their opinion or confirmation that the image File:Isle of Portland from north.jpg is reversed. It does seem that way to me, but OTOH it has been the lead image on the Wikipedia "Isle of Portland" page for well over a year, and I am surprised that no one would have noticed it, so just in case I am somehow getting totally confused ... ITookSomePhotos (talk) 20:50, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
Oh yes, sorry, I made the mistake of thinking ... well, never mind, just being an idiot. Thank you both for taking the time to look at it. ITookSomePhotos (talk) 14:45, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
Your confusion is completely understandable. IMO, you won’t be the last. I know Portland well, and it gave me pause. If I were you, I'd consider leaving a confirmation on the image's talk page confirming the orientation. You could also put in camera co-ordinates, as a suggestion. Broichmore (talk) 11:06, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
Category:Stores is a redirected to Category:Shops. So the differences probably don't matter even if there are any to begin with. Personally, I've always found putting everything having to do with retail selling in a category for shops to be a little weird. But it is what it is. So Category:Toy stores should probably just be a redirect unless your willing to relitigate the whole thing more generally. --Adamant1 (talk) 06:51, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
12 Public domain images from an archived page at archive.org, which I uploaded. I was was unable to specify the web-address/origin of the uploaded images, due to the current version of the website being banned. I can't even put the address here for you to look at because
"The text you wanted to publish was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to a forbidden external site. The following text is what triggered our spam disallow list: turismo-prerromanico.es."
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:43, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
Seems plausible. The linked web site has a footer which states Музыка, тексты и изображения сайта распространяются по лицензии Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. Next question is whether it's in scope; I can't help but notice that the artist doesn't have an article on any Wikipedia. Omphalographer (talk) 01:53, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
The threshold is much lower at Commons than at Wikipedia for some categories of media. Do we have an abundance of contemporary music? If not, then musicians do not have to be that famous to be in scope. We should even have samples of amateur music of different genres from different countries, if possible. Only when we have redundancy for some categories, we should heighten the threshold for them (usable quality should be required from the start, and some level of representativity, but not much more). –LPfi (talk) 10:01, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
More junk data being added to 'depicts' statements
I thought we had stopped the automatic addition of vague and irrelevant "tags" as values for depicts (P180) when we turned off the WMF's benighted Tagging Tool and reverted most of its edits, but apparently not. This has been going on for months, it seems. I just removed a load of nonsense values from an image and replaced them with the value for the item describing the actual subject. They were added by the bot in August 2023.
The bot approval - dated 2021 - says "depicts (P180) - What do we see in the photo. This based on the [[tags and on the reverse geocoding of the object coordinates". Separate SDC properties for tags exist.
The conversions are apparently handled by the list at User:GeographBot/Tags - but this includes some very problematic pairs, suggesting, for example, that a Geography tag of cross should be interpreted as depicting cross (Q40843) - a "geometrical figure". But the tag is most likely to be used on images depicting a Christian cross (Q392371) ("symbol of Christianity") or a Celtic cross (Q229788) ("Christian cross superimposed on a circle"). Another entry suggests that images might depict Ordnance Survey (Q548721) ("organisation that creates maps of Great Britain"). Another that images tagged as "standing+stone" depict menhir (Q193475) - a subclass of standing stones. Anything tagged "town hall" will be said to depict Rathaus (Q543654) - which is unique to German speaking countries. Odd, given that the entire Geograph corpus consists solely of images from the UK.
I do not believe there has ever been community consensus expressed that tag values should be used in P180 (I have asked previously, more than once, and have never been furnished with evidence). Such behaviour needs to stop, or be stopped; and the values moved or removed. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits18:53, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
What's the best way to make a bulk upload using the same Summary, License and Categories across all images?--Trade (talk) 01:03, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
With the Upload Wizard. You enter the license all the images will share in the first screen. In the second screen where you enter the summary and categories (and depicts statements, etc.), enter this information for the top image, then below there's a drop-down menu (closed by default) to "Copy information to other uploads". ReneeWrites (talk) 01:14, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Usage of "on Wikipedia" header for subjects that have multiple Wikipedia articles
To give an example Category:Photography. Maybe it's just me, but that large of an infobox just seems needlessly obtuse and pointless. Especially considering people can find links to Wikipedia articles from Wikidata if they want to. IMO it's not really useful to have a link on our end to every single Wikipedia article having to do with photography though even if some of the articles might be worth linking to. As it just gets in the way of people finding images and categories related to the topic. Thoughts? Adamant1 (talk) 05:21, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Both the {{On Wikipedia}} template and the cluster of "sister" ({{Sisterwiktionary}}, {{Sisterwikiversity}}, etc) templates below that seem unnecessary given that the Wikidata infobox automatically displays links to any associated projects in the user's preferred language. This may have been necessary before interwiki links were centralized at Wikidata, but it isn't anymore. Omphalographer (talk) 06:46, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Agreed, these are remnants of days gone past. Nowadays, they just add additional clutter and make the user experience less consistent across different pages. I think they can be weeded out without much concern. El Grafo (talk) 08:23, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Actually it displays the term in multiple languages which the infobox doesn't. For photography, this isn't particularly interesting beyond the F/PH question. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 10:45, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
The infobox automatically translates terms like these to the user's preferred language. If I read the page in English it has "animal" at the top, but if I change my language setting to Dutch, it changes to "dier", and so on. ReneeWrites (talk) 12:25, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
That's a monolingual approach. Depending on the topic, the preferred language may change. I would generally want to see English and Portuguese descriptions on anything related to Portugal or Brazil. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 12:28, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
We were talking about both the template and the infobox. Enhancing999 said he wanted two languages, and defended the use of a template that adds hundreds without filtering them out, because the infobox only does one at a time. That is wildly excessive. ReneeWrites (talk) 15:06, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
"photography" is obviously pointless as a category name to look for, as it's implied in almost all categories. Besides, the word isn't really any different every language. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 17:10, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Agree and I have already removed such from several categories. Category:Animals is one example where I removed it. Btw, it doesn't seem like it led to a drop in pageviews. The Wikipedia articles of various languages are already linked in the sidebar / the language panel and so redundant in terms of links. When it comes to descriptions and titles for categories in other languages (to make the cat understandable, findable in external search engines, and findable in the internal search engine when for some reason searching in another language), see Wish:Add machine translated category titles on WMC. In short I think all of these boxes should be removed since the Wikipedia links are already in the panel and it clutters the page while pushing its content down. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:47, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Replacing a working solution with a link to a wishlist entry (possibly existing for 20 years) results in the opposite you might intend. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 10:55, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Well good point. It's a link to a wishlist proposal to be precise. However, a) the motivation and need for it to be implemented would increase if problematic workarounds are abandoned instead of kept which inhibit truly addressing this b) such large headers aren't that useful for that purpose because it's hard to spot your own language text among the many links there and most categories miss these headers. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:59, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
(a) Yeah, it's true that things that have a half way working community solution might be less likely to be fixed then matters where we just let it be not working, afterall Wikimedia has paid staff for just that part. I doubt we should remove working approaches just for that.
(b) isn't there a feature that highlights that? Personally, I think these are more useful in cases where the language is less known (to me) or the terminology a bit obscure. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 11:06, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Isn't the language thing a none issue if the Wikidata infobox automatically displays links to any associated projects in the user's preferred language anyway? I really don't understand what purpose a list of articles in different languages serves at that point. Especially considering as Prototyperspective points out it's impossible to find an article for any given language in the list anyway. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:12, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Looking at Category:Animals there's links to other projects in the infobox under the images of animals, right above the section for audio. So I'm not really sure what your talking about. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:27, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Other than the layout being suboptimal, it displays actual translations, sometimes more than one (sample: Esperanto/eo). The links are secondary. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 12:07, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
1. You said no links involved which is what I referred to 2. The language panel also displays actual translations (indeed just one which is the page title). Prototyperspective (talk) 12:14, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Good point. I had looked at the diff only.
The language panel isn't really a substitute. For English language only users, it might be sufficient, but it doesn't really support our multilingual website for other languages. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 12:18, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Apart from all the other things wrong with this, it's manually populated, which is just silly. I've removed it from Category:Photography, along with the duplicative sister- project templates (incusing one linking it to, er, Category:Photography!). We should probably consider a script to mass remove them from categories and galleries; then delete them. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits11:16, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
I started doing this for some existing instances of sisterlinks and noticed a couple of other category page cleanups which should perhaps be performed concurrently:
Placing templates in a standard order to achieve a consistent appearance.
Would be good if somebody did that and probably the place to request this would be Commons:Bots/Work requests. Probably something should be done to increase the number of people able to and engaged in creating in Commons bots since there's already a fair amount of requests there + a number of archived unsolved requests. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:51, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
It's a good initiative. I think it would be helpful to first establish what the actual template order should be and what is and isn't suitable for category descriptions before we start initiating a mass editing campaign. Wikipedia has an elaborate manual of style but Commons does not (though I think we could copy a few pages from there). The upside to having established policies is that it leads to clear guidelines, uniformity, and avoids conflict and edit warring. ReneeWrites (talk) 19:56, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
The alternative to the "sister links" templates is the existing list of links in {{Wikidata infobox}}, as well as the automatically generated interwiki links in the sidebar ("In other projects" / "In Wikipedia"). Manually maintaining a local duplicate of these links is unsustainable. Omphalographer (talk) 20:48, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
For sister links, Wikidata Infobox might be an alternative. Maybe it can be enhanced to point to other languages. The sidebar doesn't seem to work in general. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 20:56, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
It's unclear what or how you think it should be improved. I recently listed 11 issues for MediaSearch and its underlying search algo that is also used in the prior SpecialSearch that you link to here. I think it should show some results of the category you linked to because e.g. it contains the word "work" that you searched for multiple times in its categories, description etc combined with the other terms you searched for. I also think the Commons search should be improved, and one issue that I listed there relevant to your case here is that files in use in mainspace on some or several Wikipedias would be good to display high up in the search results and several/many files in the cat you linked are used. The files in the search results are also used but files in the cat you linked aren't even displayed on the next few pages (or scrolling down in MediaSearch). Prototyperspective (talk) 18:41, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
New reports: categories with only redcats & cats with only infobox cats
I requested the Quarry query here so a big thanks to Matěj Suchánek who implemented it. (Collaboration like this makes everyone more productive and saves time as well as making each one's expertise/skills/knowledge more fruitful.)
In previous discussions about uncategorized categories I clarified multiple times that these categories are also missing categories or have issues but don't yet have a report where they show up. What I did not know at first is that this could be solved via a Quarry query and what the place to request such queries is.
Most of the categories on these reports need some work. So if you're interested in helping out please take a look, especially if you already have experience with cutting down the Special:UncategorizedCategories list. You can add /Page_1 to the two report links if you want to see only a small sample of the first 500 items.
Lots of work needed there. Probably, the list will not grow back as quickly as the entirely uncategorized cats in UncategorizedCategories.
Thanks for putting this together! Any chance it could be formatted as a table instead of a comma-separated list? That'd make it a lot easier to work with. Omphalographer (talk) 22:28, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
I thought so at first but then found it would be easier if one was able to see just as many items as possible in one view. One can see lots of links without having to scroll around. The link color changes once you visited the pages so e.g. row-numbers don't add anything. A table would be useful if there were more columns....maybe at some point there could be additional columns that show e.g. whether a category only has 1 file (or the count of files) but I currently don't see how that would be useful (if anything that could go into a separate report page). Is there any reason you'd prefer a table? It wouldn't be difficult to convert it to a table but I don't see what advantage it would have. Maybe you mean a table with multiple columns but only these wikilinks instead of a one-column table but then I wouldn't see the difference to the current format. One thing that may be useful is a page with raw URLs so one can open many of these in new tabs at once (select and drag onto a tab or right click->open in new tabs). Prototyperspective (talk) 22:36, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
There's one way a table format may be useful: making it possible to sort these alphabetically. However, the query could be changed to order the categories that way without losing the advantages of the comma separated list which I think only needs ORDER BY page_title DESC in the query (probably will be done before the next report update). Prototyperspective (talk) 22:43, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
I, for one, find the current format very off-putting (but thank you for doing this at all).
It's OK if we have a format that doesn't end up showing everything in one view while there is so much to show. People will whittle down the list pretty quickly, in my experience, and it can be re-run periodically. It doesn't matter if not everything is in front of people at once while the content is still voluminous; it's a lot more important for this sort of task that what is in front of us is sane to skim. - Jmabel ! talk20:51, 9 October 2024 (UTC)
Alright the question is simply which other format would be better and why? Currently this is only one link and doesn't even other data for other columns and people often dislike things at first they are not familiar with. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:48, 9 October 2024 (UTC)
If a list format would be better the page would be very large and I don't know if it causes other problems but one would have to scroll a lot. Without alphabetic sorting, a list format makes less sense. But I guess once the new version is sorted it could be easier to skim or skip over similarly named items if it was in a list format. Maybe there could be multiple columns so the page isn't so large. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:58, 9 October 2024 (UTC)
A wiki table (with one row for each category) would be easiest to work with. Even if the report itself isn't sorted, presenting it as a table will allow users to sort it themselves. Omphalographer (talk) 22:16, 9 October 2024 (UTC)
The report has been updated now. It has the same sorting as before (no ORDER BY SQL added) but now has a table format so it can be sorted alphabetically by clicking on the column header. Moreover, empty categories have been split off from the report. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:45, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
Pretty hard to figure out any kind of pattern in that list. Maybe a simple word count helps. I used that when the "uncategorized" reports were longer. It allows to fix several similar ones at once. Sample wordcount (some "words" are years or other numbers): from 7899, Fire 7879, Sanborn 7877, Insurance 7877, Map 7876, County 7525, in 1170, North 829, Oklahoma 681, Texas 572, Rhine-Westphalia 546, California 546, New 537, Pennsylvania 513, Washington 492, Missouri 464, of 382, 1911 356, 1909 346, Carolina 332, 1912 328, 1910 324, Ohio 317, Jersey 317, Montana 296, 1914 287, 1913 282, Oregon 281, Indiana 272, Kansas 271, 1921 266, 1908 256, 1915 255, 1920 245, 1916 245, 1922 242, Georgia 241, 1905 235, Florida 232, Virginia 222, Maine 219, City 218, by 212, South 207, 1904 203, 1917 194, 1901 190, 1900 180, Massachusetts 178, West 176, 1919 175. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 23:46, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. At the next update it will be sorted alphabetically, maybe that helps. I noticed most of the Rhine-Westphalia cats do have categories but they have been set by a template by the first and only edit by XrayBot and I don't know how to best make such categories disappear from the report – one example for that would be to have a query show all cats included there that have a template set (which usually sets cats) so all of them could get a nulledit to remove all which do have a category from the report (that's just an example, I don't think that's readily possible). Prototyperspective (talk) 09:23, 8 October 2024 (UTC)
Updated the reports. Down to 1965 now after Sanborn maps cats (thanks Enhancing999 for that) as well as empty cats (separate report) have been taken care of. The one with only infobox categories now has 4364 items (but so far didn't have the empty cats get deleted).
Second was also updated and is at 4106 but it's probably better to cut down on the report of cats with only redcats because the cats with only Infobox cats can be solved via some tool/script that syncs their categories with ENWP. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:02, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
I uploaded the files with the intent of creating the most best collection of sanborn maps anywhere.
Not only did i fail to find a single person with the slightest enthusiasm for it, but i encountered a number of obstacles. At first i tried to slalom around and through the stupidity, but it was going to be a long process of grinding through ever more peanut brainery, so i started a vote to give me the necessary authority to shove it aside and to flip the switch on the bureaucrats (of which i conversed with a total of at least 5, who were all not talking to each other) in one stroke of genius. I lost the vote, so i pulled the plug on the enterprise. As a bonus, i witnessed a bunch of people who most be on probation or something, manually rename 20000 files, because nobody writes scripts for them, and i learned that commons cannot reliably rename files and the ticket is 10 or so years old (i think there was more than one ticket in that general problem domain). It is not possible to work on a data-mega-center on complex issues if the number of people with a problem solving attitude hovers around 0%. Nowakki (talk) 18:05, 8 October 2024 (UTC)
@Nowakki: Hi, Your intend is good, but your working process isn't. 1. You shouldn't count on anyone else to fix problems you created with your uploads. 2. You should have start slowly, only uploading a few dozens or hundreds of files, and check if everything was OK before uploading gazillions of files, where the problems have overcome you. Yann (talk) 20:19, 8 October 2024 (UTC)
Nobody cared about sanborn maps until they suddenly started caring in the middle of the upload campaign. Even after the debate was over involving more than 5 people, at no point did a person appear who was in charge of these maps. I can compensate for lack of leadership with initiative, but if you don't want my sanborn power-user setup, then you don't want it. Nowakki (talk) 20:43, 8 October 2024 (UTC)
I run into similar issues myself sometimes where people criticize and attack me for doing things that are supposedly controversial. But it's almost impossible to know what is or isn't going to trigger any of the over sensitive snowflakes on here or otherwise cause a controversy until after the fact. There's really no way what-so-ever to know before doing something what random nonsense is going to be an issue or otherwise cause problems though. And good luck getting anyone who throws a fit about it to actually help you fix the issue. Which 100% they should if their the ones making an issue out of it to begin with. More on topic, is there a reason that a bot can't just add parent categories to the ones for Sanborn maps? --Adamant1 (talk) 23:35, 9 October 2024 (UTC)
Creating the categories is easy. Just got to find somebody to devise a scheme and write a bot.
@Adamant1: I spent like two weeks or so writing code for this. I don't really need anyone to do anything, except give me mass rename privilege for a selected number of files.
Isn't there a way to override borderline imbecile snowflakes, who have the power to vote, with the help of specially trained overlords who act in the interest of progress being made? Nowakki (talk) 12:30, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
I think people who refused the privilege back then were using about as many brain cells as you just did when you imagined you knew how to be of help. Nowakki (talk) 13:35, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
You're quite condescending, even more than Adamant1 here once again. I prefer you do not upload these files versus uploading them the way you did. Apply again with the info why you need these permissions. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:45, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Yeah well, I find your attitude towards Nowakki rather patronizing myself. I don't think it really helps to go off about how they shouldn't have uploaded the files to begin with at this point. Different strokes for different folks I guess. I'm sure your the one who's in the right here though just because your acting more agitated about it then I am.
More on topic, the files have already been uploaded. So the question is what to do about it now. I'm a little fuzzy on the original details, but assuming this mainly (or only) has to do with uncategorized categories then I don't see what renaming the files would have to do with it. Someone could use User:Nowakki/test3 as a starting point to create the categories through a bot edit. Then the file names could hopefully be fixed in the future, but that's tangential to creating the categories. Or I assume it is. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on that though. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:09, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
I'm not agitated at all and nowhere was I acting patronizingly or condescendingly towards Nowakki. I don't really care about this case at all. A user asked about it and I looked at the history page and pinged the respective user, then Nowakki said there's problems with renaming without any further details and I helpfully mentioned this can be done by requesting file-moving rights, that's all. Yes, the question is what to do about the files & cats now. The answer to your question of what file naming has to do it is that Nowakki wrote […] except give me mass rename privilege for a selected number of files. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:24, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
I think you were. We'll have to disagree though. But that's not all you said. You seem to have a real problem with being patronizing towards other users and then trying to weasel out of it by acting like everything you said was totally innocent and on topic when it wasn't. Regardless, I think the best way to deal with this is by doing a bot edit based on User:Nowakki/test3. But I have other things to do myself. So someone else is going to have to do it, but that would be my suggestion. I see you asked Nowakki to create a bot request. So at least we're in agreement about it. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:56, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
@Nowakki: Creating the categories is easy. Just got to find somebody to devise a scheme and write a bot. Could you please create a Bot work request with the details? and if you don't really need anyone to do anything, except give me mass rename privilege for a selected number of files could you please request these permissions? Thanks for your efforts so far. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:45, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
The Sanborn map collection needs to be fixed properly. If you fix the categories you are hiding an indicator that it is broken, which will make the real problem worse. I would therefore advise you to not touch it and move on.
You can copy+paste the above to where to redlink cats problem is being discussed, so they know that a fix is nontrivial and it will be fixed together with the underlying problem eventually. Nowakki (talk) 23:19, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
What about just up-merging the files to more general ones and deleting the categories their currently in outright then? Or conversely the files could just be mass nominated for deletion. That sounds like a less then optimal solution though lol. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:26, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
If you delete them now they might have to be downloaded again when somebody wants them. Therefore that should be not an option.
I'm a little hazy on the details, but from what I remember your proposal to rename the files was rejected. So that's clearly not an option. I don't think just leaving the categories as is really helps either. So what's your suggestion to deal with the issue aside from leaving the red links or renaming the files when that already failed? --Adamant1 (talk) 23:46, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
I only state my original proposition. You can proceed in any way you see fit. I would advise you to develop a scheme that make the sanborn map collection awesome and then implement it. Nowakki (talk) 23:50, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
The above discussion has gotten terribly convoluted. If there are things that one or more of the participants wish to see happen, could you please each state those, without a bunch of cross-talk? - Jmabel ! talk07:45, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
I think this short comment sums it up. I do not understand Nowakki's reply to it. It's unclear what is meant with needs to be fixed properly. And it's also unclear what is meant with I would advise you to develop a scheme that […]. If somebody understands what exactly needs to be done or is proposed please explain it briefly and if not I repeat my question for Nowakki to create a request with the explanation/details. Prototyperspective (talk) 09:37, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
You are right, the underlying issue has never been properly explained to you.
The filenames for map files prior to 1900 are bad. They were chosen by a not so brilliant coworker who came ahead of me.
The map files after 1900 have a better naming scheme.
If you think this is a cosmetic change, click on one of the files named "ind". The plate number and LOC sequential IDs don't match for the old scheme. It's broken. Suppose you were to run the index through OCR. With the old scheme, you need a separate database to map plate numbers to files. Unsustainable stupidity.
Alright, thanks for explaining! That was the missing info. If you requested file-mover permissions and it was declined that doesn't mean you can't apply again. I think it the permissions will be granted if you provide them with this info. If not, you could also check what else is required to get these permissions but I don't see why the request would fail so please request the file-moving permissions, afterwards you could make use of the mass rename tool and implement the filetitle changes. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:40, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
If I wanted file mover privileges I could have requested them at any time since January. I just came here to talk about stupidity. Nowakki (talk) 17:06, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Agree. Not sure what the user is up to now when writing sth like that. What about throwing all of these Sanborn cats into a flat category (for now)? Also maybe they should be separated from the report (if they are in a flat category they wouldn't show up in it anymore anyway). Prototyperspective (talk) 12:42, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
My 2 cents: When it comes to categorizing, I would prefer that Sanborn maps are sorted into cats as follows: Most importantly capsuled in their own categories, always. --> Otherwise, they clutter any categories they are placed in, and are difficult to handle. These are mass-produced cadastral building plans in such a detailed scale that people would not really even classify them as "maps" under some definitions.
Sanborn maps by states (e.g. Category:Sanborn maps of Maine (or Category:Sanborn maps of Essex County, Massachusetts, if there are sufficient numbers per County) --> This ensures that Sanborn maps are differentiated by the states for those who want to search for them by state overview, but they still don't clutter the direct "Maps of Maine" categories.
Old maps of Uvw County, Xyz-State (e.g. Category:Old maps of Franklin County, Maine (unless there are sufficient numbers to warrant a "Sanborn maps of Uvw County, see above) --> This ensures that they can be found as reference material for each county that got coverage.
Whatever exists: Location (e.g. Category:Farmington, Maine for "Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Farmington, Franklin County, Maine") or more detailed: "Cat:Maps of Farmington, Maine" or ideally: "Cat:Old maps of Farmington, Maine" --> This ensures that they can be readily found for the actual community they were created for.
What we don't need is e.g. File:Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from La Grange, Oldham County, Kentucky. LOC sanborn03193 002-1.jpg being placed as "1895 maps of Kentucky": Because it is not a "map of Kentucky" (this is a map of Kentucky! - similarly, this is not a 1827 map of Tibet (just incidentally showing a white border region with that label) and this is not a 1784 map of the world (despite showing a patch of Earth in 1784)). So, inserting Sanborn maps in the year-maps-of-Kentucky is a disservice to the users because in those categories one would expect finding actual maps that show all or at least a considerable part of Kentucky in the time. Not glorified building plans. Sure, in cases where there are no alternative categories available, users have to improvise in some way. But we do have subcategories on the County and Township levels for the United States. Make use of them. --Enyavar (talk) 10:09, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
Use of "opaque" background request template on photographic images
Hi,
I'm looking for some feedback upon whether or not it is considered reasonable to apply the {{Opaque}} template specifically to an image that was originally a photograph taken against a white background. This template states
"This image was uploaded with an opaque background where it should have been transparent. If possible, please upload a PNG or SVG version of this image, derived from a non-JPEG source so that it has an alpha channel and no compression artifacts (or with existing artifacts removed). If it is not possible to obtain a cleaner version then consider creating a new, derivative, image with the background removed, while leaving this image alone; use templates such as {{Retouched picture}} and {{Derivative versions}} as appropriate; then ignore the rest of these requests."
koavf (talk·contribs) applied this to of one of my images here (which was in turn propagated to a cropped derivative).
An image that was taken as a photograph with no inherent transparency "should" have been uploaded with a transparent background? Really? Are you arguing that every such image "should" have been manually (and painstakingly) worked on to do this before upload? Because that's the only way you're going to get that from a regular photograph.
I reverted the change on both versions, but on the derivative copy, my reversion was undone by Koavf with the argument that
"It's totally valid to have a photographic element extracted from its background to have a transparent one and it's totally normal in a lot of bitmap formats such as PNG. It's not possible with JPEG, that's true, but the photo could be embedded in PNG and have the background removed."
This misses the point. There's a big difference between effectively arguing that it would be *nice* to have a version of this image with a transparent background and (mis-)using a template that states that it "should" have been uploaded like that in the first place.
To me, it seems obvious that this template was intended for images where transparency *already* inherently existed and could be restored from the source, or where it could easily be applied by re-rendering.
"If you [Koavf] are willing to do the hard work [emphasis added here] of Photoshopping it to (convincingly) remove the background yourself, and upload that version as a borderless PNG version under a different filename, please feel free to do so."
The hint clearly wasn't understood or taken. And Koavf didn't, of course, get round to doing themselves the "hard work" they seemed to take for granted the uploader would be magically able to do.
Regardless, by that logic, one could slap this template on countless JPEGs of objects photographed shot against a white background, and it would just end up being similarly pointless and inappropriate clutter because there's no inherent transparency in photographs, and no simple way to add it. If you *want* someone to do that, please don't misuse {{Opaque}} for that reason.
Agree when it comes to photos. However, I have to add that there's now AI tools to easily and quickly remove backgrounds so maybe it actually makes sense to add them now since a few months or in the near future. Search for hugging face remove background to find some Web tools to do so. Maybe something could be done there. The large template seems unwarranted in such a cases however. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:46, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
@Prototyperspective: Even if that were the case- and there is a place for that- I would disagree with the misuse of the {{Opaque}} template for that purpose.
I'd also disagree that such versions *should* be uploaded- or expected- as the "original" rather than as a derivative and modified version (and clearly marked as such), if only for reasons of veracity. Multicherry (talk) 21:07, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Entirely unreasonable. {{Opaque}} is clearly intended to be applied to non-photographic images (like logos or diagrams) which were "generated" with a matte background, and where it's possible for the creator of the image to losslessly regenerate the image from source data without that background. It is not applicable to photos. Omphalographer (talk) 20:56, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
"one could slap this template on countless JPEGs of objects photographed shot against a white background". So? There's a lot to do. This is a media repository with an extremely broad scope and we could plausibly have... 100 billion pieces of media? Just because that's a tall order that we're not likely to ever fulfill, does that mean we should give up? I just don't even understand this line of reasoning. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯22:37, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
@Koavf: - You're still missing- or ignoring- the main point that has been stated multiple times. Please go back and read what I already said elsewhere in this discussion, especially here.
Again, the problem is that you're misusing a template whose wording makes clear that it isn't intended for cases where one would like the background manually removed, it's for ones where the background *should* be removed.
Whether or not it would make sense to plaster a wish for background removal on every single white-background-image (and my personal feeling is that it would just be clutter because no-one will have time to do that vast majority), it certainly shouldn't be done via the misuse of the {{Opaque}} template, which covers a different use case.
If there's no existing way of requesting such edits in a more appropriate manner, IMHO a new template or mechanism should be created. Multicherry (talk) 18:24, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
@Koavf: That's precisely what this discussion was started to clarify. Several others in this thread (myself included) disagree with you.
But let's go with your assumption that you *were* using the template correctly and that it accurately reflects what you want to say- namely that that I "should" have uploaded a photograph with transparancy pre-applied.
Really? Do you imagine I have a magic camera that automatically does that? Or are you suggesting the onus is on me to manually apply transparency to an image where it never existed in the first place?
I'm not saying that particular photograph is especially great, or that I spent that much time taking it, but it's still irritating to see someone slap wording on it telling me I "should" have uploaded it with transparency applied when I already spent time taking the photo and they haven't done anything.
Or maybe that's not what you meant, and that's only how it comes across because the wording was never written with that usage in mind?
Could you please stop with the hysterics? No, I don't think you have magic. It's fine to upload an image with one format or border or cropping or whatever and then modify it to add another. This happens all the time and doesn't require magic. No one is saying that you should have done anything: I'm saying that a modified version of the image would be best. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯19:09, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
"Hysterics"? No. You can read that "magic" comment as irritated sarcasm if that wasn't already as obvious as it should have been.
Regardless... if what you were actually saying- or rather, what you wanted to say- was "that a modified version of the image would be best", well... that's not what the template says. Which is the point I was trying to make. Multicherry (talk) 19:35, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
I don't like the phrasing of the template. It's almost accusatory, like the person who uploaded the image it's applied to made a mistake. But it's used on various .jpg files (files that don't support transparency), where it basically serves as a request for a .png version to be made where the subject is isolated from its background. In that sense I don't think the template was mis-applied, but the wording should be fixed so a request for a derivative version doesn't read like an insult to the original. ReneeWrites (talk) 21:26, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
@ReneeWrites: As you note, misusing {{Opaque}} in that context gives it an irritatingly accusatory and entitled tone, and I don't think that was ever the intention.
The reason it comes across badly is because it *is* being "mis-applied" for something it wasn't meant for.
It clearly *wasn't* written to be used as a "request for a .png version". As Omphalographer (talk·contribs) noted, it was intended for cases where it would be easy for the uploader losslessly obtain or create a transparent version.
I don't think it should be reworded. If a "transparency request" template is needed, a new one should be created for that distinctly different purpose (assuming there isn't a suitable candidate already).
What we *shouldn't* be doing is slathering the {{Opaque}} template all over images where it doesn't make sense.
It still seems broken. Does anyone know why? If permanently shut down the template should get updated wording, it appears on over 200 file description pages. Commander Keane (talk) 23:08, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Category:Minority schools came to my attention when User:Elkost added it as a parent of Category:Jewish schools and my immediate reaction was, "What about a cheder in Israel (where Jews are not a minority)? We had a bit of a discussion and both agree that this area of categorization needs more thought than it has had, and more than just he and I can bring to it. In particular (some of this per our discussion, some not):
@NeverDoING: as creator of Category:Minority schools, can you explain your intention and, in particular, the intended criteria for inclusion in this category?
Quoting myself, rather than try to word this again from scratch: There are also Japanese and Korean schools in the U.S., American schools in practically every major city of the world, French schools in Spain, Romania, and who knows where else, etc. I'm not sure how we should handle these all, but the emphasis on minority seems wrong to me. Also, there is some sort of distinction to be made between (for example) a Japanese school in the U.S. that focuses entirely on people of Japanese ancestry and one where non-Japanese might study aspects of language and culture as well. I don't think any of this has been well thought through. Plus "Jewish" especially raises the issue of religious vs. ethnic. For example, a cheder is a very different matter than a Jewish day school that teaches a broad curriculum. Analogously, but not a school: the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan is emphatically culturally Jewish, and equally emphatically secular.
HBCUs are very simple, because they are self-organized into an association.
I have no problem with the existence of any of these subcats. My issue is with the term "minority schools." Since you bring up Black Americans: would an African-American academy at the high-school level in Detroit (a city that is over 75% Black) be a "minority school"? And, again, why on a global basis are Jews and Armenians deems "minorities" (even though each has a country where they make up the majority) but Hungarians (the majority in Hungary, and an important minority in Romania, Slovakia, and elsewhere) are not? (All three are within about 20% of the same size populations.) - Jmabel ! talk12:51, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
My thoughts are that the term "Minority" is really poorly defined and that maybe "Ethnic schools" would be better and more precise, we can also use "Religious schools" where relevant Oxyman (talk) 03:59, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
"Ethnic schools" wouldn't cover Swedish-speaking schools in Finland, as they are based on language (language choice for some of the pupils), not ethnicity. Swedish-speakings Finns, most of whom attend those schools, are still a minority (arguably an ethnic one) on the country level, although not in all towns. I think minority schools would be an adequate category for the schools, at least for schools in areas where Finnish is the majority language. Whether inclusion is based on country level or something else needs to be told, and one might have to go to individual schools for including subcategories (unless there are suitable subcategories, such as Minority schools in Sweden or Jewish minority schools – a naming scheme should be decided on). –LPfi (talk) 09:48, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
I'm going to speak up again because this doesn't seem anywhere near resolution: I think the concept of "minority schools" is a mess. There are ethnic schools, there are religious schools, there are language-specific schools, etc. They are more or less the same thing whether the group involved is a majority or a minority in a gien place. E.g., a Chinese-language school in Richmond, British Columbia, a place with an ethnic Chinese majority is not at all deeply different than one in a different part of the Vancouver area where Chinese are a minority. - 23:24, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
UploadWizard gives author as "[[User:Example|Example]]"
UploadWizard has started between 16:42 and 18:41 UTC today in my uploads to put the whole wikitext syntax again as the label of the link for the author, e.g. here. In wikitext this is: [[User:Example|[[User:Example|Example]]]]. Other files uploaded with UploadWizard at Special:NewFiles seem not to be concerned. Do you know if this is a known bug? --Marsupium (talk) 19:30, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
How to handle a widespread hoax flag used as official flag?
Fake joke flag
This troll Martini-flag has nothing to do with Saint-Martin. It's not used on the island. It's a well played booze and word joke. It's funny to see that the joker or marketeer who made this fictional flag rotated the Sint-Maarten flag 90°, just like the Dutch and French flag are rotated, and modeled it after a Martini cocktail. I hope you do see that the glass is low on liqor but still has an olive in it. Of course this must mean that the whole nation is drunk and possibly hung over?
Too few involved users = Wikisupport for the troll
Not so funny is the naming on Wikimedia and widespread use on Wikipedia, of the liqor flag as the or as a Saint-Martin flag. That's similar to replacing the US Stars and Stripes by a Coors flag and then editing (templates on) 1001 pages to deliver the joke. I suspect that would be considered offensive and vandalising. Probably the changes would be corrected very fast, as there are many of our users that salute the US flag on a dayly basis.
Meanwhile the "look at this funny drunken nation"-flag spread onto nearly a 1000 pages. I've just removed the flag from the Dutch wiki, including an EU navigation template with all the official flags of the EU... That's what you get when the name of the flag seems official, and users expect Commons to uphold the same reference based quality checks as Wikipedia. It would not surprise me, if "we" had a significant part in spreading this joke of a flag to the flag-shops of the world.
How to solve this and learn from it?
I've read a whole series of pages to see where this problem would fit. On several specific pages you can post simple problems, like the talk page which has no traffic whatsoever, or action pages to simply rename, delete or ... This complex problem transcends them, it is not a simple to do action or policy, more like a whole project. I'm new here, so I wonder how we discuss these complex problems and break them into simple steps like these:
removing all the above flags and flagmaps, except for the first one.svg, to break up the troll relation with Saint-Martin;
renaming the pranksterflag as such: Martini cocktail joke flag.svg (remove the StM reference from the name);
uploading the official French flag in the old namespace, as it would solve most of the problems on the 1001 pages in one go;
using the cocktail flag as an example and reminder on Commons that we should check sources before posting an image ¿is this policy?
...
Do you think this flag is offensive to Saint-Martin inhabitants? Do we have policies to deal with this complex kind of problems? If not, what can we do to solve the problem? How would you reach out to 50? different language Wikipedias? Are there joke categories or pages that would embrace the Martini flag? ...?
Flags that are in fact used on Saint-Martin
Official flags that are used at the border monument, or used to in the past.
border
EU
FR
NL
Ant.nl
StM.nl
On the streets you can see the local government logo and the before 2010 Coat of Arms, the new one is used in local government documents.[5][6]
Another flag that is visable on local photos is a political island unity flag.
The flag maps absolutely need to go; I've just nominated them for deletion. The educational value of flag maps is marginal at best; if we're going to have these images at all, they should only be based on official flags.
The other flags should, at most, be consolidated to a single image with a filename which makes it very obvious that it's a joke. Official-sounding filenames like File:Flag of Saint Martin.png are part of the problem here; they invite editors to assume that the flag has official status (particularly since the same naming scheme is used for real national flags). Omphalographer (talk) 22:39, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
I had thought about nominating some pretty dubious "flag maps" for deletion awhile ago but they were all in use on other projects and the creator of a DR can't usually remove images involved in it from other projects without people on here crying foul about involved editing or whatever. There really needs to be solution to that though or I don't imagine these types of fake images will ever be dealt with to any meaningful degree. I don't think it's an issue of there being to few users to deal with it though. There's plenty of people on here who are against Commons hosting these kinds of files. It's more the bad faithed personal attacks and obfuscation from the other side that tends to happen when someone nominates in use files for deletion or tries to remove them from other projects before doing so. The same usually goes for the uploaders BTW. They also tend to obfuscate and derail DRs having to do with their uploads. So there's really no point in bothering. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:20, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Categorization is another thing to think about. This one for example somehow ended up in subcategories of Category:Proposed flags. I think that category tree should be used for flags that were actually somewhat seriously proposed to become an official flag of something, not merely fictional/parody flags like these? The Category description offers no guidance on this. --El Grafo (talk) 08:39, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
To some extent, any content can be used for jokes. We can't really edit Wikipedia on behalf of users there.
Totally agree about the Category:Proposed flags. I get in a little tiff with a user once because they thought user created flags should go in the category. Kind of a weird opinion really, but I don't think the category should include user created flags that haven't been proposed anywhere outside of a Wikimedia project. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:33, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
However, this template-shit looks really bad to me. When I first saw this I thought it just needs some diligent work to revert it, but quick reversion is impossible if you cannot revert changes. The flag has been spammed into all projects via some undetectable template... or something. The code in the projects says [[File:Flag of Saint-Martin (local).svg]] (good!) and the rendered content for that very code then shows . Has this magic trick been done in Wikidata, in Commons, or in each project separetely with a template? How does this even work? However it was done, right now it seems to me like a really heinous way of project sabotage. --Enyavar (talk) 19:52, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Huh. I force-reloaded the page a few times (usually solves similar issues), and my problem with it was also already there yesterday, so I hadn't considered a stuck cache. Thanks, that makes it much much less heinous. Does that mean we have to manually purge all 900+ pages where the flag is still cached-in-use, or is an administrative action possible? --Enyavar (talk) 21:45, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be better to make redirects to a correct file rather then renaming? This will avoid all manual replacements. Ellywa (talk) 22:14, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
For each item in this report there is a flaw in the categorization somewhere creating a categorization loop. This may also be a problem for search results and the deepcategory search operator that can be used to show or search files across a category's subcategory branches.
It is easiest to find a category that should be removed for page 1 where one can simply remove the direct self-categorization. In this example one would remove category "Fungi of Italy" on category "Fungi of Italy". In later pages it's not necessarily more difficult to identify a miscategorization somewhere in the cat-path than in earlier pages. In some cases, a new category is needed or a change in a category description (from where one could link to a category). The same report also exists for Wikipedia categories.
SD0001 who ran the code said Due to the sheer volume of data involved, even the initial step to fetch the list of all subcategory associations from the database was failing both on Toolforge bastions and on the Toolforge kubernetes cluster. I then spun up a 16-core, 32 GB RAM instance on Cloud VPS, and there it all worked out! So the report probably can't be updated frequently. Maybe it could be possible to make it rescan the cats of a particular page and then update just that page but for now it doesn't seem so. Thus, if you work on this report a lot, it would be good to coordinate with other users, for example by removing/striking items from the report if you solved them or making a post on the talk page which page(s) you work on. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:36, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
They are on page 1 (starting at 津まつり → Copyright (C) 八幡の笛木) up to page 15 (ending at Selve (Unternehmerfamilie) → Hermann Dietrich Selve) so they're already separate.
However, it would be best if one could update specific parts of the reports individually. I think a straightforward way for that would be rescanning cat links on a particular page and updating that page and I asked whether that's possible on the talk page where the report was requested. Maybe it's also possible to make it scan all categories again for parent=child category-cycles but I think that would run longer etc than simply checking a list of cat-links. I don't know though, maybe it would actually be easier to implement that if not yet possible / or only that is possible with the current code. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:52, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Awesome. It looks like some of the single cycle categories are that way because of templates. Any idea what to do in those cases? (I assume you can't just remove said category from the templates code for something like that). unsigned by Adamant1 (talk)
It varies: often the template parameters need to be changed. In some cases the template itself may need to be edited in which case one can ask on its talk page and/or remove (or comment out) the template to replace it with just the remaining categories. In the case of Category:1559 sculptures in Italy with Template:StatuesItalyCat, the template was made for statues cats but is also used for sculptures cats causing this problem. There the solution I think would be to remove the cat or ideally to create either a new template for sculptures (such may already exist and only be adjusted for Italy) or add a parameter to the existing cat. I think people going through that report could ask the people who added the template and/or created the template to fix this problem instead of fixing it themselves.
However, a template for this purpose may already exist so maybe if some people have a good handle of such navigation templates they could take a look at those items which appear many times in these reports and fix the underlying template issues of them (such as those {year} sculptures cats). --Prototyperspective (talk) 20:58, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Question about images with serial but non destructive watermarks
I know that there is the "Graphics Village Pump" that may be more suitable for this question, but I think that this issue is more general and may be discussed even here (and even because here there are more users that can see and answer. XD)
There are some guidelines about watermarks on images, but those are not official policies of Commons (and I hope that they don't become part of them)
There are archives that put their watermarks even in a serial way, over the commonly one in a corner. These are ratherly non-destructive and sometimes even "invisible" due to the nature of the historical photo.
How should we handle this particular case?
The images in particular I'm talking about are something like this ([7]) and this ([8]), from the huge archive "Istituto Luce" from Italy, with tons and tons of PD photos waiting only to be uploaded, and another one called EBAD (Italy has a particular law, that distinguishes between "creative" and "non-creative photos", the second ones being the ones from natural and everyday society and events... at least with the object not in a particular "position" and things like that; for those "non creative" photos the copyright is only 20 years after being taken, that is to say that all the 'non creative' photos shot in Italy until 1975 can be directly uploaded here on Commons, a great deal)... the only problem being that there are those serial watermarks on it.
Here in Italy they love putting tons of watermarks even on perfectly PD photos and on entire historical archives... they think they can still profit from them, scaring ignorant people... but they still didn't know about us Commoners.
There have been some discussion about this (even in the discussion page of the guidelines theirselves) and I have even talked to some experienced users here, like the italian @Ruthven: (who still pointed to those guidelines).
In general, I (and the the other users in the guideline's discussion page) believe that PD and free-license photos should be uploaded regardless of their quality and how they are "adorned": we simply put the Template:watermark and simply hope that in future we will be able to find the same photo without those watermarks.
What do you think about it (even about those images that I linked specifically)?
Hi, I checked the two links you provided, but I think it would be good if you also linked to the previous discussions you had. I'm sceptical about the Italian law claims (it says here: "use very carefully" with regards to "non-creative photos"). But in my following opinion I am mostly disregarding possible Copyright concerns, as the topic is watermarks here.
Now, the link to Luce, labeled [5], is in my opinion a highly destructive way of watermarking. The watermarking pattern covers the entirety of the image: if all images from that archive look like that I don't see why Commons should host these basically unusable files.
The Ebad watermark [6] is big and flashy and possibly distracting when used to illustrate an encyclopedic article... but it's not as bad as the other one, as long as it doesn't cover important features of the images. Users would be able to crop an image for their purposes if needed.
Yet, unmarked images would be preferable. To get those, I would assume that one could ask the archives directly (via GLAM contacts etc.) to kindly give access to non-watermarked versions for Commons uploads. There are benefits for them too: Just look at other big contributors like Rijksmuseum, Eran Laor, LoC, Polonia and Gallica: uploads from these institutions have big templates with the contributor's logo that link everyone to the original files: that shows providence properly, gives prestige back to the institution and makes watermarking fairly unnecessary. That's my reason for wondering why the archives insist on watermark-only images? Oh, and in case that we haven't asked for such permission yet, we should: The reaction tells us whether Commons/Wikimedia could get into trouble if we just rip the watermarked stuff from their pages without asking. If we "rob" them now, that makes future collaboration more difficult. The archives would also warn us away from stuff that might still be copyrighted for whatever reason. --Enyavar (talk) 21:21, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Ok, so we have to proceed first by contacting them, confirming what @Ruthven said. So how should we do that? What is a "GLAM" contact? Who should do that? I'm still not expert on this.
Yeah I know it's an embarrassing way to watermark, but here in Italy they want to speculate on everything, profiting about the fact that people is very ignorant about their own rights (Ruthven may know it well, being him Italian too).
Let's see, so, if we can contact these archives and bring so much more value to our good Commons portal. :)
The EBAD one is little and unknown... we may persuade them in a fast and easy way.
The "Luce" one, instead, is perhaps the second most important and big archive in Italy and most of all, it is the most famous, being particularly linked to the fascist Italy and the first half of the 20th century in general. It is well guarded and won't give away anything in a easy way.
From experience, it is best to have one designated Wikimedian for "first contact", and not speak in many voices. For first contact, a polite and careful approach is best. One approach is to lead with "we'd like to use this/that image for this/that article to illustrate the topic", to show some specific practical usage. Once a contact was made and the archive can see how we'd use the files, they may provide more.
GLAM stands for "Galleries • Libraries • Archives • Museums", and there is a wikimedia page on GLAM outreach as well as a Commons page: Commons:GLAM.
Accusation about "vandalizing" without giving reasons
A. Savin accuses me of "vandalizing" without giving any reasons. I don't know what this person means, I did'nt vandalize anything.
What should I do? Could it be that someone has broken into my account and is doing nonsense under my name/pseudonym? And how could I check on this?Hornstrandir1 (talk) 13:28, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
All contributions made by your account can be seen at Special:Contributions/Hornstrandir1, there will be a "Contributions" link somewhere at the top of the interface when you are logged in so you can find the page easily. Check the edits there for nonsense from a break in.
If you don't understand a warning, discuss it. I see you already have on your talk page. Reasons have been given. Keep in mind that "vandalizing" can be used as a broad term with varying understandings. Commander Keane (talk) 22:20, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
This is difficult with as many edits as the user has. Moreover, a clear reason should always be given. There have been a reason given now by another user. It's not vandalism or doesn't seem like it at all. However, there seem to be many problematic edits that make large-scale changes that the community disapproves of or would disapprove of – but that should probably be discussed at some place rather than the user talk page. The reason is with no editors approving of the level of splitting you are performing but this is not a problem specific to this user but a general problem. I have proposed a technical solution to the issue but it's not applicable in all cases and the issue may still exist even if things like Help:Gadget-DeepcatSearch always worked and very readily accessible & known to most users. What about categories that have been split to the by day level when the subject is only relevant at the year scale and even that is debatable for example? Prototyperspective (talk) 08:55, 23 October 2024 (UTC)
I do agree that he sulfuric springs example seems like overcat. Overcatting is good-faith editing that results in undesired outcomes. It does NOT merit placing an unexplained "stop vandalizing" template on the talk page of a user who has done thousands of edits. Alexander Savin completely overreacted by calling it "vandalism" and I would also say he under-reacted by not considering an actual talk with Hornstrandir. --Enyavar (talk) 09:06, 23 October 2024 (UTC)
I don't think we should have admins calling our contributors "vandals" merely because they have a different editorial view. Consider contacting WMF. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 19:02, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
The uploader claims copyright, although he is only the photographer. No statement of original author (painter) exists. This is a newly made painting Creuzbourg (talk) 18:41, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Keep Attribution fixed. Keep if "made public" in 1959. --RAN (talk) 00:08, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
Kept: no valid reason for deletion. --Sadads (talk) 01:18, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
The uploader is only the photographer; still claims to be copyright holder.
The painting is presented by Georgia Division by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1959.
When did the artist lose copyright to the photographer?
The licensing information for the file is inadequate. It does need to show that the painting (and the frame) has a free license.
If the painting were published in 1959, then COM:Hirtle leads many places. Published without a copyright notice would put the image in the public domain. The plaque on the frame does not have a copyright notice. If there were a copyright notice somewhere else, then there would need to be a renewal 28 years after publication. That would need to be checked.
@GlrxThank you for your reply. Shall I move the matter to: Commons:Village pump/Copyright? I do not understand how the photographer becomes the copyright owner, and believe that the image should be deleted. Creuzbourg (talk) 20:05, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Ordinarily, George Mandus (the painter) would have a copyright to his work. In many circumstances, a photographer making a photograph of someone else's work has a copyright on his derivative work. That copyright does not negate the original artist's work. In this case, the File page adequately described the photographer giving a free license to the derivative work, but there must also be a free license for the underlying painting. A faithful photographic copy of a 2D painting usually does not qualify for a derivative work copyright.
Moving this topic to the copyright page would be good. The contributors there understand the issues far better than I. Glrx (talk) 20:58, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
I wonder how much explanation we should expect from admins for their admin actions.
Supposedly, an admin should be able to explain which policy they applied when the delete content from Commons. It's fairly obvious when the content is deleted due to copyright issues, but less so, in other case.
His question probably relates to deleting unnecessary empty categories that will not be filled in the foreseeable future. To be fair, I would like to inform admin @Yann about this ongoing discussion. Lukas Beck (talk) 14:29, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
@Enhancing999: If an Admin is doing something wrong, then certainly they should be held accountable. On the other hand, if a user is doing something wrong (like trying to keep empty categories without good reason), then they should be held accountable. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 21:29, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Let me rephrase the question: can we expect from an admin that the explain their action in terms of the policy they applied? ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 21:32, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Up to a point. But if I had to give a detailed explanation tying every action I took back to policy, I would not get much done. Most of the time, it should be clear on the surface. For example, if I correct a misspelled category name, I'm probably not going to cite a specific policy to say why. - Jmabel ! talk05:15, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
Not by default, but when asked about it, shouldn't you be able to explain that category names are to be spelled in English per our policy on categories (insert link), that the word is written without the letter "y" as can be found in Wiktionary (insert link), and thus you fixed a typo, applied this or that part of speedy deletion policy (insert link) after the stated delay (insert link). The detailed explanation would be almost the same for thousands of admin actions.
Jeff: your comment appears to be off-topic. Please discuss CSD with Yann on their user page. The question here isn't about a particular action of Yann. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 21:39, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Generally admins don't give rationales for their actions. Nor do I think they should in a lot of cases because it would just get in the way of them doing their jobs. Deleting empty categories being one instance where it's totally pointless and would just needlessly slow things down. Probably with something like blocks they can and should do a better job explaining the reasoning behind it though. I don't think the default block message is really helpful or gets at the issue that led to the block in a lot of, if not most, cases. And the person who is blocked risks having their talk page access restricted or the length of the block getting extended if they ask for clarification about it. Which just seems like a bad way to go about things. Although I don't really see it changing either though. There doesn't really need to be a policy based reason for anything admins do in most cases anyway and it's not like they are (or ever will be) held accountable for anything either. --Adamant1 (talk) 00:51, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
I'm a big believer in holding admins accountable for questionable actions, but it is no secret that Commons has some fairly severe issues with backlogs. Requiring detailed explanations in situations where the reason is obvious places an undue burden on admins. If asked, they should of course provide at least a basic explanation but requiring it upfront in all cases seems needlessly burdensome. Just Step Sideways (talk) 22:13, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
In general it's fairly trivial to provide a full explanation. Either there should be a relavant policy or guideline that can be linked. Otherwise, one would have discussion that lead to a consensus.
Obviously, if one just tries to avoid stating that it's a personal view or one just tries to close a discussion with a disagreeing view, one would have a hard time to provide a link to any of these. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 19:11, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
For information. The user has already been informed several times about which policy serves as the basis for deleting the empty categories. Lukas Beck (talk) 07:34, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
Picture of the Year 2022 finalist with an undeclared fake background: what should be done?
Dear users,
It was recently discovered that this picture that achieved rank 4 in POTY 2022 fooled everyone by making them think that it was taken at the perfect place and time when in reality the sky is completely fake and comes from this other picture. Because of that, the picture was delisted a few days ago from it's previous Featured picture status.
The questions that now remain are : should a picture that fooled everyone keep it's POTY award or not ? Should it be disqualified or not ? How should things be presented on the POTY 2022 results page and on the file page?
If the question of disqualifying the picture from POTY is of the POTY committee competence, everyone is nevertheless invited to give it's opinion. One easy way to do so is by voting here (and everyone can feel free to add alternative voting options).
(To avoid having two parallel discussions I invite people to only reply on this page and not here).
Pointless. Wikipedia can not vouch for a photos authenticity, so why tell the world somebody has won? Take away the competitions official status. Alexpl (talk) 17:02, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
Sorry but I don't understand the meaning of your comment (perhaps you could rephrase it in a clearer way). I also invite you to discuss the matter on this page (instead of Village pump) to avoid two parallel discussions on the same topic. Thank you for your understanding -- Giles Laurent (talk) 17:12, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
I think 2022 is already history. Mostly people have a strong dislike to that being rewritten. Just add a note that it was delisted .. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 18:45, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
As written on the initial message and on my other reply, I kindly encourage you to participate in this discussion (and not on the Village Pump advertisement of the discussion) to avoid two parallel discussions. This is the third and last time I will be repeating this. Thank you for your understanding -- Giles Laurent (talk) 19:49, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
Totally agree. I had my suspicions about it at the time but wasn't sure where or how to bring them up. It's clearly fake though. I'm actually kind of surprised no one noticed until now. --Adamant1 (talk) 13:44, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
Hey, just to point something out that I noticed right away: The uploader has only contributed with edits for two days: November 23rd and 24th in 2019. Unless we're dealing with an unproven long-term sock puppet acount, the uploader has not self-nominated the picture for the PotY contest and never even acknowledged any of it - they might not even know that they participated, that they won a final spot, nor that they were disqualified just now. I claim that the uploader never intended to fool or deceive anyone, especially not in a contest: or they wouldn't have uploaded the original aurora image as well. The manipulations in several (!) of the images by that uploader can only be seen when you zoom really in, too. It's not that obvious (but our image quality buffs should have noticed). --Enyavar (talk) 19:11, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
We don't know if the author knows that the picture participated in POTY. But what we know for sure is that the author uploaded this image alongside other pictures to participate in the Wiki Science Competition 2019 in Ireland and won two awards in 2019 and the church picture is one of the two awarded pictures. One of his two winning pictures was honest about being a photo montage (but in that case it was anyway quite obvious) : this picture while the church picture original description was falsly claiming : "The aurora or northern lights shot with a Canon camera over the church at Vik in Iceland on a clear night" making any reviewer of the file think it was a single picture and not a photomontage. To me, claiming something is a single shot taken only with the camera when in reality it's a photomontage with a fake background is cheating. And the author not only won an award by cheating but was also likely paid for it (at least with WSC 2023 I personally had a money prize but for WSC 2019 in Ireland I don't know if there was a money prize but that wouldn't be impossible). Also, just for your information, the author also came back in 2023 with a second account and won two other awards in the Wiki Science Competition 2023 in Ireland -- Giles Laurent (talk) 20:38, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
@OperationSakura6144: If you have been blocked in those Wikipedias, I am not sure why you think it is appropriate to ask someone else to edit there on your behalf. For that matter, when you say you are blocked on these wikis, I take it was under a different account name (since this account name never registered on either of those Wikipedias. Without knowing what account you edited under there (and were blocked) we have no way of knowing whether you may have been blocked precisely because they found edits like the ones you are requesting objectionable. - Jmabel ! talk18:40, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
If the block was not about you, IP address blocks normally do not prevent logged-in users from editing. If you are in good standing there, and the blocks are simply coincidental but include logged-in accounts, say so, and I'll see what I can do about appealing those blocks. Feel free to email me off-wiki if you want to indicate the IP address in question without making it public. - Jmabel ! talk18:42, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
At Commons talk:Nudity categories#Editorializing?, Prototyperspective and I clearly disagree about a recent edit he made to the project page in question. I don't think the two of us will reach any consensus without the involvement of third parties. Discussion should presumably take place there rather than here (other than the fact that I invited Prototyperspective to comment here if they think my wording in this notification is not neutral). - Jmabel ! talk19:31, 27 October 2024 (UTC)
It does not matter much whether it's neutral or not and whether it's "editorializing" since this is an essay page and the essay hatnote itself already clarifies it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Commons contributors
Neutrally mentioning objectively relevant information about how other large sites handle this is appropriate and not editorializing or unneutral – if you disagree on that, please see the point above. I don't know what the objection is here, adding some info about how this is handled elsewhere( without e.g. saying it should be the same way here or that how other sites handle this is best) is not nonneutral but clearly relevant at this page.
I'm not really clear on the details here but aren't all essays inherently "editorializing" to some degree since they aren't guidelines that were voted on and/or edited by multiple users based on consensus? --Adamant1 (talk) 15:15, 28 October 2024 (UTC)
@Adamant1: If you ask that on the discussion thread, rather than here where I gave a notification directing people to the discussion thread, I'll respond substantively. - Jmabel ! talk01:40, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
Help interpreting photographs from the Velvet Revolution in Prague in 1989
Protest rally with participants holding up two fingers
I recently dug out some 35 year old negatives, had them scanned and post‑processed, and uploaded them to Wikimedia yesterday. See this Wikimedia category.
If you can help with information about the context and circumstances of these various images, shot during the high point of the Velvet Revolution, can you please edit the Discussion tabs of the respective images or use the Discussion tab for the aforementioned category.
With reference to that thumbnail, the crowd also took out their house keys and rattled them to symbolize freedom. I was there as a tourist (and these pictures probably better qualify as holiday snaps but I nonetheless ticked the educational box on upload). TIA, RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 16:47, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:38, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
Final Reminder: Join us in Making Wiki Loves Ramadan Success
Dear all,
We’re thrilled to announce the Wiki Loves Ramadan event, a global initiative to celebrate Ramadan by enhancing Wikipedia and its sister projects with valuable content related to this special time of year. As we organize this event globally, we need your valuable input to make it a memorable experience for the community.
Last Call to Participate in Our Survey: To ensure that Wiki Loves Ramadan is inclusive and impactful, we kindly request you to complete our community engagement survey. Your feedback will shape the event’s focus and guide our organizing strategies to better meet community needs.
Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts. Your input will truly make a difference!
Volunteer Opportunity: Join the Wiki Loves Ramadan Team! We’re seeking dedicated volunteers for key team roles essential to the success of this initiative. If you’re interested in volunteer roles, we invite you to apply.
I've put a request there for a tag to also filter changes made with the tool in Wikipedias like it is in Commons, but the page tells me that: Talk pages in this namespace are generally not watched by many users. and sends me here. I understand that this page is only for Commons issues, but I don't know exactly where to ask. Thank you. Gdaniel111 (talk) 12:00, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
The given image is currently licensed CC‑BY‑2.0 (generic). But the image metadata clearly states CC‑BY‑4.0. Should the licensing here be changed? I prefer the information in the metadata myself. Also, the version 2.0 licenses are at least a decade stale and legally deficient in several respects.
In addition, I can easily contact the copyright holder and gain explicit permission for CC‑BY‑4.0 should that be necessary.
Sorry, I did not realize the item for "copyright" at the top of this page is clickable and not an indicator. But I'll leave this posting here nonetheless. (It would be more intuitive to have little subtabs at the top and not just colored text, a hint!) RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 12:27, 28 October 2024 (UTC)
Afaik, it is important what is written in the license template. The problem is that data in the metadata might become obsolete due to changes, or the metadata is automated for all works by a photographer. Sometimes we have an upload to Flickr with an NC license, but the author decides to change to CC BY. Then the metadata does not reflect recent changes, but in fact, there are some. (Another example: When a photographer uploads his image to Commons, but has a NC license stated in the metadata, it becomes obselete when he declares to publish his work under a CC BY license, for example). There are also many cases where the metadata states that the respective image must not be used without permission by the photographer, but since then, usage rights were transferred to another institution and they released the image under a free license, but the metadata does not reflect these recent changes --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 08:00, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
In this case, it is interesting whether a usage under the conditions of version 2 AND 4 is allowed, as the license only vary in the versions, not the restrictions necessarily --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 08:04, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
@PantheraLeo1359531: No easy answer, I guess, in terms of workflows. The tags embedded in the file can easily become obsolete. But — I would strongly argue — that the most liberal license present should still take precedence. And I would suggest that the CC‑BY‑4.0 license is the most liberal with its grant of 96/9/EC database rights. So returning to my original question, I believe the license notice on Wikimedia should be modified to version 4.0. I am going to get technical here, so feel free to stop reading! The SPDX AND logical conjunction operator requires that recipients simultaneously comply with the terms of both or all listed licenses. This is correct, AFAIK, in your example because CC‑BY‑4.0 is simply more permissive than CC‑BY‑2.0. In short, CC‑BY‑2.0 is forward/inbound compatible to CC‑BY‑4.0 (my best info using a quick search was this). Noting also that the CC‑BY‑2.0 does not contain the "or later" version language that some software licenses do. Thanks for your reply. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 09:16, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
If they offer two versions of the same named license, any reuser can select whichever they prefer. Just like any other multi-licensing. - Jmabel ! talk03:40, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
@Jmabel: Thanks. Essentially the SPDX OR logical disjunction operator if a need to be explicit was sought. That was not my question. My question was should that image stored on Wikimedia be tagged as CC‑BY‑4.0 and not CC‑BY‑2.0 — version 4.0 being the more favorable license for several reasons (universal, database rights grant, contemporary)? RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 11:46, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
@Jmabel: That is a sensible approach. Some only obliquely relevant comments follow. Why does Flickr apply CC‑BY‑2.0 on images shot in 2022? I could not find a definitive source for CC‑BY‑2.0 being forward compatible to CC‑BY‑4.0. And I spoke to the photographer of the image under discussion recently and he said he would reissue any of his material for Wikipedia under CC‑BY‑4.0 on request (we often end up photographing the same climate protests in Berlin). Thanks for your replies too. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 15:26, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
@RobbieIanMorrison: Flickr never updated this aspect of their offered licensing. I have no solid idea why they have made that choice; most likely the defaulted into lack of change by not addressing the issue. But you'd really have to ask someone at Flickr why Flickr made a particular decision; I certainly can't speak for them. - Jmabel ! talk17:42, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
There seems to be some inconsistency between the use of the term "music groups" and "musical groups". Anyone know which is correct?--Trade (talk) 21:05, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
Maybe but arbitrarly having one set of categories use one spelling and another a different spelling makes for a complete mess. Trade (talk) 21:26, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
FWIW, "music groups" may be easier for non-native speakers, since we would refer to "rock music groups" and "jazz music groups", not "rock musical groups" and "jazz musical groups". - Jmabel ! talk01:02, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks again to the person who posted the link to https://ocr.wmcloud.org/ for me. I am rerunning news articles where Newspaper.com could not transcribe their own articles or could not properly distinguish the columns of material and jumbled the transcribed text. The Google OCR was able to transcribe the previously unreadable articles and even transcribed handwritten cursive writing. Thanks again. RAN (talk) 21:35, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
@Trade: What language is that? Setting it to Korean, it transcribes something, although it doesn't look quite right. I'd think with such a tiny amount of text it'd be easier to just type it, rather than using OCR at all! :) SamWilson00:43, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
@TansoShoshen: I've deleted the template page; you can go ahead and re-make your request. Normally you would have gotten an error, since the page is create-protected. However, admin FunkMonk had recently made the same error, so the page happened to exist and you could edit it. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 22:21, 27 October 2024 (UTC)
"[Administrator should have a] user-page with .. [information] how they could be contacted": Is that a joke? Don't we have talk pages for that? ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 10:14, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
@Enhancing999, I'm sorry if that sounded somewhat weird. I've made a change and tried to clarify what I exactly mean by it. You're free to comment on that discussion. I posted here for a wider community input and won't be monitoring any responses here. ─ Aafī on Mobile(talk)10:23, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
Aren't language skills, user rights status and projects where user is participating/had participated completely useless? This seems bare minimum for me and I don't demand for something more. EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:34, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
For user rights, the information is generally not complete and better left to the relevant MediaWiki function.
Information from user talk page could be accidentally removed. For example links to archived talks were deleted couple of times from my talk page. Also archive bots could move it. So user page is something more persistent. EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:31, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
In contrast to user talk pages, I've never heard of a user page getting archived, and other people don't normally come along and edit your user page. So I think the distinction is valid here. - Jmabel ! talk06:09, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
Admins are expected to know how to configure archiving so that not everything gets archived. Never heard of problems with the archiving bot in this regards. ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 09:48, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
"Admins are expected to know how to configure archiving…" Really? I'm an admin and have rather little idea how to set up archiving. I've had a couple of occasions to do it in 20 or so years, and looked up what I needed to know. Is this listed in the requirements for adminship somewhere? If so, I suppose I should learn it, but I'd be surprised if it is. - Jmabel ! talk17:31, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
It seems you figured it out. Most config things need checking each time one uses is at those thing tend to evolve.
We wouldn't want to require to create user pages and add languages to user pages instead of where there are need: talk pages .. just because some admins wouldn't be able to manage their user talk page, wouldn't we? ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 21:53, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
Views through mobile phones
Musicians seen via a mobile phone screen and directly
There's no category for that currently, but you can find enough images that depict something similar to justify creating a new category for it. I'm not sure what to call it though. ReneeWrites (talk) 20:21, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
No, there is no category for that. Checked this by searching for images like this and opening some that are of the same kind which all do not have such a category set. I doubt such a category would be due or useful though but it could be created. I think it would be useful if the phones showed augmented reality but there's very few photos of that kind and it would be a subcategory of Category:Augmented reality. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:41, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
The result is that some of those files have been marked for review for years and the source die before anyone review the file. Then we have two choises:
Mark the file for deletion (just like what is standard for recent files that fail upload)
Keep the file
I'm sure reviewers feel tempted do skip such old files because it does not feel right to delete a file that could have been saved if it was reviewed right after the file was uploaded.
The good news is that many of those files might actually not need a "normal" review to confirm the license. For example a bot can verify a video have the right license but it can't check if there are any derivative work in the video. So it might help if we somehow could sort the files in those that urgently need a review and those that can wait. If anyone have ideas feel free to fix the problem.
If a file is checked 1 or 10 years after upload and no longer available we could create a template like {{Grandfathered old file}} that say that uploader claim the file is licensed freely but we can't verify that (now).
If we do so then we could move files that can't be reviewed from the normal review categories and hopefully it will be easier for reviewers to keep up with new uploads. It's like link rot. We can't fix what is allready broken but we can focus on new files.
Delete the files. Otherwise, we create a playground for underworked attorneys to hassle Wikimedia/Foundation for years - before we ultimately have to delete those files anyway. Alexpl (talk) 16:55, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
There is 30k+ files from Finna.fi which could be reviewed by software if somebody would like to write script which compares image to image in Finna and confirms that the licence is correct. I could even write script for that if somebody wants to run it. (note: I am participated to uploading the images). I suppose that there is other images uploaded from well formed repositories with API too which could be reviewed automatically too. --Zache (talk) 17:20, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
I don't see how (all) files can/should be deleted as long as there is no obvious violation of guidelines or laws (and probably a huge amount of files is good (and several files are in use etc. etc.)) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:36, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
Where exactly are those "400k" files? There are e.g. ~110,000 files in subcats of CAT:URAA (which includes +600 artist categories whose works are potentially affected by URAA paranoia), or ~130,000 files in CAT:PD-Art (PD-old default) (which are in 95% of cases obvious PD-old-70 or similar). There are 'only' 70,000 files using the actual {{LicenseReview}} template, and from my experience it dosen't seem to be the case that those files are more likely to be copyright violations than other any file on Commons (pretty much the opposite is the case). ~TheImaCow (talk) 17:56, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
@TheImaCow: I agree that many files does not require an actual review but there are other review templates that LicenseReview. For example YouTube, Flickr and GODL-India. That is why I said it might help if we sort the categories in files that should be reviewed where someone confirm that the file is on some website with some license and files that need some other review were we do not need to compare the file to some website. --MGA73 (talk) 18:07, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
About the files in those two subcats, I was wondering to what extent they are part of the actual license review process (and should therefore only be dealt with by a license reviewer). Unlike PDM Flickr files and those manually tagged for license review, the files wouldn't be in those subcats if the uploader had used the correct templates to begin with. If the uploader could have done that, couldn't any Commons user in good standing just add the relevant tag (or nominate for deletion), without using a {{License review}} template at all? Felix QW (talk) 17:36, 8 November 2024 (UTC)
@Felix QW: yes I think you are right. We should have 2 different categories. One where we need trusted users to verify that a specific file is on a specific website and has a specific license and one for other types of review that does not require users to check a specific website. --MGA73 (talk) 17:46, 8 November 2024 (UTC)
I agree. I do think though that when a license review has been requested manually (as for the templates added by ShakespeareFan00), then it should still be dealt with by a license reviewer (as the successor to the previous more specific user group of PD Reviewers), despite not requiring the verification of a specific website. Felix QW (talk) 20:24, 8 November 2024 (UTC)
@Felix QW: I think any user can remove a request for a license review if they have a good reason. In this case what is needed is that someone find out who wrote the articles and I'm a license reviewer and I have no idea who the author of those articles are. If a non-reviewer knows who did then I see no reason why they can't add that information. --MGA73 (talk) 20:31, 8 November 2024 (UTC)
I agree that they can, and in this particular case - as you said below - the more precise template should have been used instead of the review template. I think since it is there now though, such a user should add the information but keep the license review template, and then a reviewer checks that everything makes sense and fills in the template. Because understanding the details of global copyright is quite different from verifying pages, COM:PD review was originally a separate process, with a separate user group. Recently, they were integrated into license review and I think we are still working out what that precisely means. Felix QW (talk) 09:52, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
@Alexpl: underworked attorneys could have done that already if they want. Some of the file have been here for many years. If the files are uploaded by users with a good upload history I would not worry that much. If uploaded by someone with only one upload or with 10 uploads where 9 was deleted as copyvios I would worry much more. In any case if someone send a take down notice then I’m sure the file would be deleted even if it had a template saying file was claimed to be free but sadly not reviewed in time. --MGA73 (talk) 05:59, 1 November 2024 (UTC)
A bot could identify files, that have a source, that is archived in archive.org or archive.is or both and add this information to the talk page of the file. Files without an archive version could get priority for review. --C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm - p7.ee/p) (talk) 07:05, 1 November 2024 (UTC)
That is simply most (or so I think) files uploaded with video2commons for example. I don't know why you suggest deletion. They definitely should not be deleted just because somehow a license review tag was added. Most files simply do not have such a tag but are likewise not license reviewed, there is no reason for deleting files that have this template set. Once again I strongly disagree Alexpl but also I don't understand why he would even comment something like that.
For license review, please prioritize those files that are in use. Various tools like GLAMorgan can be used to see files that are in use that are in category Category:License review needed. This tag / category is useful for that but maybe it should be used more sparingly, e.g. only for uploads by new users or a subset of video2commons uploads and/or the reviewing could be automated.
Here's one further idea: a link archival bot for external links on Commons (anywhere but especially in the source field of {{Information}}). There have been many requests & proposals for this in the Community Wishlists and so on but they are usually focused on Wikipedia. It seems like on Wikipedia lots of this is being done. Not so much on Commons except for vid2commons which seems to request an IA-archival for every video/audio import. This recent Wishlist proposal has "All projects" specified so its scope includes Commons; probably more could and should be done: Automatic Archiving of Cited Web Pages in Web Archive. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:27, 1 November 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for all the ideas. It would be great if they could be implemented. :-)
I mentioned a template earlier and I made an example of how it might look:
This image was originally posted to a website and claimed to be licensed under a free license. An administrator or reviewer <user> tried on the <date> to confirm that the above/below mentioned license was valid. However the file was not available on the specified source so the copyright status could not be confirmed. Administrator/reviewer found no indications that the copyright claim can't be trusted. If you disagree you can start a deletion request and state your reasons.
I think such a template would be useful because it will make it possible to get the file away from the review category and at the same time it tell everyone that there is no reason to asking for a new review. --MGA73 (talk) 16:48, 1 November 2024 (UTC)
Support such a template.
we need a bot to go through files with a youtube source and test if the youtube source is ccby. when no, fail the review; when yes, mark it with a template that says something like "bot xx confirms that the given source youtubeURL is ccby" and auto categorises to a category "youtube files reviewed by bot". if a human reviews after the bot review, it gets categorised to "youtube files reviewed by bot and reviewer".
we also need bots/some better automatic processes for all the iranian news photos.
Re 2.: Agree. However, it's not so simple: often people upload videos they don't have rights for under CCBY or only mean the music is CCBY but not the video. Sometimes, a different license is specified in the file description but usually that's just CCBYSA or CCBY4.0 instead of CCBY3.0. Sometimes, a license may be specified in the description but not in the file metadata but I think this is an edge case that shouldn't be a problem. Lastly, some files were CCBY at the time of upload but had this changed later on or the video is down. In any case, I don't think most of these 400 k files are videos from youtube. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:08, 1 November 2024 (UTC)
All the special cases can be handled in a DR started by the bot, or by the uploader replacing the failed review template with one that says "this youtube file fails bot review but is actually good so a human please review it".
as long as a bot starts working and continues non stop, any new youtube uploads will be handled shortly after upload. then it's the uploader's responsibility to explain all those special cases (changed licence, taken down video...). if they cant do that in like 1 or 2 days after upload, the file deserves speedy deletion.
RoyZuo there are allready too many DR to handle. If a bot start thousands then the system will crash. I agree that files that fail a review shortly after upload should be deleted. But I think that a "no source" is better than a DR. --MGA73 (talk) 17:41, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
Support. No legitimate file, specially a good quality one, should be deleted because of lack of information, if that information was publicly available in the past. MGeog2022 (talk) 19:33, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
Comment There was an attempt earlier at Commons:Bots/Requests/EatchaBot 3 / Category:Arranged license review project to make review easier. I think it did help but it have now stopped. Maybe there are some ideas or code that can be of use for future bots. I also like the idea Zache mention about having a bot to confirm that files from Finna match the source. It is probably not possible to make one bot that can solve all problems but it will help if one or more bots can do some tasks and reduce the amount of files that humans have to work on. --MGA73 (talk) 19:40, 1 November 2024 (UTC)
Comment there is certainly a real issue here, but I have no idea how it would best be addressed. In an awful lot of these cases, the original source is no longer available. - Jmabel ! talk17:39, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
lol and I would have prefered that the review template was remove and the other one was kept. It is more specific. --MGA73 (talk) 14:22, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
If only a good solution would also pop up :-) I think that adding a date could be helpful in some cases. Because new uploads are more likely to still be online. --MGA73 (talk) 20:08, 11 November 2024 (UTC)
Google's semi-censorship of Wikimedia Commons must end
It is a private company and if not violating the law, they can do whatever (...) they want. If they choose to ignore stuff on commons - that´s fine. Alexpl (talk) 20:02, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
I was not saying it's illegal. That may be fine according to law. I wonder if it's fine to Commons that users' contributions are just blacked out and not available to people. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:39, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
Huge filesizes for photos are a cost factor when it comes to processing and are almost never worth it anyway. I dont blame them from not wanting photos with the megabytes in the three digits to show up, whenever somebody types in a generic searchterm. Alexpl (talk) 14:13, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
This seems offtopic. 1. Most files on WMC are not many MBs large and this is not about some particular few large files. 2. It only shows gstatic thumbnails in Google Search, not the whole image, and it's the same for DDG and other search engines. It's absurd to argue that Google's storage or processing would have notable issues that out of the millions of indexed website makes WMC one whose media is not findable. You can of course defend anti-WMC practices – despite that I don't understand why Commons contributors could be supportive of that – but this point does not make sense, partly because this isn't about the <0.1% of WMC files that are large image files to begin with. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:33, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
I said it seems offtopic and I did notdismiss the comment but address it comprehensively. When I say it seems offtopic that is for example because I may have misunderstood it and/or the user may want to clarify how it would be ontopic. I do wonder why you're so super sensitive about me using the word offtopic. The user did say something but did not explain how it relates to this subject and clarifying that with clear language is I think more constructive than beating around the bush. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:41, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
There is a commercial interest in steering the search results to commercial and social websites. These generate clicks, not the commons. I do have the impression that Google is much more interested in SDC of files than the Commons categories. Every effort should be made to fill in the P:P180. Google certainly uses the labels in Wikidata as datafeed for the search engines. Also used for educating the translation software.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:12, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia itself is indexed rather highly on Google search results though. And it does index images that are used in Wikipedia articles, but this treatment isn't extended to the other Wikimedia projects. (I can't speak for other media files however). ReneeWrites (talk) 18:26, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Yes Wikipedia is, but not Commons, the second largest Wikimedia project with a type of content that lots of people are interested in, watch and search for (media of all kinds). It does not index any video on here (at least in my tests I could not find any so far even when searching for the exact title) and images I think are only indexed when they're used in Wikipedia articles and even then often missing from the main results. One part of the proposal is systematic tests/investigations so there is some data on this. I think overall the indexing is pretty bad even when one is searching for a subject that WMC has lots of high quality contents and other image results that are shown are fairly low-quality. One could also focus on the videos. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:32, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
Google often indexes images that are not in a Wikipedia article. I find plenty if I do specifically an image search. But it doesn't tend to list pages that are mainly an image in its general results, so Commons image pages often don't show in the result if you do a general Google search. - Jmabel ! talk05:11, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
Rarely it does, but indexing a random tiny subset of files doesn't change anything about the issue and only makes it harder to notice this. I did not find plenty of images for prior searches I did where I then either used an image not from WMC despite that I know WMC has at least as good images well-organized or used the WMC search. Again, investigations are the first step of what is proposed so maybe you could share your searches. Images certainly shouldn't show up in the general search results (well nearly always) – I made it clear that this is about the Images and Videos tabs of these sites...only when it comes to category pages is this about the general search results. I currently don't have many good examples. Things I searched for (those may not be the best examples) I think included roughly Rivers from space and Algae blooms from space and Satellite picture of cities at night. This is not about Google&DDG not indexing any files on WMC. Please let me know if that should be clearer in the proposal. It is about them indexing only very few images (and those are not even the most relevant or best) when it should be many (e.g. in searches where WMC has lots of good-organized files), not showing nearly all categories in the results and not indexing any videos. Maybe it should be clearer that isn't necessarily all Google's fault – the investigations may reveal things Wikimedia community & tech could do to improve its inclusion in external search results – however such steps depend on investigations and don't mean step 2 & 3 are invalid, other things could follow up on that step in addition and shape these two. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:30, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
Yes, that's the kind of investigations I'm proposing are done large scale and in systematic ways (and well visibly e.g. published in diff) so we can identify cases that are well indexed, find out why, and identify cases that should be well-indexed but aren't and so on.
It could be that it's at the top because it contains a long descriptive category description – which most cats however don't really need because the category title is self-explanatory – as well as an infobox with all sorts of data. It's not unlikely also because there's few other websites with info on that subject, especially not recent ones that are linked from other pages. As a result of findings like your example, one could for example conduct tests (and/or check the theory via the dataset) whether it's the company's name in the description that caused the cat to show up this high or the description and consider things like adding category-descriptions (partly automatically via WP article leads and/or Wikidata item description). An open letter doesn't have to be as provocative and confrontational as the title of this thread, one could nicely ask Google & Co to improve their results by considering specific things or identified requested changes. Relevant to that is that Google & Co heavily make use of Wikimedia content in all sorts of ways but this isn't about fairly giving back (some media attention however could be due to that and reference that): it would be about them improving their search results for everyone so it shows media or pages that the person searching would likely find useful (e.g. via considering how many files and how many Wikipedia-used files are contained in the category). (When it comes to videos however it seems like purposeful exclusion.) Prototyperspective (talk) 08:24, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
Google clearly does take these images into account. I looked up a handful of terms:
Google Images searches
hubble extreme deep field (1 top result from WMF projects)
pando tree (2 top results from WMF projects)
tokyo tower (2 top results from WMF projects)
african renaissance monument (2 top results from WMF projects)
burj khalifa (2 top results from WMF projects)
gutenberg bible (2 top results from WMF projects)
ka'ba (7 top results from WMF projects)
michelangelo david (3 top results from WMF projects)
mount denali (3 top results from WMF projects and 1 from Wikiwand, which mirrors Wikipedia)
keyboard (0 top results from WMF projects. In this case, it gave me stores near me to buy keyboards, which makes perfect sense, if you ask me.)
hurricane milton (1 top result from WMF projects)
vladimir putin (1 top result from WMF projects)
mitochondrion (1 top result from WMF projects)
october revolution (2 top results from WMF projects)
northern lights (0 top results from WMF projects)
train (3 top results from WMF projects)
barcelona (1 top result from WMF projects)
mesopotamia (2 top results from WMF projects)
If you narrow your search to CC images, you get more from Flickr and Commons:
Google Images searches - Narrowed to Creative Commons
hubble extreme deep field (4 top results from WMF projects)
pando tree (4 top results from WMF projects)
tokyo tower (4 top results from WMF projects)
african renaissance monument (6 top results from WMF projects)
burj khalifa (7 top results from WMF projects)
gutenberg bible (4 top results from WMF projects)
ka'ba (5 top results from WMF projects, decreased)
michelangelo david (6 top results from WMF projects)
mount denali (3 top results from WMF projects)
keyboard (4 top results from WMF projects)
hurricane milton (1 top result from WMF projects)
vladimir putin (4 top results from WMF projects)
mitochondrion (16(!) top results from WMF projects)
october revolution (1 top result from WMF projects, decreased)
northern lights (3 top results from WMF projects)
train (4 top results from WMF projects)
barcelona (2 top results from WMF projects)
mesopotamia (5 top results from WMF projects)
I don't believe there even is a problem. Sure, results from WMF projects are only 1 or 2 in many cases, but:
it's not like there was any other site that did have a majority of the top results
you can improve them by searching for CC content
Wikipedia was almost always in the results, even if they didn't have a majority in the top images (which there's no reason it should, might I add). I can't say the same about other results I saw, like Britannica, NatGeo, Adobe Stock, etc.
Google is showing results from Wikipedia, Commons, and even smaller projects like Wikispecies and Wikivoyage, at times .I wouldn't put it past them that they're prioritizing commercial and social sites that run Google Ads (purely speculation from my part, don't take my word for it), but I find it hard to believe that they're straight up censoring, shadowbanning, or otherwise limiting results from WMF projects. Rubýñ(Scold)17:21, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
I haven't repeated all the searches to test this, but with the ones I did I only got 1 result from WMF, and it was the image in the infobox of the Wikipedia article about the subject. ReneeWrites (talk) 20:29, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
I personally use Ecosia to search things and I often just type in something in Ecosia rather than search it here because I am too lazy to use the convoluted Wikimedia internal search method (yes, using external websites to find something is oftentimes easy than the internal "search" engines on Wikimedia websites), but I noticed that in the past few months Ecosia has been suppressing non-Wikipedia Wikimedia websites more, now, this seems to coincide with the switch where Ecosia now mixes in Google Search search results with those from Microsoft Bing, before this change Ecosia exclusively used Microsoft Bing and while I've used Microsoft Bing as my main search enginge since 2011~2012'ish, I switched to Ecosia a couple of years ago (after I saw one of their advertisements on Google YouTube) and I occasionally compare it with Google Search and other search engines. Judging by the fact that Google Search suppresses Wikimedia Commons and Microsoft Bing does this to a lesser extent I assume that this likely is a deliberate choice by those companies. But it could probably also be something internal at Wikimedia websites as all non-article space pages at Wikipedia are also excluded from search engines (meaning that someone cannot find any Wikipedia policy pages unless someone looks for them within Wikipedia, which I've always found to be a rather odd choice).
Now, we know that Google Search, Microsoft Bing, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo! Search, Etc. all heavily rely on Wikidata, perhaps linking all Wikimedia Commons category pages with Wikidata items might help integrate this website better with search engines, if you think about it, the exclusion of the Wikimedia Commons is exclusively the exclusion of the Wikimedia Commons, I have no trouble finding results from the Wiktionary or Wikivoyage, which probably means that the integration between Wikidata and other Wikimedia websites helps them. Now, I know that "SEO" is considered "a curse word among Wikimedians", but if we want the Wikimedia Commons to show up in search results we most likely do need to link to Wikidata and properly use redirects, alternative titles, translations, Etc. in a way that makes sense. For example, if you search for alternative titles on Wikipedia you get them, like "Communist Germany" in a search enginge you'll find the DDR because "Communist Germany" is a redirect at Wikipedia. Meanwhile, we tend to have highly specific titles and redirects are typically deleted. But my guess is that the main culprit is the lack of Wikidata integration at the Wikimedia Commons, I wonder if files with more optimised structured data also show up in search engine results more as these are dependent on Wikidata items. Alternatively, we could compare if categories with or without Wikidata integration show up more in internet search enginges. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 18:52, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for this interesting info contribution.
Comparing indexing results between search engines like so and across time (especially after algorithms were reported to be changed albeit it's often probably not announced) could help identify causes and potential mitigation measures.
I never noticed or thought about search engines not indexing policy and meta pages of Wikimedia sites (nonWMC), if so that's also I think something that would be good to be changed if possible. For example, new editors or readers may search for these with a search engine instead of the internal one. If they searched for a meta/help pages on Commons it's often quite possible they can't find it because they don't show up in the search results even when in the MediaSearch' Categories and Pages tab (issue #8 here).
[Google & Co] all heavily rely on Wikidata that good integration with Wikidata is a cause for SE indexing or good indexing and that improving that integration are two hypotheses that could be tested. I do not think this is the case much because category pages that are linked to Wikidata items also do not show up and only a tiny sub < 0,01% of files are used in Wikidata items or usable there while most items are somewhere underneath a category that is linked to Wikidata item. I think 'it's not linked to a Wikidata item' or 'it doesn't have structured data depicts statements' would be not much more than false excuses (not necessarily deliberate) for not indexing and I don't see why it would rely on / require it / why it should be expected. Moreover, some categories should probably be well-indexed without being linked to a Wikidata item or linking such would be inappropriate or at least can't be done at scale(?) – e.g. Category:Drone videos with lots of organized content can't even be found in DuckDuckGo when searching for drone videos wiki (btw I think it should also show up high for searches like free drone videos). The linked proposal however is interesting but I have doubts this can be done both at scale and affects the SE much. Data suggesting such as has any significant effect is also missing. So I don't think it would solve this, e.g. videos on WMC still don't show up in the videos tab and many large categories are already linked.
and properly use redirects, alternative titles, translations, Etc. in a way that makes sense Agree. One option is to sync ENWP redirects of items to WMC so WMC has the same redirects [ie a tool for doing so]. Another is Adding machine translated category titles and this could also be implemented via redirects and be extended to category descriptions. This however is another case that I don't think should be required for the pages to show up in search results but only improve them. It's possible that this would solve this even if it shouldn't be that way due to how pages are ranked. Note that this may require that the category page is an actual url with an actual title and not not the same url with some Javascript dynamically changing the title depending on the user language. Another option of creating redirects of translated titles – Category:Tiere (de; only plural form not singular) currently redirects to Category:Animals – can't be done at scale and may cause issues (such as HotCat autocompletes).
In any case such comparison data would be great even if it's just a small factor (I doubt it's the main culprit for the plural indexing issues).
From everything I've been able to tell, Google does index pages in "Commons" space. For example, do a Google search on "structured data commons" (no quotes). - Jmabel ! talk16:43, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Yes, this is known, e.g. the intro already is about "most" files, not "all" files as well as results' ranking/findability. I've yet got to see a WMC video in the videos tab however. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:46, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Sorry I misunderstood your comment Jmabel – it's addressing point #2 and you're right on that.
Some examples of low-views useful major categories below. Please comment if anybody knows more in regards to why Videos on WMC are not showing in the Videos tab of Google, DuckDuckGo, etc. Maybe one could ask them or see if there's any other large websites whose videos are not shown there (and why).
The 14th most viewed page and the second most viewed category on Commons [12] in also a video category [13]. Views on all Commons pages are quit low there is nothing special with videos on Commons. GPSLeo (talk) 19:13, 26 October 2024 (UTC)
Yes, even Commons pages with most view get few views which is consistent with the problem description in the proposal. I did not suggest there was something special with videos except that none of them are shown in and indexed in the videos tab of the search engines. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:29, 26 October 2024 (UTC)
It's a good thing, if Google keeps us a relative secret. This is a databank for a select audience, that’s hopefully using items for creating content, or research. It's not a social media website for easy access to every airhead in creation, we don't need the level of vandalism, that would surely follow.
As a matter of fact, we scavenge off commercial websites, without them, we would have limited access to new materiel. It would be detrimental, to attempt to replace them, no good would come of it. Broichmore (talk) 12:26, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
Even for "select audience" it's known, used and discoverable far too little. They also use the Videos tab for example. Moreover, I do not agree with this elitism. Free media and free knowledge is about society overall not some very small group. With increased use, there would also be increased contributors who watch pages and Wikipedia is used much more and is not overrun by vandalism, it probably doesn't increase linearly with increased public use and even if it would there can be and are technological means to detect vandalism. The site would not replace commercial websites even if far more popular. I do not agree that we scavenge off these either. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:54, 29 October 2024 (UTC)
So, to wrap this up: you want to upload stuff on Commons and have it shown in google´s services in a predictable way. This would only make sense for either advertising or some sort of campaigning and that is "no bueno". Alexpl (talk) 15:43, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
No this doesn't wrap it up at all and it's entirely unrelated to advertising or some sort of ad-like campaigning. It's also not about a "predictable way". Prototyperspective (talk) 16:03, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
Its to bad the Phabricator ticket is stalled out. It doesn't seem like anything else can be done about it outside of that though. --Adamant1 (talk) 19:15, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
Sure, but I was specifically referring to this discussion. Not suggestions you've made in other proposals. Can anything be done about it in this conversation? Probably not. Can things be done about in other conversations or places? Maybe. But I'm not replying to someone else in another conversation now am I? --Adamant1 (talk) 21:34, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
I don't think it's appropriate (let alone necessary) to make assumptions about why someone would support this initiative, especially if those assumptions are going to be bad ones. For my part I just like the information I add to these projects (whether this is Commons or Wikipedia itself) to be findable, but the difference between how the Google search engine treats these two projects is night and day. ReneeWrites (talk) 15:57, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
Regardless of the effect size, I doubt we can do much about this directly. The search-engine market is far less competitive than it appears; almost all search engines have Google, Microsoft Bing, or the PRC government behind their backends (see Wikipedia:List of search engines). There are also serious obstacles to market entry, like Cloudflare prohibiting even medium-sized search engines from crawling and indexing the pages they host. So search engine backends wield a lot of oligopoly power, whether they want to or not.
I'd suggest our most effective move would be to make Commons pages more visible through more specialized, non-oligopoly search tools. For instance, we could make all Commons videos available on PeerTube, a decentralized, ActivityPub-federating video platform. This would make them searchable through Sepia Search. It would also make it possible to download large videos from Commons (which fails often enough that I've given up on it) and make downloading videos faster. We could also reach out to new market entrants like Mojeek.
We could also raise our profile directly, for instance by encouraging professional groups to use Commons (academics, journalists, people distributing public health information...). Explain that they can be contributors, users of existing content, and requesters of custom content at our graphics labs. Train librarians. Train students. That sort of thing.
And how much would that be? To handle that sort of traffic costs more money - for very little benefit to the average user. Alexpl (talk) 16:28, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
PeerTube is peer-to-peer, designed to keep bandwidth costs down. You can run a server on a desktop computer, like a torrent. Certainly the WMF can afford servers, their main expense is salaries. We could expect new users of our content, because it would make our media available on all ActivityPub-federating platforms, like Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.. Making content available to new users benefits them and is our basic goal; making knowledge available, to everyone. HLHJ (talk) 02:47, 11 November 2024 (UTC)
Yes, not much but some things. I listed some of those things, I'll repeat two: 1. doing systematic research and compiling a dataset 2. writing an open letter with some publicity via WMF. The obstacles to market entry are very interesting, did not know about that cloudflare thing, and things like this could be addressed by digital policy if it was known etc. PeerTube integration could be useful for scaling / reducing server load and large files but I don't think it's helpful here except maybe as an option of what could be done if search engines better index videos and that causes server loads. I never had any issues with downloading videos from WMC. I find Distributed search engines like YaCy interesting but things related to these is not really addressing this issue for probably the next 10 years. The suggestion about proactively reaching out to potential contributors is good but it also wouldn't address this issue – it doesn't improve the indexing and public use/awareness of the site, and how do you explain them why they should contribute here if their media nearly don't get any views? I think whatever reasons people have for contributing to Commons like public education or organizing free media drastically reduce in meaning if the site simply doesn't get used. Most files here are not used in Wikipedias and the file organization, searchability, descriptions, etc are all not relevant if this site is just for hosting files that Internet users can find and make use of when they happen to read the Wikipedia article it's used in. I think before reaching out to potential especially valuable contributors (PEVC?), we should work on solving the problem of the site's use/value/popularity/awareness. I think there's two approaches:
developments and digital policy activity to enable better (e.g. more neutrality and possibly less misinfo-spewing without any warning tags) alternatives (broader)
all sorts of activity (including digital policy activity but this may not be key or needed here) to improve the few search engines used in the real world (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) toward better inclusion of Commons (more impactful, easier, and more immediate)
If there was an open letter, I think it would probably be good to include some info about the first point but probably more as some sort of supporting context for why the few search engines should index the site & include its contents (eg in the Video tab) better. Maybe this could also boost some activity in regards to developing / helping the development of better alternatives but this is more (or better kept to be) about a real-world-pragmatic thing. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:26, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
The simplest regulatory method for increasing competition is to make crawl data public. Crawling the web takes massive amounts of time and energy, and there is no objective need for each search engine company to do its own crawl. But big crawls cost millions, so no-one wants to share their expensive asset. It's a huge waste.[14]
"Contribute so I can use your images on Wikipedia" works. "Search because there are good images you can use here" also works. A copy-paste html code snippet for embedding an image in your website might help. I'd also like better video transcript-making tools, a semi-automated process like OCR on Wikisource, so I don't spend all my time typing out timings. We have an advantage in manual transcripts.
I just think the chance of major search engines saying "Thank you for your open letter. We'd never thought to make Commons more visible! We should do that!" are nil. HLHJ (talk) 03:01, 11 November 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for explaining and interesting link. What do you think of Common Crawl in that regard then, maybe what you proposed could be achieved by improving that existing project? "Contribute so I can use your images on Wikipedia" works. "Search… what are you referring to there? I don't see how it relates to my prior comment and I don't really understand it. A copy-paste html code snippet for embedding an image in your website might help. if you mean images on Commons on other websites how images are embedded varies per website and there already is a button that shows "Embed this file" HTML when you click on "Use this file" (it just doesn't show on mobile). video transcript-making tools agree – please take a look at my proposal for that here. I just think the chance of major search engines saying "[…]" are nil. I don't think so – there is a chance they want to maintain good reputation, good standing with the community, or there is media reporting about this (media/public pressure) which is especially relevant as these search engines benefit heavily from Wikipedia (even more so with latest AI developments) so shouldn't be doing this. If nothing happens what is there to lose to at least try, and it would raise awareness of this issue and maybe boost some alternative approaches that address it (including novel search engines etc). Prototyperspective (talk) 20:03, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
Sorry, I was saying people do use Commons in response to learning that it has useful content; perhaps a bit off-topic. I hadn't seen that "Embed this file file". PeerTube was actually a suggestion for getting indexed by a novel search engine, because it has a native search engine. I like the transcription-tool proposal; I tried to transcribe this excellent series documenting the last economic European home weaving, but it took forever. I can't imagine an AI tool would correctly register the German dialect, but if it got the timings, that would save me maybe 3/4 of the time (actually, a way to play videos at double or triple speed would also be a great help). The proposal at Meta:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Do something about Google & DuckDuckGo search not indexing media files and categories on Commons seems to be a duplicate of Meta:Community Wishlist/Wishes/(Commons) file description pages should be indexable by (Google) search. I'd suggest collaborating with the other editor, TheDJ, to merge them; TheDJ has a good description of the problem, technically detailed and unarguably-phrased. I agree that mentioning both the major backends, Google and Bing (DuckduckGo uses Bing) is a good idea, and I'd suggest also making sure we get well-indexed by CommonCrawl (which I hadn't heard of, thank you); probably easier and possibly, long-term, higher-importance than Google and Bing. HLHJ (talk) 03:17, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Those two proposals are very different and I hoped you would have looked into it more. For example, the second assumes to know what the cause of this is. If you don't try the method I showed you, you won't know how well it transcribes the documentary. PeerTube indexing is not really relevant as that is not what the subject of this thread is about (and also a very small userbase). CommonCrawl seems only relevant to the issue of alternative search engines but not indexing by Google & DuckDuckGo & Bing. No idea why you think getting indexed by CommonCrawl would be more important than Google. I'm not sure anymore if you understood what this thread is about. It's not about alternative search engines. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:30, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
"Should," yes. "Can," well that's a whole other task. The decline of Google search into surfacing spam and AI slop over legitimate content has been extensively reported on this year, and while it would be great if we could singlehandedly un-enshittify Google search it is a problem much bigger than Commons. Gnomingstuff (talk) 00:25, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
See also this phab ticket (also in margin, no inline template?). We mess up our end, too.
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:11, 2 October 2024 (UTC) 
Support It's to bad the same thing can't be done for previous competitions. --Adamant1 (talk) 00:56, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
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Done - Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Raster quick response codes. I've included the decoded content of most of the images. Omphalographer (talk) 03:17, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
Thank you.! modern_primat ඞඞඞ ----TALK 05:42, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
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. Has this magic trick been done in Wikidata, in Commons, or in each project separetely with a template? How does this even work? However it was done, right now it seems to me like a really heinous way of project sabotage. --Enyavar (talk) 19:52, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
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Comment There was an attempt earlier at Commons:Bots/Requests/EatchaBot 3 / Category:Arranged license review project to make review easier. I think it did help but it have now stopped. Maybe there are some ideas or code that can be of use for future bots. I also like the idea Zache mention about having a bot to confirm that files from Finna match the source. It is probably not possible to make one bot that can solve all problems but it will help if one or more bots can do some tasks and reduce the amount of files that humans have to work on. --MGA73 (talk) 19:40, 1 November 2024 (UTC)_Composition_of_high-quality_datasets_-_The_Pile_(left),_PaLM_(top-right),_MassiveText_(bottom-right).png){kind=link}
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