This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
I found some photos on Flickr that are licensed CC BY-ND 3.0 [1]. The photos are attributed to the U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv. Can these photos be used on Commons? •••Life of Riley (talk) 22:11, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. I was not aware of that form, never having uploaded from Flickr before. Looks like CC-BY-ND photos are not allowed here. •••Life of Riley (talk) 23:02, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
If we look at the EXIF data of the photos in this album, we see that they are credited to an individual. They are not attributed to the embassy, which is mentioned only as the source. Also, if we look at all the albums from the embassy's account, we see that, in some of the albums, the photos are offered under a CC-by-sa 2.0 license and, in other albums, the photos are offered under a CC-by-nd 2.0 license. A priori, we should assume that they know what they are doing when they are tagging their photos. The current licensing implies that the photographers were not employees of the U.S. government taking the photos in the course of their work. And the licensing would be the choice of the photographers (or of the embassy if it acquired the rights from the photographers). But it might be worth the effort of verifying with them. There is always some possibility that they were not paying attention when they tagged the photos. There is a contact address for their web team where they invite questions from users. If you want, you could try to contact them and verify the status of the photos. -- Asclepias (talk) 23:32, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
No, please DO NOT assume State Department employees understand what restrictions they can impose on images. In the last 2 years dozens of new flickr-ids have been created, which seem to be run by (junior) officials from State, DoD and the USCG, specifically to republish official photos which should all be PD. Most of these flickr-ids inappropriately use "all rights reserved". Some of these officials will change their liscensing when approached with a polite explanation of the US rules on the PD nature of official works of Federal employees. Most ignore those explanations. Initially the flickr-id US Missions Canada uploaded images with restrictive liscenses. I wrote to them and they changed all their liscenses to free liscenses. The equivalent flickr-id for State Department images from Afghanistan uses the wrong liscense, and has ignored all their flickrmail. So, mo, please DO NOT assume State Department employees understand what restrictions they can impose on images. Geo Swan (talk) 13:49, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
July 25
Cateogry No. 2
Per the above thread, I noticed several images in my watchlist that had had "Cateogry" fixed. Is there any way that we could have "Cateogry" made into a pseudo-namespace for "Category"? I don't know how this would work technically, but it's possible to do something like this in MediaWiki. For example, "WP:" is a pseudo form of the Wikipedia namespace in en:wp — whenever you type "WP:" at en:wp, it's automatically treated as if you'd typed "Wikipedia:". I'm asking for essentially the same thing to happen when yoe type or click "Cateogry". Nyttend (talk) 05:39, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
Not sure you're aware of what's required to get modifications made to the configuration of the wiki. While it's as easy as adding a single line to the configuration, we have to get widespread consensus before the developers will make changes and it will take several weeks to months after a bug report is filed before it is implemented. For 150 typos that we know of that can be fixed. Few even enter categories in by hand anymore with HotCat making it easy to do so. – Adrignolatalk16:12, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
It's far more than 150 — I'm always typing "Cateogry"; it's just that I usually notice a random piece of text beginning with "Cateogry" and have to make more edits to fix it. Nyttend (talk) 17:07, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
A pseudo-namespace would work for links to categories, but category redirects don't work mechanically. Powers (talk) 21:20, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
The pseudo-namespace CAT: is documented on Help:Namespaces, and I fixed my erroneous listing of COM: as pseudo-namespace on this help page: COM: is technically an alias for Commons: or Project:, just like what you find for WP:, Wikipedia: or Project: on Wikipedia. Typos as namespaces make no sense, why not use Special:Prefixindex? –Be..anyone (talk) 14:00, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
SVG metadata
I've noticed that even though there is a SVG metadata format, it displays just a small amount of the information compared to the number of fields you can fill out in Inkscape for example; can't there all filled fields be displayed? I suppose this could also be used to extract information like the author, source or licence (if available) when the uploader doesn't specify them, or the metadata may reveal different information than the one specified by the uploader. Same issue applies to the additional chunks in PNG formats (I use to add them using Tweak PNG).
Also, when in Google Chrome and accessing one of the PNG available size versions of a SVG, except for the 2000px version, there seems to be a problem with the rendering, it doesn't display the said size but an upsized version of the PNG, don't know if this has anything to do with the site. --ANDROBETA15:05, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
Yes, I've noticed that the metadata table has a "short title" field (which may not be short at all, as in your example) which it fills with randomly chosen information from one of the fields in the image's metadata or with text from the image itself.
In your example it probably took information from the description field, in this one from the publisher or contributors fields, in this one from one of the tags (not the first), in this one from the source field, in this one from the title field and in this one from the image itself. --ANDROBETA16:09, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
"Inkscape SVG" is not recommended,[2] because unnecessary file size and for reasons of compatibility, amongst other things. "Plain SVG" does not remove metadata. -- πϵρήλιο℗19:46, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
It says right there, in the link you provided, that it does remove it :P (though I made a test and it really appears not to). However this is not related to the issue/suggestion i brought in this section. --ANDROBETA10:00, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
You're entering into deeper waters than I was aware of -- I never observed it to pay any attention to the SVG "metadata" (as opposed to the SVG "title" and SVG "desc") at all before... AnonMoos (talk) 11:35, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
The idea will be to organize this effort at COM:NARA (still under construction!). Specifically, each NARA document belongs to a series (the one above is in "Signal Corps Photographs of American Military Activity, compiled 1754 - 1954"), which we have marked with a category. Each series belongs to a record group, which we are placing those record group categories. We should be able to show break the job of categorizing into these smaller series and track our progress in a table with something like Commons:National Archives and Records Administration/Categorize, with the numbers updated by bot. That's what I am working on, but right now of people want to help categorize, you can just watch the bot feed or work off of Category:Media from the National Archives and Records Administration needing categories. Dominic (talk) 18:52, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
Can we implement a process for error reports or suggestions? In the past I did some work with Category:William S. Soule for example, besides some new versions of NARA files credited to Soule I also saw some files not credited to him but taken by him. Im not a historian and not more than an intrigued reader on this field, but If I can provide a reference for authorship and more accurate date (for example a record in SIRIS), can I report this to NARA somewhere? --Martin H. (talk) 19:17, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
I've uploaded a PD image, File:Felling derailment 2007.jpg, which is over 100 years old and by an anon photographer. The file contains EXIF data advertising the source. What do we do, in such cases - leave it as is, or edit or remove the EXIF info? Andy Mabbett (talk) 17:07, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
It's fine - the source and accession number are valuable info, and it's not worth it to modify it just to remove the promotional language. Dcoetzee (talk) 18:14, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
I would even say that such a promotional text placement in EXIF or similar metadata could be proposed as argument to convince someone to contribute rare images, to convince someone like an archive or a library to donate images... This should be a fair deal for Commons. Grand-Duc (talk) 21:10, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
Archives and libraries are having a bad influence on Commons. Look at the first version of :File:Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses - NARA - 532930.tif : they are usurping the artist's authorship, removing the artist's name and putting their own name in a prominent place instead. It is not enough to put their name "NARA" in the file name. They also want to have the picture inserted into 4 categories bearing their name : Media from the National Archives and Records Administration needing categories |Images from the National Archives and Records Administration | High-resolution TIFF images from the National Archives and Records Administration | Media contributed by the National Archives and Records Administration. They ignore the rule not to use cryptic names "Don't use a non-descriptive name like "DSC123456.jpg" : Commons:First_steps/Upload_form#4._Set_an_appropriate_file_name and put their record number in the file name "532930.tif". But that is not enough. They spill all their garbage of reference numbers all over the page : "Record group: Item from Record Group 148: Records of Commissions of the Legislative Branch, 1928 - 2007 (ARC identifier: 477)Series: The George Washington Bicentennial Commission, compiled 1931 - 1932 (ARC identifier: 532858)NAIL Control Number: NWDNS-148-GW-872 Select List Identifier: REVWAR #1 148-GW-872". What is 20740-6001 after 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD ? A postcode ? Do they want to add their phone number too ? Are we going to keep decent neatly presented pages like File:Patrick Henry Rothermel.jpg with a meaningful title, a simple description with the standard Template:Information or is that a nostalgia of a foregone era ? If the future is a future where author names are removed and replaced by a Record creator name instead and garbage meaningless numbers everywhere, this future is totally crazy. Teofilo (talk) 23:10, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
They didn't remove the artist's name; they labeled it as unknown. Which it is; the person we credit as the author now is merely the painter whose work the engraver copied. The full name is a descriptive one; is it really such a crime to have a record number in there?--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:37, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
y
I was about to respond similarly...Teofilo, I'm afraid I don't understand your outrage here. The image in question was bot-uploaded with information based on a dump from the NARA database. I sincerely doubt the bot could be smart enough to recognise "P.H. Rothermel" and automatically assign it to the author field (which would be incorrect in any case, as Prosfilaes points out) Further, why is having the record number in the name in any way ignoring the rule to not use cryptic names? There's more to the title than just the record name! Not exactly apples-apples, but when I upload NASA media, I typically include their image ID number in the file name as well. In short, I see nothing wrong with any part of this upload process, other than that the NARA categories might be better off hidden. They are providing high-quality images to Commons, and they've already done the vast majority of the work in fleshing out details of those images. I don't think it is too much to ask that interested volunteers do bits of tidying here and there to fit the descriptions to our norms. — Huntster (t@c)01:44, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
I am also guilty of adding source information to filenames of images from WGA. It sure makes it easier to keep track of what was successfully uploaded and what did not. Also I do do not thing NARA is doing anything other than allowing wikimedians access to their database. Uploads are done by wikimedians, so we can not blame NARA for formatting. --Jarekt (talk) 01:55, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
Hey guys, who is this "they"? It's we. :-) I don't even know where to start with that comment, Teofilo. The National Archives has not required or even asked anything from us related to all the documents they are making available. The kinds of things they want to see happen with the documents, like accurate metadata, use on the projects, and topical categorization, are precisely the things that we as a community are already engaged in. Moreover, the National Archives can't require anything of Commons. It's a contributor without any special rights. The way the categories and templates are structured on Commons represents the best attempt of Wikimedians to make it all work within community norms while dealing with the pressures of creating an automated process to import these files, not some dictate from the National Archives. Indeed, the things you have complained about, everything from the IDs in the file names to the categories, have been done at the suggestion of Commons editors themselves. Dominic (talk) 03:07, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
What you are saying is all true. The problem is why on earth are wikimedians so infatuated with archives and libraries that they want to copy the archives and libraries's habits. In the case of Bundesarchiv there was a secret agreement (there was a press release but the exact terms of the agreement were never publicized) so probably adding the Bundesarchiv brand name in file title names and the Bundesarchiv sorting number was part of the deal. I don't know what the deal with NARA is. There are deals between Wikimedia chapters and archives or libraries. The deals are stronger than wikimedians. Wikimedians can't fight, because the chapters are too powerful. Teofilo (talk) 08:43, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
I swear, the only phrase that comes to mind is "looking the gift horse in the mouth". I think we like these archives and such because they contain large quantities of historic documents and art, along with associated metadata, that would ordinarily take a very long time to wrangle individually. So, they are providing their expertise in preservation and collection, and are basically getting nothing in return other than a link. I'd prefer to not antagonise them because their name is in the title... — Huntster (t@c)10:28, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
Not to mention the fact that everything Teofilo has complained about has been for our own benefit. The file numbers and "brand names" (good heavens) are in the filenames for quick and easy identification; that's exactly what we like to see in filenames. The categories are likewise extremely useful for Commons editors. I really don't see any cause for concern here, let alone cause for outrage. Powers (talk) 13:21, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
One challenge faced by someone writing an upload bot is how to ensure that file name is unique and the technical solution to the problem is to add some source acronym (like NARA or WGA) and their unique accession number so even different copies of the same artwork by the same author from the same source have unique filename. This is the main reason why mass-upload filenames use that format. As for Teofilo's "nostalgia of a foregone simple description with the standard Template:Information" - mass upload use Template:Information when appropriate, but {{Artwork}} and {{Book}} are able to capture much more relevant metadata about artworks and books, as a result they are much preferred for files where such metadata is available. For example, Commons:Wikipedia Loves Art projects often use {{Information}} template with a lot of good image metadata, see for example File:WLA cma Farallon Island 1887.jpg, but the data is practically unreadable in the original format (try to find painters name in the description). As for Teofilo's concern that "author names are removed and replaced by a Record creator name instead" as shown by the first version of :File:Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses - NARA - 532930.tif. I think this comment refereed to earlier version of {{NARA-image-full}} where author and "record creator" field were placed in the same cell. That was fixed since, so Teofilo's example does not show anymore the issue that (justifiably) outraged him. --Jarekt (talk) 14:16, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your statement, but I don't see anything in that image's description labeled as being author unknown. There is uncertainty about who the author was, but the U.S. Archive's data is provided. — Huntster (t@c)05:25, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
@Teofilo: I have on numerous occasions placed the source in the filename and added image source categories when uploading files from a third party, even when I had no contact with or permission from that third party, much less some kind of imagined "deal" (e.g. all files in Category:Google Art Project). This effectively distinguishes them from other digitizations of the same works from other sources, which are quite common on Commons, and lets you browse all works from a particular source, which is useful to both readers and editors. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:06, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
July 29
Category question - Science videos vs Videos of sciences
"Science videos" would be videos made by science -- a category which is "<Noun> video" are videos made with that process or method. "Videos of science" would be videos of scientific experiments, outcomes, equipment. So, "Videos of <noun>" would be videos of that noun (or verb -- grammar is not my strong point). See Category:Videos by technique and the problem that I really have created (and shall repair) in Category:Videos of computer design. Several of the members of that category should not be there and should instead be relocated to Category:Computer generated videos.
Is this the proper location at the commons to thank people for their patience during the move? Also, during this move, I have kept my watch list to a minimum, if there are more questions or suggestions or the ever possible spelling problem or other mistake, please contact me on my talk page. (I would like to actually accomplish this task rather than talk about it ;) ) -- Queeg (talk) 21:37, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
User Queeg is doing a reconstruction and harmonization of standards of the video categories (great work!). During this time there may exist some categories in the old form and also in the new form (Videos of ...). For more information feel free to contact him directly. Regards, --Pristurus (talk) 21:19, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
Queeg, I have to disagree with you concerning the difference between "Foo videos" and "Videos of foo". From a semantic point of view, I don't think it can be said that the first category unambiguously relates to videos made by foo, and the second category to videos about foo. For example, the term "Gorilla videos" does not necessarily only refer to videos made by gorillas. Even if you disagree with me on this, I would say that the distinction is too subtle. You will either have to add a usage note to both of the categories explaining how they are to be used or, preferably, use a clearer category name (such as "Videos of science experiments").
While I agree that "foo videos" doesn't necessarily mean that foo made those videos, in the case of your example, those videos not made by gorillas would simply be relocated to "Videos of gorillas". It's just one of those things that have to be examined on a case by case basis to determine which naming style is most appropriate. But having a declaration of intent for each type of category is invaluable to editors and end users. — Huntster (t@c)04:58, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
Some of this can be resolved with more specific naming than just "X videos" and "Videos of X", for example "Videos by X" or "Videos produced by X", etc. The basic distinction between "videos by production technique/author/source/etc" and "videos by subject" makes good sense, but the distinction ought to be clear in the category name itself, if at all possible. Rd232 (talk) 09:27, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
blocks and clean slates...
I'd like some input over the issue of when a contributor who has served out their block is not entitled to the assumption of good faith, and a clean slate.
I've had a discussion with another contributor over whether a third contributor merited AGF.
That third contributor came off a long block, for persistently uploading certain kinds of images, in the face of community consensus the images weren't in scope. When that block was over that blocked contributor up0loaded some images.
My correspondent acknowledged that all those newly uploaded images were within scope, with one single exception.
They nominated that one image they had concerns about for deletion, which I have no problem with, although I disagreed with their concern.
I was concerned that the nomination brought up again the problematic images the formerly blocked contributor uploaded that triggered the block -- even though the new image had little in common with the earlier problematic images.
Because I don't want to seem to be forum shopping, I won't name the deletion discussion, or the identities of the other parties here.
I'd like input from others on something I wrote in this discussion. I suggested that since the block was over, and the concern that triggered the new deletion discussion had nothing in common with the concerns that triggered the block, that it was a mistake to mention the block in the deletion discussion.
If the concern that triggered the new deletion nomination was similar to the concerns that triggered the block, mentioning the block would make sense.
So, once a block is over, should a formerly blocked ocntributor be able to expect a clean slate -- the assumption of good faith?
In general I really do like AGF and I think anyone who contributes positively (on this project) should be encouraged. Such a view tends to set us apart from that "other place" I guess as does the general lack of policy in some areas.
As a general rule if someone uses an alternative account for a fresh start it is sensible to inform some of the projects CUs just so they don;t get the wrong idea and that has happened before.
IMO Assumption of Good Faith should not be thought of as some absolute that is either there or not there. In practice, it is more like a sliding scale. Double checking each others work is common on Commons. Even the most experienced contributors with excellent records can make occasional mistakes. Some who has been blocked should probably expect that at first they will be watched to make sure they learned from their mistake rather that repeating whatever got them blocked. If they are making good and proper contributions, their AGF will grow over time. Infrogmation (talk) 16:30, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
There's not really a concept of a contributor having "served their time." If they return and re-commence the behaviour for which they were blocked, of course it is relevant that they were blocked for it in the past, as this speaks to a pattern (e.g. we often depend on user reputation when considering the merits of "own work" assertions). In a case where it's not actually the same behaviour, people in the discussion should raise that point, and the closing admin should take that into account. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:00, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
Geonotices
On English Wikipedia we have w:Wikipedia:Geonotices, where location specific messages can be displayed to users. Many of these notices are GLAM related, so they would be more relevant here on Commons. Also as Commons is where the languages come together, it would be useful for Commons to run geonotices which might be relevant to people of different languages. For example, an event in Canada might be relevant to English and French speakers. An event in Europe could be relevant to people of the many languages of Europe.
Absolutely Geonotices are a useful communiction tool, more effective then banner notices and would be an effective tool to assist in notifying whn transaltion assistance is required Gnangarra01:49, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
improved and replaced image doesn't show...
Hi all,
I improved and replaced the image meetjeslandlocatie.png , but after uploading the old image stayed visible. I uploaded again, and now my previous upload changed to the improved image, and my new upload was again like the old original image. So I clicked revert on the penultimate upload. Now this one showed the old image again...
I gave it a few days to see if maybe something had to be processed, but it's still like that.
The image is only used on three to four wiki's. Should I wait untill this fixes, or just start a new file and replace it on these wiki's?
Please go to File:meetjeslandlocatie.png and then Please purge your browser’s cache or enable JavaScript in your Browser's settings. (You only need to do it once.)
I'm new to this and I've added numerous images, and I thought I gave them categories but a bot tells me otherwise. After several, what I would consider common sense searches and poking around, I still can't understand how I am to update my images with new categories. Please explain.
As a general issue, I've observed throughout wikidom, there is too much information in some places; I'm overwhelmed. Often it is hard to tell what to do, or I can't find the answer to what must be common questions. Thankfully everyone is willing to help. Thanks for the for whatever guidance you can give me. Mlane 18:49, 2 August 2011 (UTC) -- User:Mlane78212
I have successfully applied ImageAnnotator on my gallery images as instructed in the Help page but when I select it and cut and paste it to my Wikiarticle it doesn't transfer. My browser is Google chrome and windows 7 PC is my operating system. Beyond that I don't know what you need to help me.Thank you for any guidance you can give me. This gadget looks very useful for many articles I have planned. Mlane18:32, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
The article is en:Château de la Motte, Joué du Plain. It is a line drawn map of the Chateau. Maybe I misunderstand something, but I thought that the images at wikicommons were primarily for wikipedia articles. I'm not sure why I would want to annotate an image solely for wikicommons. Please enlighten me.
For some reason the above link says there is no article. I'm not sure why. I visit the article daily to work on it.Mlane 10:19, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
Can you please change your signature to link to your userpage? (concerning the article, if you link from not en.wp you have to include :en: -- RE rillkequestions?10:44, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
Imageannotator is installed in en.wp but you have to enable it in your settings and it does not work in the article namespace. Ask your local administrator to enable this feature in wgNamespace == 0, too. -- RE rillkequestions?11:18, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
Edit page of retired user
Is there anyone who can edit this page? To me it only dipslay the source code. The problem is that this template contains a category that has become obsolete, and to change the category of all the images we need to change that template. The user has retired so I cannot ask him. -- H00521:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
This is from New England Wildflowers, A Guide to Common Plants p 174 by Frank Kazmeric:
"The leaves are in whorls from 3-6 (most commonly in 4)."
I have also seen this in other references, but they are not handy now. If need be, I can produce them. Having five leaves does not disqualify a specimen from being Lysimachia quadrifolia. There is no such plant as L. quintifolia. Please restore the category as it was, as it was correct! --Jomegat (talk) 00:03, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
I've found a template at Commons:Upload which points users to the new UploadWizard. Since the former is English-only (I think) and the latter is translated into at least some other languages, the template, {{UploadWizard}}, should be translated into other languages. I've listed it at {{Requested translations}} but I mention it here because it seems rather important. I've made the template use LangSwitch, so it's easy to translate, and it's just one line. NB I've already done the German translation. Rd232 (talk) 22:23, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
If there are no responses to this, I might do some other languages... probably not very well. Crappy translation still better than no translation here, I think. Rd232 (talk) 08:47, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Dunno, more than one language is a good start, the +/- or similar link should be clear for folks wishing to add more languages. I tested the procedure on a new polling Template:Merge_icon some weeks ago, if you know the "correct" de:w: terminology please fix it. –Be..anyone (talk) 10:08, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Hello. :) If any project is keeping up with this, I'm sure you guys are, but as the dates are approaching, I wanted to make sure that everyone knows (or remembers).
The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the Board of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of images strictly for their own accounts. The referendum is scheduled for 12-27 August. You can read more about it at m:Image filter referendum/en; if you are interested in weighing in, you may especially want to review M:Image filter referendum/FAQ/en. Your participation there will be very much appreciated in helping to determine the approach to this. Thanks, and my apologies if I'm reminding you of something you all remember very well. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:33, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
Hopefully folks here are also aware of the new abuse opportunities offered by this feature (if/when introduced) especially here, e.g., adding [[Category:Murderous mob against CENSORED comic]] to a file could have an effect for folks not interested in murderous mob images. –Be..anyone (talk) 02:07, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
my gallery has not functioned for several days
I uploaded around 20 plus images last week and the heading said delays of several days expected. No new images appeared. I was in no hurry, but my gallery has not functioned since. Only one appears on each page and a strange code appears in bold colors as a headline. What is going on?Mlane (talk) 20:11, 5 August 2011 (UTC) Mlane
It has been brought to my attention that the standard upload form for Flickr images like this does not automatically add the {{Flickrreview}} template. I think this should be added to the script so one doesn't have to tag the page manually afterwards. Or at the very least there should be a clear instruction on the upload form to add {{Flickrreview}} to the "additional info" box or in the license section. De728631 (talk) 01:02, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Metavid.org - Public Domain Videos of Congress, House and Senate Proceedings
I wanted to let everyone know that Metavid.org and the Internet Archive have full length public domain videos of Congress, House and Senate proceedings. I was thinking it would be great to add these videos to the Commons. Metavid.org has over "266 days 23 hours 11 minutes 52 seconds of footage and counting..." What do you guys think of adding some of these videos? --Mattwj2002 (talk) 06:57, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
I agree. I was thinking about adding some of the debt ceiling debates. I can take the OGV from this page (for example) and chop it into 100 MB blocks. They run about 20 minutes a piece. Even though we have to work within the size restrictions, I think it would be great to have for the important stuff. Any other opinions? --Mattwj2002 (talk) 20:13, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Can someone explain why the newest edition of this encyclopedia would be in the public domain, as this template claims? I don't see anything in our various PD-Sweden templates that would account for this. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:10, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
I think it is because authors of images are not mentioned in that encyclopedia. And as anonymous works the images are public domain 70 years after publication. /Ö18:15, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
August 8
uploaded a couple of public domain photos from Flickr. tag?
I recently uploaded a couple of public domain photos from Flickr for the first time. Is there some special marking that I should put on these uploads to that they can be reviewed for the proper license? •••Life of Riley (T–C) 00:05, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
See Commons:Flickr_files#Guidelines and Commons:Flickr_files#Uploading_images. If it is clear that the photos are PD (public domain) then there is no tag needed. Anyway, to be safe: just use {{Flickrreview}} (as mentioned on the help page I linked to). If the images are not marked PD/free license on flickr then be sure to explain on the file page why the image is PD.
Could somebody experienced in UK & US copyright check the content of Category:Hugh Lofting. This illustrator was born in the UK, but died in the US in 1947, which would usually mean that his works are protected until end of 2017, provided the inconsistent US copyright regulations don't apply. Eventually that cat needs a {{NoUploads}}-tag. --Túrelio (talk) 07:22, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Looking at w:Hugh Lofting, he moved to the US early and pretty much everything he published was at least simultaneously published in the US--the Adventures of Doctor Dolittle were first published as a serial in the New York Tribune, for example. I don't see any reason why the (perfectly consistent) US copyright regulations don't apply. No NoUploads tag needed.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:55, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
We have a category for Lever frames en one for points. I am looking for the connection between the two. In railway stations, there used to be lots of cables wich transmitted the movement of the lever tot the point. This was channeled in neat cable channel with lots of cables. There also exists the transmission througth interconnected bars for shorter distances. Are there any pictures of these kind of mechanical transmissions? Smiley.toerist (talk) 15:56, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
These aren't lever frames, and we're poor on signalling-related categories. They'd probably go under some vague "signalling equipment" at present. Create more if you wish, we need some.
Incidentally, for UK practice at least, signals are worked by pull wires and counterweight levers at the signal post (no matter how far) whereas the square-section rigid channel is a push-pull linkage for points. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:44, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Well, when I was a kid the switchboards in Switzerland looked like it, and they changed the signals and the switch plate at the same time. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 18:08, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
About Copyright of photo images National Diet Library Digital Achive Portal, Japan own
but,Most Japanese wikipedian dose not use National Diet Library Digital Archive Portal. I am opposed now.
This images is uncopyrighted pieces. (almost 100 years ago)
we don't know how to judge its use whether or not. It is complicated that we have to understand NDL license.
so,I don't know which need to commons lisence for this image.
Could you tell me about which use license.--Ow00wo (talk) 18:40, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Pale photos
I have seen that a few photos are very pale. For example this and that one. This one showed before also a pale large image, but now it is normal again, but the thumbnail is still pale as also in the Wikipedia page. I wonder what is the cause. If needed I can re-upload the photos. Wouter (talk) 09:08, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
That's very weird. I assume you uploaded the correct versions of the photographs? (Or there is only one version?) — Cheers, JackLee–talk–09:17, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
I see two of them really pale. The third one is normal, but if i click on it to get the full size version, it is very pale too. Same with the tiny image in the upload log. Too high brightness. I'm pretty sure there's nothing wrong with the image, it might be some new bug on mediawiki. When i download the photos to my hardrive, they are normal. --Lilyu (talk) 09:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
I guess it’s some metadata in the file, which changes the brightness, and is supported by one viewer but not the other. Looks pale in my Firefox, but OK in Geeqie and Gwenview. Did you ever change brightness of the file before uploading? --AVRS (talk) 10:24, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
All files contain "Nikon D70 generic V2" color profile, possibly this is the culprit? Pale colors show in Firefox 3.6, but looks ok in IE 8 for me. MKFI (talk) 10:55, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
I checked a few other photos uploaded in the same period all with "Nikon D70 generic V2" color profile. Indeed again pale photos (in Firefox 5.0.1 on Macintosh) but for example this photo shows normal behavior for the 800x532 pixels and the thumb nail, but the full resolution is very pale. Photos with an other color profile did not show the "pale behavior". Wouter (talk) 12:13, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
I think the thumbnails are actually fine -- the color correction rather seems to depend on the browser. Both the full-size and thumbnail files render too pale in Firefox 5.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.7, and both sizes render correctly on Safari 5.1 or saved to disk and loaded in Preview on the same machine. Perhaps Firefox is either ignoring or misinterpreting the color profile? Is there a particular browser/version/os combination that you're using that shows different results on different files? --brion (talk) 17:26, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
If I try to expand from what MKFI said, I don't really understand why 120px-Arnhem_station.jpg (bright) and 800px-Arnhem_station.jpg (bright) behave differently from 1024px-Arnhem_station.jpg (too pale) on Firefox 3.6. It seems that Mediawiki removed the profile from the 120px and from the 800 px, but kept it for the 1024 px. Perhaps it is a very rare bug that happened only at 20:27, 4 March 2007 and had already disappeared two and a half hours later when File:Overijse Processiestraat kerk.jpg (all thumbnail sizes are too pale on FF3.6) was uploaded ? Teofilo (talk) 14:04, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
The 120px and 800px thumbnails were rendered in 2009, before ImageMagick was upgraded to a version that preserves color profiles. I've taken the liberty of doing an ?action=purge on the image to force them to be rerendered -- if you force a reload you'll see that they now are just like the others.
So it looks to me like this is a combination of 1) a few old thumbnails left over from before color profiles were preserved [causing the inconsistencies on some particular images between different thumb sizes] and 2) Firefox's color management mishandling some particular color profiles [thus the very visible difference in this case]. --brion (talk) 08:50, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
brion mentioned "if you force a reload you'll see that they now are just like the others". What I see is that now all images of File:Arnhem station.jpg are pale. As the cause is found, should I reload the images with another color profile? As I still have the RAW files it is not a great problem to do that. Wouter (talk) 20:12, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
Even normal upload seems to work too slow these days. Not "spotty" but systematically slower that before on the same bandwidth. NVO (talk) 20:11, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
There seem to be two different problems: API calls failing with 500 errors, and general upload slowness. We're trying to determine if the first issue is fixed. Tentatively I have concluded that it is. As for the other issue I have forwarded everyone's concerns to operations. NeilK (talk) 19:27, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I tried, unsuccessfully, to upload some large TIFF images on Sunday using the basic upload form [4] and did not managed to. One problem is that after pressing upload button nothing happened for about an hour and than I would get some kind of error. It might have been some unsupported flavor of TIFF or just being too slow and getting disconnected somehow. One thing I found very confusing is that error messages returned by the upload script are very cryptic and not documented anywhere. They are also different for different ways uploading the files (old script, new script, commonist, pywikipediabot, etc.). I think we should have a page explaining some of those errors especially since most of them are Googlenopes. --Jarekt (talk) 14:17, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
Sort out the media which were uploaded more than 7 months ago. The uploaders left Wikimedia Commons, probably.
Move the media in use to another category, sorted by semestre quarter and year. Their hyperlinks make the categorization faster and easier.
The left over should be sorted out once more. The JPEG images with more than 300 kBytes (or the TIFF ones with the equivalent pixel size) should be moved to another category, sorted by semestre quarter and year. The other images aren't so useful.
Not sure what you mean here by semestre. Closest plausible word I can think of is semester, but that refers strictly to the academic calendar, and would be different for different schools (which might have anything from 2 to 4 semesters, possibly of inconsistent lengths, in an academic year). - Jmabel ! talk17:02, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Sorry, I was thinking on Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sept, Oct-Dec. I think the big images, and the media files in use in other Wikipedia projects are more important. I think that we need priorities. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 19:54, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
We call these quarters in English. January to March is the first quarter of the year, April to June the second quarter, and so on. Just thought you'd like to know. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–07:53, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Splitting by size is a good idea: smaller files in backlog are more likely to be copyvios. But then what? Will they stay where they are or ? NVO (talk) 20:09, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Those sound like good ideas - (i) split out images in use, (ii) split out images less likely to be copyvios (above a certain size, and/or with EXIF data) (iii) identify images uploaded by users who were recently active, and give the users in question a list of their uncategorised images. Rd232 (talk) 00:43, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Might be better just to categorise images that have somewhere a link to a country or a specific wikipedia in a "uncategorised images for x country". People tend to be more motivated to clean out images for their area. --Foroa (talk) 06:12, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
"by country"? Motivated? Been there. When backlog is >90% deletion firewood, motivation vanishes. Sifting through a hundred vios to reach something that looks sort of clean... NVO (talk) 20:57, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
2011-07-11 The step at the end of May is a correction after it was realised that the new upload tool had been fooling the uncat bot.
I agree that the backlog looks a little cronic. I have been running my own little project regarding the backlog, much to the consternation of a few people who think I am a little mad and not doing anything useful. But here is my strategy:
The significance of this is that some tools need a real category, and don't see the template generated categories.
I then use cat-a-lot to visually sort images into top level categories (such as icons, logos, photographic portraits of men) by visually assessing what the main subject or purpose of the file is. That is, I am not just adding keywords (eg this image is blue or this image has a dog in the background), but trying to put the file into the most important branch of the category tree for that file.
cat-a-lot does not know how to remove the {{Uncategorized}} template, but that is fine with me as I do not consider the addition of one category as really properly categorizing a file. My hope is that the file is now in a relevant subject area and others will now find it and refine the category and maybe add more categories. Every so often the uncategorized bot is run and removes the uncat template.
2011-08-07 The step down is when the uncat bot noticed my additions. I think the steepness of the blue line indicates that the new upload process is leaving more images without categories (although the categorization bot appears to be compensating to some extent (mauve line)). Note: Probably you are right. The new upload process saves the category only if you push the OK button, and it doesn't tells you that the file is without a category. A newbie fails here.[5]
I think others have been helping empty my categories (quite a few are now empty), any others interested are welcome to help. Any suggestions of better categories or processes are welcome too :-) --Tony Wills (talk) 09:22, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
PS I think the categorization bot already splits out images in use, and generates the "images needing checking" line (mauve line). --Tony Wills (talk) 09:39, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
May be good that before the suggestion of Foroa is carried out, that a bot goes over old images to add categories to images that have a link to a Wikipedia page such as image File:Head Shot.JPG. I go systematically from old to new and am now in July 2010 looking to all images that I think are worthwhile to categorize. The image just mentioned is an example of images often less than 300 kB, black and white without EXIF data because scanned from old photos from the family achieve. Often not yet as an illustration in a Wikipedia article. There are indeed many images such as this one that are not useful, but I do not nominate those for deletion because it takes time of volunteers to do the deletion cycle. An other option is to use the “cat-a-lot” to move images that are probably not worth the effort to try to categorize - based on the thumbnail and the image size - in a category “Uncategorized and probably not useful”. That will reduced the size of the categories “media needing categories as of ...” but does not solve the problem.Wouter (talk) 10:30, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I have categorized a few thousand uncategorized images over the last month, I don't think there is a large number of, small, blurry or unuseful images. There were a large number of logos (often corporate advertising), a large number of images of men (often posed portraits), and a large number of wikimedian self portraits taken badly ;-), a large number of coats of arms, a large number of screenshots, a large number of graphs/diagrams or maps. But note that the "uncategorized by month" categories that I created now have few such images as I have already moved them (there are still many months for which I haven't created categories). There are a large number of suspect source images (ie probable copyvios) but I haven't been looking at that aspect as others take a great deal of delight in tagging such images, and I wouldn't want to deprive them ;-) --Tony Wills (talk) 11:26, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
We should install an "add-a-cat"-day some day, where any user who wants to focuses her/his activities on reducing this enormous backlog. --High Contrast (talk) 11:29, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I just found this website and contains many usable icons. The one I want just declare the license is free. But I don't know what license tag I must put. Other works may say if the content has restrictions. What do you guys think? Mizunoryu (talk) 17:55, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
"Free" is not specific enough for our purposes. Content we may use must be expressly released into the public domain or under one of several free licenses; see COM:Copyright. Without such a release by the author we cannot use these icons. Sandstein (talk) 22:27, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
"All the icons can be free used for non-commercial, but part of them copyright belongs original author, if you want to use icons for commercial purposes, you have to pay for obtain the author's License agreement"
Today, the file File:Darth vader hot air balloon.jpg was deleted, see Commons:Deletion requests/File:Darth vader hot air balloon.jpg. The file was a featured image, was an Image of the Year candidate, and was selected as Image of the day for August 1. The deletion, since the image it was used in a dozen of Wikipedias, just left a red link (example: sah:Халыып:Potd/2011-08). Without questioning the deletion review decision, which may be or may be not according to the policies, I would like to ask two questions,
Does not it mean that there is smth is fundamentally flawed in the selection of FI and Images of the day, if the image can be nominated on the same day as it was selected for and deleted a week later?
Am I the only one who feels that the existance of a red link in the dozen lists of images of the day ... hmm... does not exactly contribute to the popularity of Wikimedia Movement?--Ymblanter (talk) 18:47, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Commons delinker will "care" for the red links. This was a very unpopular decision but we have to enforce copyright law or we have to change our policies. -- RE rillkequestions?18:58, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
There is no way to "care" of the red links except for selecting another image of the day (and translating the caption), since the problem is in the templates, which no bot can properly correct. I quoted an example above. Besides, my question is not so much why this decision was taken (though it seems to be questionable, as others have already pointed out at the admins's talk page), but how does it happen that such an apparently questionable file made it to FI and to POTD.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:06, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Fine, looks like I am the only one who is worried. I have more interesting things to do, and very little time. Sorry.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:42, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I agree with Ymblanter that deletion of a featured image and picture of a day causes a lot of trouble and messes up a lot of wikipedia main pages. However, assuming that image was deleted for a valid reason (and as far as I can tell it was), than having image with invalid license promoted to featured images and picture of a day is even note embarrassing and problematic. I think I remember that happening before and I do not see any good way to prevent this, other than for for FI and POTD folks to also evaluate the license. Personally, I am an admin here and also upload a lot of images, and despite my best efforts of paying attention to copyrights, some fraction of them is routinely deleted as copyright violations. It is lust cost of doing businesses. --Jarekt (talk) 13:16, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
I am the Admin who deleted the image. Three other Admins have concurred with my decision and the only person who argued against deleting it during the DR or on my talk page was the uploader.
It is, indeed, too bad that the image had to be deleted -- both because it was a fun image, well photographed, and probably usable in a variety of contexts as well as because it had been POTD. However, as an unlicensed image of a copyrighted character, it was an obvious problem. Perhaps those who choose FI and POTD might remember that any image of any object created by a human being will be a derivative work problem unless:
it is old, as specified by the applicable law
one of several exceptions applies, or
it has explicit permission from the creator of the object.
I offer a radical suggestion -- before accepting an image as POTD or maybe even as FI, hang a {{Delete}} tag on it with a nomination such as:
"POTD candidate. Please confirm that there are no problems with this image."
While some people object to using DR to check images, it is the only way to expose an image to the whole segment of our community that regularly deals with copyright problems. Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 13:26, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
As far as I am concerned, this could be the solution. Or, may be like for DYK nominations in en.wp, somebody (not a nominator) would have to confirm at the nomination page that the licence has been okayed.--Ymblanter (talk) 14:07, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
Strange that I've forgot to include this DW to the DR, I was absolutely sure that I did it. OK, I've nominated it now. What about File:Darth vader grotesque.jpg, it's not directly related to this case -- sculptural works attached to buildings are covered by the US FOP. Trycatch (talk) 14:05, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
Uploading tools like UploadWizard and Commonist may be unable to complete uploads. The administrators are working to fix this problem. The Commons:Upload form is not affected.
There is currently a problem with thumbnail generation when images are replaced/updated, a solution is being worked on.
System notices:
Uploading tools like UploadWizard and Commonist may be unable to complete uploads. The administrators are working to fix this problem. The Commons:Upload form is not affected.
There is currently a problem with thumbnail generation when images are replaced/updated, a solution is being worked on.
System notices:
Uploading tools like UploadWizard and Commonist may be unable to complete uploads. The administrators are working to fix this problem. The Commons:Upload form is not affected.
There is currently a problem with thumbnail generation when images are replaced/updated, a solution is being worked on.
This is very annoying: a page loads, you attempt to click on some item of interest, and then it skips down two inches because the javascript kicks in, displaying the same pair of notices three times each. Your mouse pointer hits the wrong item, you go to the wrong page. Curiously, the message pair only occurs once in the page source, in the var siteNoticeValue. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:15, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
XP, Firefox 5.01 (and now that I think of it, this started after updating it, and I've had some other problems with it). Seems like it doesn't appear in Opera, either. -- Mentifisto04:23, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
[6] --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 21:09, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Depreciating that template is a good idea. Nothing is public domain without a reason, the reason "its on google books" is unsubstantialy. Check the book and provide the true reason why something is public domain. A U.S. publication from <1923 is PD-US, but a book from europe from <1923 must fulfill PD-old etc. Not everything available in full text on googlebooks is suitable for Commons, therefore the template is(was) a misleading masquerade for PD-US providing wrong guidance that a european book from <1923 is ok on Commons just because of the pre-1923 publication. Simply wrong. This especially matters for books first published in English language in the UK, google has a lot of them. Reference to Commons:Licensing in general and Commons:Hirtle chart for the U.S. For the scan we have {{PD-Scan}}, for the source we have {{GBS}}. --Martin H. (talk) 21:16, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I see. So, this is how we do things around here: A faulty template is created, worded in a manner that suggests it can be used in lieu of a license, we do nothing for three years while the template is added to hundreds of files, then we decide to deprecate it. Brilliant, thanks. Bms4880 (talk) 22:04, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
It's said for about a year and a half that it should not be used by itself, but with the relevant PD tag. I don't see why you're throwing a fit about it. I agree with Martin, above. Killiondude (talk) 22:14, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
It should be a marker template, with a different license tag as an argument, but really just redirect it to {{PD-US}} since it is a direct synonym for that. PD-1923, PD-US-not_renewed, etc. are preferable of course. This tag should not be used on non-U.S. books but others should be fine. Nothing should be deleted due to this. Synonyms of license templates are not really desired, unless they are redirects or transcluded, but... marker templates are OK. Frankly I would just change it to a marker template, taking a license tag as an argument and defaulting to PD-US. I think the deprecation message is needlessly alarming. Carl Lindberg (talk) 22:28, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I uploaded File:Temple girls.jpg, a photo of some girls playing musical instruments in Thailand in front of a temple. User:Hdamm has repeatedly added the {{low quality}} template to the image, claiming in the edit summary that the image is "very small". I don't think that's appropriate. The image is 700x467 pixels: not terribly large, granted, but far larger than the "too small" images normally placed in Category:Images of low quality, which are almost all under 200x200 pixels. I strongly contest that this is a low-quality photograph, but I don't want to get into a revert war, as Hdamm seems determined to do. Could anyone else weigh in on whether the {{low quality}} template is appropriate on this image or not? Thanks, Quadell(talk)14:15, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
More than enough for any wikipedia article. More than most news agencies will show to the public. Not LQ. NVO (talk) 14:45, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
Oops! Seems I stepped on somebody's toes? I apologize.
I thought I read somewhere of a minimum size of (good) photos, so that they can be printed. In my opinion it should be at least 1500 px (long side?). But I'm sorry, I can't find that page any more. Quadell, if its such important to you, please feel free remove the template, I won't be in your way. --hdamm (talk) 15:05, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
Most offset magazine printing is done with a screen around 133 per inch, which means that a typical photo printed at 4x5 inches (100x125mm) needs maybe 1,200 x 1,500 pixels to look OK. At 1.8 megapixels, that's not far off the 2 megapixel requirement for a Commons Quality Image.
The most common display size is 1280x1024, so this image would fill around a quarter of that. So, it's certainly fine for web use and might even find a place in print as a small illustration.
I see the new version. If you don't please copy the image URL of the wrong image by right-clicking and selecting "copy image URL" (or similar) and paste here.
bug 28613 is fixed. If the problem occurs somewhere purging the file should help. Although I had to purge the specific thumb size which did not work - but maybe this was because I messed something up. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:41, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
How to replace and earlier .JPG file with a .PNG version of the same name?
I plan to replace some of my earlier .JPG uploads with clearer .PNG versions IN THIS CATEGORY. All images are grayscale, and the replacements have identical names, save for the extension. Because of this, the feature Upload a new version of this file will not accept the replacement. Can this option be modified? Otherwise, I have to upload the new images and then ask for a duplicate delete which doubles the processing time. Ineuw talk page on en.ws 20:49, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
You cannot replace a JPG file with a PNG file. Instead you should upload both, cross-link them with {{PNG with JPEG version}} and {{JPEG version of PNG}}. I recommend continuing to use JPEG thumbnails in articles, because the filesize is smaller and they are appear sharper due to JPEG thumbnail postprocessing. Dcoetzee (talk) 01:21, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Dcoetzee, thanks for the info however, I must say that this is a very annoying issue. After uploading about 5,000 .JPG files, in April 2011, many of my uploads were marked as {{BadJPG}} by User:Mikhail_Ryazanov. HERE IS THE DISCUSSION ON HIS TALK PAGE. I also noticed an extensive post about this issue above on June 15. There must be some common agreement between the administrators as to the instructions given to the contributors. Now, I have no clue as to what to do as I have some 5-6,000+ more images to upload. Please advise and thank you.Ineuw talk page on en.ws 01:41, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
In the past, something like this has already repeatedly taken by a bot (file converting and moving or tagging). If you have already a list of PNG files, I would ask here for help: Commons:Bots/Work requests -- πϵρήλιο℗02:09, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Unless there are visual or technical problems with the files you've previously uploaded (and I see none), then I see no reason to replace those files with PNGs. Leave them be, and just start uploading PNGs for future editions. Ultimately, the choice is yours as to which format you prefer using. They both have their positives and negatives. — Huntster (t@c)03:35, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for both comments. There are no problems with my original uploads, it's only that I became better at using the software tool when prepapring the images. At times, I feel that some of my earlier efforts could be improved. Based on this post, I will replace .JPG with .JPG and save time. I will continue new uploads as .PNGs because since May, I've set myself accordingly. At least 50% of the images are still drawings and the most photos are of less than desirable quality. Everything is grayscale and all from the 19th century. Thanks again.Ineuw talk page on en.ws 03:58, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Ineuw -- look above under "June 15" to see how User:Mikhail_Ryazanov holds a minority opinion here. I really wouldn't re-upload thousands of files just to satisfy his objections alone... AnonMoos (talk) 14:40, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
@Dcoetzee's „I recommend continuing to use JPEG thumbnails in articles, because the filesize is smaller and they are appear sharper due to JPEG thumbnail postprocessing.“ I do not share this recommendation for figures and diagrams. The JPG compression artifacts in the thumbnails are very ugly in many cases. See also my related proposal. --Leyo07:41, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Obviously not for figures and diagrams. I meant for photographs. All of the images in this question are photographs as far as I know. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:13, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
While technically they all come from JPEG2000 photographs, many of the images are really lineart drawings and diagrams. The processing (background removal, sharpening, contrasting, ...) removes most of the original JPEG artifacts, so it makes a lot of sense to save the resulting images (except, maybe, the "real photographs") in PNG. Instead of saving to JPEG with introduction of additional artifacts. If some people are unhappy with the current PNG thumbnailing, then the thumbnailing should be fixed. Circumventing a temporary technical issue by using inferior formats and thus wasting human's effort is not a good idea. After all, it contradicts your own essay.
(About Ineuw's older images — not all of them really require replacement, but some will definitely benefit (like this one, which had quite strange appearance), and if he already made the better versions, it would be indecently not to help in their uploads.)
The only reason I recommend using JPEG thumbnails in articles is due to the technical limitation that you can't have JPEG thumbnails of PNGs. I strongly agree that uploading multiple versions of an image just in order to get JPEG thumbnails is bad and requires a software patch to fix, and I've been trying to get this fixed for years, but to no avail so far. The devs have other priorities. In the meantime, I do advocate uploading both JPEGs and PNGs of scanned documents, so that we have the PNG for archival purposes. I don't advocate using the BadJPEG tag for JPEGs like these, simply because that's not what that particular tag was designed for. We don't have a tag for "please upload archival version of this image." Feel free to create one. I have no problem using or recommending PNG thumbnails instead of JPEG thumbnails for line art or diagrams, whether they are scanned, photographed, or digitally created, but I wouldn't use the BadJPEG template for scans or photographs regardless. Dcoetzee (talk) 08:41, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Quite a few of us have criticized Mikhail Ryazanov for his overuse of this template. Both formats are useful. I would agree with Dcoetzee above that the ideal is to upload both and use the cross-linking templates, but I don't think there is a solid consensus to prefer one to the other. In general, JPEGs to better on photographs of things found in nature; PNGs do better on things with sharp lines, such as most logos and some other graphic design. PNGs also do better if they have to undergo numerous subsequent edits. If I have to upload only one, I usually go for the JPEG. On low-quality images, it hardly matters. Just do either one. I suppose that one advantage of a PNG is that someone can typically make a higher quality JPEG from an existing PNG than vice versa. - Jmabel ! talk15:04, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Appreciate very much all this info. Thanks to all.Ineuw talk page on en.ws 15:24, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
I have done most of Vol. 1, but did not upload it yet because of the same issue — absence of "upload in a different format" feature and tiresome process of uploading each file separately (and copying descriptions) or as derivatives. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 07:12, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Proposition: Can we have a feature "upload in a different format" that will automatically copy all the relevant information and make the appropriate links between files? It would be also very helpful to have it included in all these {{SVG}}, {{PNG}} and {{BadJPEG}} (what else?) templates that ask to upload the image in a different format. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 07:12, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't really understand what is proposed there (I did learn German in school, but it was a long time ago. ;-) And Google translate, unfortunately, is not better). The given example did not help either. Could you shortly explain here how to upload a PNG or SVG "over" or in addition to an existing JPEG (or PNG — for SVG) with minimal effort? Preferably, without administrator's rights. :-) — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 07:27, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
There is a proposal in the MediaWiki Bugzilla, bug 4421, to abolish file extensions from image names. This would solve the current problem, since the name of the image wouldn't include ".jpg" or ".png" at the end, so there would be no problem uploading a new version of the image in a different format. —Bkell (talk) 08:07, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
The "bug" is interesting, but has a pretty long history (since 2005!) and, as I understood from the discussion there, is not solved yet and who knows when the solution is going to be adapted here. Additionally, uploading PNG versions of JPEG files with the same name now should break the future ability to refer to them without these extensions. So, what to do? Upload PNGs as derivatives and tag JPEGs as superseded in a hope than in the future the renaming process will be able to join them together? Or there are any better ideas? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 07:27, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
No, I don't think so. Individual photographs do not constitute a published edition. {{PD-SG-photo}} is the appropriate licence, but can only be used if 70 years have passed since the end of the year in which the photographs were taken. In other words, the licence can only be used on photographs taken before or in 1940. In addition, there must be evidence that the photographs were published in Singapore and not, for example, in Malaysia. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–07:21, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Slow uploads -> Fast uploads!
Hi guys, you might have noticed the slow uploads the last couple of weeks. After some extensive debugging the cause of the problem was found and fixed (details). I just uploaded a 17MB file in less than 10 seconds. That's about 1 MB/sec, much better than the 30KB/sec I got when we still had this problem. We probably have a lot of questions and remarks about this spread over different talk pages and maybe OTRS. Please point them here so that people know we had a problem and that it was fixed. And now start uploading again! ;-) Multichill (talk) 10:09, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
Thank you so much! This was preventing me from making contributions of large files for many weeks. Looks like it was a very complex issue to solve. Dcoetzee (talk) 06:54, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Upload Wizard
Good day, there is something weird with the Upload Wizard. It has included the Flickr review warning three times on the same file description page (which is already weird, one warning is enough) on a file that isn't from Flickr. Here's the link : here. Thanks you, Amqui (talk) 00:30, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
I just tried to use the normal form for uploading a derivative. Unfortunately it said I had to put in a name, though there was no box below the text to put it into. I changed to the upload wizard and that did not seem to have an option for derivatives. When I finished uploading the image, it did not have the correct attribs for derivative. Can someone point me to where I can see what I need to change to correctly list the original and that my file is derived from that.
Did you use http://toolserver.org/~luxo/derivativeFX ? I now did and just needed to fill in the author of the original as advised by derivativeFX. As the image already was uploaded I have copied and pasted the description it puts out it the last step to the derivative file desc page.
Please delete the text in the license section if you agree with the given licenses.
Yes, I was taken to the luxo derivativeFX page. I only had one box visible underneath Original Work: with it saying File: in the field. Underneath it there was "License of this file: please add name" and with no box underneath that and the OK-Next was still greyed out. When I tried to add the authors name to the Original Work box, the "OK - next" button still did not work. I thought it might be a problem with the page, rather than just a simple "how do I" question. Chaosdruid (talk) 03:39, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
You need to fill in the file's name in this box (after the prefilled "File:"): "Belitung Topography.png" Then OK gets enabled. Just try it - unless you click "upload file" in the last step nothing will happen permanently. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 03:44, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
It seems to be working now, just not before - I have done a reboot, in case there was something wrong with my system so perhaps that was the issue. Thanks for your help anyway :¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 04:43, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Newbie Questions
Hi.
--Are pdfs still allowed? They're listed under permitted file types, but I had problems uploading one. Keep getting the error message File extension does not match MIME type.
And this warning: File name has been changed to "Catholic_Radicalism-_Phrased_Essays_For_The_Green_Revolution.pdf".
Please modify the file description below and try again.
Some of the contributors in the village pump discussion of BLP 20 months ago suggests the Commons should have a BLP. But the proposal is incomplete, and, I believe, abandoned. I sent an email to User:Paradoctor, who hasn't been active here for almost a year. Unless someone is planning ot rescue this proposal, I suggest it be userified.
I don't know which files you are discussing, so I can't comment on them specifically but... there is COM:NPOV; while not like Wikipedia we should strive for neutrality in filenames and image descriptions. Even if there is no official policy, please use common sense -- slander and associated real-life laws apply to Commons just as much as Wikipedia, and the gist of that other policy is probably appropriate even if there is no agreement on the details. Commons has relatively fewer guidelines mainly because people can use common sense for this type of thing. Neutrality is therefore a even more important goal in the context of living persons, so... do try to use common sense there. Don't use something that you would be offended by if the situation was reversed ;-) Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:05, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
Some of the original respondents in the discussion 20 months ago stated that WMF:BLP was a general policy that applied to all the WMF's projects, not just the commons. They pointed out that it didn't really fit the commons, since it focussed on articles -- which we don't have -- and not images.
Does the commons need its own specific COM:BLP? Maybe not. But I don't think a draft proposal, only edited 3 times by a contributor who seems to have left the project a year ago belongs in the COM: namespace. Geo Swan (talk) 08:01, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I took the liberty to revise its status to {{Essay}}. This may be moved to Help NS if needed.
I don’t think it is such a problem − COM: is quite full of junk too. Anyway, I moved it to Help NS. Feel free to revert, personally I do not think it matters much. Jean-Fred (talk) 22:16, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Ah, nice (last time I heard this was not going to happen in case of a possible Commanche Wikipedia). But in any case, I always meant Commons: when using COM:. Jean-Fred (talk) 22:44, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Transfer Images from Account X to Y
Hi, trying to share images created and give back to the community. My account was blocked and said it violated the COI policy as it seemingly tied to an organization. Fine. I created a new account (this one) with a personal identifier but when I go to upload the same images of course I get the image already found notice. So, I know there is a deletion process, but I simply want to take all the files from account X and transfer them to new account Y. Is this possible? I tried the search feature, but did not find what I was looking for. Apolgies if there is a discussion thread out there somewhere, and appreciate the link to it. Thanks-
If you represent an organization you shouldn't upload the files again. Send an email to OTRS so the organization gets credit, not your account. – Adrignolatalk18:58, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Well that's a surprise... since you totally ignored my comments on your user page (for I don't know what reason). Thanks anyway :) --ANDROBETA17:22, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Images uploaded against the will of the persons appearing therein
I am from the Thai Wikipedia. This morning (local time), a local user notified me that the photographs on which she appears have been uploaded here and are now used globally. She insisted that she doesn't want her photographs to be here and is so much discomposed by the situation.
I have looked into the case and found that the uploader of the photographs in question claimed that he/she took the photographs him/herself. The photographs in question are released to the public domain. The Metadata about the camera used and the photographing appear in the file pages, but this in no case means that he/she is the copyright holder of the photographs in question.
The question is: When we do not ascertain whether the uploader holds the copyright in the photographs in question for real or not (If yes, he/she is entitled to upload those photographs here), can we have the photographs in question deleted on the basis that the person appearing therein doesn't want her photos to be here.
If the photographs can be deleted on such basis, can you recognize this topic as a request for deletion. Otherwise, I have to further make the request.
The photographs can be nominated for deletion. They may be deleted as a courtesy (particularly if not in use), but at least one of these images is widely in use. The uploader claims to be her brother and so it's credible that he actually took the photographs. It's also possible the uploader is fraudulently claiming to be her brother when they are not, but we generally assume that the uploader is the copyright holder if they say they are, unless evidence to the contrary can be produced. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:42, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
So, if we can prove otherwise (prove that the claim of the uploader is false), I must then request for deletion of the photographs one by one, mustn't I. Or will you recognize this topic as a request in itself? ----Aristitleism (talk) 23:53, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Has to be handled as a deletion request; you can group them in one request. I think it would be reasonable to delete these as a courtesy; she's presumably not a public figure, there's nothing particularly notable about the pictures, and if she doesn't want her image used in this manner we should probably accede to that. We've granted plenty of courtesy deletions even to people of moderate notability, and here not even that obtains. - Jmabel ! talk23:56, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I second that strongly for courtesy deletion. The only reason that the image is in wide use is because Clumsily uploaded to multiple different wikipedia projects under the article 'dimple.' I can see how she would not want her law school graduation photo used as an example of dimples in all the wikipedias of the world. Warfieldian(talk)00:02, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Our procedures recommend that outside individuals who feel they have a legitimate reason to request deletion of the image should first contact our OTRS team to confirm that they were who they said they were. I am very disappointed that no one advised Aristitleism to advise the complainant to initiate an OTRS ticket. I think it is essential that we take steps to make sure we aren`t spoofed by hoaxsters, through social engineeing. Geo Swan (talk) 12:18, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
August 17
Centuries, years, decades...
Hi all. I wonder what should be preferred and kept as standard (here France as an example).
Unfortunately, there is some wild growing history related category tree with inconsistent worldwide naming. Category:France by century is the name that is most against the Commons rules as not expandable (for disambiguated places) and different to other category naming such as culture, people, economy ... of/from/in France. --Foroa (talk) 13:13, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Why on earth does this template exist? Per Commons:Licensing, "Wikimedia Commons accepts only media ... that are in the public domain in at least the United States and in the source country of the work." I suppose I can imagine a case where something is PD in the source country but only freely licensed in the United States, but that does not seem to be how this tag is being used. This template is currently used on thousands of images. Calliopejen1 (talk) 15:47, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I find this to be wishful thinking; there is no chance that the results of a case about reliance parties is going to extend to new users like us.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:10, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of us hosting obviously infringing files, but I've held off on a call to delete these files pending the decision, as a political and pragmatic matter. I also hope to have the next version of User:Commons fair use upload bot ready before the purge begins, to make sure that any of these images which are in use are considered as fair use candidates by wikis that use them. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:56, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I may be repeating myself: these files do not need to be deleted. WMF just needs to move its servers out of the US which has a incompatible copyright to most other countries. There is no reason why Commons should be US-biased (US files only need to obey US copyright). Deleting US copyright violating files would mean to delete these files for the whole (well, at least a good part) other world. Nothing to discuss - you know how Jimbo the vandal had to had to give back his rights? Something like this will happen again if those files get deleted. Don't even think of it. ("you" does not mean any specific person here) Dcoetzee, fair use is not Commons aim, please remember. Free content is the aim. And those files are free - just not in the US. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 01:53, 10 August 2011 (UTC) Btw: I am saying this because I love Commons and I do not want to see a wasting of human ressources by "moving back" the content to all different Wikimedia projects (not to mention that they are on the same servers....). --Saibo (Δ) 21:54, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I remain skeptical that the tactic of moving these files to an oversea server, then using them on existing projects hosted in the US, is either technically practical or actually legal. Moving the entire project overseas is legally possible, but expensive and leaves us at the mercy of the peculiarities of the new host country. But we'll fight about that after SCOTUS decides. I'm certainly not going to purge anything unilaterally, but I will if necessary seek a statement from the WMF legal team. Dcoetzee (talk) 18:54, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
Agree -- unless Wikimedia splits into two separate organizations, then there would be pretty much a choice between PD-US-1923 and Not-PD-US-URAA... AnonMoos (talk) 00:22, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
but many images it tagged with this template very idiotical - if author died in 1937, file it in PB SINCE 2007!
Date of died of author + 70 years, NOT date of restoration + 70 years!
But many users use case "restoration + 70" .
I see this way - hosting ALL images on COMMONS, but censoring showing of not PD-in-USA images accoring to american IP adress.
It's not death of author + 70; for virtually all of this material, it's date of publication + 95. In any case, serving an image copyrighted in the US from a US server is the problem, no matter who the viewer is.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:28, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
I couldn't find any clear guidance on this. I was transferring an image of former NEA chairman File:DanaGioiaNEAchairman.jpg from en.wiki to Wikimedia Commons and there was a license tag on the image there PD-USGov-NEA. This indicates that it is a work of the U.S. Government and under PD. I found the original website that the photo was taken from and this notice indicates that the image is under copyright. There is no comparable Wikimedia Commons template for PD-USGov-NEA so I'm not sure if independent federal agencies fall under the provisions of the PD-USGov tag that I used when I transferred it. Any thoughts on this? Thanks. Warfieldian(talk)23:41, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Yeah, it should be fine. The PD-USGov-NEA tag seems to be just a gussied-up version of the PD-USGov tag. At any rate, the important facts (that it is a public domain image because it is a work of the U.S. federal government) are stated in both tags. --PhilosopherLet us reason together.00:10, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
There isn't actually any information on the source web site suggesting that it is a work of the U.S. Federal Government, though. Unless the photographer is an employee of the NEA or signed a written contract to make this a work for hire, the "Other articles and images" section of the copyright notice applies. People seem to assume that everything that appears on a .gov website is automatically in the public domain – that's not the case. —LX (talk, contribs)13:02, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
The copyright notice on the NEA website gives us no comfort at all -- they claim copyright in material that they created and release it only for non-profit use. I suspect that technically, as an independent agency, the NEA is not the Federal Government for copyright purposes. Certainly there is nothing there now to suggest that this portrait was taken by a Federal employee. Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 14:01, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
They do not claim copyright at all -- they specifically say they do not retain copyright. "Independent agency" just means they are an agency not under the jurisdiction of one of the main 13 executive departments (State, Labor, Commerce, etc.); they are every bit as much as part of the federal government as any other agency though, and PD-USGov applies to them. However, works done by artists under NEA grants are *not* works by US government employees, so works like that they happen to have on the website (and they are warning us there are some) should not be used. They would presumably credit the authors I would think. The official portrait above should be fine though. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:19, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for that useful information. How about the picture from Rocco Landesman's bio page since it does credit a particular photographer? Warfieldian(talk)15:27, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
I would be more careful about that one, and probably ask for permission or at least details. Eastman is definitely not a government employee, so that would only be OK if it was essentially a work-for-hire (possible, but nowhere near certain). Landesman is apparently good friends with Eastman, so perhaps this was a pre-existing portrait (not a work-for-hire, only possible recourse is if it was released to PD for use on the NEA website), or perhaps Eastman did it as a favor for his official NEA portrait (possibly a work for hire situation there but no guarantees). Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:01, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
@Carl --I'm not sure I agree. They say:
"The National Endowment for the Arts does not retain copyright on any Endowment-created material within the Web site, such as guidelines and grant listings. All such material may be used for educational and nonprofit purposes with proper attribution, such as 'The National Endowment for the Arts is the original source of this information.'"
The first sentence is a sort of a copyright disclaimer, but the second then restricts the use of the materials to "educational and nonprofit purposes" and requires attribution -- both of which are inconsistent with the disclaimer of copyright.
Or, do you think this is the same sort of Federal copyright overreach we have seen on a number of .gov websites, including the White House? Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 15:31, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
It's overreach I think, or maybe a precaution in case they accidentally use copyrighted works (although there is a section of the copyright law which requires attribution on U.S. Government works, and of course personality rights can apply). You can't say "does not retain copyright" and then make copyright restrictions ;-) But really, their employees are federal government workers like anyone else... there are a ton of independent agencies (such as the SEC or FCC) but they all subject to PD-USGov. It wouldn't surprise me if the NEA has more educational-use contracts with its grantees than the usual agency, but as far as their own employees go, it's still the federal government. They would need a special exemption (such as the Post Office) to not have 17 USC 105 apply to them. Carl Lindberg (talk) 17:01, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
Plus, many agencies try to claim more copyright than they actually can, simply because they don't know that certain kinds of work aren't copyrightable. Note, for example, the states that try to say their laws are copyrighted despite the numerous Supreme Court rulings saying exactly the opposite. --PhilosopherLet us reason together.01:57, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I'm just interested in gauging interest in helping to copy material from Citizendium to Commons. According to RationalWiki who keep a near obsessive check on Citizendium (mostly for the purposes of comedy):
As of August 2011, less than three months of hosting funds remain, and donations are no longer meeting the required target
I have a backup script that takes about four days to run on my home DSL connection that is able to download the full article dump for posterity (I've done it once before, and there are folks from the Archive Team who do it). But that doesn't cope with files. Citizendium currently has 9,595 files, although a huge chunk of those don't need to be transferred: many were copied from Commons, some are copyright violations or fair use etc. But some of them are free content files that aren't on Commons and were created by Citizendium authors to illustrate articles and thus fall under the scope of Commons as educational use images.
Citizendium may run out of money to pay for their hosting as early as next month. 9,595 files to go through: if we split it up between us, we could make short work of it.
Is there a possibility of getting a bot assisting with the import of the freely-licensed files and avoiding the work of filling in an upload form just to discover that an image is a duplicate? We'd definitely want to get {{Licensereview}} tags on any files brought in prior to any shutdown since it's not like a standard donation where we can use an OTRS tag corresponding to a single source. And some images may well deserve OTRS permission submitted but they'll have to be deleted because that won't happen for an off-site uploader. – Adrignolatalk03:52, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
I thought about using a bot, but there really isn't much point (also, the time it takes to get a bot running? Given that the site may disappear in as little as a month, I'd rather spend that time going through images checking and saving them). I expect the bulk of the files will be copyvios or have other problems, and my plan is to go through the files by hand and check them, uploading only those that are original and free images without licensing issues. Slapping licensereview on them isn't necessary if you have someone who knows what they are doing: they can use their brain to work out whether there is a license issue. And we really don't need OTRS permission: the stuff is online, with a real name user, on a wiki.
I've looked through a few, and I've been a member of Citizendium for years and years, eventually being elected to the Editorial Council. I know what we're dealing with. All we need for this to work is more warm bodies willing to do a few hours gruntwork each. —Tom Morris (talk) 07:56, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Well the license review would be for sites where the user could change the license terms. Being a wiki, I'd assume that would be a risk with Citizendium, like it might be with Flickr. I wouldn't expect OTRS to be needed for any given Citizendium's real name verification. I'd support the creation of a subpage of your user page. I can't say whether it'd be something that could get done in time if they actually do run out of money, but better to get as many good images as possible. – Adrignolatalk16:16, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
I suppose that ~10 000 pictures from Citizendium can be easily completely scraped using existing MediaWiki scraping scripts such as Wikix, WikiTeam or MediaWikiDumper. However the pictures from Citizendium should not be transferred blindly, because there are a lot of mistagged or Commons-incompatible ones (e.g. [7], [8], and so on). Trycatch (talk) 13:43, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
E.g. There are plenty of maps that have yet to be amended to add South Sudan--is there a coordinated effort to amend this? Koavf (talk) 19:39, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Public domain due to age? I'm guessing they aren't that old. I would also suggest a big notice at the top of the relevant category advising editors not to upload such photographs. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–10:45, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
The only thing I can think of is that Madame Tussauds appears to give explicit permission to photograph; their (e.g. New York) site says: We encourage taking many photos! Cameras are permitted in all public areas of Madame Tussauds except SCREAM. If you are a film crew or press and need access to the attraction, please contact our press office for further information. So, the presumed copyright owner does seem to give permission for this type of photo. Has Madame Tussauds complained about such photos being here? Carl Lindberg (talk) 14:47, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
Not that I am aware of, but I am not at WMF legal ;-). Asking them for permission might be a possibility, provided the institution (as opposed to an individual artist) has the full copyright. --Túrelio (talk) 15:41, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
Carl, I don't think that statement on the website is sufficient. My belief is reinforced by the fact that film crews and the press need special permission to film or take photographs. We have consistently taken the stand that if what the copyright holder states does not explicitly or by necessary implication state that photographs may be modified and used for commercial purposes, then that does not meet the Commons's requirements. I can only echo Túrelio's comment that perhaps Madame Tussauds can be contacted for permission. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–15:56, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
Such permissions for file crews etc. are usually due to the specialized equipment needed and specialized access (typically after-hours or areas off-limits to the general public), which would require oversight by museum staff (and therefore extra museum resources), and on their face have nothing to do with copyright. If such photographers are required to sign a contract which details limitations on what they can do with the resulting photographs, that would be different. But by itself that statement should not reinforce your belief in anything ;-) I can understand if you simply don't consider the blanket permission for photographs to be considered a fully legal copyright release for any such photographs, but it is a decent possibility. Customers are certainly lead to believe they can take photos with no restrictions, and that is something of an implied license by the presumed copyright holder. Carl Lindberg (talk) 08:38, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Is there a category for videos taken from AR Drones or similar radio controlled model helicopters? Is anybody doing experiments in this direction? I guess it could be useful for buildings, parks, and archaeological sites. I know there is a Category:Aerial photographs and Category:Videos by technique, but I don't see any subcategory for aerial videos, or whatever it should be called. --LA2 (talk) 17:31, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Where two people thought it was not fine, and two thought it was. But I wasn't challenging it's right to be here, simply querying whether it should be labelled GFDL and GNU. RichFarmbrough, 21:45 19 August 2011 (GMT).
August 19
Categorizers needed!
Hi all. I just put a request on Categories for discussion, but since the matter is rather complicated, I thought I'd request extra attention from the VP. There is a deeply entangled web of categories under Category:Locator maps that I'm not sure anyone can make sense of at the moment. Take a look at User talk:TUBS#Categorization to get an idea of the sheer number of descriptors currently being used, both individually and in various combinations, to group images under that category. I urge all avid categorizers to share their thoughts at Commons:Categories for discussion/2011/08/Category:Locator maps so we can come up with a system that's both graspable and granular enough. Thanks! --Waldirtalk09:11, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
Image name
As per my usual participation in uploading self-made images to the Commons, I recently added a photo of Rick Perry, with a by-line of "by Gage Skidmore", similar to what other contributors like David Shankbone do in uploading their images, in the title. I do this in order to prevent use of my photo without proper attribution, which I request in all use of my photos, which I have freely released under CC-BY-SA. The uploading of that image was a response to a user who had happened upon that image on my Flickr, and decided to upload it without any such by-line in the title. Subsequently, I attempted to replace the image with the properly named file, and placed the {{duplicate}} template on the wrongly named image. Despite this, my image was promptly deleted and redirected by an admin, disregarding Wikimedia Commons policy stating that "If one of the duplicate copies of the image was uploaded by the author, keep that version, and redirect the others." The opposite was done. I do not appreciate the way my images are being treated by these two users of Wikimedia and Wikipedia, and am very close to simply uploading any further images on my Flickr account under an "All rights reserved" license, in order to prevent this kind of misuse. Please address this issue, as I would very much like to continue contributing images to Wikimedia, and its projects. Thank you. Gage (talk) 02:33, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
I cropped the image. Attribution for that is necessary. You don't have to put your name in the title of every photo you take. It's starting to seem like you're doing this to promote yourself rather than add good content.--William S. Saturn (talk) 03:19, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
You are just now bring the cropping issue up. If you had wanted attribution, you could've added it. Please stop ignoring policy by trying to attack me. Gage (talk) 03:23, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
I am not attacking you. It is very clear what you are doing. I wish you would cool down and realize that this project is not for self promotion.--William S. Saturn (talk) 03:30, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
I was writing this as William S. Saturn was responding above and I would like to take a more reasoned approach. Respectfully, the title of the image won't make a difference to those who don't care about properly giving credit. Those same people would steal an all rights reserved image too. I made quite sure to specify the parameter in the template so that "Gage Skidmore" would be explicitly listed as the required attribution. It's not all right for you to take a crop produced by William S. Saturn and uploaded on the 10th-13th to File:Rick Perry (crop).jpg, then upload it to File:Rick Perry by Gage Skidmore 3.jpg on the 17th, then claim that I should have covered up the fact that another person took the trouble to produce the crop by referencing a policy that is talking about the first person to upload. William S. Saturn also used the Flickr upload bot to upload the original image from Flickr to File:Rick Perry.jpg, the origin of the crop as well, which doesn't include the author name in the image name. You're still given credit though. All the terms of the license are followed. I honestly don't wish to dissuade you from contributing and you produce good work, but let's at least not begrudge someone of at least having it shown on the record that they did some basic photo manipulation or thought so highly of your work that they felt it should be part of the Commons collection, all because the file name wasn't to your taste. I'll even go back to File:Rick Perry.jpg and make sure the extra parameter is specified in the license to explicitly show "Gage Skidmore" for that file too. – Adrignolatalk03:35, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
So why did you ignore the policy which I cited above? (Despite the fact that you even have bookmarked on your user page.) A similar issue happened with this same user, and their image was deleted, in place of mine with the by-line in the title. I would still prefer my name to be in the title, in order to prevent lack of attribution, which I do not think having listed in one or two tiny, little places will help. And whether it does or not is a matter of opinion. I'm just going by policy. Gage (talk) 03:49, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
I didn't ignore policy. William S. Saturn was the "author" of the crop. He uploaded first and you took his cropped version and claimed you did the cropping by uploading four days later. If another admin doesn't pay attention to the dates of upload, it's not something I can help. Given that the crop is still a derivative work of the original with no significant effort expended, only you deserve and will receive credit for the image. What I will ignore, however, is Commons:File renaming and rename to File:Rick Perry by Gage Skidmore 1.jpg and File:Rick Perry by Gage Skidmore 3.jpg in hopes that this pleases you. – Adrignolatalk03:58, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
That is fine with me. In the future though, I would hope that the issue of the original author being the one that is kept is the policy that is reflected. I will remember the derivative aspect, however, though, in regards to the cropping of the image. Thank you for your help. Gage (talk) 04:08, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
FYI: Cropping is not an act that requires attribution. There is virtually no creative input involved in cropping a photograph, so there is no need to attribute an "author" who did nothing but crop an existing photograph. We don't consider that a derivative work, simply an alternative version.
As well, "File:Rick Perry.jpg" is not a very good filename and renaming it is quite appropriate. Including the author name is a good way to distinguish it from other images of Gov. Perry.
LtPowers is quite right here. See {{Modifications-ineligible}}. We consider cropping and minor retouching ineligible for copyright, and so the person who does it has no right to demand attribution. There is no problem with putting the author name in the filename if you really want to, particularly if there are other images of the same subject by other people, although it is somewhat unusual. Your procedure of uploading the image and marking the old one as duplicate is fine, but an alternative is to instead use {{Rename}} to request a rename of the image, while also editing the description page to add whatever information you wish. If your version and the version on Commons differ for any reason, you should upload yours under a new filename in that case. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:58, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Since these images are in the public domain, I recommend cropping the white border that includes the photo number, since that information is already available on the description page. I will make some edits to the image in question. Otherwise, the upload looks to be correct. Regards, —UED77 (talk) 01:26, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Copyright status of film posters in Dutch East Indies
An editor on the English Wikipedia asked here about the status of works created in the Dutch East Indies, and I don't have an answer for him. I'll reproduce the question here in the hopes that one of you will know. His question is as follows:
While writing Cinta Pertama I noticed that one of the posters at Tabloid Bintang's website comes from a 1932 movie, Zuster Theresia, which was produced in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Would said poster fall under Indonesian copyright law or Dutch? If Indonesian, it would definitely be PD, if Dutch it might not.
Under Commons rules, I think we would demand that it be PD in Indonesia. I suppose we're concluding it's PD in Indonesia since it's owned by a company, and thus it has 50 years copyright according to Commons:L#Indonesia? Thus it would have been PD in its home country in 1996, and thus PD in the US.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:59, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Under Indonesian law, if the copyright to the posted is owned by the company (most likely), 50 years from first publication is correct. Under Dutch law, if the film poster is owned by the company, copyright will expire on January 1, 70 years after the first publication, which means Dutch copyright expired 2002 January 1. By US law (Commons server location), it should be in PD if it was not renewed within the first 28 years of its publication. Some fact-checking on the publishing company might be in order. —UED77 (talk) 23:21, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
I would say Indonesia. Dutch East Indies was a colony which gained independence, not really a full part of the Netherlands. Even if it was, it would probably be a "simultaneous publication" in both countries situation, and the country of origin would be the one with the shorter term. For URAA purposes, it is the country with the "greatest contacts with the work" in that situation, which I'd think would be Indonesia as well. It may be different for works produced in the Netherlands but first published in the East Indies, or perhaps by people who actually live in the Netherlands, but that does not seem to be the case here. It does not seem that legal changes in the Netherlands after Indonesian independence should have any effect. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:17, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Commonist and duplicates
Hello everyone! I want to upload thousands of pictures, hundreds of which have already been randomly uploaded by someone else. I intended to use commonist, but I feel concerned about the duplicates that would be created if this tool doesn't perform any verification. What should I do ? Tados (talk) 21:05, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
The server performs duplicate detection on its side using file hashes. I don't know if Commonist pays attention to duplicate warnings from the server - it really ought to give you an option to upload or not upload duplicates. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:24, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
When somebody writes "I want to upload thousands of pictures" I don't feel happy, because I fear that between those thousands there are many images of low quality or not very relevant to be used by others. Please check that each image has a good description and after commonist has done its work, check yourself each image for the right categories. It may be that this all is not relevant in your case. If so my apologies. Wouter (talk) 11:24, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
This user has uploaded many images both here and on en.Wiki, and many have been deleted as copyvios. Frequently he uploaded them as non-free, and then reuploaded them claiming they were his own work after they were deleted. He has claimed these images as his own works, but I don't believe it. I'm not an admin here anymore, but in my opinion his uploads should be deleted and he should be warned (at a minimum) or blocked. Quadell(talk)16:54, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Openstreet maps
Openstreetmaps are frequently used as background maps for all kind of subjects. I think it would be usefull to document the import parameters. These maps can then be refreshed or some else can redo the derived maps. Furthermore maps can be aligned with each other and combined if they are the same scale.
Can a standardized way be used for the import parameters?
I use Fotoschop software and use different layers. Would it be useful to accept the fotoschop format in the commons to use it as a work/source document? The different layers can be selectively exported for finished map products. If someone wants to update the maps, it is dificult to do without the original fotoschop file.
I use the license own work, but maybe it is better to use a specific openstreetmap licence, when no changes are made to the map. Derivatives are own work.
OSM is under CC BY-SA 2.0 http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright , you can't (but IANAL, so at least “shouldn't”) publish derivatives of it under GFDL (some contributors have agreed to other conditions, but you have to find out who are the contributors of a particular part). --AVRS (talk) 14:45, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I would recommend using SVG instead of PNG. OSM supports direct export to SVG, you can also install any of en:OpenStreetMap#Map_rendering_and_presentation and do renders with your styles (for example, if you need to highlight some elements). Inkscape can be used for edits and derivatives (it's much easier to make derivatives of SVGs than of PNGs, and you don't need any separate "layered" files). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 01:14, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
Update: I have uploaded an SVG version of File:Hainaut Centre.png for comparison. (The actual SVG exported from OSM was ~14 Mb because of their inefficient encoder, so I had to optimize the file before uploading. Compressed SVGZ is ~1.3 Mb, but it's not currently supported here.) — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 02:03, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the information. I wil try out some things, but I developed with the many maps that I have drawn a basic routine that works fine for me. I have to learn I whole new way of working and with other software. First I want to finish the project (one last map for Charleroi). This wil be the same scale and wil align (to the East) with the present map. The present map is aligned to the west with the Borinage map, but not the same scale. Later I can join this map with Charleroi.Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:38, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
I have tried to convert PNG maps in the past to vectormaps with drawn lines against a white background, but every drawn line is considered an area and you get two vector lines.Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:38, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
The best thing about OpenStreetMaps is that it supports direct export to SVG, so you do not need to convert PNG to vector (which is indeed nontrivial). For your derivatives (addition of simple lines and text) there is not much to learn about the new ways and software. Inkscape is pretty intuitive for such purposes and has all you need (layers, curves and text). I really recommend to try it as soon as possible. Otherwise your work will eventually end up in Category:Map images that should use vector graphics, and someone else will have to redo it once again. If you need some advice, Commons:Graphic_Lab/Map_workshop might be a good place to start. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 08:29, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Thanks I wil take it onboard and experiment. I dont understand why software should have such problems converting drawn lines (with consistent size and colour) to a vector. clic on the line to convert and bingo! no messing around with borders.Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:21, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
This was part of a number of batch uploads from the Boston Public Library flickrstream. They have reviewed the images and chosen to release them on a CC-BY license. I have checked the validity of this license for Commons and that they have made no fundamental error in such a classification. As far as I am aware, Commons has no policy that forces a blanket change of license from CC to PD variants and the CC license is sufficient.
If we do have a consensus to force such a change and over-ride the judgement of the donating institution or their curators, I would like to take a good look at it and review the implications. Such blanket changes may well cause problems in the future with Commons appearing confrontational over the licenses that institutions have chosen to apply, particularly for batch uploads where the license (and form of attribution) has been specifically negotiated (as I am in the middle of doing with the UK's National Archives). Cheers Fæ (talk) 09:05, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
The point is, that the images are in the PD. Whatever license the Boston Lib. or others choose to donate the images, you can not force people who (re-)use the images to respect this CC-by licenses. The images are PD so an attribution is not required. End of story.
I also do not understand why we negotiate such licenses with them when the legal situation is cristal clear. --ALE! ¿…?12:44, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
I accept your point but there is a distinction between being right, and shooting the Golden Goose. There are many reasons for context to be fully preserved or for the donating partner to have some reasonable level of recognition that they have provided authoritative descriptions and put in the hard work of scanning and releasing the images. This can happen in several different ways, and yes, I would prefer something like a CC0 or PD to apply up front, in the meantime demonstrating the value of having their material on Commons without having a lengthy preliminary argument about licenses or being confrontational by changing them en-mass as soon as they are uploaded (which I still do not believe is supported by existing policy). Feel free to disagree, though this might be a topic to usefully take up at the Village pump so that we can ensure policy is clear, particularly in regard to advice we ought to be giving our GLAM partners. If the consensus is that we prefer not to have donations without the PD license, then I will pass this advice on, and turn down proposals from institutions who wish to pursue a CC license or reject funding for WM-UK for projects that are not clear on this point. Cheers Fæ (talk) 15:14, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
They can donate the images under any free license they want but this does not prevent people from changing the license to the "correct" license. The point is not to turn down such donations or to force a mass change of license, the point is to make clear to the donating institution that the "correct" license is PD. It would be the same if the were putting their scans on their website with a CC-by license and us copying ALL their images to Commons with a PD license. Where is the difference? There is really none. So, it should be made made clear to the donating institutions upfront that their choice of CC-by has no real legal power. --ALE! ¿…?11:04, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
Factually speaking, the images are in the public domain, regardless of how we tag them. You cannot license a work you don't hold the copyright to, so the cc-by tag is inaccurate. Practically speaking, there's nothing we can do with PD images that we can't do with cc-by images. We don't lose anything by keeping them tagged as cc-by, and we do want to keep in the good graces of museums. So I understand both sides in this debate.
In my view, we can't in good faith mislead people about the copyright status of the images. Even if I'd rather they were tagged as cc-by, if someone retags them as PD-old then he is correcting a factual error... and I wouldn't revert him, reintroducing an incorrect statement, just to keep an outside organization happy. Quadell(talk)12:38, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
Parisian postcard, published ca. 1920. Added info to image description page (and removed incorrect watermark tag), but did not change license... AnonMoos (talk) 22:19, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
I think Fæ needs to take a look at Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. and see how it is applicable here to a host under US jurisdiction. There's also no "sweat of the brow" in the US or database rights. Also, many images I've looked at so far clearly indicate "rights: no known restrictions". Requiring attribution is a restriction. I think this is a case where there was no license option to indicate public domain at Flickr. – Adrignolatalk14:09, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
Images will become public domain all the time. If you're sure that's the case with an image, feel free to update it to {{PD-art}}, just add a note in the permission section what the original license was and that you have changed it. Multichill (talk) 14:55, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
I agree with Fæ. Please consider that Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. is still matter of debate, applies only in USA and a strong approach of this type may prevent precious donations from museums and collections all over the world. This would be a big damage to this project and since that this project scope is to make available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content to all (and not "improve the use of PD-License" or "act as certification authority about the best license for each media") I wish to stress a simple point: consistently with the scope of the project we have to choose the best approach to maximize quality and quantity of the media available on Commons. A simple attribution does not cost anything and may be even ethically justified. -- Basilicofresco (msg) 19:49, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
I suggest to use a custom license tag: pd-license + a statement like "this image was contributed by Foobar Archive which put much work into supplying a high quality scan. Please be so kind and attribute them if you re-use. However, this is no obligation - this image is public domain in most countries. If this image is not in the public domain in your country (e.g. due to sweat of the brow) the image is licensed under CC-by 4.2". Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 23:38, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
Tagging CC BY 2.0 a public domain work is just wrong, and providing incorrect information on copyright status to re users. So if a public domain image is free licensed (or tagged copyrighted while it's PD-simple or PD-textlogo) the correct templates should be applied and the erroneous one removed. I can see that some people here are concerned about how the source would feel about it, but it's worthless to oppose commons' policies and usages based on what someone else would feel => The answer is simple, an OTRS volunteer could just send them a mail explaining that some of their uploads were mis-licensed during the automated process, and that some images are in fact in the public domain. So we are going to tag them public domain, and ask them if they have any concern or further informations to provide about it. --Lilyu (talk) 00:09, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
I have a current case in point, that may be illustrative and of immediate concern. The British Library have asked me to look at creating a template for them to use with all future uploads that their staff might want to make. I have advised that there is no particular problem with a British Library donated image to recognize them as the source, even to the extent (as with similar templates) including their logo and a link back to the source website (or catalogue entry). I was planning on making this a variation of CC-BY as I have seen used elsewhere, but I could go back and discuss a PD variation if the consensus here is that is the advice we should be giving for all partnering institutions. Obviously I am personally worried about handling the relationship with kid gloves but I do want to be honest with regard to the prospect of their loss of control (which may include a lack of future attribution on re-use) even if this means that we might lose out on high quality significant donations in the future.
The key difference between using a CC attribution requirement and a PD is that there would be no moral right expressed for re-use; for example someone might reuse a British Library top quality photograph on their book cover or in a TV advert and never mention the British Library as the originating source or agree with them to drop the attribution and in practice context is likely to be lost on reuse as well. As the "sweat of the brow" is unsupported by UK case law, any such moral right may not (at the moment) be enforceable, but by leaving a CC style request (not necessarily full CC-BY-SA) the vast majority of re-users would attribute in some form as a precaution.
Should we go down a hard-line path of enforcing PD wherever possible, we are going to turn off institutions such as the British Library and The National Archives as they will continue to be concerned about loss of context (mainly the concern of curators) as well as any consistency in a reasonable level of attribution (mainly the concern of management). Thanks Fæ (talk) 06:00, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
So, you want to add to commons usage a kind of CC BY license to give copyright protection to someone who is not the creator/author of an image in the Public Domain, and your only argument is to threaten us with "Someone else than me might not give you anymore candies". --Lilyu (talk) 06:28, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
I believe that I am part of "us" and I certainly have no intention of making threats. I am perfectly capable of explaining Commons policy to the institutions I manage our relationships with, once we are clear on what the details of that policy is or if, in fact, we have one. Thanks Fæ (talk) 06:39, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
We're all on the same side here, trying to figure out how to acquire high-value content from cultural institutions without damaging our relationships with them or in any way reducing the likelihood of future contributions from them. It's a serious question, and doesn't deserve your snideness. Dominic (talk) 06:44, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Yes, and that's why i advised to directly contact them rather than speculating on the worst scenario. Maybe it was not intended or i understood it badly, but i felt it like an en:Appeal to fear : there is two possibilities : comply to my proposition unsupported by copyright laws and commons policies, or there will be no more institutions uploading their archives. --Lilyu (talk) 08:31, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
We absolutely need to do whatever we can to satisfy such institutions without compromising our principles. I think, though, that one of our core principles is to promote freedom and, where applicable, to defend the public domain. I don't think we should ever knowingly upload PD content under a license that claims someone owns the copyright, though, as CC-BY does. That's why it's a conundrum for us. Of course, it all depends on what sort of bargaining we are able to undertake, but we should see if we can soothe their concerns in other ways; it needn't be such a binary choice between imposing PD tags or allowing CC-BY ones. If the institution is concerned about attribution, it certainly would not be compromising our principles at all, in my opinion, to create a template that includes text like "When reusing, please credit the British Library" using whatever sort of language they like, without claiming that reusers have a legal requirement to do so. It may be hard to convince institutions of this fact, but I think you'll also find that most publishers tend to give credit without regard to copyright status. The (United States) National Archives' holdings are essentially all in the public domain, and they make no requests at all for attribution ever, but you will very frequently see where reusers in the media have actually added in a "National Archives" watermark to an image or given credit in the caption. In practice, I am not sure a CC-BY copyright license is different from an explicit request for attribution. Dominic (talk) 06:44, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
In cases like this I have advised the use of a custom tag which explains that the digitization is donated under a free license, but also explains that it is the public domain in the United States and other nations with a Bridgeman-like precedent. This is also important in case of a hypothetical reversal of Bridgeman in the future. No reason we have to pick one or the other. Dcoetzee (talk) 06:49, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Yes, the images are PD in the United States. However, they are not necessarily PD outside of the US. Reusers need to be aware of the conditions and possible ramifications of using these images, and a blanket re-tag will take that away. Lankiveil (talk) 09:08, 14 August 2011 (UTC).
Please, could you cite one nation where scanning an image create a new copyright protection and authorship ?
The United Kingdom... maybe. (Insert long, dull post about how Bridgeman v. Corel isn't binding in the UK and we are in an annoying legal limbo until someone decides to have a case in front of a higher UK court to decide whether the Bridgeman interpretation of British copyright law is something that British courts would actually agree with.) —Tom Morris (talk) 10:51, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
I have created {{Licensed-PD-Art}} to help serve these types of files. It is used like this: {{Licensed-PD-Art|PD-old-100|cc-by-sa-3.0}}. While this is useful for some files, like photos of paintings by Flickr users, I expect many of the files to which such a template applies would come from a large donation by an organisation, and such donations should generally use their own custom license template. This template may serve as a starting point. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:48, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Agreed. In cases where the museum wants some kind of attribution but the law does not support it, the template that Dcoetzee is useful. We respect the institution's wishes as far as we can, but we dont give that institution the false promise that we are going to enforce the unenforcable. It also covers us in the situtations where there may be some copyright restrictions by third party users that do not apply in the country of upload. Thelmadatter (talk) 11:58, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
@Dcoetzee: Please no, not more license templates! ;-)
I remember we had this for {{PD-art}} and {{PD-scan}} but it probably got lost somewhere. Both template should just have a backup license parameter. This should be integrated with the main templates. I don't agree with you that large donations should have custom license templates. We should try to restrict the number of templates. More makes this more complicated and a lot of extra effort for our translators.
I think that Dcoetzee's proposal is the best middle-ground between the natural desire of the community not to mis-label the already-confusing nature of copyright, and the wishes of those of us who work with cultural institutions to work with the grain of GLAM culture and support rather than scare away the fantastic nature of the relationships we have with them and what we can achieve.
I should first say that I am probably one of the "fundamentalists" referred to by Multichill, and if I remember correctly, Fae contributed similar comments to mine regarding the appropriateness of using the original Commons:Usage guidelines for public domain works. It doesn't do any good to mislead donating cultural institutions as to what "rights" they have on PD material - those guidelines must simply be "requests," since they have no legal force and, if we can have a discussion such as this one on attribution, there was no way that all those extra "rights" would get support on Commons.
Nevertheless, a simple CC-BY license on material that may be PD does no harm to anybody. And if it leads to more donations of images, all the better.
The case of Bridgeman applies in the United States only. ...
Nevertheless, under Commons rules the PD-Art tag can be used for "faithful reproduction" photographs of 2D public domain works of art even where copyright might be asserted under local law in the source country. "
Having an attribution license allows a non-US institution to avoid bowing down before US law. The Bridgeman case is most assuredly NOT the law everywhere, as explicitly stated in the policy. If a Non-US institution wants to donate images under a CC-BY license, it only improves Commons and our legal position
But, the policy also says the PD tag can be used (which is quite different than must be used) for works that would be PD in the US. What we'd gain by going around changing these tags is unclear to me, but the policy says that an editor can do it. And we should let the cultural institutions know that the license can be changed here. For US institutions the policy seems to say that a regular PD license should be used.
Perhaps we could get a template that has "attribution requested" - this would be useful to some users, who want to know the provenance of an image. Using an image from the Metropolitan Museum might be considered much better than an image some anonymous photographer from Wikipedia took.
In summary: non-US institutions - CC-BY fine, US institutions PD, get a "attribution requested" template, and please don't mislead anybody. Smallbones (talk) 14:37, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
For non-US institutions a CC-BY is not fine as that requires attribution. If the author died over 70-100 years ago it's public domain outside the US as well. An "attribution requested" is another story. But I refuse to allow a slippery slope where people are allowed to start asserting copyright over something they just scanned. I agree with the Foundation that permitting such would "represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain". – Adrignolatalk18:22, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
If you are absolutely sure about the foreign copyright law then please do put in the PD tag, in fact the PD tag can be used as noted above, even if you are not absolutely sure. But what do we actually gain? As a practical matter nothing - anybody can use the pix we're talking about in any way without any real threat of a lawsuit. If you are trying to stake out the high moral ground or marking the edge of a slippery slope, I think you're far away from that. These donating institutions have done a lot of work beyond simple scanning, e.g. putting together the meta-data, they generally use professional photographers taking hours to get the photo just right (I've seen this), and now all they want is a little recognition and are willing to give up any of their (non-US) legal rights to get it. (as well as the practical right of access - PD is no good if you can't get to the object to photograph it). Perhaps we're all too wound up in our little Wikiworld to realize that these institutions don't have to give us anything. And if they do want to give away material that they have practical control over, they can do it via Flickr or dozen's of other places, which would be very inconvenient for editors on Wikipedia.
Sorry to get so wound up myself - Why don't we just focus on what we can agree on? An "attribution requested" template would be wonderful here. The one above looks a bit too strict to me. It reads like "this is public domain, but if you really want to get sucked in, here's a CC-BY license." Why not 2 templates - for the case where there is any doubt about PD, it could say "This image is believed to be in the public domain in the US and is released by the uploader under CC-By" In the case where a US institution requests attribution on an obviously PD item, the template could say "This image is in the public domain and was uploaded courtesy of XXXX. They request that every use of this image be marked "Courtesy of XXXX" " Smallbones (talk) 21:09, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
We actually gain quite a bit. There is a lot more certainty to a CC-BY license than just PD-Art, which is a U.S. court case and is only binding in that country (and technically, only binding in one judicial circuit, though the logic appears to have been backed up in other cases). It is quite possible the logic holds in a number of other countries as well, but there are opinions out there (particularly the UK, but also other European countries) that those type of photographs can be copyrighted independently of the original. If I was a user in one of those countries, the explicit CC-BY license would make me feel a lot better about using the work. The situation is really the same with *any* copyright license actually -- if the laws of a particular country do not allow copyright on a work, it doesn't matter what the license is in that country, but it could well be useful elsewhere. See for example this photo, which was ruled ineligible in Switzerland -- by that logic, many photos that people have uploaded here are likely not eligible for copyright in Switzerland, so in those cases whatever license was chose is irrelevant in Switzerland despite the major effect it has in many (most) other countries. There is no issue with adding the PD-Art tag, but the CC-BY is not "incorrect" nor should it be removed. If you want to prefix the CC-BY license with "in countries where PD-Art does not apply, this is the license" or some such label such as the ones you suggested, that should be fine too -- it's just that the need does not come up often, and in theory could really be applied to a great many works here. Carl Lindberg (talk) 22:08, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
In addition to the above, I think that keeping {{Licensed-PD-Art}} and {{PD-Art}} separate is valuable. A conservative content reuser may wish to avoid any and all PD-Art images, particularly if they operate internationally. The question of whether these works are copyrightable is, in many jurisdictions, an unsettled legal question. Images marked Licensed-PD-Art however, are quite safe to reuse anywhere if the conditions are followed (and unlike the CC tag by itself, does not give the false impression that these works are copyrightable in all jurisdictions). Using separate tags lets users easily and automatically filter out images they don't feel safe reusing. Dcoetzee (talk) 01:21, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
Um, I don't really care about the order. It's conventional to put the license of the original work before the license of the derivative work, but either is fine. Dcoetzee (talk) 03:04, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
@Smallbones. Someone who doesn't want to confuse people? It's logically impossible (and that's as impossible as impossible gets, remember the law of noncontradiction!) for something to be both CC-BY (indicating it is copyrighted) and PD (indicating it is not copyrighted). If the status is different in different countries, that could be indicated, but in any given country it'll be one or the other. Since people want to attribute the images to a source, that is laudable, but that can be done regardless of the copyright status of the image and is therefore really irrelevant to this discussion. --PhilosopherLet us reason together.03:13, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
If you look at the template, you'll see that the first template applies to the original work and the second template to the reproduction, which in some jurisdictions may have an independent copyright (in which case there is no contradiction). Dcoetzee (talk) 22:33, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Not shooting the golden goose is actually of considerable importance - and the GLAMs are fragile things and we are, in fact, the 800lb gorilla. But so is not accepting enclosure of the public domain.
I concur with DCotezee's proposal. I would like to suggest a compromise template, with wording along the lines of:
"This image is public domain by virtue of age. The XXX institution asserts copyright in X country and releases the image under X licence. For academically correct reuse, the institution should be noted."
The three sentences are carefully constructed. The first asserts the reality (the thing is darn well PD). The second states the institutional claim, so the person releasing the stuff can tell their bosses the claim is stated. The third points out that even if you aren't legally forced to, credit is nice.
People here will know how strident I am about attempted enclosure of the public domain. But I suspect the thing the institutions really want is credit. (And their bosses want the illusion of control.) I think this will state the case correctly but keep the golden goose fed - David Gerard (talk) 20:27, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
It seems the above discussion consensus is that the images are actually in the Public Domain and not copyrightable but a particular institution is asserting a CC-BY license for the image. If this is the case, the wording "For academically correct reuse" does not seem to be accurate. Perhaps, "This image is public domain by virtue of age. The XXX institution asserts copyright in X country and releases the image under X licence. As a courtesy when reusing the image, the institution should be attributed." Warfieldian(talk)20:50, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Yuh. I would say "correctly attributed", but that's the idea: the fact, and then the assertion, and end with "but credit is nice and also correct" - saying where the PD image lives is part of our educational mission - David Gerard (talk) 21:34, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
But not a requirement for content reusers, which is what the license statement is all about. Additionally, I would refrain from naming any specific countries (except possibly the US), because we have a whole page to detail where PD-Art applies or doesn't apply, and it's often a nuanced or unresolved legal issue. This is why I favour the wording I already used at {{Licensed-PD-Art}}, although I certainly invite revision. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:29, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Your version is okay with me. I'd just like to throw the GLAMs a bone. But quite possibly the licence template is indeed not the place for that - David Gerard (talk) 22:55, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Just wanted to point out a case closely related to the original issue, but a bit more aggravated: The University Heidelberg has chosen to release 18th century engravings published by Johann Friedrich Seligmann under a CC-BY-NC-SA (noncommercial use) license, for an example see File:Lemur_catta_-_George_Edwards.jpg and the permanent link [9]. This license type can not be considered as a free license and would not be useful for Commons. How should such cases be handled? --Burkhard (talk) 23:58, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I would personally also use {{Licensed-PD-Art}} for these (unless the cc-by-nc-sa template puts the image into a category that will get it accidentally deleted - in that case I'd stick with plain old PD-Art). Dcoetzee (talk) 05:59, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
I was not aware of this template before. Either way of doing it is sufficient, but I like using a wrapper template in order to explain the purpose of each license tag before it's shown, rather than try to explain it afterwards. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:01, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Many institutions are contributing scans of public domain works without asserting copyright, e.g. Google Books, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, Nasjonalbiblioteket of Norway and many others. Some used to assert copyright a few years ago, but have changed their mind, e.g. the Royal Library in Stockholm. Aren't these institutions now going to reconsider, if claiming CC-BY to PD works is fine with Commons? Aren't they a golden goose that we risk losing, when we bend the doors open for institutions with a less mature understanding of the public domain? I think I will request all who reuse The New Student's Reference Work (which I scanned) to do the Macarena. How does that feel? Are you going to show some respect for the one who scanned it, or will you stubbornly insist that this work is in the public domain? --LA2 (talk) 02:01, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
Attempting to draw a parallel between freely releasing images with the expectation that some sort of attribution or context persists with reuse and dancing the Macarena is not reductio ad absurdum, it is just unhelpful nonsense. --Fæ (talk) 21:45, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Not having read this whole discussion, I just want to point out another example: As we probably all know, some time ago Commons received a large amount of images from the German Bundesarchiv, see Commons:Bundesarchiv. These were batch uploaded as CC-BY-SA; however, contain also images that are clearly PD. As far as I remember, the Bundesarchiv doesn't claim copyright on the PD ones and is fine with retagging those as PD, which, I think, has been done in several cases, but I'm not entirely sure. Gestumblindi (talk) 21:56, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
One of the worst things worst things flickr.com does is encourge its customers to think they are entitled to claw back the rights they released by changing the liscense they put on their previously uploaded. I have encountered several flickr customers who went ballistic when we refused to delete images we uploaded when they changed their liscense from CC to all rights reserved. Blickr should be more courageous, so that their users understood the real meaning of the CC liscense.
Similarly, we should be courageous and refuse to place more restrictive liscenses on images we know are in the public domain. Maybe some of those institutions will stop placing their scans where they can be uploaded if we don't honour their specious liscense claims. Yeah, in the very short term that would be unfortunate. But it certainly wouldn't be the end of the world.
We usually take a very firm line when there is a hint of doubt that an image was really released under a liscence as free as the uploader claimed. I suggest it is inconsistent to fail to take a firm line with institutions that claim rights we know they aren't entitled to.
Rather than not embarrassing them by exposing the bogosity of their claims I think we should establish a (tactful) wall of shame -- where we list institutions which have tried to claim intellectual property rights to public domain images. Geo Swan (talk) 00:08, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Flickr uploads are under the user's control -- they have the perfect right to stop distributing under a particular license, which is what Flickr allows them to do. However yes, if someone obtains the work under that license it cannot be revoked. I've not really used Flickr, but that should be made clear to authors. The difference here on Commons is that once uploaded, the project has obtained the work under that license -- it is not under the user's control but has already been distributed. More on-topic here, if there is really no way the work can be copyrighted in most/all jurisdictions, then we should remove copyright tags. The case in question is a PD-Art situation, and furthermore from an institution where there could well be copyright in their own country. That is a situation where something is not copyrightable in some countries, but quite possibly copyrightable in others, and the extra tag helps a lot. That should not prevent us from adding the PD-Art tag though. It's just that they are not mutually exclusive, given that every country has its own law which differs in some way, and the license provides a better guarantee than relying on the PD-ineligible line in every country of intended use. Carl Lindberg (talk) 05:14, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
August 14
ENTITY issue with SVG
Some (valid) SVG files made with Adobe Illustrator are not being rendered if they use ENTITY. For example, in File:He-231-Stufe2.svg, we had:
where ENTITY defines a kind of abreviation, so "&ns_svg;" is replaced automatically by "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" inside of the file. But the SVG renderer is not doing it properly anymore. Maybe to avoid external (malicious) scripts. Does anybody have any information about it? Should we report it or advise the users to replace manually the "&ns_svg;" by "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" (and so on), or even to reconfigure their settings in the AI? Giro720 (talk) 19:27, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
The stuff between [ and ]> is known as DTD-subset, and as you said it can contain a kind of macros. The entities can be defined in the DTD-subsets, as in your example, or imported from external sources, e.g., you could import lots of mnemonic MathML names for Unicode points from an external MathML entity file. I've no idea why that shouldn't work as designed in whatever MediaWiki does with SVG. Maybe report it as a bug — fixing SVGs manually is no long term solution. –Be..anyone (talk) 23:17, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
My gallery has not functioned for weeks
Only my last upload appears, the previous 60 odd images no longer appear. The following (strange) notification appears above in bold red:
A database error has occurred Query: SELECT cl_to as cat FROM categorylinks LEFT JOIN u_daniel_cache.commonswiki_nontopics ON namespace = 14 AND title = cl_to where cl_from = 15958565 AND id IS NULL Function: getCategories Error: 1146 Table 'u_daniel_cache.commonswiki_nontopics' doesn't exist (sql-s4)
I see a similar problem was notified 7 August but I cannot relate to the solution offered. Where can I go from here please? Thank you. Osioni (talk) 10:16, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
I noticed a lack of discussion about the proposed Image Filter. It is quoted in the Wikimedia Image filter referendum FAQ that:
"Hideable images will be grouped into categories. The community will decide the category structure and determine which images should be placed within those categories." Several threads of discussion on the proposal's talk page have touched on how, and by whom the categories will be decided.
Since the Commons is a large repository of media, it is likely that this categorization will be performed on the Commons. Therefore, it is appropriate that the Commons community discuss how the Foundation's vision fits in with the Commons' mission, and how the implementation of such a filter and the corresponding categorization scheme will affect the Commons.
If Commons categories are used as a basis for the filter, such as a user hiding all images in Category:Churches, then it is possible our category system will be subject to many edits by non-established users assign images to arbitrary categories for the sake of creating a filter. Alternatively, it may be that a separate categorization outside of the purview of the Commons is established. Either way, it would be beneficial for the Commons community to have a rough consensus in what measures we find to be acceptable, and how the implementation of such a system be tailored to meet the Commons' needs as well. I invite further discussion on this matter. —UED77 (talk) 02:46, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
If it were merely based on categories, I might consider it prudent to have an edit filter to prevent the removal or addition of categories by logged-out users. But it's true that there's no real definitive answer as to how it would be done. Many sites already use MediaWiki:Bad image list (obviously not Commons) but wouldn't be able to keep up with new images being uploaded. Even with an edit filter, if it were based on Commons categories a user could upload an offensive image and then not categorize it, allowing it to be shown regardless of users' settings. In fact, the rate at which images are uploaded will doom it to failure regardless of the system's implementation unless all images must first be classified before they can be shown to users. Undoubtedly an offensive image will be uploaded and before it can be classified, someone will see it and scream that the filter isn't working they way it was promised. – Adrignolatalk03:20, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
I think this is a minor issue. All filters have false positives and false negatives, and if people with edit filters help us find images requiring categorization, all the better. @UED77: As I've explained in my past proposals, I believe it is essential to separate the creation and maintenance of blacklists (sets of individual images and image categories that filter users may choose to block based on personal preference or a cultural standard) from the creation and maintenance of categories (which should happen precisely as it is currently happening). In particular, I think neither Commons nor WMF should have anything to do with the creation and maintenance of blacklists. It is quite possible that users may vandalise Commons images to try to filter or unfilter images; this vandalism should be reverted, and can be discouraged by implementing the edit filter in such a way that changes to categories do not "show up" unless they've been in place for a sufficient period of time (giving us time to revert). Dcoetzee (talk) 06:03, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
"lack of discussion" ? There was quite a lot of questions on the subject, but none of their lordships cared to answer (I mean, meaningful answers). Perhaps they haven't thought about it at all, and are improvising right now. I suspect that, because the sole target of current Foundation management is the English wikipedia, commons can take a break for some time. Abstain from this nonsense and let English wikipedia carry their white man's burden (that is, censorship wars). NVO (talk) 12:10, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
I think the idea is to have a separate small, flat, category tree just for filtering. Using the commons category structure would cause too many problems (eg the filtering requirements would start dictating the category structure, large groups of files could be accidentally/maliciously hidden by the simplest of changes to the category structure). With a separate tree those interested in filtering could fiddle with their category tree to their hearts content, and have edit wars over their categories without screwing with normal Commons work. --Tony Wills (talk) 12:08, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Is this PD-text?
This image at en.wiki consists of letters and punctuation. Is it basic enough to be PD-text, or does the arrangement of these letters make it a work of authorship and copyrightable? w:File:PHLF logo.jpg. I only ask because if it's PD-text, I'll copy it to commons.--GrapedApe (talk) 12:06, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
I just uploaded File:Lochness2011.ogv to which I added a CC-BY licensed music soundtrack by Kevin MacLeod (used Nero Vison, then converted to Theora using ffmpeg2theora). However, I can hear the music only when I watch the file locally (Windows Media Player with oggcodecs), not in the browser's native player (SeaMonkey 2.3). Any idea what's wrong and what I could do to fix it? I have sound for other .ogv files in SeaMonkey... Gestumblindi (talk) 14:11, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
No audio in Firefox 3.6, but did work in Opera 11.11 for me. Not certain why the difference however. MKFI (talk) 16:02, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
I guess it is because of the audioformat (3F2R/LFE, 48 kHz). Try using the standard 44 kHz stereo audio. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 01:06, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
I see there are photos in Commons that show the interior of the museums, the exposition rooms itself. Those expositions are prepared by museum employees creative work, and thus are copyrighted by museums. Is this correct? What is the Commons policy about the creative work of museum employees — about the excibitions, the showcases? Thanks.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 18:03, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Copyrightable works include the following categories:
literary works
musical works, including any accompanying words
dramatic works, including any accompanying music
pantomimes and choreographic works
pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
motion pictures and other audiovisual works
sound recordings
architectural works
These categories should be viewed broadly. For example, computer programs and most “compilations” may be registered as “literary works”; maps and architectural plans may be registered as “pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works.”
Even broadly speaking, I have a hard time seeing an exposition room as any of the above. I would certainly like to see the museums themselves make the claim instead of extending copyright in that direction ourselves.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:38, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Broadly speaking? The installations are creative works by artists. Are the museum exposition installations the creative works by museum scientists? Seems they are, as they are other audiovisual works.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 20:50, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
It doesn't matter whether they're creative works; many creative works are not copyrightable. They aren't like motion pictures at all, so I don't see how they're other audiovisual works. And I stand by my position that this is an extraordinary claim that stretches the reach of copyright, and should be made first by the museums, not us.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:09, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
They are not audiovisual works -- those are movies, films and similar types of thing. While not 100% impossible, depending on the country and the particular situation, you are basically trying to extend copyright to realms I've never heard claimed, let alone decided that way in court. The U.S. (and many other countries) requires fixation, which is generally not the case with anything like this. If you have information on court cases etc. involving this kind of thing, and that photographs of them are an issue, please point them out. The photograph of the model could well be an issue, except that is in a country with FOP from the looks of it, so it's not. The closest thing I could think of is performer's rights (which is not copyright), but even that is a stretch. Carl Lindberg (talk) 23:22, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
We're answering the question as given at the start. Tossing eight examples at us was not the way to get a detailed examination. Yes, photographs, models and posters are copyrightable. Is that really the question here?--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:23, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
You brought up the subject of non-fixed arrangement of an exhibit, and prohibiting photographs of same based on copyright grounds. I don't see it, usually. Almost every image you posted would be de minimis, or not a derivative work at all, since none of them are focusing on any particular underlying copyrighted work. The model would have been a problem except it was taken Germany -- I mentioned that specifically before. None of that relates to the subject of your original post though, which did not seem to be about photographs of obviously copyrightable works. Carl Lindberg (talk) 03:48, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Let me underline the question. The trouble is not about the objects, not about the models. The trouble is: are the museum employees — the creative workers, do they create the exposition as a creative work? Can the museum claim copyright for the exposition, like a performance or something like that? If a museum creates an exposition from separate non-copyrightable or outdated objects — is there a new object called "exposition", is there a creative author of the exposition, does the museum have a copyright for that new creative work? That is the question I face. Thank you.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 13:46, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Okay, now you are circling back to your original question. There is no fixation of that supposed "work", which is a problem in many countries. The type of work you describe is furthermore not explicitly listed in any copyright law that I know of, nor can really be extrapolated from any type of work normally protected (it would not be an audiovisual work). Performer's rights are vaguely similar, but strictly speaking they are not copyright and do not fall under the Berne Convention but rather the Rome Convention, and I don't think they really apply to this sort of thing either. And I have not heard of anyone claiming that type of work, nor (particularly important) any court ruling saying that type of thing is protectable. Short answer... no I don't think they are creative works under copyright law. Of course, there is always a tiny bit of doubt whenever you have a situation which has never been litigated -- you never know what may make sense to a particular judge. But I don't think I'd worry about it unless there is a real-world example to examine. If you look closely, this was the answer that Prosfilaes and I gave you before. If you know of a specific court case which covers this area, please bring it up, but short of that I don't think it's worth worrying about at all. It is always possible that a particular display can cross the line into a copyrightable sculpture or model though. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:50, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
The gallery option does not seem to be working for a while now - is this being fixed ? The error I get is
A database error has occurred Query: SELECT cl_to as cat FROM categorylinks LEFT JOIN u_daniel_cache.commonswiki_nontopics ON namespace = 14 AND title = cl_to where cl_from = 16194406 AND id IS NULL Function: getCategories Error: 1146 Table 'u_daniel_cache.commonswiki_nontopics' doesn't exist (sql-s4)
Wish you guys had made it more clear where the gallery link was that you were looking at, that it was a tab added on user pages if you didn't have the gadget enabled to turn it off. For other admins' reference, the code is at MediaWiki:Extra-tabs.js. – Adrignolatalk14:14, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Not too sure why we need either of these -- the first shows blatant flagrant photoshop fakery (the sign text "Oxted Surrey Girls 1985-1995 Speak" was obviously inserted into the photograph later), while the second one is a custom-made recent "fakelore" sculpture with an intentional misspelling (not an old authentic tombstone), and could involve copyright problems... AnonMoos (talk) 16:27, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Hello. I created this image to be used as a test image for a feature for RDTs at least on railways on the English Wikipedia. However, it needs to be an SVG in order to show up. Could someone move the image? Simply south (talk) 22:35, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean. The file File:BSicon STRs.png is, in fact, a PNG file and should show up just fine. Renaming it to have a different extension is not helpful. Creating an SVG based on it is a good idea, but would require more effort than mere renaming. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:42, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
What would happen if I just reuploaded it again, changing the file name to an SVG? I do not have any software to create SVGs. All BSicons are intended to be SVGs. Simply south (talk) 22:45, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
The process of creating SVGs is very different, requiring different software tools, and you cannot automatically convert a PNG file to an SVG file. Merely changing the extension will just result in an invalid file. You can download free software such as Inkscape to help you create SVGs. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:50, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I did a simple vectorization as File:BSicon STRs.svg. You can open the SVG in a simple text editor (Notepad or whatever) and the PNG in a binary file editor to see how different the two formats are... AnonMoos (talk) 17:17, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
No, when you do crops etc. the automated reviewer won't work, which means it will simply go into a category for manual review for people with that privilege (which is what happened). Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:39, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
The benefits of SVG appear to be that if you wanted to blow a PNG image up to the size of a billboard that you'd be unable to do so and in theory (but not practice) that its technically superior. The other advantage - that its easier to create multiple versions at different resolutions is basically solved by getting users to upload a high resolution PNG and then resizing that. The disadvantages are that they don't render natively at all in the browser used by half the audience, support in other browsers is also incomplete, that they are also far harder to edit and that the PNG conversion code is poor and doesn't work properly - that that helps "compatibility" is a lame excuse. If I create a PNG it displays perfectly in every browser after IE 7 and as long as it doesn't have transparency it displays perfectly in IE 6 too. Additionally if I created the image in Inkscape or Omnigraffle rather than writing the code by hand there isn't anything I can do about that incompatibility even if I wanted to. Eraserhead1 (talk) 21:43, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
PNGs aren't easier to edit; one of the most common edits is translation, and it's way easier to change the text in an SVG then to erase the text in a PNG, reconstruct whatever stuff was under it (in the common case of a map, this may be arbitrarily complex and require referencing sources), and add new text.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:12, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
"PNG conversion code is poor and doesn't work properly" - SVG artists only use conversion codes for certain purposes and do not use it to convert an entire PNG, unless the person is bad or inexperienced. Yes, using autotrace script will render bad SVG images and is why we discourage it. The artist must redraw the PNG all over to render a good quality SVG. But that is irrelevant to your case about your preference since PNGs are not required to be redrawn to SVG. --ZooFari22:27, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
That's a disadvantage, but most common problems can be easily fixed. Such fixes are not an advantage when talking about SVG efficiencies, but whatever the fix, a fixed vector would still be superior to a PNG. --ZooFari22:45, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
In theory sure, but in practice when half the readership still uses IE 6, 7 and 8 you have to convert them to another format. How long is it going to be before people stop using non-SVG compatible browsers at a high enough quantity that you can use them natively? And with regards to fixing common problems how do you fix them in generated SVGs? Eraserhead1 (talk) 07:23, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
2/3 of the audience use modern browsers and get an advanced feature (native SVG viewer), 1/3 of the audience use old and deprecated browsers and get a fully usable site but without this advanced feature (however, they still can use external SVG viewers or install an SVG browser plug-in). So what is the problem? 2/3 should get an inferior experience, because 1/3 don't bother to switch to a normal browser or at least to upgrade their IE? Anyway, if one use IE8 or older with their horrible support of web standards, (s)he likely don't care much about quality of their web surfing. Trycatch (talk) 09:28, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
I would also like to point out that if someone's not updating their internet browser then they are a danger to both themselfs and others. Why should we downgrade our content for their sake when we can give everybody a best possible quality while giving them an incentive to update their internet browsers improving the safety of everybody involved? Regards. - SuperTank17 (talk) 10:36, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
SuperTank17 -- Not converting SVGs to PNG would mean that you would be at the mercies of each browser's different SVG bugs, while converting to PNG means that you only have to worry about "rsvg", and everybody sees the same thing... AnonMoos (talk) 11:38, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
@SuperTank17, you can't ignore even 1/3 of the audience. Anything more than 10% you have to take seriously. Whether they are using an insecure browser is really up to them. @AnonMoos, so its not ready for general use yet, so we shouldn't be using it. Eraserhead1 (talk) 17:47, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Updating an internet Browser is both easy and free. The only problems you may run into is not being able to upgrade from IE 8 to IE 9 if you're using Windows XP (like I am) in which case you should get either Firefox or Opera which are both free or waiting a bit for the update or installer to download if you have a very slow connection (like 1990s dial-up slow) in which case you can either wait or get a better connection for the same or similar price. If someone's not willing to update their internet browser they probably don't care about quality web surfing anyway. Regards. - SuperTank17 (talk) 12:54, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
It would really be better not to be so arrogant as to order people to upgrade their systems (which in fact may not be feasible or easy for a number of individual reasons) or threaten that Wikipedia doesn't care about them anymore. Anyway, the software to easily display multiple in-line SVGs consistently across different browsers doesn't seem to be quite there yet, so you're advocating more the bleeding edge than the current mainstream... AnonMoos (talk) 14:45, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Prosfilaes has explained the main advantage, editability. Another is that it facilitates the creation of derivative works, by combining pieces of existing SVGs (I do this sort of thing a lot). There is no quality disadvantage - any PNG can be nearly-exactly reproduced by a competent SVG artist. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:48, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Well the editability advantage only applies to images which need translation of text in, or of which you stick into source control. The latter doesn't apply to Wikimedia as you can't "diff" an SVG. The best SVG's like the world map ones aren't editable in an image editor which means only programmers can edit them, which is a very large editability disadvantage. Eraserhead1 (talk) 07:23, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Of course they are editable. Every single modern vector graphics editor support svg (Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, and for open source Inkscape this format is native). Trycatch (talk) 09:28, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
One of the features of SVG, I like is the possibility to look into the source code. The most common problems are fixable with just having a look at it. SVG is the only accepted format on commons that supports multiple layers. The main problem, I see is that Microsoft is not really interested in SVG. They always do what they want and they have en:Windows Metafile. -- RE rillkequestions?09:45, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Because the elements in an SVG are independent and can be moved around, deleted, etc. Take File:718smiley.svg for example. I can use a vector software to move the eyes where ever I want to create an alien, and change the yellow color to a green quite easily. File:718smiley.png is a PNG of that exact file. If you ask a graphist to do the same changes to the PNG, they would most likely edit the SVG file and then render a PNG out of it. I wouldn't be able to move the eyes around in the PNG without having to put the extra effort in refilling the "holes" left where the eyes used to be. PNG files are like paintings and SVGs are layers. SVGs are just much simpler to edit if you have the skills, and fits perfectly with the scope of Wikimedia projects: To edit and improve. --ZooFari19:02, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Changing the background colour of the alien is trivial even in MS Paint, you use the fill bucket to do so, and all the more advanced things can be done trivially in any competent image editor like Paint.NET. And filling in the holes is hardly a time consuming effort with the fill bucket. Additionally with PNG's you get the advantage that a bug in the rendering code isn't going to make it look wrong when you try and do anything non-trivial.
Even so the sort of image changes people are likely to do in reality is changing the colour of a country in one of those world maps like File:IPhone_3G_Availability.svg which would be entirely trivial to do with a high resolution PNG and there wouldn't have to be a warning telling people not to use an image editor to edit it. Eraserhead1 (talk) 22:33, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Bad example. Let's have a look at this file. What if somebody wants to change the light beam behind the emission-monochromator or the color behind "Küvette". You can see, there are two layers with alpha channels and 1 gradient overlapped. Changing this without layers is very hard. Of course you may use png on simple files if this is more convenient for you. BTW: Does anybody know about a simple SVG editor with Web-interface we can host at e.g. toolserver -- RE rillkequestions?23:23, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
You can edit a PNG file indirectly if your starting document is a fotoschop file with separate layers. Unfortunately when you join layers it is not reversible. You can for example use a text layer and replace it later with another one in an other language. It is however not ideal for maps. Modern maps are just databases with a collection of geografic elements. When needed a map is rendered/printed/displayed in the rigth scale and other propertys. There are tricks to repair PNG files. One is copy parts of the original image back. See also the earlier discussion above in "Openstreet maps".Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:05, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
SVG has multiple big advantages:
It is truly lossless. You may add additional elements and it is guaranteed that you will retain the original again by deleting the added elements.
It description is resolution independent. You can zoom in as far as you like without seeing any artifacts.
You can easily change things. The style (colors, outlines, gradients) as well as existing elements (contours, text, ...).
You can extract content from SVG files without any problem and reuse it in other files.
Since it is resolution independent the file size is fixed. It does not increase with resolution, but with actual content or detail.
The only true disadvantage is the support within Wikimedia itself. It uses librsvg which is fast, but gives often wrong results and does not support/implement all details described inside the SVG standard. Maybe thats the reason why it's faster as the competitors. --／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼苦情処理係22:58, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
@Eraserhead1: you are misled about the ease of changing colours in PNG. The fill bucket is only helpful if the region being recoloured has no antialiasing and is connected. In practice nearly all PNGs use antialiasing to improve their appearance. Changing text is quite challenging in a PNG, because the portion of the image behind the original text needs to be re-created based on guesswork before the new text can be placed. Editing PNGs is possible but no simple matter. Dcoetzee (talk) 02:21, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Just do a text-editor search-and replace of the number of times the strings "[[File:" or "[[Image:" are found (or either Image: or File: at the beginning of a line within a gallery)... Emacs gives 284 "Image:" at beginning of line and 513 "File: at beginning of line, and one strange, maybe broken link (shows up as "?Image:Emile Cohl and André Gill.jpg")... AnonMoos (talk) 16:16, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
There are a zillion text editors out there which can do an auto-search-and-replace, and then give you a count of how many times the specified text was replaced. That's the simplest way to do it without resorting to script programming or Unix command-line utilities. I used an old version of GNU Emacs... AnonMoos (talk) 18:04, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
If you explain the question in more detail I can make a Toolserver script to do this, but I don't understand. Are you saying the number of files included in a page, whether using normal wiki syntax or in galleries? What if there are multiple galleries on the page? Can you give an example of a page and the answer that you expect? Dcoetzee (talk) 02:18, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
You can count images on a page with javascript. Putting something like javascript:alert($j('.gallerybox').length); in the address bar should work if the images are inside gallery tags. /Ö15:45, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Hi, I am an administrator and creative writer for the Windsor Historical Society Veterans Memories Project and we wanted to post an article up for our organization. I wrote the article and was just attempting to post it to try to figure it out - I'm new to Wikipedia and would like the help I need to put up our history and our photos. Please help me figure this out. Thanks. -- 14:40, 24 August 2011 24.57.181.232
This is Wikimedia Commons, an image archive area. The actual article should go on Wikipedia itself (though the images may be suitable for upload here, depending on content and licensing)... AnonMoos (talk) 14:52, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
For information on uploading photographs to the Wikimedia Commons, see "Commons:First steps". The key thing to note is that you must be the copyright holder of the photographs, or be authorized by the copyright holder to license the photographs. It is best if you use the procedure set out in "Commons:OTRS" to arrange for verification of the copyright status of your photographs. — Cheers, JackLee–talk–15:04, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Any way I can set my gallery images (permanently or ad hoc) so that they look bigger? I'm talking when I am looking at images in a category. They are often so micro, I have to click on them and play with them to see how they will look at a decent size. This is to help selecting stuff for articles.TCO (talk)
It can be configured on a per-wiki basis (mw:manual:$wgGalleryOptions) if you can convince everyone on commons to agree, you could request the setting be changed. Just for you, you might be able to do something with js, but it'd require someone to program something. (galleries made with the <gallery> tag can have their size changed on a case by case basis quite easily though) Bawolff (talk) 23:21, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
July 26
Publicity still copyrights
Is it right that Publicity still images from moviemakers are free of copyright? There are a number of images uploaded with this rationale -- see File:Kubrick-Fear-LoBrutto.jpg for a typical example -- and they only ask us to check an article on the English Wikipedia for information about that.
If they're acceptable after all, wouldn't it be better to have a specific licensing tag for them?
Other thing that worries me is how do verify than a given photography is really a Publicity still and was published without a copyright notice? --Damiens.rf18:34, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
In my opinion, all these pictures are very problematic, such uploads are completely based on some guesswork. Is it really a publicity shot? What if it was published with a copyright notice? What if it was first published abroad? What if the picture was not published at all before 1978? What if it was published with a copyright notice? AFAIK there is no unified approach for such pictures on Commons -- there were number of DRs, and some publicity pictures were deleted, some -- kept. BTW it's better to use Commons:Village pump/Copyright noticeboard for copyright related questions. Trycatch (talk) 22:52, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
No, publicity photos are not automatically PD (would that they were!). The rarionale on this picture is that it was published in the US between 1923 and a977 without copyright being asserted. The purpose of the photo is not germane. RichFarmbrough, 10:52 20 August 2011 (GMT).
But many uploaders use the fact that something is a publicity still in the timeframe to conclusively establish that it was published without a copyright notice. Is this in fact true 99.9% of the time, or whatever threshold we apply to say that something is almost certainly free? If not, we should establish that clearly and weed out images that rely on the sole fact that they are publicity stills to prove public domain status. And if so, we should establish a template that clearly explains this and creates a tracking category for images if we ever change our mind. Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:07, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
I've seen publicity stills with explicit copyright notices and licenses printed right on them that wouldn't be broad enough for Commons. I assume they're modern reproductions, but they had a 1950s copyright notice and a license that made sense for the hot new movie, not decades old pictures, so I assume the copyright notice is vintage. I doubt they were renewed, but that's very hard to prove for nameless works.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:13, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Problems uploading images
When it comes to uploading images, when I attempt to make the final upload I get told that Commons is still checking the names for 'uniqueness'. I have tried changing the names but it still does not work. Any ideas? Mtaylor848 (talk) 14:41, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
Hmm, I think this is a problem with the blacklisting code. I thought this wasn't deployed yet. Strange. Do more people see this problem? Are people able to reproduce this? Multichill (talk) 17:45, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
I've seen this issue from time to time and I think Neil is aware that it occurs under certain edge case conditions. I'll point him to this report.--Eloquence (talk) 06:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Violation of "attribution"
I guess that this must be a recurring issue and maybe I should have looked for answers to my doubts more thoughtfully. My question is: When someone uses a photo from here licensed with GFDL or CC-SA is it enough to add "photo from Wikipedia" to comply with the license? Does that respect the "attribution"?
Thank you for your answer, which is no surprise for me. It may sound naive, but is there any kind of de facto standard procedure on what to do in such cases? Is there any structure or group of editors here or in Wikimedia "specialised" in contacting infractors, specially when they are large companies like the example? ----Stegop (talk) 04:54, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Only the copyright holder has any legal authority over use of their works. As such, if they have no interest in contacting the infringer, it is not very useful for anyone else to do so. If they do and they want help, any of us will be glad to help them. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:44, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
@Stegop, if you find external uses of "our" images, it's always nice to put the link (URL) on the corresponding talkpage - or, if you have the time, add the published template, as I have done now for the image discussed here; File talk:İstanbul 6019.jpg. --Túrelio (talk) 07:30, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Like others have answered, the short answer is no. And, of course, you should not hesitate to take the measures to have your copyrights respected, especially by large organizations. However, I sort of understand how reusers can be confused by the terms of use of Wikipedia. Since 2009, the Wikimedia foundation staff has imposed terms of use for the Wikipedia site, forcing Wikipedians to accept that the reusers of contents can credit Wikipedia only instead of crediting the authors. It is quite possible that not all reusers of Wikipedia contents fully realize that the terms of use of the Wikipedia site do not apply to the Commons site and that each image or other media on Commons must be considered independently from the rest of the Wikipedia contents and normally credited. That's one thing that may cause misunderstandings and you should have the answer ready in case a reuser might ask the question. -- Asclepias (talk) 11:07, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Hope this image may be useful for somebody writing about the birds which live in the cities of different regions. However, I don't know the exact name of the green birds on this photo. I was told these were parrots, but I'm not sure whether this is ornitologically correct.
If somebody knows, it would be a great job to correct my annotation of this image. After that I may rename it, including the name of these doves' companions. Thanks in advance, Cherurbino (talk) 05:38, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Yes, thank you - they really look alike. Both in English and in Russian the group to which these green birds belong is named 'parrots'. In English it sounds even more definitely — True parrots. However the only thing which stops me from placing a Category:Myiopsitta monachus just now is another category which is already assigned to Myiopsitta monachus this is, Category:Birds of Uruguay. It's across the ocean from Spain, so scientists may say that two birds differ. Also, it is explicitly written that Myiopsitta monachus is a group endemic to South America. Anyway, thank you again! Cherurbino (talk)
Commons already has photos of them from Madrid, Zaragoza and ... Brussels. I wouldn't mind trading them for tropical turtles that had invaded local lakes. NVO (talk) 20:14, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
The problem is solved, I was convinced that these were the Monk Parakeets, so I shall adjust the annotation. Then I'll find the way how to rename the file into "Doves and Parrots in Barcelona". Thank everybody for the kind co-operation! Cherurbino (talk) 16:31, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Upload Wizard seems broken
I have not been able to upload anything for 36 hours now. It always falls over at the last stage. There's no talk page for the Wizard; does anyone know what's happening? Johnbod (talk) 20:23, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
It seems there is no freedom of panorama in France (see Commons:Freedom_of_panorama#France). However, there are categories, such as Category:Street art in Paris, which have contemporary street art. Are there special conditions for street art, or is this a copyright violation?
Commons has adopted a policy that photos of illegal graffiti are legal for us to use. If you mean an officially-installed mural, that might be different... AnonMoos (talk) 00:07, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Hi, I'm a little new at using SVGs in a dynamic way. I have an image that has different data on different layers that can be used to show a step by step solution to a problem, to avoid having to create multiple versions of the same image. Ideally I would want to insert the same image in a wikibook passing a parameter to show different layers: [[file:myimage.svg|layer1=show]][[file:myimage.svg|layer2=show]] Is this possible? Thanks Pluke (talk) 10:18, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't think that currently Wikimedia supports SVG scripting at all. We have a few files in Category:Animated SVG, but they don't display as animated unless you load them in an external program that supports it... AnonMoos (talk) 13:21, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
German WWII Maps
Hi, a contributor to ro.wp noticed that this site contains some maps of Bessarabian Maps made in Germany in WWII. There is no copyright notice, but the author claims that "Most of the images in this web site where obtained from the National Archives at College Park, Maryland[...]I have also found many maps at the online Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, the online site of the Institut für Geographie und Geologie der Universität Greifswald, and received many donated maps from persons interested in my site."
"None of these are for sale", only for historical studies. No commercial use, I should say. Also, german sites have a 15 years database dataprotection. It seems to me: not for wikipedia. But you may contact and ask the sitemaster: he is able to give or refuse permission even for commercial use, fit for wikipdia. --Havang(nl) (talk) 15:18, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
I would guess probably not. If there is no individual author named on the maps, then copyright in Germany would last 70 years from publication, so it would matter when these maps were produced. If they are from 1941, then the Germany copyright will expire in a few months actually. However since they were still copyrighted in Germany in 1996, the U.S. copyright was restored by the URAA and will last 95 years from publication (for a 1941 map, would last until 2037). The only chance for the U.S. status is if these are considered captured WWII material and the German copyright would be owned by a governmental entity.... that is a small URAA loophole, but I'm not sure who produced these so I'm not sure they would qualify. Maps found at the National Archives *might* have a chance at the exception; unlikely for ones from the Library of Congress. Perhaps a German speaker could clarify the publisher/maker as noted on some of those maps, but I'd lean towards not having them (unfortunately as they do look like nice maps). Carl Lindberg (talk) 22:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
No, what I want is an option to manually insert the license. I am tired of needing to upload something under a fake license temporarily every time I upload an image.Ryan Vesey (talk) 21:32, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
The upload wizard is only for simple cases. You'll want to use the standard upload form. If you go to your preferences, on the gadgets tab, the first gadget disables the upload wizard. If you check that box and save at the bottom, whenever you click the link to upload you'll use the tried-and-true form where you are able to specify a license manually (especially with the "basic" rather than the "main" form as described at the bottom of the page you'll be using from now on, Commons:Upload. – Adrignolatalk03:57, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Hey all, just to let you know as of a couple weeks ago I've created a tool pngscale that downscales PNGs with high performance and minimal memory usage, even for very large images. This was intended specifically to help address the 12.5 megapixel limit on PNGs on Commons. However so far the devs aren't responding to my e-mails and I'm not sure how to proceed. I wonder if I should integrate it into Mediawiki myself and submit a patch. If so, I don't know where to post the patch, because I don't think this bug has an existing bug report to attach it to. Should I create a new bug for it? Is there a Mediawiki development mailing list I can post questions like this too? Does anyone have any info on this? Thanks. Dcoetzee (talk) 03:19, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
"However so far the devs aren't responding to my e-mails and I'm not sure how to proceed." - Who did you email and when? Reedy (talk) 15:24, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Dcoetzee -- I hope your program responds to some of the long-standing criticisms (such as treating grayscale and fully-opaque images differently, so that everything is not reduced to a uniform 32-bytes-with-alpha-channel format on output)... AnonMoos (talk) 16:31, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
You knew what I meant. Anyway, at times the 16-bit-per channel flag has been turned on, resulting in 64-bits-per-pixel RGBA thumbnails, which were often larger in filesize than the original full-resolution image... AnonMoos (talk) 03:54, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
It does indeed. Grayscale images are reduced to grayscale thumbnails. Images with no alpha channel are reduced to thumbnails with no alpha channel. Paletted images are still reduced to 24- or 32-bit RGB. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:55, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Thanks -- that might go some way to resolving the long-term somewhat embarrassing situation that GIF thumbnailing (when it's turned on!) generally has better performance than PNG thumbnailing... AnonMoos (talk) 03:54, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Update
I've now implemented a Mediawiki patch, as well as extended the tool to handle corner cases like grayscale images with alpha channel and upscaling. See bugzilla:9497. It's ready to go if the Mediawiki devs accept it. Dcoetzee (talk) 07:29, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
It is posted on Flickr. However, it is the official US Navy Flickr account and it is reasonable believed that it is taken on the official duty of the photographer. Hence even though it is marked on Flickr as CC with limited terms, it is in fact, public domain (US federal agencies).
On the flip side, there are cases that images involved is, in fact, public domain, while being marked as Creative Common licenses since Flickr do not allow images being marked as such. This is sometimes the case involving scanned images or photographs of a public domain artwork (photographic reproduction rule). Some US federal agencies also maintains Flickr accounts that involves images taken during official duties. While these images are not problematic, it is important to assign a correct copyright tag as not to unnecessary limit secondary use.
Similarly, people routinely import my photos from Flickr and incorrectly mark them CC-BY, when the image description clearly says it's CC0. I've tried for years to persuade Flickr to offer CC0 as a license choice with no luck. Dcoetzee (talk) 07:32, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
User gallery
Hi at all. After that a database error made out of order the users galleries, now I find that the option "gallery" it's the same of the proposal "Special:MyUploads" (Proposal to add a Special:MyUploads "my uploads" link next to "my contributions"). This is not useful. Users galleries was very useful because it was possible to control uploads by group or by date, and then specially it was useful to control the categories given to each file. I think that for these galleries it's not important the description (it's sufficient to open the file); much more important is that it's possible to see the categories they are given. It is possible to add this column? It will be a big help for all people they work on correct categorizations. Thank you very much. --DenghiùComm (talk) 04:54, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Replacing gallery was a bad move - even if toolserver is down. All the discussion at VPP was about "add a link to Special:MyUploads at the top right", not about replacing gallery. Get it back. NVO (talk) 22:10, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Mass update
Hi. I want to upload thousands of pictures, hundreds of which have already been randomly uploaded by someone else. It seems that most of the already uploaded pictures (maybe all of them) are lacking the date and don't use the Information template. Furthermore, most are already used by several wikipedia. Here is a random example. I could re-upload them or duplicate them very easily (along with the other thousand that haven't been uploaded yet) with the date and the information template. I don't want to do this manually, is there any means to correct this easily? Tados (talk) 15:00, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Provided your versions are different (higher res, different colours, etc.) you should upload them all anyway. If they are truly exactly the same file or visually indistinguishable, you should just blow away the old description and replace it with a new one, while retaining anything extra like categories that you don't put in your description. This entire upload should be done by a bot, because of the number of files involved (the alternative would be error-prone and taxing). Dcoetzee (talk) 22:15, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Random portraits, unused and uncategorized
Greetings. I've been adding categories to uncategorized images, and I frequently run into headshots or portraits of random people, where those images are uncategorized and unused on any Wikimedia project. I'm not sure what to do with them.
In some cases I can't tell anything about the person. For instance, File:Deweyca.jpg doesn't have any useful information. (No Google hits on any combination.) File:Jjh.jpg and File:James Fullard.jpg have names, but Google searches turn up no one notable who they might be.
For images of users, I add one of the subcategories of Category:Wikimedians. But File:Rtbusnsuit1.jpg appears to be a self-portrait by someone who has done nothing more than upload this image to Commons, and the image is unused. I don't think adding a Wikimedian category would be useful to anyone. (There are lots of cases like this.)
Occasionally an image is used somewhere, sort of, but it's so nonsensical that nothing can be said about the image. For instance, File:Burn6.jpg has random characters for information, and its appearance on en.wiki can only be described as useless and nonsensical. (The user has contributed nothing either here or there.)
There is the added complication that such images are very commonly copyright violations, and there are personality rights associated with portraits. I'm inclined to nominate all such images for deletion when I find them, as unused and non-useful. But I wanted to get some community input first, to make sure I'm doing the right thing. All the best, Quadell(talk)14:03, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
I would agree that most or all of these are outside of Commons:Project scope, and should be nominated for deletion. The first several you list all appear to be similar, and uploaded on the same day, and are the only uploads by those users. They are probably copyvios as well. Project contributors are allowed to upload a limited number photos of themselves or other images normally out of scope for use on their user pages, which can be kept if they are in use... but in the above case, they are the user's *only* contributions and that's not enough. If such images are no longer in use, then they should be deleted anyways. A lot of this looks to be self-promotional as well. I would nominate every image you list above, and similar ones -- I don't think they are controversial. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:52, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
I got flack when going through Category:User page images and nominating unused personal images as being out of scope. Docu opposed my adminship for that very reason. So be forewarned, though I agree with Carl Lindberg. – Adrignolatalk19:47, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
If it's clearly intended to be a user page image, then add the template even if it's not actually used on any user page -- that way, it's easier for people like Adrignola to come along later and clean up. That's the way I do it, anyway... AnonMoos (talk) 02:00, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
Regarding unused portraits of unidentifiable persons, looking contemporary (probably living or deceased recently): In most cases, I would delete because of possible personality rights issues - though some images could in theory be used to illustrate subjects such as "beard", "glasses", or "pale skin colour", it's better to only use photos with a clear state of affairs for such a purpose. However, further using the example of bearded people: File:Baba in Nepal.jpg is of course a widely used picture on many Wikipedias, e.g. in the article en:Beard, and a featured picture. The person depicted, however, is an unidentified "old sadhu". And File:Orthodox Man with Beard by David Shankbone.jpg (used in the "Beard" article as well) is an unidentifed person only described as "Orthodox Man with Beard in Jerusalem", too. Though both portraits bear the "personality rights" template, we are not told whether the people depicted agree with publishing their picture in this manner. Still, it would probably be hard to get these two portraits deleted, as they are of obvious usefulness. Maybe it would be time to only accept images where the uploader at least states that the depicted people agree with publication. If another image of this potentially useful kind gets uploaded, it may start as unused, but could become a widely used one like these two. But where to draw the line? Gestumblindi (talk) 20:55, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
In my opinion there is no much sense in such deletions (if you are not absolutely sure that the picture is useless). For example, Josh Kimmel, giving his IMDB profile, participated in ~20 motion pictures as an actor, and produced at least one notable motion picture. The photo is not used currently, but it easily can be used in the future. Christian Frank is an artist from Germany, I have no idea if he is notable or not, or how relevant are his exhibitions (listed in de-wiki), but Commons hosts several his artworks, and at the very least his photo will be usable for the {{Creator}} template. Photos uploaded by Philtwalker are portraits of radio personalities mentioned in the article w:Trans World Radio, and possibly can be used that article in the future. Of course, all these pictures have unclear copyright status, but I'm not sure if they are really not useful. Commons is not Wikipedia, and usefulness is not a synonym of notability. Trycatch (talk) 21:50, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Was unaware of that Josh Kimmel one -- that is in scope, for sure. May be a COM:OTRS issue, but I can't find the photo published anywhere else, so that may be fine. Just voted keep on that one. Most of the others don't seem anywhere near that ballpark though. The personalities of Trans World Radio may be useful, but... just being an employee of a notable company usually doesn't do that, and those smack very much of profile photos first published elsewhere, so more of a COM:OTRS issue as well. A photo uploaded by someone, only used on that person's talk page, and that photo (and edits to user and talk pages) being the only contributions said user made to this project -- I would tend for deletion on those. If the photo has some other qualities that make it useful -- sure, but most of these aren't anywhere near that quality. Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:57, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
August 27
"Vehicles in country" vs. "Vehicles of country" categories.
I would like to know whether there is a policy or any sort of consensus on which of these category names should be used and in what case? Because from I'm seeing on Commons it seems there's no standard and everyone's doing it the way they feel like it should be done.
Here's my proposal: Let's use the "Vehicles of country" categories for vehicles designed and/or produced in said country and use the "Vehicles in country" categories for vehicles photographed within the borders of said country regardless of where they were designed or produced.
That would make sense on paper. In practice, it's more complicated today, as many vehicles are made in multiple factories around the world. Best to just stick to the "in" category, as that's often all we could know for sure. – Adrignolatalk16:13, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
But why put categories for specific manufacturers in the "Vehicles in country" categories (like in Category:Vehicles in France)? Also even though its true that a single car model can be produced by several manufacturers it does not change the fact that putting categories of manufacturers from specific countries in categories "Vehicles of country" makes a lot more sense than putting in the "in" categories since just because a car was designed and/or produced in a country doesn't mean it was in said country wen a photo of it was being taken. Also most of the time when a car is produced by several diff rent manufacturers it's usually produced and sold under their brands and names. All that has to be done is to create a category for each such "variantion" as a subcategory of the manufacturer's category and the category of the original car (like in the case of Category:Nasr 125 which is a subcategory of Category:Nasr vehicles and Category:Polski Fiat 125p). In case a car is produced under its original name we can always make a separate category for it (like it was done in the case of Category:Daewoo Lanos (Poland))
By using separate categories for vehicles designed/produced in a country and photographed in a country we can allow people to look for more specific content while making it easier to tell which cars were actually designed and/or produced in a country and which were just in a country when a picture of them was being taken.
In particular this is relating to the ongoing behaviour of User:Mikhail Ryazanov and his habit of tagging large numbers of others' perfectly good JPEG uploads as if they're somehow not worthy of inclusion here. Latest would appear to be here, re Category:Engravings from Album du Centenaire
Whilst recognising the advantage of SVG (which this crude template suggests, even though it would have no value whatsoever for book scans like this), and the narrow advantages of PNG in some cases, there is no reason why this large number of images should be considered for any form of format conversion. Especially not by drive-by tagging like this, which the uploader is clearly puzzled by, if not downright infuriated (the tagging editor does this a lot, some editors, myself included, considerably resent it).
There are some scans with technical problems, either of the source material (often unavoidable), of the scanning process, of image processing post-scan, and only rarely of the final format. Some of these are fixable, some are fixable after upload by other's collaborative work - I'm certainly grateful to user:A7N8X and his cleanup work to my own Category:Scans from 'The Book of the Motor Car', 1912. If scans are truly poor, then it's reasonable to re-work them, or even to request a re-scanning. The very least of these issues though is the technical format of the file. This tagging as if all JPEGs are too poor for inclusion here is quite unwarranted, and it's especially discouraging to the scanners. It is simply untrue that using PNG will improve quality. This may be seen by the tagger's own uploads, and especially where they have converted others files from JPEG to PNG and re-uploaded, sometimes then even seeking deletion of the original. Winding up the contrast to pure black & white is not always an improved image, even if it often looks "sharper" or "clearer" at first glance. Especially for those working with old or faded source materials, this absolute contrast (the narrow case where PNG might show some real benefit) is unattainable and undesirable anyway.
Is JPEG to be banned from Commons? If so, then ban it.
If not, then lay off this disparaging template, especially when it's used in such a critical and unhelpful manner to others' work. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:24, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
Those are good scans. And the JPEG conversion makes them worse because of lossy compression, while PNG format keeps them in good condition because of lossless compression.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 17:48, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
I do not see any problems with those photographs either and I am not sure what people fixing images tagged with {{BadJPEG}} should be doing with them. Converting JPEGs to PNGs is not going to improve anything. --Jarekt (talk) 18:40, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
Well, I may list several problems with those images. 1) There are small gray dots around any big black dot, seems like they appeared because of compression. 2) There are light spots here and there, seems like the portraits were not retouched. 3) They are not contrast enough, because the image prepared with black ink only cannot contain light gray places.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 18:49, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
(1) The original dimension is ca 10 cm x 7 cm , the linear enlargment is about a factor 10. (2) Old books have dots, yellowish-grey area's and other imperfections and the old paper was not blank, therefore I added much contrast, removed on the sides parts wich came from neighbouring images or texte (that however gave white side parts, I tried to avoid that) and I did a minimum of retouching. (I let further improvement be done by users of the images). But I still do not understand what you mean by compression. My question: At what stage of the process there was compression and how could i have got a SVG or PNG format without passing by the JPG format first? --Havang(nl) (talk) 19:14, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
Everything's right! Theoretically speaking, it's better to avoid JPG files from start, and make the photos in TIF or RAW formats. As soon as they are done in JPEG, it is not bad because camera JPEGs are usually compressed with fine quality producing quite big files. Any possible loss can appear with saving the final JPEGs. Yes, it may be tiny and invisible; but with PNG it may not be at all. That's the only difference.--PereslavlFoto (talk) 20:01, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
PereslavlFoto -- PNG files can theoretically preserve certain fine distinctions which JPEG can't, but with many photographic sources, this theoretical difference really doesn't matter too much in practical terms. And also, PNG files are actually less usable in Wikipedia articles than are JPEGs, since the PNG image resizing algorithm (thumbnail generator) used here is rather poor-quality and inefficient... AnonMoos (talk) 11:25, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
Yes, the format my originals have too. If you save the google version on your computer, and try to make it as big as my versions, thy look bad. Thanks for explaining those things. So the limit is the quality of my pocket camera: I don't have TIF or RAW format (or I don't know how to programm my camera for that). Finally: ==> Do we keep or remove that badJPEG tag on the category? --Havang(nl) (talk) 20:14, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
This tag was intended for cases where obviously digital-born diagrams were uploaded as JPEG instead of PNG or SVG, not for scans from paper sources. Digitally-created diagrams exhibit severe artifacts near sharp edges when compressed with JPEG, especially in thumbnails, while scans or photos tend to exhibit enough blur near edges that this isn't a big issue. Also, it's much easier to re-save an existing digitally-created digram as PNG than to obtain a camera that can shoot raw, which was not at all the intention. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:35, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
Perhelion, aren't you comparing apples with pears... your png-images, blown up to the same picture-dimensions as mine, are worse then mine. Also, converting one of my images to PNG, (opnening in paint and saving as PNG) makes it not better, just makes it four times more bits. But that can every user do with my images, so no need to do it in advance. Having had this discussion, I am convinced that I did a fairly good job at Category:Engravings from Album du Centenaire, and I removed the badJPEG tag. --Havang(nl) (talk) 12:12, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
all red are potential artefacts However, yes your images are good, but I mean you have edited the pictures, and I don't really believe your camera save with a JPG compression of 75%!? I made a small demonstration for this artefacts (from your original, as you requested) and why PNG images get bigger bits (saved in 24bit, if the PNG would be clean in ~6-8bit it would be smaller than JPG) However in (this high-res) photo like images, this effect is negligible. -- πϵρήλιο℗01:51, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
Perhelion, I see, you are a professional. Therefore some more questions.
How good a screen do you have, as I don't see on the originals the artifacts you made red?
Being a non-professional, I have run the 2010 HP-mediasmart fotoprogram over all photo's for making it black-white, taking away the yellowish-brown papercolor, and I saw the files go down from appr. 4MB to 1,7 MB, has that something to do with the 75% JPG-compression you are pointing at?
@Havang: (Thanks for the compliment, I'm only a semi advanced) Yes this details are not really recognizable (on this example). @75%: Yes, semi, color-reduction has affect too. @Converted to PNG: this can every normal graphic tool, I used (viewer) IrfanView and Gimp. If you „resave“ a JPG, a PNG choose would „save“ quality, but not improve (if you not do manually improve). Another point is that the thumbnail is compressed again, in addition stronger (but with sharpening), thus acting worse. I used only the Histogram and the Layer feature (coloring), see Wikipedia:Image editing (but it give more sure tricks to do such). -- πϵρήλιο℗00:43, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
As I said on User_talk:Mikhail_Ryazanov, the purpose of Template:BadJPEG is for diagrams, charts, graphs, computer-generated maps and the like. A large number of User:Mikhail_Ryazanov taggings fall outside those parameters, and actually have no relevance whatsoever to the current JPEG image file specifically, but instead are intended to serve as a marker that if someone were to speculatively and hypothetically do a different scan of the same picture at some time in the future, then it might be best to upload this speculative hypothetical completely-different scan in a non-JPEG format. Unfortunately for User:Mikhail_Ryazanov, that's simply not what the "BadJPEG" template is intended for, which is why his behavior is unconstructive and unproductive. AnonMoos (talk) 11:18, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
I should repeat my question again: where did you get such a queer interpretation of the BadJPEG tag? According to en:WP:PIFU and Help:Scanning, JPEG is suitable only for photographs, and all other images are to be uploaded as PNG or PNG/JPEG pairs. Why do you think that tagging of images uploaded in a wrong format is "unconstructive and unproductive"? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 20:45, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
If you read the whole text at Help:Scanning, it points out that JPEGs are good enough, not inherently wrong for scans (and needed in some circumstances, like large files), and once an image is a JPEG (like most on the web) it's generally impractical to convert it. (The English Wikipedia page doesn't discuss scans.) I don't see why these should be tagged, now that the quite fine JPEGs exist, and unless good PNGs could easily have been generated earlier. —innotata21:06, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
@innotata Help:Scanning nowhere points that JPEGs are good enough. Quite the opposite, it points that PNG is preferable because it's lossless, and quality of JPEGs should not go below 85, when the preferable quality is 95-99. Trycatch (talk) 18:48, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
Such recommendations are not that helpful, since if you set the "quality" parameter above 95% using libjpeg, it greatly increases the size of the generated file without any meaningful increase in real image quality. From the nature of the JPEG format, even a 100% setting still generates a file with lossy compression. AnonMoos (talk) 10:49, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
These recommendations make a lot of sense. Yes, even with Q=100 JPEG is lossy, that's why PNG is still better as a lossless format. But that doesn't mean that higher quality settings (>95) do not matter, the quality increase at these settings is tremendous. Trycatch (talk) 01:18, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
Setting the so-called "quality" parameter to values above 95 results in tremendous increases in filesize, but the actual improvement in real image quality is marginal. Changing the sampling parameters to 1:1:1 can have a much greater impact on real JPEG image quality than futzing around with settings of the so-called "quality" parameter in the 90s (or 100)... AnonMoos (talk) 06:40, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
"Hard-disks are cheap" (c) Jimbo Wales. There is no point to save server space harming image quality. From my perception JPEG is virtually "perfect" somewhere around 98-99, and I can't call the improvements at 90-97 "marginal" (see the picture on the right). What about sampling -- of course downsampling is more important, but it matters only for colored pictures, while scans are often grayscale. And there is no dichotomy between downsampling and high quality quantization, it's possible to turn off downsampling and to use high quality settings at the same time. Trycatch (talk) 16:23, 23 July 2011 (UTC)
That image is interesting, but it contains data fundamentally unsuitable for the JPEG format (as opposed to anything like a real photograph or scan). AnonMoos (talk) 14:48, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
And even there: for example, when the Seattle Municipal Archive releases a map only as a JPEG, what's the point of tagging it as "bad" when it is the only form of the document available? - Jmabel ! talk15:27, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
If it's indeed a bad JPEG, why it should not be tagged as such? And it will be good if one will take Photoshop or GIMP in his hands and remove the most annoying artifacts. Trycatch (talk) 18:22, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
Many scanned pages contains diagrams, charts, graphs and so on as well, and look awfully in low quality JPEG compression with all these w:ringing artifacts. I really don't see a point why such scans should not be tagged. Trycatch (talk) 18:22, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
That is a legitimate concern, but as AnonMoos says, "the purpose of Template:BadJPEG is for diagrams, charts, graphs, computer-generated maps and the like," which would also include scans of those things, as long as they're clear and reasonably high resolution. Any low-res scan pretty much has to be PNG to be remotely legible, and should be tagged with a resolution notice no matter what format it is, not a BadJPEG notice. A scan is only a Template:BadJPEG if the JPEG quality is so low that it creates harsh visible blocks and noise, IMHO. Foxyshadis (talk) 00:59, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
Are there any actual examples of images tagged by this editor, where the image is at a poor compressions ratio such that artefacts are a problem? Andy Dingley (talk) 21:01, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
For the map, I can't see the effects you complain of. If anything, I can see a problem with print registration for the spot colours. This won't be fixed by PNG or even re-scanning! Andy Dingley (talk) 13:43, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
JPEG artifacts are bloody obvious on the both pictures (both blocking and ringing), especially on the map. Of course the problem will not be fixed by converting to PNG, but it's possible to remove the artifacts (make them less visible and annoying) using special filters or by manual editing. Trycatch (talk) 16:23, 23 July 2011 (UTC)
Is the name of the template the problem here? Just because it's "Bad" doesn't mean it's unwanted; it just means it's not ideal. And for anything other than photographs (which some scans could be considered -- close up photos of a document), it's not ideal. Aren't we agreed on that much, at least? Powers (talk) 18:54, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
In this context, "Bad" is supposed to have the very specific meaning that the visual nature of the picture is such that it is inherently not very suitable to be captured using the JPEG file format. It is NOT intended to be applied to any random poor-quality JPEG... AnonMoos (talk) 01:47, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
However looney-crazy-kookoo-whacko you think it is, it seems to be agreed to by a number of active and informed people at Wikimedia Commons -- while you stand alone with your views. AnonMoos (talk) 10:49, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
I have supported my views by references to Commons and Wikipedia guidelines. Can you give me any factual proofs of your "seems to be agreed to by a number of active and informed people" claims (after I have asked you three times)? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 06:56, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
Too bad for you that no one other than you agrees with your personal interpretations of such things. "The cheese stands alone" as the old nursery rhyme says... AnonMoos (talk) 12:50, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
The tagging editor is also happy to bandy around phrases such as "the worst imaginable" when discussing other's scans. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:01, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
Info For other users: my phrase was: "the drawings are uploaded in JPEG format, which is perhaps the worst imaginable for them", referring to the format, not the scans. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 07:49, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
Let me now express my point of view on the subject. I believe that tagging of "lineart" scans uploaded in JPEG with BadJPEG:
Does not affect the current use of the images and does not prevent any future use of them.
Attracts some attention to the files, increasing the probability of uploading better versions.
Attracts some attention of all users in general, increasing the chances that the users will be at least aware of the formats and may consider better formats for the future uploads.
Therefore, I do not see how such tagging can do any harm to anyone particular or to Commons (and other projects) in general. At the same time, there are at least potential benefits.
However, the benefits are in fact not just potential. As an illustration, I can point to the related story with this file. While somebody was arguing against my attempts to remove the JPEG artifacts, a more adequate user has found and uploaded a much better quality image.
Regarding my behavior, when I can find the lossless (or just better) original, I do the work myself (unfortunately, do not have enough time now to continue with these PSM illustrations); when I can't — I put the tag in a hope that somebody else will.
The problem is that you don't get it. Just opening a jpg in a graphics programm and saving it as a png does not improve anything because you cannot regain information that was lost by compression. The images that are tagged with BadJPEG have to be redrawn. And that is the purpose of that template. By adding it to other images you are spamming the category in addition to spamming the version history and the file description page. And the effective way to change uploaders behaviour is to notify them timely on their discussion page not to tag images years after they have been uploaded with the uploader long being inactive. --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 10:20, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
Let me quote what the template really says: "If possible, please upload a PNG or SVG version of this image without compression artifacts, derived from a non-JPEG source (or with existing artifacts removed)." There is nothing about "just opening a jpg in a graphics programm and saving it as a png".
I do notify the uploaders of recent files when I find it appropriate, and it does not interfere with the tagging of the files. As for "years" — can you propose any better way to obtain higher quality versions of old files?
Mikhail Ryazanov, you're perfectly confirming the point that I've been making all along -- namely, that your use of the BadJPEG template is actually generally about hypothetical speculative future completely-different scans of the same underlying picture, and not about the specific image file that you're tagging. Unfortunately, that's not the intended purpose of the BadJPEG template... AnonMoos (talk) 10:49, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
Because image tagging in most cases (including this case) is supposed to be ABOUT THE ACTUAL CONCRETE SPECIFIC IMAGE FILE THAT YOU'RE TAGGING (not about some future hypothetical completely different scan). AnonMoos (talk) 12:53, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
You're not just applying this to "lineart" images, of the type that most authors recognise ar better as SVG, but also to book scans of old engravings. We could (unproductively) argue the precise distinction for "lineart" and whether engravings fall within this, but in practical terms for scanning old books, the scanner is often working with a grey-scale image that's no longer a simple sharp line. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:27, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
It does not mean that JPEG (alone) is the desired format. (Before I also gave you references about postprocessing of grayscale scans for suppression of irrelevant information and enhancement of the relevant. Besides other advantages, PNG even becomes more efficient than JPEG after such processing.) — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 06:56, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
While JPEG (alone) is not appropriate for scans, it is not obvious that PNG is always the best choice.
First of all, there are formats designed purposely for scanned images (like CCITT Group 4 and JBIG2 for monochrome prints), and I don't exclude the possibility that they will be supported in future (in principle, even now, JBIG2 can be uploaded in DjVu or PDF container, but this approach has some deficiencies, and CCITT Group 4 is probably (?) supported in TIFF files, but TIFF is discouraged).
Second, it might be possible to produce vector images more or less directly from the paper original. In such case they would be more preferable than PNGs. (And BadJPEG does mention SVG.)
As an example I show a comparison of the already analyzed (see above) Voltaire's portrait in different formats:
JPEG photograph
PNG: simulation of bilevel scan
SVG: Vectorization of the PNG
(Important explanation! These PNG and SVG files are shown only for illustration of capabilities of the corresponding formats. I don't claim that the images are better than the original JPEG, simply because they were derived from that JPEG, and not from the paper original.)
The PNG shows a simulation of 1200 dpi (assuming 900 dpi for the original JPEG) bilevel scan. Such resolution/bitdepth should be enough to capture all relevant details of a black and white picture printed on plain paper and to acceptably reproduce it in print with up two twofold magnification. Notice, that the file size (486 kb) is ~4 times smaller compared to the JPEG (1.93 Mb). CCITT Group 4 encoding makes a 280 kb file, JBIG2 — 212 kb — almost 10 times smaller.
For those with jaggy-phobia, there is a vectorized version, which has smooth lines and can be scaled arbitrarily. The vectorization was quite foolish (I just used the general "trace bitmap" method in Inkscape with almost default settings. The distribution of reference points is probably far from optimal. One would probably also expect separate paths for each element instead of one huge path for the whole contour.), but nevertheless looks reasonably and has not that huge size (the compressed SVGZ is actually ~1.7 Mb — even slightly smaller than the JPEG). More appropriate methods must yield even better results.
So, since there is no unique recommendation about the desired format, and we do not have (yet?) a "make better scan" template, I was using this general BadJPEG.
If someone is afraid of cluttering the "inappropriate JPEG" category, we can add a "type" parameter to the template (like it's done in toSVG), so that the files are placed in corresponding subcategories. However, I don't see it necessary, since if you are browsing all tagged files, engravings are clearly distinguishable from drawings and diagrams even in thumbnails, so you can easily skip everything uninteresting for you. On the other hand, if you are, for example, converting bitmap diagrams or drawings to SVG, then what's the difference between computer-generated and scanned files — in any case you'll have to redraw it manually. -- 09:10, 20 July 2011 User:Mikhail Ryazanov
First off, fax compression (called "Group 4 compression" in the Wikipedia article) only handles pure black and pure white (ignoring all intermediate possibilities), so that it's guaranteed in advance to be very low quality (except with certain extremely restricted and constrained types of image data), and it's quite bizarre (not to mention quite irrelevant) of you to offer it as a supposed serious alternative in this context. Secondly, Wikimedia Commons doesn't really care about filesize in that particular way -- for most cases of imges containing continuously-varying tones, a JPEG with a reasonable choice of image compression parameters will be smaller in filesize than a corresponding PNG (and will certainly generate smaller JPEG thumbnails, since the PNG thumbnail-generation algorithm is rather low performance). So JPEG is more than "good enough" with respect to image filesizes. And the purpose of the "BadJPEG" tag is the same as the purpose of all tags here -- namely, to further the practical goal of making numerous freely-licensed images with possible educational use widely-available. It's not to allow you to compare how 50 different image formats (47 of which are not permitted to be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons) might speculatively hypothetically metaphysically handle the same data. Please consult the remarks I left on your user talk page about "obsessive image-geeking". AnonMoos (talk) 13:12, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
My view: I made the best I could, expecting that somebody wants to use a portrait printed, he may adapt it by techniques as did User:Mikhail Ryazanov; I found that self-evident, and still consider that tag superfluous on that category but with a side-effect that it chases visitors away from the category. --Havang(nl) (talk) 13:50, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
The problem is that when you saved them in JPEG after editing, this second lossy compression introduced additional artifacts. Basically, everything shown by Perhelion above comes from that JPEG recompression and could have been be easily avoided if the cleaned images were saved to a lossless format (like PNG) instead. I can't persuade you to redo the work one more time, :-) but if you still have the original raw photographs, it would be very wise to upload them "underneath" (that is, upload over and immediately revert to the current versions), so that other people can access the "originals" and make their own retouching if they want. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 08:16, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
If you try to print the example of "pure black and pure white" that I gave above side by side with the "original" JPEG, you will see that it really looks like an engraving should — clean and sharp, whereas the JPEG comes out dirty (because of ringing — the artifacts shown by Perhelion are visible on paper by naked eye) and fuzzy (because of grayscale). Moreover, imagesetters in reality can print only "pure black and pure white" and at resolutions about these 1200 dpi (4800 dpi is useful only for better halftones, but we don't discuss them here), so that "Group 4 compression" at 1200 dpi is enough for exact representation of any lineart image.
Regarding the file sizes, you contradict yourself. If it is not important, them everything should be uploaded in the most faithful format, which is not JPEG. For the thumbnails it really does not matter if they are 29 kb (JPEG above) or 61 kb (PNG). I only mentioned the file size issue because uploaders might care if they need to upload 2 Mb files or 200 kb files. (This issue of slightly heavier thumbnails against noticeably lighter originals becomes more profound by the fact that many (most?) people have asymmetric internet connection with upload speed few times lower than download speed.)
Fax compression could be high-quality in certain rarely-encountered restrictive and limited circumstances -- i.e. when image data is originally generated in bitonal form (pure black and pure white only), and the image is to be handled and used at its original resolution only (with no resizing or downsampling of any kind to take place). However, in almost all other circumstances, fax compression is rather low quality... AnonMoos (talk) 11:47, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
Look at the example in the beginning of this subsection. It was downsampled and resized. Of course, heavily downsampled images should not be stored in 1 bpp format, but how this is related to high-resolution scans?
As an outstanding example of what happens when drawings are treated as photographs, I can show this image:
On the left you can see a drawing first printed as a photograph using halftone screening and then digitized (photographed?) as a color photograph. If you try to print this file, another round of halftone screening will take place producing even more disgusting results (including reproduction of the entirely redundant background). On the right you can see a bitonal scan form the USPTO website. These people apparently knew much better what is needed for faithful reproduction of drawings (where every little detail is important!) and how to achieve it properly. And (surprise!) they do store these scans using "fax" compression, which is a customary practice.
This example should also address your objection "ABOUT THE ACTUAL CONCRETE SPECIFIC IMAGE" (see above). I consider these two files representing the same image, namely a page from Gillette's razor patent. Same applies to all other scans, except the very rare case when the image really depends on a particular copy of the physical original.
Question: is there any utility Commons could run to actually assess pictures for JPEG damage, rather than tagging jpeg willy-nilly? I mean, it's not hard to see the squares in a bad jpeg, and there are certain types of terrain (like foliage) that tends to show it up most. I'd think there would be some way to program a piece of software to see those squares itself, and to give the uploader a little map of the picture indicating the damaged areas. Then you could only pester those uploaders, and provide them the means to see themselves what the problem is. Wnt (talk) 17:38, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
I doubt whether there's an existing program to detect exactly what you're asking, but there could be programs to detect very crude and coarse quantization; for example, the output of the old command-line "jpegdump" program reports on that. Don't think this would really resolve the issues between Mikhail_Ryazanov and the rest of us, though... AnonMoos (talk) 18:46, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
I have modified {{BadJPEG}} to indicate that it should not be applied to photographs or scans. If Mikhail really wants to tag scans of line art, they should create a new template for that purpose. Dcoetzee (talk) 18:19, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
Where? As I understand, at least User:Perhelion (Wikigraphist) and User:Trycatch (administrator) did not show their support for such selectivity. On the other hand, the "BadJPEG haters" did not provide any rational arguments and simply ignored my references to Commons guidelines. In any case, the main question was whether "to tag scans of line art", not how to tag, and it is still not answered (I mean, User:Dcoetzee suggested me to create another template, while the "BadJPEG haters" were actually opposing any such tagging). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 02:30, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
Dcoetzee, I have a few questions about your modification:
Did you read the resulting message? In my opinion, "...consists of non-photographic data. ...should not be applied to photographs..." sounds a little bit funny, so to speak.
You changed only the English version. If you look at other languages, you may notice that they convey somewhat different meanings. Does it mean that, for example, that Russian map can still be tagged, since the message in BadJPEG/ru perfectly applies to it?
Common sense tells me that the usage instructions should be given in the template's documentation page instead of the generated message. And that they must be consistent with the general regulations. Don't you think so?
I continue to support my changes. I think the wording is a bit redundant, but acceptable; I think it is necessary to document acceptable uses of the template in the text of the template; and changes propagate to translations over time, I cannot translate to all languages. The translations are not intended for documents from different source countries, they're just for convenience of readers. Dcoetzee (talk) 08:30, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't think that these changes will be propagated, because they don't make sense (see below). Also, people using Commons in other languages can actually never see the English template and thus be unaware of your suggestions how it should not be used.
I still believe that the file format must be chosen according to the contents of the image, not its method of production. And I don't understand why you insist on the opposite.
Consider these two diagrams:
One of them is "computer-generated", another apparently was scanned. What are the differences that make JPEG inappropriate for one of them, but appropriate for the other? Another example:
(there are many more in Category:Teaching illustrations of electronics) — I can't tell whether it was photographed, scanned or drawn in a graphic editor, but in any case JPEG is not suitable for this type of images, especially JPEG of such low quality.
I also don't understand why you don't want BadJPEG template to be applied to scans when they are indeed "Bad JPEGs", but suggest creation of a separate template. I see three possibilities how to replace tagged files with non-JPEG versions:
Find the lossless source.
Retouch the existing JPEG image to remove artifacts.
Manually redraw the image based on the existing JPEG image.
How does it apply to "computer-generated" and scanned images:
In most cases the lossless source actually does not exist (any more) for "computer-generated" files, so this method does not work for most of them. On the contrary, for most scanned images there are many copies of the paper source. Sometimes they are not easily accessible to most people, but if at least one user has access, then producing a good scan is much easier than any of the two remaining methods.
Generally, it takes similar effort for both types.
While in some cases (like this) complete redrawing is inappropriate, most scanned diagrams will only benefit from it. In that case there is no difference how the original JPEG was produced.
So, even if such template is going to be created, it will work in exactly the same way as BadJPEG does. Then what's the point?
Mikhail_Ryazanov -- continually re-editing this thread to keep it at the top of the Village Pump will eventually be found to be unproductive... AnonMoos (talk) 15:03, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Continually ignoring legitimate objections and questions is unproductive. Imperative directions about scans voiced by people not working with scans are unproductive either. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 06:31, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
If you would actually read what other people write you would have understood that we don't want the BadJPEG template to be applied to files that need to be _rescanned_. And the reason for that was given before. --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 08:13, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I did actually read, but was not able to find: 1) any intelligible reason, 2) which template should be used instead. I would appreciate your answers to these questions. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 09:09, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
1) Anybody with some minimum artistic talent can download a graphics program and draw stuff. In contrast very few people have access to original documents and would go through the pains of rescanning them. 2) I don't think a template is needed. png scans easily exceed the 12.5 Mpixel limit so you need a jpeg version to use anyway. --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 09:21, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
1) There are options 2. and 3. for "anybody". Possible difficulties of access to originals make the tagging even more important. 2) No need for tagging of images with profound JPEG artifacts? About 12.5 Mpx: hocus-pocus — File:AduC_002_Voltaire_(1694-1778).png, File:Afghanistan insurgency 1985.png and so on — working thumblailing for large PNGs without any JPEG versions. Also, Dcoetzee is working on the direct solution. Hopefully, it will start working in foreseeable future. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 09:54, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Since with this example you are clearly trying to bullshit me only that much. The common sense thing to do is to ask the uploader in case she scanned the file herself directly to upload a high resolution png. Not to add a template and then wait for years until the uploader is not active anymore. --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 10:54, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I did not understand the meaning of your first sentence. Could you please revise it (preferably, without bad language)?
If you would actually read the preceding discussion, you would have noticed that the uploaders were really asked. This, nevertheless, does not mean in general that tagging is unnecessary or harmful. From the preceding discussion you can also learn that tagging is intended for all users, not just the uploader, especially when the file is old or transferred from other projects, so that the original uploader might be unreachable.
Why uploading of compressed SVG ("SVGZ") is not supported? SVG files are often quite large and always compress very well, so it would be nice (especially for uploaders) if SVGZ uploads were allowed.
I searched through the archives and found only one very old question. The answer there was quite strange, because:
SVGZ uses gzip compression, which operates on steams only. So, 1) decompression of the very beginning of the file is simple and is enough to verify the file type, 2) there is in fact no "each file", but just one stream.
Which modern browsers/plugins/viwers/editors support SVG but not SVGZ? Even if there are some, a link "download SVG (uncompressed)" can be provided for them in the same way as PNG downloads are available now.
I'm not sure, but I think most communication is gzipped on the fly. So when you open this page the text is already compressed. Multichill (talk) 09:00, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
I checked. HTML (and something else) is compressed:
(Request-Line) GET /wiki/File:Commons-logo.svg HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Mikhail Ryazanov -- This might possibly save some disk space (though not much), but it wouldn't save bandwidth, and it would add another level of complexity to debugging and re-editing SVG file versions... AnonMoos (talk) 22:25, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
I mean also the files are compressed on the server (and that better than gzip), but anyway disk space is much cheaper than always extra required computing power!? -- πϵρήλιο℗00:38, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Many more tools support SVG than SVGZ. The issues with compatibility exceed the benefits. I would support a hypothetical format that used fancy XML compression to get really small SVGs, but no such thing currently exists. Dcoetzee (talk) 06:50, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Any particular examples of tools not supporting SVGZ? What about the "download SVG (uncompressed)" option?
(Offtopic: what happens at your talk page (diff)? And why you don't reply to my questions?)
My concerns are not about the server space (although, from my experience, processing of "text" files compressed with gzip or bzip2 is faster than of uncompressed, because decompression is much quicker than disk access; moreover [11] says only about compression of the dumps, not the working database). Are you sure that when an SVG file is uploaded to Commons, it is transmitted in a compressed form? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 08:05, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Yes, all uploads and downloads from WMF servers use gzip to compress textual data whenever it is available. It is supported by all major browsers. I'll look at your questions. Dcoetzee (talk) 08:23, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Nope, just incivility that I edited to remove. Whether a file is compressed depends not on the file, but on the client and whether their browser supports and requests gzip compression. Dcoetzee (talk) 10:21, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
Please, please look at the logs above. It was the same client, and compression ("gzip,deflate") was always requested. However one file was served compressed with gzip, but another — not compressed. http://toolspot.org/http_compression.php shows exactly the same results (upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg and upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Hainaut_Centre.svg: "not compressed", upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/AduC_002_Voltaire_%281694-1778%29.svg: "compressed using gzip"). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 08:52, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
Mikhail_Ryazanov -- Then file a bug report on this inconsistency. However, your proposal above doesn't seem to have great advantages in terms of current technology. AnonMoos (talk) 10:01, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
OK, where exaclty to file?
If the transmission compression indeed works for both downloads and uploads (I'm still not sure about the last one), then there is really no advantage of SVGZ over SVG. Probably, it should be explained at least here and here instead of just stating "not supported". The only inconvenience is that people who keep their files compressed need to decompress them before uploading. Hopefully, when bug 4421 is solved, the decompression could be transferred to the server.
Thanks for pointing out! It seems that the other problem (no compression on transmission) is related to bugzilla:22191. Interestingly enough, Hainaut_Centre.svg (see above) is now served compressed. I checked few recently uploaded SVGs, and they all were also fine. But Commons-logo.svg is still transmitted not compressed. Then I tried to find another file with "/4/4a/" in the path, and indeed File:World_map_torrid.svg is also not compressed. Maybe they are served by different servers, some of which have broken settings? Could anyone reopen bugzilla:22191 explaining this strange situation? (I don't have an account there) — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 04:35, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
Chinese variants fallback
Template:GetFallback makes all Chinese variants fall back directly to zh. Possibly zh-cn, zh-my, zh-sg should fall back to zh-hans (simplified Chinese) instead of zh (traditional Chinese), if zh-hans is available, and to zh if it's not? This is exactly what {{GetFallback2}} is for, so that if the first fallback fails (i.e., in this case, there's no zh-cn message, say, but there's no zh-hans message either), it gets a different fallback (i.e. zh). I don't know anything about Chinese though - can some Chinese speakers comment? Rd232 (talk) 08:09, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
In Chinese Wikipedia we have automatic conversion and zh usually means no conversion (display the text in wiki code as it is). But at other places (meta etc.) it is a tradition to use traditional Chinese for zh. The reason I think is that generally people who use zh-hans can read some zh-hant, but those using zh-hant usually have more problems reading zh-hans. Sometimes it is not that consistent though. Some people put simplified Chinese into zh and sometimes people put both. --Ben.MQ (talk) 08:19, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
"Error creating thumbnail: Invalid thumbnail parameters or PNG file with more than 12.5 million pixels". Can you please help fix this error? thanks in advance -- The Egyptian Liberal (talk) 06:48, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
Well, this is on purpose: it would take to much resources to create thumbnails for huge PNG and GIF. Create smaller ones for Wikipedia, and keep these for archival. Yann (talk) 09:13, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
grocery stores in the 1950s in Indianapolis Indiana
My Mother is interested in knowing what grocery store on Wisconsin street in Indianapolis Indiana -- 17:16, 29 August 2011 173.210.112.138
Confusing placement of subcategories. e.g. "Nude and partially nude women with brown hair" is under "Nude and partially nude females", but logically should be under "Nude and partially nude women".
Yes it's a mess ! And I actually wanted to find some solutions, that's why I'm here.
"Nude and partially nude females" does seem to include only women in direct subcats, but if you enter cats such as "female toplessness" or "nude females" you then found categories that concern girls or adolescent girls, so the category tree is logical for that
There's no problem if a cat only contains one picture (Commons doesn't have the same logic as Wikipedia). It prevents the eventual dispersion of files in case someone uploads other picture on any subject. Moreover the example above is not really a cat with only one file since this cat also includes sucats.
"Nudity and partial nudity" should be renamed "Nudity or partial nudity" but there's no problem with the category "Nude or partially nude people" (even if I understand the argument above). Indeed it allows a better category tree with 2 sucats "Nudity" and "Nude or partially nude people". --TwoWings * to talk or not to talk...14:13, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Okay, so I filmed some footage of a theme park ride in 1080p widescreen. The footage was rendered as an MP4 in an old version of Windows Movie Maker, one new enough to edit HD footage, but old enough not to suck. (Generally when I upload footage to YouTube, I'm stuck plunking in the yt:stretch=16:9 code to force it widescreen. It plays fine in any player offline, but YouTube just doesn't get that its widescreen otherwise.) Anyway, I used online-convert to take it into OGG format, as recommended by one tutorial page on Commons.
4) replace in this line "~path" (to ffmpeg2theora.exe) with the path where ffmpeg2theora.exe is located on your machine.
5) save the document as widescreen.bat (not .txt!!) in the ffmpeg2theora folder.
Now drag and drop your file on this batch and it will start converting. And it will work also with other files...
Well, the resulting files have an very high bitrate and for use in Wikipedia the download time will be to long. So please create also another smaller version of your videos. Open the editor again and write a new batch with the following line:
replace the ~path again and save it as 640x360.bat. By dropping a file it will produce the smaller version for you... Greetings from Germany, --Pristurus (talk) 18:45, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Yes. Commons probably needs it more than other places, to encourage interaction (especially positive interaction - how many users' only interaction is a welcome message and then problem templates?). Suggest moving this to Commons:Village pump/Proposals for more detailed discussion of pros, cons and potential implementation issues. Rd232 (talk) 13:20, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
I suggest not doing this. I'm a regular here and I don't even know about that page let alone look at it. I figure that's the case for most people. Multichill (talk) 17:47, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
There's been a watchlist notice about it for... a month maybe? I suggest not being snippy. (Maybe you need more wikilove, though.) Killiondude (talk) 22:13, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Only on English users watchlists. Users with other languages do not get watchlist notices. /Ö16:55, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
Support I recognise the disadvantages (WikiLove messages are sometimes insincere or impersonal, etc.) but I think on the whole it will encourage more positive feedback between contributors. Dcoetzee (talk) 05:49, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Support It won't do any harm, and is certainly a nice thing to have around here. We'll do some message customisations to have camera barnstars or such. Jean-Fred (talk) 12:00, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
I tried this, adding a barnstar to User talk:AlphaZeta#A barnstar for you!, and it added table code with an English title. It should have added template code, e.g. {{graphic designer's barnstar|...my message...}}, so we can provide translations of the barnstar name. --LA2 (talk) 01:22, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Tested, it apparently crashes Chrome 13, I also don't find a way to disable this cruft. Adding some "opt-out" feature after two days of discussion are spammer tactics. –Be..anyone (talk) 02:35, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
It should work in Chrome, so if you have time to submit a detailed bug report against the WikiLove extension, that would be helpful. You can disable the WikiLove button under Special:Preferences#preftab-3 (Labs features → Enable showing appreciation). You cannot disable receiving WikiLove yet, but it's in our backlog (we'll probably just make the disable feature work both ways).--Eloquence (talk) 06:20, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, the "opt out" worked today with the link provided by you. A bug report in the direction of Chrome used up system resources in a WikiLove (followed by opt out) test to a degree, where only a hard power off could terminate it would not be helpful. For starters this should never happen in Windows 7 + Chrome 13, no matter what MediaWiki does. And I could not revive my mediazilla: vintage 2006 account, the password is randomized, same idea as on en:w: and m:. –Be..anyone (talk) 22:56, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Against.
Frankness and openness about one's feelings and exchange of contradicting arguments is more important than naive or hypocritical nice words. Commons is not going to start overlooking copyright infringement out of wikilove. On the other hand, there is a system to recognize good pictures with the quality pictures, etc... By the way, I am not sure how "wikilove" translates in cultures without a Christian background. In some cultural contexts, receiving a present or a praise can be seen as an embarassment (if you receive a present or a praise, you become indebted to that person, and you must repay the present or praise back, so, all in all, you'd better leave while it is not too late, rather than face all the troubles caused by the embarrassing present or praise).
"Het einde van het verhaal speelt zich in: the ministry of love af. Dit is de gevangenis waar Winston gevangen wordt genomen en wordt gebrainwasht, zodat hij van de partij houdt" [12]Teofilo (talk) 17:06, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
OGV???!!!!!
I cannot be the only contributor who's struggled with this.......but, I'm exhausted.............I have spent HOURS trying to walk through all the Xiph steps to convert my little .wmv files and .mov files over to .ogv files and I am at the end of my rope!!! Now, I know, some good helper here is gonna say, "well do you look at [this]?" (which I did......) and they'll point me to Xiph.org [which I've already bought a friggin' time-share at!!!}......why does stuff have to be so d$%%^%#$$%%^%^^^ hard?!!!!! I really don't get stumped often.......I'm a mid-level technology user............yes, I'm the guy in the office that EVERYONE goes to before they call I.T.....but I cannot figure this out. I don't want codecs and scripts and why-Linux-users-will-love-this gibberish.....I just want a freaking piece of software, man! Y'know, start with bubba.wmv and end up with bubba.ogv.....is that so much to ask for? Even command line stuff doesn't scare me, but....I dunno.....I could go on for hours......can anyone help me??Buddpaul (talk) 02:25, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't think it is fair to blame Xiph for this -- video formats are very complicated without any input from Xiph. They are 2 dimensional images with much more than the addition of the forth dimension (let's take a few moments to thank the unreal world for usually skipping the third dimension in video format) and optionally audio.
Did you try ffmpeg2theora? And after you answer this positively, did you try "ffmpeg2theora -h" or "info ffmpeg2theora" or a functioning equivalent?
Also, there is a web interface available -- not sure of the url for that, however.
Perhaps when you get over your struggles, you can, with me, guess at the reasons that commons does not yet allow upload of flac files. And, what the hell is the difference between "ogv" and "ogg video" and why should we care? -- Queeg (talk) 03:37, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
Credit has been added now on both pages where the image is used. Actually, they now set a very good example by not hesitating to put a near-image credit even on the cover page. --Túrelio (talk) 20:03, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
'This file has annotations. Move the mouse pointer over the image to see them.'
A village pump in Burkina Faso
Sometime recently an image with annotations inserted on a page here on Commons (I haven't noticed this behaviour on any other Wikimedia/Wikipedia-site), automatically get the text 'This file has annotations. Move the mouse pointer over the image to see them.' prepended to the image-description (if any - otherwise it's just inserted below the image). For example take look at the village-pump to the right (the same one as the one used on the top of this page) or my sandbox. While I agree that this might be a good thing in most inclusions, I am missing the opportunity to disable this in specific inclusions - i.e. by adding a parameter like no-annotation or something:
[[File:Balga, February 2010, Women around the water pump.jpg|200px|right|thumb|no-annotation|<div style="text-align: justify">A village pump in Burkina Faso</div>]]
See Template:ImageNoteControl. Suppressing notes is especially important in templates, so if someone adds a note to an image used in a template, that note does not shows up in all transclusions of the template. --Jarekt (talk) 17:17, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
A village pump in Burkina Faso
I found the solution in that template:
<span class="wpImageAnnotatorOff">[[File:Balga, February 2010, Women around the water pump.jpg|200px|right|thumb|<div style="text-align: justify">A village pump in Burkina Faso</div>]]</span>
{{ImageNoteControl|img=[[File:Balga, February 2010, Women around the water pump.jpg|200px|right|thumb|A village pump in Burkina Faso]]|notes=off|caption=off}}
I'm unsure whether this lecture[13] would be okay to upload. While it is licensed under CC Attribution by UCL, do they own the copyright or does Chomsky? I couldn't find a precedent for this. InverseHypercube (talk) 18:11, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Generally the party who places the work in a fixed form has the copyright. However, in the EU, a person performing may also have a performer's right for up to 50 years. Moreover, although he did not appear to use any visual aids, if Chomsky wrote out any part of his speech beforehand then the speech would have its own copyright of which he would be the copyright holder and this would be a derivative work. In short, I'd ideally like to get a release from both. Dcoetzee (talk) 22:36, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
New reporting page for title blacklist issues
Wikimedia Commons uses a title blacklist (defined at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist) which is used for file upload title checks (as well as some other purposes). It prohibits file names like IMG_0713.
UploadWizard previously used its own implementation of the title blacklist, which caused a number of problems. It now uses the same blacklist as all file uploads. In the UI, we've added a simple feedback mechanism to report false positives and other issues whenever a title is prohibited due to a blacklist match. This feedback form sends comments to Commons:Uploadwizard_blacklist_issues.
I suggest that admins help monitor that page in the event that there are rules in MediaWiki:Titleblacklist which lead to false positives or other user interaction problems. Those problems would affect both the new and the old upload form, unless there are specific bugs in UploadWizard that we're not aware of.--Eloquence (talk) 21:46, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Idea??
I have this idea that I'd like to undertake a major cleanup of category Schools in Texas.............it needs expanding and re-working, but I think some issues should be discussed first...............like, should we set up sub-cats based on counties, etc. etc. etc. Where should that discussion take place? and....where can I best recruit helpers? Buddpaul (talk) 03:29, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion about creating a local repository for documents which may not be published on Commons. This includes supporting Wikilivres which is currently hosted in Canada. Regards, Yann (talk) 13:33, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Sent to archive --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 19:24, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
How to find images without a license?
I occasionally run into images with no license, that stayed undetected sometimes for years. Does anybody know about a way to automatically detect such files? I was thinking about creating and empty "tag" template which could be added to all approved license tags. That way we could search for files which do not transclude that template. Similar technique can be used to find files missing {{Information}}, {{Artwork}} or {{Book}} templates. --Jarekt (talk) 23:13, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Good Q. It would be also nice to have other criteria to narrow search (i.e. "no license AND in category:France or its subcategories" etc.).NVO (talk) 12:47, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Nikbot finds those files by looking up the category-tree (has a list of parent-categories). The problem is that Nikbot only taggs new files without license. BTW: How to lookup what files do not transclude a template/ are not in a category? Somehow with Special:Search? -- RE rillkequestions?13:29, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
CatScan2 is very useful for that. Unfortunately it often times out while doing big searches. Otherwise one can always request a query on a toolserver. I think all files without a license should be added to Category:Media without a license as of unknown date. Most of file I have seen were obvious PD based on provided metadata. It seems like some came from mass uploads (there were a lot from some french library). Others used some rare custom templates, which was modified years ago, leaving them with no license.
Now I wonder, Is there some official list of "approved" license templates, of which one has to be present in each file? Some years ago there was a talk about creating license template approval process but I guess it did not go anywhere? I noticed that Bot User:Nikbot running botwiki:Python:Checkimages.py creates list of license templates based on Category:License tags and altered by settings from bot subpages. That is probably the closest one can get to the list I am seeking. --Jarekt (talk) 16:45, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
Done Lupo 10:05, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
—Tom Morris (talk) 07:56, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
Resolved
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Comment Mikhail Ryazanov is trying to jump discussion to Commons:Administrators'_noticeboard/User_problems#User:AnonMoos. --Jarekt (talk) 21:22, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
Info For other users: my phrase was: "the drawings are uploaded in JPEG format, which is perhaps the worst imaginable for them", referring to the format, not the scans. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 07:49, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
Question Any comments (criticism/support/suggestions) from people not directly "offended" with my tagging? :-) — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 06:56, 20 July 2011 (UTC).JPG)
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-- AnonMoos (talk) 14:48, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
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