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Hi - someone may be kind enough to recommend a license tag for a scan of a French cooking book released in 1929. -- MaxxL - talk12:10, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
You have to presume it's all rights reserved, unless you know a bit more about the author(s) and how old they are or when they died. --Fæ (talk) 12:14, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
That's all we know: "E. Sant'Angelo remains an enigma (it is not known their dates of birth and death), but we enjoy flipping through the pages 1280 - 1.3kg, weighed - its Cookbook." -- MaxxL - talk12:29, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
It could depend on the nature of the cover - if it's just the title of the book and the name of the author in a standard typographic font, then it's probably not copyrightable (certainly not under United States law). If there's an illustration on the cover, it could depend on the status of the illustration author (not necessarily the same as the cookbook author). AnonMoos (talk) 12:33, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
The Flickr importing in UploadWizard used to be limited to 50 images. Now it's limited to 500 images (which is actually a limitation imposed by Flickr, not by UploadWizard). If you would like the ability to import Flickr images via the UploadWizard, please apply for the right at Commons:License review/requests. Kaldari (talk) 01:25, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
snow/ice clearing in Lviv
I am scanning and uploading pictures of a wintry Lviv in 2004. How can a classify this vehicle? motorised cart? What is the name of the tool to break the ice? As the drainage was clogged up the snow and ice refroze every evening.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:07, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
It is used as a long chisel (beitel) instead of a crowbar as in pulling out nails or opening boxes. Once it gets between the ice and the pavement, the ice mostly breaks of when its melting. (When its frozen solid on the pavementsurface its no use)Smiley.toerist (talk) 15:39, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
The tools would probably go in Ice chisels. I think the kind used for ice-fishing tend to have narrower blades than those designed for clearing pavement, but they’re essentially the same.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 06:35, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
Use an existing template or create a new one for UNESCO publication content?
Hi All
Would it be best to create a new one or use an existing template when importing publications (mainly reports and books) from UNESCO to Wikimedia Commons to capture all the metadata? Here are the fields they use:
Title
Added title
Series title
Series (vol/issue)
Other language series title
Authors
Corporate author
Imprint
Edition
Country
Year
Collation
Original language
Other languages
Other language title
Non-latin script title
ISSN ISBN
Document code
General notes
Main descriptors
Secondary descriptors
Identifiers
Name of person as subject
Corporate body as subject
Meeting as subject
Meeting
Meeting session
Meeting place
Meeting date
UNESCO Library Location Documentation Centre call nr.
The best existing guidance is at Commons:Guide to batch uploading and checking previous examples of custom templates at Category:Data ingestion layout templates, with the GWT manual being useful. There are no hard community agreed best practices for precisely when to create a custom ingestion template, with some being fans of that workflow and others preferring to fall back on templates that (in years to come) might be easier to reverse engineer with Wikidata.
You could reframe your project and ask a different question by starting with a Wikidata import of your UNESCO data, then thinking about how to use that to populate image pages on Commons automatically.
As highlighted by others in the threads and email discussions you have created about this same project, mass importing raw documents to Wikimedia Commons may be out of scope and become controversial.
Taking the example document given above of over 300 pages:
there is one photograph (the cover) where the photographer does not seem attributed, this would be more useful uploaded as a jpg for illustrative reuse
there are some small icons in black and white, which appear too poor quality to be useful to extract
there are a couple of charts, which might have educational use if extracted and given the context of their source data
the rest of the document is pure text which could be made available on Wikisource in a more easily reusable format than the pdf given
the document's license is given as all rights reserved within itself, and co-copyrighted with Akhtar Soomro (presumably a UNESCO employee at the time, but this is not stated). This is confusing when compared to the CC-BY-SA-3.0 as UNESDOC
Thanks for your suggestions, as Prosfilaes says, I think that all the publications will be useful for Wikisource, additionally many of the publications also include multimedia content so the content included will be useful for Wikipedia etc. I'll be running other trials shortly with other content that will be a more obvious fit for multiple Wikimedia projects. Cheers John Cummings (talk) 14:02, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
Come read about the findings and next steps as WMF’s Community Resources team begins to implement changes based on your feedback. Your questions and comments are welcome on the outcomes discussion page.
@I JethroBT (WMF): There is too much text, i fail to see how to request a grant for example (i don't need a grant, just curious). I also fail to see where to discuss existing grant request. Too much text, too less simple english. Sometimes less is moor. --Steinsplitter (talk) 13:35, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
@Steinsplitter: Yeah, I understand the report may seem a little lengthy. The outcomes report is on the long side for a few reasons. First, the changes are comprehensive across all of the WMF's grant programs (i.e. not just a single grant type), so some detail is needed to describe those changes. We made sure to describe the kinds of feedback that prompted these particular changes. We also reported on participants' attitudes about existing grants (e.g. on reporting, applying, etc.). I agree in the use of minimal text when possible, and as such, a summary of this report is available on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. As for info on grants and grant requests, those are available at m:Grants:Start, so feel free to check those out if you are curious! Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:59, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
Zalta is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at Stanford University. I suggest you contact him there. - Jmabel ! talk15:30, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
Hello. Earlier today I moved a category from Marion Dickerman to Marian Dickerman, since virtually all of the NARA image file descriptions had her first name spelled in that way. I've since determined (via Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt) that her first name is correctly spelled with an O rather than an A. I'm unable to move the category back, and rather than muck things up any further I'm here asking that someone do that. The correct name is Marion Dickerman. I'll clean up the category names on the image files after the move back, of course. Thank you. — WFinch (talk) 21:34, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
Done, but this was simply a bunch of file edits; I can't think what here you might not have been able to do. What were you prevented from doing? - Jmabel ! talk22:58, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
I was trying to move the category a second time, from the Marian Dickerman back to Marion Dickerman, and after submitting it I got a red alert notice telling me I didn't have the authority. I was a little puzzled since I've moved things over redirects on Wikipedia, but this was a first for me at Commons so I didn't want to push it. I'll use more caution when reading NARA file names and descriptions, I promise. Thanks for your help. — WFinch (talk) 23:19, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
Any API to get Commons categories that are near a particular latitude/longitude?
I have a coordinate, and I want to know what categories are nearby.
For instance, for 40.7576,-73.9857 I would get [[Category:Times Square]] and probably [[Category:Broadway]] and a few others nearby.
Is there an API that gives this?
If not, is there a way to get the same via several APIs calls? 50% of false positives is OK. Using third-party APIs is OK.
A problem is that {{Object location|40.75773|-73.985708}}-type tags are not widely used, many place-related categories lack it, so a trick could to serach for nearby pictures and then take the categories of these pictures, any better idea?
So, it looks like most cats don't have coords on them, and those that do don't show up on list=geosearch for some reason. Two main approaches I see:
Option 1: Look at files near that location, and try to find common denominators among their categories [1] - probably would have a lot of false positives, and miss a lot of stuff due to unmarked files.
Option 2: Use wikidata. This is probably your best bet - https://wdq.wmflabs.org/api?q=around%5B625,40.7576,-73.9857,1%5Dclaim%5B373%5D&props=373 - the props["373"] array. ( The around[625,40.7576,-73.9857,1] should be read as 625 = coordinate location ( vs e.g. 1332 for coordinate of northernmost point. See [2]), then the lat and longitude, followed by the radius of the search in km)
I was unable to upload a larger, higher quality file.
If anyone can upload the highest quality file available to that file page (or to another separate file page with the WEBM extension), that would be most appreciated.
In last days, I have a problem with a colon. When I write a colon using keyboard, it is interpreted as a different character (with triangle dots) than the standard colon (with square dots) and doesn't work as a prefix marker. As i noticed, that is not only my problem; see CategoryːEdward Donovan, CategoryːVenom, CategoryːPrague. What is that problem caused by? Formerly I had not this problem. --ŠJů (talk) 18:33, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
That is a U+02D0 MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON (Most commonly used in writing IPA). Most likely you either switched keyboard layouts, or changed input method option. There's an input method option on wiki (The letter language icon in top right of the page -> little keyboard icon in the pop-up window). Check to see if that's set, but I think its more likely the setting in your Operating system, which varries how to set with different OS. Bawolff (talk) 18:49, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
Please, some bureaucrat or an user with sufficient permissions, can restore the File:Flag of Guarico State.svg ? it was deleted on Commons by lack of references, but this is not true, because it was drawn by the user Unukalhai according to the Guarico symbols act (see pages 6 and 7). I was going to tell this to the user that deleted it, but this person has withdrawn from Commons. Thank you.--Shadowxfox (talk) 18:37, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
Batch uploader for inexperienced users: new tool project using Excel spreadsheets
Hi,
Please take a look at this project by Yarl of a new tool for performing simple batch uploads - Batch uploader for small GLAM projects. This is meant as a tool for small-to-medium batch uploads by GLAM institutions, cultural centres and other parties who find the Upload Wizard too limited (it is not possible to provide adequate file descriptions, easily incorporate Artwork fields at the stage of upload...) and the GWT too complex. Please look at the proposal and feel free to comment. Thanks! --Marta Malina Moraczewska (talk) 21:17, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
This looks like a very interesting project; I like especially the approach of gathering speadsheet-entered or -compiled data. I’m usually very sceptical, even suspicious, of such projects, but this one looks like a good thing: Well thought out and likely to improve the contents of Commons and the make the best of volonteers’ time. -- Tuválkin✉✇23:23, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
@Tuvalkin: we are waiting right now for community support and questions. If you like it or have some thoughts about it, feel free to leave a note on grant page. Cheers, Yarl✉21:00, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
I thought the ability to create new pages and at the same time classify your edit as "minor" has been disabled on MediaWiki, as there is no checkbox to do so. However, apparently the welcoming bot is able to create new pages and mark them as minor edits, which shouldn't be happening. Could someone please fix the welcoming bot to not do so? Gparyani (talk) 01:28, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
I don't see any problems for welcoming bot to have creations as minor. Besides, it's a MediaWiki extension working on the servers, so what it can do is not limited to what checkboxes we can see or what api options there is. --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 02:51, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
This was raised as an issue on enwiki, and it was even agreed on the Phabricator that new page creations should never be marked as minor edits. The Phabricator ticket raising this issue first covered all tickets, but the only fix that was ever released by WMF was the UI fix. (I do believe that an API fix was deployed later, to fix a related issue with a tool there on enwiki. I can't find the links at the moment, but trust me.) Gparyani (talk) 18:21, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
The change for API not allowed to create pages on minor edit is [3]. Extensions are allowed to do what they want in terms of making edits and are not bound by requirements of the interfaces exposed to users (Which is the entire point of an extension). In this particular case, I think these page creations are legitimately minor, so this makes sense. However, if community doesn't want them to be minor, it can request that the config option $wgNewUserMinorEdit be changed (Just like any other config option). Bawolff (talk) 21:21, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
Marking them as minor (which only really affects watchlists and recent changes patrolling) seems harmless, TBH. The 'welcoming' behavior is rather strictly defined. Revent (talk) 06:02, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
I found a number of pictures representing the Evangelical Cathedral in Sibiu (Romania) which had a wrong name - Biserica evanghelica din Turnisor and a wrong monument code (12065). I changed the code in the description (12078) and moved the pictures in the right category, but they should also be renamed accordingly. And maybe I did not find all of them... pls check! Hkoala (talk) 12:53, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi, On the English Wikipedia, there is User:SineBot, which adds signature when users don't sign. I think it would be useful to have this here. It could work on every page, or only on some selected pages where new users often forget to sign (Help desk, etc.). Opinions? Regards, Yann (talk) 10:00, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
discussions on commons are not very crowded, I see no risk of edit conflict, it never occured to me in the past. for the same reason it takes some times before someone sees a missing signature and corrects it. For these reasons, I think the bot would work just fine. Let's start with some selected pages if we need to test it.--Alexmar983 (talk) 16:36, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
@Yann: He edited enwp yesterday, but I don't see any replies on his talk page. Should I consider writing one myself? Or other bot writers? Al lot of users from the archive has gone inactive or left commons :/ --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 10:50, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
Looking for a tool for finding files in a category on commons without descriptions in specific languages
Hi all
Is there a tool available to find files in a category on Commons that do not include a description in a certain language? It would be very helpful indeed if the user could also input another language they can also speak to help them translate.
Hi MKFI, thanks very much, this is really helpful, all files will have a specific UNESCO template so this will work great. It would be very helpful to have a way of filtering by which languages are present as well but this is more than enough to get started.
@SilkTork: Is this correct? I always have tried to make it clear when I previously granted an older license version elsewhere, but I can certainly stop doing that. - Jmabel ! talk17:38, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
@Jmabel: Third party interjecting... while you as the copyright holder are perfectly able to grant permission to use a work under multiple licenses, just showing a single license instead of both isn't technically 'wrong' (you did license it under the 3.0 version as well). Since the crop is 'technically' a derivative work (though a non-creative one that creates no new copyright), and the 2.0 license allows licensing of derivatives under later versions of the same license, I don't think it's really an issue to only show the later version of the license on the file page. At the same time, I personally would not have done so (I would have kept both, if I was making the crop). To more address what I think you were asking, though, as the copyright holder you are in no way required to indicate all licenses under which you have released a work when uploading it, you just need to indicate an 'allowable' one when you upload it here. All Creative Commons licenses are 'nonexclusive', and don't prohibit multi-licensing. Revent (talk) 07:19, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
In the few situations in which I've uploaded a derivative work of a dual CCBYSA30/GFDL work (example), I've always marked my upload as CCBYSA30 only (the GFDL being such a burden to use properly), so I don't see anything wrong with distributing this DW under only one license. Since this clearly isn't a case of someone attempting to revoke the free license or trying to get us to delete it for lack of a license, I don't see a problem with un-marking it with CCBYSA20. Nyttend (talk) 13:06, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
I wasn't really even looking to that aspect that he also cropped the photo: I was more looking to the original, underlying work, which is licensed under cc-by-sa-2.0 on Flickr. I gather you are saying that when I copy my own works over from Flickr, there is no reason to indicate cc-by-sa-2.0 if I am also offering cc-by-sa-3.0. - Jmabel ! talk17:10, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Indeed, though with your 'own works' the license on Flickr is rather moot anyhow, since you can just 're-release' your own works on Commons under any acceptable license. Revent (talk) 02:16, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
I reverted the change as 1) only the original author may change a license and 2) the version 2 license is still valid even if a version 3 license of the same type is also in use. --Denniss (talk) 19:41, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
I must confess, I did not lokked at the cause here, because it was a set of files and the others were nominated because of the series criterien. That made sense for me. I think, the requester only used the false number as he wrote the request. Marcus Cyron (talk) 21:34, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
False number? It was one of a numbered series of photos of the same subject, a perfectly common practice. - Jmabel ! talk02:14, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
iMO, at least, the 'default' should be to not rename files, unless there is a specific compelling reason, instead of renaming them on request. As long as the existing name is 'valid', leave it alone. 'Series' of numbered images with missing members are not uncommon... since the numbered 'order' of images is usually irrelevant, IMO there is no real reason to rename files purely on that basis. Leaving them along (filename integrity) should be the default setting. Revent (talk) 07:29, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
So at Commons, consensus is not needed for featured pictures unlike when it is needed for featured articles at Wikipedia because articles and pictures are entirely different? 76.176.28.23522:33, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
I clicked a random link and ended up at Gérard serée, which had nine images until they were all deleted as copyvios. I wonder if the same is true of many other empty galleries? Nyttend (talk) 13:10, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
That looks like it would fall under GA1 speedy, but obviously it would be unhelpful; let me ask at the CSD talk page about making an exception for navigational pages like this one. Nyttend (talk) 13:19, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Wouldn't the category be sufficient? It doesn't seem to me that this page serves a Commons purpose. It certainly isn't a gallery. --Auntof6 (talk) 01:56, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Copyright transfer agreements
For the last several days, I've been helping a musician who desires to upload images from his own website; he's just sent OTRS an email confirming his identity as the owner of the website, although it's not yet been confirmed by an OTRS volunteer. This being done, we should accept anything from his website (after all, we accept anything by photographer Jerry Avenaim uploaded by User:Jerry Avenaim, since the user's identity as the photographer has been authenticated). He says that he owns the rights to a group of photos that depict him, and I'm waiting to hear back from him as to whether they're works for hire (the musician has a bunch of employees) or whether they're ordinary professional images by some studio. If it's the latter, and if he says that they signed a formal transfer agreement, what process do we follow? Do we accept such a statement on its face (just as we accept a statement that others were works for hire, since authentication proves that he's the owner of the company), or do we ask for some sort of additional evidence/proof? Of course, this all assumes that the OTRS authentication checks out; if not, of course they need to be trashed. All the images in question appear at Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Mlaucke, if you want more information. Nyttend (talk) 13:17, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Hey all. I've been looking at maintenance categories and I noticed that Category:Creator template possible is pretty large. I have a bot from some batch uploading work that creates Creator templates from Wikidata entries. I'm think about modifying Template:Creator possible to allow a user to specify a Wikidata ID when they add that template. Pages tagged this way would appear in a different category, and a bot could go through that category and automatically create those templates from Wikidata. Any thoughts or objections about this? BMacZero (talk) 01:51, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
A slightly related question: does anyone know if we're going to get support for linking Creators directly to Wikidata any time soon? That would be a much better system, but I feel like that feature is not a high priority. BMacZero (talk) 01:51, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Yes, that would be much better. The "arbitrary access" feature needed for this has already been deployed on several other wikis – does anybody know the status of this regarding Commons? Last thing I remember was "it's coming soon". --El Grafo (talk) 10:09, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Yes, "it's coming soon" was the last I heard about it too. I think it is a great idea to replace Template:Creator possible with creator templates written based on wikidata. Wikidata have d:Template:Creator/wrapper which can create very good Creator template based on wikidata. See d:User:Jarekt/a. The output is not ideal yet but probably can be fixed. It would also be great to come up with some way of adding those new creator templates to the home categories and files. --Jarekt (talk) 12:11, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi
There are these objects: c:File:Bomb container in Moscow subway June 2012.jpg at every station of Moscow Metro. If a bomb or smth suspicious-looking is found in the Metro, it will be put in this bunker to get blown up. So it's used for safety, agaist terrorism for example. What is a category tree will be suitable for it? I did't find anything. //Stolbovsky (talk) 16:19, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
با سلام من ابتدا توی ویکی انبار یه سری عکس آپلود کردم.حالا وقتی که به جدول ایامی استان مورد نظرم میرم -نمی تونم عکس اونجا آپلود کنم.سوال اینجاست که الان عکس ها واسه مسابقه شرکت داده میشه یا باید ابتدا عکس ها رو حذف کنم و از نو آپلود کنم.
@Skyllfully: a lot of pages like that are pretty inactive; we generally allow people to post in any language here, but of course we can't promise someone will be able to help them. - Jmabel ! talk02:28, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
While browsing the Bahamas near the location of the SS El Faro sinking, I ran across the photo File:Solfarata fumarolas putana volcano.jpg. Its coordinates are wrong: N should be S (and otherwise it's correct). I have no idea how to go about fixing it; there's no Talk page for the item or for the owner. If someone knows how to fix it, please do.
Is there a way to easily track use of your uploads?
Just wondering - I know that on Wikipedia you get notified when a page you've created has been linked to from another page. Is there something similar on here to let you know when an image you've uploaded has been used in another Wiki? Apologies if this has been asked before, I did a few searches but didn't have much luck due to lots of hits for "tracking images" etc... Mabalu (talk) 12:08, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
There used to be WikiSense, but if you access that website now there is a message stating "The WikiSense project has been discontinued. It was based on a very old version of MediaWiki, and very much entangled with the Toolserver environment. A migration of the old code seems unpractical, and a complete rewrite of all tools would take a lot of effort. Please check on the ToolLabs overview page if an alternative tool exists for your need. If you would like a WikiSense tool to be re-created, try the Community Wishlist process (or the Technische Wunschliste on the German Wikipedia)." I don't know if there is a replacement tool yet. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–12:34, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
If you maintain a personal category for your uploads, then the 'Global Usage Badges' gadget (it's in the preferences) will give you the same 'red question marks' as using MyGallery.. it will add them to all categories and gallery pages, though. Revent (talk) 02:08, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, guys! The Commons:MyGallery link does more or less what I was looking for, it's useful to see which images are being used and where, especialy if they've been found and used by other users. Mabalu (talk) 14:25, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
Generator
Am I correct in seeing this as a generator to charge the batteries of the coaches. This way the coach doesnt depend on an electric supply from the locomotive.Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:41, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
No way to really tell from this, but it looks more like it's hydraulic to me (note the drain plug just to the right of the pulley). Revent (talk) 10:03, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
graphic improvement and image filters for original uploads
Hi !
I was wondering whether their is official policy or standard for dealing with improving/beautifying/filtering original uploads.
In the case of significant manipulation or a format change creating creating a new derived work seems to the the obvious way to go. I'm wondering however how image filtering like color correction, sharpening, etc. of an original upload should be handled. Should they be uploaded as a derived work as well or simply uploaded as new version of the existing file. The latter version has the advantage that all articles using the old image are automatically improved. It has however the disadvantage that the original upload (is some regard the "unprocessed" image) becomes somewhat "hidden" and the "improvement" of various filters might often just be in the eye of the beholders.
So is their any policy or established practice how to deal with case or is it right now simply up to the judgement of an individual editor how to proceed here?--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:30, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I don't think we have a firm standard, but here's what I go by, and I don't think I've ever had any complaints about my approach. Assuming that the image is "own work" (so it isn't important to preserve the version in some archive), things that are unambiguously improvements are OK to upload over the image. For example, stripping borders; removing watermarks; white-balancing where uploader had no idea how to deal with tungsten light or with shooting an aerial landscape through a haze; slight (<2°) rotation & corresponding cropping to get a level horizon line. However, most other edits (including most color balancing) are a matter of taste, and if you don't get sign-off from the original uploader/photographer, you should almost always upload under a different filename. - Jmabel ! talk15:17, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
If in doubt, at all, don't overwrite. When you overwrite a file, you are effectively (from the perspective of anyone not actually looking at the file page, and most people who are) deleting the old version, and replacing it with your own. Even if you upload your new version under a different name, and then everyone decides it actually should have been overwritten, it's easy enough for an admin to merge the new upload on top of the old file (FYI, you delete it, move the replacement on top, and then undelete all the old revisions). Revent (talk) 06:22, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
I think that the stamps will have to be reviewed and nominated individually. Some of the {{PD-German Empire stamps}} files will qualify for {{PD-old-70}} because the stamp designer died long ago, some stamps reuse old artworks and some are {{PD-ineligible}}. I suggest keeping the templates for now until all stamps either have been deleted or retagged as something else. --Stefan4 (talk) 20:42, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Any stamp should be considered an official work on behalf of the state-owned post (BRD/DDR and earlier german post stamps). This changed in 1995 when it became a shareholder company so any stamp from 1995 or later should not be an official work. --Denniss (talk) 21:08, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
This court ruling is only applicacable to DPAG stamps, not to older stamps issued by Bundespost or older/other government agencies. --Denniss (talk) 07:39, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
The court ruling is applicable to § 5 Abs. 1 UrhG, on which all of the templates are based: "the Landgericht Berlin decided that § 5 Abs. 1 UrhG only applies for literary works (Sprachwerke) and not for works of the visual arts (Werke der bildenden Kunst)" (quote from Commons:WikiProject Public Domain/German stamps review). Furthermore, the ruling is also applicable to {{PD-GermanGov}}, which is also based on § 5 Abs. 1 UrhG. Since § 5 Abs. 1 UrhG only applies to literary works, none of the templates can be used for artworks. --Stefan4 (talk) 11:18, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
In the old days, stamp illustrations were "defaced" which then made them usable in publications. At first the defacement was a wide white line through the stamp, but generally now is just a black line through the denomination of the stamp. Collect (talk) 23:28, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
A mass deletion request for several thousand stamps is exactly what could've happened in 2012. Opting for an individual review process was a compromise between deleting and keeping files. As you might imagine, reviewing copyright for German stamps was and is done by a limited number of users. Therefore few stamps were reviewed in the last three years and the larger portion of unreviewed stamps remain. The stamps were uploaded by individual users, all assigning public domain status based on §5 of German copyright law. In the past we've seen a number of batch uploads with third parties (usually cultural institutions) assessing a certain copyright status for their uploads as well. No individual copyright assessment is done in both cases. In the case of batch uploads user reviews and error report systems allowed to identify some files didn't meet our copyright policies (e.g. they are not yet in the public domain) and had to be deleted in the process. The German stamps are different in that no single third party vouches for their copyright assessment, but a number of individual users did when they initially uploaded these files. The question is if we want to treat German stamps different than any batch upload when it comes to copyright assessment of individual files. A mass deletion request would result in a lot of false positives and is neither reasonable nor productive. My impression was that we came to this conclusion in 2012 already and therefore didn't follow through with this idea. Individual deletion requests for several thousand files would create an immense backlog and will occupy a lot of users for a long time. Moreover I think it's unlikely that these individual requests would get the attention they require, unless someone has a couple of experts on German stamps and copyright hidden somewhere. I can understand the urge to do something about this pile of unreviewed files. A modus vivendi could be to nominate smaller batches for deletion at a time. Say a couple of dozen individual deletion requests simultaneously. Regards, Christoph Braun (talk) 23:57, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
You should probably keep one of these pages Commons talk:Stamps/Public domain or perhaps better under the German section of Commons:Stamps/Public domain#Germany updated on progress, actions to be taken or decisions. I only happened to stumble across this discussion. It might also be useful to tell the German wiki as there may be some experts there who can assist and a good place to start, before commencing any deletion process, might be at de:Portal Diskussion:Philatelie for starters because it will have significant effect on them in particular. Ww2censor (talk) 11:51, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
I left notifications at some German, French, Russian and other philatelic wiki pages. I've been informed that tomorrow's French Signpostfr:Wikipédia:RAW/2015-10-09 will mention the issue. In the meantime the deletion nominations should perhaps be put on hold for a least 7–10 days until we possibly get some more input or help to deal with this. Ww2censor (talk) 08:52, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
Ww2censor, thanks for your work. We do not have to resolve it right away but there has to be some ongoing process, so we can retire the 5 above templates in some foreseeable future. --Jarekt (talk) 11:45, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
for the recent several month I cannot type "space" when writing in Commons. Sometimes refresh, helps but it is prety annoying. Tested in both FF and Chrome. Do you obscure such problems also?--Juandev (talk) 08:49, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
Something like that happens to me: apparently it is caused by the use of the Category Slideshow gadget, and affects only HTML form entry boxes, not other kind of typing. It does go away once the page is refreshed; this has been happening in several versions of Firefox during the last couple years. -- Tuválkin✉✇10:16, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
Why do 6% of all Commons images get uploaded with no text?
I have been making a fuss about finding that 0.3% of my uploads have been created with no text pages since the weekend, due to a apparent unknown WMF operational glitch (phabricator:T113878). However, on investigating the numbers more widely for how often images are uploaded to the project with no initial description, I was completely astonished to find over 1/20 images starts out with a blank page. The numbers have been hovering at 5% to 7% over the last two years:
Can anyone work out why so many uploads start out blank, and if there might be ways of decreasing this number, on the presumption that a significant proportion of these must create work for volunteers to repair them? I'm half expecting to discover that one of our popular upload tools does its uploads in a weirdly unexpected way. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 01:00, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
This is not good; thanks for digging it up, Fæ. Could these files (almost 1 million!) be tagged with a mantainance category, at least? Or is it so bad that there’s not even a filepage to add the category to?
I'll dig into it a little more, however keep in mind that just because a file gets uploaded with no text, does not mean it stays that way. The numbers above just state how the file was at first upload. It could be that a lot of these have image text pages created by their upload tool within seconds of the image having been uploaded, rather than at the same time. I think that when we transfer images cross-wiki this might happen, it's something to piece together... As for images with blank text pages longer term, they do get flagged by bot and will end up at Category:Media without a license or a similar maintenance category, probably within the first half day. --Fæ (talk) 09:57, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
Fæ: how did you calculate your numbers above. Do you include images that were eventually deleted (probably significant if they're uploaded blank). Are you counting revdeleted initial revisions as "blank"? My calculation for September 2015 (admittedly not including things that were eventually deleted - tried select count(*) from revision inner join page on rev_page = page_id where rev_parent_id = 0 and rev_sha1 = 'phoiac9h4m842xq45sp7s6u21eteeq1' and rev_timestamp > '20150900000000' and page_namespace = 6;) only had 279 blank images (and 898692 total images = 0.03% blank) being uploaded that month, which is two orders of magnitude less than your count. Bawolff (talk) 18:39, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
I used the image table and checked for img_description = "". This will just report pages that still exist, should include renamed files without worrying about redirect pages and will count pages that were later fixed but originally blank. I don't think it would count deletions, that would be the fa table.
BTW, checking for page len as zero is a bit pants, as there are bots that rush around slapping a category or template on those, quickly making them non zero. In fact I double check my fixes so that I count any (of my uploads) under 400 chrs as being equivalent to blank. --Fæ (talk) 19:13, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
While many tools make img_description and the initial page text be the same, there are many that don't (UploadWizard being a prime example where img_description is almost always "Uploaded by UploadWizard"). Its entirely possible for img_description to be blank, and the page text to have text (e.g. File:Stadtparkhafen_(Hamburg-Winterhude).Treppe.22022.ajb.jpg). Your query would also come up with cases where someone did a re-upload with a blank summary.
If instead of using the sha1 for empty string, I use rev_len < 400 for initial revision of page in File namespace, I get 148,062 results for September. But I suspect that there are lots of legit image desc pages that come in under 400 bytes.
As for deletions - I don't really know an easy way to count those (due to limits on tool labs), but it would make the numbers more interesting. Bawolff (talk) 21:14, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
I agree with the 400 chr limit, that's just true for my upload projects. I'd guesstimate that any image with a text page shorter than 80 chrs is 99% likely to be a bad page... prove me wrong. With a bit of smart analysis I think something might pop out of this that would help our volunteers that enjoy maintaining blank pages. --Fæ (talk) 21:35, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
@Bawolff: Playing with the numbers makes Selenium user (talk·contribs) pop out as a mass uploader of mostly empty pages. Shouldn't this WMF official test account (along with any others) have either a bot name or use the now agreed WMF suffix used on role accounts (there is no specific named operator)? --Fæ (talk) 14:19, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
I didn't even realize we were (still) doing selenium testing on the live site. Personally I'm not sure how much I like have tests that make actual writes on a live site, although I guess the bot isn't getting in anyone's way if it has gone so unnoticed. Maybe it would be nice if that bot deleted the images it made after its done uploading them. As for (WMF) prefix - I kind of feel like that is supposed to be for people who are doing things as part of their job, that doesn't seem to quite fit the definition of a testing bot. But it would be nice to clarify its role. Personally, I'd like the name Selenium user (WMF QA bot) (talk·contribs), and yeah there should be a contact person on the bots user page. Pinging @ZFilipin (WMF) and MarkTraceur (WMF): in case they have any thoughts. Bawolff (talk)
To fit rather better with past practice, see m:WMF Advanced Permissions, something like Selenium QA bot (WMF) might be more the thing. I'm vaguely thinking of others in the future using global regex searches for "official" accounts, or indeed to uncover redundant accounts to retire or to pop any special rights off. --Fæ (talk) 17:09, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
Thoughts on creating files with very short or minimal text pages
Just looking at page length to find patterns, I think that a search for underpinning issues would have to be more complex. The following list for uploaders of images with the shortest image text pages, probably tell us little apart from these accounts are doing more unusual things with image creation.
Just a note - The normal search engine (Cirrus Search) works on the contents of pages after expanding templates. If I remember correctly, this was one of the major changes from the old lucene engine. So using templates in a way similar to File:趮-bigseal.svg doesn't negatively affect search results, and the uniformity of doing it that way, potentially makes it easier to extract metadata in the future. Bawolff (talk) 01:11, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Indeed, with the Ancient Chinese Character template "ACClicense" there is not much more to say once the model fields are filled, and even if necessary, there is a comment field for that. Michelet-密是力 (talk) 06:10, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for explaining how the search works. It's much smarter than I expected, sounds "wikidata ready" . --Fæ (talk) 13:04, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
enforcing proper category names using AbuseFilter?
Generally category names should be in English (though there may be exceptions), but new users aren't always aware to this policy and may categorize new files using local names. In some cases, where the local name is using non-latin alphabet (Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese etc), it can be easily detected automatically using AbuseFilter. I'm suggesting to use AbuseFilter to detect such assignment to categories with non English names, and show the user notice (which is OK to ignore) before saving such edit. Eran (talk) 15:40, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
This ain't an extension of en:WP, but something for the whole Wikiverse. If you said "latin letters" it would perhaps be OK, but I even don't think that would be OK, or should the alphabet be restricted to 52 letters + 10 numbers and be plain ASCII? How about at least proper names with all diacritics, not just the dumbed down english versions? --Sänger (talk) 10:35, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
Such filter shouldn't prevent users from associating pages to categories with non alphanumeric character, but just politely remind them it is unusual and the convention is to use English names and not local names in categories. The whitelisted characters may be defined using some query (example quarry:query/5585), or based on community consensus. Eran (talk) 11:05, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
Would this apply only to defining categories, or would it also apply to categories that haven't been defined? There are many redlinked categories that are not in English or even in Latin letters.
A consideration that came up in another conversation concerns names of things: books, buildings, government agencies, and others. One can try to translate these, but that translated text is not the actual name. With books, the best we can do might be to transliterate, but it has been argued that most people looking for a book written in a certain language will search for the title in that language, not in English. With buildings, some are best known in the English-speaking world by their foreign names (the Taj Mahal, for example) and others are not (for example, the Eiffel Tower) -- how do we decide whether to translate? Do we created redirected categories for them? And then we have categories like Category:Hôtel du 2 avenue Vélasquez, which is basically just the address of the building and not its name at all (at least as far as I can tell).
This would apply to categories that haven't been defined - when someone upload or edit an image description and adds new category that match such filter. A possible filter could be:
added_lines rlike "\[\[Category:[^a-zA-Z0-9]" and !(old_wikitext rlike "\[\[Category:[^a-zA-Z0-9]")
(the whitelist characters can be defined differently) In such way that once there is a good reason for exception and the file already linked to such category, the filter will not match anymore on that page.
Sometimes there may be good reasons for using local names and in those cases it should be fine to not translate - we shouldn't decide ahead whether to translate - this should be kept as a per case consideration. However when there is a clear and known name in English - this should be the preferred choice. The notice for the user when this filter match an edit should explain this. Eran (talk) 06:50, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
Zhovkva
I suspect this is written in Polish and I see a posible date of 14-7-1904. At this time Poland didnt exist yet and this is probably the Russian part.Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:54, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Saying that «Poland didn’t exist yet» in 1904 is a distraction as needlessly inflammafory as it is irrelevant for the subject: This is in the Region of Lviv (back then Lwów), and we usually classify / categorize geographical items into countries according to current boundaries, so I added a few cats under the Ukraine tree. (The printed text of the postcard is indeed Polish, and I’m almost sure the handwrittent text is too.) -- Tuválkin✉✇00:06, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
The historic boundaries are often respected as is in the case of Category:Königsberg/Category:Kaliningrad. (also Austria-Hungary) In 1904 Lviv was part of the Russian empire, but this contained a lot of non-Russian people and regions. I cannot make out if Lviv was part of autonomous Congres-Poland (File:Karte kongresspolen.png or old map) or Ukraine. The language map of 1880 File:Polish language1880.png places Lviv on the border. So on balance in 1904 Lviv was on the Ukraine side of Russia, but I would like to see more precise maps. I suspect the USSR reactivated the old Poland-Congres borders.Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:56, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
Probably just the same as any other mailing list or newsgroup: kind of wobbly. Per law (but which country's laws do apply?) all rights usually belong to the author, but in most cases noone really cares? --El Grafo (talk)
The interface (not the individual posts), if its complicated enough to warrant copyright (which seems doubtful), would probably be copyright the people who made the software - GNU mailman (GPL). Some (not all) of the individual listinfo pages use a custom template which I think is CC-By 3.0. Bawolff (talk) 18:47, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Well, depending on what is shown in the screenshots, it might be below COM:TOO and qualify for something like {{PD-text}}. Maybe just upload an example and immediately file a DR for it to find out? --El Grafo (talk) 09:46, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
If the license is not stated, or there simply wasn't one applied automatically, I would think that the national 'post laws' of the sender of the mail applies. Yes, it is a tower of Babylon situation. Possibility to solve the issue would be that when you join up, you receive an EULA stating any future mail would be under a specific license. It shouldn't be difficult to implement this. Regards, --OSeveno (talk) 13:50, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
When you contribute text to a Wikimedia wiki, you agree to MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning, whereby you license your text. E-mail clients do not contain MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning, so unless you agree to something similar when signing up to the mailing lists, the content is unlicensed. The copyright holder is probably determined by the law in whichever country the sender is located, and most copyright laws would make the sender the copyright holder. --Stefan4 (talk) 17:53, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Requesting of authors information on photo donations
Hi. Recently I uploaded a serie of donated photos of the mexican flautist Horacio Franco. @Jcb: requested me the information of the authors of each photo perhaps the materials was donated trough e-mail using a template of donation under CC-BY-SA 4.0 by the artist trough his communication agency. Franco is the owner of the photos, that was ordered and paid by him. Now the images was deleted. In other case I received after Wikimania 2015 189 photos donated by the Mexico City Police (contained in Category:Images donated by Secretaría de Seguridad Pública del Distrito Federal) and Jcb is asking me again the author's information of the photos. The Mexico City Police have photographers who are paid staff doing his work and the own donator expressed trough a scanned document (received by the OTRS team) expressing the donation to Creative Commons as other donation of contents managed by other fellow GLAM wikimedians around the world. I don't know if other content donation managed by OTRS team received the same requirements of info than me in similar donations (AFAIK not) but this is very annoying for me, specially for the amount of time invested in get this materials in the real world. I'm a long time wikimedian and president of my chapter so I have other content donations pending from other sources but this lack of good faith can't support in our work opening more closed collections. Thanks, --ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 06:32, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
I sympathize with you, it must be discouraging when you work so hard to contribute to our community, but end up seeing your efforts deleted. Has happened to me too. I can only make suggestions I am considering myself: 1) Do not upload anything unless the OTRS path has first been fully completed. 2) During these large projects, try to find a member of our community with broader authorities to assist and/or advise during the process. I am aware that this way it takes a while before you can see the fruits of your efforts, but with our very large community you would have a more secure path ensuring secure completion. You might consider advertising such a need here in Village Pump. Commons Wikimedia is lucky to have dedicated members of it's community, such like you. Regards, --OSeveno (talk) 13:36, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
@ProtoplasmaKid: , depicted people and organizations way too easy call themselves the copyright holder of pictures. Even if they paid for pictures, that doesn't mean a copyright transfer. I have e.g. seen lots of cases where a depicted person claimed that the copyright was transfered by contract and when I asked them to send us a scan of that contract it turned out that the photographer granted a usage right for 5 years, which is obviously not a transfer of copyright. Your view may be that you are obstructed all the time by people like me, but in fact we need to be careful, because most of the people we talk to at OTRS have no clue at all about copyright regulations. Jcb (talk) 14:57, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
@OSeveno: Thanks for your message and recommendations! I will do in this manner or others for have another results the next time. I think the security of our movement need to have secured legal basis to avoid problems but sometimes we forgot the Wikipedia 5th pilar. --ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 20:26, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
@Jcb: I understand all the legal conditions of my country, I'm a regular evangelist on Commons and free licenses as a part of my volunteer job in Mexico. And in my professional experience I signed agreements on some government agencies and/or companies where I worked and I made creative work like scripts, photos or videos and AFAIK in my country the copyright owner can or not make different agreements to be definitively the ultimate holder of the economic rights of a creative work did by a person which work to them. In both cases the legal representatives should have this in mind when donate photos and sign in a document with legal validity that I sent to OTRS team. Previously I explained to each entity where I make donation agreements about if they are the copyright owners and they are expressing in a document that yes it is. If they are lying or they are not the copyright owners it's not a problem of you and me but the people who did the donation. You're making an assumption about something that could happen. If the individuals that work for that agencies have another version or does not want the photo here in Commons can talk with us about the agreement with their bosses. BTW I know that many other massive uploads doesn't have this kind of persnickety procedures and was sufficient with this kind of templates signed by the GLAM institutions that are collaborating with our movement. --ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 20:26, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi Multichill my intention never was make feel bad to another colleague. I'm feel shame too BTW. If JCB felt bad I can ask for an apology. But I have too the right to state my point of view about something related to my work. There's different authors in the metadata due are employees of the Secretariat who give me the photos as you can read in the last paragraphs. In addition I will try to have the author information to add to each archive. Thanks, --ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 23:35, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
In most jurisdictions pictures taken by employees only belong to the employer if the employee has a contract as 'photographer'. If not, permission in principle has to come from the employee. In most cases employees are willing to write a release statement. And don't worry, I'm always available for explanation when something is unclear. Jcb (talk) 07:02, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
October 11
Reasons why Global Replace might fail?
I recently became a file mover and have been moving some files. I've noticed that Global Replace isn't working for me: the script will automatically fix links if the file is only used on Commons but if it is used on other wikis it fails and falls back to CommonsDelinker. Does anyone know what the problem could be?
Technical details: I use Firefox 41 on Windows 8.1. I have HTTPS Everywhere, AdBlock Plus and Tracking Protection enabled but these do not block anything on Wikimedia wikis. Javascript is on. Third-party cookies are disabled, but when I re-enabled them it still didn't work.
Have you considered the possibility that there might be a problem with cross-wiki account unification for your account? AnonMoos (talk) 05:24, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Global Replace won't work outside wikimedia.org wikis with third-party cookies disabled. When enabling third-party cookies, I've found that I sometimes have to log out and then log back in again before Global Replace starts working. --Stefan4 (talk) 17:46, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
This service on wmflabs appears not to be running- can anyone tell me how to restart it as it's making my work incredibly tedious? Cheers. Rodhullandemu (talk) 17:45, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
This file presents a fake version of the national flag of Cyprus (branches are in the left and not in the center like the official flag). I informed the community in the talk page of the file, but nobody cared. I please on those responsible to ensure for that problem. Thanks. --IM-yb ( talk) 21:32, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
European Science Photo Competition Greece 2015 - Grant (PEG) proposal
I’m with Tuválkin on this. We are supposed to favor stability of filenames. If nothing is actively wrong with the filename, leave it alone. - Jmabel ! talk02:28, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I don’t know the background surrounding this specific case, but in general I’m very strongly in favour of respecting an uploader’s choice of filename (especially of own work) as long as it’s reasonably apt, at least partly meaningful, and not misleadingly (or technically) incorrect. Any perceived failings beyond these basics can be addressed in the accompanying description or by categorization (including sort keys), compared to which the name is quite unimportant for the file’s accessibility.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 03:04, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
It was claimed to be due to reason #2, but the explanation given by the requester doesn’t match that: "More concise and lets get her name right.". Regarding the person’s name, the three Wikipedia editions which use this image in their articles on her all use the original, rather than the new, name for their articles. Overall, this certainly seems like a good candidate to be moved back. JesseW (talk) 03:38, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Sorry - but no. If a new image name is really beter than the old one - especially when we don't do anything against the photographers freedom of naming his images - the better name should be used. A better name is a better name. And consistence in an area of images is not a fix idea. This is professional work. Marcus Cyron (talk) 19:03, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I'm also confused. How is a longer filename "more concise", and a person's name which differs from the name used in 3 different articles about them the "right name"? The provided explanation appears throughly inadequate and mistaken. JesseW (talk) 00:43, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
If you don't like COM:RENAME, you can always try to get it changed. (Personally, I would also prefer a bit more liberal renaming policy.) But, as long as the policy is as it is, I expect you and everyone else to follow it. --Sebari (talk) 05:01, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
To the best of my understanding, {{PD-USGov-NASA}} should apply. It applies to most work produced by NASA unless there are some special circumstances surrounding the production of the particular work. BMacZero (talk) 23:35, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
On this FAQ page, there is a question about I have been searching and searching and can not locate a copy of the Murmurs of Earth CD. Would you know of a vendor that might sell copies of it? The answer implies that at least some of the content on the Golden Record is copyrighted, and states that the Voyager site only includes the content for which NASA was "able to get release." The page listing the photos included on the record states that the photos are copyrighted and at least some of the photos have copyright notices on them. At the same time, the pages about the greetings and sounds do not have any statement about copyright; there is a page about the process of creating and compiling the recorded greetings. In short, it sounds as if the music and photos on the record were copyrighted; but not necessarily the sound effects and greetings-it would be useful to know as to who exactly was involved in producing them. --Gazebo (talk) 04:12, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
As a counter-example, looking through, I notice one recording of Bohumir Kryl. He died in 1961, so I would guess the recording copyright would not have expired until after 2031, unless there is some rationale otherwise. --Fæ (talk) 22:37, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
True, however I believe there is no evidence that all recorded performances by Blue Amberol were in the U.S. It would be worth doing a bit more research on the artists and how agreements were made for the recordings and their rights. --Fæ (talk) 04:01, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
What we need for this to be a mass upload project, would be an extended rationale for PD to be laid out for the record on, say, a batch upload project page at COM:BATCH. This would avoid DRs or uncertainty in the years to come, as well as being a place to cross-link to any DRs that do get raised against specific recordings. That a recording was produced on the Blue Amberol Recordings label, does not mean that there can never be any artist rights outside of the USA for all the various performers and composers, or that some recordings were themselves made outside of the USA. --Fæ (talk) 04:11, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
the blue amberol label is a strong indication of first publication in the US before 1923. shouldn't be too hard to find a history book confirming that. you would be hard pressed to find a blue amberol recording first published in Europe, given the difficulty in analog reproduction. they instead exported cylinders. here is the finding aid for the foreign releases of cylinders [5] - library are however saying "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5" [6]. Slowking4♡Richard Arthur Norton's revenge04:18, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
Sound copyrights in the US are a mess. Prior to 1972, there were no federal copyrights on recordings, and they were not brought under federal copyright; they are covered by state copyright, perpetually in all cases I'm familiar with, and will be until 2067, when federal law will sunset those laws. There were some cylinders given to the US Government and released as PD, but otherwise virtually all audio recordings are under copyright.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:32, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
Actually, while reading that, it's interesting that the National Park Service has ownership of the Edison recordings! I think they should be reached out to for clarification. If the US government is a copyright holder of a work, does that make it PD? If not, can they be persuaded? Victorgrigas (talk) 03:22, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
A number of Edison Records recordings have been uploaded to Commons and there is the {{PD-Edison Records}} license tag which was likely intended for these recordings. Even so, as mentioned in this LibraryLaw article, it is not at all clear that all the Edison Records recordings are out of copyright even though the NPS acquired a large number of physical recordings. The current policy on Commons seems to be to allow Edison Records recordings even though there is uncertainty over the copyright. (As a side note, the PD-Edison Records license tag seems to indicate that the restored MP3 editions from UCSB are not acceptable due to the noncommercial-only license, though unrestored WAV editions that were downloaded before UCSB stopped making such editions available are acceptable.) --Gazebo (talk) 06:03, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
That all makes sense, but my question is - did the NPS acquire the copyrights to the Edison recordings, not just the physical records themselves? Was that transferred to them? In which case since the NPS is a bureau of the US govt. shouldn't they release them PD?Victorgrigas (talk) 17:26, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
One of the state laws in question is Nevada's (and it seems relatively unexceptional among the state laws I've looked at):
NV Rev Stat § 205.217 (2013)
1. Except as otherwise provided in subsection 3, it is unlawful for any person, firm, partnership, corporation or association knowingly to:
(a) Transfer or cause to be transferred any sounds recorded on a phonograph record, disc, wire, tape, film or other article on which sounds are recorded onto any other phonograph record, disc, wire, tape, film or article; or
(b) Sell, distribute, circulate, offer for sale, distribution or circulation, possess for the purpose of sale, distribution or circulation, or cause to be sold, distributed, circulated, offered for sale, distribution or circulation, or possessed for sale, distribution or circulation, any article or device on which sounds have been transferred without the consent of the person who owns the master phonograph record, master disc, master tape or other device or article from which the sounds are derived.
So if they own the masters, they have the "copyright". If the masters are gone, I guess the law doesn't apply? The government doesn't have to release anything it didn't create as PD, but I've seen no evidence they are trying to claim any prohibitions on what can be done with this.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:44, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
At the current time, it appears that Commons policy is to allow sound recordings that were fixed prior to February 15, 1972 if the recording does not incorporate any underlying copyrighted works. In particular, it seems that the license tag {{PD-US-record}} was intended for this situation. Unfortunately, it may be that there is no clear answer for the copyright situation with pre-1972 recordings (the US Copyright Office has recommended changing the law so that pre-1972 recordings are included in the federal US copyright regime and has laid out recommendations for carrying out such a change.)
It is possible for sound recordings of foreign origin (i.e. non-US origin) to be copyrighted in the US even if the recording in question is out of copyright in its home country. In addition, it appears that some pre-1972 sound recordings can be subject to federal copyright if the recording was of non-US origin and federal copyright was applied to the recording under the URAA (Uruguay Round Agreements Act.) For pre-1972 recordings that are subject to federal copyright by virtue of the URAA, it would seem that the correct policy would be to not use the {{PD-US-record}} tag and to only upload the recording if the copyright holder released it under a free license or the recording is otherwise out of copyright. --Gazebo (talk) 06:19, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
In the deletion discussion for the {{PD-US-record}} template, the closing admin wrote that the template 'Should be fixed'. I take it that this means that files only may be uploaded to Commons if the files comply with a 'fixed' version of the template. I am not sure if the current version of the template is that 'fixed' version or if the 'fixed' version of the tempate is supposed to be a different version of the template. The closing admin didn't specify how the template should be 'fixed'.
The status of pre-1972 sound recordings seems to be confusing. In UMG v. Escape Media, New York ruled that federal copyright law is null and void in its entirety with respect to pre-1972 sound recordings, both stating that certain use is permitted and when stating that certain use isn't permitted. This specific case centered around Article § 512 of the United States copyright law, which says that it is permitted to use the material without permission from the rights holder provided that you are a 'service provider', that you are unaware that you are using the material and that you stop using the material as soon as you become aware that you are using it, and the court found that service providers didn't have this right with respect to pre-1972 sound recordings. If federal law is null and void in its entirety, then it also means that normal copyright expiration rules do not necessarily apply but that some states may use different copyright expiration rules (or lack such rules altogether). --Stefan4 (talk) 14:26, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
September 28
I messed up a Featured nomination template and need someone to help fix it
I posted about this on the Help Desk a few hours ago, but no one responded.
When trying to nominate my first Featured picture set, I erred and do not know how to fix it. Maybe it takes an admin. I have since managed to correctly post a set nomination. But the error I created with my first try needs to be taken care of. My initial mistake was saving right over the nomination template instructions. Right now, if you go to the Featured picture nominations and click "Create a new nomination" for Set, it points this path:
And instead of loading the Template FPCnom/Set and instructions on how to set up a Set nomination, it has my delete template when I was trying to correct my mistake. I don't know how to correct this. Can someone please correct this so editors can once again nominate Feature picture sets.
I have created the category:2004 in rail transport in Ukraine with the Template:Railtransportyear-Ukraine. I took Poland as an example. I am afraid there are stil some red categories and templates. Can somebody check and complete? For Ukraine we dont have to go to far back, as before 1991 it was part of the Sovjet Union.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:30, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
"Moral rights" in the news - can someone evaluate the threat?
According to [7], a rapper who wrote w:Big Pimpin' is being sued despite having paid for use of a copyrighted song, under the claim that using it thus-and-so required some kind of special "moral rights" permission. However crazy it sounds, the suit is in the news, and the idea is obviously a threat to Commons - maybe even Wikipedia if some Ayn Rand type decides that because you didn't follow his blueprint for an article he has the right to blow it up. This forum seems to have a lot of people who know about expansive copyright claims .. can you shed light on the argument here? Or better yet, can you update the Wikipedia article about the song to make it clear to all? Wnt (talk) 18:57, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
In many, probably most, countries of the world, author's rights include two aspects: patrimonial (economic) rights and moral rights. But not in the United States. Regarding the court case to which you refer, it has been before the court for eight years. During those years, the parties have filed preliminary requests against each other. You can search the legal sites for the various episodes. The court says that the facts must be examined and the case decided on its merits. The issues include the sequence of licenses, the scope of the licenses, if they included the right to make derivative works, their expiration. Without having read through all of it, it seems to me that basically the matter to be determined is what licenses, if any, were obtained. This is all determinable in terms of U.S. copyright. Nothing out of the ordinary. You probably shouldn't lose too much sleep over it. -- Asclepias (talk) 20:12, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
October 15
Upload statistics in the time dimension
Is there any information on the age distribution of uploads of own work? Are most pictures taken less than a year before the upload? 2 years, 3 years, etc. Some uploaders dig into their private picture banks and some go to the bother of scanning old slides. I suspect there is a big leveling when you start to get into the pre-digital age. The change was gradual as at first only professional photografers took digital pictures and a lot of people kept using the familiar non-digital cameras, until they broke down or where lost.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:27, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
Would it be difficult to create a tool that allowed people to more easily provide description translations? One idea would be to have a link in the filedesc template that would add a link under Description. This link would bring up a box that would allow people to select a language to translate into, show current translations and a field to add a new translation, once they had pressed save that language description would be added. John Cummings (talk) 13:17, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
I guess there is something like you request at User:MarkTraceur/editDescriptions.js, a tool mainly for file descriptions. Not well-known though and probably needs to be polished a little by its author, considering the abilities that rose up with the availability of Parsoid. -- Rillke(q?)10:39, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Cross-wiki uploads to Commons from the visual editor
Media upload dialog, "Upload" stepMedia upload dialog, "Details" step
Hi all,
With the deployment of this week's MediaWiki version, all desktop users who can ordinarily upload images to Commons will be able to do it on other wikis from inside the visual editor as they edit. (Later today on non-Wikipedias, tomorrow on Wikipedias.) Monday on MediaWiki.org, Wednesday on non-Wikipedias, Thursday on Wikipedias. Matma Rex (talk) 16:58, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
As you can see in the screenshots on the right, the interface offers a very simplified version of the upload tool, directing the user to use UploadWizard here on Commons if it's insufficient. This is limited to just self-created single images under the default licence. It can be accessed under Insert → Media → Upload in the visual editor's interface. We're intentionally keeping it low-profile until we're confident that it is improving edits and Commons.
The uploads use an edit summary of "Cross-wiki upload from xx.wikipedia.org" (or similar), which should be enough to track them. We're considering adding a change tag to the uploads to making tracking them easier.
If everything goes well without disruption, we'll bring this long-requested feature to the wikitext editor (within a week or two), and we will provide additional uploading tools over the coming months.
Good question. Please make sure the uploader is aware of the fact that uploads are going to Commons – at least until we get some kind of cross-wiki notifications for deletion requests and the like! --El Grafo (talk) 11:14, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
If they read the three lines of text in the dialog, they should be. When inserting the image (after it is uploaded), you also get a "More information" link that points to the description page on Commons. (It seems that VisualEditor doesn't explicitly indicate whether the images on the page come from Commons or local wiki.) I'm not sure how clear the distinction between various Wikimedia wikis is to casual contributors, anyway… The source wiki of the upload is indicated in the edit summary, so it should be easy enough to reach them at their home wiki. Matma Rex (talk) 16:58, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi everyone :) There is a new website with all the collections of French museum here. Sadly, everything is under a CC-by-NC-SA licence. But there are lot and lot of pictures that are aithful photographic reproductions of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. And the API is here. Léna (talk) 08:17, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
At a quick glance, I suspect we already have a lot of those. They do look like they are largely PD-Art, tho. A very careful scraping (to avoid dupes, and not grab recent works) might be in order. Revent (talk)
Help request for some old Pennsylvania government photos
NB. I have received explicit permission to divulge certain details in the following. Al Goodman, who was Coordinator of Photographic Services in the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare in the 1970s has contacted OTRS wanting to donate some photos in his possession of various state officials such as Milton Shapp for whom we seem to have no photos. He seems pretty confident that there would be no copyright issues, but I think I will have to look into them on a case-by-case basis using https://archive.org/details/copyrightrecords to make sure they fall into something like {{PD-US-no notice}} or {{PD-US-not renewed}}... which may prove difficult if the exact date and photographer is not certain. He also would prefer to mail physical pictures, but I think I have persuaded him to scan them himself, starting with just one. Looking for any advice and/or offers of help, especially from people who have done anything similar before. Storkk (talk) 14:52, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
There is one Category:Terrace-pier (Gatchina): its name fits the description, but the actual structure less so. The depicted Hague cafe, though, is a terrace only by a very stretched extension of the (admitedly fuzzy) meaning of the word: It is a repurposed barge or boat, serving as a cafe terrace; the latter term from Latin "TERRA" (="earth", "land", "soil"), meaning originally a kind of earthworks. I added Category:Repurposed vehicles and Category:Floating restaurants, but this could be improved. -- Tuválkin✉✇00:35, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
It is a practice much used in the Netherlands to extend the local sidewalk café on to the water in the summer season. Its very cheap as these floating pontoons have many other uses as work platforms on water. I would never consider it as a vehicle as it is never used for transport. The inside is sealed and it is only used as a floating element for platforms on water, for example a floating bridge or crane, where many such floating elements are used as a foundation. Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:56, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps a better name: Floating food and beverage facilities ? This should cover a lot. Otherwise you would also need Floating bar's, and whatever else of this buseness that may be floating. Regards, --OSeveno (talk) 14:10, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
October 17
مسدود شدن بخش بارگزاری ویکی پدیا در ایران
سلام ظاهرا بعد از وقوع مشکل در سرور های ایران ویکیپدیای فارسی .هم اکنون این بخش کماکان با مشکل روبروست و به سرور متصل نمیشود و این مشکل درباره اتصال به بخشهایی زیادی از ویکی مدیا و دسترسی مستقیم به بسیاری از عکس ها صادق است. و تنها با استفاده از نرم افزار های دور زدن فیلتر در ایران قابل دسترس هستند--Sajadmoradi11 (talk) 06:31, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Google translation: Hi appears after the occurrence of a problem in Server Iran Persian Wikipedia Both now this sector is still in trouble and cannot connect to a server connection problem on large parts of Wikimedia and direct access to many of the photos is true. And only using circumvention software available in Iran Hstnd-- Sajadmoradi11 (Discusión) 06:31, 17 October 2015 (UTC)B25es (talk) 10:52, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Jpeg and DRM
This article covers some early thoughts of the JPEG committee about putting DRM into Jpegs. (Don't you hate committees?) RichFarmbrough, 00:31 16 October 2015 (GMT).
Their capitalization of jpeg makes me cringe... Anyways, i dont think there is anything to worry about at this stage. Such a plan would require buy-in by all major vendors, which seems unlikely. Probably will end up as just another standard nobody adopts. A rather common occurance in the tech world. Bawolff (talk) 05:38, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
Hey guys, Commons:First steps do not work properly, when we click in the button, the page come back to "en"... I don't know how to fix... and I created a "better" version for pt Commons:Primeiros passos, and this auto translate undertake this page... (and we have pt and pt-br, totally unnecessary). -- RTA03:05, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
Ruslik0, Firefox (both in win and ubuntu)..., keep returning from es to en, pt to en, fr to en..., all of them actually (I tested, but not in all pages). My Commons is in EN. -- RTA06:01, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Except USA in other countries government made works are protected by copyright like any other works. So, I do not think you can upload this video. Ruslik (talk) 19:56, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
The copyright statement on the website states that "unless stated otherwise the Creative Commons zero (CC0) applies. They also state that only for photo's this doesn't apply, unless stated otherwise. Do we need to interpret photo's as to also include video's ? If not, either their copyright statement is not complete (which shouldn't be our concern, I'd think), or we are allowed to assume that Creative Commons zero (CC0) also applies to video's ? Just asking, what's your opinion ? Regards, --OSeveno (talk) 17:58, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
October 18
How do you call a sort of "pit stop" for running or cycling competitions ?
Hi everyone. I wanted to add a category for that file but I don't know how we call the equivalent of a pit stop for running or cycling competitions (in that case it's an ultratrail race). In French we use the same word in all cases ("ravitaillement") but I can't find any confirmation that it may be called a pit stop too in English. Thanks for your help. --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk...07:05, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Just point of note - for tiff files (and png files for that matter) this (i.e. Thumbnailing process exceeding memory limit) is a mostly solved problem (especially for single page tiff files). Bawolff (talk) 20:52, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Also for this PDF even the small preview image is not created. Does that mean, PDF format actually is not supported on Commons for such "large" PDF's and I better should upload those files in JPG format? --Alexrk2 (talk) 12:46, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
I wonder if you could use Inkscape to convert the PDF to SVG and then upload that. At least it might be a better quality than JPG ? Regards, --OSeveno (talk) 18:13, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
The content of the first PDF is just a single image, so a vector editor won‘t be the best tool. If the image is already in JPEG format, it should be extracted as is, if possible, and uploaded as such. Otherwise it should be saved as a TIFF or a PNG to avoid introducing compression artifacts (or, if JPEG content has to be expanded, adding more). Let me have a look … OK, the content is a JPEG, compressed about to about 6% of the original size. It appears the original was a TIFF, converted to PDF by Adobe Distiller; uncompressed it would be about 240 MB, losslessly compressed probably half that. I‘ve extracted the JPEG content as a stand-alone file, should I try uploading that as an alternative?—Odysseus1479 (talk) 20:31, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Yes, the first PDF seems to contain a JPG. Uploading it as JPG than would be reasonable. Can you extract that JPG from the PDF 1:1?
The second is vector. I think the problem with that file is because of the mass of signature patterns in the map. For such complex PDF's conversion to SVG is also no option (to large, to much elements, to much problems with typography). I'll try to convert it to PNG or JPG. --Alexrk2 (talk) 21:01, 18 October 2015 (UTC) ... converted to PNG --Alexrk2 (talk) 21:58, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Increasing amount of difficulties at Commons Wikimedia
For a while now I am having problems with GIMP-made PNG images not rendering properly on Commons Wikimedia. Because of this I have already abandoned PNG altogether on Commons Wikipedia, since I found out that this issue is valued at very low importance by the people that should fix this. So no transparency in images. Now today I discover that when I download blanc SVG maps of the world, posted on Commons Wikimedia, which I wanted to use for creating a map for use on Wikipedia, they won't open in Inkscape. None of them. Does anyone have an idea what's going on here ? --OSeveno (talk) 19:51, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
That occurs to me as well—some kind of download accelerator perhaps, that might mess with the character encoding? (Another possibility, rather remote: ISTR that a few years ago certain ISPs were ‘helpfully‘ intercepting & converting some image formats, for convenience of caching or some such reason, preventing verbatim transmission.) Try opening a downloaded SVG with a text editor: does it look like plaintext XML, or binary gibberish?—Odysseus1479 (talk) 22:30, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
Until now I had downloaded using the following procedure: I clicked the "original file" link below the image and let it open in Firefox 41 (on Windows 7, x64). I do not use any download accelerator. After opening the file in my webbrowser I would use the "save page" option. Opening the file with Notepad++ would present me with just a few lines of the XML text. Now I also noticed the downloaded files being smaller than the original. Today I tried a different downloading procedure: I right-clicked the "original file" link below the image and used the "save link as..." option from the context menu. Now I can load the file correctly in Inkscape. Also the size of the downloaded file is correct. I am convinced using the first method didn't give me any problems in the past. --OSeveno (talk) 20:01, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
User:OSeveno -- SVG files that won't open in Inkscape are usually made with Adobe Illustrator (occasionally with CorelDraw or another program). I can usually do a little judicious hand-editing of file headers in a text editor to ensure cross-program compatibility. AnonMoos (talk) 00:37, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
If someone would produce a detailed listing of a problematic PNG using the pngcrush command-line utility run with the "-v" option, the problems might become obvious. AnonMoos (talk) 00:32, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
Please consider not everyone uses commandline (in Windows) or console (in Linux) regularly. I used the application TweakPNG from http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/ to take a look at the files, but I couldn't determine anything. I am not a PNG expert, but willing to learn more on the subject. Before someone mentioned a problem with the gAMA setting when applying grayscale or desaturation. Following is a list of some of my 'problematic' files: File:Pieter Paulus (1753-1796).png, File:Jeremias Faber van Riemsdijk (1786-1863).png, File:Spuipoort, Den Haag (reconstructie).png. I do not know how to use PngCrush to change the gAMA chunk. I f there where a GUI application to do this I could try. But considering the userbase of Commons Wikimedia not being all experts, I would consider this to be a workaround. Regards, --OSeveno (talk) 20:14, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
A test file I uploaded today. It should look like this.
I have been had the exact same issue with PNGs appearing too dark. It's affected every black and white PNG I've uploaded today, and only the black and white ones. Adding colour seems to negate the issue. How much colour? It seems you're in the clear if the thumbnail contains at least one coloured pixel. Here are the other things I found out:
It only affects the scaled-down versions generated by MediaWiki. The full-size original will always render correctly.
Following on from the above, it doesn't matter which browser you're using, as the issue is generated server-side.
I tried adding a single pink pixel to my test image, which made it render correctly, but only at sizes where the pixel is visible. The cut-off point for that turned out to be somewhere between 200 and 300-pixel sizes, but it would of course vary from image to image.
Darkening the red channel imperceptibly is another viable way of adding coloured pixels to a black-and-white image. But we shouldn't have to be keep using these workarounds.
It doesn't matter which program you save it in. I tried Photoshop and Apple Preview. Nor does it matter if the image has a transparent background.
Conversely, it DOES matter if you save it in PNGCrusher. The bug doesn't seem to have an effect on optimised PNGs.
Using the greyscale colour mode (for me at least) made the image appear TOO LIGHT rather than too dark. Again, the full-sized original was not affected.
It only affects recent images. I have a black-and-white PNG dated 28 January that is unaffected.
Take a look at the past versions of my test file, and maybe we can fix this bug. Till then, I'm just going to put all my B+W images through PNGCrusher before I upload them.
-- Jynto (talk) 17:48, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Hey, that looks great, Storkk. If I can see it properly on my computer, it probably looks that way on everyone's. I still don't know what you did to it to make it like that. Could anyone with knowledge of how MediaWiki scales images weigh in on the discussion? -- Jynto (talk) 17:19, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi Jynto... it appears that the version of imagemagick that MediaWiki uses assumes a linear gamma if there is no gAMA chunk in the PNG. According to phab:T106516, if we upgrade imagemagick, it should assume a gamma of 2.2, which is probably what we want. As a workaround until then, when you save a PNG, there should be an option to save the gamma chunk. Grayscale mode may be a red herring, but it appears to be clearly best (assuming no imagemagick weirdness) for grayscale images... Does that explain it adequately? Otherwise User:Bawolff can probably explain it best: he helped me understand it back in July when I was having these issues. Storkk (talk) 17:37, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
October 10
Technical support satisfaction survey
Patting one’s own back is not easy, and it takes extra pains to do it using other people’s hands. Here’s one more example, where, in a Phabricator (!) thread, people who should be working discuss how to gather the most active volonteers of selected Wikimedia projects (Commons and 9 Wikipedias) to randomly select those who are fed a satisfaction survey.
Project namespaces are eventually classified into content, technical, and curation, and top users from those are pooled in each project: No attempt is made to cater for Commons’ differences: The misnamed and largely irrelevant “gallery” namespace and the file namespace are given equal status, both assumed to make up Commons’ content, and the category namespace is classified as a curation, along with, i.a., the project namespace. (This approach replaced an earlier idea, in which Commons’ file namespace was paired with Wikipedias’ article namespace: It went from wrong to wronger.)
It needs a special kind of uninformedness to see Commons’ articles/galleries as content, along with its files, when Commons’ core concept is being a mediafile repository, not to mention the fact that most articles/galleries are largely contentless, haphazard, unmantained and obsolete — their intended role usually much better covered in the Category namespace.
The invitations to the survey that I've seen on user talk pages here on Commons stated that the intent was to "gauge community satisfaction with the technical support provided by the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikipedia", so presumably, they're not actually interested in Commons at all. —LX (talk, contribs)16:40, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
I wonder how clean they think their results can possibly be: there seems to be one unique survey link per wiki. Storkk (talk) 17:03, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
@LX: Yeah, that was a pretty unnecessary mistake. The phrasing was supposed to stay on the English Wikipedia survey only but managed to get to the Commons survey as well. Our apologies. We do care about Commons. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 22:27, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
@Tuvalkin: It needs a special kind of unfriendlyness to see your lines as constructive input. Do you have indicators why you assume that members of the Community-Tech team are after "patting one's own back" or is that just venting your general frustration with WMF, by assuming that this team is not interested in gathering honest feedback via that survey? --134.169.216.14516:03, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
I believe the plan is to gather a baseline survey now, then repeat at some later date, to try to measure the difference in satisfaction (and thus measure wether the team is effective in its role of improving the situation). Not a perfect way of measuring effectiveness, but a lot better than just blindly doing things without checking that they work at all. Bawolff (talk)
@Tuvalkin: I really don't understand your criticism. The Gallery pages are part of Commons content. I've built lots of them and frequently link to them from Wikipedia articles. Sure, they aren't as important as the File pages, but they still count as content. And what's wrong with considering the Category and Commons (aka Project) namespaces as "curation"? The Commons namespace is where we discuss deleting images, which is certainly a form of curation. And assigning categories to images is also a form of curation. If you have a better idea for how to evaluate contributions to different namespaces in the future, I'm open to suggestions for improvement. Kaldari (talk) 20:17, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
[I dont care either way] I have trouble seeing the logic of having categories be curation but galleries non curation. If anything galleries is more curational then categories. But i dont really care. Arbitrary definitions are always going to be arbitrary the important bit is to pick something. Bawolff (talk) 21:38, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Some help with extinct mammals
We've been taking pictures of the Rodrigo Botet Collection and some fossils seem to have no category or in some cases there are spelling mistakes. One we cannot categorize is this fellow. Help is wellcome. B25es (talk) 10:57, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Now it's a Dasypodidae. We don't know much about biological taxonomy so we just went and took notes from the exhibits explanations. Thanks a lot for your help. B25es (talk) 16:19, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Search for just Featured or Quality images
Is there a way (in the Commons search bar preferably) to search for a topic but only return results that are featured images or quality images? This would make it much easier for people looking for good quality images to reuse on Wikimedia and elsewhere, especially with broad topics. Or perhaps this is a bad idea because not enough images have been assessed?
Hi @Bawolff: , this is really helpful, thank you. I think the second option will serve my purposes best. I can't see it in the documentation but do you know a way of combining the search of two or more categories into one search term? I would really like to create a link that would return the combined results of World Heritage Sites for valued images, featured pictures, quality images and media of the day.
I write a blog. I like to include pictures with my posts. Usually I use Google to look for pics, and that works pretty well, but it has some shortcomings.
- It will return a zillion results regardless if they have any bearing to the search terms.
- For common pictures, you can't tell where it originated.
- The information on the page holding the picture may or may not have any relevant information.
What I would like to see would be a list of fields of standard information for each picture, things like where and when it was taken, by who, the subject and a caption.
The key item is that when you embed that image in another webpage, that information would be inserted along with the picture.
It might be that Wikimedia already implements something like this, but I haven't found it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cpergielx (talk • contribs) 02:49, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
@Cpergielx: If you search for pictures on Wikimedia Commons by using the search function in the upper right corner, you'll find File description pages which provide all the standard information which you mention. There is also EXIF metadata embedded in image files, but that data is not automatically extracted and displayed by your blog software or your browser, so it is still up to you to fulfill the requirements). --Malyacko (talk) 08:20, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
US, Russian copyright and pictures taken during the Great Purge
..User Ctac has recently uploaded pictures of individuals killed during the Great Purge by uploading post-1926 (all post 1926 images are copyrighted in the US).. However, he had a very convincing arguement, no one will pursue a copyright infringement case on pictures taken by the NKVD. More specifically, the NKVD took images of individuals before they killed them. I'd argue, maybe not that convincingly, that pictures taken by the NKVD during the Great Purge should be uploaded to Wikipedia. First, it would look extremely bad if the Russian government sued someone for uploading a copyrighted image of a person killed by the NKVD, secondly, these images have all been released to the public domain...
Of course, I could have argued more convincingly, but my arguement is simple; what is the chance of the Russian government suing use for uploading mugshots taken by the NKVD right before the individual in question was killed? I'd argue its very small. What are you're thoughts? --Trust Is All You Need (talk) 21:26, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Whether someone would sue is not relevant to Commons. We respect copyrights independent of the likelihood of their being pursued.
You mention Wikipedia. Which language Wikipedia? Each has different policies on fair use.
In case your question about the chance of being sued is about your intent to re-use these on some non-WMF site: I'm not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but I would say your estimation of this is reasonable. I personally would certainly not worry about copyright issues if I were posting these on a website, and would expect that at worst I'd receive a takedown notice and deal with it then; I might think more seriously about publication in book form. But that has no relevance for Commons and little for any Wikipedia. - Jmabel ! talk
Unless there is some basis for them being PD in the U.S., that still doesn't change anything for Commons. Commons requires that they be in PD or free-licensed both in their country of origin and in the U.S. - Jmabel ! talk05:15, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
Basicaly you use the argument ´the law is the law however stupid the case is´. Even judges have the posibility to ignore the law if it is against all common sense. As there is no legal risc I wouldnt bother respecting it.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:17, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
And on your own site, you are welcome to have that policy. But on Commons, if you go against Commons' policy, expect to be reverted, and if you repeatedly and persistently go against policy, expect to be blocked. - Jmabel ! talk15:28, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
@Smiley.toerist and Jmabel: I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is this; these images are in effect in the public domain. It would be different if a commercial entity had things in the public domain in Russia, but not the US. That entity would seek to protect its interests. When it comes to the Russia, the NKVD and the Great Purge no such entity exists. These images are de facto in the public domain. WP should treat them as such. Shouldn't It?
This is not a case of 'the law is the law however stupid the case is', but rather that WP Commons is not pragmatic when it can be. We're pretty much saying that when the legal entity as such won't sue us for copyright infringement (without creating mass hysteria), we should still pretend they are copyrighted. No entity in Russia would sue us for uploading these photographs; Commons need to take that into account. --Trust Is All You Need (talk) 08:56, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
Again: "won't sue" isn't the same as "doesn't own the rights." And Commons has long since decided to go by the latter. - Jmabel ! talk16:36, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
Just to ease a bit my ignorance: Since those images aren't in public domain in the US, someone owns the rights there. Who owns those rights in the US? Russia? The heirs of the NKVD agent who thook them?--Pere prlpz (talk) 13:19, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
October 13
Thumbnails not appearing in categories
I uploaded a number of photographs yesterday using the UploadWizard. The uploads appeared to be successful. Initially when I viewed the files, the {{Information}} template (and possibly the category) failed to display. On forcing a reload they appeared. However, even though the photographs are in categories, when I look at the category pages the thumbnails of the photographs do not appear. Here is an example: "File:Basilica of the Assumption, Strahov Monastery, Prague, Czech Republic - 20140712.jpg". Reloading the file and the category page do not seem to make a difference. Is anyone else experiencing this issue? — Cheers, JackLee–talk–09:17, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately, I seem to have fixed it by adding a new category and removing it. I say unfortunately, because I have no idea why this happened. I confirm that for me, purging the caches did nothing, but adding a new category made it show up in both. I've never seen this before... do you have a new example so that others can see the behavior? Storkk (talk) 10:05, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
(further comment) Sometimes, when purging fails to fix an issue, a 'null edit' (opening the edit window, and then hitting the 'save page' button with no changes) will fix the problem. Revent (talk) 12:27, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
Ia happens the same to me, from 2 days.. All the changes I do, all the new images I upload, all the new categories I create do not show in older categories until much time after.. Is it possible to fix this issue and revert to how it was before? Thank you --Sailko (talk) 19:07, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
No: the backlog started on 20 October, and were this related to the backlog, it would not have been fixed by adding a new category and removing it or performing a null edit. Storkk (talk) 08:12, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Trademarked logo requires copyright to upload?
Hi, trying to upload a trademarked logo (I am the trademark owner) onto my Wiki page, but it keeps requiring a license or permission. Why would I need a license (or permission) to post MY OWN work? Any help? — Preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.120.216.105 (talk) 16:51, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi,
all uploads to Commons have to be free for many kind of uses, including commercial use and creation of derivatives (see COM:L). The way to document this freedom is the license (=permission). Of course, only the author/creator/rightsholder can release a still copyrighted work under such a permission. If you try to upload a logo of a well-known business, you will of course be asked for evidence that you are the author or representing the rightsholder. If the trademarked logo, which you want to upload, is still in copyright (above threshold of originality), you should think twice (or check with the legal department of your business) whether it is wise to release it under a free license, as this might lower your chance to prosecute trademark-infringing uses by third parties. --Túrelio (talk) 07:19, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
24.120.216.105 -- Trademark and copyright are two different things. Trademarking is irrelevant to uploading to Wikimedia Commons, but copyright status is critical. Are you the artist who made the logo? If not, was the artist under a "work-for-hire" arrangement? Etc... AnonMoos (talk) 08:56, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Placing or copying files to categories does not work. For example: Copying from Category:S-Bahnhof Aumühle to Category:2007 in rail transport in Germany. Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:46, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
It happens the same to me, from 2 days.. All the changes I do, all the new images I upload, all the new categories I create do not show in older categories until much time after.. Is it possible to fix this issue and revert to how it was before? See also another discussion above, of Oct 16th "Thumbnails_not_appearing_in_categories". We are not impatient, we just need to watch what we have just done (like, to chose an image to use), so this is a mayor issue, do not ignore please. Thank you --Sailko (talk) 19:09, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
To give an example, I created Category:Bakunina Street 4, Penza an hour ago. It still shows up as empty (in fact, it contains one file), and cat-a-lot does not find it and refuses to move files to a category which it does not find. Yesterday I had same problems, but the file became visible in less than an hour.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:35, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
I moved some files into a different category more than 8 hours ago and they're still not showing up in the new category. - Takeaway (talk) 20:48, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Oh, of course it is. This afternoon, I created Category:Ellen J. Ward Memorial Clock Tower (Roslyn, New York), and added four images. I didn't track the amount of time for any of them to show up, but so far only one image has done so. Earlier today I posted four images each of two of the surviving Apostle Houses of Garden City, New York, and not one has turned up in any category. ----DanTD (talk) 22:29, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
There was a bug. Its fixed, but now there's a huge back-log of category changes. I suspect things will look brighter in 48 hours (if not sooner) once the backlog is significantly reduced (Update: As of 20:16 UTC, some additional resources were dedicated to clearing the backlog [9], so that will hopefully help get it down quicker). Bawolff (talk) 22:25, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
To be clear, I had nothing to do with fixing the bug (Just reporting what other people have done), so thanks should go to Ori and Aaron. Bawolff (talk) 23:04, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Sometimes (I have noticed that server-slowliness several times in the past). A solution is to click the new Cat. in the photo-description-page to activate the "sleeping" category: if you wait a few minutes, sometimes the photos you can view in the category soon (similar interwikilinks of wikidata) but sometimes (last night indeed!) that doesn't work. --LudwigSebastianMicheler (talk) 19:47, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
October 22
Hi
I would like to have a new subject introduced on Wikipedia, would you kindly guide me how to upload such a subject and all its
relevant details? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elviskastom (talk • contribs) 09:24, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
I have a question for the community. In a recent batch of photos I uploaded, I took the pictures while working for my independently-owned business, and the copyright resides with the business entity. So, I included the business name in each of the descriptive file names, e.g., "Such and Such Building in Philadelphia (by BusinessName) - northeast view.jpg". Is there a specific policy that prohibits that? I know that file names should not contain "blatant advertising or self-promotion", but I would view that as something more along the lines of "Such and Such Building in Philadelphia - call 1-800-RENT-NOW for rental rates!!!.jpg". As most regulars here know, David Miller used to adorn thousands of his file names with "by David Shankbone", which was his trade name of sorts. - Thekohser (talk) 19:45, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
I mean that the activity of going out walking in Philadelphia to take photos to upload to Commons was not something I was doing primarily as personal enjoyment. I was responding to a request by a Wikipedian in Residence, and it is my hope that one day the MyWikiBiz enterprise will place personnel into Wikipedian in Residence programs for businesses, so I need to be establishing that MyWikiBiz is capable of addressing the specific needs of Wikimedia projects. Using the name "Gregory Kohs" instead of "MyWikiBiz" would have no business value because Gregory Kohs doesn't intend to be a Wikipedian in Residence. Having the business name in the file title helps me to associate MyWikiBiz as a pro-Wikimedian brand, and this non-intrusive file-naming practice has long been accepted (even encouraged) in the Commons community -- see "Shankbone", which is not the photographer's name, either. - Thekohser (talk) 10:40, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Given some history here, which is probably not a good idea, why refer to "MyWikiBiz" (which is not a company related to the image) rather than "Gregory Kohs" (which would be perfectly acceptable)? Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we are being trolled and should not take the bait. Rodhullandemu (talk) 23:56, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
What do people think of photo file names like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_designers_in_Chennai_Bangalore.jpg . The photo does not depict interior designers in Chennai, Bangalore. It depicts what is likely a remodeled room that was designed by FreeSpace Interiors, which I learn is located in Chennai, based on following the URL link that's emblazoned on the photo. Anyway, it looks like there is a mild concern about having the name "MyWikiBiz" in a file name, but not enough consensus to say that it is "wrong" to do so. Thank you for the discussion. - Thekohser (talk) 14:54, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
You're welcome. You might also want to look into this one, regarding the descriptive text: "Beautiful custom-made window treatment offered by Aeroshade.com". And this one, with "Deck adds beauty and character to the house. With passage of time, deck can lose its original glory. Proper deck oiling and cleaning can help bring out its natural colors. Deck Revive is a renowned deck oiling Brisbane company with deck maintenance and repair services at affordable prices. Visit us at : http://deckrevive.com.au". - Thekohser (talk) 13:18, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
October 21
Length of descriptions
How long should the description of a file be, and how much should it stray from what is visible in the image into history and geography outside the image? When improving the categorisation of File:St Saviour's Church, Brixton Hill (5991457261).jpg I also condensed its description. Tm objects and has reverted my edits.
I don't think there's a hard rule about the length of descriptions, as long as it's not really unreasonable and it's not a way to include material that would be controversial, advertising, copyright violation, etc. I suppose it should not be the equivalent of a Wikipedia article, but some contextual information can be relevant. In the present case, IMO, the problem with the description of this file is not really its length, but the fact that it is an integral copy of the text from the source. When a Flickr image is licensed, I think the license of the image does not apply to the text of the Flickr description page, unless specified. -- Asclepias (talk) 01:07, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Lengthy descriptions, namely from photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, are not problematic per se — the problem is that, in most cases, those descriptions are either irrelevant ramblings that have no place in the curation of its image, or are indeed relevant descriptions but focus not on that one specific image, but cover instead a large number of related (but possibly disparate) images, and are repeated verbatim in each and every image of the series. Descriptions of both these two kinds are deterimental to the curation mission of Commons, via both its mere reading when perusing the filepage, and through false positives in raw text search, both when it is done for its own sake and when it is done for curation goals (namely, for categorization). Such descriptions, lengthy or otherwise, should be altered and/or deleted and/or replaced with suitable ones as part of the normal editing process, the reversion of which constitutes vandalism. -- Tuválkin✉✇16:10, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
User:Tm seems to view Commons as a mirroring service for each and every image ever posted on Flickr under a suitable license, instead of a curated repository with its own goals which draws on Flickr, i.a., to supply itself. That leads to this kind of problems concerning not only descriptions imported from Flickr, no matter how unsuitable, but also things like rotating unintended camera tilts, cropping around misframed subjects, or deleting nearly identical photos. This position of User:Tm’s is not inimical to Commons in itself, but is made problematic when conjoined with this user’s uncooperative stance when challenged. -- Tuválkin✉✇16:10, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Thankyou Tuválkin: your view and mine are more or less in accord. But I am only one contributor amongst many, and I have got nowhere in what User:Tm has turned into an edit war. Please will someone with more authority intervene?
Keith-264, using your recently uploaded file File:Translation of the German Operation Skorpion Operation Order 1.JPG as an example, are you sure the Crown copyright has expired? The duration of Crown copyright varies depending whether material is published or unpublished. Unpublished material was originally subject to copyright protection in perpetuity. However, the 1988 Act removed this concept from British law. Transitional provisions that apply for 50 years after the entry into force of the 1988 Act provide that no unpublished Crown material will lose its copyright protection until 1 January 2040. New Crown copyright material that is unpublished has copyright protection for 125 years from date of creation. Published Crown copyright material has protection for 50 years from date of publication. It looks like this is a photo of a page from these records "WO 169/1447", which have not been digitized. When and where were these records first published? Did you take this photograph? —RP88 (talk) 18:09, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
rename files
Hi, are those renames desired from this User? [11] - like: File:Undated Giacomo Berger portrait of Maria Cristina di Borbone (1779-1849) future Queen of Sardinia.jpg or File:Anonymous oil portrait of Maria Antonia of Spain while known as the Princess of Piedmont.jpg. Excuse my bad English. Cheers. --Knochen ﱢﻝﱢ17:20, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. One of the two files has been changed the move request before by an IP. At the other was the request removed befor by the IP. --Knochen ﱢﻝﱢ07:04, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Alright, this is getting effing ridiculous- note I'm coming here, to a random village pump, because I know there's not a particular individual at fault (and even if there was, they don't deserve to be raged at), but I have no problem raging at the system. Because the system is $%^ing stupid. So please, can someone please explain to me how this makes any sense, and calm me down with some sort of sensible explanation?
A photo-loving Wikipedian (me, or anyone, really) contacts photographer to ask for photo release
Wikipedian kindly uploads photos onto wikimedia for rube clueless photographer, and explains how to mail in an OTRS form
OTRS form is sent within several days.
Within a month or so, a bot deletes photo because an administrator hasn't bothered to check the OTRS database yet.
Wikipedian assume it's a fluke.
It happens dozens more times, more often than not, for months. Each time, several months pass with no-one confirming OTRS.
Looking for a sensible alternative, Wikipedian begins guiding photographers on uploading their photos to flickr, giving them complete control of the copyright and skipping BS OTRS system
Flickr loads to wikimedia are also regularly deleted, on any editor's suspicion that they're stolen from somewhere (usually with only one other person besides the nominator contributing an opinion, and no-one making any effort to contact the uploading Wikpedian, the flickr account, etc., to help clear things up). Usually this deletion happens under the argument that "because there are versions of the photo elsewhere on google, they must've been stolen," often disregarding the fact that the owner of the flickr account is openly using their real identity, often connected to their photography website.
I understand I could find some pet admin to harass into checking all my upload, but what about the newbies who don't know that's something they need to do, or just don't have the patience? Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but it seems like every option is turning to crap - I've wasted freaking hours on this system over the past half a year, time I could've, oh, I dunno, spent on infoboxes or something. Something productive. Earflaps (talk) 13:13, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
@Earflaps: If you have an example ticket number or filename, I could look into this for you. None of the notices on your talk page seem to be relevant to the above. (In fact, File:Eliot-54920005 -1.jpg may even be problematic - the photographer should really confirm the license). Note that most admins are not OTRS members, so they cannot directly check and they rely on OTRS volunteers to do this for them. It is often the case that we receive inadequate releases, then go back to the photographer who either never responds to the request for clarification, or says something like "WHAT???!? Are you joking with this? I have to allow derivative works?!" or something else pointing to the fact that they never read the license they were asked to send in. Of course, without a filename or ticket number, I have no idea whether this was the case for the uploads you facilitated. Storkk (talk) 13:30, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Comment Are there really bots that delete stuff? @Earflaps: One thing Wikipedian could do is add {{OTRS pending}} to the file description page, so that admins know that there should be something in the system. Unfortunately, we don't have the possibility to automatically notify Wikimedians about deletion requests at Commons yet. I do that manually sometimes, but you really can't do that everytime you start a DR. Imho, the problem is not the OTRS system itself, which was a great idea when it was introduced. It's just that Commons has grown so (effin') huge that handling it has become a lot like fighting windmills – In multiple regards … --El Grafo (talk) 13:56, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
I can answer this question fairly easily. The OTRS system sucks and always has. Its volunteer run and they do as good as they can, but they are generally overwhelmed and there is no requirement for the to do things in a timely manner. Then that result has to be implemented on the projects and if its not done exactly correctly, which occurs fairly often, then bots delete content and mayhem ensues. Reguyla (talk) 18:52, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Bots do not just delete images: volunteers run tools that help them identify problematic images and tag them when for example file is missing a license (as I often do). The uploaders are notified (unfortunately only on Commons instead of home wiki) and they have a week or so to fix the problem, before files are deleted. OTRS is a fairly complicated ritual that many participants have problem with and many OTRS tickets get dropped when other parties stop replying to emails or sent in inadequate permissions (like Wikipedian: Can I use your image in wikipedia article? Photographer: Yap. ). We loose a lot of files that way, but the key is to listen the the communication and follow the instructions, because often things are not going to be repeated twice. Unfortunately, not everything is translated and that is often hard to do if you do not speak English. Any proposals and discusions to improve our processes are welcome. --Jarekt (talk) 13:12, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
One thing that may have played a role: about two months ago we had a huge backlog. For the moment the number of open tickets is within reasonable limits. For the moment, yes. It's true we are being overwhelmed. Jcb (talk) 15:55, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
OTRS has its faults, but the main problem here seems to be that there are just not enough OTRS volunteers to cope with the volume of emails that require responses. Given the vast sums WMF now has access to, you would have thought it might be time to recruit paid OTRS agents. WJBscribe(talk)16:12, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
An honest guesstimate is that 10% of the tickets take up 90% of the time and give 99% of the grief, both to agents and customers. And some can be quite miserable to deal with. Conversely, 90% of the tickets are great, quick, and leave the agent with a good feeling for having verified, and therefore saved, a file. If my gut feeling is even remotely correct, having an "OTRS-paid" queue that volunteers could shunt difficult tickets into might alleviate a big load. On the other hand, it could create further difficulties, one of which is how those agents would be chosen, who would vet them and who would oversee them. Storkk (talk) 16:34, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
When I create a new subcategory, it used to appear immediately. Yesterday and today, it doesn't appear in the Cat-a-lot menu for 5-10 minutes after it is made - very tiresome, as it slows down recategorisation a lot. Anyone know what's wrong? - MPF (talk) 09:22, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
I just wanted to write here the same. I created a category and put images in it, but the category is empty and did not appeared in higher categories :( //Stolbovsky (talk) 09:43, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
same for me. It seems that categorization is done immediately (if you look at the individual image), but that the necessary database updates on the category content is put to a queue and the queue either is new or totally busy. So it takes some twenty minutes until a category change on a file shows up on the category the file was put to / removed from. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 11:01, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Same here, but it is not only with Cat-a-lot and HotCat: Normal edits suffer the same fate. It seems to be a server issue. Maybe when WMF employees are all done with pointless surveys and learning basic wiki editing something could be actually done? -- Tuválkin✉✇11:24, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Ditto. Made new consolidated subcategory for File:NYC Hostel from west.jpg by Hotcat followed by cut & paste. Only the picture knows it's in the new category. The parent cats don't know they have new child cat. The new cat knows it has parents, but does not know it has a picture. Jim.henderson (talk) 11:54, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Cat-related tools seem extraordinarily slow for the past day or two. I moved some images from the Petersburg, Virginia category, into the more specific Transport in Petersburg, Virginia one, and it took a while to catch up. This morning I posted four images of an NRHP-listed house in Lynbrook, New York, and not one of them can be found in either of the two categories I added.--DanTD (talk) 12:39, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Ah. I thought it was only new categories and only half an hour, but no, even diffusion to a months-old child cat is registering only after a delay, and if the delay becomes hours as American wikkans wake up and produce more traffic, then that's crippling. Jim.henderson (talk) 12:51, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
I discovered this category lag yesterday. I hope it can be fixed soon. It now takes a while before I can recategorise media with cat-a-lot into a newly created category. - Takeaway (talk) 17:13, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Well no, categories are usually cheap on resources and it's something else that is preventing updates from happening as quickly as they usually do. Rodhullandemu (talk) 23:51, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Refer to the Phabricator ticket above. As of 3 hours ago the statement was "There is still a large backlog of jobs, but it is shrinking." However right now, any volunteer maintenance tasks based on categories are almost unusable. --Fæ (talk) 10:02, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Problem appears worse now using HotCat. Yesterday delays seemed to be measured in the minutes, today so far a category I created does not appear in its parent category, nor do the subcategories I moved into it or the individual images added to it, about an hour now. --Lineagegeek (talk) 10:57, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Apparently I have the same problem, I upload a file, then place it in categories, reload, and does not work for me at all. I have attempted to find out when I placed it on my computer. I think something is wrong with it. --Nim Bhharathhan (talk) 11:22, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
I have no problems uploading files with categories or adding categories, but when I when want to check if the files can be found in the added categories its no go. It seems as if a background tasks of updating the categories is not working. In datbase terms it looks as if keys are not updated. As this is secondary information no data is lost. This is the list of files/categories wich belong to a category.Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:07, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Most probably yes. The job backlog stopped increasing, and it is quite stable now around 2 M jobs (see [12], select Jobs in the dropdown). Regards, Yann (talk) 17:37, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Same problem, images take hours to show in the categories. Tried in 2 different devices, same thing. Please fix. Thank you --Sailko (talk) 19:13, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Update: As of right now, if you directly put a category on a page (e.g. [[category:Foo]]), it will be prioritized over categories being added by templates. That means direct additions should happen fast. Bawolff (talk) 05:21, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Reasons to prioritize this operational bug
As well as getting Commons working again, we need some weight to support investment by the WMF in a full investigation and improvements to ensure a similar failure does not happen again. If you know of ways that this categorization failure is actively damaging Commons and other projects that rely on it, please add to the list below: --Fæ (talk) 22:27, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Categories which appear empty may be deleted, it being impossible to tell for how long a category has been empty.
Categorisation of batch uploads using tools like cat-a-lot becomes impossible, as newly created and populated categories cannot be checked.
Live projects, such as editathons, are significantly impaired as new users cannot see the effects of their category changes, nor can new material being generated during an event be reported on live.
I doubt your list is going to make much difference. WMF is already aware that this is definitely not a good thing. At the same time they are aware its not catastrophic (As, for example, being totally unable to edit or view commons would be). The backlog is being processed. Everything will be back to normal soon. Bawolff (talk) 00:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Further reply to @Bawolff: , no one said it was "catastrophic" but this bug is causing massive headaches for everyone and is unproductive for the whole Commons community, since any changes to categories makes them unusable until the database catches up (and the backlog is getting longer, not shorter). I've also found that "catalot" is now totally unusable thanks to this bug getting worse and not better. Bidgee (talk) 04:30, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
@Bidgee: My point is: No need to make a list of why its bad, we already know this is bad. Catalot should be fixed now (I think), and the backlog is definitely getting shorter (currently 800,000. At peak it was 2.2 million). I wrote a more detailed explanation about what happened below. Bawolff (talk) 05:47, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Summary of events
So it seems people are confused, and want to know what happened. (Or at least Fae seems to want a "full investigation"). So here's a summary of events based on comments other people have made (Hopefully I don't screw up any of the details. I'm trying to make this easy to understand, without omitting any of the interesting details).
Background: Currently, Wikimedia websites are served from computers that are in Virginia (In tech speak eqiad). There are a number of other data centres around the world (ulsfo in San Francisco, esams in Amsterdam). If you're logged out, and just looking (not editing), then the data center closest to you will respond to your visit (Its a caching data center, so it checks if someone has recently viewed that exact page, and returns a saved version of the html that the last person got, otherwise it passes the request to the main data center. These caching data centers can't do any of the logic themselves, they only repeat what they've seen previously). But if you're logged in, or making an edit, it has to go through the main data center in Virginia.
However, we want the site to be reliable. Thus we have a back-up main data center in Texas (codfw) in case something bad happens, and the main data center goes down. Right now its just sitting there not really doing anything (Which seems kind of wasteful) but has a full copy of all the data. So we want to change it so that the Texas data center can be responding to read requests from logged in users. This is different then the caching data centers I mentioned above, in that it can make the entire page as opposed to just remembering what previous views looked like, and if something happened to the main data center, it could totally take over the operation of the site. The technical details for this plan is at mw:Requests_for_comment/Master &_slave_datacenter strategy_for_MediaWiki
In order to make this vision a reality, we need to make it so "view" type actions avoid changing the state of the site, and where they do change the state of the site, they do it using the job queue instead of doing it directly, so that the job could be transported to the other data center, for people who are visiting from the "slave" (read-only) data center. Or so it can be processed separate from the page request, in order to tax the databases less (reduce slave lag)
As a result there's been some recent changes to how certain actions on wiki are processed. One of them is deferred updates (Which includes a bunch of stuff, most importantly categories) are now handled by the job queue (as of oct 14).
Unfortunately, there were a couple bugs in the implementation, Specifically:
The jobs didn't properly remember at what time they were triggered. This meant the job queue thought that previous work done was too old, so it occasionally re-did work it didn't have to
There was a bug in which queue it was placed in. Jobs for direct category additions are supposed to go in a high priority queue (They are supposed to be prioritized over jobs that add categories triggered by template changes). Instead they were half prioritized, which meant that they went in the low-priority queue (Meaning if a highly used template was changed, all category additions stop until the template is fully processed), but part of the code thought they were in the high priority queue, so MediaWiki thought the jobs were failing, and re-did them a couple times, further backing things up.
So this was mostly all fine, until {{Information}} got edited on oct 20. Since {{Information}} is used on like a billion pages, and every page that uses it has to be checked to make sure the template change wouldn't cause any category change. At that point the implementation bugs I mentioned earlier caused the queue to get totally overwhelmed. As a result, all category additions seemed to stop working as the length of the queue spiked to 2.2 million entries.
However the good news is, that these issues are now fixed (See the bug for a detailed timeline and technical details). The queue length is falling back to normalacy (As of current writing its at ~800,000 entries. I expect it to back to normal in around 8 hours). And any new direct category additions/removals are correctly in the high priority queue, so should happen pretty immediately (Which was the biggest problem imo).
Its similar in that both issues are caused by recent changes to how the job queue works, but its a different change that caused that bug. Bawolff (talk)
Thanks for the description of events. Is there going to be some planned improvement on the root cause of the failure? Based on this description, the actual root cause is more along the lines of Wikimedia's system having a complex set of interrelations of job queues, possibly underpinned by long term use of Agile methods leading to a mare's nest of organic growth.
A fresh analysis of the state machine (or whatever UML type thing you want to call it) and a better means of testing and assessing proposed changes to these fundamental operational queues might be needed, could be worth tasking. Without a fresh approach, there seems nothing so far in the fixes to the incident that would stop future changes causing similar unpredictable severe disruption to operations. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 08:36, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
@Fæ: I don't work for the performance team, so I can't really speak to their intentions. However, in the past when major incidents have happened, the WMF has done "retrospectives" in order to identify how the event happened, and what to differently in the future to prevent similar issues from arising. But these retrospectives usually only happen until after the issue is resolved and settled (No point looking back at what happened, until you're sure it is done happening) and its just now that things are going back to normal. Bawolff (talk) 17:40, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. Hopefully the relevant team will see that a bit of 'community liaison' is a good idea for this one, and come back to fill us in. --Fæ (talk) 17:43, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. It's somewhat over my head, but good to know that the people who ought to understand, do. And, best of all, categorization seems to be instantaneous now, in plenty time for our en:Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/OHNY New York photo contest deadline Saturday night. Jim.henderson (talk) 09:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
It's getting there, but it's not entirely finished. I just moved some imnages of a 5th Generation Chevrolet Camaro RS into the appropriate category, from just the general Chevrolet Camaro RS category. While I was successful at moving them all, one is also still lingering in the general Chevrolet Camaro RS category. Likewise I moved the remaining images of the Port Jervis Erie Railroad station from the general Port Jervis, New York category to the more specific one, and though I was successful, one Erie RR station is still lingering both in the station category and the city category. ----DanTD (talk) 19:38, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Van de meeste afbeeldingen in de Beeld en Geluidwiki ligt het auteursrecht bij derden, maar is Beeld en Geluid gerechtigd de afbeeldingen te plaatsen (middels expliciete toepassing of omdat het specifieke gebruik onder een uitzondering in de Auteurswet valt).
Een aantal foto’s uit de eigen collectie van Beeld en Geluid is in een lage resolutie (ongeveer 500 x 483 pixels) te vinden in de wiki. Deze foto’s zijn te gebruiken onder een Creative Commons-Naamsvermelding-Gelijk delen-licentie (CC BY-SA 3.0), indien dit expliciet in de beschrijving bij de foto staat vermeld.
In English (my translation, and I am not a lawyer):
The copyright for most images in the Beeld en Geluid Wiki is held by third parties, but Beeld en Geluid is authorized to post these images (by means of explicit permission or because the specific use is covered by an exception in the Auteurswet [NL copyright law --Qw].
A number of pictures from Beeld en Geluid's own collection is available in low resolution (roughly 500 × 483 pixels) in the wiki. These pictures may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA 3.0), when this is explicitly mentioned in the description accompanying the picture.
Emphasis added. I've been going through the list of images, and so far I haven't encountered a single instance where this CC-BY-SA license was mentioned in an image description. (Worse, often the links are not to the image descriptions but to gallery pages on B&G's wiki. Sometimes the image is no longer listed in that gallery.)
What is the right course of action here? I've no time to go through all 2500+ images myself and deal out {{copyvio}} tags. Qwertyus (talk) 11:26, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Taking the first in the list, there was a DR closed as kept, so at least, it shouldn't be "speedy". I converted that to a regular DR. More generally, did you ask Edoderoo who uploaded it? BTW, this thread belongs better in COM:VPC. Yann (talk) 11:46, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
I hadn't seen the earlier discussion. Abigor appears to quote an earlier version of their licensing terms, which have changed over time, becoming more precise (and more restrictive). I presume that is because the Institute does not actually hold the copyrights for most of the images. I pinged Edoderoo on his nlwiki talk page. Qwertyus (talk) 11:58, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
The image [[File:FredEmmer.jpg]] was uploaded on May 12th, 2009. B&G made a special page about images in their wiki on December 2nd, 2009, that is, later than the uploading. That version states Het gebruik van de afbeelding uit de wiki is onder Creative Commonslicentie naamsvermelding-gelijkdelen. De afbeeldingen uit de catalogus zijn in een low-res web resolutie te vinden in de wiki. My translation: 'The use of the image from this wiki is covered by CC BY-SA. The images from the catalogue can be found in a low-res web resolution in the wiki.' [13]. Before that, B&G had a single page with user info[14], of which the version valid at the time of uploading the for-mentioned file says De wiki beoogt kennis over de collectie van Beeld en Geluid te ontsluiten. Centraal staan films, radioprogramma's en televisieprodukties die in het kader van Beelden voor de toekomst gedigitaliseerd worden. My translation: 'The wiki aims to disclose knowledge about the colletion of Beeld en Geluid. Central (in this catalogue) are movies, radio programs en television productions that are digitalised for the project Beelden voor de toekomst (Images for the future)' about the aim and with a Voor de volledige inhoud van de Beeld en Geluidwiki wordt gebruik gemaakt van de Creative Commons Naamsvermelding-GelijkDelen licentie. My translation: 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 is applicable for the complete contents of the Beeld en Geluidwiki ' clear link to CC BY-SA 3.0. CC 3.0 states clearly Once you apply a CC license to your material, anyone who receives it may rely on that license for as long as the material is protected by copyright and similar rights, even if you later stop distributing it.[15], so it seems the later change in the license terms gives no reason to state the images which are placed on commons before June 2nd, 2015 17:47 (CEST) should be regarded as lacking permission. Sincerely, RonnieV (talk) 12:43, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
I get the feeling that Beeld en Geluid-wiki have tightened their license terms overnight. And I'm not sure if this can be done, as an image that is released under CC-by-SA can't become CC-by-NC or even (c) later on. When I took the images several years ago, they were released as CC-by-SA, I believe we also created a commons-template for those images to be used. Let's hope that B&G-wiki has made a mistake in this, that they will revert, else I hope they will clear things up on this page. Edoderoo (talk) 12:58, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Edoderoo exceptions to the CC licensing were in place as early as 3 March 2010: my translation "Exceptions to the use of the CC license in the B&G Wiki are the small pictures (so-called screen captures) from the B&G audiovisual catalog, and photos from third parties." This image is from November 2010, but it is not clearly marked third-party or owned by B&G...
Yes, there were exceptions before as well, I clearly remember that not all images were CC-by-SA, and we only took the images that were under a free license. The disclaimer that they use nowadays is way more restrictive as what it has been in the early days. Therefore I'm sure that they have changed something, and that is at the least not so nice, and from a legal point of view maybe even not possible. Edoderoo (talk) 14:31, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Alle afbeeldingen met als bron het archief van Beeld en Geluid, zijn te gebruiken onder Creative Commonslicentie naamsvermelding-gelijkdelen: this is the text that used to be there: all images that are sourced as archive of the Beeld-en-Geluid-wiki, are to be used under a CC-by-SA license. Unfortunately, that is not anymore what they disclaim nowadays. Edoderoo (talk) 14:34, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Qwertyus, the next line states De belangrijkste categorie is te vinden op de productiepagina’s, hier zijn kleine screencaps toegevoegd, het formaat is ongeveer 176 × 144 pixels. De rechten van deze afbeeldingen zijn voorbehouden aan de omroepen en producenten van het materiaal., roughly The most important category can be found at the product pages, where little screen caps are added, measuring about 176 x 144 pixels. The rights for these images are restricted to the broadcasting companiesThe Dutch media system is quite different from that in other countries. (RonnieV) and producers of the material.(My translation). The uploaded material is not in that category. Hopefully 85jesse can clear this up. Greetz, RonnieV (talk) 10:47, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Your link doesn’t work for me (I’m not a g+ member), but I think you‘re right: this appears to be the UC2 Kraka by the same designer (who is also credited as author of the photo). TinEye finds a higher-resolution version of the image, “crane_one.JPG”, dated 2005, at PSUB Picture Exchange, in the section headed From: "Peter Madsen" _peter 'at' submarines.dk_ / Kraka launched may 2005 with no evidence of a “free use“ licence (or any other). Uploading this picture and adding it to the enWP article appear to be the user’s only contributions. I‘ll nominate the file for discussion.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 00:54, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks all. UC2 was my guess too, but I wasn't able to confirm that, only that it definitely is neither UC1 nor UC3. Thanks again. 223.205.243.20505:25, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Are you saying the photo is mis-labled? Please start a discussion about the photo itself on the photo's talk page, and start a discussion about the use of the photo on en:Talk:UC1 Freya. You may wish to advertise the latter discussion on the talk pages of one or more of the WikiProjects listed at the top of the en:UC1 Freya talk page. Davidwr (talk) 20:12, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
What US license should be used for PD-old-100 files?
Lately I was working on unifying language of PD-old templates. We have ~25 of them and originally they all used almost the same English phrase, which was then translated independently into other languages. Two years ago I created Template:PD-old-text which is used to provide a single license phrase (""This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus xxxx years or less..."") translated to as many languages as possible (Please verify or add you language) and used in many templates. As User:RP88pointed out, the problem arouse with template:PD-old-100, since the old template used phrase ""This work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less"" which also claims that the work is PD in the US (without saying why), and the new template does not.
So the question is how to fix it? We could add standard "You must also include a United States public domain tag to indicate why this work is in the public domain in the United States." warning asking people to add US license, but what is the US license tags for files like "Mona Lisa"? Majority of them where either published and should use {{PD-1923}} or unpublished and we should use {{PD-US-unpublished}}, but the definition of publication is quite uncleared to me when applied to old artworks which are majority of {{PD-old-100}}. Any ideas about the best course of action? --Jarekt (talk) 13:08, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Yes, your recent change to the text of {{PD-old-100}} changed it from a "PD in US + PD in source country" to just a "PD in source country" tag. For reasons related to the "PD-old" tag on en.WP, PD-old-100 has been a "both" tag since its creation, despite this not being entirely consistent with the other PD-old-X tags or the details of U.S. copyright law. I think the general idea was "this is really old, it's almost certainly {{PD-US}} due to expiration or failure to comply with copyright formalities". In my option, we should either change the wording back to the original wording and simply embrace the ambiguity, or, if it is going to remain in its new "source country" form, it should definitely have a warning asking people to add a US license just like {{PD-old-80}}, {{PD-old-75}}, etc. all do. I lean towards the latter, i.e. adding a note asking for a U.S. tag just like all of the other PD-old-X tags, particularly if we acknowledge that there are hundreds of thousands of files on Commons with a PD-old-100 (or a related tag like {{PD-Art|PD-old-100}}) and the lack of a specific U.S. tag for these PD-old-100 files, while not preferred, isn't in of itself reason for deletion. By the way, with regards to the Mona Lisa, it is definitely {{PD-old-100-1923}}, it is easy to find examples of pre-1923 publication. For example, a photographic reproduction of Mona Lisa appears in the February, 1914 issue of "The Century" in the article "The Two 'Mona Lisas'" by Walter Littlefield. —RP88 (talk) 14:37, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
You are, of course, correct, I think it is well established that merely because an author has been dead for 100 years is not enough to guarantee a work is PD in the U.S. (a famous example being John Adams' letter to Nathan Webb), it's just very likely. This is why I called the old text inconsistent with U.S. copyright law and keeping the old text would necessarily require us to "embrace the ambigutity". This is also why I lean towards keeping Jarekts new text with a note asking for a U.S. tag just like all of the other PD-old-X tags, so long as we all agree that this won't, in of itself, be sufficient reason for the 100,000+ files with just a PD-old-100 tag to suddenly be eligible for deletion. Basically I think the intention behind the old "PD-old-100" tag was a strange mix of "this work is PD in the U.S. (but I won't tell you why)" as well as "PD in all p.m.a+100 or less countries."; I don't think the original PD-old-100 text ever intended to suggest the U.S. was one of the "p.m.a+100 or less countries". —RP88 (talk) 15:00, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
My problem is with how to pick US license for PD-old-100 artworks, and let's work with Mona Lisa as an example. I am positive that the painting itself is PD in the US, but why? So I look at Commons:Hirtle chart and I have to decide if Mona Lisa was published according to US definition. It seems like if work was displayed "at a place open to the public", like Louvre than it was "published", but also other definitions of the word might apply. According to en:Mona Lisa the painting was on display in Louvre since 1797, so we can change {{PD-old-100}} to {{PD-old-100-1923}}. My guess is that is the process we would be asking to apply to other PD-old-100 artworks. We probably should create some help page about it with some examples, as a lot of it is quite counter intuitive. --Jarekt (talk) 16:48, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
The definition of publication you link to is from the 1976 Copyright Act; under that act (i.e. after January 1, 1978) the public display of a work of art is not publication. See Commons:Public art and copyrights in the US for both pre-1978 and post-1978 rules for picking the correct U.S. copyright tag for public art. —RP88 (talk) 17:18, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
RP88, thanks for straitening me out. I got lost in double negatives of sprawling definition. So Commons:Publication#United_States says that just displaying artwork "at a place open to the public" is NOT a publication. However since I am still thinking about en:Mona Lisa any trying to justify {{PD-1923}}, I can use pre-1978 definition of publication which included display at museum, and that is why Mona Lisa is in public domain in the US. If there is some flaw her can someone say why is she in PD in US? --Jarekt (talk) 19:37, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Bear in mind that the 1976 Act didn't un-publish works that had previously met the definition of publication; if an artwork were publicly exhibited before 1978-01-01, it counts as published. Meanwhile, works not published before 2003-01-01 are PD-US if the author died before 1945, so even if we apply the current definition of publication, she's been in the public domain for quite a while now. Nyttend (talk) 01:12, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
You should keep in mind that Mona Lisa has appeared in print too. That's 'publication' according to all copyright laws. The tricky thing is that it only counts as 'publication' if approved by the copyright holder. Has Leonardo da Vinci (or his heir) personally approved any publication, under either definition? --Stefan4 (talk) 18:00, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
“Approval by the copyright holder“ implies a copyright is in effect. Unless XV-century Florence had a copyright law (which would seem very unlikely—AFAICT the concept is pretty modern, and not widespread beyond the influence of British common law until the XIX c.) or there was a retroactive Italian copyright in effect at the time the reproductions were made, nobody has ever needed Leonardo‘s permission. Some countries recognize “first publication rights” over otherwise free material, but usually for a fairly short term.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 20:21, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
If the source country had copyright relations with the United States when the work was first published, then the work is copyrighted in the United States if it was published in compliance with all relevant copyright formalities (notice+renewal) which applied at the time when the work was published, but it is irrelevant whether the source country has a copyright law or what that law says. If the work is unpublished, then the work is covered by United States copyright law even if the source country does not have copyright relations with the United States. Of course, the copyright may have expired, in which case the work isn't protected by copyright at all. Due to a bug in United States copyright law, unpublished works couldn't enter the public domain in the United States before 2003. --Stefan4 (talk) 13:59, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
One thing for sure, figuring out US copyrights for PD-old-100 files often needs information which is not provided with majority of the files. If it is unclear for Mona Lisa, how are we going to do it for other less well known 100s of thousands of files. I am quite sure that they are all or almost all in PD in US as well, but it is sure hard to say why. We should develope some guidelines for people who might want to figure it out. Some specialized Commons:Hirtle chart for PD-old-100 artworks. --Jarekt (talk) 19:17, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Unless there is some legal case, I'm not for worrying about US law pertaining to anything before 1776. There's some claims over Adams' letters, I guess, but we're really so far out on the limits of law and the limits of what anyone cares about that it's silly.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:48, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Prosfilaes, Ok so at the moment {{PD-old-100}} asks to figure out what US license to use. Should we create some template like {{PD-1776}} that says that there should be no US copyrights on items created before 1776? I know it is kind of silly, but I dislike putting warnings in templates asking others to perform impossible feats, which will guarantee that the requests are never followed. Alternative is to just remove warning from the {{PD-old-100}} and ignore the fact that we have unclear license situation in US (99% sure it is PD but hard to say why). --Jarekt (talk) 02:27, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
Comment Interesting theoritical debate... The Berne Convention defines the country of first publication as the one which matters. So I suppose the definition of "publication" is to be taken from that country law, or is it from US law whatever is the country of origin? Regards, Yann (talk) 18:39, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
According to the Berne Convention, you should only use the law of the country where protection is claimed, so if you are going to a United States court, I assume that you should only use the United States definition of publication. This means that "Country A" could identify one source country whereas "Country B" identifies another source country if the definitions of publication differ.
Also pay attention to the word "country". There was a Japanese supreme court ruling which found that an entity which is a member of the Berne Convention only can be the source country under the condition that the entity is a country, or something like that. This complication combined with the fact that Japan doesn't recognise the statehood of North Korea had the result that the Japanese supreme court determined that one or more North Korean films were ineligible for copyright protection in Japan. --Stefan4 (talk) 00:36, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
Commons requires that works be public domain in the country of origin and in the U.S. It's my understanding that this policy originates, at least in part, on: (1) users in the source country are among the most likely to want to reuse a work on Commons so their needs are important, and (2) Commons is hosted by the WMF in the U.S. so Commons needs to comply with U.S. law. If the public domain status of a work in its country of origin depends upon whether or not it has been published, we should use the source country's definition of publication when deciding which source country copyright tag to use, since that is the only definition that will matter of reusers of the work in the country of origin (i.e. case #1). However, the U.S. definition of publication should be used when deciding which U.S. copyright tag to use, since that is the only definition that will matter under U.S. law (case #2). —RP88 (talk) 19:43, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
The problem is that the definition of 'publication' also depends on what the source country is. A country which uses one definition of publication might decide that the source country is 'Country A'. A country which uses another definition of publication might decide that the source country is 'Country B'. Should we then use a 'source country copyright tag' for Country A, for Country B or for both? --Stefan4 (talk) 16:56, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
We're getting a bit far afield here, but I'll discuss how I approach this. Commons is hosted in the U.S. by a U.S. non-profit, so we're obliged to comply with U.S. copyright law. Any other copyright restrictions we choose to honor are a matter of Commons policy, not a legal requirement, so we're free to choose what works best for us in accordance with the Commons mission (namely building a repository of content usable by anyone, anytime, for any purpose). Commons could have decided on a policy that favored the "usable by anyone" part of the mission by saying we'd only accept works that are public domain in every country in the world. However, applying such a strict policy would have been onerous and highly restrictive on the "building a repository of content" part of the mission. Commons has adopted the less restrictive "PD in U.S. and source country" policy.
Using your hypothetical example, if Commons decides that the source country of a work is obviously C, it doesn't matter if for some reason the odd copyright rules of country X instead say the country of origin is A while some other country Y's odd copyright rules say the country of origin is B, so long as we're choosing country C in a way that promotes our mission. For most works the source country is not hard to identify. For more ambiguous cases It's been my observation that Commons contributors have typically attempted to determine the country with the closest connection to work, but conflicting cases are sometimes resolved by applying the rules in the Berne Convention for determining the country of origin. Additionally, when I am relying on a U.S. license tag in the "PD in US because PD in source country on URAA date" family of tags (e.g. {{PD-1996}}, {{PD-old-auto-1996}}, etc.) I use the U.S. definition of source country (17 U.S. Code § 104A (h) (8)) to determine which source country tag to use simply for consistency sake and to avoid having to use two definitions of source country to explain the licensing section (but this is personal rule, not any sort of Commons policy that I am aware of). —RP88 (talk) 18:32, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
I agree "we're getting a bit far afield". I still would like to figure out how to set required US copyright licenses for files 100, 200 or 300 years old. We all know that they are (or most of them are) in PD, but we do not have a template for it. May be we can:
drop requirement for {{PD-old-100}} to have a US license ( a de facto state until recently)
add a note to {{PD-old-100}} saying that PD in US is assumed because likely either
work was published and file meets conditions of {{PD-1923}} or
We can also create {{PD-1776}} explaining concept of US law not pertaining to anything before 1776 as stated by Prosfilaes, if there is such legal concept.
You would have to recategorize most of the files and also change the gallery. But the wikipedia article you link says exactly the opposite of what you say. -- Asclepias (talk) 14:56, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
No, the objects are called meteoroids while still in outer space; while falling through the atmosphere they’re meteors, shooting stars, fireballs, bolides, &c.; their remains on or in the Earth are meteorites.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 04:25, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
If I am not logged in I frequently see yesterday's "picture of the day."
Recommended fix:
If possible, automatically purge all caches of the Main Page any time one of its elements changes.
If that is not possible, then have a "bot" automatically purge it once every hour or two.
If there are several "front end caching servers" (or "front end caching proxies" or "squid proxies" or what-not) then each of them should have their caches of the Main Page and pages transcluded into the Main Page purged on a regular basis as described above.
I don't know - what Main Pages are visible to non-logged-in users and, for that matter, how is that determination made? When I log in, I get the current picture-of-the-day, so presumably this is not an issue for logged-in editors in any language. Davidwr (talk) 20:05, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
The parser cache (what logged in users see) of the Main page lasts one hour. The varnish cache (What logged out users see), probably lasts until someone edits a template used by the main page (Or at most 30 days) [The ultimate issue is that {{CURRENTDAY}} and friends make the logged in cache be shorter, but does not affect the length of time the logged-out cache lasts]. Bawolff (talk) 23:02, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
You are rigth. I didnt see that the two pictures where already treated and the thumbs are not updated rigth alway. I see that there are 7 more pictures in the category that need a correction. Thanks for the ones done already.Smiley.toerist (talk) 17:53, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
For the past ~10 min. till almost right now, each and every Wikimedia project page I tried to access gave me this:
MediaWiki internal error.
Exception caught inside exception handler.
Set $wgShowExceptionDetails = true; at the bottom of LocalSettings.php to show detailed debugging information.
Really cool. Am I now excused to reply to the whiningresponse that followed my last week’s complaint about WMF techies wasting their time (and, thusly, our money) on pointless surveys? Was the the 2nd major hiccup within just a few days? -- Tuválkin✉✇15:34, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Not related to this issue, but i like to note that there are a lot of critical bugs and urgently needed featured requests open for years (on phabricator). This year WMF collected 75,5 millions of $. I am wondering where all this money is going. --Steinsplitter (talk) 15:58, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
The conclusion is quite interesting. Finally, ResourceLoader should not fatal the site due to configuration issues. Other people would say "it's good to error out so the error is spotted immediately". -- Rillke(q?)20:19, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
I do kind of find it concerning how long it took to revert this, and that we don't have any sort of last minute testing (e.g. Throw on test.wikipedia.org, if the site totally goes down, don't put it on the rest of the wikis). This incident seemed kind of avoidable Bawolff (talk) 20:41, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
October 27
geograph.co.uk
I know a lot of photos have been uploaded from geograph.co.uk and most I have seen have a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, but when I try to upload one myself [16], commons only allows SA 2.5 and above. What gives? Is there a way to fix this? Derek Andrews (talk) 11:47, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
@Derek Andrews: Commons do allow CC-BY-SA 2.0, although if it might be deprecated and not offered in some tools like upload wizard or so. If you can't automatically set it, you can upload the image without a license and edit the image page to add {{Cc-by-sa-2.0}}. Some uploading tools allow you to put a custom license template, too.--Pere prlpz (talk) 14:30, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
@Derek Andrews and Pere prlpz: On each image page at geograph there is a "Find out How to reuse this image" link, and on the corresponding page one finds wiki text ready-made for commons. I just paste exactly this text into the edit window. -- KlausFoehl (talk) 09:05, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Using the basic form, you can write what you think is best in the edit box. The suggestion by KlausFoehl seems very good: you can paste the ready-made text from geograph.co.uk into the Commons basic form. If you want to modify something, you can modify it in the edit box before upload. -- Asclepias (talk) 15:02, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Earlier this year, I embarked on a project, WikiProject X, to improve WikiProjects on the English Wikipedia. What we found was that WikiProjects can be a helpful way to organize editors interested in the same subjects, but have issues with sustainability because of how much effort a WikiProject typically takes to maintain. We have approached this by developing a new WikiProject design that presents information more clearly, and by developing automated tools that provide work lists for WikiProject participants. You can learn more at w:Wikipedia:WikiProject X.
As part of the next phase of this project, I would like to bring Commons into the fold. Why Commons? Because I'm amazed at how successful Commons has been at collecting free media for the world to use, and I would like to see that media used more on Wikimedia projects. The English Wikipedia, for example, has an extensive backlog of requested images. (Wikipedia in other languages may have that problem as well, but I'm not active on those editions.) There should be an efficient, automated way for that information to be communicated to participants on Commons. Likewise, when a photographer uploads a photo to Commons, or when a GLAM partner uploads a collection to Commons, there should be a way for volunteers to match up media with articles.
Please review my proposal on Meta. I would like to better support cross-wiki activity through better tools. Admittedly I am not very active on Commons, so I am eager to get feedback from all of you as to what could help Commons better achieve its mission and what could help Commons better share its media collections with the Wikimedia projects and the world. Harej (talk) 09:37, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
How does this proposal improve on or learn from the current Wikiprojects system on Commons and the system for batch project pages? As far as I am aware the Commons Wikiprojects system is hardly used these days, with WLM using separate processes, and the current system for batch upload projects is well established; the latter being what I have mainly used for GLAM partnership uploads.
Is the intention to create a new system to replace those processes?
I think, Fæ, that this is about padding one’s budget with 3×10 k$. It is for six months, too, so it will be starting around Christmas. Don’t be a Grinch! -- Tuválkin✉✇15:39, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Oh, be nice. 30k sounds cheap to me, if a bit of software development can make an impact on more collegiate working and encourage non-Commonists to chip in more often here in a positive way, rather than when some troll shouts 'porn' or 'Commons is broken' on the usual soapbox. --Fæ (talk) 17:06, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for the question, Fæ. Broadly speaking, I am interested in helping people collaborate on Commons. This includes efforts like Wiki Loves Monuments. Of course, there is no need to fix what isn't broken. The question is: once these uploads take place, what processes are there to ensure that these uploads are all well categorized? That they get used on Wikimedia projects? My local chapter has run photography contests for three years (WLM in 2012 and 2013 and a WLM-like contest in 2014), and the National Archives in the U.S. has uploaded over 125,000 media files to Commons (with more to come), and despite all the uploads that have come from this, I don't see a clear way to participate in the back-end maintenance work. I would like to work on making more tools available that make media on Commons more discoverable to Wikipedians and other users.
Does this mean we are going to graft the system from English Wikipedia onto Commons? No. Before I developed anything for the English Wikipedia, I spent months collecting community feedback on what editors needed, and then I built around that information. Likewise, I want to develop something for Commons made with Commons in mind, specific to Commons' unique needs. This could mean an improvement on the current WikiProject system; it could mean something else altogether. But I want to hear from the Commons community. Harej (talk) 16:31, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Sounds like early days. It might be an idea to frame the development in a way that makes this more obvious. I'll think about expressing the point on the grant page. --Fæ (talk) 17:06, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Early days indeed. It's all part of the process—rather than commit to something and tell you it's the right solution, I want to work collaboratively with Commons. Harej (talk) 22:45, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Harej, I guess the first step would be to look at Commons WikiProjects and asses how many are still active. My guess would be that not many. I can think of Commons:WikiProject Heraldry as one that saw some activity. Most others might be more like Commons:WikiProject Creator which never had any activities after creation. We often have pages devoted to "organizing editors interested in the same subjects", like Commons:Geocoding, Commons:Wikimaps, Commons:Walters Art Museum/Categorize, Commons:National Archives and Records Administration/Categorize, Commons:BAnQ or Commons:Structured data, but those pages are not called WikiProjects or are often not categorized in any useful manner. Many multi-user collaborations are organized through discussions at talk pages for relevant templates or COMMONS pages, at individual user talk pages or even through email. Also a lot seems to be happening without any organization or communication other than observing what other editors are doing.
I think it would be good to have better organization of such projects which could start with categorization and assessment of activity level in the past and present. Than I would try to talk invite active projects to discussion about their needs. One need is kind of obvious: to have more than couple core participants. Best luck to your WikiProject X. --Jarekt (talk) 17:46, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for the feedback, Jarekt. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the WikiProjects on Commons were inactive. I am intrigued by these initiatives that are not called WikiProjects but function very similarly to them: there's a central gathering page and people work collaboratively toward some goal. I consider them WikiProjects from a functional point of view, but we don't have to call them WikiProjects if you don't want. :-) Organizing these initiatives seems like a good place to start. Getting more participants would be excellent; I can't guarantee it, but I think there is potential in improving the tools and making it easier for people to collaborate. Harej (talk) 22:45, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
I have to second that. I spend most my Commons time handling pictures of my hometown, New York City. Only a few of us work that topic. We keep in touch mostly by our user talk pages. Commons is small, and so the individual topics are very small. Jim.henderson (talk) 21:56, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
This does sound somewhat useful. I am active in UK railway photography, but I wouldn't ask anyone on Commons for help as there's insufficient exposure. Instead I go straight to enwp's WT:UKRAIL. A better way to collaborate across projects would be handy. -mattbuck (Talk) 23:02, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Outreachy project proposal welcomes Commons community feedback
Hi, these days the Wikimedia org admins of Outreachy round 11 are helping mentors and candidates to review project proposals. Successful candidates will be awarded a 3 month full time internship to work on their projects proposed. There is one project idea (Wiki 3d warehouse) and a related proposal (Outreachy proposal for "Wiki 3d warehouse") presented by one candidate and backed by potential mentors that is related to Commons, but the org admins have some doubts about its appropriateness for Commons and Wikimedia. The project is definitely interesting, but we would like to hear more opinions about its scope for Wikimedia and its feasibility for Commons. Please check the proposals and comment, either at the project idea (phab:T107410, preferred) or here. Thank you!--Qgil-WMF (talk) 12:00, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi, what i can explain more than what I've written in the project itself on phabricator (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T115987)
Is that I've just finished the cineca school of 3d graphics for cultural heritage (www.cineca.it/it/content/scuola-di-grafica-3d-i-beni-culturali) and they have published their 3d models as open data on the municipality's web site (dati.comune.bologna.it/3d)
to enhance studied and researches about that historical wealth.
During that school days i could talk with some archeologysts and researchers eho worked on Bologna's models, they addressed me on the IFC 3d format to storie parametric data, like materials and date, and enhance researches and studies on 3d models of these monuments.
The also thanked me for this outreachy proposal and assured me support for the task. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeeltcraft (talk • contribs) 22:32, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
For those skimming, this is about File talk:Aktenordner und Locher USA-Standard.jpg. I can't really see any reason this needs something as broad as a discussion or notification on the Village pump, but here are my comments anyway. If you think it's a copyright violation, you can start a deletion review. I don't think it is: the Swingline logo is certainly a text logo, and the other visible text is probably de minimis. If it isn't de minimis, a Gaussian blur to the point of making the text illegible would solve the issue. - Jmabel ! talk15:48, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
I have move privs so I was going to simply fix the name, but it says that file already exists. However, trying to go that that file does not work, saying no such file.
AFAIK you can't change the filetype by uploading a new version over an existing file. The Tiff is still a Tiff. If you want to use the PNG, you have to upload it as a new file. --Magnus (talk) 15:46, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
I think the issue is that the duplicate detection system kicks in to prevent it being uploaded. The only solution to that I would think is to delete the TIFF, or just accept you uploaded a TIFF. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:58, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Hello everybody. Already few months I am trying to clean up this category. Suspected sockpuppets of WPK~commonswiki upload a number of knowingly incorrect and misleading files with the intention to vandalise the content. I am failed to get these incorrect files deleted due to the lack of enthusiasm of some users. All i managed is to replace the incorrect image with correct, but it created a lot of duplicates. So the issue remaining. Need you help. Sincerely, --Kwasura (talk) 15:52, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately. But I did not expected that it will be so hard to convince someone in something so obvious. One need to understand that the subject we are talking about is the flags. Moreover - the heraldic flags (the ones of the Finnish Air Force). They are introduced by the government (of Finland), are used by the government organization (Air Force), and being depicted and manufactured according to precise official descriptions and examples. As I wrote previously: we can not remove the stars from the USA's flag and call the newly created file the "base flag of the USA" because such thing is simply not exist. We can not adjust, remodel or change anything from the other flags of the Finnish Air Force components, like did the user WPK~commonswiki and his sock puppets, changing the swastika with the lion and the roundel, replacing the lynx with the savage, Mannerheim cross with the cross of Liberty, playing with the colours or deliberately creating multiple files of the same. WPK~commonswiki and his sock puppets are blocked now, but what about the files? Isn't it the time to clean up the category from the fruits of they activities? --Kwasura (talk) 06:32, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
Abusing No Facebook icon
This file has been released under a license which is incompatible with Facebook's licensing terms. It is not permitted to upload this file to Facebook.
No Facebook icon has been uploaded for user templates telling this user has no Facebook account, but recently it used in many photos in above template. I believe this announcement has a big problem because:
If somebody sends "own" "unpublished" work to facebook, facebook will have right to reproduce it, but it is obvious that when you upload and republish somebody else work you don't have copyright of that to give it to Facebook. Therefore this announcement is unreal.
When you publish your work under CC, it means everybody have right to republish your work, no exception. You can not rule BBC and CNN are OK but not FOX NEWS and FACEBOOK! If you do so, the work is not under CC licensing anymore and it must be deleted from commons immediately.
Big brands, eg. McDonald's, Microsoft, Facebook and etc, have lots of lovers and haters. But here we deal with law, not with personal interests.
Actuallly, it's not really incorrect, in a lot of cases. When you upload an image to Facebook, you are 'yourself' granting Facebook a "non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that image" without any requirement for attribution, 'ShareAlike', or anything similar. You can't do that if you are not the copyright holder, and it's not compatible with the terms of CC licenses for you to upload other people's images under those terms. Revent (talk) 20:26, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
There are 10s of thousands of things that are not compatible. Are we gonna list every rule in every rule book on filedescription pages at some point. ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:58, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
@Monfie, a lot of things are (or seem to be) "obvious", but people don't care anyway or have no clue at all. AFAIK, the same applies to Flickr. You are not allowed to upload someone else's work. Nevertheless, Flickr is full of it. So, it's a legitimate measure by the creator/uploader to (try to) prevent abuse of his/her work. Would you prefer that the creator drags the culprit to court? --Túrelio (talk) 07:36, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Many Creative Commons licences are incompatible with Facebook, so Facebook can sue anyone who uploads someone else's CC-licensed picture for violation of the terms of use. However, it is debatable if the copyright to the picture is violated unless the Facebook uploader specifically claims that the picture is licensed under the terms of the Facebook terms of use. Also note that the Facebook terms of use seems to be incompatible with concepts such as fair use and FOP as you are required to grant a worldwide licence to Facebook and therefore need to ensure that the picture is compatible with the copyright laws of every country in the world. If a "FOP country" user uploads a picture of a modern building in his own country to Facebook, then the architect probably wouldn't be very successful in suing the uploader, but Facebook might be more successful when attempting to sue the uploader, claiming that the uploader didn't grant Facebook a licence to use the picture in France. --Stefan4 (talk) 10:02, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Again: If somebody you send own, unpublished work to facebook, it will be under Facebook licence because uploader who owns the right has transferred it to FB. And another issue is some users claim it violates FB terms if you upload works that not belong to you. They cite to "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook" but if you read full sentence in Facebook terms it is clear that it they mean: "If you own the work when you post it to FB, you will be still owner of work but you give FB right to publish it. Monfie (talk) 11:14, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
October 23
Palace of the Parliament of Romania
We have a ton of pictures in Category:Palace of the Parliament of Romania, but the category has a warning at the top that "The architect of this building is still alive or died too recently for the copyright on their works to expire. Since there is no Freedom of Panorama in Romania, it is not allowed to publish pictures of the Parliament of Romania under a free licence, without an explicit free license from the architect." Should all these images (presuming that are correctly in the category) be deleted? - Jmabel ! talk22:14, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Looks like a clear FoP case to me. I've done 3 mass DRs:
It was a big honor for me to represent the community at the ceremony. As a Malayalam Wikipedian from India, the local community is very happy and I hope it give a new refreshment for the local activities there. As a more Commoner than Wikipedian, I think I represent the importance of Commons in Wikipedia too there. There were several discussions and I hope I'm somewhat succeeded to highlight the importance of media contributions for the wikis. As my area of interest is Biology, and I'm not a subject expert, I conveyed the importance of cooperation, and how international cooperation works wonderfully here. One take and upload the photos, another identified the subject and provide the description. We have other volunteers to find a suitable use for it.
I hope we can implement the "ID please" project soon and start more similar projects where we can work together for a better use of knowledge. I would like to quote the first mail I got from a scientist when I start this mission. It was from John D. Oswald, Professor of Entomology, Texas A&M University: "Thank you very much for your support of the Lacewing Digital Library project. Please keep us in mind when you are out in the field photographing. We'd be very interested to see additional high-quality images of neuropterans from you. We are interested in pictures of all species in the orders Neuroptera, Megaloptera and Raphidioptera, from anywhere in the world. Our success in illustrating our global keys and other biodiversity science projects are very dependent on the good will of cooperators like you, who have 'boots on the ground', in different areas of the world." It inspired me a lot and give the confidence that ordinary people, so called citizen scientists too can contribute to the too technical topics.
I hope more people, especially youngsters will join with us to make better Wiki[m/p]edia! I would like to use this occasion to say thanks to all colleagues here. I had worked together with many of you with "common interests in spirits" for years! Thanks all. :) Jee08:43, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
The news gathered some local media attention too as Indian flag is showcased there. Links:
Nice work as always. You may be a "citizen scientist", but I bet most of the scientists wish they had your photography skills... INeverCry10:07, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
Finding undercategorised files within a category
Is there a tool that could display undercategorised files within a category? I would like to know which files within a certain category tree have two or less categories attached to them. E.g if an organisation release 10,000 files and add them all to a certain category is there a way of providing a page for volunteers to see which of those files may need additional categorisation?
I suspect there is nothing automated, but once the situation is identified it would be pretty easy to slap a maintenance category on them about the need to check categories. - Jmabel ! talk15:44, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
@Jmabel: So you would have a category something like 'files from x organisation to check for additional categorisation' and then once they have been checked and additional categories potentially added you would remove them from that category. Is this correct? John Cummings (talk) 09:19, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any particular tool. Its pretty easy (for people who know sql) to make an sql query to do something like that for a specific case though. Bawolff (talk) 21:46, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
Videos from NASA
Hi, What do you think about uploading NASA videos from YouTube? This one has a particularly high EV, to understand how the ISS looks like. It has a Standard YouTube License, but I hope it is still OK (I can't find it on NASA website). Videos from NASA has quite a lot of videos which need better subcategories. Opinions? Regards, Yann (talk) 20:46, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
The only possible point of concern is who the videographer was. I would tend to assume it was another NASA astronaut, making it PD-NASA, but there exists the possibility that it was Aki Hoshide, who works for JAXA. A suprising amount of NASA videos and images are like this...they cannot always be assumed to be public domain simply because they are uploaded or hosted by NASA. — Huntster (t@c)20:55, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
I think that for anyone interested in uploading videos or images from the ISS, this article from the Economist is worth reading. It's actually on a somewhat unrelated subject (Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity, which is, on a personal note, IMO awesome as hell) but gives an interesting discussion of the 'jurisdictional' issues. Revent (talk) 16:27, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
I've been better categorizing hundreds of images that were in Category:Bucharest.
If I understand the lack of freedom of panorama in Romania correctly, many entire categories (e.g. Category:National Library of Romania) are full of images that constitute copyright violations.
I've already nominated some large classes of photos for deletion (images of the Palace of Parliament, recent sculptures in public places, etc.) but I'm not really interested in combing through and playing cop. I'd rather just focus on identifying and categorizing. Is there someone else more willing to take on sorting out this FOP issue? - Jmabel ! talk06:26, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
Florida State images
There are several OTRS permission statements covering a number of images. While the text of the permission suggest that the image is a public domain I don't think that's quite correct but it may be close.
The assertion is that the images belong "to the State of Florida and as subject to the state statute 257.35(6): http://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2012/257.35
"Any use or reproduction of material deposited with the Florida State Photographic Collection shall be allowed pursuant to the provisions of paragraph (1)(b) and subsection (4) provided that appropriate credit for its use is given." "
It looks to me that the attribution credit means that exactly public domain but they could qualify as a free creative Commons license.
I don't know enough about the interaction between Florida State University and the state of Florida to know whether photos in the Florida State University digital library I deem to be owned by the state of Florida. It seems plausible but I'd like another opinion before accepting this permission.--Sphilbrick (talk) 16:01, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: Images from the 'Florida State Photographic Collection' should really be sourced from, and linked back to, the 'Florida Memory' website (at https://www.floridamemory.com/) using the {{Attribution-FLGov-PhotoColl}} template. (FWIW, the first photo you linked doesn't look like it's actually from Florida Memory). To the best of my understanding (and this was apparently stated by them back in 2008, see {{Image from the Florida Photographic Collection}}) the donation agreements under which materials were deposited in that collection specifically allow for reuse with attribution under those terms, but I have never seen anything indicating that they are not still under copyright (and 'effectively' equivalent to CC-BY). The Florida Memory website does state a specific form of attribution under each image, however, that should be specifically used as a 'Credit line' (as a random example, this image should be attributed "State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, https://floridamemory.com/items/show/103121 / Donn Dughi", not that I think we have that image). We should not be claiming the use of any image under that provision of Florida law, however, unless it is specifically demonstrated to the have been deposited in the Florida State Photographic Collection (as demonstrated by it's existence on the official website). Revent (talk) 17:33, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
It's worth noting, additionally, I think that a separate subsection of that same Florida law... 257.35(3)... states that "Title to any record transferred to the Florida State Archives, as authorized in this chapter, shall be vested in the division", which would cover the status of any material deposited there by a state agency (as opposed to private donations). Revent (talk) 17:51, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
Hopefully my edits to the last two (which also fixed things like the date being wrong, and a copyright claim being made on the basis of simply mirroring the image) were sufficient to resolve the issue with these. I didn't remove the warning tags. Revent (talk) 18:16, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
DoneSmiley.toerist (talk) 10:58, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
-- AnonMoos (talk) 16:07, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
— 0x010C ~talk~ 22:53, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
--Fæ (talk) 15:48, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. all. --Jarekt (talk) 16:19, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
Comment Are there really bots that delete stuff? @Earflaps: One thing Wikipedian could do is add {{OTRS pending}} to the file description page, so that admins know that there should be something in the system. Unfortunately, we don't have the possibility to automatically notify Wikimedians about deletion requests at Commons yet. I do that manually sometimes, but you really can't do that everytime you start a DR. Imho, the problem is not the OTRS system itself, which was a great idea when it was introduced. It's just that Commons has grown so (effin') huge that handling it has become a lot like fighting windmills – In multiple regards … --El Grafo (talk) 13:56, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
See also: w:WP:VPT#Wikipedia down. 
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