User talk:CarolSpears/2008-06

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Quality Image Promotion

Your image has been reviewed and promoted Congratulations! Dawn over Oostende-retouched.jpg, which was produced by you, was reviewed and has now been promoted to Quality Image status. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Quality images candidates. We also invite you to take part in the categorization of recently promoted quality images. Comments {{{3}}}

Your image has been reviewed and promoted Congratulations! Pena Palace back-edit.jpg, which was produced by you, was reviewed and has now been promoted to Quality Image status. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Quality images candidates. We also invite you to take part in the categorization of recently promoted quality images. Comments {{{3}}}

Your image has been reviewed and promoted Congratulations! Citroen AX white 1.JPG, which was produced by you, was reviewed and has now been promoted to Quality Image status. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Quality images candidates. We also invite you to take part in the categorization of recently promoted quality images. Comments {{{3}}}

Your image has been reviewed and promoted Congratulations! Powerlines Over Fields Erzhausen.jpg, which was produced by you, was reviewed and has now been promoted to Quality Image status. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Quality images candidates. We also invite you to take part in the categorization of recently promoted quality images. Comments {{{3}}}

Your image has been reviewed and promoted Congratulations! Artist Point-Monument Valley-USA-retouched.jpg, which was produced by you, was reviewed and has now been promoted to Quality Image status. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Quality images candidates. We also invite you to take part in the categorization of recently promoted quality images. Comments {{{3}}}

For not looking like an idiot for template psychology games...

-- Thank you for your bid for my picture from Artist Point in Monument Valley ;) -Tobi 87 14:25, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

That was last February, I couldn't place a vote for it because I edited it. It seems like all of your images were really nice and all of your images had one problem or another that could be repaired (not necessarily easily repaired). I was the human bot managing QI for that month and I think that a heavily edited image that gets any kind of acknowledgment that the editor should be acknowledged as well. On the other hand, there was an SVG that I cleaned and for the simple reason that I know that I could not produce such an image (cleaning text from a file -- it was a big job but not like the creation of the image), it seemed simple to not give myself credit for that. Since this time, I had another image that I edited a lot achieve FP status here and at English Wikipedia and none of these templates made it to my talk pages at either location, the reason is that credit is supposed to go to the photographer and to the nominator. I also had an image that I nominated for FP here get accepted and I did not get the little template pasted here.

This is all quite complicated so here is a summary for those whose brains have not been developed enough to manage all of this contradictory information (not necessarily you):

1. I made my own rules and awarded the QI templates to photographer and editor and not to nominator
2. Someone pasting FP templates for commons awarded the FP template to photographer and nominator but not editor
3. Someone pasting FP templates for English Wikipedia awarded the FP template to photographer and nominator but not editor
4. Someone pasting FP templates for commons awarded FP template to photographer and not nominator.
5. I think that SVG should have the software cruft cleaned out -- perhaps by the artist but this in itself is not worthy of artist or editorial credit.

Items 2-4 skipped me. Items 2 and 3 were about an image that would have failed without editing. The person responsible for item 4 informed me that his goal is to make the process "fun" for new people. My theory about item 4 is that it was all accomplished through user account that was being used by a new admin. I actually blame google for much of this and right now wonder if the Tobi87 user account is being managed the same way....

In the stack of QI templates I pasted here for myself -- the car is the one that perhaps should not be here. It was a simple small rotation and just a little color adjustment. Maybe the powerlines -- except that also involved some color decisions. The other images had a sizable amount of editing or spots that no one else could see or admit to seeing. I think that it would be very difficult for software or people who are soft in the brain to determine what kind of editing deserves mention. Actually, that is a fact which I can show -- not just something that I think.

About your image; it was very nice to work with. I have been pasting the gradients that I used on the image talk pages and I will do that right after I finish with this -- I don't even want to call it a rant. If I remember the edit, there was some noise in the sky that I used motion blur to get rid of. But that made parts of the sky appear at one side of all of the 'monuments' and looked worse than the unedited image. So, it was not an easy edit and I learned a lot and appreciate (no matter what little templates got pasted around about the image) that it was uploaded here and I had the chance and the license to repair it, etc.... According to the test image, my monitor is not calibrated correctly -- and I can see the image properly on other monitors that I looked at. But even though my monitor failed the test image, I can see artifacts when cloning was used in skies. That has nothing to do with this image -- except that this is the reason I started to use gimp's gradient editor to replace skies instead of cloning. Photoshop 6 and 7 did not have anything like that editor, unless it was hidden in their well-thoughtout gui somewhere.

Your photograph was very nice -- the landscape was great and if you made a decision to over expose the sky to be able to get a good landscape, it was a good decision. Your photograph was fun to work with -- no one made it fun except you (or whoever took it and uploaded it here).

The destruction of the credibility of the template awards for all three of these image nomination processes -- I don't completely understand that nor the fun that is involved with one exception. Being like a child is interesting advice which is half good. Being innocent and able to learn new things like a child and asking the questions that are more black and white like a child is great. Being the schoolyard bully like a child is wrong and sad for an adult or young adult who is behaving that way.

Also, there are a lot of strong opinions about images and there are a lot of people here with administrative privileges both who don't understand image formats or photography very much. This simple fact shows itself. Privilege is not in itself an established superiority. -- carol 21:24, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

The reply to your licencing question is on my Commons page

Carol, please go to [[1]] for my rather late reply to your question - Arpingstone 10:10, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Pink spot

I've taken a shot at cloning out the pink thing, take another look. I must confess I didn't quite understand your confession though. Why is the other image "completely unacceptable"? --Dori - Talk 15:32, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Honestly, I thought about it for a while after writing that and I wondered the same thing myself. The one thing that I haven't done (and don't think I can make myself do) is put 'horse' or 'horsey' into the search engine and look at the photographs there to confirm what I kind of think I remember. The one I promoted is classic though -- this I know. -- carol 15:51, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Are you saying it's the composition that bothers you (just curious)? --Dori - Talk 16:17, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I like all the images just fine -- and they all meet the QI requirements. Equine photography is a bit more narrow in what is good and not, when I promoted the first one, I felt like I was using my couple of months of experience to keep the QI collection at its finest. Today when I declined the one, it was for the same reason. I thought it was not one of the poses that the horse people like. My comparison of the event photography I participated in to a wedding photographer was the thing. Some wedding photographs were a waste of photographer film because of it being non-standard and not wedding album fodder. The event photography was like that -- it was horrible and grueling and a different kind of creativity where you try to get the same photograph only of different horses. I was joking around that time about making a GIMP plug-in that would use different colors of dresses and different faces and make wedding albums. The equine photography -- it is the same thing. Two months of experience with that almost six years ago -- I am this kind of expert now! Beware! -- carol 16:45, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

That is a beautiful photograph of a beautiful horse. Also, no comment about me adding the 'talk' to your user page? -- carol 15:59, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

No comment, I've done that myself to other's pages, no biggie. Also, I wouldn't exactly call that horse beautiful, it was just the better looking of the bunch (notice the scar). There was a black horse that was a better specimen but he was a bit too friendly and would get too close to the camera. Plus black doesn't come out too well with my lens. --Dori - Talk 16:19, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I didn't notice the scar. My dad had a black labrador retriever -- same problem, I don't know about camera hogging though. Almost all scars come from extending ones self too much -- except the one on my nose, that came from trying to hug an over-sexed, hyper-thyroided dog of the extended family who had peed on my brother a few days before (causing him to be literally and figuratively pissed off!). I have since then been more thoughtful about what to hug and not. Wow! Do I miss people! Having said that, FPC is just not as much fun since it is no longer in the category of Zoology. -- carol 16:35, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Revert

Thanks - :) --Herby ^{talk thyme} 17:29, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Interesting work :) -- carol 17:34, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I have a varied fan club...:)--Herby ^{talk thyme} 17:47, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Socks & sorry

Just archiving my talk page I see I missed one of yours from the 3rd referring to socks. I don't see anything obvious that inspired it? If it is interesting and you have the time/patience and you want an answer (etc etc) feel free to let me know. With apologies as I do try and respond to postings on my talk - cheers --Herby ^{talk thyme} 10:02, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I explained myself. It is entirely up to the page owner now.... -- carol 14:26, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Image:Plant Buds clasification.svg

I really dont mind you correcting my spelling,i am not native english speaking. the only question would be.. where is it missing an s? -LadyofHats 14:00, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I was an almost A+ speller 32 years ago. I almost completely lost my ability to form a comprehensible sentence (grammerically correct was further out of reach than comprehensible even) when I was studying physics. Lets just call that fair warning.

Classification. English is very fuzzy in its use and with its rules. -- carol 14:06, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

You know, this image would be useful split up as well, I think. -- carol 14:20, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Re:Being the grunt for contests...

Hi, Thank you very much for giving the advise. I just following the Commons:Featured picture candidates/What to do after voting is finished to close FPCs. For me, I am not care if the pic is selfmade or a copy of dead peoples work. I am not the nominator or voter. I have add {{FPpromotion|Image:XXXXX.jpg}} to both photographer and nominator since yesterday. For the rule only metion "Add the template {{FPpromotion|Image:XXXXX.jpg}} to the Talk Page of the nominator". --Mywood 21:16, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Heh, that is interesting! I would be very embarrassed to have one of those things on my talk page for an image that all I had done was fill out some wiki forms for it. People are certainly different from each other and their expectations of life. To me, it is like first grade -- where the teacher looks at the papers and puts a gold star on the good ones. If the same procedure were followed with six year olds, the schools would really start to fail I think. Good thing I am not a six year old. -- carol 01:55, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

HD template

Hi, I made HD template for gimp too, long time ago, filling a bug for that. I Don't know if there is something todo with your information, is there project to insert it in Gimp default distribution? Anyway happy to meet you again, on wikimedia this time :).Popolon 22:10, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Heh, I don't know, GIMP bugzilla is being run by not very intelligent software instead of human beings -- the template mention was a non-template'd hello. It was nice to see your name here. I was remembering when I first lost everything that mattered to me and threw a fit when you reported having a problem with thumbnails drawing; an embarrassing memory! It has been a long while, although, it still might be a long while since Florida has a history of dead people voting and stuff.... -- carol 00:50, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Category:Senecio

Dear Carol, it's hard to remain patient when you cause one mess after another. Particularly you can't make Senecio species out of plants that don't belong to genus Senecio by reverting my edits. When I'm trying to clear the mess in Category:Senecio your heckling is not at all useful. If you don't understand plant taxonomy and don't have appropriate literature and tools kindly don't touch categories like this! -- Ies 17:09, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Provide documentation about the names -- feel free to get this documentation from the articles I authored on English wikipedia. I had to look at all the names. Please do not make a religon out of what should be a simple science. There are several names, feel free to make gallery for each and every name and I will treat that with the respect that a gallery of complete information should have. Until then, making one name instead of the other is just ignorance. Add category if you do not have time to make all of the gallery for all of the names. -- carol 17:12, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Senecio: if the information is not available for everyone then it is not available. Are you promoting a book? -- carol 17:15, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Stickers

I know what you mean. As you've missed out several times I hereby award you this nice fresh banana sticker. --MichaelMaggs 18:29, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

I like it :) -- carol 18:32, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

I wonder the reason that FPC was made into a banana sticker contest and that these three are no longer together on your talk page. Any theories or facts about these decisions you made? -- carol 18:13, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't really collect stickers, so I just let them get automatically archived by the archive bot. --MichaelMaggs 12:41, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Uncat software

It's self-written: see User:Patstuart/Extrascripts.js. I added this to my monobook.js file. It has several other scripts as well, a few of which you will probably not want to add to your own (e.g., the tmpfunc button). If you are unfamiliar with coding, feel free to write back to ask about implementation, or drop a note at the village pump. Alternatively, someone around here probably needs to write a bot to tag all the uncategorized images, rather than doing it by hand. 71.58.56.181 19:53, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

There was a mention of ~3000 images being uploaded here per day. That is a lot of images! I have really enjoyed finding the images I needed (on the occasion that I did find some or one) when I looked for them. It was also kind of fun when I was manually going through the directories that the uncat template makes -- there were a few really great images there and some that were really funny also. I bookmarked your script, thank you for the reminder of its location (I could have dug into the history to find it). If I ever install it, I will be sure to let you know. -- carol 20:59, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

stickers

I hereby award to carol the Photographer's Barnstar for fixing jumpy animations, colouring correct images and cleaning photographs that were taken by dead or living people. Lycaon 10:19, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

be kind

May I ask why you "dereviewed" Commons:Quality_images_candidates/candidate_list#March_20.2C_2008? Your comment is not constructive at all. Maybe I did a mistake but nobody is perfect. Your Userpage for example looks crap in Firefox because not all babel blocks are in the babel box. --Ikiwaner 14:18, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

I 'dereviewed' anonymous supports and declines. There are instructions above the nominations for how to deal with the page during these 'parser problems'. I don't think that it is unkind to "dereview" anonymous reviews.

Thanks for the information about my user page; I guess it depends on the theme and/or the version of firefox. Of course, beautiful user pages are what it is about? -- carol 16:00, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

You had several options: a) Ask the tech guys to step back to the last Mediawiki version that worked correctly. b) Fix the Mediawiki bug. c) Insert the signature manually. The review was not anonymous, just the signature thing did not work.

What did you do? You reverted the edit with a rude comment... Last but not least RTFM yourself "until further notice could people sign with..." Note the difference to you have to or you must. Inserting the signature manually is extremely user-unfriendly. Code is there to make humans life easier not more complicated. --Ikiwaner 06:29, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, please don't forget that I insulted artists and photographers as well. I have no opinion about the signature stuff. When I was reading the archives of QI when it was started and the reasons it was started -- in there was the mention that it was made to be technically more challenging than FP (these are my words now) to keep the bar higher for nominations and involvement. The seriousness of nominations, declines and promotions -- can they be measured by the users willingness to work with the software in its current state? It was also an option to do that.-- carol 18:17, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi

Hi Carol,

The age of information is also the age of disinformation. Those who have not their own choices and information sources are led by those who have interests in others choices. Yes I'm the same Nevit as on ftp.gimp.org and gimpi group. Thankyou for remembering me. & Thankyou for nomination of Image:Kids_09185.JPG The gradients no longer work with new version of GIMP. New and updated version is available here [2]

Regards, --Nevit 09:14, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, well -- not being remembered for the good things is one of the most cruel things I have ever experienced. There are a couple of interesting things about that url -- one, I was greeted with an age restriction policy by yahoo! and two, it is in rar archive format -- could the gradients be stored any further from the humble linux roots?

Carol I tar'ed the gradiends and uploaded them here [3] . So you can take a look.

Thanks for the url; one of my recent GIMP builds was a lot like the photoshop trial version I downloaded and played with (back in 1998 or 1999) -- meaning that the right click menu had disappeared and the save button failed to work -- I suspect that I am using a more recent gtk+ than some of GIMP's developers. I like your puppet image very much, btw. Also, I am very sorry about the bad feelings that I was getting from everything -- including gimpi -- a few years ago. Do you remember 'lasm'? S/He got some really weird and wrong mail from me. Really weird and wrong mail written from a really weird and wrong life I suddenly found myself in. -- carol 02:01, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Gimpi is dead now since Yahoo destroyed the attachment archive and does not store attachments anymore. I remember lasm and your contributions, but does not recall the incident. Please remember that there are people like me who appreciate you work and forget about untasty incidents... --Nevit 20:05, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about what used to seem to be a very functional egroups mail list manager. It does seem that since that time that the internet is a place where perfect people are -- they show up perfect, they remain perfect -- totally inscrutable. I do not want to be a part of a life in which great pain and big problems are to be endured with a smile and happy-outlook. I really did not want a different life back then, just a little more of the same with more to work with. The work I was doing was aimed where I was and here -- the feeling of a fake internet grows stronger everyday -- an internet where everyone is always perfect and well-behaved. A huge conflict between literal and simile seem to exist lately (in reference to your 'untasty' remark). I wrote a story about a cookie that my aunt made; the idea that human beings have evolved to be unable to discern between literal and a funny similarity in appearance -- this is not a good world and probably not 'evolution' (not the software, the idea that each new generation becomes a little smarter and more adept). Interestingly enough, after I wrote that this neighborhood filled up with people walking white terrior-like dogs. The neighborhood and the internet both are drearily the same and not very clever on their own like that. I don't know if all of California is like this -- I have not seen much evidence that it isn't -- I do know that for almost 4 years now (July 2004) I have not wanted to be here. It is a whine, but it has been consistent. Going through the photographs taken at GIMPs meetings has been several levels of dreadful for the memories and such. Thank you, btw, for writing here lately. -- carol 20:34, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I didn't have anything to do with that image and it is very interesting that the signatures then were not broken but appear to have been broken in the archives right now.

What was that about choices? -- carol 10:05, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

It was about imposed choices like this ...every windows box I saw back then had that free version of Paint Shop Pro installed on it; the one that announced how long it had been installed without a registration by counting the days in the opening dialog before it would start...

Intresting

Carol, if you had some time take a look at Ergun Akleman's page. He has got some good graphic stuff and papers. [4] ie. I liked the tile making Java application by one of his students. [5] [6]

--Nevit 20:15, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I can't remember what the reason we were discussing java on the gimp-developer list; it was before I became opposed to binaries so it didn't really bother me that at this time, java was a binary that was dropped into place (although it does now). One of the reasons that I gave to not use it was the question Which one? One propietary binary vs another and they were "freely available" but different.

Lately, I use binaries for software -- however, almost all of the applications that I use from X up are hand built, which makes using gtk+ an efficient choice (even though I read lately that they have made some really not well thought out decisions about what the libraries do at the different levels). Some days, it seems really stupid to be like that as I can't (or haven't) read the sources -- but other days and firefox is a good example of this -- I did not like the big slew of software that my distribution was going to install to upgrade what should be a simple web reading application, a browser. The ability to build the software and fine tune the configuration file -- it is like not needing to give a 'whole room' to everything I don't use on my computer. I have a build history which doesn't use some of the more questionable free softwares as well. Anyway, that was a lot to say before saying that I only have the java installed that this browser (from last week) needs and builds for itself; making it only as propietary as firefox is. Last summer I downloaded the source for Sun's java and the build system is quite complicated -- I really lost interest while trying. I try not to be a religous gpl user, but the reasonable build system makes me seem that way sometimes.... -- carol 19:51, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I used Linux for a couple of years so understand you perfectly. I will try to share other intresting stuff I come across. Regards. --Nevit 12:18, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Re:involvement with the QI sorting and stuff

Hello Carol, you don't have to feel bad. I have done too few organisational things in the past, so I guess it is only fair that I also do that work now. For too long I somehow took it for granted that those organisational things get done somehow. So it is actually up to me to feel bad.

Still thanks a lot for your offer, to help out when I need a break. The only problem I currently have is dealing with those little crawling animals that don't obviously look like bees, butterflies or dragonflies :-) ...in the beginning I maybe need some assistance with that.

You are right teamwork is a great thing, online and offline. I think it is difficult to set up a schedule for the possible QI-team members. But I guess it is already helpful when we can somehow rely on each other and when we help out each other when it is necessary. --AngMoKio 12:36, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

It was a rewarding activity -- I read where you were asking Alves some of the same things I did. Write a few articles about bugs and flowers and start to really understand what a mess that whole "science" is! If I were to write about this I would title the book Biology in a Fragile Eggshell, Observations from a Person Educated on How to Throw Things. (I studied mostly classical physics.)

I keep praying (not exactly praying but the activity fits that definition most closely) that something whisks me out of this life as quickly as whatever it was whisked me out of the life I was enjoying -- until then, just let me know. You can see in the history how long my attention span was for it. My attention span was actually longer, I just was in need of not feeling alone with the task. -- carol 19:32, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Image:GIMP-GEGL-GTK+-hackfest.png

Image deletion warning

Image:GIMP-GEGL-GTK+-hackfest.png has been listed at Commons:Deletion requests so that the community can discuss whether it should be kept or not. We would appreciate it if you could go to voice your opinion about this at its entry. If you created this image, please note that the fact that it has been proposed for deletion does not necessarily mean that we do not value your kind contribution. It simply means that one person believes that there is some specific problem with it, such as a copyright issue. In all cases, please do not take the deletion request personally. It is never intended as such. Thank you!

-- Fernando Estel ☆ · 星 ^{(Talk: here- es- en)} 10:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

re:an image of yours

which image are you referring to? I missed it and I would like very much a screenshot of the page. Thank you --Esculapio 11:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

It is there right now. I wrote an article for en:Senecio angulatus, your images were the best here for that and the article and the image is being featured in the Did You Know section! Whee!

If you would like the screenshot I took, I can upload it here or at my web site -- however, I did not hid the bookmarks toolbar and such for uploading here.... -- carol 11:30, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Don't bother about uploading screenshot, I got it, thank you ! --Esculapio 11:36, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

They are very beautiful photographs, you should not be surprised that they get used :) -- carol 11:38, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

re:Quality Image Promotion on User_talk:Nino Barbieri

Hi CarolSpears, thank You for informing Nino, unfortunately I must tell You that he died this year, if You were friends or had contact and if You wish, You can condole his family here, best regards, --birdy geimfyglið _{(:> )=|} ∇ 14:43, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for Your answer, I know Arria a bit, I talked to her on IRC about it. I think it is nice to propose his images, I am sure his family does appreciate, that his contributions were not in vain and that his work lives on. Thanks and best regards, --birdy geimfyglið _{(:> )=|} ∇ 22:57, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Question

Hello. You closed this discussion here. I am unhappy with the resolution, especially as I did address the concerns of the first of the two people in opposition (but he apparently never came back to say whether he was now neutral or supporting), and the main negative comment of the second person (too dark) could, I think, also be fixed (to a limit, of course, but then I don't think it is THAT dark to start with - not an expert on fixing images, but I'll give it a try).

Sadly, I went away in Real Life for some time and totally missed the end of this discussion. What is the appropriate way to reopen it? Resubmit, call for another look, etc...? Thanks for your help. Ingolfson 07:05, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and you wondered why the tracks were laid out that way - there were previously two tracks running diagonally as well, but they were removed. The local maintenance people obviously felt that replacing the x-ing sections was not needed when they were still perfectly servicable. Thus the funny layout. Ingolfson 07:18, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Without looking up what happened with that image, I liked it and remember it. I like images that are low contrast with only a little color. I think that I wrote when I supported it that I thought there was an editorial contained within. At the very least one. Also, my childhood was filled with trains nearby and model trains being enjoyed by my dad and grandpa and vacations to historic train related sites -- so my vote was a personal thing.

I marked it declined because it was. A lesson that I have learned far too well in this life is that things don't often go the way I think they should. I am actually a little bored with this lesson :) The time lapsed and the votes added up that way. I was sorry about that -- even without a discussion about it with the photographer.

Your question is a nice diversion from being disturbed by the fungi image that is there that really looks like a big zit and from trying to manage the delusions I have that both Flickr and wikipedia were the invention of me and the people who used to be working with me, heh -- I thank you for this! (Another lesson like the one I mentioned above). That white rose which is in CR right now was nominated and declined this year. I haven't looked at the rules lately but I don't think they have (yet) written any that says that this is not allowed.

So simply, just renominate it and I like it no matter what the outcome of the vote process is there.

I really miss my real life, I worked kind of hard to make it. I miss it a lot, actually. -- carol 07:56, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer - I will renominate some time in the near future as soon as I know I'll have a week where I will be online enough to respond to queries. Ingolfson 10:26, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Image:Annona muricata Blanco1.196.jpg

---

There seems to be a problem regarding the description and/or licensing of this particular file. It has been found that you've added in the image's description only a Template that's not a license and although it provides useful informations about the image, it's not a valid license. Could you please resolve this problem, adding the license in the image linked above? You can edit the description page and change the text. Uploading a new version of the file does not change the description of the file. This page may give you more hints on which license to choose. Thank you.

This message was added automatically by Filbot, if you need some help about it, ask its master or go to the Commons:Help desk. --Filnik 13:48, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Valued images evaluation

Dear CarolSpears,

This is a standard message to the 18 different users who so far have been involved in testing Valued images candidates as either a nominator, reviewer or project editor. We are interested in hearing what you think about the project and what your positive and negative experiences have been. We would be grateful if you would voice your opinion here. Thank you,

-- Slaunger 19:35, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Image:Blank_map_of_Europe.svg update

Would you be willing and able to help with the request Commons:Help_desk#Please_move_Image:Blank_map_of_Europe-RSfix.svg_to_Image:Blank_map_of_Europe.svg?

I would be grateful if you could. Please excuse me if this edit is not appropriate; I am new to wikis.

-- TimothyBourke 00:16, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I just answered everything and more on your talk page, except about the appropriate-ness. If it was wrong and you fixed it this surpasses appropriate (a word that I learned to detest in the 1980's) and is situation where it is simply the good and right thing to do.

Mistakes get made both with and without knowing, probably more than get repaired. Thank you for noticing it and taking the time to figure out how to correct it. Some of the maps here at the commons are easier to work with than others and there are some map artists who are awesome and then there are several like me who are learning and grateful for good base maps to work with. Let me know how things go. -- carol 00:47, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your tips and encouragement. I've switched to the Classic Skin and it does make things easier. Today I was able to upload an edited version of the image and mark the other for deletion. -- TimothyBourke 01:58, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, the skins are weird -- it affects the upload dialog as well (if I remember correctly about this) and I like the classic there as well. The default skin seems to be more advantageous for the wikis with lengthy paragraphs. Let me know if you need anything else, and by the way that is a good eye that can spot one of those isocodes in an svg... did you find it with your eyes or with a script problem? I have been working with some of the maps here and I think that the last step will be to make a separate set of them with the three letter codes so that they can be managed with a script. Machines and humans are still different -- I am really glad about this particular fact! -- carol 02:11, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Removal of comment

Hi carol, What is your objective for removing this comment of mine? ~Cheers, -- Slaunger 18:18, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Heh, hmm -- you can put it back if you would like. My reasoning was this: it had nothing to do with the image being reviewed. It was your opinions about what I should do and my opinions about whatever. If it did have anything to do with the image being reviewed, please let me know! I meant no harm when I removed it. -- carol 21:41, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I kind of agree with you in hindsight. At that time I literally did not undertsnad your comment, but now I think I do, so let us leave it at that. -- Slaunger 22:09, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Re : embedded bitmaps

Hi Carol.

Yes, I never tried to vectorize a shaded relief image as I thought the result for such a complicated image would be visually far of my expectations. I was wrong. The vectorizations I make for maps concern the different levels of elevations I extract from the digital elevation models. A really simple black and white image vectorization.

With a better understanding about maps (it's not my job) and as I wrote in the FPC page, I agree with user:Alvesgaspar who is a professional of this area and who says that creating a full vector map in the only purpose to be able to enlarge it at very big size (btw, for what ?!? - does anybody do it ?) is useless and an illusion. Yes, you can enlarge it without loss of quality, but you won't get a better or more precise map : if the basic precision of the map is 93 m, enlarging it on a 10 m banner will not increase its precision. What would be the purpose to take a 1:1,000,000 scale map and enlarge it to a linear scale of 1:25,000 ? What would you think doing so with a map like this one which already looks simplified ? Would anybody do it ?

Maps are not the same that diagrams or schemes as they are not intended to be upscaled. This misunderstanding, associated to the versatile svg format, leads to a wrong reasoning. If you can easily re-frame, make limited re-sampling and modify the data on an svg map, this format sees its main finality in the easy translation it allows and not in the fact you can display it ten times its original size, which makes no big sense for maps.

Furthermore, svg is not the 'ultimate format', at least not for relief / topographic maps : the file weight increases very fast if you don't make harsh simplifications on the paths and the viewing of the full size svg map in the navigator is particularly slow. That's why I upload for some time now a svg version which is the working file for corrections and translations, and a jpg version which is used in the article pages.

Whatever, the shaded relief isn't such an important layer : you can delete it without loss of information and its purpose is only to highlight the relief, making it easier to read when displayed on a screen, and secondarily making the map visually more attractive.

I think we should use the file formats in a practical way which serves our purposes and allow us to make new visual effects, and not be bounded in single format only to be able to say that it's a 'pure format', as nobody uses this functionality.

But if you want to 'play' more with embedded raster images you can check the Category:Atelier_graphique-fr_map where you will find the work of our cartographic lab in which the topographic maps may all have this raster shaded relief.

Greetings. Sting 19:17, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time with this lesson in maps and what to expect from them -- it all makes sense except for this one thing. The difference between the outputs. For screen display, the file size is truly generous and more than enough. For print, this image will print at 10 inches by 8.5 which is certainly generous but not exactly poster sized. And it is beautiful enough to be a poster! So, as large and for so many reasons as horrible as my version is, it should translate into a more beautiful poster than the one I started to play with.

I worked for a long while in the reception area of a Fishery research building. On the wall directly in front of me were actual maps of Michigans Great Lakes, in three dimensions like this map -- only real, like a model had to be dug out of whatever and filled with plastic and painted.... I was way too young back then to appreciate all that. The similarity of those maps with this one is on my mind since working with it. The lack of similarity between 'government documents' I have found online recently and the kind of stuff those biologists used to produce is like the difference between the Hawaii map and this one. Very little of this paragraph has anything to do with those maps and more to do with how sad and wrong this world seems sometimes while looking at it through this California internet.

Also, how did you change the transparencies without uploading a new version? -- carol 21:48, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I24 bridge

Seldomly do I see such a sharp and right on the spot analysis here. I'm impressed. Maybe it takes a midwesterner to understand life here. --Dschwen 13:58, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I am homesick. The situation that put me here was wrong so to me any 'making a new life' is making more wrong. 41-42 years of enjoying life, 5 years of trying not to make something in the wrongness -- your photographs always remind me of how very very wrong the last 5 years have been. Did you fsck my upload dialog, btw? It is a different kind of hell here. There are trees that flower in January. Problems have to be invented. Invented problems are very difficult for me to take seriously. The photographs from the woods have been particularly difficult. The sense of elation when the world goes from gray and on a good day muddy to trees edged with light green and little whites and pinks and the sweet air. One New Years week, it seemed like I had to brush six inches of snow from my car everytime I went to it -- like every six hours or so. When I got to be 'boss' and run the front of the store, it felt like I was abusing it because I used the privilege to watch the oncoming storms (the fact that it could have been dangerous and watching them was a legitimate function of my job description is a fact that is not as strong as my enjoyment of the view).

Everything here seems fake compared to the reality there. There are other things about here that make me not have a lot of respect for it. Their old concert hall is still in use, is one example. Almost the same concert hall in Detroit was closed decades ago. I blame heating costs and the toll that the environment takes on structures. And I think that the conditions that closed things there are the very thing that makes the venue which the structures housed that much more welcome and -- it should be there. Roads are another thing. The Michigan roads have to withstand temperatures that range from -20F to 110F -- and that temperature difference happens more often than major road buckling earthquakes do here. Even farther north, in Canada -- their roads were beautiful, but that is a case of temperatures rarely making it to over 80F. To try to explain the difference in the conditions either verbally or via text like this is impossible. If I was just looking at those photographs, none of that would be apparent either. The gray -- the seemingly endless gray between late-October and the first of May -- it is excruciatingly bland with nothing but cold and colder in between. I miss that as much as I miss myself, my stuff and my life. It is a reality where here I find stupid human conventions that perhaps attempt to emulate this.

The high cost of living here -- it is so fake. It is as imaginary as their problems.

Without knowing all of the details, you are the one who made the file uploader I was using for a while here? If you did this, you little bastard, how come you don't spend that time making inkscape see all of those same things that the uploader did and clean them? If you can write software which inspects svg (and I think that even I can do that) you would be improving the world to do that for the application. I don't really need help to live up to my own standards and long since stopped demanding that others do. That upload dialog was a small version of the kind of wrong that I am spending my time trying not to live in or build on. Even imagining what I would have done if I had come to be here not of wrongness is well, it is wrong. The list of things that I am quite sure that have happened to me here that I would have not 1) done to people 2)invested my money in the idea at the onset grows longer and longer.

I don't think it is possible to be alive and not play 'little games' with people -- especially the ones you know and enjoy. That being said, I don't think that any of those 'little games' I played affected software that is supposed to be for everyone.

Compare the ignorance of an argument about economics between a person who inherited a home and had an income based on meeting a minimum of requirements (ie., the closest thing to socialism that can be acquired in the United States, civil servant) and a person who had been a good capitalist (ie, sell goods and having people return to buy more goods) to the very real elation that the change from that endless gray of winter into that sweet, lightly touched with bright colors and sweet air of springtime. I am homesick in a way that I can hardly manage it. Everything else just looks like people pissing in the wind. -- carol 18:19, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Categories Flora of Kilimanjaro and Plants of Kilimanjaro

Hi Carol,

I can't understand the rational for having the two categories you recently created, Category:Flora of Kilimanjaro and Category:Plants of Kilimanjaro, as two separate entities. Could you explain the reasoning behind this please? My current opinion is that both should be under one title or the other and the empty category should redirect to the the main one chosen.

On another note, I like your new image Flora of East Tropical Africa Peaks Grid.svg

Thank you Mehmet Karatay 17:19, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Hello, interesting thing about those 'Flora of' categories -- they are redundant. Many of the categories that are called 'Plants of' (perhaps not the ones for Kenya and Mount Kenya) are being managed by people who are aggressively opposed to using categorization to store images here. It becomes an edit war that I want no part of and I find it an interesting and non-aggressive fact that both gallery and categories can exist but this fact does seem to be lost on some here.

While writing articles for all of the Senecio species, I had a difficult time with distribution information for them. Dividing the world into economic areas only makes sense for the people counting and naming the fauna and flora, not to the fauna and flora themselves. I started sections like Afrotropic and Nearctic here and needed a way to get the categories which contain plants and the categories which contain plant galleries to those areas.

If all galleries were beautiful and well maintained, I might not have gone in this direction, but they aren't. Many of them are just pasted lists of image names which give less information about the image than the Categorization of it does. Also, the images are 'contributed' and how difficult should it be to contribute useful images?

So, the summary. It was the most peaceful solution I could find. I am not fond of aggression and it is a stance I rarely will take.

And hey, while you are here! I recently updated the article for en:Dendrosenecio and am still having that (perhaps false or temporary) feeling that it is a fairly good article that I seem to get right after such an update. I became sorry about the Europeans trampling through your country as I collected the information as well and I have been left with the questions about how to see parts of the rest of the world without being 1)a stupid tourist and 2)harmful to the lands being visited? Also, that lobelia photograph is beautiful, beautiful enough that I am quite certain that you will know which photograph I am referring to. Without visiting that well, even that continent, there is something that separates a photograph from a good photograph. Some photographs also capture an aura (this is an imprecise word for an imprecise concept) which is the atmosphere and the feelings of being at the location. I think perhaps that photograph does that. I just spent some of these last few months looking at photographs from an area similar to where I grew up taken in the months there that are not so fun to live in and, no one liked them but me. They were photographs that possessed the same quality of capturing the mood and the aura. It is too many words now -- great photograph.... -- carol 18:11, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[[Category:Thomé, Flora von Deutschland (modified)]]

Hi, thanks for your message. If you are interested in flowers, please do not *replace* the images of Thomé's flora by clean versions, but instead upload the clean versions with new names in the "modified category". Frédéric 21:53, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I will consider that. The fact that the original still exists here and that uploading an honestly improved version into the namespace puts an honestly improved version on every wiki that the image is being used is what made me change my ways. I have been uploading new images both original and clean with the clean image having the shorter name. You did know that the versions stay with the new upload?

Also, do you need help to improve simple black and white line drawings? -- carol 00:49, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Help needed with the Valued images project

As you may have seen, this project is going live for nominations on 1 June, 2008 at 0:00 UTC. Before then, there are a few things to be finished off, and any help you can give will be welcome. The latest discussion is at Commons talk:Valued images candidates#Open action items for Valued images.

When the project launches publicly on 1 June, it will need reviewers who are able to jump in quickly and provide prompt feedback. During those critical first few weeks it will be important to have a decent number of reviewers who are prepared to put in the effort to make sure the first nominations are well-reviewed, as that will set the standard for the future.

Would you help, please, with the final tasks now, and also pledge your help with some reviewing on 1 June and thereafter? --MichaelMaggs 17:08, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Pledge is a funny word to use for this :)

I have watched it, I have respect for it, and I also need to fix some things about the images I nominated there. I promise to enthusiastically watch when it starts for real and to participate when my expertise is up to the review :)

-- carol 19:51, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi carol! I saw your note on my discussion page. (I don't really see your point about the ../ thing, as I naturally use that notation since errrr.... the last millenium). I'll try to help in June, but I can't promise I'll be very active, as my job is to be a little tricky until July. Bye, Stephanemartin 20:03, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Script

Hello Carol, can I ask you for some advice for my first attempt at GIMP scripting? It's a tool for image sharpening. The basic idea is to apply unsharp mask with an additional "limiting function" (implemented here by the two "limit" layers) based on the extremal values of the surrounding pixels. The effect is to reduce or revert much of the local contrast enhancement, including haloes and noise amplification, but retaining the sharpening effect on slightly blurry edges. I don't expect to be the first with this idea, but I didn't find anything like this for the GIMP. I find that the result is somewhat similar to the "smart sharpen" techniques based on edge detection, but with additional control over halo formation. (You could arbitrarily refine the result by adding masks to any of the four layers.) If the "limit" layers are left at 100% opacity, I find that one can sharpen fairly aggressively, generating artifacts no worse than some aliasing on sharp edges (existing artifacts may be enhanced however).

First of all, lets both understand this -- this is way beyond my experience with GIMP or with graphic manipulation at all. Second of all, I find it extremely interesting how a note left in one place seems to inspire a message in another (wiki-works -- that).

The problem is this: to create the "limit" layers, the script successively creates several new layers which are then merged down to the layer below. It seems however that all those layers are retained in memory after merging, so that on large images GIMP quickly runs out of memory and starts swapping like mad.

To the best of my understanding, gimp-2.4 is using tiny-fu which was better for internationalization due to UTF stuff. Script-fu refuses to work at all here when I have a large enough image open; I am using a 2.5 gotten the day after they removed the xml file that puts the menu into the tool box and the right click options. I don't know what they are doing with it now -- I also don't know why they hate me and have abused me at bugzilla and also put lies on the new site. The people involved with that seem to like to tell me a few days later or years later that 'such and such' was not a good thing to do; never before. Sorry....

gimp script-fu has never been known in a positive way for memory management. I cannot say that python or perl have been developed in a way that overcome those problems of script-fu. Personally, at first I refused to learn it and then it seemed to be redundant to what I already could do with python.

Maybe there is an alltogether more efficient method to create the "limit" layers? What would be needed is similar to a 3x3 median filter, except that instead of the median it should pick the max resp. the min.

Here is my experience with the sharpening filters -- I do not think that I have saved any images where I used them and Edit/Undo is usually my next step after using any of those scripts. I would like to know more about this stuff, similar to how I would like for the last 5 years to have been much different as well. I would like to be able to ask a simple question on the wiki and not have an instant message on this or other wikis

Your script looks nice and I wonder if it is as sarcastic as the one on my user page. I got that from Tigert, and I could actually read that -- it was how they were 'sharpening' images here last summer; I watched them do it.

Any suggestions on this or the script in general are welcome. TIA, --Stefan Vladuck 09:28, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Is it sarcastic? Can you translate like that? That is what the extension looks like .scm and in real life, I speak sarcastically sometimes, but would rather not have the opportunity or need to that often.

Also, for my own self esteem, I can probably work around their removing those menus from where they should be, but what I want to know is where are the real people who would not have done that? -- carol 10:14, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I guess the script itself is rather neutral to sarcasm, though it's probably fairly well suited to such usage. The built-in sarcasm coefficient of your script is certainly greater... Anyway, I hope my message didn't bother you. At least, it wasn't my intention... --Stefan Vladuck 11:46, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Nope, it didn't bother me at all compared to everything else, including how little I actually understand about computational devices and algorythms that are used. And I wanted to. Since before 1974 -- it is a long while since then here. I often wonder what century it is in places like Belgium and Germany and even in my own country sometimes. These things are much more bothersome to me. And that I knew that I would not actually be of much help for a sharpening script-fu script. Have you actually had any luck with any sharpening algorithms in any software? And did I make myself appear like a graphics expert on my web site? That was never my intention.... -- carol 12:13, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I guess that all that GIMP-related material led me to the conclusion that you must have lots of experience...

As for the sharpening, I'm not so sure... I've never tried any actual image restoration techniques for fixing bad focus or motion blur, and I know next to nothing about them. The stuff I've been toying with is in a sense the opposite: a willful degradation of an image to trick the viewer into seeing more sharpness than there really is. Applying those tricks to hi-res images is arguably nonsense. If anything, they should be applied to the downsampled versions to be viewed on screen, to compensate for the (perceived) lack of sharpness due to the low resolution (and in fact, Mediawiki does that automatically). But I'm afraid that it would be very hard to convince users that it is natural for a digital image to look "soft" at 1:1 magnification on screen. For now, I'd be satisfied if we could convince people that downsampling is not and enhancement... --Stefan Vladuck 14:09, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Nothing can replace a well taken photograph except for additionally having seen the subject. My experience for identification purposes (when I was gardening and eating things that I found growing wild where identification becomes more important) photographs were not enough. I have been working with images of plants lately so this is constantly on my mind. The watercolor artists who paint somewhat realistically and make line drawings that are proportionally and visually similar -- these things were very helpful to assist a photograph either of the plant in its habitat or one that had been pulled up and placed like a herbarium sample for photographic study. I still am impressed by how flat a photograph can look. When I was writing about the mountains in Africa, the photographs were helpful but here, there were a handful of photographs from the Midwest that went into the stuff that I look at and I could smell them and I knew the temperature and what the people were doing who were not in the photographs, but in the buildings and who had driven the cars that were there and I could probably guess what they had for dinner and such. The 'not flat' about those photographs were the things my mind knew to put there with them. Similarly, I will probably not look at a photograph from California and think that most problems here were invented.

I made their web site. No one was interested in updating that when I started to chat with them on irc. I apologized to them for knowing more of the people who had made the web site before the one we made and tried to keep 'me' out of the content there. To me, if there is a group of individuals who is good at accomplishing different tasks, it is more advantageous if everyone does what they are good at to get the whole task done. For me to learn how to write plug-ins like many have done or to spend whatever years mitch and Sven spent learning C to know enough to clean the source code of what had been a lot of individuals who could write stuff or were learning to write had done (which was what happened to the software between gimp-1.2 and gimp-2) would be redundant and unnecessary and make a group of people heavily weighted to one side. If all you have are a bunch of code writers, what have you got? Corporations have marketing groups -- these people often do not know the product they sell nor the people they sell it to, but they get income and prestige equal to the people who made the product. This is not how it worked in our group. The web team knew the product and knew who was to be using it (at least at the download and use level -- I have no idea about the people who got a version of GIMP for their games and things, but the web site is not for them, is it?). Personally, I don't know if it was my involvement with GIMPs web site or my involvement with the ccc camp wiki in 2003 that lead to the demise of what I consider my life, but there were enough people involved that it should not be such a problem to just put it back.

The people who have joined the project since then seem to be eager to make war within. The idea that there is a battle to be won is really one of the things that makes the human species stand out from most of the other, i think. Aiming the battle inwards is an old ploy and one that I did not want to be involved with and a curiosity to me the reason that only people with this sort of idea would join. I took my web site down twice to 1)keep the understanding that there was no war from me against those within the project and 2)give others a chance to catch up. It is equally interesting that they did not catch up but instead went away. Interesting enough that I do not trust the internet for information now as these things in a real life situation would have accomplished my goal easily. I had two views of one of the people who has (at least from the appearance on the internet) done well due to working with GIMP. A talk about how to use the software that was not so good, and most of this persons experience is with inkscape and a personal view of a non-vegetarian who had been stuck with vegetarians for this journey to a different continent. That was after (from my understanding) just a few days and when we were outside the smoked meat restaurant, I could sense the weakness from having to live the different lifestyle from this person. It is similar to what has happened to me from my move across my country. It is a lifestyle that I do not believe in, one where psychology fills in where the environment is not such a challenge. I actually worry that my body is becoming weak for real life and my distain for people too strong to be able to live in my own home again.

So, there you go. As a human being, I have been downsampled. Different from a photograph, I would have probably known how to downsample myself. I have been fired from different jobs before, rules get inforced more strongly for some -- this wiki is no exception to that as some people get looked at more thoroughly than others. My dad said it was because I was 'taking over' and 'they' don't like that. It hurt because I was not 'taking over' but doing my job and getting advice from people who were experts and not just promoted to be experts (which is the nouning of the verb "experience", I think) and working with the systems that were in place. It is interesting several years later where these places I was fired from before 'taking over' have somewhat failed. It must be that 'they' wanted that to happen as well.

It is also interesting how problems are not as gender related as I once though also. So, sorry about this. You had a script that I do not understand that uses things I don't particularly like that come with the software I love. I also have no idea how much I followed that script while writing this, heh. The authoring of articles and trying to stay distant from my own problems so they do not go into those articles -- it is a psychological pressure build up probably.

Once I told a young woman that people do not accuse others of doing something unless they could imagine that they might have done the same thing. In this case, it was a bunch of groceries that the total was voided out so the register did not expect anything. My idea that she did this had to do with imagining that if I had been that young and beautiful (I wasn't when I was her age) that I could have easily done this. There was the additional idea in my mind that the woman who originally discovered the voided groceries in no way could have hacked the computer to make it appear that way. This idea is somewhat downsampled as well, and there are ideas that I have now because I saw them in a movie or on television or photographs where other things could have not been in the frame. There is an additional dimension to that accusatory tendency in which media increases the imagination -- as story telling and songs once did. It is impressive to me how much these other ideas are present while I am trying not to think about my situation and write these articles (and lately even while making the plant stubs). Five years of what a horrible species human beings can be; I am interested in a few years of seeing how beautiful they are again.

Too many words. -- carol 01:35, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

VI closure

Hi Carol, I have written down a proposal concerning VI nomination closure. I'd like to hear your opinion on the procedure because you are very much involved in closure. I have tried to find a balance between providing sufficient structure and keeping the workload for the closer down.

In particular, I have tried to lessen the burden of maintaining a monthly log. This happens behind you bag in monthly categories, when subsituting {{VI-add}} onto the image page (where it is replaced by a {{VI}} template with some added date related parameters generated during the substitution).

Also I propose not to have a parallel subject hierarchy as in QI and FP (Animals, landscapes, natural phenomena, and so on) as it seems that closers always run into problems that there is really not a fitting category). Rather I propose to weave in the VIs in the normal category/gallery structure, as it is here the editors looking for specific material will notice it.

You may want to review my structuring proposal right above as it gives some further insight. -- Slaunger 12:15, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Re:Turtle

I didn't quite get what you meant. There was no accepting the changes and an upload of a new image. I was just telling Muhammad Mahdi Karim how I edited my picture. --Digon3 ^talk 13:41, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I got scolded when I improved an image of yours; others are thanked. My message had nothing to do with Mahdi Karim, and more to do with edited images. Perhaps you could publish a list of people who are allowed to edit your images and upload over them and those who are not. Also, I did not appreciate that you reverted my edit of an image of yours and did not remove the template so it looked as if I had made the image look like the crap it was reverted back to. -- carol 13:48, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I see. I did not remove the template because I did not see it and for that I apologize. The reason I reverted was because if you look at the edges they are not quite done and the bottom of the rock is missing [[7]]. What I needed to do to remotely salvage my crappy image was go in at 1000x magnification and manually remove the background with a paintbrush (I had already tried to do what you had done and came up with the same result, though I greatly appreciate you trying). Just because I reverted one of your edit does not mean you are banned from ever editing my images again. The Thegreenj edit to my picture was just a simple color removal on the shadows and if I had not liked it I would have reverted. The best way to upload an edited image is to upload it as a new image and link it to the old one. Again, I apologize for any grief I caused you. --Digon3 ^talk 14:09, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

It was not grief, it was confusion and as I mentioned, the noise from whoever runs the media here was simply terrible -- what the noise was suggesting was not what the situation was. Do you ever get the feeling that whoever is running the media you are listening to and putting the stuff online at the other end of the places you get it from online is just a few rungs down from you on the evolutionary ladder? Also, I did not cut off the bottom of your rock and the conversation here was more like that you had a problem with anyone doing anything to any of your images. Sorry for the confusion; I am not sure how much of it was mine, yours or from those people below who don't know how to, or want to, climb that ladder.... -- carol 14:22, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Quality Image Promotion

Your image has been reviewed and promoted Congratulations! Resin from Pinus Radiata Stump 4-5 point fractal.jpg, which was produced by you, was reviewed and has now been promoted to Quality Image status. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Quality images candidates. We also invite you to take part in the categorization of recently promoted quality images. Comments Dazzling and clean; good stuff RevolverOcelot 23:16, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I think the creative component by each of us was similar, I twiddled the dials on the camera and watched the results of photon impacts in my view finder and pressed a button when the pattern pleased me, you twiddled the controls of some graphics program and pressed the save button when the results pleased you ... credit where credit's due :-) --Tony Wills 12:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC) (PS I'm not really back, but just lurking ;-)

I know it is a beautiful image; I would not have uploaded it or used it for that purpose if it hadn't been. My comments were about the QI templates; they have been used to discourage me, maybe others. Actually "diss" and "courage" separately as well. BTW, what is the difference between resin and sap? -- carol 12:16, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, as Seagoon would say, "they're spelt differently" ;-). 'pedia has somethings to say on the matter resin/sap - basically resin is viscous sticky stuff from trees, sap is water stuff from trees :-). PS I didn't see the templates as discouraging, just the reviews :-) --Tony Wills 23:14, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

qinom

yeah and at first glance its almost at home. Gnangarra 11:55, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I saw a really good movie today. The name of the female lead backwards was "stop reppep" but when I flipped it in my mind right before typing this to see if it sounded interesting enough to mention it here, I got "stop repper". That being said, I don't want to have to flip every word around before I use it or when I think about it.... -- carol 12:08, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

QI noms

Hello. Yes, I've heard of "Things Fall Apart" (though I've never read it), and of the second law of thermodynamics. What, exactly, is your point? Arria Belli | parlami 12:11, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

The long of it: Vonnegut once wrote that if you include a few semi-colons in your writing, people will think that you probably went to college; I am paraphrasing the quote. It is not that often that I write on a user page where the infoboxen says native english speaker, and you had a lot of other boxen there. So I allowed myself the whatever to just type something and those things were on my mind. After typing that, I thought it was a great joke for people who had gone to college; one that had probably been told before but also one that I had not heard before. I would not have read the book if I had not gone to college nor cared about the laws of thermodynamics. It has been a long while since I read the book, but I have been thinking about it lately because I have been writing articles about people from that time who went to Africa.

The short of it: I was gloating about a good gaming move at QI, and I do not game there very often and will only do things that do not make an inappropriate outcome in my opinion. It probably had nothing to do with you except for all of those languages on your user page. Did you learn them on your own or do infoboxen lie? -- carol 12:38, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I did. I moved around a lot as a child, making both English and Spanish my native tongues. French I learned later, Catalan during a couple of years in Barcelona, and the others come from familiarity with romance languages and/or language courses. I don't see what any of this has to do with my QI nominations, though. Again, what is your point? Arria Belli | parlami 12:56, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

My original reason for going to your user page so that I could get to your talk page was quite honestly to thank you for nominating images that were not your own -- upon reflection. I wrote recently somewhere that it was more fun when it was the photographer who had taken the photographs and this idea neglected the fact that I think it is also good to know what other images are here. I ignored the fact that I saw many of the photographers you had nominated in an 'ops' list somewhere and went to thank you (anyways). The rest of it was freedom of speech. -- carol 13:09, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. I originally went about nominating photos that are not mine because I was getting a bit tired of seeing the same names over and over again on the QI candidates page, as good as their photographs may be. I think it intimidates many Commons contributors. It certainly intimidated me at first. I try to encourage the new QI nominators as much as I can when they nominate good photographs, though I have less free time these days.

What "'ops' list"? I chose those images while exploring categories and poking about Commons in general. I don't care who takes the photographs as long as they are good.

Cheers, Arria Belli | parlami 13:26, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Does it matter which ops list? Several of your nominations were from admin/ops -- or do the people who administrate the wiki not know who else is running things? -- carol 13:29, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Image:Vilnius cathedral.jpg

Hi,

would you please tell me what did you mean when commenting this picture? Sfu 14:13, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

It is kind of difficult to describe some problems, in this case it was perspective distortion, in such a small area. When I got my digital camera, it was a point and shoot and I had not had one of those since I was seven or eight years old and film was expensive so I did not take so many photographs with it. Then almost 20 years with SLR and an assortment of lens. Going back to a point and shoot, it took about 2 or 3 months of experimentation with it and I started to take photographs that were purposely distorted as that was going to happen anyways.

The discussion of your photograph was about the same thing. Perhaps you have a good camera with focal length choices and a quicker command over eh, I forget what the name is for how large the opening is for the lens but quicker command over that (my camera has some but it difficult to access and I don't believe much in it). That discussion was about the focal length compared to your distance from the building which was the subject of the photograph. The mild distortion (not exaggerated as I started to do with my photographs) was found to be a little disturbing and that is the reason that it was declined.

Feng sheng was the name of a way of reviewing layout and build up that was used by some interior designers and similar in the 1990s whose literature and discussion was in with the other stuff I was looking at then. I got a book about it, but I only looked at the pictures and read the captions. It was interesting, actually. And I have no idea how much the one book I had or the information I retained from it actually resembles the ideology of it, so be warned and advised about that.

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  Really bad feng sheng, the monument dominates the landscape
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  Good feng sheng, beautiful but not dominating the landscape; natural lines, a relook at this makes me wonder if a distortion has been built into it with the heights and widths of the 'sails' so that the building seems deeper in the image.
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  This image has that distortion I mentioned (I took the photograph). I am too close and my camera is limited. In the landscape, interestingly enough, this structure is not such bad feng sheng, there are some other buildings around that are this tall or taller. Compared to the opera house it has not the worst but still terrible feng sheng, but that opera house is text book perfection for this idea.
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  The same structure, less limited camera. For me and my camera to get a 'good' photograph (like this) of it, I would have had to have been standing very far away and then crop the photograph. This is what that discussion was actually about.

The first two structures (left to right) were used as examples. There was another example that I don't know how to find an image of, but it was about placement of houses in a neighborhood layout. A house at the end of a street where cars on the road would have the choice of turning right or left but not to go straight is well, more than being kind of dangerous also has bad feng sheng because not just cars but energy is flowing towards the house -- the book suggested to place a large rock in front of it. It is kind of funny that actual good safety measures worked so well into the 'ideology'. A house that is relatively distant from that position on the road would probably be physically safe but supposedly still has the bad feng sheng.

While not in the book of feng sheng whose pictures and captions I looked at, the EMU water tower, while not evident in either of the photographs, is not such bad feng sheng as might be expected from such a 'structure'. That building on the left of the wider angled photograph is not as tall as the tower, but the building that is kind of behind that is. I took photographs of the top part of the water tower in the 1980s from the roof of that building -- no distortion and level plane. At night and of the lights that someone had strung around the eh, tip. Heh, I would like to call myself the founding member of the Water Tower Preservation Society because of how much there is nothing wrong with that thing except the language that often gets used to describe it. While living there, seriously and honestly, it just gets a 'heh' from both the observatory (near to it) and the natives.
So, 'bad feng sheng' was a short term that was already defined that fit into that little review box at QI. What I understand from the more technically accurate discussion there is that your photograph is distorted (and then corrected, perhaps) just enough to be disturbing. I could perhaps attempt to correct the distortion in the photograph of the tower that I took, and it might be more obvious what the problem is but I don't want to do that.

In this area that I have been staying, there is a very interesting sculpture which doesn't look so interesting until I attempted to get a photograph of it. It was sails that were shaped much like the roof parts of the opera house. I wanted to get a photograph of it with just a little bit of the background scenery showing through the separation of the sails which it had -- that photograph was impossible to take. I should dig that out and upload it -- it was very frustrating and technically interesting and I think that both things about the sculpture were not an accident.

My photograph of the water tower is good for that law of thirds though... -- carol 23:29, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

BTW, my sentence structure here is good except for the tense -- the past and present forms of the words. I wrote about things in the past tense because I was writing about things I have not seen in a while but it should have been written in the present tense because those structures still exist. Sorry for the confusion of this. -- carol 23:56, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Big thanks for such a wide explanation, I didn`t expect. Yep, it`s not that easy to take a picture of big building while not being far enough from it. But I must say it was the first time, when I was taking this picture, that I spoted clearly that building in my eyes looks straight. Buildings viewed by camera are distorted. Any way, software makes pictures look more natural, but still not enough in this case. Sfu 19:53, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

At least an equally big thanks for a good question that gave an opportunity for a lot of thoughts I had to land into an at least semi-coherent structure somewhere. Commons is nice because when I have verbally attempted to explain those pictures I saw -- it is just better to have the photographs. -- carol 23:09, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Valued images test review phase has ended

Dear Carol, Thank you for participating in the development of the Valued images project by test nominating one or more candidates. We have used the input from the test reviews to fine-tune the guidelines, process and templates used, hereby hopefully improving the setup. We have now decided that on June 1, 2008 at 0:00 (UTC), the valued image project will be opened for official nominations. To get ready for the grand opening, we will close down the last remaining open test candidates in a few hours, such that the candidates list pages are emptied and ready. Since there has been a certain amount of instruction creep over the course of the test review pahse, we have decided that all promoted and declined candidates from the test review phase will be reset to the so-called "undecided" state prior to the opening. This means that test valued image candidate review pages all end up in Category:Undecided valued images candidates and the test sets end up in Category:Undecided valued image set candidates. The votes from the original test review will be archived in a previous reviews subpage and reset upon renomination. Although all nominations will be reset, you, as a test nominator, will still have the advantage that each candidate can be re-nominated beginning June 1 0:00 UTC. The votes from the original test review will be archived in a previous reviews subpage and reset upon renomination. Click on the links to the aforementioned categories for instruction on how to renominate. In addition, the project has decided to re-nominate all candidates, which were test promoted, unless you tell us not to do so on my talk page. Also, do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or problems relating to valued images. I hope, you will also take part in the project once it goes on the air, either as nominator, maintainer and/or reviewer. Happy editing, -- Slaunger 21:45, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Carol, thanks for your other questions on my talk page. I'll get back to them a little later. Cheers, -- Slaunger 21:45, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Sarcasm

I'm not amused by your sarcastic comments, carol. One day it will earn you a civility warning. Lycaon 17:41, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Heh, I type what you type.... -- carol 23:15, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Which one bothers you the most, btw? -- carol 00:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

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What's wrong with me?

Hello, you wrote at the QI Candiates page "This image should be reviewed by someone who does not have a bias from the user name." What does this mean? --Berthold Werner 08:07, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Nothing wrong with you. By typing that, it kept your image there and perhaps another reviewer will look it over. Let me ask you a question. Are you always relatively unbiased? I am not always and in this case I am kind of sure that I wasn't.

What would be more upsetting? To have your image drop off the page eight to nine days later or to have someone extend the time some with an honest confession? Both can be disturbing, but putting a photograph anywhere to be reviewed is kind of disturbing to begin with.

I honestly did not mean to upset you nor to cause you to spend anytime worrying about it. I wanted the image to have more of a chance. -- carol 09:21, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Completely ignore the wikiuser names and two of the more interesting photographs in this current set of QIC for this are yours and that extremely suspicious one of the Oceanary. See:

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My bias when I reviewed the oceanary building was stronger for the architecture of the building than it was against the wiki user name. (Heh, I thought this was Alves wife and it is instead his daughter, heh -- that is a great photograph for that age, much nicer than mine were at that age! But there you go, I had a point and shoot -- a Brownie and it was a little more complicated than downloading to a computer then) I am sorry that review time came up after I wrote about that book I only looked at and did not read. Which of the two structures in the current QIC do you prefer?

I have no idea if their presence there made me think about that book; I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Since then, I have been trying to remember the little bits of political history I kind of remember (I do not like to memorize things) to see if I can find an incident of a strong leader who succeeded. Do you know of any? Meanwhile, the name thing is silly and I know it. I went to college and many of my happiest moments were spent in a building called "Strong Hall" and the leader of that little group was kindly and smiling all the time and hardly interfered until he saw something very wrong. He was for me a great leader and probably a great teacher as well, I never a class with him.

I would like the wiki to be nice for you and for Ines. As crushing of an experience as having my images be ignored or actually, much weirder things happen here depending on the review system your photograph goes to, I am several years older than Ines, and I don't know about you. I would like for someone to review your photograph and I am glad that I didn't decide that this was Alves in 'wiki-user name' drag and treated that photograph with the respect it deserved. It only needed a crop at the top.

You know what else, I don't want those weird things to happen to that little girl or to you either. -- carol 10:12, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Thor Able Launches

Hi, I have suggested that this page be moved to the English Wikipedia. Due to a lack of anywhere else to suggest this, I have filed it as a deletion request. Discussion is located at Commons:Deletion requests/Thor Able Launches. --GW_Simulations_{User Page | Talk} 18:59, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Downsampling

Hi again Carol, I've tried writing up an explanation why downsampling does not improve an image. Maybe it can help eradicating this silly practice. Any suggestions for improvement?

That is a good write up, in my opinion. I learned something and I thank you for that. -- carol (tomes)

I guess I should also finally follow up the discussion at Commons_talk:Image_guidelines#Downsampling_and_colour_spaces. Maybe we can indeed get at least this downsampling issue into the guidelines... --Stefan Vladuck 09:23, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

My first experience with Photoshop and the CMYK default color space they provide, I did not experience actually but my friend told me about her experience with it. Her goal was to look professional and 'in the know' about her profession (photographer -- stuck in the area between film and digital); yet she had a good amount of experience on the other side, dealing with people who are like that (waitressing). To make the long and uncomfortable story short, the print company was really glad that she had brought the original file with her because of how the profile for the machine that will be displaying the image on or printing it on is needed for making the conversion. Having been on the 'other side of the counter', we both kind of knew that they were laughing at her, maybe, for her valiant attempt to be the professional. Generic profiles are simply damaging to the image.

My "real" experience with the profile stuff is actually via hand calculation of astrological birth charts. The printed ephemeris told the position of the planets for each day at noon or midnight (depending on the version). So, (it has been a while...) log tables were used to find the distance the planets had moved between the noon before and the noon of that day for the time that was needed. It was cool and it was a chapter that was skipped in trig classes and later in diffyqs. When I looked at the equations for printers and thought about it -- the differences in the color outputs (the temperatures of what was wanted and what the difference was) would be the same as the differences in the planet positions. It was kind of neat to see the maths being used for that as well and have it make so much sense to me. I have yet to own a printer and I like my display to be a little on the darkish, low contrast side; so my real experience is in recognizing the maths. I used to check how my images looked online on different computers and operating systems; they looked a little different on the different kinds of displays and the transparent png was interesting with the background color set and on IE, but that was years ago. California is not accessible to me that way though.

My experience on the wiki in telling people to 'just skip it please' is here.

The rumors and the pressures for 'color management' -- it sells photoshop, doesn't it? How is, btw, IE handling color management? Canned browsers should know how to handle canned color management, huh?

Honestly, since color profiles are out there and being used, the only time they get noticed compared to images that are not using them is when they look wrong. There was a joke about make-up application I heard once, that the goal was to see how much you could put on and still look the same. It seems to me to be the same with color management.

Feel free to correct anything I wrote here that is wrong. -- carol (tomes) 11:39, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

That might certainly explain why I tend to feel a bit uneasy around women with a significant layer of makeup... Colour management also sells lots of magazines. This works so well because most people don't bother researching and trying things by themselves. And if things don't turn out as expected... buy more magazines (or gear, or both). --Stefan Vladuck 13:04, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

It isn't capitalism. That is where there is a need and the market fills it. This is where the market claims there is a need and then doesn't actually fill the need. There should be a name for that. So, that means that I my understanding of color management is not wrong? -- carol (tomes) 13:08, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Don't know about the name, but that's what the western economy has been based on for quite a while. Make people believe that they absolutely need your new product. Add some superfluous features and make people buy the "upgraded" version, too. Or just change the colour of the packaging.

I think your analysis of colour management is correct. Lots of people don't even notice when they botch their colour management workflow. Some don't even notice when their white balance is off and their images have an ugly colour cast. And yet they firmly believe that they absolutely need that little extra gamut for CMYK devices provided by AdobeRGB. Never mind if they never actually print their images. Never mind if the original scene doesn't even contain any colours from the extended gamut. Oh well... --Stefan Vladuck 08:23, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Do you know that there is a one to one relationship between my writing at certain places elsewhere on this wiki and you or others leaving messages here?

Another interesting thing is the number of photographs from LOC that started to occur here and other wiki which look like people from my life before I got here and only one person knows all of that? It is not amusing; this life like this is not fun. For a 'how to' on how to make what had been an interesting life dull and lifeless, ask that person what was done to me. -- carol (tomes) 11:04, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Talk

See my talk page. — Rlevse • Talk • 11:40, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Uncategorized images

Hi Carol, are you still working on your uncategorized images project? I have a little proposal here and i would like to hear your opinion. Thank you, Multichill 12:23, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Re:Turtle

Its not a pet. I found it wandering around on the road and I set it free after the photos. I couldn't photoshop out the hairs either. For this I didn't do any magnifacation editing, I just messed around with the levels and contrast. --Digon3 ^talk 22:31, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

In Michigan they are pets except for an excellent story I heard on the radio long ago -- one of a handful of stories, verbalized on the radio which made me gladly decide to never watch television again and to spend more time with my homework. Might I suggest more photography on bright cloudy days. Clear and pretty and sunny days make for harshly contrasted photographs. Well, you worked with the image, the lack of contrast between the top of the shell and the cement was not as difficult to manage as the lack of contrast between the shadow and the dark lower part of the shell.

I am quite bored with image manipulation talk. More than 7 years now, longer than many marriages. Do you know that when I moved away from that radio station they started to fail financially and when I moved back within their broadcast range they started to flourish again. This one fact made me refuse to listen to the same network of stations here in California -- or that fact as it was presented to me by that station. That station is apparently failing again. These facts make no sense to me -- I am unable to look at their financial records and I am even unable to verify if the 'news' I heard from them was accurate or if the news I read here of their not doing so well again is accurate. The same thing with GNOME foundation -- my effort and contribution is being determined by a bunch of people who I don't know of. Here is the interesting thing -- it doesn't seem to matter if it is a commercial network or system or a non-commercial network or system.

It is nice and good that you set the turtle free. It has been about 5 years now where image manipulation also gives my mind time to check or fill in missing parts of the lives of people who I spent time with before and this image was no exception. Real people, you know? Not comicbook characters or historical figures re-represented for popular movies. Using the phone system in California and 'hearing' my mom play Sophies Choice while measuring me against my brother -- California is not handling a real life very well. It is not possible to measure me against my brother or the other way around. It is however, possible to measure the abuse of technology by the lack of creativity or new ideas or self definition by the adherence to movie/media images that were created by that same existing system. -- carol (tomes) 23:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Problem

Hi carol. Please see COM:AN/U#Request short block for CarolSpears (talk • contribs). Thanks. Rocket000 12:48, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

PDF Files

Hi Carol, I have been organizing the Category:Pdf files for a couple of months so if you have any more pdf files to upload could you link them to the Cat as well. I am still working on the lists. Thanks WayneRay 16:04, 3 June 2008 (UTC)WayneRay

That was my first upload. I hadn't gotten around to figuring out what extra things and I saw the category you added to it. Thanks for the notice as well. -- carol (tomes) 16:19, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

QI sorting

Hey Carol, I am a bit stressed these days and don't really find the time to sort the recently promoted QIs. I thought I could somehow keep up with it, but right now I really don't get it done. Do you mind to help out a bit...? I will still do some sorting but I am not sure if I can clean the whole recently promoted page alone. Thanks for any help. --AngMoKio 20:54, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I certainly can help. It would be really nice if it started to seem less like a puppet show there though. Does it feel like a puppet show there to you? -- carol (tomes) 03:12, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

How do you define puppet show in this case? --AngMoKio 14:21, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I would like to say that I am not the puppet in the show, but I have not been able to check through all of the details about that -- the circumstances that I have been stuck in might indicate that I am one; I don't feel like I have been a puppet at QIC though and that was not the idea when I suggested that. More like Image:Karagoz_theatre_06315.JPG, with only people with extra access allowed to easily enjoy the review and have images accepted. The "rules" there are generous and not too restrictive. Not many follow the suggestion to review from the lower parts of the page first. As much as I am not so fond of movie images, there is this one little piece of a movie that I think about often when I think about trying to join into an existing system. I think it is a fantasy scene, where the person who is the subject of the movie wishes he could do what the scene shows. There is an open concert and some of the musicians in the band that are playing are standing at the front of the stage. They move together with their instruments -- not complicated moves with military like perfection, but with swaying and simple left to right steps. The narrator, the subject of the movie, joins them on stage somewhat seamlessly with the simple movements; not in possession of an instrument, but not interrupting the concert either. It is a very beautiful and subtle scene and the next few minutes is where he talks about wishing he could dance. An uninteresting movie would be where the puppets are not too smart and the puppet masters are not as smart as the puppets. -- carol (tomes) 20:44, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

EXIF

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you are asking for; do you want an original with EXIF attatched? Thegreenj 17:51, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

• If so, here you go. Thegreenj 17:58, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

heh carol (tomes) 18:03, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

You have to be patient with this answer, I am still a little brain dead from trying to determine if the photograph was from Washington or from D. C. -- iirc, the image was stitched. One of the original images would be enough and I could "replace" the EXIF info (an original which has not had the information stripped from it). Or, the original if it wasn't stitched (heh). I can reupload it to my website so that you can have the upload log here, if it matters. I did this once to make a completely fictitious image for Fictional Pictures Candidates, and I still was ignored and abused there.... I do not like to do this wrongly, but putting the information back into the image should be good. -- carol (tomes) 18:03, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

^^^^ Edit conflict ^^^^

That is a crop from one of the originals with EXIF attatched. Sorry, I'm not willing to upload original photos to wikiprojects (but it is a panorama, FWIW). Thegreenj 18:54, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

That was plenty (I think). I have no complaints at all and especially about the size. It had everything that I needed. I am actually waiting to know what you prefer for uploading it. -- carol (tomes) 21:16, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Go ahead and upload on the old namespace. Thanks for taking the time to restore the EXIF data. Thegreenj 00:11, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

The task can be measured in minutes and seconds. It is an interesting photograph, I think I would not like to stay where that was taken for very long. -- carol (tomes) 10:12, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

TLSX

That's very impressive; I may have to learn a little GIMP. Was your upload of the XCF file intentional? - "The use of XCF as a data interchange format is not recommended by the GIMP developers"[8] Hesperian 03:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

QC comments on Image:Cape Barren Nest with Eggs.JPG

Hi Carol, I've moved your decline of this image of mine in QI to the review process as I'm concerned with a decline based on Ethics. I've marked your comment as an oppose but would welcome your thoughts particularly on the Ethics issue - Peripitus 04:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Is it only interesting to me that you did not do this with the image that I supported? -- carol (tomes) 11:05, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

It's hard to behave unethically to a fountain. I find it interesting that yourself and Lycaon recently have ethical issues with nest photography, yet we have featured pictures like this and this. - Peripitus (talk) 11:44, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

My experience here has been that when I first started, I made some mistakes and also I was approached by people with 'rules' or a way of working here that was in their vision for the archives. The first thing I remember from this experience was that commons was not for documentation, although there are some images where some documentation upon the image page is extremely helpful. Then there seemed to be some cause and effect games that are enabled -- the spamming of images with templates was the effect part. I spent some time working with removing the templates from the spammed images and that was extremely good for me to understand what kinds of images there are here and to look at sections that I typically wouldn't be looking at. None of this has that much to do with your question except that, I wasn't involved here in 2007 and that nest imagery idea being unethical makes sense to me.

I can't remember the exact year they did this in Michigan, but I think it effected the people who were two years older than me (the class of '78). They changed the legal drinking (of alcohol) age from 18 to 21. It would have been weird for them because one day it was legal to drink and the next day it wasn't. I remember all of the feelings of injustice and being picked on from then -- I was 15 or 16 years old. I would still feel this way, actually, 25 years later if I hadn't been told this one fact that really did seem like a fact. That fact is that by turning the legal age that far back, they got alcohol out of the junior high (children aged 11 - 13/14). Being willing to cross a line is what makes many things and is part of evolution. Knowing that lines get crossed and to draw them in obvious places to prevent very wrong things from happening is also part of evolution. I happen to agree with the nest photography guideline. It is totally possible to spam the review thing with friends and whatever who give positive votes, but what have you done then? Crossed one of those good lines and perhaps devolved. And you get what for this?

And, btw, if the eh, "alpha dog" Lycaon asks or demands that you do something that you disagree with, let me know. I have an article about how the species once known as wolf has somewhat diverged into a species that is easier described as 'canis soup' due to the tendency to mate with anything that lets them.... I totally agree with the nest photography thing. It is a good line not to cross. I almost had nesting birds in my apartment and really, it was unethical that they were being kept there -- long before the nesting stuff. I would have let them out if I knew they could survive a Michigan winter. -- carol (tomes) 12:12, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Sturm, Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen Images

I see you have "retouched" a couple of these images and like the results. I wonder if there is any point in me proceeding with the simpler cleanup that I have been doing - are you planning to work through the whole book?

The images I did recently I found in articles I was cleaning up on wikipedia. -- carol (talk) 12:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

As far as I am aware Commons only stipulate that images should be useable (plus licensing of course). To that end I have been removing borders (also requested by User:Lokal_Profil who placed a cleanup tag on the gallery). I cannot see a use for versions wih a border (apart from perhaps one sample to show the "original state"), so have been uploading under the same name. I know this has been discussed for other sets of images. Is there any point in having an original and a cropped version? The earlier versions are retained in the history.

Finally, I still maintain that images should be in appropriate categories. Has there been agreement that biological images do not follow this guideline? Finavon (talk) 06:59, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I assumed (something I know not to do since my viewing of the original Badnews Bears movie) that you had scripted GIMP for what you were doing, with the exception of the cropping, it could be scripted so forgive me if that seems rude and if you have python installed I could script it for you. (At least I think so -- if I remember correctly, it was not possible to access the 'ends' of the histogram via a script but other levels correction things were accessible.) The number and frequency of the uploads made me think that you had scripted the work as well, so that is a compliment if it wasn't scripted!

The answer to the first question is that I think your versions are better than the ones that are here. The aster one I redid -- I was going to be not impressed with how the white point color adjustment had worked on the image until I saw the original. What you are doing is improving the image. Had I not known that asters are supposed to be purple, I would not have changed your work. I think that some colors of ink fade more than others -- a chemical reality. The pink and the orange of the paper is another chemical reality. Your process is repairing the second time rendered problem and it is good.

Back to that aster illustration. Once I adjusted the colors to make the flower petals (what I think is) more accurate, the line drawings in the image were also purple -- so that repair took a couple of different layers and perhaps 20 to 30 minutes. Not that many of those scans have that much color problems....

About categories. I started here on commons using the classic skin. It puts the category at the top. On the documentation wikis, I used the default skins until recently. My understanding and movements through the images here is usually through category trees. The amount of discussion I have seen about this has been other people telling me that galleries are used which (without looking up the definition of discussion) I don't consider to be discussion. I have been working mostly with the Asteraceae category tree making them work with the taxonomy template which has entries through species and I have been making templates for each tribe that makes adding the navigation template easy for both genus and species. I have had to stop this productive work occasionally to (I guess) wrestle with one of the gals about this. There is some link somewhere about a previous discussion and vote about how both can exist and should be allowed to. There is a bot that is really good for helping the 'Gals' get over their problems -- if you have a problem with one of them, Commons:Bots/Requests‎ was a really good place for me to mention my problem and have it repaired immediately.

About the cropping. I have no idea what is supposed to be done. I know what I have done and I can tell you the reasons I did that. I rarely cropped the page stuff from the image but I claim that my brain is kind of conservative (my votes are liberal though) and that is the reason for that. In the back of my mind is the possibility of reassembling the book with modern printing and improved inks. This image repository serves the images to the encyclopedias but it is also a host for images for other use. I honestly would have bought that book if it had been in my price range and in the area I shopped in -- back when I was trying to identify the weeds that were growing around me. All that being said, I did crop those recent images that you had improved and I further improved from how nice your cropping looked on the articles that I found them on. I am sorry that this paragraph is about me but that is the real answer to your question. What should be done? I have no idea other than my own.

I have been very impressed with what the simple white point adjustment and the cropping has done for the images. Much of what I did is because I enjoy it. Let me know if you would like a script or if I am offending you too much. -- carol (talk) 12:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Glad to hear that you think the "white point adjustment" is worthwhile. I will continue. It is not scripted (I would not even know how to do that!), but is only three additional mouse clicks while cropping the image. The category/gallery discussion could continue for a while! Finavon (talk) 13:10, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

It is the 'war' here it seems. The fact that the two can live together just fine has been discussed and decided upon long ago. It does remind me of the movie Platoon somedays though. Not about the war in Viet Nam, but about the war among the people who are supposed to be on the same side; and I didn't understand that part of that movie and I don't understand the problem here. Hmm, Oliver Stone -- figures. -- carol (talk) 13:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Need Help on cloning

Hi,

Sorry to bother you again, I wish you would do me a favor.

I'm now trying to produce an image similar to current FP,

however, a ship moved drastically during the exposure. Which made 2 same ships showed up in the panorama. If you have time, can you clone it out? as I don't know how...

Here is the segment that needs improvement: File:HKNILocation For Editing.jpg

Here are the issues:

• A duplicated ship due to blending of SmartBlend,
• A few glitches in the water.

I've uploaded the segment (14.7 MB) to:

• [9] (enter the code on the right)

OR

• [10] (not all browsers are supported)

The file format is Photoshop Smart Object(.PSB), but I think you can open it as Ordinary Photoshop file(.PSD) in GIMP. It's 16bit/channel.

The finished image of the entire pano should be about 4670 x 2000 pixels.

Thank you so much,

--βαςε_LXIV™ 15:51, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I can and would clone it, downloading the image was disturbing and unsuccessful. I did manage to enable and disable javascript in the time that was allowed. Interesting as well that along with an image that has a bogus file history here is a photographer who I have some serious questions about the existence of prior to a few months ago.

The thing about GIMP, I understand that it can open psd from a certain point in Photoshops development, but I have no experience with that recently. Building a version of the software GIMP that was psd enabled before the regular app was, I did this as well in spite of the confusing instructions that existed for that plug-in at that time. This is all so gimp-1.2 though....

I did not purposely build this browser to not accept downloads, but I would have disabled it anyways as I feel no need for a 'manager' to help with this and the browser that I have built has a broken download manager. It is only a pain in the ass on sites where downloading is a pain in the ass.

Is there any good reason that you have Photoshop with its superior tools and such and not poor, illy conceived and not socially accepted GIMP which can be gotten for free installed? The upload dialog here says that xcf are allowed although, my personal experience with this is that the internet becomes unusually interrupted for the uploading.

When I recently resaw bladerunner, I thought it was one of the saddest movies. Especially that part with Larry from Larry, Darryl and Darryl and his "making new friends". http://www.imdb.com/media/rm4058945792/tt0083658 ->it really is similar atmospherically to the movie.

Let me know if you can figure out some decent place to put the file. -- carol (talk) 16:28, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm Sorry for causing trouble, I should have found a better place for upload.

I've uploaded the copy in TIFF format, then GZip it:

• Part 1 Save As
• Part 2 Save As
• Part 3 Save As

I believe it couldn't be opened in WinRAR, but I am able to open it in 7-Zip.

• If you are able to open it, please conserve the margin area.

I see you are suggesting me to use GIMP, I tried to install it but it wouldn't open 16 bit TIFF. Do I have to download CinePaint or Krita to edit 16bit files?

Also, I accept GIMP as reliable image editing tool, but I just don't have the motive to learn a new thing.

I always use Open source softwares, like FileZilla and 7-Zip. I also have Fedora Core, but I seldom boot it on.

Thanks,

--βαςε_LXIV™ 01:29, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

About 16 bit editing, I have no idea. To the best of my knowledge, I have never had access to files like that, I have not seen any differences in images that makes me ever wish I had access to whatever creates them or edits them and to be honest, due to these access problems, I only recently started to build my software to work with tiff format. Why build a bikeshed if you don't have a bike? Kritta was the first of the linux editors to work with color management and again, I see no honest use for this and most people end up mangling images with this when they get the opportunity to enable it. One of those things that all the Windows users seem to desparately want and need. I was making fairly wonderful graphics with gimp-1.0 complete with a 70M harddrive and 8bpp display so I sometimes laugh at the 'needy' now. Should I take a few moments to laugh now?

About those files, it has been a long while since I have attempted to unarchive anything that was not from a linux box and if I had any doubts if my distribution had turned into Windows on me, these files have renewed my belief in it somewhat. Here is what my 'investigative software' says about them:

carol@bread:~$ file HKNeedImprovement1.tif.gz.001
HKNeedImprovement1.tif.gz.001: gzip compressed data, was "HKNeedImprovement1.tif", from FAT filesystem (MS-DOS, OS/2, NT), last modified: Sat Jun 14 18:14:16 2008
carol@bread:~$ file HKNeedImprovement1.tif.gz.002
HKNeedImprovement1.tif.gz.002: data
carol@bread:~$ file HKNeedImprovement1.tif.gz.003
HKNeedImprovement1.tif.gz.003: data

I don't open rar files and I have only worked with software that splits files for floppies and it has been a really really long time since I had anything to do with a floppy....

It would be nice to work on this in the next few hours, but if it is impossible to upload an image to a not a pain in the ass web site, I can and will understand. Is it stored on several floppy discs? -- carol (talk) 03:53, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

It's split GZip file. I believe it could be merged by 7-Zip

Do you have any suggestions on uploading 22.5MB file to a website that only allows 10MB per file, or can you recommend me another method? I'm not so familiar with linux system... Sorry

By the way, where do you live, do you rest? --βαςε_LXIV™

Sorry, my writing here not just seems crass, it is. I am now trying to read the manual page that came with the software and I am sorry because I have been spoiled with web space and forget what it is like not to have unlimited access. So far, with the assistance of the manual page, I have created another archives of the same files. Much better to be laughing at myself than at others!

I have been staying in California since 2004 -- it is not my home and it doesn't feel like my home. You know how in movies and books, often it starts in the middle of a story and the beginnings get revealed via a plausible backstory? It was like one day I woke up in the middle of someone elses life and I am awaiting the plausible backstory to explain what caused all of that. I spend a lot of time on the computer because I really have nothing better to do. If I don't occupy my mind with something that feels productive, then my mind wanders over my accomplishments and I become very angry at how this world doesn't really 'work'. The image work is fun and these photographs of yours are particularly nice and very different than my own and other images that it has been my privilege to have anything at all to do with. I am sorry that I don't understand the 16-bit image work also; it starts to feel like one of those things that everyone wants but doesn't really need because I just have not seen examples of the advantages of it. I get crass sometimes from this. Oh, and the europeans that I was friends with seem to be very gayly supportive of each other when they all have problems -- too bad about the girl who worked with them. I should be more crass than I am perhaps. -- carol (talk) 04:48, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Good News, I've managed to upload the file in one piece: here

--βαςε_LXIV™ 04:32, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

An edit conflict! Yay! I am of the birth sign that enjoys the sound of their own voice (or words) when complaining, so I pasted it anyways. I will get back to you soon! -- carol (talk) 04:49, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh well, I should have uploaded the 8 bit file, cuz it's 5mb only... Looking forward to your good news :-) --βαςε_LXIV™ 05:09, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Read

[11] [12] Lycaon (talk) 19:39, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I did read about the nominator of the image: Nomination.

And further: I believed that the image was from Mbz1. It had that footprint as it was the only photograph at the time of that thing and it was too small. Perhaps it had been originally nominated by that person -- I really do not care at this point. Should we call the attention of the admins to you for harrassment and constantly removing edits here, there and elsewhere? -- carol (talk) 20:44, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Odd categorization

[13]: you put an image of a park in Chile in Category:Seattle, Washington. - Jmabel ! talk 01:08, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, you will not get any argument from me about it being wrong, odd or otherwise. When I was in the category Washington, I was working on plant images and happened to notice that there were a lot of Washington, D.C. images there. Lincoln memorial and other things like that. I have no idea if this blunder was made then or not, but it seems like it. Thank you for managing it correctly.

Well! I just looked at the date there -- November 2007! When I sorting through the images that had been uncategorized perhaps. My mind was a gradient of alive to dead during that. It is good that people familiar with the area go through the categories. -- carol (talk) 01:18, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Editing others' comments

Hi Carol, thanks for taking part in assessing images in Commons. I write to let you know I was confused by you making changes in another user's comment. While I know you mean well I wish to remind you that such activity is generally discouraged. –Dilaudid 08:12, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Dschwen can speak for himself, I think. I know that you mean well, but I think that in almost every situation, it is best to let the actual offended people speak for themselves. -- carol (talk) 08:16, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Correct me if I got the wrong impression but it seems to me that you misunderstood what was intended as a friendly note as patronizing behaviour from "someone who knows everything". I wrote to kindly inform you of existing practices and express my own confusion, not to nag nor act on behalf of another individual. I don't think this makes anyone a "know-it-all" (a term that can easily be interpreted as offensive). As to your regards "May all of your real world reflect your wiki world", I'm not sure I understand what that means; can you clarify that? –Dilaudid 08:58, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, you got it wrong. -- carol (talk) 09:00, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Dorstenia Brasiliensis (imagen)

Atento a su pregunta me cabe informarle que si, yo he dibujado la imagen de referencia. Es posible que su pregunta se deba a que ha encontrado algún parecido con alguna otra imagen pues de otra forma no se explicaría su pregunta. Ya que lo he dejado claramente declarado al momento de hacerlo. Pero también he aclarado que he tomado modelos para realizar el dibujo y carecía de modelos naturales (esto lo aclaré para evitar suceptibilidades). De todas formas afírmole que el dibujo ha sido por mi realizado. Igualmente y para demostración de que tengo la capacidad de dibujar, por haber aprendido algo sobre ese arte, he querido realizar otro dibujo de la "planta" que nos ocupa (que a mi gusto me ha quedado mejor aún) y lo he subido a Commons para ponerlo en la página correspondiente. Ahora se cuenta con dos versiones de Dorstenia Brasiliensis:

Dorstenia-Brasiliensis.jpg

Si le ha quedado alguna duda, ruego me lo informe; y si por otro lado ha encontrado algún caso parecido a la primera versión (ya que de otra forma no encuentro sentido a su pregunta), seguramente es mera casualidad. Salúdole a usted con mi mayor consideración.--jorge horacio richino (talk) 20:05, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Category:Flora of Saskatchewan

Hello thank you for your note, but I think you should put the plant back into the flora category and not the provincial category.. I found the plant Category:Heliopsis helianthoides in Category:Saskatchewan and figured that was wrong so I moved it over to Category:Flora of Saskatchewan. Why is putting this plant in the provincial category better than the flora of that province? Manitoba is our neighboring province, and this same Category:Heliopsis helianthoides is located in the category flora of Manitoba and not the provincial category of Manitoba. SriMesh | talk 21:53, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

That paragraph confused me. Here is what I thought I saw and what I did after that:

1. I saw in my changelog that Category:Heliopsis helianthoides had been moved from a subcategory of Saskatchewan into the main category with that name.
2. I reverted that move.
3. I used the history of that page to get to the talk page of the person who made that change to explain my reversion like the nice human being that I often am.

If there was an error in what I did, like if I clicked through the wrong user name in the history of the page or well, I cannot determine anything else which could have been done wrong but I will willingly look mistakes I might have made in this situation. -- carol (talk) 22:45, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

renewed

It looks very nice on Wikisource:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London/Volume 10/Characters of a new Liliaceous Genus called Brodiaea, don't you think? Hesperian 13:10, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I am unable to argue about how nice everything looks there. Including the little image in the middle of the collection of pages there.... -- carol (talk) 19:33, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I wonder, though, just how white early 19th century paper was. Hesperian 11:36, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

They were more white than they were pink or yellow or brown. Paper has an additional quality of having different levels of reflectivity and different heights of grain. I think that in this case, white is the best guess and for further looking like the 19th century thing, print it on paper that was made the same way. -- carol (talk) 17:07, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Hehe

You really didn't want to separate the frog and the boat, huh? ;-) --Dschwen (talk) 20:34, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Shh! Nice work by the way.... -- carol (talk) 20:38, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Britton and Brown

Category:Agalinis has been updated with Galleries for each species listed in the B & B page. I have left the duplicate flower image in Agalinis and placed the drawings in the Gallery Just an FYI WayneRay (talk) 23:27, 27 June 2008 (UTC)WayneRay

Carex

Carol, I would like to clean up the Category:Carex by placing illustrations in the galleries or same named Categories and leaving the photo images. Many are ones you put there of the illustrations from Sturm. I will be creating new gallery pages for ones that dont exist. Do you have any comments or suggestions before I start and get in ^%$# again LOL I am trying to comprimise between my thoughts that images should be in Galleries and galleries in the higher order Category and others as we discussed that think there should be both available., Thanks in advance WayneRay (talk) 21:34, 29 June 2008 (UTC)WayneRay

Wayne, It would be sensible to get consensus from the wider community. User:Ayacop and User:Multichill supported these images being in Category:Carex. If you are proposing policy (especially as it differs from non-TOL practice), take it to Commons:Village pump, rather than discussing on User_talk pages. Finavon (talk) 00:09, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, Link to a diff <-- this is how I learned about this group of people. Until that time, which was an explanation by a user who did not agree with the way the TOL users work, it was just a bunch of extremely non-communicative and aggressive people. -- carol (talk) 00:14, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Re: Annona

Please see my discussions at Image talk:Custapp.jpg and Image talk:CustardAppleCLoseUp.jpg. Did I do something wrong changing A. reticulata to A. aquamosa? Nguyễn Thanh Quang (talk) 02:08, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

I am kind of busy with an article about Senecio and it is difficult to put that down. My problem with seeing the category changes now is that I try to be careful, especially when writing articles at the same time. I purposely came to mention where the articles I wrote were at English wikipedia. Writing those articles was a very bad experience for me there and very good articles were buried. Perhaps you could consider unburying those articles and looking into whatever mistakes I made when categorizing them. I do know that one species is more like a raspberry (compound fruit) than the others and you have them in a category together now... -- carol (talk) 02:30, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Flora of vs Plants of

Hi Carol, It seems like we do not quite agree on plants of vs flora of. I am not convinced there is community consensus for the "Flora of" scheme. I have asked at COM:VP to make sure what the policy is. -- Slaunger (talk) 16:10, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I already mentioned it before there, here we made a consensus. You should look at it from Category:Ecozones and work your way down. -- carol (talk) 22:45, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, I see the short discussion about the ecozones, which ended June 28, but I do not really see a sign of a consensus. Are there other threads I am unaware of. Very nice work with the ecozone maps by the way. If I undersdtand correctly, the two categories Category:Plants of Greenland and Category:Flora of Greenland are not redundant then, as with your idea the "Flora of..." category is a broader category, which contains both Category:Plants of Greenland, Category:Trees of Greenland and Category:Forests of Greenland? I can see this makes sense (except that I am in doubt about the general use of "Forests of...", which seems a little redundant to "Trees of..."). I think it would be helpful if you joined the discussion on the new thread to explain this very carefully (if I have understood you right). I understand you are frustrated by some cate deletions. Did you discuss the ecozone stuff first anywhere before you initiated that, just to make sure the minds of the regulars understood your plans? I think a lot of the confusion stems from many users thinking that Flora of and plants of are identical, thus one has to go. -- Slaunger (talk) 07:43, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I did not see you already posted at the VP. -- Slaunger (talk) 07:49, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Users are not the ones with the problems understanding things. -- carol (talk) 08:15, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Category:Flora of Subarctic America

Hello; I noticed you created this category. When you create new categories (or upload files, or whatever), please try to include as many relevant categories as you can think of. You placed this in Category:Subarctic America, which covers the 'Subarctic America' part, but there is no 'parent' category for the 'flora of' part. In this case I think the best category here is Category:Plants by region, which I have added.

Nearctic is the parent of that category. -- carol (talk) 23:43, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, could I request that you make another archive (or top up an existing one)? Thanks. Richard001 (talk) 23:20, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

If you want to populate the Flora by region categories, by all means do that. I have been busy building up to Category:Ecozones which is my area of interest. The divisions I am using are a morphing between Ecozones and also a paper that was made by a bunch of plant people somewhere that had an interesting attribute to it of "making sense". On the outside chance that your "Flora by region of" category is interested in different divisions than all of the maps I have made and all of the image maps I have made that are being put into place to manage the navigation in the tree for the Ecozones, please try to be respectful that it is a fairly well built tree, that is built with recommendations from people trying to locate plants on maps and me within a seemingly abandoned category tree that kind of existed here. -- carol (talk) 23:41, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

botanical literature

We need a category for this; can you think of anything better than Category:Botanical literature? Hesperian 03:50, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Works for me. -- carol (talk) 05:40, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

I just found out we have Category:Botany books; that will do for now. Hesperian 23:36, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Creation of species/variety pages

Please don't move species galleries to variety or subspecies, even if they are exclusively one variety or subspecies.[14] Illustrations of other varieties or subspecies will be added later. If you disagree with the guidance of COM:TOL#Articles please discuss there. Currently, it reads, "Each species gets its own article, titled with the scientific name." Walter Siegmund (talk) 04:17, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I was apologizing for that when I saw it in my watchlist here. I can retype it all here if you need that. -- carol (talk) 04:19, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Also, it is kind of late to be seeing that link to WP:TOL, but thanks anyways. I will not interfere with any of the species galleries in the future; and I guess that I will need to trust that there will not be any interference with the species categories in the future? -- carol (talk) 04:23, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

You, or any of my fellow editors, may bring my edits that are inconsistent with Commons policies and guidance to my attention and I hope you will do so. It is most helpful when you provide diffs. It wouldn't surprise me that there are many to criticize in my edit history. But, I try to learn from my errors. I hope that I've corrected most, but I'm sure many remain.

You are welcome to work on species galleries, but do read COM:TOL first please. To be clear, it is COM:TOL, not WP:TOL, that I cited above. Best wishes, Walter Siegmund (talk) 04:49, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I am mostly interested in including them into the species categories as I make them. (evolution of my species:) I started working here with the classic skin and it puts the categories prominently on the pages (usually categories) that I am looking at. There is some rule somewhere that a category should not exist in a parent category and a subcategory and that makes some sense, I don't think it makes so much sense for galleries though. Including the gallery into the category I made, occasionally I included a gallery that was superior to the category I had made for the species and on other occasions it was a pasted list of images. I let the gallery speak for themselves and merely include them. I started trying to get Category:Asteraceae into subfamily and tribe categories -- I am all over the place now and there is some argument between the two systems that I am perhaps not treading lightly enough on.

I was told by some one at English wikipedia Plant Project that Asteraceae was simple. I will let that be at that statement as it was stated....

User:Kilom691 one time was following me making gallery for every category that I made. It stressed me. Later in an exchange on that talk page, this user expressed an interest in making the gallery with only the really good images. Now that the collection here is growing (for instance, I have grabbed whatever images I could find that were licensed to use to populate a subject here) this might be a nice way for things to go. -- carol (talk) 05:07, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Another interesting situation was with User:Finavon who was cropping borders from images and also using a white point color correction on the flora images if they needed it at the same while. I like the categories for the amateurs like me and the people who are actually helping (and not amateur botanists) and the galleries for people who are not such amateurs. It would also be nice if (as the arguments about the upperlevel classification of these genus and species) a more than amateur person could fill in the parts of the templates I have made at Category:Plant Navigation Templates are accurate. My work is suffering from some paste errors, some which are probably my own and some that might not be mine.

I became interested in this when I started to notice that after reading what I consider to be a good article at English wikipedia, two clicks and I found myself into a wasteland or image dump when I would have liked to look at more. Later, I learned about the commons link to the galleries, but I usually clicked on an image -- that is a report from a reader and a little before I became such an avid user. There is a problem about having the wrong species name to an image of a plant, but this problem is not isolated to either category of gallery.

Anyways, I try, when I write a plant article at English wikipedia, make the images I use look nice with the information template and a good description and things like that. And the category look good. If there is a mature and non-neglected gallery, I put a link to that as well at the article -- I might have not always been so good about that though as the environment has been somewhat combative. Some of the originally cited articles are being uploaded to wikisource -- even when they don't have much that is interesting within them, I have found that the whole title put in the reference adds enough words that occasionally, the article comes close to qualifying word-countwise for a Did You Know article without actually including any text. en:Brodiaea coronaria is almost an example of that.

The wiki are all supposed to work together, I think.... -- carol (talk) 05:42, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry you were stressed by the actions of another editor. Please bring problems with other users to their attention on their talk page, or on your talk page when you are having a dialog with them. If that doesn't resolve the problem, a post to COM:AN may help. Otherwise, a criticism by name of another editor on your talk page may create or sustain ill feeling with no constructive result. Above, I think you can make your points without mentioning specific editors by name.

That is solid work on en:Brodiaea coronaria. It looks good too. Thank you for bring that to my attention. Commons_talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life includes a discussion of the organization of gallery pages that you might find helpful. You might want to start a new discussion on that project page after you've reviewed that material. COM:TOL recommends categorization of gallery pages at the family or genus level, I think. Walter Siegmund (talk) 15:47, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Maps

Some time, can we talk about maps? -- carol (talk) 09:56, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, when you want. Sémhur 10:07, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I have been working on Category:Ecozones. The information that has determined the divisions is a little from en:Ecozone and a little from http://www.tdwg.org/TDWG_geo2.pdf <-- the map information starts on page 121. I have been trying to use the system for locating plants and it works pretty well.

I started that because I want to make the creation of range maps for plant and animal articles easier to make -- that was a long time ago though, heh. Category:Afrotropic was starting to look like something (last time that I looked at it). I am stuck though with Category:Palearctic due to the differences in size between some of the second level political divisions. I think that I split Russia into four on one of the maps -- it is a very sad attempt though, compared to other maps I have seen here.

The information about where plant and animal species tends to be gathered according to politically divided sections of this planet; even if the plants and animals don't live according to them.

On the world map, if a species is native to New Zealand and to an area which is part of Russia or China or the United States or Canada (the biggest problems with the world maps which are divided by levels of politics) the map looks kind of silly with all of Russia highlighted and is not that informative. It is easy to kind of make the area with a little experience with Inkscape or whatever application -- it ends up being like when I tried to divide Russia though and might look amateurish.

Can you help? -- carol (talk) 10:35, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

hmm... I am not sure to have understood your problem. I try : you have a map of Palearctic zone (or the world map), with a second level division, and you want to build an <imagemap>, with poly coordinates which matches with those level divisions. I'm right, or wrong ? Sémhur 13:15, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Very close (I think), I need a world map with some of the larger areas broken into the next level of political divisions (Russia, China, United States, Canada, Mexico, maybe Brazil and also Greenland -- which I did and is probably not too bad. And a map of that part of the earth that is in between England and Japan (which could be taken from the world map like I had). Europe is already into small enough pieces. The divisions I need are based on land area more than political level, I might not understand or use the terminology correctly. -- carol (talk) 02:45, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

I wish I could help, but...

I'm just really busy in "real life" this time of year. If there's something I can help you with, please let me know in the most direct language you can muster. While I do get a kick out of puzzles and word games, I really can't justify taking time away from the crops, goats, and other things this time of year. I'm also frankly dissapointed in your behavior on Wikipedia (you should have done more, rather than leaving it to me and a few others to apologize for you), so I'd appreciate it if you could just leave me be for a while. Sound OK? I'll have much more time to play come November :). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 23:46, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I am very jealous, I was a fairly good gardener. I am very very jealous, even. -- carol (talk) 00:33, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Please stay off my talkpage... I'm trying to do productive things, and getting 4 baffling messages from you while I'm trying to upload isn't helpful. I can arrange a forced wikibreak for you if you need some time to understand this. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 09:48, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Okay, but I was not playing so that might be a part of your bafflement and mine for what should have been a simple message of please unblock that other user. What will you start to play in November? Are you the owner of the user name Juiced lemon? -- carol (talk) 09:53, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

You know Carol, it's rather difficult to believe that you don't know what happened with JL, since you were leaving large numbers of messages on his talk page at the time. Since you seem to need a reminder, he was indef-blocked in December (by me), and the block will be lifted if/when he finds a mentor and/or agrees to some groundrules (similar to your situation on en.wp).

Please find something productive to do, or at least try to respect other people's desire to be productive. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:11, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Western Australia Biocountry

WTF does that mean? I'm sure I've never heard the term.

Biogeography is a very interesting area. I started some notes on the biogeography of W.A. at the other place, but the project lapsed.

Anyhow, long story short, W.A. is not a biogeographical unit. It is traditionally divided into three biogeographic regiosn: southwest, northern and eremaean. There is a finer scale division into phytogeographic districts, which are essentially the same as the IBRA regions, for which I have created maps.

Hesperian 06:40, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

The Australia category is very well covered. I have some problems with the TDWG scheme sometimes because they name some of their areas like "Brazil". I put Biocountry at the end of some of the problem names for their areas. Did you see that document? -- carol (talk) 06:46, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

http://www.tdwg.org/TDWG_geo2.pdf

maps start on page 121; Australia on 136 and 137 -- carol (talk) 06:47, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'm familiar with it.[15][16][etc] I just didn't realise that was what you were doing. The WGSRPD does not define ecoregions/bioregions; it proposes a database schema that compromises between biogeographic and political factors. Basically it recognises that people will want to record and query the flora of political national and/or subnational entities like Western Australia, even though that is nonsense from a biogeographical viewpoint. It is an eminently suitable source upon which to base a category structure, for flora anyhow.

I grant you that the TDWG's semantics for Western Australia is not the same as the Australian Government's semantics. But personally I don't think distinct category trees are warranted. For political purposes we treat Western Australia as politically defined; for biological purposes we treat it as defined by biologists; and both cases can happily coexist under Category:Western Australia.

Finally, it has been a while since I perused that document, and I don't want to download it on my current connection. Does it really use the term biocountry, or is that your own invention? If the former, do they really apply it to subnational entities?

Hesperian 11:53, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

I have been working with similar things for the whole world. Yes, they are different because what you are suggesting contains many many many other subcategories which are not related to the Ecology of an area. Subcategories which belong to the area and should not be removed; but I am working on things for plants and such and I am not going to start to try to divide the world into the portions the size of the ranges on your maps. I think I pulled the word Biocountry from that document. It is a morphing of two things though, the Ecozones which were almost abandoned and that document which you should have seen when I first saw it, I think. How long has it been since you were active with the Plant Project?

The media here portrays Australia to be somewhat free thinkers and a little chauvinistic, is that an accurate description? -- carol (talk) 12:01, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

How about you set up a Category tree that shows the Ecology of the world, Geography, Plants, Animals and get back to me with your recommendations? -- carol (talk) 12:06, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

When I do I certainly won't be taking a recommendation for exchange of data between regional herbaria, promoting it to a system of ecoregions covering all kingdoms of biota, and then confabulating a name to describe it. But I'm busy doing other stuff right now, so you just carry on. If you fuck it up, at least you can say that you fucked it up all on your own. Hesperian 12:35, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Do you have any idea...

...how this might have happened? --Dschwen (talk) 16:00, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

The image doesn't belong in both galleries? -- carol (talk) 21:37, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

There is no both in duplicate. Lycaon (talk) 21:47, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I see what the intenton was. However, the way the script currently works it stores the category based on the filename (one filename one category). --Dschwen (talk) 21:53, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Over-hinted I thought that the day that QICBot duplicated the images at that location was actually a hint to the answer to my previous question of how to put a single image into two or more galleries (subject and technical is the usual case for this). It is a week where I am questioning if productive information is being freely exchanged; please forgive the perception of a hint.

It could solve that question/problem though, eh? -- carol (talk) 22:27, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

It made sense as the way to handle it. Could the images be stored in an array for their intended gallery instead? It sounds like a little bit of a rewrite though.... -- carol (talk) 22:31, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Infinite Block of Juiced lemon

Hi Carol, thank you for your concern regarding Juiced lemon. I'll will forward your message to him by email. He was blocked on December 6th, 2007 (see here) by SB Johnny who did this on his own without seeking consensus first. However, his decision remained undisputed under his admin colleagues (see here) even if some of them felt somewhat uneasy. I tried some negotiations on back channels which were unsuccessful. Too bad that Juiced lemon can no longer contribute to the category system of this project. Regards, AFBorchert (talk) 19:58, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

The block message on the talk page said May 2008. -- carol (talk) 22:30, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

I know, this message was added in May 2008 but the block is much older, i.e. from December 6th, 2007, see the block log. SB Johnny didn't close the talk page immediately as he hoped that Juiced lemon would follow his terms. In that case, Johnny would have unblocked him. Hence, it wasn't a permanent ban but an indefinite block which effectively became an infinite block. --AFBorchert (talk) 23:06, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Not cool

This comment suggesting another user should "get [their] mom or dad or care-keeper" was not what I meant by talking it out without making it personal. If you can't discuss a simple disagreement over grammar with another user without resorting to that sort of ad hominem sniping sarcasms, take a break for the day or at least for a cup of tea. I've enjoyed discussing various topics with you, so I very sincerely regret having to issue this caution, but I will not tolerate anyone taking that tone with my fellow contributors. To avoid digging a deeper hole, I ask that you please do not respond to this, at least not right away. Just take a moment to think about it. If you still feel the need to respond, I'm watching your talk page, but know that I'm not looking for excuses or apologies. We all lose our temper or make jokes in bad taste sometimes. What I'm looking for a change in tone, and that usually doesn't happen without a moment of contemplation. —LX (talk, contribs) 07:57, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

This is a brown square.

I did not intend that the first comment get taken so wrongly. I think that the situation has actually been over-thought (over intellectualized) into difficulty (and/or things for the bots to do) and I was a little offended that the opinion that what English wikipedia does is what should happen here. I am pretty sure that Polish wikipedia has some horrible mangling of the word Australia on its pages, for example. I was very personally offended that my work was undone without mentioning it. It is cool writing given the circumstances. The conversation started by me saying that it is my opinion that the original decision was made for reasons that are pandering to a 20% (or less) who want to make trouble.

Do you like that image of the brown square there?

Define "not cool"? Also, I am not really in the mood to asskiss right now, I would rather have sympathy for speedy categorization of things, if anyone asks or cares. -- carol (talk) 08:08, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Surrealisme is great in paintings, conflict generating in conversations. --Foroa (talk) 08:28, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

I had several cool discussion when the work I had done was mangled without telling me within a few hours though. I took it public when it became clear to me that the incident was not going to be discussed, cool, hot, direct, semi-direct. What temperature would "no discussion" be rated with? The action was being done without discussion and continued to happen without discussion. Please do look at the histories of the files. Where I live and have been for the last several decades, it is not names that hurt but the actual actions. Is it different where you are? Apologies for things that should not have been a problem are quite often a problem as well; I don't like to need them, myself. -- carol (talk) 08:37, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Still not cool (please take it slow)

Carol, being civil means treating others respectfully... even the guy you're disagreeing with is (like you) here to help improve the wiki and its organization. Please make good use of the preview button, and read your comments carefully. When previewing, put yourself in the place of the person you're addressing, and if you might interpret a comment as insulting of dismissive, either reword it or just don't hit save. It doesn't matter if you think someone is over-reacting, your only responsibility is not to feed into the over-reaction and make it worse. Next time, you'll be blocked for a few days, because it's really becoming disruptive now. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 09:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Just to be clear about what you are saying -- it is more respectful to delete the work of others and to not communicate about it than it is to not delete the work of others and to ask with various degrees of intensity that they stop? -- carol (talk) 10:05, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Please be very precise about the expected behavior from all of the participants here. -- carol (talk) 10:08, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Whether or not other people are being respectful is not something you can control. Not responding with insults (either direct or backhanded) is in your control. Content disputes are just content disputes: they'll go on until a compormise or consensus is reached. However, name calling and insults don't help solve them, and will not be tolerated. Just lay out your reasons for doing it your way, and explain why you think it's better than his way (and do this in a way that doesn't involve questioning the intelligence of the other side). Clear enough? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:23, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

This was started by a person so thoughtful that a deletion template was removed while in the thrall of reversion. Be careful that all attempts to communicate are deemed "uncool" and not communicating while being aggressive begins to be considered to be "cool".

Trying to communicate should be cool. Actually, trying to communicate is cool. That is if the definition for cool is a good thing to do. If it defines "productive fun". Maybe we use the word differently. -- carol (talk) 12:25, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Category:Northern Territory

Page has been protected, seek an agreement on the talk page(s) instead of edit warring. Finn Rindahl (talk) 06:19, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Attempts at communicating fail. It would be nice if you could have put the protection onto Category:Flora of Northern Territory and Category:Fauna of Northern Territory when this happened to the work I was doing. I have no hidden agenda and I have no need to make other category work like the one I am making does. I do like to see the example of what happens to civility at the only means to communicate I had left.

How do you think they use the word "civil" in Australia? -- carol (talk) 06:31, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I have no clue if the word "civil" has different meanings in Australian/American/British English. I do see that you have made a lot of comments lately that have been more disruptive than helpful. Please, take a step back&calm down before you are forced to take a commons-break. Finn Rindahl (talk) 06:38, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Does that mean that I should talk to people who are making something and tell them that I am going to be changing it? Or is communicating before making changes the wrong thing? I tried it both ways. Neither seems to be acceptable to the people who started the reversion and template pasting. How to make something stop and not be disruptive? -- carol (talk) 07:06, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Being bold is good. Doing things that are inconsistent with established conventions used in a lot of categories without changing them all (and major changes like that are usually best discussed first) just to make a point is not good. I'm rather confident in guessing you would not have tried to rename Category:Northern Territory to Category:The Northern Territory if it weren't for the edit war over the definite article in categorising its flora and fauna. Civil is, in my experience, used much the same way in Australia as in other English-speaking countries, although perhaps prefixed with "bloody" a bit more often. —LX (talk, contribs) 08:09, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to go over that. All I am able to do is ask that edits to what I am doing "please cease"; it is kind of easy to just sit and wait for a version of the asking to kind of seem offensive. Not only did I not want to change Northern Territory, I did not change "the" edits to Nature of category, but it is a real pain to use that way. I suspect that it is a pain to use if you are typing the location, pasting a list of the location and writing software that directs phish into the category.

Also, I am really bored discussing things which seem obvious :)

-- carol (talk) 08:49, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Flora/Plants of

Hi Carol, This thread has not yet (and seems unlikely to) come to a clear consensus. I think you could help getting there though if you could provide us with an example of how you see the eco-region categories could be merged into the existing category structure? It may be evident for you, but I will be frank and admit, that it is not that evident for me. You have recently enquired several users concerning their understanding and/or intelligence. I will gladly admit that my intelligence level is probably 10 dB lower than yours, so I'll appreciate an simple-minded explanation for the slow thinking user. Preferably short, concise and with a specific example. Thank you. -- Slaunger (talk) 10:17, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't think your intelligence is any different than mine. I don't think that the existing structure can merge and I am confused that people think it needs to. The Ecozones category contains Geography, Plants and Animals. Flora of and Fauna of was a way to get all of the different instances of categories from everywhere and put them there.

I think that photographers might say "I took this photograph of this flower while in Austria" and place it in "Flora of Austria", they won't even have to identify it and determine if it is native or not; having it put where it was found growing should at least be helpful if anyone wants to find it to identify it.

On the otherhand, I think that people writing botany articles about a species which is native to Austria might understand to make the species a subcategory of "Flora of Austria" or if it is native to all of Middle Europe, then subcategorize it into "Flora of Middle Europe". Unlike the people who maintain the "Plants of" categories, the subcategorization of native species will be encouraged. Even with the first few articles that I wrote, it was clear that the species were native to some areas and introduced to areas.

I don't think that there needs to be any merging. If people want to clean up the Plants of categories and Trees of categories and let the Plants of category people know that they cannot remove species subcategories from them -- have at it.

I think that there needs to be a halt put on people who edit categories without mentioning it to the person/people who made the category less than a few hours before. I also learned some respect for the people who maintain the Plants of categories. Any species categories that I make will never be subcategorized there.

I never questioned your intelligence. You have always been communicative and discussions have gone well. I typically question intelligence levels when trying to initiate a conversation with anyone who is continuing to revert something I created without discussing it with me and even then, it is not an actual question, it is more like an expression of frustration. -- carol (talk) 10:35, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

The intelligence part was mostly to indicate that I would appreciate a straightforward, on-topic answer without the usual spin-offs in completely opposite directions making it difficult to keep a discussion on track. And I must say that your reply here seems much more understandable and useful than other recent contributions. So, I appreciate that;-)

I agree with you that there are different kinds of use cases for the categories depending on the individual users knowledge about botany. Personally I always try to organize my plant images such they are both categorized according to the region in which they were observed and associated with the relevant species gallery. Due to the recent always categorize discussion, in the future that will mean, that I (reluctantly) categorize to the relevant species category. I have until know used a category like Category:Plants of Greenland to indicate the regional origin of each specific image. It seems like other users like you and Ies rather would like to use the Plants of/Flora of type of categories as placeholders for species articles. Is that correctly understood? Or is that the way you distinguish between plants of and flora of? That the "Flora of" cats should be species placeholders, whereas the "Plants of" should be image placeholders? I am confused about this.

Much of the science that I saw of botany had to do with the native status and it was interesting how some of the species migrated. Everything from "introduced" to "invasive" seems to have to do with money and politics. The category for Plants of Greenland is a special case among the Plants of category for other areas. For some reason it was left alone. -- cms

I am not interested in interfering with the people who maintain all of the other Plants of category in which are not made the way that Ies and WayneRay insisted on making them. I suspect they have a good thing going as I observed from their aggressive actions disembling categories which were subcategorized into them. -- cms

I am personally concerned about making all the associations between species and regions (be it political or ecological) as it seems for me like encyclopedical information, which is better maintained in the Wikipedia articles. Having the species association to regions on Commons is for me redundant work, which increases the overall maintenance work for keeping the associations updated. The two worlds will always be inconsistent and resources used for keeping it right will be split instead of focusing the energy on maintaining this information in a single place. Having plant images categorized to the regios where they were taken is on the other hand not information which needs to be maintained as it is static and indisputable information.

I liked to work on both though. Writing the article and making the category while the information was in my mind. Or finding citations for the article (several that I did not write but were filled with information from who knows where?) and cleaning up the commons instance of them. Also, making it easier for others to upload into the category. I also think that a collection of flora for areas is easier to find things in. I am using maps made by people who think about these things as well. -- cms

If users really insist to do these species-region associations I think that should be done in special categories dedicated for the purpose. like, e.g., Category:Plants species endemic to Austria. By keeping such clean categories, the maintenance of these could also easier be bot-assisted in a smart future.

For as many articles as I have authored or found citations for, I am unclear what the word "endemic" means. Do you know what that word means? -- cms

In continuation of this species-region topic, I am concerned about the specific example you give with categorizing a species endemic to Middle Europe to that higher level category (only?) as that means it will not be in Category:Flora of Austria, which is I think misleading when you are looking for species in Austria.

It is not a perfect system. It is to the best of my experience optimal for photographers who know where they took a photograph of a flower and for people who are authoring an article on any of the other wiki to make the category look nice and locate the species in the Ecozone tree. Optimal is not perfect. -- cms

You mention that you are confused (there is a lot of confusion around it seems) why a merge of the eco-zone work would be warranted. Well I do not know if we are speaking about the same thing. But it is my opinion that it should be possible to browse to the relevant ecoregion from a plant image, provided it is properly categorized and that this should be reversible in a pretty clear manner.

Is the problem that Ies and WayneRay do not want to be left alone to maintain the Plants categories (with the exception of the Plants of Greenland category)? There is no "merge". If one day, I see that all of the Plants of categories have disappeared and have found themselves and their painfully and pain-giving galleries merged into Flora of, it should not change anything I have done. -- cms

That requires that there is a link path between the two, and I fear this could easily be broken is there is both a "Flora of" and a "Plants of" category. It appears to me that you are in favor of "Flora of" categories because - out of convenience - that makes it possible for you to avoid interaction with "Plants of.." users, who apparently have different objectives (Are these the same few users you have mentioned before, and exactly what is the difference in opinion between the "Plants of" editors and your goals with the "Flora of" categories)?

It is difficult to know what the problem is when the only communication for months and months and months is to have recently made categories desembled. If they tell you what motivated them to do that without communication, do let me know. -- cms

For me it seems far from logical to maintain parallel "Plants of" and "Flora of" categories. Which of the two should not-so-regular users use when uploading new images?

Good question. I can't answer that. If they make a gallery and put it into a plants of category, it is in a Flora of subcategory. If they put it into a Flora of category, it is there. If they simply put it into a species subcategory then it is there. I tried to optimize, I have tried to be nice about it, I have tried to think of how this would be easier if I were uploading an image and wanted it to be quickly located in the correct areas. All of the maintenance problems associated with galleries are also associated with categories. -- cms

I am not going to do anything to maintain the Plants of categories. Consider that, it is a simple solution. -- cms

It would be vandalism though wouldn't it? If I were to start to remove galleries from their categorization -- it would be vandalism. I have had my work vandalized recently. It is interesting how the vandalization is encouraged and attempts to communicate are discouraged. -- cms

I like the report that Ies and WayneRay needed the images to be put into species subcategories so that they knew what images should go into the galleries. I find that to be so void of logic that I do not believe that the actual people said that. -- cms

- Slaunger (talk) 11:28, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Commented within ending with --cms -- carol (talk) 12:16, 7 July 2008 (UTC)