This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hello all, this is a one-time post to the English-language Commons village pump about the proposed structured data on Commons project. If you're interested in subscribing to future editions, you can add your name to the subscribers.
With this newsletter, the Structured data team plans on keeping you informed of technical progress, events, and communications to talk about the project, and continued information on how you can participate. This newsletter will be sent approximately every two weeks, and future editions will be translatable prior to publication. If you're new to Wikidata and want more information about how it works in relation to Wikimedia Commons, you can read an introduction to Wikidata for Commons being drafted.
Tech and design
The software development for this process is still in the planning phases. The idea is to have some functional prototyping done for experimentation and feedback by the end of the year.
The initial roadmap for development has been posted on Commons. The roadmap is a rough outline and is open to iterations as the team learns where and when to focus its energies.
There is a page set up for design ideas about what structured data could potentially look like.
There was a week-long meeting between the Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team, the Wikidata team, and community members, held in Berlin, Germany, at the office of Wikimedia Deutchland on October 6-10. You can read an overview of the event in on this page on Commons. There are also plenty of pictures available on Wikimedia Commons.
If you would like to read more detail about what was discussed, there are etherpads of notes taken for each day of the event.
The MrMetadata tool on labs that will identify files on your wiki(s) that need information templates added.
A hub has been launched to facilitate communication and documentation for this work.
There is a frequently-asked questions page that is finishing drafting and will need translated. Keep an eye out for when it is ready if you are interested in translating.
There will be active organization of the Get involved page as community participation is further organized. There will be work groups, similar to specific Wikiprojects, dedicated to particular aspects of structured data like licensing presentation, design, API performance, and even helping out with this newsletter and other community communications.
There will be much more information and activities around the proposal to develop structured data on Wikimedia Commons. This project is a major undertaking and an important step as the chief provider, repository, and curator of media for Wikimedia projects.
Thank you for your participation in such an extensive project, let me know if you're interested in participating in this newsletter. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 04:49, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
I would think it is an en.wiki problem. If a wiki has duplicates on stuff on Commons the normal procedure is to delete their local copy unless there is a specific reason not to, but not much to be done from this end. If a name conflicts (ie same name, different content), again it is the local.wiki copy that needs to be renamed, rather than all other wikis having to be updated if you change the Commons copy. --Tony Wills (talk) 19:43, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
FYI at this moment there are:
4,520 files on en.wiki which are identical (by comparing SHA1 values) to files with the same name on Commons. The query took 1 min 50 sec.
5,234 files on en.wiki with the same name on Commons which are not identical (by SHA1 values).
1,657 files on en.wiki with identical SHA1 values but different names on Commons. Perhaps the most interesting cases? I have included a sample of 20 of these files in a table below.
I'm quite busy with other stuff, and Yamaha5's webtool above is pretty handy, but if anyone would like me to pull one of these full lists (or a more specific type of list) for them, I'll be happy to dump a report on-wiki for you to work on as this part of the work is relatively easy compared to deciding what to do about it.
Addendum/wrinkle One last thought, there are multi-way comparisons to be done, for example I make it that there are today 5,415 files which have different names but are identical on enwiki and ruwiki, but do not exist on commons; similarly there are 1,498 files which are identical but under different names on frwiki and enwiki but do not exist on commons. If we could find easy ways to filter these we might not only find out which proportions could reasonably be moved to commons and used across all other projects, but perhaps provide motivation to find a better way to harmonize these assets and flag their cross-existence (such as when uploading a new file to a wiki), even when not suitable for commons. --Fæ (talk) 20:38, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Files on Commons get deleted, without reference to the wikis that are using them. Notably those that are duplicates might well get deleted after being moved.
Some wikis prefer to keep a local protected copy of high profile pictures.
They aren't necessarily eligible for Commons, just because they are hosted here.
I hate to be a pain, but I need to remind everyone that extensive restoration is more than enough to gain copyright in the UK. See Commons:Threshold_of_originality#United_Kingdom and remember that this was granted copyright protection. (See [1][2])
I'm not a bear when it comes to things. If you see something where you think that my licensing is substantially hindering reuse, poke me and I'll look it over.
But don't violate my copyright by changing licenses on it without asking me. That's not just rude, it's technically illegal, and it's particularly galling when someone changes the licenses without even telling me they are. (I shan't link to examples to spare blushes). Adam Cuerden (talk) 21:23, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
(Just a question, if I use an IP from the UK, does UK rules apply for me as well? hmmm...) There is one example of this (redicules) thing on my user talk page... Josve05a (talk) 22:51, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
The logo was deleted here in 2012, and the US {{PD-textlogo}} variant on Wikipedia makes sense. The edit history on Wikipedia does not contain Adam Cuerden. IOW, I don't get what you are trying to say. Fixing an obviously wrong license would be okay (and can go wrong), but an intentional misrepresentation is, as you said, illegal. –Be..anyone (talk) 06:47, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
While I'm open to relicensing my work as less restrictive given good reasons - and most of it I just release into the public domain anyway - you can't just change copyright status on something without asking. Adam Cuerden (talk) 12:41, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the prompt. Unfortunately this is an area of derived works that we need to keep on educating users for. Perhaps you would consider an illustrated case book, or a short screen-capture video, to help newer users understand the issue. I believe it would be fair to respect the attribution licence for all volunteer created restorations/derived works regardless of the country this was happening in and if this is an ongoing slow burn issue, we probably should try to establish a consensus for it as best practice in order to stave off future changes, or indeed pointless reverts. --Fæ (talk) 12:58, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
I've considered video before, but it's hard to know what to include - raw footage of a restoration could easily be about 20 hours if it's going to be something sufficiently damaged to warrant a copyright in the first place - "I removed 10 dust spots" does not warrant such; "I used creativity to overcome major challenges in restoring the image" probably does. I'd also need to do a lot of pre-planning, to make sure that any copyrighted elements were de minimus. Luckily, I use GIMP, which would help, but I'd need to keep from having too much view of copyrighted software, desktop backgrounds, web pages, etc. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:38, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Conversely, if the permissions situation for an image is non-trivial, it is a good idea for the uploader to explain it rather than just slap on a template. - Jmabel ! talk16:08, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
One doesn't expect to have one's work randomly relicensed, especially when the edit summary makes it perfectly clear they knew it was a restoration. I don't want to be too aggressive about copyright, so try not to use "Grarh! I have a copyright! GRAR!!!" language too much. You'll note that in the example, it even said "is requested for this restoration", which was carefully-chosen wording - I have about six levels, from release into public domain to "Please give the restorationist credit" to an {{Attribution}} template, to a full-on copyright claim. This is because I want my work reused, but also would rather like to be credited, especially for the most difficult restorations, and thus try very hard to balance requests to work [with a few exceptions: Anything civil rights related, no matter how hard, will get a PD release from me to encourage reuse, for instance.] Adam Cuerden (talk) 16:33, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
November 01
What can I do about rudeness from another contributor?
Hi.
I have recently been contributing to the domain of woodworking and have had a couple of very unfruitful interactions with Andy Dingley. He's extremely rude in his edit messages which were the only way that he communicated with him. I've left a message on his talk page| but that obviously did nothing to defuse the situation. It looks to me like it is overkill to start an administrator's request about this but I'd like advice on how to treat such situations. What did I do wrong if anything? Badzil (talk) 21:33, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
The category planers, jointers and thicknessers is an awkward sub-category of fixed woodworking machinery. It contains four sub-categories with much overlap in their definition and a significant transatlantic variation in both their common use and in terminology (the US favour separate planers (which they call jointers) and thicknessers, whilst Europe favours combination planer-thicknesser machines and separate jointers (which are too narrow to use as planers)). Descriptive notes have been on these categories, and the over-arching category, for some years. As each of these groups also has a strong primary relationship with woodworking machinery, the are categorised there too.
Badzil rocks up and proceeds to start dismantling the lot (undiscussed, of course) by redirecting the categories into a pile of mush. As is long recognised, this type of category redirect is a serious problem because they 'bots then start to rearrange the members in a way that is difficult to roll back afterwards (as there is no clear single user edit history as a log to rollback). When reverted, he repeats this, pausing only to whine pitifully.
Yet again, we have a newbie editor who has read One Thing, and that's COM:OVERCAT. The gospel that any subtleties in categorisation of the awkward real world can be replaced by a simple interpretation and a very small Perl script.
Badzil is also categorising images like this File:Makita KP0800 Planer.jpg into the same tree. These aren't even woodworking machinery: it is long established the "machinery" is the terminology for fixed machines, "power tools" for the portable hand held.
If Badzil doesn't want his ears burned, then don't make bad edits like this and then don't keep repeating them when they're reverted. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:01, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
I wish that you had given this explanation instead of being directly very offensive about my edits. I understand that they might not have been the most appropriate, but they made sense to me at the time. I also wished that you didn't consider "newbie" editors (also wondering how you came to the conclusion that I was a newbie) and that you didn't make it your mission to "burn" other contributors' ears. I recently restarted contribution to Wikimedia projects and find exactly the same atmosphere that made me leave before. It's really sad.Badzil (talk) 23:48, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
No need to hop around, you can find nearly 10,000 uploaded photographs of toilets, poop and urine recycling, urinals, latrines, bottles of urine (both fresh and old), dried faeces, sewage digesters, urine-based fertilisation, etc. at Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA). For years folks have said that Commons is full of this stuff, now you can point them to plenty to reuse.
These are the product of a network of worthy sustainable sanitation projects worlwide, and this upload was suggested to me at the request of James Heilman from WikiProject Medicine.
Enjoy having a surf through this big pile, and if you have a moment to spare please improve the categorization, descriptions or rotate any image that might need it. Don't forget to wash your hands! --Fæ (talk) 00:38, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Map tagging campaign fully underway
The campaign to find all the maps in the million images released onto Flickr by the British Library is now well and truly underway. (For background, see this week's Signpost).
Thanks to a sterling overnight effort by User:Daniel Mietchen already 2,995 new maps had been found and tagged, with 19.5% of the target books examined by 7am UTC this morning.
A huge thank-you to everybody who has been helping with this (just look at the Special:Related Changes logs here and here), and let's see just how many we can find by 2pm on Monday, when our good friends Ben O'Steen and Mahendra Mahey of the British Library go on stage at the BL Labs big annual symposium to set out all that's been achieved with the #BL1million this year.
In a separate development, User:Metilsteiner (upload log) has just created the 500th book category of images uploaded from the collection (diff), a heroic almost single-handed work over the last 10 months.
to see just how many more maps and ground plans we can get found and tagged on Flickr, and checked off from our indexes here on Commons by Monday afternoon, ready for properly categorised upload to Commons in the new year.
I am trying to find out the photografer of an sailship picture on a postcard and trying to date the picture. On the back is the mention Verslag: Julius Simonsen oldenburg. when I check in google and the Commons it seems to be a postcard editor with a long history, so I suppose the photograph is anonymous. The postcard however is posted at 21-2-1944 Swinemunde in the middle of the war (going badly for the Germans)so I suppose the picture was taken before the war. The postcard is of sailing three mast big ship sailing past a ligthship.Smiley.toerist (talk) 13:55, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Oldenburg was purchased by Finland and renamed Suomen Joutsen in 1931. Before 1922 the ship was named Laënnec. That would give a date range between 1922 and 1931. MKFI (talk) 07:39, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
It is a German postcard, showing the tall ship Horst Wessel (left) and the lightship Kiel (background right). The postcard was published by several publishers; compare for instance [3]. The photographer was Ferdinand Urbahns. Although it's a little bit unclear whether the photographer was the father or the son[4] I suspect that it was the son. Ferdinand Urbahns junior died 1978, so this is still copyrighted in Germany and will remain so until the end of 2048. (And even if the father had been the photographer, the image would still be in copyright until December 31 of this year.) The Horst Wessel was commissioned in late 1936; a colorized version of this photo was sold by a German newspaper for a collector's album in 1939.[5] All in all I suspect that Urbahns senior may have been already a bit old and most probably his son took this picture. Lupo07:46, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
Look closely, one is a Commons:gallery and one is a category. Categories are used to sort and catalogue files. Galleries are used to present them, thematically, chronologically, as a narrative or a mix. With categories with few files categories and galleries may look much the same, but for example in this case there are some 185 files in the category; with a gallery you can choose the best of these images.--KTo288 (talk) 15:49, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for your answer, but now I'm puzzled: How come the link to the category from w:Goldfrapp leads directly to the Gallery and not the whole Category? While the link from w:he:גולדפראפ leads to the whole Category. Liadmalone (talk) 23:24, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
When you put the little link at the bottom of an article, "Wikimedia Commons has media related to Goldfrapp", you have a choice of whether to link to the gallery or the category. One wiki chose the gallery, the other the category. Delphi234 (talk) 03:37, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
Weird transclusion-induced slow-down
What's going on here?
I had a big page with lots of templates on it, but it was okay, everything rendered down to the bottom. (old version).
I broke the page into transcluded sub-pages, diff. Now the renderer falls over two thirds of the way down.
Without having looked at the code, is it possible that what's going on is the following?
I can imagine that each time the renderer hits a template or transclusion, it needs to check whether anything has altered in the parameters or in the wikitext of the template or transclusion, that would invalidate its cached version of the output.
It seems to me that when I've split the big page into subpages, it may now be doing this twice. First to see whether the whole page needs to be regenerated it's checking all the templates (and all of their templates) for change. Then when it's rendering the page, for each transcluded chunk, is it possible it is running that whole same check all over again, this time to render the sub-page?
(Rather than forcing the sub-page to re-render in the first stage if it needs to, then knowing that all the sub-pages are then clean, when it comes to do the final build of the end page).
What it's doing at the moment cannot be right can it? And on the face of it must be costing the WMF and its servers huge numbers of unnecessary CPU cycles?
Is this a known perennial? Or can anybody shed some light on why this weirdness occurs and seems to be allowed to continue?
Interesting - never seen it do this with transcluded subpages before (but then, it's unusual to have template-heavy transclusions like this). Andrew Gray (talk) 19:07, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, @Ruslik0: the enwiki note and bugzilla report are very informative. It seems one issue is the total length of text PHP has to copy. Another layer of transclusion means another step of copying, hence why it gets pushed over the transclusion limit. Jheald (talk) 07:29, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
There's a link on User:MiszaBot to a help page on Wikipedia. I think the configuration has to start immediately before the content (same idea as here), otherwise the Bot doesn't know what to do. –Be..anyone (talk) 12:26, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Meh. If you want Commons to be dominated by North American culture and alienate others, presumably because most Wikimedia Foundation employees are based there, then chose "Gray". If you believe Commons is an international project, choose "Grey". --Fæ (talk) 15:05, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
I want neither. I want (and I suppose we all do want) terminological stability and coherence, the specific language in use for it being transparent. English was “chosen” for Commons on practical grounds, so we should demand it bend a bit to live up to that, even if we have to incurr in dialectological, glottohistorical, etymological, or orthographic blunders which would be rightfully unnaceptable in the English Wikipedia, where the intrincacies and complexities of English are not a hindrance but a delight. -- Tuválkin✉18:33, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
As a dictionary will tell you, grey is the British and gray is the US variant. As Gray is also a physical unit and as gray even on :en redirects to grey, grey seems to be the better choice. --Túrelio (talk) 18:48, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Out of interest, here's how the 906 categories in Commons with Grey or Gray in them (as individual words) break down:
How to handle new files missing information template
It seems to me that first step towards Commons:Structured data is to have information about source, author, license , etc. for each file and to have it in a standard machine-readable format provided by Infobox templates. Many files on Commons are missing Template:Information or other Infobox templates. A quick look at Special:MostTranscludedPages shows that we have 23,717,439 files with {{License template tag}}, 21,238,318 files with {{Information}} and 1,789,294 files with {{Infobox template tag}}. Which means that we should expect to find 23,717,439-21,238,318-1,789,294=689,827 wiles without any Infobox templates. Most of them are old from the era before such templates were introduced, some have syntax errors preventing proper parsing of the page, but we also have steady stream of new uploads without any infobox templates, see for example files from last week here. How shall we handle such files? I do not think we have a policy stating that files should have Infobox templates - should we? Many of the files do not have proper source and/or author information but it is hard to automatically figure out which one is missing what. Any ideas? --Jarekt (talk) 20:14, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
November 04
Charles Overstreet collection
I recently uploaded a few pictures that I found on Flickr from the Charles Overstreet collection of WW II photographs https://www.flickr.com/photos/imlsdcc/sets/72157622639536326 I am planning to upload a few more that illustrate various topics, but before I proceed, I wonder if we should have the entire collection on Commons. They appear to be licensed appropriately, with one exception, 4120672204, a photo of a newspaper clipping. Is there an activity on Commons that vets collections like this one?--agr (talk) 17:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
to follow the detail of the work everybody has been doing with the map tagging campaign (6200 tags now added, 67% still to go), plus any other changes like people noting new book categories for images they have uploaded.
One thing about the pages which aren't appearing in related changes is that the footer is wrapped in a <noinclude> ... </noinclude> pair, so that the footer is only visible when the sub-page is viewed on its own, not if it's part of the larger page.
But I do want to see changes for the sub-page -- which surely I ought to be getting, because it is included in the "What links here" list as a transclusion.
I think you just need to select the "Show changes to pages linked to the given page instead" checkbox (try [6]). The default is to give a list of changes to pages linked on the target page, not pages linked to the target page. For reference, Special:Recentchangeslinked and Special:WhatLinksHere get their information from the same source, so they should always be in sync. Bawolff (talk) 20:38, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
@Bawolff: Thanks, that makes sense. I'm so used to templates that are link bars to all the pages that they are used on, that I never noticed the difference. But "Linked to the given page" is exactly what I wanted. Thanks for straightening this out for me. Jheald (talk) 22:50, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Upload of previously deleted image
I'm trying to upload this image from the National Congress of Chile, but I can't because it was deleted before because it didn't have license. The image is under public domain in Chile (created in early XIX century). I would appreciate any help with this. Thanks. --Warko (talk) 17:19, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Hi community — this is just to inform you that I started a formal request to have CheckUser privileges removed from the account of Gmaxwell (talk·contribs) as result of inactivity for a period longer than one year. Your thoughts and opinions are, as always, warmly welcome and encouraged. Thank you for your time, odder (talk) 20:07, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
Hello. I just created Category:Bridge End townland, County Donegal Bridge End is also called Drummonaghan. The pictures in the category were taken at Drumadooey . GeoLocator shows a spot near Bridge End. I followed the information on en Wikipedia: en:List of townlands of County Donegal. Then I discovered the Category:Bridgend, County Donegal which seems more or less in the same area Bridgend(one word and only one e (Pen-y-Bont ar Ogwr). But the information in several languages says it is in Wales. The information in English that it is in County Donegal and no gaelic (?) name given. The pictures in that category were taken in County Donegal. If there is someone who knows if an Irish townland is a village or the difference between them and get the categorization right? Maybe the Category:Townlands of County Donegal should also be a sub-category of Category:Towns and villages in County Donegal. Traumrune (talk) 22:30, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
November 07
Sexual and Relationship Therapy journal - tables and figures
This journal article has useful figures on pages: 25 (table with simple text), 26 (Figure 2), 27 (Figure 3), and 28 (Table 2).
I was wondering if any of these could be uploaded here to Commons with a free-use license?
Specifically, if one could use their data to make their own figure or table, and then would that be free-use?
Thank you,
-- Cirt (talk) 02:36, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Raw facts or data are generally not copyrightable, but a specific presentation or analysis based on the facts is copyrightable. The illustrations couldn't be copied to Commons unless they're from an open-source journal (which doesn't seem to be the case)... AnonMoos (talk) 04:24, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
So I checked the only other one uploaded by that user and tagged it for flickr review as well: File:Lorde in Seattle 2013 - 2.jpg -- also now has problems there.
As a note, there is the User:KirkStauffer that has uploaded most in that collection, and those images are tagged on flickr with the right license (CC-BY). The ones above are updated by User:Kirkstauffer (differing by one letter), and that's the two in that collection that lack the right license. --Masem (talk) 05:13, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
I messaged Kirk Stauffer on Flickr about the Lorde images, and he replied: "I forgot that I used to contribute some my concert photos to Wikipedia! [7] Instead of sending you a photo to post, I’ll add it to my Wikipedia collection and link it to Lorde’s page. I should be able to get to that in a day or two – and will use a photo that’s similar to one of your selections." Perhaps he didn't upload to Commons one of the photos that he also uploaded to Flickr. Adabow (talk) 21:12, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
This has probably been asked an answered before, I just couldn't find anything - sorry for the probable duplication. There used to be a gallery function on the Uploads page, which showed you which of your pictures were being used in Wikipedia articles. What happened to that? Is there any way to check file usage now, for more than one image at a time? It's not essential, I just always thought that function was neat. Adam Bishop (talk) 16:25, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Looking for small tasks and mentors for Google Code-In - Got something in mind?
Hi everybody! Google Code-In (GCI) will soon take place again - a six week long contest for 13-17 year old students to contribute to free software projects. Wikimedia took part in 2013 already with great results. Tasks should take an experienced contributed about two-three hours (but "beginner tasks" are also welcome which are smaller) and can be of the categories Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance, and User Interface/Design.
Do you have an idea for a task and could you imagine mentoring that task?
For example, do you have something on mind that needs documentation, research, some gadget issues, or any templates to port to Lua on your "To do" list but you never had the time? If yes, please go to mw:Google Code-in 2014, check out the "Mentor's corner", and add your task there (adding until Sunday even if it's only a stub very appreciated - we can still polish them until December 1st when the contest begins)! And if something is unclear, please ask on the talk page. Happy to help! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Plant classification
A took 3 macro pictures of a plant on the rocks in South Korea. I have little botanical classification knowledge. The problem is dertermining the big classifications, where I only know the common names if any. If I get past that I can check the images of the individual species. Is there any instuction manual how to classify plants for dummies? I think a lot of uploaders have similar problems and dont bother to research the correct latin classification names.
Rose hips. I don't know which one, but you can put it here: Category:Rose hips
Rose hips
pretty sure that it is some kind of Tradescantia. Maybe put it here: Category:Unidentified_Tradescantia
Are fruits (classification Commons) by definition edible? The local geographic classification is confusing: I have created Dolsando (island). (Yeosu, Jeollanam-do) seems to be a city but it has islands and very rural areas.
Hi Smiley.toerist, identifying plants down to genus or even species level from one or two pictures can be extremely difficult to impossible even for experts. But if you know the common names, that's a good starting point. The one with the red fruits seems to be some kind of Rosaceae, but that's really just a guess. de:Wikipedia:Redaktion Biologie/Bestimmung is specialized on identifying biological species. It's a german page, but english shouldn't be too much of a problem there. There's also the french fr:Discussion Wikipédia:Atelier identification/Identification d'un être vivant, but that seems to have a much broader scope. Hope that helps a bit? --El Grafo (talk) 12:33, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. I was guessing at somewhat more than half that number. The link does not work for me. I wonder why "Contributions" or "Uploads" doesn't supply such information. Jim.henderson (talk) 21:41, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Counting things can take a long time if there's a lot of things to count. Generally MW avoids counting things that can be very big, particularly if a user could trigger the thing to be counted over and over again. Places where there are total counts (Contribs at Special:Preferences [The reason your total edit count isn't shown all over the place is political concerns over editcountis, see for example rev:41921. Of course mobile seems not to care about that], categories, and Special:Statistics) generally have the total written down somewhere, and simply add one to the total everytime you do an action. Bawolff (talk) 23:12, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanations; there's no need to keep careful track. "Three or four thousand" is the answer I've been giving this year, and the underestimate didn't much matter. "Six thousand" will do for the rest of the year, and "six or seven thousand" next year at current pace. Every month or two, someone asks. A few days ago User:OR drohowa (Dorothy Howard) asked, and it's the first time it was someone important enough to make it worth checking properly. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:15, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
November 08
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology journal cover
I was recently reading through commons policies, trying to see if there was any way I could upload this flickr image, which is of the new model of Spinosaurus displayed at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. As the model was not produced by a federal employee, I read through en:Copyright status of work by U.S. subnational governments. I the last section, Organized and Unorganized Territories, it mentions that US law does not state whether "organized" territories, such as Washington D.C., fall under section 105, which prevents copyright, and that it accepts registrations under its "rule of doubt". Does this mean that I can upload the image, as the sculptor was employed by Washington D.C. to create this model? IJReid (talk) 16:12, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
206.02(c) [District of Columbia.] Works of the government of the District of Columbia, as now constituted, are not considered U.S. Government works.
And as for D.C. being a place where copyrights don't exist, that's a nonstarter: Chapter 1100 (ELIGIBILITY), says:
1102.08 [United States.] The "United States," when used in a geographical sense, comprises the several States, the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the organized territories under the jurisdiction of the United States Government. 17 U.S.C. 101.
Since it was created in 2006, Commons:Photography critiques has never been a high-traffic page but lately it has been essentially dead. I think that's a shame because it could be a great place to get feedback on our images. A place for getting quick opinions on questions à la "do you think this image would stand a chance at FPC/QIC/VIC?" or "I can't decide which of these to enter at the Photo challenge – what do you think?" A place for prolonged discussions about details and techniques. A friendly place to learn from each other. A place for constructive criticism without the need to decide for Support or Oppose.
I've tried to make the page look less abandoned and more welcoming by re-activating automatical archiving and giving it a new header (improvements welcome!). The only thing that's missing now to get things running again is people using the page. I hope that once we have a bit more activity, it'll pop up on the watchlists more often and make its way back to people's minds. So if you have any image that could be discussed there, please don't hesitate to add it to the page – and if you don't, maybe at least consider to add the page to your watchlist. Any ideas on how to improve the page are of course very much welcome here.
It's starting to look much better already, but it could still benefit from more examples to have something to talk about in the initial phase. Come on people, don't be shy! --El Grafo (talk) 15:07, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Anyhow the (loooong) template syntax on the image description is broken. I.e. no license is displayed anymore. It must have happened during this edit. But I can't find it. Can somebody else have a look and fix the syntax? Thx. --JuTa20:11, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
Hi Folk, I photographed a vintage car run, I'm not all that good at vehicle model identifications request help with identifying each vehicle then adding them into the vehicle categories. All images can be found in Category:Brockwell Port to Whiteman Park Classic Car Run 2014. While the run occurred in Western Australia there are more European and US vehicles than Australian manufactured ones. Thanks in advance Gnangarra13:30, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
I think all those photographed on the green are identified now (unless I missed some). Remain those on the street, but I guess many will be the same cars. Lupo23:19, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I do not know if I should put this message here of elsewhere, and if I should do something else but : I think the file L-usage-du-monde.jpg, that has been uploaded today, is not copyleft. --Jimmy-jambe (talk) 19:00, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Hi, anyhow a few images appearing now directly in Category:Broken category redirects (only categories should be there). I.e. File:Safo2.JPG and File:Safo villa dei Papiri.JPG. There is nothing directly with that category in the source code on the description pages. I guess a change in any (sub-sub-sub) template is causing this, but I am unable to find that. PS: These images are using {{Object photo}}, but there was no recent change within that template. Can anyboy else can locate and fix the error. Thx in advance. --JuTa20:39, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
The provided object names of these files were referring to category redirects – replaced them with the redirect targets, now apparently fixed. FDMS 4 21:40, 11 November 2014 (UTC) Well, just found out that the category mentions that … may be {{Object photo}} with parameter object equal to category redirect …
Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls is a new tracker category that contains pages with template calls that use duplicates of arguments, such as {{foo|bar=1|bar=2}} or {{foo|bar|1=baz}}. It's rather full at the moment with 4.600 subcategories, 1.300 pages and 37.000 images. Most of these problems are probably caused by a small number of templates that are transcluded on a large number of pages. First focus should be to fix the {{Creator}} templates. Who wants to help? Multichill (talk) 19:21, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
Looks like some of these may have been the fault of Dexbot, or at least it really didn't like the Wikidata parameter being repeated in a creator template. See eg this diffJheald (talk) 19:29, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
@Multichill: yes it is still there even after i purged the template, see Be..anyone's comment above.
@Be..anyone: thank you for the comment! i forgot this aspect and it of courses reduces the problem. But i still find it annoying that my talk page (and nearly every other user talk page, since the automatic welcome messages) is classified as "Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls" as if the page is full of errors ;) Holger1959 (talk) 21:48, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
@Holger1959: I don't understand how Be..anyone's comment is related to me unless you're under the impression that I don't know how hidden templates work. I guess you're using German as interface language because as soon I switched my language from German to English, the tracker category popped up. The problem was in Template:Welcome/de. Multichill (talk) 22:27, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
@Multichill: sorry for confusing and thank you very much for finding and fixing the problem! that is the first time i see a category depending on user language, didn't know it is possible. Holger1959 (talk) 22:37, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
@Multichill: I fixed few hundred Creator templates with some repeated issues, but a lot of those pages I can not find any issues. Few that I really looked at i trace it to some hand alterations of giant {{LangSwitch}} statements in city name templates like {{Osaka}}, or repeated parameter in {{Authority control}} templates. A lot of them are really hard to trace. This fixing process would go much faster is the code that detects the issue could also display error message with template name and parameter name. Is that possible? --Jarekt (talk) 20:14, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for helping Jarek! Templates like {{Osaka}} are a pain. I fixed it, but took be quite some time to see it. I'm not sure if the code has some sort of debug option. Not as far as I'm aware of. I'll ask around a bit. Multichill (talk) 21:36, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
@Multichill: , All Creator pages are done except for Creator:Guo Xi. I also looked into templates and often I can not figure it out. for example:
Template:Community tabs/bn is a translated page (using translation extension) the original was fixed but I do not know how to update the translated version. I can not edit it directly. @Steinsplitter: , you started the translation process - do you know how to fix it?
I was looking the winners template of the Photo challenge, and there are not the pretty, so I create this three here to substitute, and I want to know what's your takes on it:
User:Rodrigo.Argenton/test. All of them have slices modifications to test, if you could give a feedback about it I will honestly appreciate.
The banners are far too large in my opinion, and your logo uploads are copyvios (derivative works missing attribution). FDMS 4 16:54, 4 November 2014 (UTC) Sorry, our logo is in the PD.
Looks sleek. But do you intend to replace the congratulation templates (e.g. {{Photo Challenge Gold}}) or the award template for the file description page ({{Photo challenge winner}})? Because if its the first (which really does look bad), you need the file name instead of this picture - and in my opinion it makes sense to leave the winning picture on the left - but I'm all for exchanging the cameras and the yellow box for something better. I'm not so sure about the text...
Your derivates of the commons logo look really nice - the only thing I'm still questioning about the symbol is that the photo challenges are specifically only for photos (and no other media - which would be included in that symbol) - not sure if that's important, but I did want to say it...
I didn't say that using cameras was necessary - in fact, I said that I liked your derivation - I just wanted to point out that the commons logo could be associated with more than photos. As for the format - being out of pattern is one of the reason - but the main reason is that I think that pattern developed because they fit file description pages better. File description pages are normally held as short as possible, but you still have to scroll down quite a lot to get all the information you want/need. Keeping that in mind, I think that broad templates with a small height make sense on those pages. In contrast, the congratulations for the discussion pages should stand out - and the pages can/will be archived if they get too long - which is why I'd immediately support your format there.
Anna reg, I get, but in the context, the logo will not be a deviation of the subject. And is just a fill lines on the height, not gonna make any difference. But, I don't care any-more, let ugly, I'm tired of this community. Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 17:28, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
The clips are news paper clips and permissions are available for their use. These are from The Bucks Herald and the other news papers who took the picture originally. ``in what format would you like this confirmation
Thank you for you response 519Clarke. I don't believe it's appropriate to scan images from newspaper clippings and claim them as your own work. That would seem to be a copyright violation here on Wikicommons. Wikicommons only accepts images that are explicitly freely licensed or public domain per Commons:Licensing. Wikicommons does not accept images that are fair use. If I am wrong then I apologize in advance, but it does not seem that you are the copyright holder of these images. Are you the original copyright holder? If you are the copyright holder, you should read COM:OTRS#Licensing images: when do I contact OTRS?. If you are not the copyright holder, then you should read, COM:OTRS#If you are not the copyright holder. I do not believe it is appropriate for you to claim to be the copyright holder if you are not and upload the images using the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Doing so, in my opinion, makes the files suitable for speedy deletion per "1. Apparent copyright violation", and possibly "criteria 4, 5 and 6" as well. This is how I understand things, but I may be missing something. Perhaps a more experienced Commons editor will be able to provide you with more specific information. According to your contribution history, you have uploaded 33 files since October 27, 2014 and are claiming all of them to be your own work, even though many of them do not, at first glance, appear to be so. I really suggest that you hold off uploading any more files until you are for sure that you have the permission to do so. - Marchjuly (talk) 00:55, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
The picture of the year rules included a similar statement in 2013 (and earlier, but I cant tell how long), and you'd find it under Help:POTY. It's a redirect, I created it when I didn't find the POTY rules in less than five minutes. So if you find your solution please add a dummy help page redirect with a good name for the search engine. –Be..anyone (talk) 21:23, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
@Rodrigo.Argenton: There is no source for this. This is not a voting process of the political kind (like admin elections etc.), where the rules for who may participate can be found in some kind of official policy. This is a voting process similar to those at COM:FPC, COM:VIC and COM:QIC, where the rules were developed together with the rest of the concept of the competition. This ten days old and has more than 50 edits (plus all people who participated in the challenge) is simply what people thought was a good measure. You can find the discussion about that in die challenge discussion page archive. --El Grafo (talk) 15:38, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Humm, "sounds good" was the whole support for that...
I thought that they had removed that from some rule of voting in official policy, that's why they have the same restrictions
So where this voting policy in official statements?
Concerning the voting procedure at the Photo challenges: Back in 2013 the whole thing was an experiment and nobody knew how it would turn out. The topic was brought up again in January with the decision to give that system a bit more time for testing. Since until now nobody objected against that system, it was kept. Since the project is approaching its first anniversary, maybe this is the right time to start a general discussion revisiting what was good and what was bad – which could of course include the voting procedure. --El Grafo (talk) 09:13, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
November 11
Anti-censorship Barnstar
I came across this image called the Anti-censorship Barnstar, at File:Ac bstar.png, could be useful perhaps if made into SVG.
Perhaps could someone experienced with SVG conversion make an SVG version of this file?
I'm uploading pictures at Wikimedia Commons for about eight years now. I started with using my Wikiname, Tukka. I like to use my own name from now. Is it possible for someone with a bot to change my name for every picture I uploaded? I like to hear from you what's possible.
Just tried it. It didn't help. It found exactly what I was able to find by searching the tools.wmflabs.org page with my browser's find in page feature. (But, it's amazing how many people don't know that their browser has an intra-page search function!!!) Thanks for the tip though! I just asked here at Wikipedia talk:Closing discussions on en. --Elvey (talk) 20:21, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
Licence Art Libre1.3 est juridiquement compatible avec la Licence Creative Commons BY+SA 4.0
Is there a way to batch edit file categories more easily? I am looking at museum bulk uploads for example and wishing that there was a way to reorganise them more easily. We must have millions of badly categorised/sorted images on here and it seems the only way to fix it is to individually edit each and every separate file page. I tried to find info/help pages on this very issue and couldn't find them easily enough so if you could direct me there I'd be really grateful. I'm guessing that if such an ability exists, like "rollbacker", it is something that has to be awarded on a case by case basis.
But how amazing would it be to be able to tick/select individual files in a page such as Category:Clothing in Livrustkammaren and recategorise the selected files to say, Hats in Livrustkammaren? If this ability doesn't exist, why not? If it does, where can I get it? Thanks for any advice/help you may have - finding the help pages on here rather hard to navigate as the usual WP:Categories searches don't seem to work. Mabalu (talk) 11:03, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
You're looking for Commons:Cat-a-lot (in which you click near the filenames to select, then choose to Move or Copy) and Commons:HotCat (which lets you edit the categories from the category list at the bottom of each file). They exist on most Wikipedias also, not just on Commons. Go to your Special:Preferences, then the "Gadgets" tab, and look under "Tools for categories". Check those checkboxes to enable them. HotCat is usually already enabled by default. --Closeapple (talk) 11:13, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
Thank you SO much, that is fantastic - I'll have a look at Cat-a-lot as I think this will be extremely useful! I do use HotCat a LOT but Cat-a-Lot sounds more like what I need. Much appreciated. I had tried WC for Wikimedia Commons and other prefixes but never thought to try COM. Mabalu (talk) 15:54, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
I think I am doing something wrong. Tried adding a new category and just added "Categories for redirect" to 15 files which I then had to manually revert. Tried it again with only two files so if I buggered up it would be easier to fix but no luck. I'll have to look at this again later tonight when I can think about it, but Cat-a-lot currently seems extremely counter-intuitive. Mabalu (talk) 16:23, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
Visual representations of lectures, concepts, and theories
I have a difficult time with Wikipedia. I'm fairly dyslexic, and so walls of text, regardless of how well curated and organized, are difficult for me to process. Regardless, it's been a valuable resource to me over the years.
So my question, dear Village pump, to which I am new, is: if these are ok to delete because "educational images look a little bit different then those you uploaded," how do we build new legitimacy for non-text-based expressions of ideas? What would be necessary to count as legitimate? Deleting these has wrecked a few conference pages, including IEEE's GHTC, some Ivy League school pages, as well as wikimedia instances across a few continents. I'm slowly working on finding and re-sourcing.
Hilariously, one of the things I'd like to do as this evolves is to sketch out how these workflows operate in a way that's understandable to visual people like me. It was confusing to me that the twoplaces I tried to ask questions were not the right places. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Willowbl00 (talk • contribs)
It is not because a file was used elsewhere than it is automatically in scope here. Was any of your file used in any Wikimedia project? I could imagine some of your ideas accepted on Wikibooks, but did you try there? Regards, Yann (talk) 17:48, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification, Yann and Bawolff. Does that mean, for example, the image based on the opening talk for AkiraChix Women In Technology Conference, which they've use on their site about engaging with high school girls with in-school programs towards the empowerment of Kenyan women in technology, would be legitimate? If so, what process do I go through? Request an undelete with a reference to the stubbed page here, the less relevant page here, and add Category:Technology_stubs as there doesn't seem to be a page dedicated to ICT for girls in Kenya?
As another example, to be sure I understand, the framework for consent policies currently in use by the Engine Room and Amnesty International to teach people about how to address consent in their digital initiatives (I just loaded the image directly to their servers instead), do I need to tag that as Amnesty, even though it's not directly on their Wikipedia page? And then, do I request it be undeleted?
[Slightly off topic] In case its helpful, some dyslexic people find it useful to set wikipedia to use the OpenDyslexic font, which can be set by clicking on the gear symbol by the languages menu on the sidebar on the left, selecting fonts, checking Download fonts when needed, and selecting "OpenDyslexic", as the font for english content. Bawolff (talk) 19:56, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! It helps quite a bit, but it's still only one component of things. I'm a visual learner as well, not just due to the dyslexia. It just compounds it. Willowbl00 (talk) 05:09, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
November 14
Pipe following Category
I've really just found out about some plumbing that works with the category feature, but don't have a full grasp of it, e.g.
if I categorizes 3 photos, one as [[Category:Market Street (Philadelphia)|110]], another as [[Category:Market Street (Philadelphia)|112]], and the third as [[Category:Market Street (Philadelphia)|115]], then they will appear in the category listing according to the numeric order 100, 112, 115, which makes photos in a street category very easy to find - just pipe in the address!
But it's not all sweetness and light - while east-west streets in Philadelphia generally only have numbers, north-south streets are labelled "North 3rd", "South 3rd" etc. How could I get the order N. 101, N. 53, N.2, S. 1, S. 3, S. 25, etc.? Also numbers seem to work only up to 999, but then letters can be added in front, e.g. a001 in place of 1001.
I basically just stumbled into this feature but can't find any documentation/explanation of it. Any help would be appreciated.
Docs are at Help:Categories#Sort_keymw:Help:Categories#Sort_key. The order is more or less lexiographical (AKA alphabetical, with numbers treated as if they were letters in the alphabet that come before A. And non-english letters have a funky order). Which means that for numbers, you take the left most digit, compare that, and only move to the next digit if there is a tie. For example, 010 < 1 < 350 < 5 < A < Z. If you want it to work for four digit numbers, just add an extra zero to the left of your three digit number so that all the numbers have the same "length". Bawolff (talk) 18:10, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
p.s. Technical nitty-gritty for those who care: MediaWiki supports different sorting methods, but the fancy sorting methods tend only to be in use on smaller wikis. Commons is currently on the old style, "uppercase" sorting method, which is when you take the sort key string, convert it to uppercase letters, convert these letters to whatever binary number it would be when encoded as UTF-8, and order by that. This means a few things - first that numeric strings aren't really sorted by numbers as mentioned above. Alphabets go in order of how its specified in unicode standard, which is somewhat close to alphabetical for many languages, but there's plenty of exceptions (for example, farsi becomes really screwed up), and accents get thrown all over the place. For example é would get sorted way after z, instead of directly after the letter e as you would expect. On the other hand, http://mediawiki.org uses a more complex three level sorting method, where first only the base letters are compared (so é and e both treated like e), and if theirs a tie only then moves on to accents, and then if there's still a tie, it uses case (e vs E). It also does a whole bunch of other complex things to try and make the order be as people would expect. Bawolff (talk) 18:10, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
@YLSS: I don't believe its ever been seriously discussed. The only mention on commons I'm aware of is a small comment from 2011. I made an overly optimistic comment at bugzilla:30996#c8 about 2 years ago. So the current situation is that there's some scalability issues with the conversion script (bugzilla:56041), which makes it basically impossible to convert a wiki the size of commons to the new system (pl.wikipedia.org is roughly speaking the largest wiki where the conversion has gone smoothly). I imagine its probably possible to work around that issue by changing how the code works, but some love is needed in that area of the code base. Bawolff (talk) 04:47, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, the explanation above is very good, all that I really need now. For future reference the help documents now seem to be off-Commons and at meta.
So for Philadelphia street numbers, it looks like all I need is 4 digits (consistently) with an N or S at the end if needed - which gives me *almost* exactly what I wanted. Going strictly north to south would likely be a huge pain in the butt.
This suggests the answer to another quandary that I've never been able to solve. At the gallery The Flower Book by Edward Burne-Jones the slide show - media player always plays the slides in its own bizarre order with no explanation. I'll see what happens there if I play with this.
Also, I just found out that you can't find public domain images on Flickr, even though they exist (as demonstrated by the example above). Bennylin (yes?) 15:41, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
Bennylin the US State Department has instructed their embassies to licence their works on Flickr under CC-BY-ND. But as the work of the US Government they are indeed {{PD-USGov-DOS}}. The whole Jakarta embassy stream can be uploaded to Commons, but it would need to be done with a bot. russavia (talk) 16:10, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
I've just sent an email to the @usembassyjakarta account requesting these three images to be uploaded under Commons copyright. So, can I upload these three images with {{PD-USGov}} then?
This was archived, but the matter is unsolved. As I explained / apologized yesterday to a fellow user envolved in random a/e swapping, «changing »« "gray" »to or from« "grey" is trivial, but we’d be going fruitlessly back and forth if a stable terminological agreement »« is not reached first.» So, please, lets do it.
This is not foremost a matter of US/UK bickering, not here in Commons (as opposed to in the English Wikipedia, I guess). English in Commons is a conventional commodity not an identitary trait. While arguing that UK-ers would be giving away something precious if "gray" is accepted and that US-ers would be giving away something precious if "grey" is accepted, please understand that everybody else is constantly going an extra mile than both of you while using either flavor of English.
I frankly don’t care which it is, as I suspect most non-native English speakers here do, but we need only one word for this one notion. (And no, it doesn’t need to be the same side that gets chosen in every cases for these UK/US variants in category names — I’d be perfectly happy with something like "[[Category:Mushrooms by co̲lor|Gre̲y]]", provided it is stable and unvariant.)
An old en:w: rule was, that editors are supposed to follow any already used valid style. A humorous IETF rule for RFCs was, that the shorter spelling wins, but I don't recall how they'd handle a tie. Toss a coin and redirect the loser. –Be..anyone (talk) 15:58, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
Wasn't there a (small) consensus in favour of grey in that archived thread? Hereby "adding" myself to it per reasons given. FDMS 4 16:54, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
"I frankly don’t care which it is, as I suspect most non-native English speakers here do" – not all, some have a strong preference for classical (i. e. British) English. But possibly some have the opposite, I dunno... YLSS (talk) 17:38, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
In the absence of other good reasons to choose one over the other I suggest going with the current majority, which seems to be grey (with approximately a 2:1 majority). --Dschwen (talk) 20:21, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
I'd go with grey for two reasons, one is that the English Wikipedia page is en:Grey, and two is that in the lead it says: "Grey is the dominant spelling in European and Commonwealth English... Gray has been the preferred American spelling... although grey is an accepted variant." We can cite precedence by conforming to ENWP's naming convention on the matter. However, how is this going to be enforced? Will Category:Gray be moved??? ColonialGrid (talk) 03:19, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
I'd support either as well. Although the "use any valid style" usually works, there are issues here if we aren't consistent. After Tuválkin reverted some edits of mine (I'd been working on non-empty category redirects), I found at least one place where one template used "gray" and another used "grey" for the same kinds of things, so a template change would have been needed whichever spelling was used. As a temporary measure, I manually added some categories that normally would be added by a template, just to get the media into the non-redirect category. --Auntof6 (talk) 03:56, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
The X11 rgb.txt isn't a dictionary, they made it up as they went, because everybody armed with a text editor could modify it. At some point in time Netscape 3 insisted on a for some greys, and e for other grays. It was hilarious; not a good example. ;-) –Be..anyone (talk) 07:03, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the pointer. Is that something like what "you" (the BOFH crowd) have on COM:AN? Some uninvited accusations of edit warring by an apparently undocumented filter without bug report address for a perfectly harmless comment had me to edit my raw watchlist for the first time ever, removing everything remotely related to COM:AN. –Be..anyone (talk) 16:15, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
Like accusations of fascism, accusations of BOFH are self-disproving, because if they were BOFH, your ass would be gone in an instant for making the claim. But, good job finding a way to attack members of the Commons community in response to something going on Meta.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:13, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
The operator in this case would know, that an unrelated "thanks" on his page followed by a BOFH here shouldn't be a convoluted personal attack, but any operator might have something to say about the weird abuse filter here. BOFH is BTW no attack, it's a joke. –Be..anyone (talk) 14:07, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
File was uploaded as own work by Kathrynshourds, but it appears to be a cropped version of this,this and this credited to a Talia Hermann. It's possible Kathyrnshourds and Talia Hearman are the same, but not sure and there's no OTRS permission posted saying they are or that permission to use the image has be granted if they are not. - Marchjuly (talk) 06:58, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
I have been looking at uploading videos from YouTube. They are often available with a 640px-wide webm version which works perfectly well on Commons. However when I upload higher resolution versions in webm, such as at 1280x720px these are playable at full size but the in-built transcoding so that we have transcludable versions at lower resolution falls over.
Is there a way of fixing this, or do we accept this as a limitation of the wiki-software as it exists today?
it has nothing to do with dimensions. The larger file is in a different format than the smaller. A webm file can contain two different types of video data (vp8 or vp9) and two different types of audio (vorbis or opus). Wikimedia uses really old software (libav 0.8.12. Ideally we would use 10) that only supports vp8 and vorbis (supposedly things are in the process of updating, but people have been saying that for a while now, but unfortunately the version people want to update to is still too old to play vp9 [but will play opus audio, which is also becoming more common, even if not used in your file]. However once its updated we may have more options with other programs like gstreamer. Maybe. Not 100% clear). The large version of the file uses vp9 and vorbis so the video content cannot be recognized by wikimedia servers (i say wikimedia not mediawiki because the mediawiki part can handle things just fine).Bawolff (talk) 17:40, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation, knowing the limitations of the wiki should make this possible to work around, even if the right format is not available from Youtube. Now I just have to puzzle over whether my cruddy old kit is up to re-coding video on the fly without leaving it glitchy or taking all day to handle it. --Fæ (talk) 18:14, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Practical example of a government supplied Magna Carta video.
For those unaware of what this means, the Magna Carta video (left) is available in VP9 encoding from Youtube. Having to recode it to VP8 and reupload took my old machine about 2 hours. In the same time I could have uploaded six or seven times as much content if the wiki could take the newer formats. Basically uploading freely available video in a way that works usefully, is made just a bit too time-consuming and complex for most volunteers; including me --Fæ (talk) 00:04, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
Note that the version of libav on tool labs is 0.8.16, so unless Prolineserver manually installed/compiled his own (Which he very well might have, I have no idea if he did), that video conversion tool won't be able to recognize VP9 files. Bawolff (talk) 23:44, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
@Atlasowa: One interesting thing I'd note, that roughly in the 9 months since that graphic was made (I'm using numbers from Feb 23 [9] instead of from graphic as its unclear from what time period the graphic is getting numbers from, but its metadata says feb 28 even though its using numbers lower than what commons had on that date), the number of videos on commons has grown by 27% (currently 52,653). For comparison, in the same time period, the number of images has only increased 17%. Bawolff (talk) 01:51, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
A lot of the ogg-videos come from User:Open Access Media Importer Bot (17,843 files since July 2012). That makes the growth of webm-videos even more impressive (WebM video format only was accepted since November 2012 on commons). Thanks for the bugzilla link! --Atlasowa (talk) 15:56, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
For the Open Access Media Importer, we are actually considering to switch to WebM eventually. It depends in part on technical development on our ends, but progress towards full support for WebM on the Wikimedia end would help move this forward. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 22:38, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
Is there a Category or Template for missing/incorrect original creation date?
Hi folks, I'm somewhat new to the mechanics of wikicommons, so forgive me: I've come across some photographs that appear to be have been taken in the 1960s or 70s, but the date listed is the date of uploading (e.g. 2013). I've notified the uploader to request they add the original date of creation (even if approximate, i.e. to decade or "circa 19xx"), but got to wondering if there is a template one could place that states "the original creation date is missing or likely incorrect: please add the original date", and adds the file to an "incorrect creation date" category. Or is there some other way to indicate the original date is lacking? Thanks. Animalparty (talk) 22:15, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
Very often, even an approximate original creation date is just unknown, therefore I don't think there should be a maintenance template or category for such files. Instead, in my opinion, the date parameter should be optional in {{Information}}. FDMS 4 22:27, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
I'm not sure about optional, since date is often critical in establishing PD status (even if the date listed is incorrect). Date is a required field during the Upload Wizard, with the note "Date work was created or first published", but perhaps this is often ignored (note: I currently have no evidence, not even anecdotally, that incorrect file dates are a significant problem). Animalparty (talk) 23:52, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
I think a template would be useful. The information template can categorise as date missing, we want one for date disputed. For instance I know a lot of photos of UK railways which are uploaded from a flickr account with criminally incorrect metadata. -mattbuck (Talk) 00:10, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
An approximate creation date is always known. There's no license tag you can add without an approximate creation date, and most photographs can be dated with internal evidence to at least within about 30 years.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:19, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
An approximate creation date can usually be deduced to withing 30 years for many works, but for large number of files nobody bothered. Also dates for some old artworks of anonymous artists might not be known. --Jarekt (talk) 19:07, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
November 16
Community Liaison job openings at WMF
Hello, everyone, There are currently two job openings on my team, and I thought someone from Commons might be interested.
Community Liaison: This person will initially focus on working with the mw:Flow team and on mw:VisualEditor with the Editing team, mostly at non-English wikis. However, a lot of smaller or short-term tasks come up, too, so someone who is adaptable and interested in all aspects of WMF products and features would be a good candidate. (Bonus points if you have edited a lot on a non-English project and put your username in your application.)
Community Liaison (Part time contract): This part-time person will primarily work with the Mobile teams. (Bonus points if you have used the Mobile app or edited from a mobile device.)
I guess it kind of makes sense - ':' is supposed to denote main namespace (e.g when doing {{:foo}} syntax), in addition to the make category/file links normal, albeit its rather confusing in this case. Doing [[:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}/Foo]] should work even in the Main namespace case I believe. Bawolff (talk) 03:47, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
I've never seen DrTrigonBot do anything other than dump a butt-load of ugly and useless numbers onto image description pages, and add Category:Graphics, so probably a program wouldn't have to be too powerful to do better than that... AnonMoos (talk) 13:29, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
Ah okay I see. I guess I'll stick with the fair-use image on en.wikipedia, then, and not upload it here to Commons. -- Cirt (talk) 22:43, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks: I am confused with the statement: average speed of 150 kilometers per hour. What is the maximum speed? If more than 200km/u the train should be reclassified as High Speed and I suppose it would use parts off the High Speed line.Smiley.toerist (talk) 17:55, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
I have to check some technical docs to check details (speed), but I am sure that ITX-Saemaeul does not use High Speed line - it is only reserved for KTX-I (french one) and/or KTX-Sancheon (aka KTX-II, Hyundai Rotem too.). Original Saemaeul used traditional line, and since ITX-Saemaeul is replacement of it, I am sure ITX-saemaeul uses non-High Speed line. — Revi18:06, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
The problem is that many of the templates used in the Category namespace are mostly the same templates as used in the file namespace, in different positions. For example we have:
Category:Monument templates a zoo of 130+ diverse templates often not following the same format. May be they should be converted to something using uniform format when used in category namespace
Hi everyone, some time ago image usage tracking was enabled on Wikidata. It works the same as using images on normal wiki pages. The table tracking this usage wasn't updated after enabling this feature so about 350.000 items on Wikidata were using images from Commons, but this usage didn't show up here. At the recent Amsterdam hackathon I started a bot to purge the links on these items. Bot is done and everything seems to be up to date now. See for example the usage at this image. Multichill (talk) 10:44, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, and thanks for putting so much personal effort into the hackerthon hosted by WMNL. Though the focus was on Wikidata, there have been several excellent spin-offs that benefit those of us who mainly volunteer as Commons contributors. --Fæ (talk) 12:09, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
Well, there are also fake paddle steamers such as Category:Louisiana Star (ship, 1999). This is a boat with diesel engines and using propeller propulsion, the stern wheel is just for looks and doesn't serve a real purpose (see also de:Louisiana Star in the German Wikipedia). I would only classify "steamers" of this type as a fake; there are also non-steamers where the paddle wheels at least serve as the real means of propulsion, such as Category:Herrsching (ship, 2002) - in this case, two diesel engines (not a steam engine) drive the sidewheels. I wouldn't call that a "fake", though such ships/boats are often wrongly called "steamers". Gestumblindi (talk) 00:59, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
November 22
access to data on Wikidata is coming on Dec 2nd
Hey everyone :)
I've been asked to enable access to the data on Wikidata for Commons. I'm happy to make that happen. We'll enable access on December 2nd. What does this mean? You will be able to access data from an item on Wikidata like the date of birth of an artist or the name of a city in different languages. Where and how much you make use of that is up for you to decide. You will be able to access the data in two ways. The first one is the #property parser function. The second one is via Lua. There are two big caveats at this point. 1) You will only be able to access data for items that are connected via a sitelink to the page you want to show the data on. We're currently working on allowing accessing data from any item. This should be available around January/February. 2) You can not use this to store meta data (like the date a picture was taken or who took it) about individual files. This will in the future be stored on Commons itself as part of the structured data project.
Please let me know if you have any questions. I am looking forward to more integration between Commons and Wikidata and all the things this will make possible. It'd be great if you could help with updating and expanding Commons:Wikidata. The relevant page on Wikidata is d:Wikidata:Wikimedia Commons.
Hi. Sorry about write in english. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post. I appolige if is not. I need help to add categories to the uploaded pictures of this user. If someone can recognize the places or translate descriptions (or both), I'll be very thankfull. Regards. --Ganímedes (talk) 12:36, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I've tried to translate with Google, but the results were awfull. However, another user is already helping. Thanks a lot. Regards. --Ganímedes (talk) 21:30, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
empty day
November 24
How it is possible?
How come that some nonexistent categories are given for existing? It happens sometimes using HotCat, or when I do a search in the box on the left. For example: if I write "Category: Alinari" (HotCat gives me the V that the category exist, within the framework of the research it is given in bold), then when I save, it is given in red, that is non-existent. Why? It's annoying to have to run for cover every time. I would like to understand what is causing this "deception". Thank you very much. --DenghiùComm (talk) 08:32, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
Good question. It does that because the server tells HotCat that such a category existed. At least the query HotCat makes returns the search string "Category:Alinari" as a matching page title, even though Category:Alinari clearly doesn't exist as a page. Perhaps some file once was categorized in that category, even though the category page didn't exist, and the MediaWiki software therefore "thinks" that such a category (still) existed. I don't know why the opensearch search suggestions return this category as a match. Maybe the search index is just lagging behind in updating? Lupo11:38, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
FYI (and I don't know if this will be better, worse, or the same), UploadWizard uses something like this via a core JS function called mw.Api.prototype.getCategoriesByPrefix. As long as that function exists, you can use it, and it will fetch categories prefixed by whatever the user is currently typing - which is how UW's nasty HotCat library does things. But you may prefer a "better" solution...I know I do. --MarkTraceur (talk) 12:12, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, Mark; I know, and AFAIK that code was even inspired by HotCat. The HotCat gadget does more, though. It uses a combination of the page index (the query you gave) and the opensearch (the query I gave above). That was done deliberately; when we used only the page index, people were complaining about not finding similarly named categories (collations; type in "Sidliste": opensearch will show you also suggestions starting with "Sídliště", while the page index comes up empty). With only opensearch, we would miss out on recently created categories (created since the last index update). Therefore, we combined the two. Old discussions about that can be found at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-HotCat.js/Archive01#Support of charactersets and diacritics. Lupo12:42, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
P.S.: @MarkTraceur: when I wrote above "the MediaWiki software therefore 'thinks' that such a category (still) existed" I was thinking of bug report T28411 (bugzilla 26411, from 2010). Why that would make it appear as an opensearch result I don't know, but maybe the search back-end looks at that table, too? I do notice that API:Allcategories recommends "the list be filtered to those where the size is greater than zero or the category page exists". (The HotCat gadget does not use allcategories.) Lupo14:53, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
Mrs. Megan C. Robertson has published a great number of well researched photograps on het own website. They are all photographs of the various orders and medals of the world. Many of them are hard to come by! The photo's are all of good quality and have a uniform model and background I have asked het permission to release the rights on her photo's and she gave us permission to use them on Commons!
That is very kind of her. I have downloaded one of them, with the relevant email, on[11] Is it possible to make a licence called "from the collection of Megan C Robertson" to facilitate the use of her photo's on Wiki-Commons?
Thanks, Robert. However, I think that the designs of medals from some countries may be copyrighted, especially if they are recent. You will need to try and check which medal designs are copyrighted and which are in the public domain. If you need help with this, leave messages at "Commons:Village pump/Copyright". — SMUconlaw (talk) 18:20, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
Dear Robert, please don't paste emails on File pages, we have OTRS for that. The email leaves room for interpretation and someone might see it as {{Wikipediaonly}}. Could you please follow up with OTRS to get proper permission stored? Multichill (talk) 19:52, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
All right, I will put my next email from Mrs. Robinson on OTRS. I could not find it on the page. As far as the release in the public domain is concerned, I will contact Mrs. Robinson again for an unequivocal release. I thought that my question was clear enough though... But I understand that we have to be exact. Bulgarian medals are allways free of copyright, there is an appropriate tag available. Faithfully yours, Robert Prummel (talk) 22:46, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
OTRS-membership is not linked to any specific wiki (AFAIK) so I am surprised that we keep track of it as a local right is there any reason to keep track of it locally? --Jarekt (talk) 14:06, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
I uploaded this file for a wikibook on painting. I plan to make more. Any suggestions for categorizing such pictures? Thanks Elly (talk) 16:58, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
Could someone help me confirming if the app for ios still exists? I cannot find it anywhere. Thank you for your help. I can't even find its name, but surely a few months ago I had dowloaded an app allowing to upload photos direcly onto Commons. Thanks Anxe Lytton (talk) 21:06, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
Hi all. I've been slowly whittling away at the backlog of Media needing categories, but got to thinking it would be a lot more effective to have some sort of group collective effort. The 46,000 image backlog in Category:Files from Wellcome Images (categorization needed), for instance, could be eliminated if only 230 people categorized 200 images each. The way it might work is: everyone gets supplied with a randomly assigned subset of 100 or 200 files, resources about how to properly and effectively categorize media (including usage of tools like Cat-a-lot and the creation of new categories as appropriate), and a reminder of how categorizing enhances the aims of Commons and users everywhere. Links to using Google Translate and/or embedded coordinates to identify subjects or places would also be helpful. Links to Project scope and Deletion policy could also aid in deleting out-of-scope images rather than retaining copyright violations or poor-quality images of little educational use. If participants want to categorize more than their allotment, great! There could even be a "Categorization drive", to encourage participation: maybe a special barnstar or userpage banner for every X number of images categorized (simply for community recognition): e.g. "This user categorized over 1,000 files in the 2014 CatDrive!". I haven't really thought out everything of this idea, and don't know much about the inner mechanics of Commons but just thought I'd initiate discussion. Animalparty (talk) 22:42, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
There are a lot of images in those categories with other issues as well, such as bad licensing, copyright violations or being out of scope. It might be easier to approach the images based on some easy-to-filter characteristics. By chance I just created User:Basvb/Logos/2012, which filtered everything with "logo" in the title, most of these are uploaded as own work and might meet the threshold of originality or on the other hand be unused (or even advertisement). Mvg, Basvb (talk) 23:36, 25 November 2014 (UTC)
I'm very skeptical about bot-based categorization, but it would be good to have a list of uncategorized images that are, in fact, in use so that those can get scrutiny first. - Jmabel ! talk16:53, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
That would be fairly easy to do, just check for images with the uncat template which appear as having entries in the globalimagelinks table and then stick the list in a report. Unfortunately due to a problem with replication, the database tables for Commons which volunteers have access to are significantly out of date, so this is something only worth doing when the problem is fixed by the WMF, hopefully sooner rather than later as it's becoming a real stumbling block for many of our maintenance tasks. Refer to https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/labs-l/2014-November/003158.html --Fæ (talk) 18:22, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
@Jmabel, I was proposing to do some filtering with bots and then manually process the filtered results, combining the power of machines and the power of humans (make fast judgements based on visual input: images) we should be able to speed up some processes. Mvg, Basvb (talk) 18:59, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
Yep, I initially misread (the number in the welcome images is around the same as for the 2012 category). I think there's two ways of looking at priorisation (with over half a million uncategorised images you'll have to prioritise), one way is to first categorize the useful images (allready in use, licensing in order), the other way is to try and throw out the bad stuff (that was more the approach I was taking). Mvg, Basvb (talk) 19:24, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
If an image is used on wikipedia than one might look for commons categories associated with a given article. Any image found on one of 1.17M en-wp pages related to people (and using en:Template:Persondata) can be probably added to a new category with the same name as the English article and added to Category:People by name, and births/death categories. Similarly some roles can be developed for categorizing and creating new categories based on articles related to places, organisms and probably more. --Jarekt (talk) 18:25, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
There are also some interesting pictures wich are put in very limited categories but where a lot of classification stil needs to be done. A good example of this is Smiley.toerist (talk) 23:50, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
These photos are embedded there from Flickr, and are originally available in this Flickr set, and all of them are tagged as a US government work. So, yes, go ahead, best to do that with Flickr2Commons. darkweasel9412:27, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
_and_urinal_(right)_(4547794820).jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
--Fæ (talk) 00:38, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Rose hips. I don't know which one, but you can put it here: Category:Rose hips
Rose hips
pretty sure that it is some kind of Tradescantia. Maybe put it here: Category:Unidentified_Tradescantia
-- AnonMoos (talk) 06:07, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Jmabel ! talk 00:18, 10 November 2014 (UTC) 
Support or 
Oppose.
Done Fixed. Some of the templates where not closed with closing curly brackets.--Snaevar (talk) 00:54, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
.jpg){kind=link}
.svg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://www.heimatsammlung.de/motiv_unter/schiffe_ab_03/images_01/1622-postkarte-horst-wessel.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
![[11]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orde_van_de_Volksrepubliek_Bulgarije_drie_graden.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
