{{FrenchMinistryOfForeignAffairs}} is mistakenly displayed to suggest a free license – to me it seems not: It does not allow unrestricted modification. Deletion of any image with this tag should be considered. Comments? Perhaps I have overlooked something... --Rtc20:07, 31 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really want to create COM:FG, but are there some gallery pages that you feel are comprehensive, particularly well organised and maintained? Do you know of some "model" pages that other galleries could do well to copy? Are there some pages that you think present material in a particularly enlightening or illuminating way? Or even just do the "basics", but do them well? (Think species/animals, locations)
Hi all. We, for now, have some problems about the licenses on the Flags. I thought that if the Governative Flags are in the Cia World Facbook, they are PD. Why we don't do a template:PD-GovernativeFlags, for these images? I don't know if it is right (probably no), but I want know if anybody know this argument better than me. Thanks, bye. --RED DEVIL66610:49, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
See Template:PD-Flag. Flags are not automatically exempt from copyright, which is why I think no one wants to use a blanket "PD-flag". (For example the Australian Aboriginal flag, one of Australia's national flags, is copyrighted.) For images from the CIA World Factbook you can in fact use {{PD-USGov-CIA-WF}}. But having user-created flags under things like PD-self, GFDL and CC licenses is really really weird, I totally agree. pfctdayelise (translate?) 14:11, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I am not agree to use Pd-self for flags. If the design of a flag is copyrighted, if I do it on myself, it is copyrighted too. I want know a general rules for governative flags, or almost for national flags. --RED DEVIL66616:17, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
National flags are PD, since either by national law made them PD, or that they have been seen everywhere and it takes no real effort to redraw such flags. I personally use PD-self when I draw flag images, and it usually stays that way until people actually challenege it. User:Zscout370(Return fire)00:57, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
But PD-self implies that you own the copyright and you are releasing it into the public domain, which is not what this case is. So I think that's also a misleading tag. pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:04, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think that if the design of a flag is copyrighted, if you draw it the design is copyrighted too. Imho, we must have a list of all flags used in the CIA WF, because if are usable by CIA WF, we can use they too. For the otherswe must see case by case. --RED DEVIL66609:04, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A user is warning on the French Bistro that this picture's filename « Etterbeekse-raedhuis.jpg » is wrong. Instead of being the city's town hall (raedhuis) the image is in fact depicting the police station.
Is there any solution to this problem if the photographer does not upload the picture himself again with a new name ?
If the photographer doesn't answer our request, can we create a duplicate with a corrected name (Etterbeek's fire_station.jpg), mention the wrongly labeled image as a source, as if it came from an external internet site, and add a warning message on the wrongly labeled picture like « please do not use this badly named image, use Etterbeek's fire_station.jpg instead ?
I guess this is not the first time such a case has occured. How have you dealt with this kind of problem in the past? Teofilo14:25, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There is no way to rename an image without re-uploading it under a new name. If the original photographer wont reupload it then anyone else can (make sure you donwload the full version not the thumbnail). Give the original source (not the wrongly named image) but mention that it was previously uploaded by user:x as image:y.jpg and the reason for reuploading that.
You can then request the other one be deleted as a duplicate - use the {{[[db|reason]]}} template. It would also be helpful if you replaced teh link to the old image with a link to the new name on all projects. Thryduulf17:10, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
same file with a new nameI've re-uploaded the same image with a new file name. And left a warning message on the wrongly named file. Teofilo09:04, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Two indefinate blocks
I've just blocked 2 users indefinately.
User:Thry Duulf - for impersonating me, including copying my user page (I have deleted the copy now) and vandalsing several people's user pages, to mark them as vandals.
User:BROOKE-CANADIAN - for replacing all content on several users userpages with a spamming link. Is an indef block too long for this?
What does the "bot" flag actually change about an account? Is the bot status reserved for admins? Maybe some words of explanation should be left →here.
Hm, why use a complicated upload tool when there is the neat Perl script available? ;-) I didn't know about the Commonist tool. Somehow I just wouldn't hit on the Tools site(*ashamed*). I only found the Commonplace which unfortunately does not work on my system. Thanks for the tip! -Pumbaa01:26, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Anyway, I think I'll use my bot account even though the bot flag is not set. This way, everyone can easily see how the upload came about. This might be helpful in troubleshooting, for me too. Maybe I'll ask for the bot flag to be set later on. At the moment, I might be just too new to get accepted. --Pumbaa01:26, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I belive the bot flag is often though of the wrong way... think about it this way: the bot flag expresses trust, because people have the opetion to hide bot edits from the watchlist, recentchanges, etc. I.e. a "new" bot should operate without the flag for a while, so people see what it's doing. Only when it's well established and trusted, give it the bot flag. -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:09, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this assessment. Let it run without a bot flag and maybe even get someone else to look over its contribs for a while to make sure it's not missing anything. pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:03, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just found the web page of Stars and Stripes magazine, a paper run by the US military. www.stripes.com
Now, the interesting question is, since reporters and photographers of the magazine are employed by the US military and thus by the US government, wouldn't all pictures on their webpage be in the public domain? --Mkill19:38, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No. "Stories and photos by Stars and Stripes staffers are copyrighted, and may not be reprinted or used without permission. E-mail permission@stripes.osd.mil, and let us know what you need. We regret that we cannot grant reprint permission for wire service or other syndicated material, or provide copies of photos from those services."[1]
And "Stars and Stripes is authorized for publication by the Department of Defense for members of the Military Services overseas. However, the contents of Stars and Stripes are unofficial, and are not to be considered as the official views of, or endorsed by, the U.S. Government, including the Department of Defense or the U.S. European or Pacific Commands. As a DoD newspaper, Stars and Stripes may be distributed through official channels and use appropriated funds for distribution to remote and isolated locations where overseas DoD personnel are located."[2]
I used "Mechanical Tabulator" and "Addelektra" as keywords.
However searching, e.g., "Addelektra" does not yield any result. So my question is: did I make an error while annotating the picture, does indexing the pictures take so much time or migh there be a technical error.
The search on Wikimedia projects uses the en:Lucene search engine. The search index is not updated immediately: it may take several days (or even weeks, depending on other tasks performed on the servers) until a new page is indexed. -- Duesentrieb(?!)12:18, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, btw: make sure you have the image namespace included in your search. Not sure if it's searched by default on the commons (as it should), it's not searched per default on Wikipedia, for instance. You can change that in your user preferences. -- Duesentrieb(?!)12:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 2, 2006
Common Misconception
I saw that some licenses are severely misinterpreted here on commons. Here is a list of problematic areas:
"Public Domain"
Let's be honest, this is a really over-used term. Except in the case of a legal base (US govt) or in a very explicit statement from the author (CC PD) it can be assumed that all use of the term Public Domain merely refers to a copyrighted work which can be copied freely, and exploited commercially, but usually a permission for unrestricted modification is not intended. Actually, "Public Domain" is often not used to grant a permission at all, but simply used as a term for a license for the general public (arbitrary third party without further request, ie. not as in for one person or one organization)!
"Copyright free"/"No copyright"
Ditto. This one might not even intend to allow commercial use.
"For publication purposes"
Very common. For example Template:DutchRoyalNavy, Template:FrenchMinistryOfForeignAffairs (see also #French_Ministry_Of_Foreign_Affairs) Often allows (even commercially of course) use in journalistic and scientific context, and allows cropping of the image as needed. But it commonly does not allow arbitrary modification and use, for example using the picture by itself entirely out of the context (promotional poster for example) or deformation. A large amount of commons pictures falls under such a non-free license yet is displayed as if it were a free one.
"May be used freely"
Often means copying is permitted, but not modification. Can also mean for 'if used for free as in beer' (ie., non-commercial).
Modification not permitted explicitely
From a legal sense, modification is permitted only if it is actually explicitly mentioned or really (and I mean really) clear from the context (as in "unrestricted use as far ranging as legally possible").
All these can be assumed not to be free licenses, except if the rights holder explicitly grants all necessary permissions in full awareness of the consequences. Let me show you an example: [3] used at (Image:Horst Köhler.jpg for example). It says "These photographs are in the public domain. They are free to use for publication purposes." Knowing the above, it must be translated carefully to: "We grant a license to the general public concering these photographs. You are permitted to copy and display the picture only in scientific and journalistic contexts about the displayed person, but you are not allowed to make substantial changes to the image (if necessary for the publication, cropping or slight color changing/halftone is okay) or deform it or in any way, use it without such a context or in a different context." Ie. actually what claims to be "public domain" in the sense of US-Govt work turns out to be a very restrictive and non-free license after all!
Now an example I already verified: Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Copyrighted_Other Many CDU (german party) pictures were listed as PD. When I asked them if that was really what they intended, they told me they had got a phone call (!) a long time ago and it was not really clear to them how far-ranging the permission asked for really was. They did not intend to grant any rights outside display on Wikipedia. See de:WP:UF#CDU-Bilder for the statement of the partial non-exclusive rights holder. (He writes even if he wanted, he could not grant such a far-ranging permission; one had to ask many single exclusive rights holders to get such a permission legally.)
I think many tags have to be reconsidered and checked really careful and rights holders need to be asked for a clear statement (see de:Wikipedia:Textvorlagen#Einverständniserklärung für alle Anfragen) to really exterminate the non-free stuff from commons which today is still largely prevalent. Much could be done better if interpreters of the permissions would see the situation from the rights holder's perspective and not from the perspective of the "I found another public domain gallery, great!" guy if only one of the seemingly magic words from above are spotted on it. Also most people seem to look for things forbidden explicitly while what really counts is what's explicitly allowed, since everything else is forbidden by copyright anyway.
Well at first it is the problem of the CDU not ours if they don't know what they said... (I hate if I told people 5 times what the GFDL is and later they say "Huh I didn't know".) But bay the way the "Einverständniserklärung" has been translated already in English, see: Commons:Email templates. I would be ver happy if you can translate the other templates from the German page Commons:Emailvorlagen as well into English. Arnomane09:51, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It is always our problem, since if you make use of copyrighted work, by law it is on your side to prove you have permission. "I phoned this guy once" is not a proof, since even if you lied one could not prove the opposite; also the actual conditions would be irreproducible. Also all of the above magic words are in a strict legal sense null and void in most countries since there *is* simply no legal way of "public domain by declaration" and since the term is used so commonly for so many things; so claiming an unrestricted right to use from the words 'public domain' is not appropriate, see [4] for cases where only "unveränderte Vervielfältigung und Nutzung" (unmodified copying and using; emphasis by me; 4 U 223/93) or even only non-commercial use (17 O 382/93; but I dont know if one decision revised the other.) was deduced by the court. granted, this is about computer programs, but the situation is more than similar. --Rtc17:23, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It may be a good idea to have this list of popular misconceptions on Commons:Licensing - a link to Commons:Email templates should be there too, but the page should be populated first.
@Arnomane: the thing is, it is our problem if the CDU folx misunderstood the request: the point is that they do not even have the right to grant a fee license, we would probably have to ask each photographer. I.e. whatever they say is void if they don't have complete control over the usage right of the phoptograph (which is very rarely the case, escpecially since German Urheberrecht is not transferable). -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:06, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
When people choose and label content as being in the public domain, we can generally safely assume that they know what that means. If they turn out to have meant something different, well, they can approach us and ask for certain media files to be removed, and there's a good chance we'll comply, but we will certainly not preventively remove images because someone "might not really have meant it". I'm also opposed to any attempt to undermine the credibility of "public domain" as a personal choice. If you feel that the information underlying a particular image upload on Commons is insufficient, try to get better information. It is generally not a reason to delete content. We have enough categories like Category:Unknown - March 2006 where the licensing situation is much worse and more pressing. Of course, I do agree that some terms (e.g. "promotion photo") are simply not compatible with Commons policy.---Eloquence15:04, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly disagree. The cited court rulings have shown that simply saying 'Public Domain' does by far not cause a work to be free in a US legal sense or what comes as close as possible to this in other legislations. What is important in contracts is what is meant, not how it can be understood by third party perhaps according to some foreign law system. It is on the rights holder's side to clearly state what he means, that's what we have Commons:Email templates for. We must assume that Public Domain = promotional purposes or even only fair use, since that is how it's understood. It is okay to label one's own pictures since the label ist clear enough about the consequences. But interpreting simply the general words 'public domain' from a third party website in their specific interpretation of the tag is not admissible, if there is not clear evidence to support this interpretation (CC PD icon for example). --Rtc12:11, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And we will revert it and make a proper review of the license templates as I tried to explain you on IRC for several hours. We really don't need people that know everything better and that do not assume that we have some knowledge on licensing. You did not contribute to Wikimedia Commons in the past and now you want to teach us with "Common Misconception" ? Sorry that's not the way it works. And Eloquence remark is worth considering it. Arnomane08:49, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Commons is not a social event in which you have to make friends with others to get a reputation and then after lots of sleaze you perhaps can go ahead and change something. There's the pinciple being bold. Merely if you have the better arguments, you win. This time I have the better arguments, which we have already seen in IRC when you tried to evade the only test that can prove you wrong: To ask the rights owners. We can discuss for years about the interpretation of the licenses. Or we can simply ask the rights holder. It's that easy. Please see that safety of licenses is more important than mass of pictures. Even if lots of pictures are lost in a honest way because rights holders say 'no' on request that's better than lots of pictures kept in a dishonest way of mere hope that some optimistic interpetation might be right an the rights holder won't sue. --Rtc20:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Once again. I never said that we make a big long debate with no result. There is beside the principle of being bold the principle of "assume good faith". You apparently did not assume good faith towards the good will of those people that created that templates and the other Commons contributors judging mainly correctly on Licensing and your mass template change did help nobody. Have a look at Commons talk:Licensing and maybe you should start to respect the knowlegde and procedures of the long time active Wikimedia Commons people. So this debate is now closed here. Arnomane00:41, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You misunderstood the concept of "assume good faith". It applies to people's intentions. I assume good faith that these people have done these license templates because they didn't know better and I also assume that they didn't want to do anybody harm. Sure! But "assume good faith" does not apply to the content of the templates themselves. This is a very dangerous legal problem, it has to be looked at with much skepticism, not with good faith at all. Claiming that good faith would apply would be the same as assuming in Wikipedia good faith that what people write is correct no matter how abstruse and without source it is. When today the first mail was received that showed for the respective template that I was right, and even more than I had thought, you went completely crazy and reverted everything I had done so far about warnings. Please stop trying to star a personal war against me, start attacking my claims by proving that you can get the email template permission by the rights holders. --Rtc01:06, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 3, 2006
&uselang= links in language menues
In order to help not-logged-in new users, I have a proposal to add "&uselang= + language code" at the end of every link in language menus. The language menu for the Main page would become :
Good idea for anons... but may be annoying to logged in users, especialy to people that are trying to to cleanup/mainatance work on thos epages. I click the link for the chines version, and can't work with it because my interface turns chinese... not good. -- Duesentrieb(?!)12:40, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Why, yes. Thats's quite annoying if I simply open a tab for each language of a page, to fix the category or replace a template or whatever... Also, the uselang setting does not carry through: as soon as an anon follows a link (by clicking "edit", for instance), the interface is back to english. I don't see grat benefits from that. Maybe MediaWiki should support something like useanonlang=xy or something... -- Duesentrieb(?!)13:54, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Dusentrieb, if an old dinosaur like you is unable to find his way through links written in Chinese, how much more disturbed a Chinese newbie will be, to find his way through links written in English ! If you need to edit a page, you may type "Alt + E" and you won't have to read what is written on the tab. Anyway, as I explained on Template_talk:Lang-mp#&uselang=_links, I also provide small "▫" alternate links for users who want to use different languages for the page and the language interface.
Note also that the help balloons (the yellow pop-ups that come out when you put your mouse on a link) on the tabs are always provided in your prefered language, even if you click on a uselang=zh (chinese) link. Teofilo17:49, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see grat benefits from that.
This is a great benefit, because for the first time, people will have an opportunity to read the "Log in / create account" link in the top right corner not in English, but in their own language. This way they will have an opportunity to sign up, and set up their language preference, even if they do not know any English. Log in is especially disturbing, because this expression has very little to do with what a log is supposed to be, I mean a piece of wood. Teofilo16:37, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
as soon as an anon follows a link (...), the interface is back to english.
You can change links too, using a new template I've just created, template {{L}}.
Example
{{L|fr|Commons:Bistro|The French language Village Pump}} becomes
The altenative links labeled "▫" help a bit, i didn't notice them before. But I'm still concerned this will cause more confusion than it actually helps: while it's nice to see the login link in the user's language, he will still get the english login page when he clicks that link. AFAIK, it's not possible right now to change that. See our earlier discussion for ideas on that. -- Duesentrieb(?!)20:38, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Teofilio that it can't cause any more confusion than the current situation (where everything is in English for a long time). The little link that says "Refresh this page with French menus" or something similar is a GREAT idea, we can implement that straight away. That's not going to affect our translators at all.
The {{L}} thing is kinf of neat... but I still don't get who this is really going to help. Does this proposal, which means quite a bit of work and infrastucture, solve an actual problem? How many anonymous users who don't speak english want to post here?
The real problem I see is how to create and configure an account here if you don't speak english. Another is internationalized templates and category names, because that's important when looking for images. We should concentrate on these issues. IMHO, none of them can be resolved in a good way without some changes to the software, but we can try to find "stop gap" solutions that don't create redundant work and would be compatible with a software change - such as translation subpages for tags. -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:43, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
while it's nice to see the login link in the user's language, he will still get the english login page Yes, but the English login page has been improved by adding a language menu, so that the user may skip it and perform log-in or sign-up in his own language.
But I'm still concerned this will cause more confusion than it actually helps. Personaly I would favour removing the alternative "▫" links, but I had to add them as a compromise in favour of the people who say that they want to read non-English pages with an English interface (which I find, well... excentric).
How many anonymous users who don't speak english want to post here? I believe that all the people who want to post here first want to have a look at the Commons Website before signing up. This is what the "main page", "welcome page", "first step page" are meant for. These pages are supposed to be read by newcomers who have not yet signed up. If people need to insert a credit card (and therefore need to already be customers with an account) in a slot in order to open a bank's entrance door, no potential new customer without an account will ever enter the bank to ask for information nor ultimately open an account.
What is the purpose of the "welcome" link in the left margin if the person is unable to read the English word "Welcome"?
What is the purpose of the "Help" link in the left margin if the person is unable to read the English word "Help"?
we can try to find "stop gap" solutions that don't create redundant work Changing the language menus like I propose does not create "redundant work". It's quite straightforward. Teofilo09:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Position of newly-appeared "(Talk)" links
Might these be moved to sit between the checkboxes and page names, please? I imagine the list would then look less cluttered. Regards, David Kernow11:41, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Allowing to upload OpenDocument files
I ran into the problem than, while the old OpenOffice/StarOffice file types are acceptable for upload, the OpenDocument format used by OpenOffice 2.0 (and used/supported by other programs) cannot be uploaded. I've had to save files in the old format, so far without any problems, but I assume some things may break in this conversion.
This has been discussed just about a month ago, see the relevant discussion in VP archive-25. Basically, most OpenDocument files are ZIP files, and have the capability to store more than benign XML data. Also, we really have no need for rich text, OpenDraw files can be exported to SVG, and Impress/Powerpoint is useless :)
Really the only thing that we might use are spreadsheets... but given that the contents of an OpenDocument file cannot be determined by the file extension (which is just a convenience), if we reject four, we should reject the fifth as well. Perhaps, if the MediaWiki software detected whether an OpenDocument spreadsheet is actually a spreadsheet and nothing more, then it should allow it. Or the other option is to allow the uploads of raw OD spreadsheets (one XML file).—UED7713:25, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The link "This file", which is generated from {{Cc-by-sa-2.0-uk}}, which contains the code [[Media:{{PAGENAME}}|This file]]. Media links are listed in the File links section. Don't ask me why all the Creative Commons license tags contain Media links. User:dbenbenn00:58, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think so... I never understood why the link is there at all, it seems completely pointles... and it's in all the CC tags :( -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:11, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The link in the CC tag points to the actual image file (not the Image:... page). I guess this prevents you from copyrighting the whole description page. I don't know, IANAL --Pumbaa15:07, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
sxc.hu continuation
I've draft a new analysis about the Stock.XCHNG material here. I think that the images downloaded after 29 Dec, 2005 (date of revision of SXC terms of use) should be deleted. I'm more dubious about the images downloaded beforehand. At any rate, I'm asking Foundation and its legal dept. to decide, and let you know. villy ♦✎21:17, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry, I don't know how to list copyright violations. Image:Mapnl.jpg is clearly a shot from Google Maps and not, as the uploader claims, his own personal work. I'd suggest a review of his other contributions, too - Image:NewlanarkNL07.jpg seems old and unlikely to be the contributor's work, and Image:Altavia03.jpg looks like a scan from a modern book. These, I think, call into doubt the veracity of his PD claims for his other uploads. Thanks, and sorry for the trouble. :: 84.45.132.9616:07, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for notifying us! Whenever you encounter copyright violations, just edit {{Copyvio}} into the file description. That places such files into the Copyvio category, making it easier for admins to delete files. —UED7717:32, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Mucha died in 1939, so for all countries where copyright lasts for seventy years, his pictures will enter the PD on January 1st 2010. Husky20:22, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Is it possible that some countries adopted 70 year limit after the year 1989 (50 years after Mucha's death), so his work is PD after all? --romanm (talk) 16:42, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(copy from deletion request) At least in Germany, the 70 pma rule is retroactive, so it does not matter when it was adopted. I expect it's the same in most EU countries: retroactive at least for works still under copyright at the time of adoption, maybe even for everything. Things are different (and even more complicated) in the US. -- Duesentrieb(?!)17:24, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, in any case we should have a look at what Czech law sais - everything else is idle talk, I guess. If it's not PD by their law, it has to be deleted. If it is PD by their law, things get complicated... -- Duesentrieb(?!)17:26, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
For EU countries we have to respect the 70 years pma rule (EU directive 93/98/EWG from 1993) and no specific shorter country rules. en User Lupo could say whether these UK photos are PD in the USA but I can definitively say that a photographer can sue us in nearly all EU countries except of the UK. Discrimination of foreign EU creators is forbidden in all EU countries -> no rule of the shorter term (Schutzfristenvergleich) in the EU and a few other countries (e.g. Switzerland). The UK photo is treated in Germany according to German law (70 years pma for photographic works). If we want avoid legal troubles we should accept the rule:
For Works with a country of the European Union (or Switzerland or Iceland etc.) as origin we have to respect the 70 years after the dead of the author/creator rule. --Historiograf19:04, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe I'm confused... but how is it we've been running around with a million templates for every US govt department to ever have existed, yet we don't even have a basic one for the European Union, whose laws we regularly cite to cover dozens of countries????? {{PD-Germany}}, {{PD-Italy}}, {{PD-Sweden}} - what are we doing wasting our time? Let's merge them all to {{PD-EU}}! Or could someone explain what's actually going on here? pfctdayelise (translate?) 07:32, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps the Americans (with all their asinine laws) have been the only ones so far to actually look up the copyright laws. It makes a certain sense to me.Themadchopper07:43, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Historiograf is correct. Actually, upon closer inspection, the archivists' flowchart actually agrees with www.intellectual-property.gov.uk. If a photo was taken in the UK before 1945 then copyright would have expired on or by 31 December 1994. However, by the EU directives, if the photo was protected in any EEA country on 1 July 1995 then as of 1 January 1996 the copyright is revived. This is a particular issue since Germany had life + 70 years so any work that was protected in Germany became copyright again. Of course, because it is a matter of the national law of the individual EEA countries, and because it is hard to work out if a photograph is protected in that country, it all becomes a legal minefield, so the archivists just assume that the work was protected in Germany etc too. The UK government site points out that some photos, for a variety of reasons, would not actually have been protected in those other countries on 1 July 1995, so some would slip through the net - in these cases, the archivists are being unduly pessimistic. Yet one can hardly blame them for not checking through all the different EEA countries' copyright laws as of 1 July 1995.... I suggest that {{PD-Germany}}, {{PD-Italy}}, {{PD-Sweden}} and the new {{PD-UK-photo-pre-1945}} (which I had a hand in suggesting, under a misapprehension from a Wikipedia page I now believe to be incorrect and a misinterpretation at first reading of the government guidance) are actually incorrect and we should reduce them all down to {{PD-EU}}. TheGrappler02:44, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As {{PD-Sweden}} is based on a specific Swedish law (or actually, if I understand the issue correctly, an exception to a law introduced on a certain date), why wouldn't it remain useful to actually continue to refer to that law in the tag for Swedish photographs? (We should add a link to the law as well.) Tupsharru18:44, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 5, 2006
Bot help needed
Can someone with a bot please do the following:
For all the images in Category:Interstate Highway shields of the form "Image:Interstate X.svg", where the filename has no parentheses, mark it as a duplicate of "Image:I-X.svg".
Copy the categories (only the categories, not the description) and sortkeys from Interstate X to I-X. (This step is optional if it's hard to do.)
Is there a reason for using the I-X.svg name? Interstate X.svg seems a more helpful filename and one that is less likely to conflict with other potential uses. Thryduulf11:45, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ease of typing, and the fact that Interstate X was already in use. (I couldn't just upload over, as Commonist can't do that, and I'd need to change every description anyway.) --SPUI11:49, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oh God, I hate Commonist. Changing every file name means that 1) the old versions will be lost, and 2) all uses on Wikimedia projects will have to be updated. It would have been much better to use some other tool, such as Eloquence's very simple Perl script.
I suggest it would be better to use a bot to do the reverse of what SPUI asked for above. Copy the I-X.svg images to Interstate_X.svg, copy the new descriptions over, and mark I-X.svg as a duplicate. User:dbenbenn17:47, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ack, after I just changed most of the usages on en: to use I-X.svg. I'm not going to change them back. --SPUI23:35, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Proposed change to Wikimedia Commons box
Please see http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=1652553 for my proposed change to the "Welcome to the Wikimedia Commons" box on the Main Page.
This box is wider than the rest of the page, which fits pretty well an 800x600 display. Besides, only in doing the modification did I realize that Nature, Society and Science are topics, while Images, Sound, and Video are (media) types.
OK?
--67-21-48-12219:20, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Please read en:Wikipedia:Public_Domain#World_War_II_images for info on images from Nazi Germany - they are not PD automatically. Relying on the strange distinction between "Lichtbild" (photographic image) and "Lichtbildwerk" (photographic work) is probably not a good idea anyway - recent court decisions tend to handle everything as a "work", giving full protection.
Hah. This is a perfect example of the absolute paranoia regarding copyright that exists on en:Wikipedia. One cannot put something into the public domain and then "take it back", any more than one can divulge a military secret and then make the enemy "forget" it. What happens to people who publish in the interim, are they sued? Themadchopper13:27, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
"think for yourself": thx for the condescension, I assumed the USHMM to be trustworthy being a US governmental institution. Besides, I didn't assume PD according {{PD-Germany}} - that's 65.23.171.130's suggestion. I assumed PD because it states so on the photo's origin pages, where it says:
Credit: USHMM, courtesy of Aufbau - Copyright: Public Domain[5] (db error msg 15:16, 4/6/06, try later)
Credit: USHMM, courtesy of Stadtarchiv Aachen - Copyright: Public Domain[6] (db error msg 15:16, 4/6/06, try later)
"can only be in the public domain if...": To my understanding it could well be that the USHMM, Aufbau or Stadtarchiv Aachen got hold of the copyright (USHMM owns many according to their site) and made it PD intentionally.
It would be interresting to know their rationale for declaring it PD in any case. Perhaps it's the logic of the victor: "Nazi Image => PD", or something like that... -- Duesentrieb(?!)16:48, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
"logic of the victor": Don't think so, I searched their website for photos on the Kristallnacht, 17 out of 81 were declared PD, the rest were "Copyright: USHMM". Anyway: is it ok to upload them here under {{PD-USGov}}, or should I wait explicitly for a satisfactory reply? --tickleme17:00, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's probably relatively safe to upload them, but tag them as {{PD-because}}, {{PD-USGov}} if for works created by the US Government. Please ask them for clarification, especially if they belive the PD claim applies world wide. We have had problems with images from the canadian national archive, which where declare PD... but only for Canada, as it turned out. -- Duesentrieb(?!)17:24, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's why I would suggest to use a separate template... e. g. something like User:Svencb/PD-US-USHMM. Feel free to modify it and move it to main template space. --20:53, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Please ask en User Lupo for a clarification if it is not enough for you to read his recent statement at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:PD-Germany . USHMM can only claim copyrights (and also the Stadtarchiv Aachen) if the copyrightholder (the creator ot his heirs) has given it. We should have a real proof not a worthless declaration of a US agency which is not quite friendly regarding "enemy" copyrights. Delete the pictures above mentioned! --Historiograf18:57, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There are roughly hundred USHMM images on Commons and way more on en-Wikipedia which are marked PD. If we follow your argument only on Commons, there would be never-ending attempts of transferring images from en to Commons (or even worse from en to other local wikipedias). Either we can find a way to treat those images differently on en or we have to keep them here, preferrably marked with a separate template (see above). --Svencb20:53, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've added {{del}} to the imgs I uploaded so far -> in dubio contra reo, for the time being. I mailed USHMM, but don't really expect a sensible answer anytime soon or at all. However, there's a candidate for featured article on de that would need them - Historiograf et al objecting the nomination e.g. for lack of imagery. I'd have no qualms using e.g. PD-US-USHMM or following Duesentrieb's suggestion. What about the imgs already uploaded by others, e.g. Goebbels in Lustgarten - should existing USHMM imgs be avoided at all cost?
Since "we" don't own the copyright, we can't enforce it. Only the creator Chris Harman can, You can notify Chris Harman that his image is being used without the credentials. --Fb7809:52, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, Mr. Harman entrusted us with his artwork with the conditions we agreed to. Why didn't BBC check out the particular copyright status of that image? I don't mean we should try to bust them, but it would seem to fall to us to remind them that use of Wikimedia resources, though generally a matter of applying loose "copyleft" principles, is not always just a copy n' paste operation... Mr. Harman is an extraordinary artist in the true lineage of Audubon and it would be no skin off BBCs back to include a tiny italicized attribution that might help business over at http://velvetgreencreations.com (I'm not affiliated with them, but I am tired of social parasites like golden parachute CEOs, ambulance-chasing lawyers, heirs and heiresses, tax cheats, etc,., etc,.,. hoarding almost all the gold while hardworking talents like Harman have to fight tooth and nail for a thin wedge of pie)... Er, sorry for rant. Was just reading how w:Stephen Foster died in the Bowery with 38 cents to his name, whle the latest on Enron scrolled by on my news ticker.. u get the picture. JDG22:23, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You don't know that the BBC got the image from us. They could have got it directly from his website like we in fact did. Maybe they contacted him and he agreed to an uncredited use (does seem unlikely, though). Anyway, I would just contact the author and let them know, and then they can decide what to do. pfctdayelise (translate?) 00:30, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
license
what is the opinion of the community about this pict, is my opinion right ? you can find more information on pict description page Jeffdelonge11:05, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If the graphic was publisched before 1923 in the US, and not published anywhere else before that, the image is PD, no matter who scanned it. -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:41, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This book was published between 1888 and 1900. Also if published before 1900 in Europe, the book and graphics would be PD, as the author, Peter Cameron, died in 1912. --Franz Xaver13:05, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The initials on the Lathyrus tuberosus painting obviousely mean Ludwig Bartning. I found some information about him: He lived 1869-1956 - see [7]. --Franz Xaver00:06, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a way to search the help files on the Commons? I'm sure my queston has been asked before, but don't know an easy way to search the Commons for an earlier answer.
Next week a friend and I will be interviewing historical figures about whom Wikipedia articles already exist. Since we will be recording the interviews ourselves, I assume that we own the copyright and I am free from that point of view to post the files. On the other hand, if each hour of interview is about 60 MB of MP3-encoded audio, the files will be large. Would it be appropriate to upload the audio of the interviews here, assuming that the interview subjects grant permission? Would it be better to post the audio to Google Base and link to the files from WP? Would it better to perform large uploads by another method besides the normal one? Chaiken14:16, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it would be appropriate to upload the interviews here. Unfortunately, the file size limit is 20MB. Maybe you can break each interview into 3 chapters? (Also, we don't accept MP3 format here, so you'll have to convert to Ogg Vorbis.) User:dbenbenn18:44, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Voices can be compressed far better than music. I think you'll easily be able to compress an hour to 20MB, and if it still does not fit, split. :-) --Dschwen21:04, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yea, but even using Ogg Vorbis (or MP3), you can compress voices far more (use a lower bitrate) than music before the quality degrades noticibly. Also, don't use stereo... -- Duesentrieb(?!)08:48, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the tips. I'll use an Ogg encoder and will employ Audacity to chop the files into < 20 MB if necessary. Chaiken14:05, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, w:Template:Coat of arms says "Representations of coats of arms are subject to copyright as original works of art". I don't know whether that's true, but it seems safer to assume it is. Given that the designs are free according to the Dutch government (Niels' comment below), if the person who actually drew the specific picture says it's free, there should be no problem. User:dbenbenn15:11, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The nl.wiki template states (rough translation):
This image depicts a coat-of-arms of a Dutch province or municipality. These coats-of-arms are included in the registry of the High Nobility Council and are still used in official municipal seals. Although the reproduction of municipal and/or provincial seals is prohibited, anyone is free to use a depiction of the coat-of-arms. Using the coat-of-arms however can be restricted. See letter of the Dutch Foreign Ministry. Quote from the letter:
The depiction of a municipal coat-of-arms is allowed: the municipality does not hold copyrights. There is also no objection to the use of the coat-of-arms as an indication of place on objects which are commercially used, as long as it is clear to the general public that: the production of or commerce in such objects doesn't occur without municipal authorisation.
Taking this regulations into account, this picture can be seen as PD, as well as reproductions thereof.
The Special:Contributions/RichardL of RichardL only dues to an very obscure "multitalented" semi-actress called Xzanthia. Despite the fact that the most of us would never heard about her "works", RichardL pushes her by putting a lot of pictures and linkspam on commons to distrubute it on other wikis. On my point of view this crap has to be (speedy) deleted at once. CU --Herrick09:27, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to know how I can put in my user page some boxes with my studies, interests, etc. like in English Wikipedia. In Commons I just can put languages.
Thanks,
Benedicto XVIEspañol | English17:40, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You can put whatever wiki-markup you want on your user page. No one has created loads of userbox templates here, and I think that's a good thing. Userboxes have caused a tremendous amount of strife on EN, including people being blocked and admins being de-sysopped.
Hi. I think it's just a mistake between two combined revertions on 11-14 Mars 2006. I've tried to put it again. It's simple, just
{{H-Langs:Contents}}<br / style="clear:both">
before the first line. But I stopped because I noted that all the links are to "meta", so I think the old pages are not ok. Maybe someone knows the correct code to fix it... if any (if there is already a multilingual template/pages for help contents in Commons).
Yes. The function of Help:Contents has changed significantly. It used to be, like on all other projects, just copies of the meta: handbook. Arnomane has been changing it to make it more relevant to the Commons. Before it seemed quite strange and irrelevant.
Colegata is right that the menu could be inserted again but the links are wrong - they don't reflect translations of the current content. So probably the menu should be reinserted, but also blanked (or if up to date translations exist, list them).
Again, the accusations are really not helpful. You could simply have asked "Why is there no language menu?" on the talk page and I'm sure you would have received a civil reply. pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:13, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo I removed the template as it was pointless. It pointed to Meta-wiki pages and the translations in Commons do not exist yet. Language templates get only added after a translation not in previous. By the way I also wrote pages at first in German and later in English here... So I don't see a "English-first/English-only policy" from my side. Arnomane16:34, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Why can't I see that German page you wrote at first when I click on "Hilfe" under "mitmachen" in the left margin, when I select "German" as my language preference ? Teofilo13:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that MediaWiki:Helppage which determines the link target of the "Help" link in the left participate box is not whitelisted serverside. So MediaWiki:Helppage/de (which currently points to the main page as the help page is not translated into German yet, simply because it is not ready) does not have any effect if you set your interface to German, it gets ignored by the MediaWiki software. I'd need to ask the developers that they whitelist that page in order to have a localiseable link target (as I did with the new MediaWiki:Welcome-url). That's also the reason why MediaWiki:Contact-url and some other links in the interface still points to the english page only in all languages although the translated link targets exist. The reson why MediaWiki:Contact-url does not get whitlisted is that the developers simply refuse to do so and I really was deeply dissapointed by their lack of understanding. They say that that important legal pages have to be only in the systems default language in order to avoid problems with inapropriate translations. So I tried hard to explain them that we now keep track of such pages with the Commons:Help page maintenance (and actively will remove unmaintained translations in the interface) and that a URL localisation can only be done by an admin and that even the english legal pages were missing required legal information until I changed them. But well it didn't help. I simply got ingored and that was a really disappointing experience for me (among another experience with a rejected MediaWiki patch from Duesentrieb that would allow us to adapt the interface for anonymous users to their browser default settings and thus would solve our problems with the english only interface for visitors, well the reason was understandable why we aren't able doing this for all Wikimedia wikis as the caching architecture would get problems but for multilanguage wikis like Commons and Meta only it wouldn't have been a problem). So I am not keen on asking whitelisting MediaWiki:Helppage until I haven't fleshed out the English page and its translations in fully as I surely won't succeed otherwise. And that experience was also the reason why I did a surprisingly good working interface hack with the upload link position without asking the devs for a clean serverside solution: The "Upload file" link still exists in the toolbox (you will see it in the HTML page code) but I did hide it via CSS in MediaWiki:Common.css (that as also the reason why people had two upload links until they refreshed their browser cache). So in summary I hope that you can understand why I sometimes got angry about your comments as we have to accept certain limitations and also have to live with some developers positions for the time being (I don' want to blame them in general; they are working hard and are doing a great job but I fear that some of them did somewhat loose contact to the community, well it's also very hard given the number of wiki communities that want them to listen) and sometimes you need to do internationalisation very carefully as it would blow up maintenance of the whole project otherwise. Arnomane09:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, i v got problem with thumbnail with this image. Its a realy big PNG 2900x1554 ; indexed color (233 color) with transparent color. All resized images are black, in a category its not very helpfull ! Is it a MediaWiki bug, or a bad PNG file ? Thanks a lot. ~ bayo or talk14:58, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Can we please calm down about replacing PNGs with SVGs? I've seen several people replacing PNGs with inferior or broken SVGs in an attempt to kill all PNG instances so they can be deleted. There's nothing wrong with PNGs. What is inspiring people to do this? It should be toned down.
Well I fear that you won't adress the right people here. Those people that do such mistakes generally do not contribute here and there are so many "shadow workers" in Commons that we are never able reaching all in previous so we simply can't say "don't do that" in an effective manner. It is sad but true. I am currently redesigning the deletion request templates so that in future people will do less failures at least the admins... Making our structure less confusing is the only effective way reducing these problems and that's what I am doing for quite some time now. Arnomane00:17, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
My idea is to delete only the orphan .png because they are really redundant, but the used .png are not a problem, for me. If is mistoken delete the orphaned .png too, please repeate me it, because I don't know if the orphaned can be deleted or not. --RED DEVIL66605:10, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Some of the svg replacements are terrible adding huge ammounts of whitespace or similar sins. Furthermore even if the SVG is well down our main medium is web and its pretty much impossible for to do better than a hand drawn bitmap when it comes to display on screen.
In most cases the SVGs are based on the PNGs so the pngs should be kept arround as revision history.
If anyone is aware of mass replacements or SVG deletion going on, please bring the specifics to our attention (ie file names)... chances are these people don't read the Village Pump, so communicating with them directly is the best option. You don't have to post details here if you don't want to. Anyone can email me or leave a note on my talk page too. pfctdayelise (translate?) 00:43, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, i need help about an image. Image:America's.jpg have just be upload, maybe its a screenshot about the videogame en:America's Army. The PC version of this game are developped and published by the U.S. Army, then is it realy possible to create screenshot about this game according the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code (as we can see in the picture) ? Thanks a lot. ~ bayo or talk15:22, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If all code and graphics was created by government employees on duty, i guess the results would be PD. But chances are, much if not all of the war is licensed from somewhere else. -- Duesentrieb(?!)17:31, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The screenshots and software are acutally NOT public domain b/c a large majority
of the work was produced by 3rd parties under contract w/ the US Army.
We don't have a problem with you using screen shots from the game in the
Wikipedia article. We just ask that you put "(C) Army Game Project. Used by
Permission" next to the images.
Let me know if you need more information.
David Gardiner
Vipuser removed the Pin Yin and Zhu Yin versions f Main Page from MP LAng template. Why? And now it is PROTECT so cannot edit! HELP
You can still edit the Talk page. I would have to support his decision though. Here are the pages: Shǒu yè (pinyin) and ㄕㄡˇ ㄧㄝˋ (bopomofo or zhuyin). The pinyin one actually makes my skin crawl! Yuck.
Is there anyone who could read these that could not read the 简体中文 (simplified chinese) or 正體中文 (traditional chinese) versions? If you can honestly say yes to this, then there might be an argument for keeping these pages. And Chinese learners reading pinyin is not a good argument: we would expect them to read in their native languages. Also is there support on any other Wikimedia project for either of these 'languages'? If you can say yes to that as well, then we might be getting somewhere. --pfctdayelise (translate?) 04:13, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 10, 2006
Cleaning up images with Fourier transforms
Hey everybody - sorry that I haven't been around in a little while. To facilitate cleanup of some especially tricky interference in images, I've added the tutorial Commons:Cleaning up interference with Fourier analysis, linked from Commons:Images for cleanup. I appreciate any comments or edits, and would especially appreciate if you could add sections for other tools such as the GIMP, which I'm not so familiar with myself. I hope this will help us get more out of some of our lower-quality images. Deco07:29, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Let's pretend I'm a total image manipulation novice
Is there any way to easily transfer subnational lines to one of the free world maps?
April 11, 2006
Extra tabs enabled for all
Hi as the test with the extra interface functions in Commons:Tool integration via Javascript for admins was a great success and these functions (especially check-usage and the category tools) get used more and more and are really very much helpful for Wikimedia Commons I have enabled them for all now. If something nasty is going on with that change please let me know inmediatly. Arnomane12:53, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Download images from commons / link to images?
Hello! Where can the images be downloaded? I cannot find an archive with all the images, but it seems to be possible (answers.com has all images in articles). Best regards, Peter
There is currently no archive with all images for download. The main reason for this is that it would be insanely huge (about 180 Gigabyte). -- Duesentrieb(?!)15:31, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I have seen directly linking to images is forbidden (I mean using wikimedia commons as "image host" http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps/Reuse ... using by webservices does also not work yet (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InstantCommons) so my question is how e.g. answers.com did get the whole material (apart from the german content upload.tar file with 27 GB which I've already downloaded)
Perhaps they are fetching thumbnails, one by one? Or they simply got a bunch of DVDs from the server admins - answers.com has an official deal with WikiMedia. And yes, useing commons images directly on your site would be leeching, which is not nice. -- Duesentrieb(?!)20:35, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This topic has been discussed already here. As as consequence I made an attempt asking the server developers providing an image dump. Currently it is simply a technical problem with the file size. Webserver downloads and DVD's are not manageable. I personally would like to have a snail mail tape service for interested people (that way the foundation could get some extra money with that service). However there need to be some people that keep that service running and the server devs are currently overworked. So I don't know who whith access to the servers would like to volunteer (and of course wants to sort this out organisational inside the foundation)... Arnomane21:10, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There are also legal problems involved - distributing the images without the acompanying descriptions and licenses would be a violations of the virous licenses we have for images. Including that info can be done, but it's not trivial... I belive Eloquence tried to do something like that once. -- Duesentrieb(?!)21:53, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A while back, I proposed to use meta-tags to allow tools to easily find images that have no license tag, and to search images by license requirements. I have abandoned that plan after some technical problems and a discussion with TimStarling (one of the lead developers). I now propose a different scheme to achieve the same thing: Commons:Tag categories.
The idea is to categorize templates (using category links in noinclude-tags). This would also allow tools to identify license (and deletion) tags (although not quite as nicely as my original proposal), and it would also produce nice listings of such tags. So, please have a look and comment... thanks you! -- Duesentrieb(?!)19:21, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think categorization of templates is good idea. At least I started to do categorization by purpose (infobox, Babel, etc.) on Belarusian Wikipedia. --EugeneZelenko03:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 12, 2006
Proposed policy on images of human nudity
Hello! Due to images of men's penises regularly appearing on COM:DEL, usually because of vandalism attacks but sometimes also just because of morality concerns, I have written a proposed policy for the community to decide where the bounds of acceptable images should be. Broadly speaking, it aims to affirm that the Commons is not censored while encouraging broad diversity, high quality educational images. Please comment on the proposal, help improve it, or if you are 100% against it please say why. You can read it here: User:Pfctdayelise/Commons:Nudity. Thanks, pfctdayelise (translate?) 12:53, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Commons Helper - automatically move images to the Commons!
Well, almost. This makes it pretty easy -- all you have to do is copy and paste. And add a category (but it can suggest some). And verify that the license is accurate in the first place. Try and generate the code for a fair use image ;). And spread the word! --pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:34, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Nice approach. There are some automated move bots around as well that I really dislike as they very often create really bad image descriptions that very often lack important information (or just provide it in a really ugly way). So I would suggest that we encourage such helpers like the one of Magnus for hand crafted and half automated moves and tell the people that quality not quantity of a move to Commons is important. Arnomane00:11, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's good, but I think will be useful to add warning like This image can't be uploaded on Commons for fair use, non commercial, non derivative content and etc. May be this could prevent unwanted uploads. --EugeneZelenko15:04, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for my misleading comment. I tried album cover, and it was not detected as unwanted content, same for movie poster. I tried fair use image, and it was detected.
So problem is: more fair use tags from en: should be detected by this tool.
Hi I have worked up a list (~900 articles) from a SQL query returning all articles in main namespace (ns0) of Wikimedia Commons that did not contain images, were no disambiguation page, were no (translated) Commons Main page, or no redirect. I did find and did delete a huge number of spam, copies of Wikipedia articles, user failures, reverted a large list of blankings of gallery articles and moved (forgotten) help and project articles and such in the appropriate Commons: namespace (and sorted them there in the category:Commons subcategories). So currently I am quite confident that Commons contains now significant less spam and such crap...
During that work I found a huge list of species lists that themselves contain nothing else but huge hierarchical species lists (I also did write to the creator of most of these lists and hope that he will finally answer as he is active but up to now did not answer to a single question from others). This looks to me like a duplication of Wikispecies and also beyond our project scope and of course hierachical animal relationships can be much more better sorted into a category system. So my suggest is that we delete all such species lists that aren't a disambiguation (a valid disambiguation would be IMHO for example Elephant).
There are some other things like regional lists with the same problem (see the comments there) and some other text only articles that need cleanup. So have a look at the remaining entries on my list at User:Arnomane/bad and share your thoughts here what to do with that. Arnomane00:00, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hello! I agree, IMO these lists can be deleted in the present form. Their place is at wikispecies and maybe in some wikipedias. Checklists can make sense within a wikipedia to show, which articles still have to be written. However, a commons article cannot be written without media files. As an example, to get photos of all these red linked species in Troglodytidae (not included in User:Arnomane/bad), several expeditions to South American rain forests would be necessary. And even there it would be difficult to spot many of these drab colored and lurking birds. So this list is quite pointless, if it should motivate people to take photos and upload them to commons. Animals and plants, where photos are easy to obtain, do not need such lists. And for the others, they even could motivate somebody to fill red links by uploading copyrighted stuff. Anyway, most of these lists are from birds, which group numbers only to about 9000 species, and I do not want to see similar lists of the 350000 species of beetles or the 20000 species of butterflies here on commons. Some entries of Arnomane's list, as e.g. Nolina, can easily be converted into a gallery page - see e.g. Trifolium. I did this now for Reseda. Such gallery pages IMO are more usefull for commons links in wikipedias than would be a category of similar content, as category content usually is an unorganised heap of photos and the organised part consists only of blue links. Maybe an alternative to deleting these comprehensive bird lists, is converting all of them to such galleries showing only these species, where we already have photos. --Franz Xaver08:33, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would also agree with Franz Xaver, the lists are not very useful and it would nearly be impossible to maintain them in a sane way --Chb09:34, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
@Xaver: A further problem is that these galleries are often far to fine grained compared to our current image content. For example there exist even galleries of plant hybrides although there are at most only a hand full images of that plant existing at all (Those hybride galleries contain among the name a single x in their article name, maybe we should make a sql-query looking for that pattern ;-). The consequence of that problem is that people need to search for images like searching for easter eggs ("Ah there is one image... Hum there not..."). This is not specific to species this is general to Wikimedia Commons but I suppose as species have a rather good systematic scheme compared to ther topics it can be solved more easily at species. You solution at Reseda for example looks like a good solution. As I personally have not that much knowledge on species I'd need some biologists that volunteer working up that remaining list and convert those lists were it makes sense into such galleries as done by you (I fear that I would make to much failures at bio-image gallery sorting for making it really useful) and strike out the entries they worked up and mark pointless lists for deletion directly in the list so that I can delete them in the end (or if the person is an admin deletes it directly). Arnomane10:47, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As fas as I see, most photos of hybrids come from cultivated plants. Actually, many plant breeders prefer hybrids for cultivation and there are plant groups, where almost exclusively hybrids are cultivated, e.g. Dahlia x hortensis. Personally, I prefer wild plants and dislike hybrids, as in wild plants it often is very difficult to identify parent species of hybrids - which is necessary for ID. However, generally I think we could treat hybrids in the same way as full species. So we can link to the hybrid gallery from both parent species, if their galleries are existing, as I did in Laburnum anagyroides. In my opinion, searching is easier, if the stuff is organised always in the same way. I think, species level is the most appropriate way to organise all the plant and animal photos. Species, after all, is the most stable entity, limits of taxa above or below are changed much more often in science. I do not like it very much, that at the moment, when I am searching for a photo of a special plant, this can be found in its species gallery or in a species category of the same name or in a genus gallery or category or ..... In Fabales, Malvales and Asterales (not finished with Asteraceae), I have made an attempt to have almost all existing stuff in species galleries and these organised in categories, including category redirects for obsolete plant families still used in some books. We had it in a similar way at the very beginning, after plant photos from the Stueber website had been uploaded, but afterwards .... --Franz Xaver12:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, now we'll need to get the original email forwarded to permissions@wikimedia.org so that we can confirm the license on the image. Alphax (talk) 04:12, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Is the info on licensing and source adequate? The description translates as: "Karl Dönitz as Admiral of the Fleet. Oil of that era, unsigned, family property." --tickleme19:03, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No. It's tagges as LGPL, which a) can only be done by the copyright holder (which is not the same as the owner of the physical image), and b) is totally inadequate. There should at least be an approximate date of creation, so we have some idea about how likely it is that the painter has been dead for more than 70 years. If this is likely, the image should be tagged {{PD-old}} or {{PD-Art}}. Otherwise, it should be deleted. -- Duesentrieb(?!)21:47, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can't seem to view any photos on Wikipedia, when I click to see them I get a message saying that upload.wikimedia.org cannot be found. I was wondering why this was happening.
Well this is not the first time that the lag of the toolserver is that high. It has been solved everytime up to now. And checkusage gives you always a warning about the current lag that you hardly can't miss, see: [11]. Arnomane13:39, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Nonetheless it is not that ideal that tool server people often need to make a cleanup after a change on Wikimedia main servers. Arnomane13:55, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
NOTE: the replag warning is for the databases that are, in fact, replicated. Databases for the wikis on the asian cluster (ja and some others) and the english wikipedia are currently not replicated to the toolserver!. DaB. is working hard on this, I hope we'll have replication of all wikis in a few days. -- Duesentrieb(?!)18:45, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hello all. Orgullobot is a bot based on the pywikipedia framework. It can do interwikis, category moves, disambiguations, and all that other stuff that isn't useful to Commons ;), plus whatever I program it to do. I'm interested in fulfilling the Commoners' bot needs, and I've hinted at bot status before, but have never made a formal request. I've run es:User:Orgullobot on es: for nearly a year now, and the community seems to like it there. Any complaints I've had have been dealt with. Therefore, I venture to ask, is there anyone here who opposes my requesting a flag on Meta? And additionally, what are some bot tasks (in other words, repetitive and tedious) that you would like to see automized on Commons? Some things the bot has done in the past include:
Periodically resetting the Spanish sandbox
Detected all of the Images on es: that shared a filename with Commons which were then renamed and reuploaded or deleted if they were a duplicate.
Detected all the wiki page that had a fruitless image link (the ones that give something like )
What we need most is a bot that can be driven by a web frontend by users that have a login to that service. We had several bots that did come and go with their users and bots are often of limited use if you just want to do do a certain job quickly by yourself but don't want to wait until a bot owner did handle it for you. This would be much helpful especially with the tasks you're aiming at. Arnomane20:17, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Funny you mention it. Check out this page. I think it's the closest I'm going to get to a web frontend. It is a protected page on es: that admins edit and the bot reads every thirty seconds and performs the tasks indicated. Non-admins request tasks on the talk page and admins either do or don't add these to the protected page.--Orgullomoore20:55, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
EN's w:User:NekoDaemon is extremely useful for moving categories. See point number 5 on its user page. If an administrator applies {{Category redirect}} to a category, NekoDaemon will move everything in the category to the new name. Orgullomoore, could you do this for the Commons please?
Aye, sir. That is precisely the purpose that es:User:Orgullobot/comandos serves, except a bit more. That page is capable of redirecting (moving) categories, as well as some other basic tasks--anything I can get the bot to do, I can implement into a protected page for the same use. Said page is still in it's beta version and isn't very widely known on the wiki, which is why it has such a limited variety of functions available.--Orgullomoore09:12, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I object. What is the problem exactly? Are you afraid that someone will think Category:Maps of New York should have maps of New York City? If so, just put a note at the top of the category directing people to the City cat. Anyway, as long as we use Category:New York for the state, we should use simply "New York" for related categories. User:dbenbenn15:42, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's a courtesy, to avoid what you describe (viz. having to visit one of these categories, only to realise it's not what you were expecting). Worldwide, I'd guess that most people who recognise the phrase "New York" would think of the city and may not even know there is a state with the same name. Less U.S.-centrism, please? Regards, David Kernow17:06, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Technically speaking, I don't see how this proposed move will solve any problem. David Kernow appears to be worried about the following situation: someone uploads a photo of New York City, and puts it in Category:New York, expecting that to be the city category. Well, suppose we move Category:New_York to Category:New York State. Then either
We have a category redirect from New_York to New_York_State. Then a bot will automatically move all images from the former to the latter. So the result is that the photo ends up in Category:New_York_State. It still requires a human being to notice that the photo is in the wrong category, and fix it.
We don't have a category redirect. In that case, the innocent uploader gets a red link. User gets confused, and creates Category:New_York, or doesn't. Either way, a human being has to move photos from Category:New_York to the correct category.
Given only three people have stated a preference (so far as I'm aware/recall) I don't think that can indicate a consensus. Any ideas on how we attract more people to state a preference or "don't mind"? Regards, David Kernow11:59, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Geez, I think you can assume that the rest of us don't feel strongly enough about it to comment. I don't care what you do, as long as it's clear, obvious and consistent (actually, if you tried to make Category:New York a disambig cat I would care, because that's a very bad idea, but apart from that I don't). pfctdayelise (translate?) 12:14, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
See Some points of critique on the current approach of "featured pictures". To me it seems very relevant that Featured Pictures do have encyclopedic value, and are not just nice images. It makes it easier for any language wikipedia to find nice pictures for articles. I was shocked to learn that people from the English wikipedia use the Featured Pictures on commons as a dumping place for non-encyclopedic (it was stated as "contextless") pictures in their own process of Featured Pictures. This totally ignores that commons is supposed to be a common project for all wikimedia projects, including non-english wikipedias.
Currently the Featured Pictures here seems more like a generic photo-contest. I have nothing against generic photo-contests, but commons is not the place for this. There are places much better fit for generic photo-contests on the web.
Since commons does not only serve Wikipedias, but aims to be a media repository, I see no reason that featured pictures here should be required to have encyclopedic value - although if an image illustrates something nicely, this would sure be an argument to "feature" it. And yes, images on commons should be at least theoretically useful to some Wikimedia project - but that does not neccessarily require "ecyclopaedic value".
What I find sad is that there does not seem to be a coordinated process to transfer pictures featured at the wikipedias to commons. We would greately benefit from that. -- Duesentrieb(?!)09:01, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Could anyone please advise why my uploaded Image:TW-Art059.2.gif has no image readily visible at the file page? I have reloaded but the problem still persists. It can cause problem when linking from another Wiki Site, such as Wikipedia.--Jusjih05:02, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Which browser do you use? I usually use Mozilla FireFox and it does not show up, though it does show up with Internet Explorer.--Jusjih13:54, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just went back to the image file and found its URL to be [12] and my pop-up blocker thought it an advertisement (ad) to block. I just wonder why assigned /a/ad. After adjusting my pop-up blocker, it is okay to me now. Thanks for your replies.--Jusjih16:09, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Which got resolved as invalid 13 minutes later. It's always such a joy interacting with the developers, trying to improve MediaWiki. And they wonder why there's a shortage of people contributing code! User:dbenbenn15:37, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmph. Oh well, I commented on it anyway. Since this is a stupid random problem that we happen to know the cause of, I really think we should fix it. I doubt it would be that hard. (At least to stop it occurring for all future uploads, if not the existing ones.) pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:50, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just so people don't miss this comment from brion: "Please note that sooner or later we *will* change how uploads are arranged in the filesystem and what their URLs look like." - The devs are not ignoring the problem, they are simply refusing to put in a kludge to fix it, and waiting to fix it until it can fixed neatly. I understand the frustration, but it's misplaced in this case. Also, try writing up a patch - even if it doesn't get in here, it will be useful to other Mediawiki installations that do wish to workaround the problem. JesseW06:03, 13 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
At first thanks a lot for your feedback JesseW. Regarding your remark we should provide patches and improvements for MediaWiki. Guess what at least some of us already do. ;-) Take a look around at Wikimedia Commons and you will notice some things that are different from other wikis (and we hope that our currently external .js add ons that only look as they would be part of the interface and our css interface hacks will be integrated in the one or other way into MediaWiki). So we do make a lot coding in order to improve the software but we can't do everything at our very own. We honestly are willing to share our feedback, time and coding skills and we also do this but it is really frustrating if you wrote a detailed bug report or even a patch (Ok it was not me that wrote this patch ;) and get a WONTFIX with a "No way" comment or at worst without explanation and no real constructive critics like "Hey I know that's a problem for you, but see as well related problem foobar.. So we need to find a way how to make it a little bit different." I don't care if people get a silent WONTFIX on poorly written bug reports or on just pointless whishlist entries like "I want MediaWiki looking after my children when I am away." I am really happy that I got this [13] bug solved so quickly. But that's the first of my bugs where it was worth the time writing that bug report. And I did spend on any of my bugs a lot of time making it as clear as possible and even trying to find out what's going on there in order to make it for devs as easy as possible. And of course there are easy to fix but yet important bugs that nobody else but the devs can solve like that one: [14]. This minor bug (yes it is newly created but has several far older bugs related to it, I wrote a new one as the general conditions in Commons on that matter have changed since quite a lot) has caused a lot of anger towards us Wikimedia Commons admins from Wikipedians and has at least taken from me a lot of time hanging around on IRC with zero result. I think for such an issue a short "Hello would you mind fixing this" on IRC would safe us all a lot of time (it is the same amount of work as if someone makes a note to me on IRC saying "Hey I have a vandal on that image please protect it"). So I really hope that we can differenciate on both sides. Wikimedia Commons admins are generally very reasonable when they make bug reports unlike other random persons. We try to differentiate as well. There are devs that care a lot about other but are just overworked by the amount of work but there are others just feeling proud that they are dev (you know what I want't say). Arnomane10:53, 13 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 15, 2006
I have a problem with SVG images upload
I have upload some svg images. Nothing appears there is just a link. Did I make a mistake or is there a problem? I have made these images with Inkscape.
For me, the second one is fine, the first one doesn't show up but if you click on the link you can see it, plus it thumbnails fine in Category:Hiking. So probably it is a rendering thing, but I don't know how to fix that really... pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I found the explanation. I have included PNG elements in my images without conversion. That works fine with Inkscape but not on Commons (apparently). For the second one I converted the element (the gauss curve). For the first one even with conversion it does not work. I have converted the whole image in PNG (see Image:Azimut principe.png). Thanks for having takes time to help me.Romary15:16, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you would make "boussole.jpg" available, I'll fix Azimut.svg. It's possible to include a JPG file directly in an SVG file. The problem at the moment is that the Commons can't render boussole.jpg because it doesn't have it. User:dbenbenn15:28, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you I do not think that worth to spend more time. As you are an admiistrator, you should delete this picture.Romary18:05, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Bittorrent/ Torrent hosting of free content.
What's some opinions on posting torrents of content like music, free open source software(linux), public domain, torrent mirrors of current wikimedia content, etc...? As I think this is a good way to off load the servers.
Thanks.
As has been often lamented here, Google image search pretty much ignores Commons images. I have itemized some of my observations on current status.
text associated contextually with an image is not found. EG search Свастика site:commons.wikimedia.org, you will see hits in text mode on the text in the Image: pages, but no hits none in google Images mode.
"Alt text". Google's engine does look at HTML "Alt Text"- the stuff that is displayed if you turn off display images, or if you hover the mouse over the image. You can get this with a thumbed image with a caption. But it's no dice on Commons- Search for "This is a logo" site:commons.wikimedia.org and you will see the hit on the help page for images in text mode, but no hit in images mode. External sites, no problem- Search "red eye condition is an obvious problem" and you will get a hit on the microsoft site where they used this alt-text for a tutorial example.
External references. Here is where I see some hits. Search on كفر جمال site:wikimedia.org yields one picture on commons, but only because it appears to be referenced on ar.wikipedia.org. Still- many of the inbound references are broken, and the number of them is a tiny fraction of what is on Commons. In fact- I see very very few good links from Commons itself- usually the hits are from wikipedia.org that I suspect have been wildcarded to match wikimedia.org.
So how does it come up with the text? It does appear to use the name of the file under certain circustances: Eg. Search "Close up yellow rose" site:wikimedia.org (with show large images only) and image search will hit on hebrew wikipedia.org that references a file of that name that exists in commons. I dunno if they have a mirror copy in that wikipedia, but there is no alt text with that phrase (its all hebrew), so it is coming from the file name, or the title of the page associated with it (also the file name).
Ok so to isolate out mirror copies of files so we know we are just talking about a commons file, I know for sure I uploaded an image onto commons not wikipedia that is used in an article. Search " "frontal depiction of the version of the sculpture " site:wikipedia.org and you will find that alt-text using Google text search, but flip into image mode and no image. Great. So search for the file name? No dice- not on wikipedia, not on wikimedia. Great. Here is a high res free image of a statue few people will see because it is way off in St. Petersburg, but it is also just as inaccessible from google.
But google is crawling it- it sees the text, sees the reference to the image...(Canova thing I think was end of feb.), but it is pretty spotty about what pictures it is picking up.
It's really a pretty bad situation. If I knew what information to include with the images to get Google to index us, I'd be happy to stick it in, but so far none of the multilingual texts I have been transcluding are going to do a dang thing as far as increasing visibility from Google is concerned. Even direct links from Wikipedia that ARE getting crawled doesn't help.
It's pretty mystifying. It would be nice to have a central page where this data can be exchanged- if there isn't one already. These scattered notes here and there in the pump archives is no way to address this important issue.
As far as I'm concerned, most of our huge mass of great images is virtually invisible to the web. That's gotta change.
As far as I understand this, google does not look at image description pages, because the URL looks like the URL of an image (i.e. it has a .jpg or .png "file extension"). It apperently does not trust the MIME type returned for the page, or doesn't even try to load the page to look at the MIME type. This makes sense since some webservers may mis-report the MIME-type, an the google spider would spend some time to try to analyze several megabyte of binary garbage. Side note: google apperently does analyze pages with the .svg extension (and perhaps some others, like .ogg?).
IMHO, google should maintain a whitelist of sites that can be trusted with the mime type, and where pages having an image-type extension should be analyzed. I hope Wikimedia is big enough now for google to at least give it a thought... -- Duesentrieb(?!)00:12, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Personally i think we should find a way to avoid using file extentions when identifying files anyway. They just mean that if a new version uses a different format it can't be uploaded under the same name meaning we either lose history or end up with multiple image pages.
As for that example you gave of google indexing a description page that one has a svg extention not gif jpeg or png. Plugwash00:40, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Can/should we ask the Foundation to make some kind of submission to Google for us? I also find it extremely frustrating, not only is our excellent content effectively hidden, but it also hinders our work in trying to clean up the Commons (since very likely Google search is better than MediaWiki search). pfctdayelise (translate?) 02:30, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
or doesn't even try to load the page to look at the MIME type...-- Duesentrieb
I think your first thought is correct. It's not just google- it's any spider. Look at it from their perspective- it is a massive IO bound operation. We aren't talking microseconds here. New IO means your crawl cycle is extended by weeks or months. MSN search does the same- search.msn.com on "painting site:wikimedia.com" and you will get zero hits in image mode. Ok fine- in text mode you will see a hit that links to Marie Antoinette. Great- nice gallery but look at what the spider sees:
What data is there to suggest that this is anything but a jpg? They have no idea what it will cost to do an IO on that site (heck- it might be a MySQL backend serving up pseudo pages for all they know), and you haven't given them any evidence to assume that it is anything but what it appears to be. So what are we expecting them to be, mind readers? No- whitelisting is bogus if what you want is for them to check mimes on everything on your site. Assume these guys are going to be aggressive minimizing IO- give them a benefit and data they can work with to implement, and we'll see the searches coming in alright.
BTW- if you want to motivate dominant companies, one useful technique is to talk to whoever the competition is first. In this case, just let it slip to google that MSN has seen your proposal and is interested in supporting you. That will put fire in their belly. Just tell them the number of images Commons since the Google program manager drone answering buckets of emails every day probably doesn't have a clue. The PM better know after the first three sentences why they will be an f'ing corporate hero for championing the idea in your email... Anyway, the win on richly annotated images is worth a little dev time on their part, especially since they have so much capitalization they are running out of things to spend money on.
Just my opinion- I'm going back to deal with that teensy hyperbole about "richly annotated". *ahem*. There seem to be one or two images here or there with no cats or references. -Mak18:48, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I do suggest we ask the foundation to send and official request to Google, Yahoo and maybe even MSN. We should make it clear that we are talking about more than one million media files (all wiki projects together), which are usually of rather good quality and have rich context info (at least compared to other places you find images).
As to the technical part: i'm not sure how this can be done without some special-case rules for mediawiki sites... but perhaps thei'd even do that, considering the amount of files effected. Alternatively, maybe a special attribute or something could be used in the link to hint them towards the image page. -- Duesentrieb(?!)18:55, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have now asked in #wikimedia and Sj did get in contact with a person from Google. So the right people are now aware and will look into the matter the next days. Arnomane20:45, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I asked an old friend, Dave Alpert, to pass on the request. No word back yet... I'll let you know when I hear from him. +sj +06:41, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's great. I think if a real google search developer becomes aware of it, they will be super motivated. It really is pretty laughable how egregiously bad these search failures are.
... hint them towards the image page. -- Duesentrieb(?!)
Right. And as importantly, we want them to follow the cookie crumb trail back to the high res version, which may be two indirections- a jump from a thumb to an image page version which itself is not the full file because noone's display needs an image 2000 pixels across. It won't do much good if google suddenly starts reporting tons of images, but as far as the undiscerning public is concerned they are all 120x90 (gallery size thumb versions) -Mak07:25, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It sure would be nice if google whitelisted us and told us where to stick likely search keywords. Trying to work with their existing proximity scheme will lead to some pretty ugly text nearby images. And ultimately it won't be effective because you will have to have a separate page for each language for each image, since all the associated text for each term is too large. For example, for a hypothetical picture with Khrushchev and Zhukov, simply enumerating all the transliterated variants of their names will mean that some terms will not be found because the number of variants is larger than the word proximity window for associated terms. You can test this by doing an image search for some terms, then look at the text nearby for additional terms. It looks like somewhere around a half dozen terms away they search will fail. OK. For some proper names there aren't that many variants eg. Paris is Paris in nearly all latin script languages. But what of common nouns? You want to search for picture of animal A with animal B, then what are we going to have to do to get the hits in other languages- create a Gallery article in every language with an instance of the picture with a lion with a water buffalo with the translated caption? Because that's what you'll have to do if there is no relief from the proximity restriction and ignoring metadata keyword fields for the image. Just my 2 cents. -Mak01:18, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have talked to brion about this, and he has written an email to google. Let's hope the best.
Strongly recommend we request they whitelist recognize <meta> tagged keywords for our site. Our case is that we are multilingual, and it is not physically possible to collocate text strings from the 20 major world languages next to the same image. Interested parties might be interested in considering a proposed example image Image:USS West Virginia;014824.jpg. Ideally, at some future date Commons will have 20 captions for this image specifically tailored for it. The problem is, only the language with the caption at the top will get a search hit.
Secondly, it is not realistic to expect that our half million images will have captions from the 20 major languages written for them anytime soon. However, it is practical to generate text for inclusion in meta tags. This West Virginia page illustrates the kind of text that could be provided in meta tags, these text strings are drawn from the first sentences of the wikipedia articles for the two main features of this image- That it is of the Pearl harbor event, and that the ship is the USS West Virginia.
Consider the alternatives. We could find the image in a gallery article Pearl Harbor, then pick up the strings associated with the title of the interwiki article linked to the gallery article. That would get you hits on Pearl harbor in several languages, but not the USS West Virginia feature. Also, the number of target words is small- google user would not get hits on Hawaii and other associated words that are found in summary sentences but not in article titles... OK so say google's spider gets super fancy and tries to walk each interwiki link. The problem on this variation is that first sentences of wiki articles aren't ideal. Often they include dates and omit pertinent information useful for search targets. It is better than humans determine the text. Commons editors can and will refine this associated text when they see its relevance to google image search.
As a final alternate proposal, google could propose instead of meta tag recognition that google would enlarge the amount of text gatherred nearby an image from the current 8 to 10 words up to 300 words on Image: pages. Well, that kind of blows too, because just imagine what the article USS West Virginia will look like with all 20 languages for all three features (USS Tennessee is the thrid feature- its the other ship burning.) The visual clutter can be reduced somewhat if we used techniques for hiding the alternate languages at display time using for example dbenbenn's monobook thing, but some editors have the POV that this text is generic spam and shouldn't appear on the image page in any case. I don't agree with their POV, but just the same, I think there are significant numbers of Commoners with this view, and so I think the greatest support would be found for the Meta approach.
Yes, it would be good if all of the (hopefully meaninfull) text on the description page is indexed and associated with the full scale image. In additioon (or as an alternative) to meta-tags, rel-attributes in the links could be used to guide the spider. -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:09, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Right. Possibly there will be discussions about what exactly goes in Meta fields, but it is an separate issue and can be dealt with if and when we get this support. Good luck. I repeat my suggestion you go after Yahoo, MSN- everyone and their cousin on this. I happen to favor Google, but I'd jump to any other searcher if it would do Commons searches properly. -Mak17:27, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can not read Italian. But in the source provided [16], it is marked with CC as "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0".
AirBa09:37, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Done. By the way, even the localized versions should include the /Lang template. And "Lang" should be capitalized. I corrected your links and moved a talk page. I like your {{L2}} template, by the way :) —UED7716:52, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've been trying upload new versions of Image:Wikipedia-logo-es.png and Image:Wikipedia-logo-fi.png, with the correct font for the subtitle, but I get this error: "A file with this name exists already; please go back and upload this file under a new name." Can anyone provide any insight as to what is going on? I thought they to upload a new version was to upload a file with the same name... Nohat19:14, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The reason is that your account was newly created, see [17]. Newly created accounts cannot overwrite existing revisions in order to reduce image vandalism. After 4 days AFAIK (in any case not longer) you can automatically overwrite old revisions of existing files. This feature is quite new (1.6 Beta something). Just contact a Commons admin on IRC in #wikimedia-commons (be a little bit patient the channel is not that crowded like #wikipedia) and I think we can sort this problem with the Wikipedia logos somehow out. Arnomane19:37, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The Deletion Log shows that Arnomane has disobeyed the rule written on Commons:Deletion guidelines that says that only a category with no content or containing only a parent category can be speedy deleted. And that page contained more than a parent category.
Therefore I request :
a speedy restoration of this page
a regular deletion procedure, so that the creator of the page and the users of the page receive a warning, and so that I and other users can take part in the discussion on Commons:Deletion requests. "An administrator will consider the discussion and determine, based on the discussion, whether the file should be deleted."
It was established a long time ago that categories should be in English. We must give precedence to that, and needn't occupy the deleteion request with this. / Fred Chess11:38, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I knew that this will come up... I have deleted a bunch of these local categories and other duplicated ones and have merged them in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion before I deleted them. It makes absolutely no sense creating localised categories for commons maintenance as people will (and did) mix the whole system up otherwise (for example I found several images sitting only in the french deletion categories, which I naturally did place right before a deletion of the category). And by the way I did care about proper replacements: It is crucial creating a proper Commons:Deletion guidelines page and proper translations of it. This is the real important thing not if Category foobar has a localised name. So I don't stick to some procedures in case it is so obvious (as otherwise I would have spent several days with tagging only). Arnomane11:46, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Due to a change in the database structure, it has now become easier to implement at least part of a localized category scheme: Titles of pages and categories could be shown in the user language, based on interlanguage links. This could work at the top of the page as well as in category listings.
I will look into implementing this - I can not promise anything yet though, as i'm not sure about the details, and I have much other things to do, too. -- Duesentrieb(?!)13:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo, please don't assume bad faith. Having duplicate categories to store the same things is completely irrational in itself, but having several categories that should fulfill the same purpose but don't fully overlap is a huge pain. There should be one category for one purpose, and localization should be done some other way. Since category pages can include templates, I suggest providing the same localization scheme as you did with the Login screen and such.
As a personal opinion, I hold that all sysops know enough English to understand the categories for deletions, or if not, then they can follow a localized link or remember a three-letter shortcut for it.
Keep in mind that even though language barriers plauge our times on the Commons, we run one database. Deletions here span all language communities.
It really doesn't matter what language is dominant on the Commons — it could be Lojban for all I care — but it would make sense to choose the one that most people can understand. And I don't think you can argue that that's not English. Sure, it's nice to have translations, but we have to communicate somehow.
Teofilo, I consider you a bold user, as you actively participate in the localization efforts. That's really commendable. But please, please be a little understanding and don't condemn Arnomane for performing a completely rational deletion just because he didn't follow the due process that was drafted for an entirely different situation.
Arnomane (...) performing a completely rational deletion--> assessment of the rationality of a deletion should be made beforehand, not afterwards. That is what Commons:Deletion requests is for. One cannot juge of the rationality of a deletion without watching the page first. After the page has been deleted one can no longer watch the page. Justifying a deletion afterwards instead of beforehand amounts to making a blind judgement. Teofilo09:28, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo: do you seriously belive that it is a good idea to duplicate the entire category structure in every language? What use is that? How is it supposed to be maintained? The idea seems completely insane to me, even if limited to maintenance categories. This warrants a speedy deletion, without further ado. We have enough overhead and beurocracy already...
On a related note: I have written a patch that will automatically show translations of page titles in the user's language, based on interlanguage links. I will submit the patch today, and I hope we can try it out on commons soon. Expect a post about this here on the village pump shortly. This patch will not completely resolve the issue of internationalizing categories, but I hope it will help a lot.
Teofilo, please note that Arnomane, me and many others are verry much concerned about internationalization, and are doing our best to improve the situation. You are welcome to join in, but your clamoring and accusations do much more harm than good in that respect. -- Duesentrieb(?!)09:49, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo: do you seriously belive that it is a good idea to duplicate the entire category structure in every language? This is a debate we should have before the deletion, on Commons:Deletion requests. I refuse the arbitrary fait accompli. I want to watch the history page and warn the people who wrote that page. The scheme "remove multiliguality now - restore it maybe later some day" is a fool's deal I do not buy into. Teofilo11:05, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo, please assume good faith. Accusing Arnomane of "deleting by stealth" and your other comments are entirely uncalled for. I'm certain that Arnomane wasn't intending any harm to you when he made the decision. Cary "Bastique" Bassparlervoir17:40, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
He's afraid of a category? Haaahahaha! I can see it - he's shivering in bed! Wow man, just wow.
Anyway: admins can, of corse, skip the speedy deletion procedure (if speedy deletion is warranted). And I don't see what evidence you are talking about (and not much here is "physical" anyway).
Teofilo, this is verry sad. We all have the same goal: make commons easier to use for everyone. What you are doing does not help. It just makes live harder for us. Seeing your latest comments, I'm gebinning to thing it may be best to simply ignore you. Which is, agin, sad. -- Duesentrieb(?!)18:20, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just wanted to add that I appreciate Arnomane's efforts to clean up Commons. And I think if someone cleans up like he does, it should be possible without lots of bureaucracy. That would be a possibility to save lots of time. --Crux15:20, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not to mention that it is quite pointless for an admin to tag something speedy and delete it 5 minutes later. Speedy deletion is meant as "delete on sight" if someting is really speedy deletion. So every admin is trusted that he knows what a valid speedy candidate is and what not (that's why he is able to delete something, if not he shouldn't be an admin). If I am in doubt with an inmediate deletion it is not speedy but deletion request, that's the definition of it all. Everything else would be pure bureaucracy... By the way Teofilo join #fr-wikipedia IRC channel (or look at fr.wikipedia village pump) and guess who initiated the current channel topic/call about translation of help pages into french. This is the stuff that maters if you want good french language support in Commons. Arnomane17:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
P.S.: Teofilo. I appreciate your cleanup efforts looking at interface strings and alerting an admin in case it is outdated or nonexistant and give translations and by the way it was me that made internationalisation of the interface strings of the new Commons tabs (like check usage and such) possible - not that I'm proud of that but just in order to show you that I do care a lot about I18n. Arnomane17:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not to mention that it is quite pointless for an admin to tag something speedy and delete it 5 minutes later––> I have never requested this. What I request is not a speedy deletion, but a regular deletion procedure, with a debate on Commons:Deletion requests, so that the rule an administrator will consider the discussion and determine, based on the discussion, whether the file should be deleted is respected. Teofilo10:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If an admin perhaps an action that they suspect will be controversial, it would be polite to post a notice to explain their intentions and reasons. I think it is better not to "surprise" people by deleting something existing with no warning OR explanation. "Surprises" like this tend to upset people that might even agree with the reasoning if it came without the surprise. But beyond that I agree with this course of action. pfctdayelise (translate?) 11:14, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes you're right and because I suspected for example controversial views (and I had respect for the work of others) with these large text only lists I was placing them here in order to get feedback but there were quite some other notifications here by me a Village Pump as well that got just read and silently "okayed". So naturally it's not that easy forseeing if something is controversial (of course I am not perfect) but apart from that policy thing "how to make a proper deletion in order to satisfy everybody" I see that this particular thing wasn't really controversial. And of course I wouldn't have been able to do so much changes (in large parts positive ones I think) if I wouldn't have been bold with just going ahead and fixing things on my own and I really appreciate the follow up changes and as well also critical remarks at my talk page and in IRC when I do change something. P.S: I'm saying this more to the general public and hope getting more constructive feedback and more hands involved. ;-) Arnomane21:14, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can't find the page you want me to link to. Please clarify. Could it be that you want these to be labels, not links? —UED7713:24, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I was wrong for those 3. The necessary changes (for the text diplayed on links, not for urls) are as follows :
It is not working. And I don't know why. Try to change your language preference into French or Japanese and tell me if you can see the changes. I have tried this, and the tabs have all but disappeared (although I can see them in English or in German when I select English or German as language preference)... :-( Teofilo10:17, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Strangely, it doesn't work for me either. They show up for me in all cases, but are not localized (not even German, French or Japanese, they all show up as English)... I don't know what the problem is :( —UED7715:32, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
After my school page filter prevented me from saving the trimmed-down pump after an archival, I quickly typed up a tutorial on how to archive the Village pump. I know I'm taking tediousness to the max, but that's really the correct way to do it. And I'm willing to do it every time, so don't worry :)
The Deletion Log shows that Arnomane has disobeyed the rule written on Commons:Deletion guidelines that says that only a category with no content or containing only a parent category can be speedy deleted. And that page contained more than a parent category.
Therefore I request :
a speedy restoration of this page
a regular deletion procedure, so that the creator of the page and the users of the page receive a warning, and so that I and other users can take part in the discussion on Commons:Deletion requests. "An administrator will consider the discussion and determine, based on the discussion, whether the file should be deleted."
It was established a long time ago that categories should be in English. We must give precedence to that, and needn't occupy the deleteion request with this. / Fred Chess11:38, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I knew that this will come up... I have deleted a bunch of these local categories and other duplicated ones and have merged them in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion before I deleted them. It makes absolutely no sense creating localised categories for commons maintenance as people will (and did) mix the whole system up otherwise (for example I found several images sitting only in the french deletion categories, which I naturally did place right before a deletion of the category). And by the way I did care about proper replacements: It is crucial creating a proper Commons:Deletion guidelines page and proper translations of it. This is the real important thing not if Category foobar has a localised name. So I don't stick to some procedures in case it is so obvious (as otherwise I would have spent several days with tagging only). Arnomane11:46, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Due to a change in the database structure, it has now become easier to implement at least part of a localized category scheme: Titles of pages and categories could be shown in the user language, based on interlanguage links. This could work at the top of the page as well as in category listings.
I will look into implementing this - I can not promise anything yet though, as i'm not sure about the details, and I have much other things to do, too. -- Duesentrieb(?!)13:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo, please don't assume bad faith. Having duplicate categories to store the same things is completely irrational in itself, but having several categories that should fulfill the same purpose but don't fully overlap is a huge pain. There should be one category for one purpose, and localization should be done some other way. Since category pages can include templates, I suggest providing the same localization scheme as you did with the Login screen and such.
As a personal opinion, I hold that all sysops know enough English to understand the categories for deletions, or if not, then they can follow a localized link or remember a three-letter shortcut for it.
Keep in mind that even though language barriers plauge our times on the Commons, we run one database. Deletions here span all language communities.
It really doesn't matter what language is dominant on the Commons — it could be Lojban for all I care — but it would make sense to choose the one that most people can understand. And I don't think you can argue that that's not English. Sure, it's nice to have translations, but we have to communicate somehow.
Teofilo, I consider you a bold user, as you actively participate in the localization efforts. That's really commendable. But please, please be a little understanding and don't condemn Arnomane for performing a completely rational deletion just because he didn't follow the due process that was drafted for an entirely different situation.
Arnomane (...) performing a completely rational deletion--> assessment of the rationality of a deletion should be made beforehand, not afterwards. That is what Commons:Deletion requests is for. One cannot juge of the rationality of a deletion without watching the page first. After the page has been deleted one can no longer watch the page. Justifying a deletion afterwards instead of beforehand amounts to making a blind judgement. Teofilo09:28, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo: do you seriously belive that it is a good idea to duplicate the entire category structure in every language? What use is that? How is it supposed to be maintained? The idea seems completely insane to me, even if limited to maintenance categories. This warrants a speedy deletion, without further ado. We have enough overhead and beurocracy already...
On a related note: I have written a patch that will automatically show translations of page titles in the user's language, based on interlanguage links. I will submit the patch today, and I hope we can try it out on commons soon. Expect a post about this here on the village pump shortly. This patch will not completely resolve the issue of internationalizing categories, but I hope it will help a lot.
Teofilo, please note that Arnomane, me and many others are verry much concerned about internationalization, and are doing our best to improve the situation. You are welcome to join in, but your clamoring and accusations do much more harm than good in that respect. -- Duesentrieb(?!)09:49, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo: do you seriously belive that it is a good idea to duplicate the entire category structure in every language? This is a debate we should have before the deletion, on Commons:Deletion requests. I refuse the arbitrary fait accompli. I want to watch the history page and warn the people who wrote that page. The scheme "remove multiliguality now - restore it maybe later some day" is a fool's deal I do not buy into. Teofilo11:05, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Teofilo, please assume good faith. Accusing Arnomane of "deleting by stealth" and your other comments are entirely uncalled for. I'm certain that Arnomane wasn't intending any harm to you when he made the decision. Cary "Bastique" Bassparlervoir17:40, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
He's afraid of a category? Haaahahaha! I can see it - he's shivering in bed! Wow man, just wow.
Anyway: admins can, of corse, skip the speedy deletion procedure (if speedy deletion is warranted). And I don't see what evidence you are talking about (and not much here is "physical" anyway).
Teofilo, this is verry sad. We all have the same goal: make commons easier to use for everyone. What you are doing does not help. It just makes live harder for us. Seeing your latest comments, I'm gebinning to thing it may be best to simply ignore you. Which is, agin, sad. -- Duesentrieb(?!)18:20, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just wanted to add that I appreciate Arnomane's efforts to clean up Commons. And I think if someone cleans up like he does, it should be possible without lots of bureaucracy. That would be a possibility to save lots of time. --Crux15:20, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not to mention that it is quite pointless for an admin to tag something speedy and delete it 5 minutes later. Speedy deletion is meant as "delete on sight" if someting is really speedy deletion. So every admin is trusted that he knows what a valid speedy candidate is and what not (that's why he is able to delete something, if not he shouldn't be an admin). If I am in doubt with an inmediate deletion it is not speedy but deletion request, that's the definition of it all. Everything else would be pure bureaucracy... By the way Teofilo join #fr-wikipedia IRC channel (or look at fr.wikipedia village pump) and guess who initiated the current channel topic/call about translation of help pages into french. This is the stuff that maters if you want good french language support in Commons. Arnomane17:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
P.S.: Teofilo. I appreciate your cleanup efforts looking at interface strings and alerting an admin in case it is outdated or nonexistant and give translations and by the way it was me that made internationalisation of the interface strings of the new Commons tabs (like check usage and such) possible - not that I'm proud of that but just in order to show you that I do care a lot about I18n. Arnomane17:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not to mention that it is quite pointless for an admin to tag something speedy and delete it 5 minutes later––> I have never requested this. What I request is not a speedy deletion, but a regular deletion procedure, with a debate on Commons:Deletion requests, so that the rule an administrator will consider the discussion and determine, based on the discussion, whether the file should be deleted is respected. Teofilo10:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If an admin perhaps an action that they suspect will be controversial, it would be polite to post a notice to explain their intentions and reasons. I think it is better not to "surprise" people by deleting something existing with no warning OR explanation. "Surprises" like this tend to upset people that might even agree with the reasoning if it came without the surprise. But beyond that I agree with this course of action. pfctdayelise (translate?) 11:14, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes you're right and because I suspected for example controversial views (and I had respect for the work of others) with these large text only lists I was placing them here in order to get feedback but there were quite some other notifications here by me a Village Pump as well that got just read and silently "okayed". So naturally it's not that easy forseeing if something is controversial (of course I am not perfect) but apart from that policy thing "how to make a proper deletion in order to satisfy everybody" I see that this particular thing wasn't really controversial. And of course I wouldn't have been able to do so much changes (in large parts positive ones I think) if I wouldn't have been bold with just going ahead and fixing things on my own and I really appreciate the follow up changes and as well also critical remarks at my talk page and in IRC when I do change something. P.S: I'm saying this more to the general public and hope getting more constructive feedback and more hands involved. ;-) Arnomane21:14, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 18, 2006
Category nightmares
I've been organizing/creating a heap of categories, starting from Category:Heating. In particular, I've used "See also" sections on cat pages for stuff which is related, and might be what the reader wanted, but which is neither a parent nor daughter cat. I've only seen this done in a few places, so am not sure if it is OK (PLEEEEEZE say it is...). Could people comment on this before I get much further? Ta JackyR00:06, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sure. What you are doing is extremely helpful to casual browsers and editors alike. Remember, be bold, and you're certainly doing so. Thanks for your contributions! —UED7700:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Symbols protected by the Geneva conventions?
It seems that all symbols protected by the Geneva conventions (1949 I: Article 44) are marked with PD or similar copyright-tag. This might be a problem, because one is not allowed by the convention or/and the national law to use the symbols in everywhere ([18]). Should these symbols be marked with some special tag or remove them totally (as fair use images)? --Ekeb06:01, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I bexpect the usage restrictions are similar to the restrictions for the use of coats of arms, seals, flags, etc. Such restrictions are not based on copyright, but are supposed to protect the symbols gainast abuse. Also note that in this context, "using" a symbol is not always the same as "showing" it. Generally, such restrictions are acceptd on the commons, but the should be clearly stated in the respective tags. -- Duesentrieb(?!)08:28, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Funnily enough, I have just receive a mail from the Austrian Red Cross complaining that I used the Red Cross symbol for the First Aid article in the German Wikipedia. I replied about the same as above, in some more detail. Note, btw, that the red corss is the official street sign for First Aid in germany (and probably more european countries). -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:42, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The Red Cross don't want it's cross to be misused. I was told it only allows the Red Cross as symbols for hospitals that are used in war times. Maybe it is different in Germany. But everyone needs permission to use the cross. The reason is that they don't want the cross to use its value as a neutral part when they are acting in war etc. / Fred Chess14:03, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
But everyone needs permission to use the cross - i'm pretty sure this is false; Or rather, it depends on what you mean by use. Having a red corss in teh article about the Red Cross is definitely OK, IMHO. -- Duesentrieb(?!)14:35, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Dont't think that foreign user will able to understand the difference between use and illustration which is clear for de users. We have a lot of things here at commons which are NOT free in ANY respect and that is good. --Historiograf17:24, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's linked to prominently from the main page... I see the nav links as useful for frequently used pages. FP you more or less look at only occasionally. pfctdayelise (translate?) 08:01, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Size limitations
Hi!
I have photography as a hobby and have no problem sharing my work under {{PD-self}}. Are there any limitations on how much one can upload? I could otherwise reformat the images to a smaller resolution in order to conserve space. --Oden08:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks a lot for contributing! There's a 20MB limit per file, but you are welcome to upload as many images as you want, preferrably in high resolution. If you upload lots and lots of images that all show the same thing, people may start to complain (we had someone upload hundreds of pictures all showing very similar looking boats and details shots showing nothing in particular). But just go ahead and start uploading, just make sure you are around when someone has a question about your work. In short: be bold!
Personally, I love high resolution shots, especially of things like historical documents, ancient jewelry, insects and other objects with small, fine detail one can only study adequately in extreme close-up. Even so, it's probably best to pick your best images & avoid inundating our servers with multiple high-res versions of the same objects or views from slightly different angles or under slightly different lighting. So, I would discourage you from doing *any* downsampling, but I would encourage you to upload only your very best images, or images particularly needed as illustrations or examples in existing articles... BTW, I think that 20Mb limit should be lifted for outstanding photos/illustrations that need extreme high res to adequately show features discussed in articles, say, a discussion of how most insect antennae are modified hairs: for this you need a lossless cloesup of nearly microscopic structures and anything less than a huge Tiff will fail to make the visual point. Perhaps a single b'crat should be assigned power to waive the limit upon considered request, and in all such cases a reduced jpg or png should be provided as a thumbnail for the article with the high res version available only from a link on the image file page. JDG05:37, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Pictures from morguefile.com
There is a problem that got my attention through morray and
D[a]rkone: At Commons:Free media resources/Photography morguefile.com is listed as a free media resource. We also have Template:Morguefile. At least about 70 pictures are tagged with this template, most probably there are more pictures from morguefile.com at the commons. But let's have a look at there terms of use: The part "II. USE RESTRICTIONS" seems to be contrary to our aims and licenses. So in my opinion we should delist morguefile.com and delete the images in question. --Avatar12:12, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have a bunch of public domain Windows Metafiles that might serve a purpose here. I have Windows XP. Is there any freeware program to convert WMF to SVG? I have tried some, but with unsatisfactory results. --Hautala15:21, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have tried SVG Factory, but the results were cluttered with lines. See the history of Image:571.svg for examples. Also the resulting file sizes seemed unnecessarily large. Inkscape doesn't identify WMFs. Please, how do I copy and paste? (At least I tried viewing the WMF in Irfanview and copying it to clipboard, but Inkscape declares "Nothing on clipboard") --Hautala16:35, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Automatic translation for page titles
I have written a patch for MediaWiki that would show a "translated" page title in the user's language - see bugzilla:5638. The translation would be based on the interlanguage link on that page, and would be displayed at the top of the page and when the page is listed in a category. This would work for category titles too, of corse. I hope that this will help to resolve the problem that the category structure is currently english only. As an example, a user with teh interface set to german would see the title of Equus caballus as Equus caballus[Hauspferd].
The code is there, now I need your support to get it into MediaWiki and enabled for Commons. So, if you do not think that this is a completely stupid idea, please voice your support here and/or vote for the bug on bugzilla. Any comments are welcome too, of corse. -- Duesentrieb(?!)13:28, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Anything that helps with the language problem (although of course the interlanguage lks will have to be good to make it work). JackyR14:09, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you Thank you. This is a very nice step towards making Commons a truly global Commons, a more welcoming environment- especially for those who stumble upon Commons through search engines and haven't a clue about wikipedia or commons is. There are huge numbers of google users who have very little experience with latin forms of words they use in their native language- eg. if you search for Red Panda pictures using Chinese, you may not have a clue that we even refer to it as a Panda, since it has a unique name in chinese. If they wanted a picture of a red panda so they knew what it looked like and all they are confronted with is latin text, well, we have not helped. Is stuffing the ballot box permitted? (Just kidding.) -Mak03:27, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Go ahead and vote for it - if nothing else, you will get email updates when comments are added or the status is changed. Voting is reported to not influence bug fixing though. pfctdayelise (translate?) 07:57, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is - this patch does nothing for anonymous users. It would be possible to detect their language from their browser settings (I have even submitted a patch for that a while back - bugzilla:3665), but that would kill the cache - so, it can't really be done :(
Maybe it would be possible to offer a language selectior to anons... that would also effect the cache, but only for those who actually use that box... hmm... -- Duesentrieb(?!)18:29, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Another side effect is that if a significant number of visitors is logged in our chaching infrastructure doesn't work as well... So somehow the devs hope that most people never log in ;-) If we would have not the necessity login in for anon users in order to customize the language caching would still work at least a little bit, as let us say with German interface anon user 1 gets exactly the same page as anon user 2, while for logged in users it is different because of the different nick names (yes the nick names on every page are the big problem beside user customized interfaces). Just my two cent on that matter why I think a solution with a language cookie (that maybe needs to get set manually once in a drop down list in the upper right as on so many other web pages in the net) for anon users would be the best solution in the long run. Arnomane00:35, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, a language cookie from a dropdown list would be nice - the more i think about it, the more i like it :) But please let's not confuse these two issues - while they would work hand in hand, they need to be implemented and considered separately. -- Duesentrieb(?!)00:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ok... in case someone is still paying attention: the patch can now be tested live at the semi-official mediawiki test site: http://test.leuksman.com/ - so, play with it if you like. There are not many interwiki links there right now i guess... here is one category where you can see the effect: [19] (the language is forced to german by this link). -- Duesentrieb(?!)00:33, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Nice work; it works wonderfully. What is a reasonable date by which this patch could be installed on the Commons? —UED7701:10, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know, ask brion :) In theory, days - the code is there. Some people playing with it on the test site would help i guess, so we can sort out any issues before it goes live. -- Duesentrieb(?!)01:17, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
April 19, 2006
Upload not working
I just tried to upload an image and the page gave me the error Fatal error: Unknown function: wfms[forcontent() in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Licenses.php on line 41 (10.0.5.3). Just a heads up to anyone who is interested. Janizary20:00, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for reporting it. I have forwarded the error message to the server admins. I went to bed after that, but I hope the probelm is fixed now :) -- Duesentrieb(?!)10:18, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to Magnus Manske, we have another Commons tool at our disposal! This one is to help you easily generate description texts and interwiki links for articles and categories here at the Commons. For an example, see Basenji improvement.
Several points:
You may feel that this kind of long description is overkill for many subjects; in that case, just put the article name for the description. If the article name is the same as the Commons name, you probably don't need it at all.
For species, descriptions should almost always be the common name in that language, even if the article is under the Latin binomial name
The links problem will probably be fixed soon. At any rate, it's just a helping tool - I'm sure everyone here has enough common sense not to just blindly copy and paste this output into Commons pages. :) pfctdayelise (translate?) 00:47, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Max upload size
Hi, this is sort of a stupid question, but I could not find it on any documentation. What exactly is the largest size an uploaded file can be? I have some public domain audio files I'd like to upload, but I'm not sure if I need to pare them down before I do so. Thanks!—Zhaladshar(Talk)01:35, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Goodmorning, really sorry if I ask a question maybe too much often questioned, but there's a discussione upon it.wiki concerning images and licenses, and an user asked me why CC-by-nd are not allowed on Commons, and I wasn't able to answer nor to find a logical reason for this. Could someone please explain me? Gatto Nero08:00, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe Commons:Licensing can help you: "The Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content, that is, images and other media files that can be used by anyone, for any purpose." --Fb7808:02, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Then, this phrase is intended in a restricted way? Ie, CC-by-nd allows usage - for what I know - for any-purpose, the only thing not allowed is to "edit" the file, to manipulate it. So, should we consider not-editable content as a not-free content? I guess no, but I'm here to understand why... Gatto Nero08:16, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
ps:I read this "Publication of derivative work must be allowed", but it's not explained why...
I'm sorry but this is in fact being explained quite in detail that free images only is one of the core founding principles of Commons that thatfor do not need any further justification (apart from that there do exist jsutifications why - like the fact that there are quite some larger wikipedias that allow free images only and that would disable Commons for themselves if Commons would ever allow unfree images). Have a look at Special:Upload, Commons:Project scope and Commons:Licensing. Commons is simply not meant for nonfree images. Arnomane09:03, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
But that's for sure... The thing I don't understand is why non-derivative=not-free. I need to understand this to explain it to other, if it's right... —Gatto Nero09:20, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Read the mails. A problem: there's always an association between "nd" and "nc", and all the people ends talking then about "nc" only :D I understand why "nc" are not allowed and I agree. I have some problem realising it with "nd". Of course, I don't believe that "nd" are not in the wiki-spirit of collaboration, cause one releases an image that can be freely used by anyone.
I read on Commons:Welcome: "Thus it provides a central repository for freely licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text, video clips, and media of all sorts that are useful for any Wikimedia project." Freely licensed, not freely editable... Free-license=free-edit? —Gatto Nero09:47, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(reset indent) Side note: the italian wikipedia is currently voting about deleting all ND and NC content (which is currently allowed there). This question is not about allowing that content on commons. He's asking why we do not allow it, so he can better explain why it should not be allowed there either.
So, here's my two cents: First of all, to me "free" means "you can do with it waht you want" - "you can copy it" is not enough. But more importantly, the goal if the Wikimedia projects is to bring knowledge to everyone, especially to the underprevileged, into thired world countries, etc. Since not everyone has broadband internet access, this makes it neccessary to distribute the content on other media. This means that it must be allowed to charge (at least a little) money for it, and also that modification must be allowed.
If you try to make wikimedia content available on paper, or on a PDA or cell phone, for blind people, or for children or mentally handicaped people, you have to be able to create derivative work, especially:
translate labels in the images
adjust/reduce colors, scale and crop the image to fit the medium
highlite bits of photos or adjust diagrams to be easily understandable
combine images into posters, charts, etc
Furthermore, people should be able to use our content to build their own projects and content (provided they follow the attribution and share-alike policy). It's not "be happy that you can look at what we did", but "you are welcome to use what we created"! At least that's my understanding of the spirit of Wikimedia. -- Duesentrieb(?!)10:06, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sidenote about the sidenote: that's quite a flame about copyrighted images... That's why I'd like to understand as more reason as I can, to consider and combine it and find a solution.
As regard what you've written... most of your consideration seems to fit more on "nc" than "nd", but there are some good point for these last ones: editing images is important 'cause of handicapped people and similar... That seems a quite good reason to prefer not-nd images... but should that be so restrictive: "not admit" instead of "prefer"?
The most problematic issue brought up by some it.wikipedians is that some images (like city-logos and other cases) are not legally editable, that's why they cannot be released under a GFDL or PD license, but only in CC-nd... —Gatto Nero10:28, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Citi-Logos, etc, can only be released under any license only by their original creator anyway! If you dar the coat of arms of some city, the copyright is not yours, because you just reproduced an existing design.
I don't know about italian law, but this issue is quite easily resolved for the most critical cases in most countries: Restrictions that are not imposed by copyright but by other laws, do not effect our license policy. For example, official seals and coats of arms (not logos!) are PD in many countries, but are protected against misuse by separate laws. For that, we have {{Insignia}}. Another example is images of people: even if they are under a free license, you are not allowed to used them to make fun of the people shown - they could sue you. This has nothing to do with the license. Please consider that.
And yes: ND policy mostly harms accessibility and availability, especially for the underpriveleged. Because is is a prime goal of Wikimedia (as expressed by Jimbo) to make content available and accessible, I belive that media must not be restricted in terms of commercial use and derivative work, if that's legally possible (see my comment about insignia above). -- Duesentrieb(?!)10:59, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'll read your opinion with a better attention later, just please, don't combine "nc" and "nd"... It's not what I want, it's not what I asked... —Gatto Nero11:07, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Of course redundant images should be deleted (what else, since they are redundant?). After replacing the image with a cross, the template redundant should replaced by the template Deleted duplicate and after that you can read: Sysop information: Please wait one month before deleting this "placeholder" image. --jed12:58, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
So if Image B is a derivative work of Image A (cropped, converted to a different format, SVG replacement for a PNG diagram, etc.), Image A should be deleted as soon as it's not in any articles? I don't think so.
Besides, you say that admins should wait one month before deletion, but the template says to delete as soon as it's orphaned. The template needs to be changed. — Omegatron13:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The one month delay is tehre to assert that it really *is* orphaned - there's no way to tell for sure. My CheckUsage tool improves the situation, but sadly I currently don't have access to up-to-date data for the asian wikis and for some internal foundation wikis; replication for the english wikipedia has also been suspended for a week or so. People are working on those issues, though. If an imare is really redundant and really orphaned, I don't see a reason to keep it.
The issue of derivative work must in fact be considered. The original should be available somewhere... but who's responsibility is it to assure that? On the other hand, in my mind "redundant" really means "the same image", not "superceded". We never need the same image twice, do we?
Maybe a good solution would be to have a thumbnail of the original (or at least a link) on the description page of the derivative work, so derivative work is easily found when looking if an image can be deleted. If derivative work does exist, the image should then not be deleted, but marked as {{Deprecated}}. Alternatively, the original author could be asked to give consent to deleting the original - then all should be well to. -- Duesentrieb(?!)14:42, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If Image:B is the exact same image as Image:A, but Image:A has a history of different revisions, then we need to keep A for licensing reasons, correct? Most free licenses require the history of the image, its derivative works, and the creators of each to be kept, right? I believe deleting the image should be avoided in most cases, since it destroys information and is permanent, which is why I changed the template, but I was reverted. — Omegatron14:57, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
perhaps we should rename the template to {{Duplicate}}, and adopt policy accordingly.
I was going to say something similar. {{Redundant}} is currently being used for both exact duplicates and things like SVG replacements for PNG images. That seems appropriate to me, but the template's wording has been changed so it's more like "this should only be used for exact duplicates and any that you find should be shot on sight".
{{Redundant}} should be used for similar images that carry the same theme (images that are "redundant", in other words), and {{Duplicate}} should be used for exact duplicates, but even the exact duplicates should only be deleted if a list of conditions is met. — Omegatron14:57, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would strongly support separating these cases. Having them mixed in together has and is causing a lot of confusion. Let's try and make a really clear procedure with terminology that is as specific as possible. pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:23, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. I support the idea separating them and am considering if it makes sense adding the not exact duplicates to the deletion requests or not (and thus making this a subtemplate of the normal deletetion template)... I did made the one revert recently because I think that the thing with the crossing is too much overhead and with this separation we hopefully can reduce the number of problematic issues far better (so sorry for not explaining why I did so). Shall I merge and delete the localised deletion redundant categories (but I don't have much times this weekend ;)... Anyways we need some text at the Commons:Deletion guidelines at redundant images (just merge in there the content of the category header and remove it in the category and make just a hint like in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and change it according to the current scheme). Arnomane10:15, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Image:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary).png
Could someone please replace at "Image:Map-Hispanophone World.png" with the newer version File:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary).png at "Image:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary).png", and then delete the latter? I have made the Philippines in light green, as Spanish is spoken by under 1% of the population, and even if Chavacano-speakers are regarded as Spanish-speakers (which they are not, Chavacano is a distinct language offshoot of mixed Spanish and Malayan origin) they still represent under 0.5% of the population. Al-Andalus15:28, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure we could...but I think, to maintain consistency, that the United States needs to be entirely in one mid-green color rather than New Mexico being dark green (it is certainly less than 50% of New Mexico's population!) and a mint green swath across the southwest! Certainly more all across the US than the Phillipines. Cary "Bastique" Bassparlervoir15:55, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Spanish and English are both de facto languages of the state of New Mexico, and 43% is Hispanic. But if need be, I'm sure the entire US could be made a light green. But that would mean i would have to uplaod to another location, because my account is too new to replace file with new versions. Could you do it? Al-Andalus16:01, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'll do it, indeed. I have to laugh, because I live in an area of the United States that is somewhere between 30-50% Latino, although my state (Florida) has declared English as the official language.
I would encourage you, even if you wish to point New Mexico out, to make its color look more like the remainder of the US rather than the exact color of Mexico. Kind of makes it seem a part of the country it's in rather than another nation altogether. Cary "Bastique" Bassparlervoir19:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I hope this is a good place for such trivial requests. Can someone please delete Image:Misza13.status.in.png? The files on my disk have cryptic names such as N0023_.png and I got them mixed up while uploading. The one I'm requesting to delete is now a duplicate of Image:Misza13.status.out.png (don't delete this one!). I'd upload a newer version, but my account is too new or something... Thanks! Misza1316:44, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I put the wrong copyright status for a file I uploaded and tried to upload an updated version, but it said my account was too new(I made it today) and to ask someone on village pump to move it to the right name. The name of the new file is Image:DS Lite2.PNG and the one I want deleted and it moved to is Image:DS Lite.PNG.—Sam20:14, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You can just edit the image description page of the image, like you can edit any other page in the wiki. Click on the image, then click the "edit" tab at the top. You can then change the copyright tag.
Renaming files is not possible, by the way. You would have to re-upload under the new name and have the old one deleted. But it seems unnecessary, if you just want to edit the description. -- Duesentrieb(?!)20:49, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The site is copyrighted and the uploader doesn't provide any information to justify that the image (and many others from the same site) is at the public domain. Just provide that information. Sanbec✉09:34, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
IMHO, if the design shown in the image is PD, the image file itself is PD, no matter what the website claims. There is no creative originality in creating a graphic of an official flag, so there's no copyright. At least that's my take on the issue
On the other hand, {{PD-Flag}} states: Representations of national flags are subject to copyright as original works of art and do not fall under Bridgeman Art Library Ltd. v. Corel Corporation's purview as they are not representations of two-dimensional works of art. I belive that needs to be discussed some more... while it's true that Bridgeman v. Corel is not applicable (because it's not a photographic reproduction), I do belive that represenations of flags, coats of arms, etc do not fall under copyright, because they are not original - for a start, search for sweat of the brow on wikipedia.
The reference on Bridgeman v. Corel is pure nonsense. Flags are inelegible for copyright because they are too simple (and 1. often too old not to be PD and 2. regarded as official works free of copyright in many countries). PD-Flag has to be changed because it is explicitely false that representations of flags are not 2-D representations. Photographs of flags blowing in the wind are indeed representation of a 3-D work. The picture has to be kept --Historiograf13:46, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This flag is not a national flag. This flag is not an old flag. This flag is no too simple. This flag is from a copyrighted site.
We cannot generalize: each flag is a different case. If this flag is an "official work free of copyright in many countries" you must provide information to verify that. Sanbec✉22:40, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
IT IS BORING NONSENSE TO ARGUE WITH a copyrighted site. It is ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT if a website is copyrighted. We have to decide if the work in question is copyrighted. I cannot see that this flag is eligible for copyright. For me it is simple. --Historiograf21:37, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Don't shout please. It's absolutely irrelevant wath do you see or not. You don't provide any information. For me it is very simple: we can't verify that you see. Sanbec✉22:18, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
WikipediaNL attitude toward Commons
There have been strong objections from the Dutch Wikipedia against Commons policy. (see Commons:Village pump/Policy proposal:No deletion of improved versions of images). I recently asked, and it was said that things have been better recently. Still, I would hope that we can get some guarantees on the following points so the weather gets cleared for real:
That removals, at least of much-used images or series of images, but preferably of all images removed for another reason than copyright violations, are communicated well with the projects using the image to be removed and the original uploader
That changing format (from png to svg, for example) is not a reason to delete the original
That usage of images is always checked with removal
That removals, at least of much-used images or series of images, but preferably of all images removed for another reason than copyright violations, are communicated well with the projects using the image to be removed and the original uploader
notification of the uploader has been part of commons policy for a long time - it is however the responsibility of the uploader to check the commons talk page every few days.
communication with projects usign the image would be a lot of work to do manually, and would be difficult if the admin does not speak the language of that project - I wouldn't even know where to start notifiying the japanese wikipedia. But: I have been working on a tool that would automatically list changes on commons that are relevant to each project - this includes changes in tagging, deletion requests, and overwriting of images. The project is called CommonsTicker - sady I have not had much time lately to work on it. It well be another few weeks before it's up and running.
That changing format (from png to svg, for example) is not a reason to delete the original
This needs to be discussed some more - ther's no simple yes or no answer here. I persoannyl see no reason to keep a PNG if there's a truely equivalent SVG version - on the other hand, there have been a lot of problems with SVG versions that where inferior, or could ne be used as a drop-in replacement for the bitmaps. That should not happen.
I think Andre is right that changing format itself is not a reason for deletion. Improvement of an image being a criteria for deletion is a whole other kettle of fish. I guess the reason they seem the same here is because if you improve a JPG and produce another JPG, you can simply load the new one over the top of the old. Because of the file extensions when you switch format you can't do that. PNGs may also record required history information. At the end of the day, I think you lose more, and piss more people off, if you delete "inferior" images, than you gain by reducing replication. pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:39, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That usage of images is always checked with removal
As you may know, I have written CheckUsage for this purpose, and it has become widely used. Sadly, due to technical difficulties on the toolserver, it is currently not possible to check usage in projects hosted on the asian cluster (japanese, etc). I also do not have access to some internal wikis (nl.wikimedia is checked now, but wasn't for some time, for example). Also, the english wikipedia was moved to another master, and replication for that data is still in an experimental phase. But all this is being worked on, and should be resolved in a matter of weeks, I hope.
Arnomane, Pfctdayelise and others are working on that, and the situation has improved a lot over the last weeks. Help with translation would be appreciated, see Commons:Help page maintenance. Btw: I am working on a patch for MediaWiki that would allow at least limited localization support for categories: see #Automatic translation for page titles.
the link is there, and has been for about 6 weeks now. Yes, the reason for deletion should be made clear; in case of a regular deletion request, a link to the discussion should be provided.
Could you clarify what you mean by "SVG-pushing"? I don't know whether the SVG versions or the PNG versions are more accurate (I do know that the SVG versions will get better over time, since there are lots of people who care about making them accurate). But anyway, the PNG versions have never been deleted or Xed out. So where is the SVG-pushing? User:dbenbenn05:12, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The PNG has been repeatedly marked as redundant to the SVG, which implies that the SVG is better and should be used in preference to the PNG. The fact that those images have talk pages commenting on the quality of the images suggests to me that someone has tried to change the image in local projects, local editors have noticed and not been happy with the "improvement" and come to complain. pfctdayelise (translate?) 13:38, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The PNG versions were again marked as redundant by an ignorant user on Commons, and I removed the tags just before I placed my comment above - Quistnix10:20, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Some further comments on the initial comment:
Notification: We make a lot of notifications inside Commons (have a look at many many talk pages here) but no project can demand from us that we notify them in their local project manually (it is simply not possible given the fact that there are over 600 wikis using Commons, just in order to give the amount of the task some nl.wikipedians wants to impose on us). And beside that problem we did (if we had enough time) notifications eg inside fr.wikipedia and guess what happened? People were ranting that we did not notify them in their native language but with evil english in their non-english project... Well I can't help those people.
Check-usage at removal: Same problem here. Try to remove a heavily used copyvio in 50 wikis (that itself have lets say 3 usages; quite usual) and now imagine 100 copyvios that urgently need to be deleted today. We did write and embed Checkusage in the interface in order to enable all people making this hard unlinking task themselves previous to a deletion. Checkusage is no admin tool. So nl.wikipedia can't demand a task from a tiny group of active Commons admins that they don't want to do themselves. By the way in order to manage all the copyvios we curently have we need to delete much more files per day as currently. So the problem won't go away unless local projects help. And in order to enable these local projects getting the information doing so in an efficient manner Duesentrieb is writing a tool as he mentioned.
Yes. Deletion lag is a massive problem because no one wants to manually unlink an image in heavy usage. And why should they, when a bot can easily do it? Once the universal login is implemented I am going to make a proposal for a Commons delinker bot (to work in ALL projects that use the Commons) We can make it give translated summaries but we just need it. Otherwise projects should either (A) supply human volunteers to do the delinking in their project or (B) deal with it when they get broken red links in articles. pfctdayelise (translate?) 10:17, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Better help pages: This really makes me upset. I have worked very hard rewriting all Commons help pages (and am still not ready but many pages are already done like Commons:First steps and wait for translation) and have countlesss times promoted the Commons:Help page maintenance and I also want to say thank you to some nice nl.wikipedians I talk to on IRC and that have translated some of the help pages that are ready in English. So I say to those nl.wikiepdians that have a problem with the helppages: Just go along translate them and help improving them and stop demanding things from others they don't want to do themselves.
So in summary it sounds to me that these demands come from people that aparently never did have a look at Wikimedia Commons and our great improvements in the last time but simply want to rant and do Commons bashing. We have problems and we make failures no question but problems won't go away by ranting and demanding things from others but by improving things. I myself saw that our help pages need improvement and that's why I started rewriting them in Feburary (there are a lot of things I'd love to to instead like scaning and uploading my photos of the beautiful ancient byzantine city of w:Ravenna). Arnomane09:25, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Quistnix we have chatted quite some time on IRC and you know that I am working hard solving your personal flag problem together with others but your problem wont go away if you make demands from people like me and there is a Commons:CommonsProject Insignia which waits for poeple working together there and yes it is waiting for you. Apart from that there were quite some SVG flags that are indeed superior and people rant anyways. Have a nice day. Arnomane11:52, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Screenshot of a copyrighted movie or television program on a photograph of a display
hi, i want to use this pic en:Image:ISDB-T.jpg in the german wikipedia, and there i want to upload this into the commons. BUT on the description page, there is a note, that the picture on the display could be a problem. so i do not know, if it ist possible to upload this pic into the commons. could anyone please help? thx in advance, --Andreas -horn- Hornig12:32, 2 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
This is somewhat ambiguous because the photo isn't entirely of the programming on the screen, but it mainly is. Because of that, this qualifies as fair use and shouldn't be uploaded to the Commons. I suggest you just upload to to the German Wikipedia instead.--Pharos04:52, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think thats a good idea, deWikipedia does not accept fair use images and it should be possible to take a photo of a screen showing free content. -guety20:06, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Is the screen showing free content? Does this broadcasting station in fact put out non-copyrighted programs?--Pharos07:02, 5 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
But if the program is copyrighted, the screen isn't showing free content. The whole purpose of the photo is to show the copyrighted content on the screen; hence it can only be justified under fair use. Therefore, I can't see how it's apprpriate for Commons, or, if what you say about their policies is true, the German Wikipedia either.--Pharos06:21, 7 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
hi again, perhaps i found a way to avoid theses copyrighted "screenshots" in these pictures. would be a way, to to do a photomontage and cover the bad parts with blur, black spaces, or other free pics available in the commons? i mean, if the licence the original pic is using besides the fair use licence allows it, we could change the pic in a way, we can use it in the commons and do not get into trouble because of showing band content, we only leave the original pic where it is and just link from the transformed pic to the original. how about that? greets, --Andreas -horn- Hornig21:01, 17 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, this would deal with copyright issues, but what exactly do you want to use the image to represent on the German Wikipedia if not the quality of the picture in this form of display? I would instead suggest getting another photo of a monitor of this type displaying a public domain NASA photo or something.--Pharos17:58, 22 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Please, don't post in the archives. I'm probably the only one who actually watches them anyway :) So, I moved this discussion here. —UED7712:56, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
hi (and thx UED77 for your removing, I just did not want to create a new topic, when the old one still exists :) ), but that is no screenshot, that is a normal picture made with a cam. so would not that lead to a ban of all pics with brands and other copyrighted material on it? so what if I make pic of a a random street here, but there is a McDonald's sign hanging there on their restaurant, what about that? the "golden M" logo is a trademark, so it is copyrighted, so are we allowed to use pics with it in here? I fully understand why no screenshots (like pressing the print buton of the pc and than past it to ms-paint) are not allowed, but a pic with surrounding and one of the elements is that perhaps copyrighted area on it is forbidden? that is not logical for me, but if that is the rule, okay, but than there would be a lot more pics to delte than this, and almost all pics ypu take on the streets would be no allowed here, because of a Nike logo on shoes/shirts, perhaps there is a ADAC helicopter flying in the background, etc. there are alwas brands in the pics. greets, --Andreas -horn- Hornig11:44, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
At Image:JohnMcCarthy041006 part1.ogg, I've uploaded the first part of a multi-part interview in OGG format. I've put links to the other parts under "See also." Is there a better way to interlink the various parts? Also, I put a link to the first part of the interview from John McCarthy, but the link refers only to the first part once again. Part of the difficulty is that links point to the OGG files themselves, not the description page. Pointers are welcome! Thanks. Chaiken00:26, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Aha! Thanks, I guess I should have thought of that. The whole concept of using Image: for OGG files threw me off. Chaiken06:23, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
"If the only source given is another Wikimedia project, and the file was deleted at that project for a copyright violation or lack of source/license information, then the file can be speedily deleted at the Commons as well."
Seems like a no-brainer to me -- anyone else? It makes more sense to me to trust the administrators of other projects, than to waste our own time duplicating their efforts. pfctdayelise (translate?) 12:33, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
seems like a good idea - though the admin should at least do a quick check if the info is indeed missing. Also, some tricky cases of copyright interpretation may warrant a new discussion on commons. But in 95% of the cases, we should just delete. -- Duesentrieb(?!)12:44, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
yes, plus a quick look on the description page if the info in fact is missing. Maybe the uploader added more info when uploading to commons than there was on the original wp. -- Duesentrieb(?!)13:17, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This seems like a good idea to me as well, provided that common sense is used to check that the info is missing (and common sense is pretty much a prerequisite for adminship). Thryduulf13:34, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hello. I'm trying to upload a new version of an image I created, but I'm forbidden to do so because my account is too new. As per the message I got, I uploaded the new version of the image under a new name, and I'm posting a request here to move it to the old name. The new version of the image is this one:
Ditto. I'm trying to upload a new version of an image I created, but I'm forbidden to do so because my account is too new. As per the message I got, I uploaded the new version of the image under a new name and I'm posting a request here to move it to the old name.
I need some help from someone with knowledge to create a new template out of this template to work similar like Template:no source since with the translated text arranged like in Template:PD. That's because several things do not work with the current template:
The template occupies too much space with all translations visible, could be modified like in the PD template
Tagging per date does not work, images seem to use only the current months category. It looks like there has to be a subst command like in {{subst:nsd}}.
the current command line is too complicated,most of the images are tagged as redundant but the command redundant:Image:xxx.jpg has to be changed to deleted duplicate|IMAGE=xxx.jpg . It may be easier to use the command line from redundant in the new template (don't know if this is working, maybe auto-created by the subst command, plus an additional ~~~~ to see who installed the template and when.
The first two steps might be implemented into the current template, especially the first one, but I don't know how to fix the second one or to program the third one. --Denniss22:43, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Now you can use {{subst:deldup|other image name}} instead of {{deleted duplicate|other image name}}, and the month is automatically filled in. Every month, someone has to create the appropriate category; Category:Deleted duplicates - May next month (though they can be reused every year ...).
I don't know about commons cat schemes, but I'd say keep it as simple as possible, the state or country should only be included when needed for disambiguation, if there are two Bocholts (possible, don't know for sure) in Germany or two North Rhine-Westphalia's (extremely unlikely) in Europe for example. There are a lot of towns with the same name in the US (as there are in France to give another example), so maybe disambiguation has become the standard instead of the exception there, but that's just a guess. So I'd go with your second example, as it seems to be the simplest solution. NielsF00:47, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Or not. I'd rather use the safer - more explicit - version. People on Commons have just noticed a couple of weeks ago that they need two categories Category:Frankfurt, Germany - even though both cities have been around for ages. So when someday you'll realize that there are two Bocholts, you're in a lot of trouble.
I am proposing a reorganization of the ship categories to bring in some of the improvements that have been made in the WP ship categories recently and apply them here as well. To that end I have created Commons:Category scheme ships to describe my proposal, as well as offered some discussion on Category talk:Ships regarding this. I invite all to comment on this proposal. I am prepared to do the labor to make it happen, but I want to get input from folks before embarking. Thanks! Josh06:26, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
not a media
Hi. Take a look at The Ballots, A Reparations Guide. I found it browsing for "voting theme" pics. I guess it shall not be in commons. I let you deal with it properly, should I be right.
I'm trying to upload a new version of an image I created, but my account is too new. As per the message I got, I uploaded the new version of the image under a new name and I'm posting a request here to move it to the old name.
New Image:POL_Kętrzyn_COA.svg
Image to replace this one - Image:POL Kętrzyn COA v1.2.svg
Recently I uploaded a few svg images. All were correctly displayed by MediaWiki, but the last was not. This is Image:Fresnel lens.svg. Not only it isn't displayed on its page, but when I try to use it in article, it produces error message ("Error creating thumbnail").
Does anybody knows what's going on? Pko14:03, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's usually better to save SVGs as Plain SVG (instead of Inkscape SVG) with Inkscape. The code is cleaner and clearer and sufficient for Wikipedia. I resaved the file and it works, doesn't it? --Madden10:58, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Pictures conserved in Commons - reasons for deletion
Actually we do not want users to persist in having their pictures deleted. My point of view is, that the right of having pictures deleteted due to change of the photographer's attidude is indispensable. The photographers right to wish pictures being deleted can not be taken or given away.
But on the other hand Commons reserves to have any picture deletable. My point of view is that photographies are hold in trust and that therefore it should be worked out more detailled under which circumstances one has to reckon with pictures being deleted. -- Simplicius17:41, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't work teaching everybody everything everytime in detail. We simply don't have the time. Remember also the very clear upload warning: "If you do not provide suitable license and source information, your file will be deleted without further notice." In contrast to that warning we do notify the users on their Commons talk page on a regular basis and if that user in question does not watch it regularly there is nothing we can do else. And of course Commons uses a wiki. A wiki is a moving target. Thatfor we give no warranty for anything. So your suggest is in large parts existing Commons practice and in its extrem not manageable. Please also read a lot of older threads on the very same topic where all essential points on that matter (and also some half automated solutions) were exchanged. Arnomane23:30, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
For example private collection, orphaned, ugly, oversized, any other reason... do we delete it at the whim of some admin? Are my pictures really preserved for future? The circumstances for deletion should be written down more detailled in Usage Conditions. -- Simplicius, Germany 10:10, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I know that some photos might be more valuable in 10 or 20 years than they look now. Maybe pictures of buildings, factories, cars, street panoramas, even pictures of lakes or glaciers might have a growing value.
First of all, guidelines are no Conditions of use. The guidelines say a lot about copyright violations but there is not very much about the rest. In this way any photography can be deleted because one says "this artist is not important" etc. (which is an example from the guidelines).
This means, a photo of a red telephone box can be deleted as well, although it might become a contemporary document some years later. -- Simplicius19:32, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Simplicius I don't want to be harsh but honestly this is currently a phantom debate. Just have a look at Commons:Project scope were it is stated what Commons is and what not. Currently have elaborated more in detail that we don't want to be like flickr. That's currently enough if you care about our content. We also don't want detailed policies for everything in previous. This would just make our policy trolls happy. We create policies (or better detailed clarifications of Commons basic policies) if we really need them. Arnomane21:14, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Simplicius, I will just say that at the moment there is a strong attitude of conserving nearly everything that is not a copyvio at the Commons. Things that increase the likelihood of your photo being kept include: describing what it depicts, the significance of that, in some detail. Giving details such as location and date. Having the subject in focus. :) Uploading high-res originals. We can't predict what the future Commons community will be like but at the moment it is very conservative on the issue of deletion, copyvios aside, which I believe is the right attitude and I hope it continues. pfctdayelise (translate?) 00:19, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
pfctdayelise, I already said, I am talking about the politics in general so there should be an readable information for all uploading users like "Thing that increase the likelihood of your photo being kept include: describing what it depicts, the significance of that, in some detail, giving details such as location and date."
In Germany Wikipedia more than 100 pictures were deleted by the only actice buerocrat da didi, reason "orphaned", there was no deletion discussion before.
If the consensus is "we don't want to be like flickr" there should be a statement informing uploading users "please note that any file might be deleted at any time for any reason" or a better wording. -- Simplicius12:10, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Simplicius. Come on. I am simply not interested in your problems with da didi and we both know that we two had some problems with each other quite some time in the past in de.wikiepdia too. This here is Wikimedia Commons and Commons is even less interested in votings as de.wikipedia. We simply don't want to vote on every content and we were very relaxed in the past with content. Arnomane12:36, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
More than 100 deleted pictures (orphaned) give an example that it is not a question in future. At least one photography (and the photographer Stahlkocher was not relaxed) had been used on German Wikipedia CD 1.0 so the credits pointed into zero on German Wikipedia.
There should be a proper disclaimer informing about the terms of use concerning the future of uploaded pictures (are they hold in trust or not?). -- Simplicius17:58, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Arnomane, I once started my participation in Wikipedia for the promise to keep knowledge alive even when and after brains will surely have passed away. Your sayings above are of an intention that there would be no real actual needs for regulations, that there would be no need for enduring regulations, and that the "community" would take care and regulations whenever it would be interesting / or nice (for the community? for roughly speaking persons like you seem to be?)
Pheew my dear... Sorry. This is a POV which is NOT acceptable. If I contribute a photograph (for example my collection of wine bottles, most of them extremely expensive versions of 1961 vintage grand crus) then I expect the photographs either to be deleted immediately (along of 14 days after having put them in) OR stored for lifetime and longer. Imagine: I want to be free to sell these items, AND I want the photographs kept AND having no need to preserve them privately because I donated them to the WP community. This is no claim for webspace: this is claim for eternity. Like promised with the invitation to take share of knowledge contribution. Because the photographs SHOULD be useful for future or usable in future. Imagine: the grandson of your grandson could see a photograph of his grand-grand-grand-father marrying, eventually drinking a wine of his birth anniversary. But he cannot identify the wine exactly, and would like to compare with big photographs of winebottles of that age... Could he use wikipedia category wine bottles, see them, or would Arnomane have deleted the photographs at any liberate time..?...!...?.. Free of justification to the donator and(or the community? (.. not only the then-actual communitiy, but the ever-former-community since contents were contributed...)
Imagine, you are not alone on the world, and your tricky-this-tricky-that-arguing is not the rule for wikipedia. There ARE needs for GOOD and LONGTIME reliable regulations how to store photographs, how to keep them and and and.. Otherwise there could occur a lack of willing contributions, because the knowledge would be spread that there are some guys who have an apporach to the contents of wikipedia that they would do with the contens what they like to do and whenever they would like to do.
Arnomane, clever guy, please see: THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.
So we need good rules. OK? NOT for making some trolls happy.(To mention "troll" in this relation nearly made me eager to write some insults. But I dont. And you please don´t use the "T" word...) KdM de:Benutzer:Kassander_der_Minoer
As by current policy and mission statement, commons is a repository, not an archive. To me, there is no real difference between articles on Wikipedia and images on Commons: what you contribute is "ours" and can be modified, moved and deleted, whatever serves the project and pleases the community. If you want a permanent stash for your images on the web, use Flickr & co.
Kassander der Minoer said "If I contribute a photograph (for example my collection of wine bottles, most of them extremely expensive versions of 1961 vintage grand crus) then I expect the photographs either to be deleted immediately (along of 14 days after having put them in) OR stored for lifetime and longer" - wherever did you get that idea? Just like on Wikipedia, things may be deleted if they have been superceeded by new content or policy.
That being said: you are of corse free to lobby for a change in this policy. If the community decides that we want to be an archive, then indeed some policies and processes would have to be changed. I personally feel however that an archive is somethign static which does not really fit with the wiki-principle.
Apperently, the aim and purpose of the commons is often misinterpretet. We should make it more clear what the commons is about. A change of the Common's mission can be considered, but I don't really support such a change. -- Duesentrieb(?!)10:34, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I do not support the opinion that Commons is not an archive. For scholarly purposes log-term preservation is needed. If Wikipedia wants to be a serious encyclopedia it should take account of scholarly needs. I do NOT see that Duesentrieb speaks for the whole community here --Historiograf19:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sheesh. We will aim to be an archive, but we don't promise it. All we're saying is, don't rely on us as your sole storage provider. Why would you upload an image here and then destroy your own copy of it? :/ That's really weird. Probably even flickr has a disclaimer about this.
If you want to make policies to protect against admins who go on inappropriate deleting sprees, well, that's one thing, but I don't believe the existence of a policy is likely to stop anyone who really wants to run wild. pfctdayelise (translate?) 07:08, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, pfcday, I dont speak about destroying my own info. I am aware that for any deliberate lousy reasons anybody else could destroy my pics. Yess I can accept that Commons will try to be an archive. Related to this there should be a commitment not do delete material (maybe elsewhere needed), and not to destroy info until a better version of the same information would be available / uploaded. I would not have objections to delete my old winebottle pics if a similar bottle (same vintage) is being portraited by a better pic. But I DO HAVE objections if for any lousy reason (save disk capacities.. or so etc. ) anybody at any later time would feel encouraged to destroy info which was once herited to the commons. Of course I accept that WP:commons cannot be webspace for private use. But if there are reasons to think that old pic material should be preserved for the future why not try to rely on WP:Commons? I own a wine bottle from 1911, Leoville las Cases, a famous Grand Cru in Bordeaux. I would very much like to compare THIS very paper on the bottle with a good printable version in any wine archive available for me... : to check if it is an original version, a wine dealer´s special filling or anything else. This is knowledge. OK, for a small circle of enthusiasts. But imagine: the US gouvernment at any time overtaken by the taliban... Would we have to accept that every wine info then will be destroyed, because Allah might have said that wine is a devil´s product??
OK, nobody can really give guarantees for eternity. But shouldn´t we try to preserve knowledge and knowledge related contents for the long lasting future? Really TRY TO DRIVE a reliable archive as long men can foresee the future?? I would invite to do so. Otherwise: why should I do my efforts to spend time and info to WP:commons? WHY?
Flickr is related to good photographs. Wine bottle photographs may often lack of "photographical quality". Mine too... So, sorry, the Flickr hint is misleading. I would like to have info like these stored (in a reliable way, related to policies) just here in WP:commons. And I would like to promote and to do a draft for such purposes. (sorry, my english is not good enough.) ... -- 13:12, 30 April 2006 (UTC) KdM de:Benutzer:Kassander_der_Minoer
Well...I think we have the same attitude, actually. But say we did make a policy about this. Policy, like everything else on a wiki, evolves. If a future bunch of admins disagreed, they could lobby to have the policy changed, so it would make no difference. Wiki policy is not law. What else do you suggest we do? If you want to make a policy about this, if you think it will help, you're welcome to do so of course. (subject to approval by the commons community) pfctdayelise (translate?) 05:22, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In reaction to the greater effort towards achieving internationalization, and specifically because of the new trend of translating license tags, I've decided that one master language template would be needed. I request that this new {{Langs}} be used on license tags, as well as in any case where the localized url is composed of {{FULLPAGENAME}}/xx, where "xx" is the language code. The template, in its present form is really easy to use: including it will automatically fill in the fullpagename, and provide links for all the languages that have a presence on the Commons. Of course, there are some disadvantages to this template, but I do have justification for doing things this way.
First of all, this template is easy to modify. If one wishes to add a new language, he need only do it once, and not repeat the same steps over and over again with all the "/Lang" templates that are out there.
Nonexistant translations will appear as red links. The effect of this is twofold:
Commons regulars will be annoyed by these red links, giving them incentive to track down translators and ask them to translate the page.
Visitors will be puzzled by these links, increasing the likeliness that they'll translate these if they can, or contact someone if they can't.
Also, the widespread usage of this new template will promote the predictable translations in the form of "pagename/lang", which could be created as redirects to the local name of the page.
Plans for the future include the implementation of uselang (probably by {{L}}), and some sort of workaround to allow pages to use it that have translations with completely localized names. Please, ask all questions you have, and tell me what you think about it. —UED7722:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A very sensible idea, of course. I think there will be a looooot of red links, though. And this is only for templates, right? Not Commons: namespace pages, which actually take translated names? pfctdayelise (translate?) 23:36, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it's currently for pages that follow the "default(english)name/lang" format. For now. I'm working on a workaround for those other pages.
Sorry for the bug. The demo is at User:UED77/Sandbox, and I'm still trying to get it to work correctly. I will post later for a status report, but eventually plan to put it into live action once it works correctly.
It's working now, but since variables such as {{FULLPAGENAME}} carry through to the image pages, and "{{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>{{FULLPAGENAME}}" doesn't want to evalutate when called, only when substed, I had to make it so that this {{Langs}} template should be included by substing the fullpagename as a parameter. The working example at my personal sandbox illustrates this behavior. If you have no objections, I would like to give this a try on some of the license tags. —UED7701:41, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
MediaWiki feature request for further upload warning
Every Commons admin does know the problem that people often retransfer an already deleted image to Wikimedia Commons simply because they weren't aware of the licene problems of that file. This problem causes quite some frustration on all sides and thus a direct warning at upload in case of such a reupload would help all people: The uploaders would get direct information and can avoid frustration with deleted work and the admins need to deleted less images and need to teach people less on the very same topic again and again.
This won't, of course, be any help to people who upload the image under a different name.
This might cause confusion for people who upload a new, legitimate image under a name that just happens to be the name of a different image that was previously deleted.
You can have deleted pages on your watchlist, right? It would be good if images that admins deleted were automatically put on their watchlists. And then if bugzilla:778 was solved, and image uploads created watchlist entries, we might be halfway there...! pfctdayelise (translate?) 03:43, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You can upload a file under a different name or a different file under the same name. But the number of files were it would help is still very large. The problem is I cannot place every deleted file on my watchlist. I would have thousands of entries and I would have no chance sorting my watchlist. For sure any warning text (editable via MediaWiki:-) needs to reflect the fact that you also upload a different file with the same name. Arnomane08:03, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think there is a feature request for some kind of system where you can give a reason for adding an item to your watchlist, then you could just view that subportion of the watchlist, eg "my image", "often vandalised", "interesting", "stuff I deleted". Well, we can dream... If this feature was implemented then it would make sense to watch the items you delete. pfctdayelise (translate?) 08:29, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes would be very nice such a watchlist feature. However the idea of this warning is that we can avoid upload errors and not cleaning up after such an upload and I guess everyone is disapointed if he discovers that his upload has been deleted and he will think "Damn how can I know that in advance?" So my idea behind that feature request is that we can reduce frustration. So your watchlist idea would still not solve the problem at the root in that case. Arnomane09:43, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A checksum on the file is an exceptionally fast way to detect identicals. Doing a histogram checksum on the rendered file will find near identicals. Image processing books contain the algorithm for the latter. Interesingly, storing this value directly in the record for the item will allow you to do similarity searches on images. Fuzziness controlled by doing a range query, with equivalence with the least significant digits signifying the closest matches. Do it on the luminance values (Black and white version). You can get fancy and look at image segmentation to get around problems with images slightly altered with overlayed text or graphics, but that's the basic idea. -Mak23:06, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting ideas. (I didn't want to demand too much from the delevopers at once in order to have this an easy to solve feature request and also was not aware of such quite easy algorithms beside size in bytes and pixel resolution match. ;-) So I would be very happy if you can contribute your ideas directly there at the bugzilla entry so that the developers are aware of it. Arnomane23:16, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There's bugzilla:1459 on having searchable checksums in a MediaWiki database. Different checksums for each file or revision could be stored in a table implemented for that feature. Would be great indeed. --para23:38, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ok Arnomane, I will post it, but I don't think they need a lot more info than the idea- everyone knows how to checksum. The only real new info is that is actually captures as many identicals as it does using such a mind numbingly simply comparison. I guess I assumed there was more compression/decompression going on that would throw off a checksum comparison. Not so according to the Image Match shareware guy where I picked up this tip. Anyway, for folks who do capture from screen or take a TIFF download and save into a JPG of course you will want the histogram thing. Unfortunately all the heavy lifting would be done by the image utility that Mediawiki uses. I remember reading the name of it and fiddling with it when I installed my wiki, but it eludes me now. Probably a sourceforge project right? -Mak04:25, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The bug has now been resolved :) Let's hope that we have soon a new version of MediaWiki installed with that feature enabled.
@MAK: The image conversion is done with "convert" from w:ImageMagick. SVG's get converted with rsvg into PNG on the fly. Perhapes there is even a tool of ImageMagick capable of such things like histogram checksums. Arnomane15:28, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
P.S.: The feature is now enabled at Commons and it just works nicely. It also directly links in the warning message to the log entry of that particluar file, so that people can directly see the deletion log entry and comment. For example just try to upload a file over Image:arnomane-test.png. You will get a error message with cancel and continue button. :-) Arnomane17:18, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
is there a way to see new versions of files loaded on your watchlist? It would also be helpful if this showed up in user contributions Astrokey4405:43, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
sorry I just started a new topic without reading the above, but is this the same thing? What I mean is where someone updates an image that is already there - you know how you can upload an image under "Upload a new version of file". If someone does this to an image you are watching it does not show up in your watchlist - so you can not easily see if an image has been altered. Astrokey4407:52, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just visited Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart where I wanted to download many ogg files. So I have a question that I'm sure has been asked 20 times already :
Would it be possible that when you write
<gallery>
Image:Mozart - Concerto in D for Flute K.314.ladybyron.ogg|Concerto in D for Flute K.314
Image:Mozart_Eine_kleine_Nachtmusik_KV525_Satz_4_Rondo.ogg|Eine kleine Nachtmusik 4th movement K. 325
Image:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Don Giovanni - Overtüre.ogg|Overtüre zu "Don Giovanni" KV 527
Image:Mozart - vesperae de dominica. 6. magnificat.ogg|Vesperae de dominica. 6. magnificat
</gallery>
You get something like this (with the direct link to the ogg files) :
But those templates are for a single audio file. What simple way have you to give a *list* of the audio files of a given componist/musician ? It seems that for now, people are using a gallery. See Mozart#SoundJmfayard09:31, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can see that they are, but I think that's a particularly unsuited method for providing these links. What on earth is wrong with a regular old asterisk-created wikilist? See what you think now. pfctdayelise (translate?) 12:44, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. It's simple and it works. I can't find anything wrong with it. Except perhaps that the use of <gallery> is consistant with how pictures are handled and how categories are displayed (see Category:Classical music) Jmfayard15:36, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would actually consider it a bug of sorts that audio files are listed as big meaningless icons. It should really be avoided, a simple list is much better IMHO. -- Duesentrieb(?!)22:24, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I know that it is possible to change the setting whether files in a category list like articles (text links) or try to list like images (pseudo-gallery). I wonder if it is possible to change this setting based on the file type - i.e. have images list as thumbnails, but all other filetypes list as text links. It probably doesn't really matter, but it's a thought... pfctdayelise (translate?) 00:23, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Why should it be a joke? Jimbo is aware of that image. It is part of the Wikimedia press kit. And if you're really interested in the background story of that phenomenal young fotographer (and want to contribute a small nice more detailed description) just say hello to Jimbo on IRC he doesn't bite. ;-) Arnomane21:19, 26 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if Jimbo's daughter has fully understood GFDL :) That is, technically, it's probably a copyvio since Kyra hasn't agreed on the GFDL criteria (a 3,5 year old person can't possibly understand it). /Grillo15:54, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Orgullobot is now able to automatically work on the categories in Category:Category redirects (thanks to dbenbenn for that idea), but it only goes through with the move if the last editor of the category is a sysop. The thing is, this is most often not the case, even when the move is legitimate. That said, a whitelist of users who are harmless/good would be very useful to increase the number of automatic moves. I invite admins to add a few of their favorite contributors to User:Orgullobot/whitelist. Since I don't know the Commoner community very well, I will only be adding those usernames submitted by admins, but other users should feel free to ask an admin to add them.--Orgullomoore03:44, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, please don't protect all those pages—I think it's bad philosophically, but it also wouldn't solve the problem. I think Orgullomoore is worried about a vandal replacing the text of some big category (like Category:GFDL) with {{category redirect|GFDL on Wheels}} or something, which could induce Orgullobot to vandalize a lot of pages. Perhaps in addition to the whitelist, Orgullobot could keep a log of categories that it refused to update, so people could check them by hand. User:dbenbenn20:17, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Upload Warning--turn off, and only in 1.6x?
Is it possible to turn off this Upload Warning:
A file with this name exists already, please check Image:example.jpg if you are not sure if you want to change it.
I want to make it so the image downloads without the warning page at all.
In otherwords, I want to be able to overwrite existing files without a warning.
Is the "ignore all warnings" button only in the 1.6x version of mediawiki? I would like to permantly have this button checked. How could I do this?
As I have told you before: you will have to hack the code. Go into includes/SpecialUpload.php and search for the following line:
if( $nt->getArticleID() ) {
replace it by this:
if( false ) {
that should fix your problem: you will now never notice if you are overwriting an existing file. This is generally a very bad idea, but if you must have it that way, go ahead. -- Duesentrieb
I created a SVG picture Image:Ellingham-Richardson.svg;
it seems the symbol police is misinterpreted, the Δ looks like a "D" when the image is "transformed" like besides,
but is looks correct when the "true" image is seen (i.e. when you click on it from the image page, see here).
Looking at the svg with a text editor, you are using the character D with the Windows Symbol font. When the font defined in an svg is not available, the renderer falls back to the default font. The D would be better replaced with the Unicode Δ character (see Windows character map), using the same font as with the other text. By the way, some of the text wants to be shown in "Bitstream Vera Sans", which doesn't sound too common either. If you really want to keep the special fonts, they are better converted into glyphs or paths. --para11:00, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I'll change that. Concerning the odd font, it's the default in Inkscape, that's why. I'll change it also.
I've begun documenting the better known rooms in the White House in English Wikipedia (see w:category:Rooms in the White House). To support this, I've uploaded a couple of official (Library of Congress [22]) diagrams, but they only cover the first floor and ground floor (there are great photos [23] of the second and third floor, tho). I found some really good diagrams of the second floor [24] and West Wing [25] and a decent one of the third floor, and I wonder if there are any Wikipedians with diagramming skills who would be willing to use these as sources for freely licensed versions to be housed on Commons. Then we would have a more complete view of the White House for additional articles. --Tysto19:10, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Category Military (People)
In Nov 2005 it was suggested that the duplicate Category:Military (People) be merged with Category:Military people (both are in use). In almost 6 months nothing has happened except that the category is being extended instead of merged. No discussion is recorded. Isn't it time for action in this pretty obvious case ?
A general remark: This is unfortunately not the only example of confusion in category names. Is anyone working to reduce the diversity and confusion in category names and organization ? -Dr Fredrik Haeffner19:38, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
To resolve duplicate categories, use {{seecat|bettername}} - contents of categories makred that way will be moved periodically by bots. When the cat is (nearly) empty, file a deletion request (or keep it as a pseudo-redirect if it's likely to come back if deleted) -- Duesentrieb(?!)19:51, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Dr Haeffner, many people are. It's an extremely complex task though. A guideline that works in one topic area will not necessarily work in another. The best thing to do is to create Categorisation scheme, and link to it from each category it applies to. This is probably your best chance of having a plan adhered to. pfctdayelise (translate?) 01:00, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If this question has been asked before, my apologies. On the Dutch Wikipedia, I'm looking after the page on Trade balance (to be found at nl:Handelsbalans). As an illustration, I have added the trade balance figures for the US and the Eurozone over the past year or so, in two simple but rather dull tables. I am thinking of replacing these tables with two graphs. My first question is: am I correct that PNG is the preferred file format for such an image? My second question is this. This graph would be updated monthly (using figures from the US goverment c.q. Eurostat). Over the years -assuming I'm going to stay around;)- this would lead to a fairly large number of files, growing by 24 per year. Is this okay or would it be preferable to stick to just two graphs? If so, do the present files have to be deleted first or can they be overwritten? Best regards, MartinD05:12, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If possible I would think that svg would be preferable to png for graphs. Images can be overwritten - just upload it with the same name. If you want to be able to display two versions then you would need to upload a separate image, but from what I understand of your project I don't think this is likely. Thryduulf10:29, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Go ahead and upload - you can consider overwriting the old version like Thryduulf suggested, or upload under a new name every time - 24 images per year is not a "large number". We had bots putting dozents of images (weather maps and stock graphs) per day on the commons - that was a problem. -- Duesentrieb(?!)10:38, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to both of you gentlemen. I'll have to find out if I can create SVG graphs. (Actually, just downloaded OpenOffice.org, which, if I'm correctly informed, would be able to make PNG files of graphs. No doubt I'll find some way of turning them into SVG.) Since I would be making updated versions of the same graph I wouldn't need to keep the old version. Best regards, MartinD11:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Turning pixel graphics (PNG) into vector graphics (SVG) does not work well (it's like reconstructing text from a bitmap), the reverse (rendering SVG as PNG) is easy. OpenOffice supports SVG output, I think, but there are better tools for creating SVG, like InkScape, for example. -- Duesentrieb(?!)11:53, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Update, in case anyone is wondering where the graphs are: the're still on my pc. Can't get them done they way I want it, no matter what I try. Wonderful things, computers! (Colourful language inserted here) MartinD14:11, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you would like to reduce image vandalism on your local project, please ask an admin to create/edit this page. Any image listed on this page will then not show up inline in an article - it will convert to just a link. The image will still show on its image description page (and it will still show up in galleries, I think).
It is a good idea to use it in conjunction with something like w:Template:Linkimage which makes a nice link to the image description page, for articles in which the image actually is relevant.
It is not possible (at this stage) to create a 'global list', so each project has to create and maintain its own list. Therefore if your project suffers from image vandalism, ask an admin to add the image to this list straight away. Of course, if it's a copyright violation, please still come and tell us so we can delete it. :)
Do I understand it right you have to install it on your local wiki ? I assume yes. It is not a good Idea to copy the en wiki list without checking them for local use. I generally do not like censorship but it might be needed, only as a last resort to stop nasty spammers/vandalizers, to temporarily add files to this list. --Denniss17:07, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It should be "installed" (that is, exist) but be blank. That's what I found when I checked a few WM projects (which are 1.5.*). (But then I checked a MW 1.6.3 wiki and it didn't exist at all, so that's weird.) You're right, local use should be checked for any file added. That's why you can use that template Linkimage, it makes a nice-looking link box you can use on any relevant article. pfctdayelise (translate?) 04:55, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Nuvola news
I've uploaded the Nuvola icon package for GNOME. This means we now have 265 of our beloved Nuvola icons in a scalable format! There are some notable omissions (still no scalable or ), and some are inferior to the PNGs (at 128px, compare the roofs of and ). But, we gain such new icons as and , so we can do more with Nuvola than ever!
I've also uploaded the Nuvola action icons. These are only 48x48 instead of 128x128, but many of them aren't available in any other format and don't have copies in other folders. This means now we have , and .
Please as you go through them, make sure there are no protected logos (eg Firefox, Windows, Realplayer, Opera). Having these logos means a trillion people use them in userboxes and it's a pain to extricate them for deletion. Thanks --pfctdayelise (translate?) 04:33, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
By "protected" you mean "trademarked", right? What's the actual trademarks policy? Haven't juriwiki-l said otherwise? Alphax (talk) 09:12, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If someone is going to go thru them all: please add meaningful descriptions. The current descriptions are identical, and the file names offer little information. --Tysto02:54, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've uploaded the new version and deleted the old one. You may need to hard-refresh the page before you see the update. Alphax (talk) 09:24, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don´t know if this is the correct place, but here it goes: I am mainly an user of the english-Wiki and sometimes I look "here" for good maps about the Roman Empire and I noticed that here in Wiki-commons there is both the article "Maps of the Roman Empire" and the sub-category "Maps of the Roman Empire" which do NOT corespond each other. Wouldn´t it be easier to have one or the other?, how can I merge the two? Flamarande14:03, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well I can only say that its a complete and utter mess in all the categories about the ancient romans, everything is completly disorganized amid an utter caos and confusion. Flamarande15:28, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, you're welcome to jump in and help us improve it. Create a model category scheme (compare to what en.wp does for ideas), get comments, implement it. We always need more volunteers here. pfctdayelise (translate?) 15:36, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for this "dumb" question, but I am a bit confused, if I want to sort the images (paintings, statues, etc) about a person what should I do? Should I create a new article (in case there isn´t any) or create a new category (in case there isn´t any)? I am asking this because Vercingetorix doesn´t have an article but he has a category where some pictures of him are organized. Flamarande16:07, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Please use english for categories - replicating the category structure in all languages would be hell to maintain and would only make the mess worse. I'm working on an internationalization scheme for categories, see Commons:Village_pump#Automatic_translation_for_page_titles.
IF you fear that translated diagrams would flood the category, start making gallery pages, on for each diagram, or similar diagrams grouped together, in all languages. You can also make translated redirects to the gallery pages (but not to categories). -- Duesentrieb(?!)18:31, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hm, in my opinion, it makes sense to create extra categories for images that are translated versions of another (and a German title for images with German text only is only logical). Why should English and German diagrams be stuffed in one big category? Somebody who is searching for this diagrams will need them for an English or for an German article, but he doesn't need them both. So make extra categories or create catscanable categories 'Image with German text' and 'Image with English text'. --::Slomox::><17:02, 2 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes- please segment using galleries. Categories are not pigeonholes to sweep excess images into so that things are eminently tidy and eminently forgotten. -Mak04:32, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, FOTW asserts copyright over their flag images, and their license is very restrictive (see [26]). Whether they can actually copyright those flags I don't know ... User:dbenbenn19:40, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Gif animation Bug
I work on the Chinese stroke order Project, and we see a bug when an animation .gif is resize in a smaller size.
My computer : Suse 10.0
Bug with : Firefox 1.5.0.2 ; Konqueror 3.5.1 ; Mozila
See below [smaller size | normal | greater size] :
Please, can you report this bug, or write to me where I should repport it.
The instructions for the Captcha should mention that the words must be typed without space in between. I thought that word boundary recognition was part of the Turing test and attributed the first few rejections to my small vocabulary ('towns' vs. hypothetical 'towris'). Alternatively, you could fix the software to silently remove whitespace. Jowagner 21:39, 30 April 2006 (UTC) The same applies for the Captcha that is requested when adding a URL to a page. Jowagner21:52, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know that we have the ability to do much at all about captchas. Try going to bugzilla: and search for "captcha" in the bugs, see if anyone has posted about what you've written. If they haven't, you can open a new bug. pfctdayelise (translate?) 02:17, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Giant Mass Upload
Hi!
An admin of de.wikisource has requested me for an mass upload of 20.000 images from the de:Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, which are in PublicDomain(PD-Old), with a size of 2gb total. I have already done 1572 of them and want to post it here (delayed; I know...) to make sure no errors occur.
I categorize the images as follows:
Category:ADB is the main category. In it only the subcategories-one for each of the 55 books.
PNG is simply a better format. Thumbnails looks better, because PNG supports antialiasing better. Also (from the one scan I tested) the PNGs will be about 10% smaller. User:dbenbenn17:07, 2 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The next point are the file names and the Image description. Image:ADB-1-101.gif is really an ugly filename and please make a polished image description using Template:Information. The current one is really ugly (despite the problem that is partly in German only). Please link the previous and the next image in the other_versions variable of template Information. So before any further upload please let us make some brainstorming as cleaning up afterwards is a big pain. Arnomane21:26, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The naming convention given to me by the wikisource admin was ADB-$book-$page.gif. An usage of Information template...I can do that in a day.HardDisk09:11, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
These are scans and no pictures, they are part of an big historical biography. There is no better description for a single scan than ADB as the name of this biography followed by the number of the volume and the number of the page.
to seperarte the volume and the page the '-' is a usefull delimiter. ABD is the normally used schortcut for the title Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie --Joergens.mi13:38, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I know what it is nontheless I dislike these database like names and so we can settle down for a better structure. Arnomane18:46, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I fear the mass upload will definitively NOT be legal according the EU database protection right. We have no permission by the Bavarian State Library and I suppose we will get no one when asking. §§ 87a ff. UrhG (de) --Historiograf21:42, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Uh, since the collection and order of pages is actually defined by the PD book, I do not see how the library would have a database-copyright here. The collection as a whole is, like each page, a reproduction of PD material. -- Duesentrieb(?!)23:58, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You are - as in most cases - bad informed, Duesentrieb. There is no Bridgeman v. Corel problem (although BSB is claiming falsely rights in the reproductions). WHAT ABOUT READING THE LAW BEFORE STUPIDLY EXPOSING IGNORANCE? § 87a Datenbank im Sinne dieses Gesetzes ist eine Sammlung von Werken, Daten oder anderen unabhängigen Elementen, die systematisch oder methodisch angeordnet und einzeln mit Hilfe elektronischer Mittel oder auf andere Weise zugänglich sind und deren Beschaffung, Überprüfung oder Darstellung eine nach Art oder Umfang wesentliche Investition erfordert. This is the EU database protection right which is valid in all EU countries. It doesn't matter if the elements in the database are PD or protected by copyright. Read Datenbankwerk in the German Wikipedia. I have NO doubt that the Munich ADB project was a wesentliche Investition and I have also no doubt that digitization projects are collections according the cited sentence. Feel free to ask en and Commons user Lupo if I am right or not --Historiograf21:12, 2 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Calm down and read my comment again. I did not cite Bridgeman v. Corel, nor did I talk about the scans themselves - we all agree that they are PD, right? I was talkingabout the collection and order of pages. As far as I understand the law you quote, it protects the systematic or methodical ordereding of collections of data. But the collection and ordering was already done in the bokk, which is PD. Are you saying the law applies simply because scanning takes time? The same would then apply to all pictures taken from any corpus of scans - i.e. pretty much everything we now use Bridgeman v. Corel for.
Again: as I understand it, that law protects the effort and originality that is involved in compiling and organizing a set of data - not the effort to transfer an exising set of data to another medium. Thus, I belive the collection is PD, just as the individual page content, because it's reproduced from the books (which are basically a "paper database"). You said: "I have also no doubt that digitization projects are collections according the cited sentence" - well, I do doubt that the mere act of scanning books falls under that paragraph. If they take that data and create indexes to make it searchable in a nice way - that database would fall under § 87a. But not the collection of pages just like they are in the book. -- Duesentrieb(?!)23:10, 2 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I am the one who uploads the images with the bot, so I take legal responsibility for the whole f*ck. So I need an definitive answer if the images are now PD or not.HardDisk16:49, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can only repeat that uploading the whole ADB is a clear copyvio. Duesentrieb has absolutely no sufficient knowledge of this topic. I think Bayerische Staatsbibliothek can clearly sue HardDisk. According to Dreier/Schulze, UrhG ²2006 § 87a Rdnr. 10 German courts have recognized as protected databases:
All of which are protected for reasons that don't apply here. In each of those cases, the copyright holder created a new database, and had to put some creative effort into its "systematic or methodical ordering". No such thing happened with the digital version of the ADB. The BSB did NOT create a new database, they simply copied an existing one from paper to digital media. It's absurd to think that this procedure would establish any new rights. --Latebird02:00, 22 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
All legal considerations aside (I don't know whether there would be a problem with database copyrights), could someone explain to me why these scans should be uploaded to the commons? They are already available online, there's a search functionality, and even a register. What would we gain if we had all those scans on the commons? We wouldn't use these scans to illustrate encyclopedia articles, I guess. I think we should not duplicate the BSB's effort but rather make an effort to extract the useful data from these scans and write a slew of great encyclopedia articles instead. Lupo19:20, 23 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I still don't see what would be gained by having them on commons. If they're for work and reference, why not just use the scans available at the BSB without uploading them here? Lupo 20:50, 1 June 2006 (UTC)The scans are Media, and Commons is the media repository. With the pending m:InstantCommons project, those scans might be of interest for others wikis or content management systems, too, scientific or commercial. We should look ahead and beyond the limits of our own imagination. Greetings, Longbow4u20:59, 1 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
)
instead of deleting it. But when I change {{Redundant}} I get reverted. Can someone else help? — Omegatron 11:50, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
at "Image:Map-Hispanophone World.png" with the newer version File:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary).png at "Image:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary).png", and then delete the latter? I have made the Philippines in light green, as Spanish is spoken by under 1% of the population, and even if Chavacano-speakers are regarded as Spanish-speakers (which they are not, Chavacano is a distinct language offshoot of mixed Spanish and Malayan origin) they still represent under 0.5% of the population. Al-Andalus 15:28, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
at "Image:Map-Hispanophone World.png" with the newer version File:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary2).png at "Image:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary2).png", then delete the latter without forgetting to also delete File:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary).png at "Image:Map-Hispanophone World(temporary).png". Al-Andalus 04:32, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
.png){kind=link}
![[12]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/TW-Art059.2.gif){kind=link}
.png){kind=link}
.png){kind=link}
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.svg){kind=link}
![[21]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Leishmania_tropica_7.jpg){kind=link}
or 
), and some are inferior to the PNGs (at 128px, compare the roofs of 
and 
). But, we gain such new icons as 
and 
, so we can do more with Nuvola than ever!
I've also uploaded the Nuvola action icons. These are only 48x48 instead of 128x128, but many of them aren't available in any other format and don't have copies in other folders. This means now we have 
, 
and 
.
--Seahen 03:47, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
.PNG&action=edit&redlink=1){kind=link}
.PNG&action=edit&redlink=1){kind=link}
