Commons:Village pump/Archive/2017/04

NASA media database

Hi, Many medias have announced a new NASA media database. Is there any attempt to upload useful material? Weirdly the search engine looks broken: searching for Apollo gives Error searching for : "apollo". Regards, Yann (talk) 20:32, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

@Yann: Search appears to now be fixed. "Apollo" gives ~4100 hits. - Revent^talk 08:04, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

March 31

cuneiform glyphs

Can someone upload SVG image versions of all the cuneiform glyphs and Sumerograms (ISO 15924 xsux, "[[category:cuneiform signs]]", "wikipedia:cuneiform Unicode")? I am not sure how to convert them myself. They are available as the free open-source font Google Noto Sans Cuneiform: http://www.google.com/get/noto/ (Open Font License). Current uploads to Commons are nearly all raster graphics and still appear to be missing some glyphs. Nicole Sharp (talk) 14:50, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

• I've uploaded between 5 and 10 as SVG, but uploading them all would be a big project. I'll take a look at the font and its licensing... AnonMoos (talk) 03:26, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I was hoping that there might be a way to automatically extract the images used for the open-source font, and then bulk-upload them as SVG files. To do them one by one would indeed be a lot of work, I agree. Naming the images is another problem. Ideally, they should be named in Unicode, using the Unicode character to name each extracted image, so that someone can simply copy and paste the Unicode character into Commons Search, and then find the SVG image corresponding to the Unicode character. However, the files can still be uploaded with arbitrary names, and then Commons volunteers can over time go through them to rename and categorize the uploaded files. Another free open-source font for cuneiform is the Ubuntu Ancient Fonts package: http://www.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ttf-ancient-fonts/ . Nicole Sharp (talk) 12:14, 1 April 2017 (UTC), modified Nicole Sharp (talk) 15:48, 1 April 2017 (UTC) (would be best to upload with correct names for characters if possible)

April 01

Something funny with this image

It seems to work fine in articles but I can't see the image on this page and clicking the link on the page gives me a 404. -- 2001:14BA:8300:0:0:0:0:BF9B 01:08, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

It is being investigated --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 03:29, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Zhuyifei1999. -- 2001:14BA:8300:0:0:0:3:6D79 09:03, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Coat of arms of Bimenes overwiten, and tagged with Superseded by SVG when them are graphically different

I found a small problem with a CoA, where some users created a mess. Altrough the three versions are heraldically equivalent, the four images involved are graphically different. Following is the history (from oldest to nnewest):

• File:Escudo concejo de Bimenes.gif was uploaded by Sitomon the May 15, 2007 at 14:50 (UTC).
• File:Escudo de Bimenes.gif was uploaded by the same user some minutes after, 15:02 (UTC) at bigger resolution and with transparency.
• Someone uncdr an IP address claimed that this is not the actual CoA
• File:Escudo concejo de Bimenes.gif was overwriten by Acantora the November 13, 2015 at 16:39 (UTC) with a different rendition but heraldically equivalent.
• File:Escudo de Bimenes.gif was also overwriten by Acantora the November 13, 2015 at 16:44 (UTC) with the same file, making it a duplicate of File:Escudo concejo de Bimenes.gif.
• In February 19, 2013 at 14:57 and 14:59 (UTL) respectively, Teoamez tagged the both files with Vector version available, but, the SVG and the both raster (older and newer version) are not graphically the same.
• And finally, Stas1995 [tagged the newer file as Duplicate of the older], without even considering the File History contains different files.

Therefore, File:Escudo de Bimenes.gif should be splitten, and File:Escudo concejo de Bimenes.gif reverted to the original version (and as it has low quality and superseded by the newer file uploaded few minutes after —in 2007—, can be elegible for deletion via a normal DR). --Amitie 10g (talk) 05:33, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Amitie 10g: If I tag file for dupe, I always check edit/file history. In these files first versions duplicated by others and 2007 version of File:Escudo concejo de Bimenes.gif better than 2007 version of File:Escudo de Bimenes.gif /St1995 09:28, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes and no. The newer file supersedes the older one, therefore, the newer file cannot be considered as Duplicate of the older, worse quality graphic. And you know how some admins are taking administrative actions blinky, without even checking the File History. --Amitie 10g (talk) 14:40, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Probably I don't right. File:Escudo de Bimenes.gif has better graphic quality than another. But on official site [2] there are only image which only in the first versions of these files. That means that 2007 versions are really hoaxes and needs deletion. /St1995 19:43, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Nope. Noticie I mentioned the phrase "heraldically equivalent" twice. All of the CoA of Bimenes uploaded to Commons are based on Heraldic information, and the SVG version mentions that, information supported by the source and also mentioned at the Spanish and Asturian Wikipedia:

• Nel primer cuartel: castiellu, lleón y blagu. Ye l'escudu d'armes de la orde Benedictina, representada equí pol conventu de San Vicente d'Uviéu.

• Nel segundu cuartel: xaqueláu de quince pieces. Son les armes d'Álvarez Asturies, d'esta familia esisten numberoses variantes de los sos escudos.

• Nel tercer cuartel: Áigla en sable, son les armes de la familia Estrada.

• Nel cuartu cuartel: cinco palos de sinople y una quilla de barca col lema "BALVIDARES", que ye l'escudu d'armes de Balvidares, familia oriunda d'esti conceyu.

The text «Nun tien una sanción llegal pola casa conceyu.» is mentioned at this and other CoAs of municipalities of Asturias. this means there is no "official" version of the CoA of Bimenes (like all the CoAs of the municipalities of Asturias) (even, the description does not mention colours, just castles, lions, eagles, etc); someone "invented" the Heraldic description, and the Town hall adopted it de facto. Therefore, Hoax does not apply, since the original version uploaded in 2007 (found in the source, now unavailable but found at Internet Archive) shows the version uploaded here, and meets the Heraldic description.

Finally, as the Heraldic information is not copyrightable but the different renditions found at different places. The second file uploaded in 2007 is the same file found at the source, and as the contents of F.A.CC. website are free licensed, there is no problem with that file; if you upload the "official" (notice the quotation marks) version adopted by the City hall's website, you're probably commiting copyvio (since there is no indication of free license for that specific rendition). --Amitie 10g (talk) 20:25, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Then merge all 3 files /St1995 20:54, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Did you mean Split? Files are heraldically equivalent but graphically different, so, cannot be considered as Duplicated. Other depcictions should be uploaded under a different filename per COM:OVERWRITE; let the Wikipedians use the depcition they like or used first. --Amitie 10g (talk) 22:17, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

1920s Radio Times

The BBC have put scans of all 1920s copies of their The Radio Times magazine online, as part of their Genome project, in addition to the text which they already provided.

While not all of the content may be out of copyright, some is. I suggest we use Commons:Radio Times to discuss and coordinate imports. Andy Mabbett (talk) 13:29, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

None of it will be out of copyright in the US, until the 1923 issues go into the public domain in 2019.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:07, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

@Prosfilaes: Are you saying that Radio Times renewed its U.S. copyrights after 28 years? Or is there some other basis for that? - Jmabel ! talk 23:11, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

It didn't have to; the URAA would have restored the copyright.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:31, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

So if a 1920s publication depicts a 2-D artwork, that is now out of copyright, we can't extract that artwork from the publication? Andy Mabbett (talk) 19:50, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Of course you can. But The Radio Times isn't exactly an art magazine.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:39, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Apart from all the art it commissioned, you're quite right. Who said it was? Andy Mabbett (talk) 20:18, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Help finding illustrations for the growth and current status of Commons

I'm supporting a workshop session during WMCON this evening, looking at how the central nature of Commons should influence WMF strategy, the idea being to ensure improving Commons remains an obvious goal. I recall a chart somewhere showing the annual growth of file numbers on Commons, could someone link to the most current, and if there are any other charts of growth in users etc., they would be much appreciated! --Fæ (talk) 07:02, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Please, see File:Commons_Growth.svg. Ruslik (talk) 12:09, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi Ruslik0 , is there something on user growth? There's the well used charts for the English Wikipedia, but I suspect there's no summary like this for Commons. --Fæ (talk) 12:24, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi Fæ, have a look at de:user:Atlasowa/commons.wikimedia-stats, for example:

• 
  Commons media files growth (June 2015: 26,3 million files in Commons)
• 
  Categorization stats commons:User:Multichill/Categorization_stats.
• 
  Commons geolocated files stats, June 2015: 5,57 million geolocated files (which is 21 % of all 26,3 million files in Commons)

Commons community

• 
  Commons vs. Wikidata: Total Active Editors (An 'active editor' is a registered (and signed in) person (not known as a bot) who makes 5 or more edits in any month in mainspace on countable pages. [1])
• 
  Active editors on commons.wikimedia, Commons at a glance December 2014: Active Editors (>5 edits) 7,041; More Active Editors (>25 edits) ~3,000; Very Active Editors (>100 edits) 1,361

• 
  1. Why and why not use Commons? (usability:Multimedia:Initial survey results of Multimedia usability project (Media survey 2009)
• 
  2. Number of Files uploaded?
• 
  3. Own works?
• 
  4. Why participate? Preliminary results of the Multimedia participation survey (October 2009) as part of the Multimedia usability project.
• 
  6. From which projects? (Referrers)

Likelihood to participate in Wikimedia Commons depending on the language of origin. Three groups stood out. Respondents coming from Wikimedia websites in Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish and Chinese language are correlated with regular participants in Wikimedia Commons. Users from projects in German, Hungarian and Vietnamese language are in a similar but less pronounced situation. On the other hand, respondents originating from a Wikimedia project in English, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish language show the opposite correlation: many of them do not participate in Wikimedia Commons. The size of Wikipedia does not seem to be a decisive factor; we suggest that policies and culture on each wiki are, in fact, mostly responsible for these differences.

Wikimedia Commons - Evolution of content vs participants. Isotype-style diagram showing the temporal evolution of the number of media files & participants on Wikimedia Commons. Data is based on stats.wikimedia.org for January of each year. (2010)

Demographics English Wikipedia and Commons

--Atlasowa (talk) 19:44, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

These are great thank you. The meeting at WMCON was an interesting discussion, keeping the focus on how to ensure Commons does not get lost from the top level WMF strategy, I'll publish the notes shortly. As a result of some post-session tech related discussion, we now have phab:T161934 started to address the lack of support for JPEG2000. --Fæ (talk) 07:14, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Draft notes from the WMCON fringe meeting is at m:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Commons in-person discussion at the Wikimedia Conference. I'll plan to post the final notes on the VP for feedback. --Fæ (talk) 08:35, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Enable the extension WikidataPageBanner

Hello,

I would like to use the extension WikidataPageBanner on Wikimedia Commons. The extension adds a banner on a page. Exemple : Berlin on Wikivoyage. I would like to use it for my inventory of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Exemple of what I would like to do: Sandbox. I need the agreement of the community to enable the extension. Are you ok? Pyb (talk) 11:28, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• That's a lot of screen real estate on a small screen. - Jmabel ! talk 15:38, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• (Heh, at first I misread this to be a template that bans Wikidata from (linking?, transcluding?) a page — now that would be a boon!)

Fine by me, provided that there’s an opt out mechanism (which I will turn immediately on and for ever).

“Good” to see that Wikidata goes on valueing really important stuff, such as eye candy. Next up: shutting out “power users” completely, and sell the whole of WMF projects off for a new, revamped, and unfree Microsoft Encarta! (Hyperbole, I know, but so was The Simpsons’ Trump presidency back in 2000…)

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 00:02, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

April 02

Monopoly agricole

I wrote a article about the Monopoly agricole and added a photography. There is no copyright violation. The Monopoly agricole belongs to the Groupe France Agricole. I requested the Group if I could use the photography. I had the autorisation.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Saurien?markasread=1253121#File:Plateau_de_la_version_agricole_du_Monopoly.jpg

• When it was nominated for deletion at Commons:Deletion requests/File:Plateau de la version agricole du Monopoly.jpg, you did not reply.
• Any such authorization has to come through the COM:OTRS process (see also COM:OTRS/fr for French). It's not enough to say you could use the photograph. They have to grant a specific free license. Your upload used {{self|cc-by-sa-3.0}}, but you yourself can't grant cc-by-sa-3.0 on their work, and certainly it should not be attributed to you. - Jmabel ! talk 16:38, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Last month Photo challenge results

Drone photography: Entries • Votes • Scores

Rank	1	2	3
image
Title	Abbaye de Jumièges	Sunset in Varbla beach. Estonia.	Yulong, China
Author	Elya/Raymond (Co-production)	KristianPikner	Chensiyuan
Score	21	20	16

Barns: Entries • Votes • Scores

Rank	1	2	3
image
Title	Traditional Norwegian barn for products storing. Norway	Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada	Abandoned barn
Author	Olga1969	Dllu	Star61
Score	22	12	8

Multilingualism: Entries • Votes • Scores

Rank	1	2	3
image	[[File:|x240px]]		[[File:|x240px]]
Title	A love message in 12 different languages, written on the shopping bag. (Italy)	Proletаrier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! . Aufgenommen in Chemnitz.	First day of school: Alice draws her family. (Italy)
Author	Rosapicci	Kora27	Rosapicci
Score	24	13	11

Congratulations to Olga1969, Dllu, Star61, Kora27, Rosapicci, Elya, Raymond, KristianPikner and Chensiyuan. Please visit Commons:Photo_challenge to see this month challenge. Also please propose or vote for your favorite theme at Commons_talk:Photo_challenge/themes. -- Jarekt (talk) 03:52, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Removing border mechanically

Is it possible to remove border from several photos at same time (by a tool is faster than CropTool)? Because

1. Category:Mittet & Co.
2. Category:Images from the Library of Congress
3. Category:Photographs by Jose A.

should be emptied from border.Thank you --ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 14:57, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Many of the images in Category:Images from the Library of Congress are of glass lantern slide, so they should not be replaced by cropped versions, but the cropped versions should be uploaded as new images. Andy Mabbett (talk) 19:15, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

i see there has been some cropping against policy. i.e. [3] and [4] you need to stop cropping archival images and make a copy. see also Commons:Overwriting existing files. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 10:45, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing and Slowking4: Based on this, Should I add the two categories to Category:Images with intentional borders‎?Thank you --ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 06:59, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Severe copyright issues

I find more and more illegally uploaded images on Wikimedia Commons, often there for years. Users with only one upload have to almost 100% uploaded a copyrighted image. In most cases it is obvious at first glance that these are professional photos. Nobody can state that this is coincidental and you can do nothing about it. I could not recommend any sincere organisation to cooperate or use such a dubious site Wikimedia Commons has become. --94.221.84.142 10:00, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

First, who are you? Ruslik (talk) 12:04, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

•  Comment Who are you 94.221.84.142 in the first place? Second, in case you do not know or do not care to know or if you know but do not care to mention, thousands or even tens of thousands of copyviolations are deleted every month, so your claim of is at best illinformed or deceitful and double-tongued at worst. Third, if you so so many copyright violations, how many did you nominate to deletion? None, i guess, so your also part of what you claim to be a problem. Fourth and las, what sincere organisation would accept advise from a random IP of the Internet? Tm (talk) 14:02, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

  (1) Why should someone have to identify here? Anyone should and could raise copvio problems. (2) That thousands are deleted every month is not a sensible rebuttal. In fact, it supports the poster's complaint: there are lots of copyvios on Commons. What percentage of images on Commons are copyvios? Any organization that must delete thousands of images every month may be on notice that it should take better steps than it is. (3) 94.221.84.142 nominated two files for deletion within the 20 minutes before posting here. That's something anybody can learn by looking at Special:Contributions/94.221.84.142. Both deletion requests are images of Stephanie Scott, and both are the one-and-only contributions of an editor. Those deletion requests support the poster's position. The requests allege a copyrighted source for each image. (4) Pay attention to the message rather than the speaker. A cursory inspection of the IP's claims shows his position is credible.

  The poster also implies a simple step. Let new editors upload images, but quarantine / don't publish those images until they have been vetted by more experienced editors. If a user's image (whether or not quarantined) is ever deleted as a copyvio, then quarantine all the user's images until they have been vetted. There have been many problems with serial copyvio uploaders even when the uploader is well intentioned. Vetting can also catch the more complicated violation: the uploader actually took the photo, but the photograph includes copyrighted subject matter.

  I also agree with the OP: just looking at a photo can call it into question. A professional looking image requires professional lighting, so professionally lit images should raise an eyebrow. Most uploaders don't know how to do such lighting, and even if they did, they probably don't have the equipment to do it. One can also clue into other features: a studio shot is probably done by a professional. A shot at a special event's glam walk probably needed a credentialed photographer. Many uploaders won't have those credentials. Shots made by professional photographers and uploaded to Commons would probably use real names (rather than Estescottfi or TeenWolfie65), require attribution to the real name, and may even say ND.

  Glrx (talk) 18:02, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

• Checking all uploads from new accounts doesn't seem completely ridiculous, but it would probably be quite a lot of work. How many such uploads occur per day? Many accounts seem to be created and used once for a one-off upload, perhaps of a batch of files, and then abandoned. Without enough people doing the checking, you'd just end up with a longer and longer backlog, which would eventually make it impossible for new users to get started. You'd probably have to pay people to do the checking. Sites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk suggest that this can be relatively cheaply, but who knows if it would be the best use for the money. --ghouston (talk) 05:13, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• • I take affront with this very hostile attitude towards an IP user. It is uncalled for and highly unprofessional. It is exemplary of the attitude that gives us as editors such a bad reputation outside of our small bubble. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:41, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

• • • yeah "i find more and more" from an ip? ; "let's delete all first time uploads; they are all copyright vios" - that is a fine philosophy. let's give this ip editor the speedy delete gadget. is it "be kind to deletionists day" or april fools? the bad reputation is from the walls of deletion templates, rather than collaboration, the attitude of this ip. is it really a banned user? sure looks like it. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 14:35, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

360 Video

Did anyone ever come up with a way to convert to inject the meta data required and convert to OGG format the 360 videos? --Don (talk) 16:03, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Nope. See phab:T150624. There is a spec to do it for WebM (not handled by us yet). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:36, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

A religious question about i18n of {{Done}}

The template uses MediaWiki:feedback-close message which has been translated using translatewiki.net. However for Polish and Russian they have been translated locally: MediaWiki:Feedback-close/pl and MediaWiki:Feedback-close/ru. I prefer our translations, but on the other hand I don't like such a mess. What do you think, should local translations be deleted? Pinging @Jarekt: , the author of pl&ru translations. BTW. Yes, I know, translations on translatewiki.net can be changed. --jdx ^Re: 23:06, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Translatewiki.net is great because many different locations use one translation and you get translations into many languages. But it's strength is also a weakness: sometimes one word in English can be used in two different situations but in other languages those two situations require different words. That is the issue here: {{Done}} is using translatewiki:MediaWiki:Feedback-close message, whose main job is a button in some GUI acknowledging that you are done with some form. In that context

English: "Done"

is equivalent to

Русский: "Готово"

or

Polski: "Gotowe"

, which just mean "Ready". However that makes no sense in context of template {{Done}}, so someone suggested this fix at MediaWiki talk:Feedback-close/ru and I fulfilled this {{Edit request}}. I also liked this solution enough to apply it to MediaWiki:Feedback-close/pl. A different fix could be to find better translation on Translatewiki, or start a new translation for word "done" in the context of this template. --Jarekt (talk) 03:29, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Which is why in general reuse of messages is avoided. As you can see on translate wiki, there are actually about 25 done messages for instance, so each can be tweaked to the best translation for each specific use. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:34, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I did not set up i18n for {{Done}} template. I also never learned how to set up translation of a new message on translatewiki.org and make it show up on Commons. Is there anybody familiar with the process to set it up properly for {{Done}} template? --Jarekt (talk) 02:49, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

April 03

Tech News: 2017-14

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [5]
• The tracking category Category:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template. [6]
• English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [7]

Problems

• Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [8]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on 5 April at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Czech and Hebrew Wikipedia on 11 April. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and user intent prediction. User intent prediction means the filter tries to help editors determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [9]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:53, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Category un-move request

I'd appreciate it if somebody could move Category:Lilleshall_(village) back to Category:Lilleshall, over the redirect.

I made a mistake re-naming the category. I thought the parish of Category:Lilleshall, Donnington and Muxton had been officially re-named to Lilleshall, so I had moved the existing category Lilleshall to make way for a category for the civil parish. But then I realised I had misread the official spreadsheet I was working from. Lilleshall, Donnington and Muxton had not been officially renamed -- rather, it had originally been created as the result of an official renaming, and the most recent change was not to rename it, but to split it. The original category name of Lilleshall (and its identification as a civil parish) was therefore correct, and my move had been a mistake.

I'd therefore be grateful if somebody could undo it for me. Jheald (talk) 22:29, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

 Done Daphne Lantier 23:38, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

April 04

Error while displaying file in full resolution

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T162035

When I try to open File:NagasakiHypocentre.jpg, it seems the jpg file is treated as text. Any ideas how to fix this? --Didym (talk) 22:57, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

• I'm not seeing the problem. - Jmabel ! talk 05:38, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
• It happened to me too with File:Sally Gap R115-R759 crossroads.jpg. Blue Elf (talk) 12:22, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

This software issue has been reported in the issue tracker at phab:T162035. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:15, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Image not shown

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T162035

Egypt map not shown at 150% scaling

The image [[File:Egypt_location_map.svg|mini|right|200px|Egypt map not shown at 150% scaling]] is not shown. It seems that the 300px-width thumb is not generated or corrupted. What is to do to overcome this problem? --RolandUnger (talk) 05:10, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

This thumbnail looks fine to me, where are you seeing it as "not shown"?   — Jeff G. ツ 05:27, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

For responsive web-design, 300px- and 400px-width srcset thumbs are added. The 400px thumbnail was generated but not the 300px one. The last one is used on my desktop computer (150% scaling) which is missing.

Code generated: <img alt="Egypt map not shown" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Egypt_location_map.svg/200px-Egypt_location_map.svg.png" width="200" height="184" srcset="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Egypt_location_map.svg/300px-Egypt_location_map.svg.png 1.5x, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Egypt_location_map.svg/400px-Egypt_location_map.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="1055" data-file-height="973" /> --RolandUnger (talk) 05:36, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Firefox returns the message: "The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression." --RolandUnger (talk) 06:40, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

This software issue has been reported in the issue tracker at phab:T162035. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:17, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. --RolandUnger (talk) 15:14, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Community notification of grant application

Hi all

I'm applying for a grant from WMF to continue my work at UNESCO from September this year, please take a look, let me know what you think and endorse if you want.

The main goals are:

1. UNESCO’s publication workflows incorporate sharing open license content on Wikimedia projects.
2. Support other Intergovernmental Organisations and the wider public to share content on Wikimedia projects.
3. Support Wikimedia contributors to easily discover and use UNESCO content and the documentation produced.

We plan to import many 10,000s of of images from UNESCO archives once they have been made public.

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 20:08, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

April 05

Screenshot of Facebook

Hi, is it possible to upload a screenshot of Facebook (like this) on Commons? I would say no, but I want to be sure. --Venca24 (talk) 06:36, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@Venca24: Definitely not, since Facebook is a non-free website. I tagged the file you linked as a copyright violation. Thanks, ★ Poké⁹⁵ 07:22, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@Pokéfan95: Ok, thanks. --Venca24 (talk) 08:02, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: ★ Poké⁹⁵ 09:12, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Which category fits for an organization that promotes the participation of citizens in policy decisions?

I'm creating a new category for a local organization "Münchner Forum", which is active in promoting citizens input and citizens participation in policy decisions, particularly but not restricted to city planning. I can put it into a local category Category:Organizations in Munich but which category fits the activities of the Münchner Forum? Do we have an appropriate cat? --h-stt !? 18:05, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• Category:Open government? - Jmabel ! talk 21:58, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
• Category:Political organizations of Germany? --ghouston (talk) 23:19, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

April 07

What process is used to have a photo's caption verified for accuracy?

What process is used to have a photo's caption verified for accuracy? The caption on this photo below may be incorrect. The provided link is not helpful. I do not think this photo contains The 13th Dalai Lama, but I could be wrong. The photo itself is great, but how can the caption info be verified? Thanks.

File talk:13th Dalai Lama with the King of Sikkim, Darjeeling, India, c. 1900.jpg

-- A ri gi bod (talk) 14:08, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

You can do it yourself if you can find relevant information. Ruslik (talk) 17:33, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

I tried to verifiy the source of this photo, but a search at link here: http://www.goantiques.com yields no such photo. Again, the photo itself is great, but probably mis-captioned. See the photos on the 13th Dalai Lama's page- note the unique mustache.

@A ri gi bod: See {{Fact disputed}} (and the other similar templates listed at the bottom). You can add it to the top of the file page to flag the issue... it won't necessarily get it fixed anytime sooon, but will at least inform potential reusers of the problem. - Revent^talk 21:46, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Does the use of the "Fact disputed" template or other similar templates listed at the bottom considered negatively or just "normal" practice?

• This image appears to come from The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism: with its mystic cults, symbolism and mythology, and in its relation to Indian Buddhism, L.A. Waddell, 1895, p.45. The caption there reads “Some Sikhim Lamas / Lama Ugyen Gya-ts'o, Mongol Lama She-rab, A Kar-gyu Lama, A Karma Lama”. Unclear which four of the six people shown it identifies, but if the positioning of the text is anything to go by they’d be the two leftmost & the two rightmost in that order. A footnote says “The annexed illustration is from a photograph by Mr. Hoffmann.” No mention of Darjeeling, the Dalai Lama, or the king in any nearby text.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 03:38, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

FYI

I started a proposal to improve the communication between the uploader and patrollers/admins. Jee 05:27, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

URAA policy

I hate to go down this road again but I feel like I have to. There is no uniformity with the current policy. Some admins will delete newly uploaded images that have restored copyright, others will just tag them with {{Not-PD-US-URAA}}, others will tag them with the appropriate "PD-country" tag and leave it at that. The lack of uniformity has led to confusion and issues as some images are deleted while others are kept.

The Commons policy on the matter is that all photos here must be PD in the country of origin and in the United States. This presents a problem with the restoration of copyrights since they do not meet that bar. On the other hand, massively deleting all the images that have been already uploaded would be immensely disruptive to all projects. So I am going to offer a compromise. A grandfathering of old files that have been uploaded that are now covered under the URAA. There is precedent for this. See COM:GOF.

I am proposing that the following become the official policy of Wikimedia Commons:

“

Files that were uploaded to Wikimedia servers prior to January 18, 2012 will be considered grandfathered and will not be eligible for deletion solely on the grounds that they are covered by the URAA. Files uploaded after that date are not eligible for this grandfathering and are subject to deletion as they do not meet the bar for inclusion per our licensing policy.

”

The date was chosen to correspond to the decision of en:Golan v. Holder which affirmed the restoration of United States copyright of these images. The phrase "Wikimedia servers" was chosen to allow for transfer of these types of images from other projects to Commons provided they were uploaded to any Wikimedia server prior the grandfather date. I hope that this compromise is acceptable to the community. The lack of uniformity has to end. There has to be some guidance on the fate of these images. Admins are split on the outcomes and therefore, we must take action to clarify their mandate and to make their job easier. --21:41, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer --Majora (talk) 21:41, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
2.  Support A cleared definition what should and should not be deleted; since {{Not-PD-US-URAA}} states "New files should not be uploaded with this tag, or they will be deleted." We need clear direction which files count as new, and that they actually should be deleted as well. Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 22:12, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
3. I actually raised this issue before, but was dismissed as a joke, since I raised it on April Fools' Day. If I registered here on the discussion on the URAA, I would oppose the massive restoration of such files since it defeats the purpose of Commons being a free, educational media repository. --★ Poké⁹⁵ 03:20, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Oppose a new vote on this, please see Commons:Massive restoration of deleted images by the URAA instead. Jcb (talk) 22:01, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

  Rejecting it out of hand will only continue to lead to confusion and variation amongst admins. When one will delete and another would not it can only end badly. All someone would have to do is fine someone that disagrees with your point of view to delete the file. That is not something the community should support. Hence the attempt at a compromise. --Majora (talk) 22:08, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

  Anybody deleting such files is acting against well documented community consensus. Scroll to the bottom of the above linked page and you will see. No need to repeat the same discussion every now and then. Jcb (talk) 22:13, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

  Then the template that some admins use to tag these files, {{Not-PD-US-URAA}} needs to be altered to show that Commons is ignoring US copyright. Seeing as it pretty clearly states on the template page that This template should NOT be applied to files uploaded after 1 March 2012 I don't see that as being community consensus at all. My proposal would solidify that line as policy (while shifting the date back to the actual start of the whole problem per the United States Supreme Court). --Majora (talk) 22:21, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

  Then someone should document that consensus. Like remove that statement that says "that are in the public domain in at least the United States and in the source country of the work" at the top of COM:L, since we actively ignore US law in basically every single case that is public domain in the source country of the work.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:01, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

  @Jcb: (Edit conflict) As I suspect you are well aware, that discussion was not about keeping files that we know are copyrighted in the US, it was about not deleting files 'en masse' on the mere suspicion. The consensus in the later discussion, and the guidance we received from legal, was that we should evaluate the individual cases carefully. Unfortunately, many files get tagged as 'potentially affected' when they are not.... in some cases, they clearly has a subsisting copyright that has nothing to do with the URAA. A reflexive response of 'ZOMG, that said URAA, must keep' is not helpful, since it essentially allows the opposite... that the mere 'allegation' that the URAA applies is being used as an excuse to keep files that are clear copyright violations. The simple fact, from what I have seen, is that most people applying the tag, and most admins closing the discussions as keep, have no real idea if the URAA actually applies, or if there is instead a subsisting copyright.

  I do not thing that anyone is arguing at this point that we should simply delete files en masse. We need, truly, to have a serious discussion about this without the drama. - Revent^talk 23:26, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

  I've also been confused about the whole thing. On Commons:URAA-restored copyrights we have the statement "A mere allegation that the URAA applies to a file cannot be the sole reason for deletion", so that there needs to be some sort of evaluation, but it's not clear at all who should do such an evaluation and how. There are two issues: firstly Commons is supposed to follow US copyright law, and can't knowing host copyright violations if it wants to preserve its DMCA safe harbour status. Secondly, these works are public domain in their source countries, and probably many other countries. Non-US copyright holders rarely seem to try and enforce their US copyrights, at least for works of limited commercial value, and deleting them all from Commons seems like overkill. I think the wording on that page is an attempt to embrace the uncertainty: allow the files to be kept on Commons on the grounds that URAA copyright issues are complex and require evaluation, so we can't say for sure they they are violations. It would at least be nice to reusers to have a warning on the files that the URAA copyright status hasn't been evaluated. --ghouston (talk) 23:23, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

  @Ghouston: (Edit conflict) We received guidance (here) on how to do such evaluations... we should keep files where we lack the evidence to determine that the URAA applies, with a notice that their US status is uncertain, and delete anything that we determine is a copyright violation in the US (either due to the URAA, or a subsisting copyright). Unfortunately, "we don't delete files due to the URAA" is consistently used by some editors as an excuse to essentially keep anything where the URAA is mentioned, while apparently disregarding the 'mere allegation' part.

  There has never been a consensus to keep files that we 'know' are violations of the licensing policy... and works that we determine to have a restored copyright due to the URAA clearly are violations. We should only be keeping 'potentially affected' files if a careful examination of the evidence shows that we can't be sure, and we should mark them that way in a clear manner. - Revent^talk 23:45, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Oppose i'm not confused. how many times do the wiki-lawyers ask for the opinion of WMF legal, and when they do opine, it's "i'm confused" = lol. "serious discussion about this without the drama." = commons is incapable of such a discussion, merely read the nomination here. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 23:39, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Majora: I think this problem could be solved in a different way, by transferring the current and past files affected by URAA to a new NonFreeWiki. That way Commons could stick to not hosting them whilst they would be available for some other wikis (ones with non-free content policies). Whenever the files re-enter full PD status, they could be transferred back here. Green Giant (talk) 23:02, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

  I don't see how a non-free wiki would ever actually be a workable solution as fair use doctrines are different depending on the country. There is a reason that each project has its own exemption doctrine and there is a reason that cross-project sharing of non-free files was never implemented. That would also require the sign off of the Board itself as it is contrary to their goals and desires. Something that I seriously doubt would actually happen anytime soon. I just don't see how your wiki is actually something that would be implemented in the near or mid-range future.

  I'm not really looking towards a possible future that may or may not happen. I'm trying to come up with workable compromises that can be implemented now. --Majora (talk) 23:33, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

we have a fair use wiki and it is english. can't even get transfers to it for files in use. just institute the WMF legal memo as policy, slap on a big warning template with scare quotes, and move on. the propensity to re-litigate every issue is very humorous. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 03:55, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Category:All media needing categories as of 2016

There are >200 files to be transferred to Category:Unidentified subjects in Iran. It's impossible to do it using Cat-a-lot. Do you know a way? Thanks----Frze ^{> talk} 14:19, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@Frze: Please let the files there. aus den Augen, aus dem Sinn ist nicht die richtige Haltung.--Aldi Geil (talk) 15:10, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Es geht nicht nur um diese Aufnahmen. Ist ein prinzipielles Problem. Mehrere gleichartige Bilder lassen sich nicht per Cat-a-lot einer Kategorie zuordnen. --Frze ^{> talk} 16:50, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Image uxWEIRf.svg on English wiki

Hi, the File:BSicon_uxWEIRf.svg icon does not appear on any of the maps on the English wiki. It is listed as being on lots of pages, eg River Poulter, but when I look at the page, there is just a blank space where the icon should be. The similar File:BSicon_uxWEIRg.svg is fine, and I cannot see why one has stopped displaying and the other has not. I hope this is the right place to pose this question. Bob1960evens (talk) 18:33, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

• Echo in Talk:BSicon. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 21:53, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Caching error, perhaps? It is displaying just fine for me. Useddenim (talk) 01:51, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

April 08

DELETE

Hi! I was just playing in the sandpit and by mistake I uploaded a random image, just to try it. By mistake I published it. I have been trying to understand how to delete it, but unfortunately I do not understand the instructions.

Can someone help, please? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SprogetIMatematik.jpg — Preceding unsigned comment added by BarnesSW13 (talk • contribs)

@BarnesSW13: Hi,

 Done If the future, please create a deletion request, and sign your post. Thanks, Yann (talk) 09:03, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Blacklisted words?

Where can I find out more about these? I ran into this when requesting a file name for File:Ossie Clark 'Lamborghini' trouser suit, 1969, and Bellville Sassoon coat, hand-painted by Richard Cawley, 1970-71.jpg, as the renamer couldn't do it due to the name of the coat ("Rajputana") being on a blacklist. I'm now concerned that this word has negative/racist/offensive connotations, as I don't know why it was blacklisted, so I would really appreciate knowing more and perhaps seeing a guide to words to avoid in titles in order to avoid causing offence in future. Wieralee suggested these links, Commons:File_naming and maybe here, but they didn't seem to offer any enlightenment. Thanks so much. Mabalu (talk) 12:00, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• See wikt:putàna and wikt:puttana. One of those unfortunate coincidences when a regular word (or a part thereof as in the case at hand) in one language is identical to a gross insult in another — a special case of en:false friends. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 14:11, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, Tuválkin - really appreciate the enlightenment! I get it now, and can continue using the full word without worry. Mabalu (talk) 14:21, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Wieralee: FYI, if this becomes an issue again, you can just ask an admin to do the page move.. we are able to override the title blacklist. - Revent^talk 21:42, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

I've requested removal of "putana" from the global blacklist. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 02:25, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Let's not forget that "puta" is also in that word, see wikt:puta.   — Jeff G. ツ 05:40, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

I wonder whether it is possible for file names containing such dubious combinations of letters to be flagged up for review rather than blocked at the upload/rename action? Of course, that means that someone would need to go through and clear each file after checking that the file names were legit - i.e., that the upload REALLY was a shot of Scunthorpe Town Hall, or a historic print of Rajputana, or a nice photo of Milford Haven, etc, just to name three innocuous names/words that contain offensive words/phrases within them. (I speak as someone whose surname falls into that category, and who keeps getting their emails blocked because people have put the combination of letters in their filters.... not realising that it also blocks my mails to them!) I'm just thinking that if I were a troll that had had a picture blocked for containing a blacklisted word, then I would just re-upload with another random name, whereas if it goes straight up and is THEN automatically flagged, we can spot these problem users/files quicker.... Mabalu (talk) 00:52, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Some admins regularly go through the abuse filter log, relieving the rest of us of the burden of dealing with the filenames the abuse filter blocked.   — Jeff G. ツ 01:38, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

New warning message on template

As per my comment here, I strongly feel that the "REVIEWED BY A BOT" template needs a warning message to say that the review's validity is only as good as the validity of the original license, such that if someone uploads copyvio to Flickr and claims it's their own, our bots will believe them. A link to the 'license laundering' article on en.wiki would also be helpful. DS (talk) 22:03, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

that bot is shut down. why don't you comment here User talk:Zhuyifei1999 ? it is a tautology that bot reviews are done by bot; and garbage in - garbage out. but maybe we should warn all re-users, "use at your own risk, no warranties given". maybe you could shout louder. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:40, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Shut down, yes, but there are still thousands of images with the template saying "THIS IMAGE WAS REVIEWED BY THIS BOT". I would like the template to have the GIGO warning, both for the original bot and the replacement. DS (talk) 01:33, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

are you really arguing about template language left by legacy bots? is there a single case of a re-user questioning an item with this template? since we seem to have a trend of people who want to add more "scare quotes" to warn people, why don't you start a proposal about "warning language review" and then standardize your scare quotes all over commons. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 14:05, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

DS, a proposal to improve the communication is going on here. This is a beginning; we will "shake" all "legacy templates" and "emotionless set of instructions" soon. Jee 02:37, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

April 09

Template:OpenStreetMap and Wikimaps Warper

Is anybody able to help with the template? See Template talk:OpenStreetMap#Template does not support Wikimaps Warper. Thanks --тнояsтеn ⇔ 07:40, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Database request: Most productive photographers

I'm looking for a a list of the photographers with most pictures from Category:Photographs by photographer. It's for my big Mass Upload Comparison.

I would adore you, if you could create me this separately for photographers of the different projects (geograph.org.uk / flickr / Commons native).

So what I like to get is:

Input: Description	Output: Photographer	Output: Number of photos
Photographs by Max Baur‎ (998 F)	Max Baur‎	998
Photographs by Nate Beal‎ (50 F)	Nate Beal‎	50
Photographs by Bear Cub T‎ (101 F)	Bear Cub T	101

When a category contains subcategories [example Photographs by Felice Beato‎ (4 C, 146 F)] it becomes a little complicated.--Tostman (talk) 17:52, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I doubt that many of the most productive contributors tag their photos with categories like this. - Jmabel ! talk 19:33, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I have 1,759 of my pictures on Commons, and I am hardly any of the most prolific photographers. Regards, Yann (talk) 20:11, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure this category will be accurate. Most photographers don't use a category for their images. Some use a category for their QI or FP but not for everything. -- Colin (talk) 21:20, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

If I want to know how many files I uploaded, I do a query for all the files that have one of my accounts as uploader (2534149). Maybe that's a better approach? Multichill (talk) 21:58, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

yeah sorry, i don't do vanity categories. i am far more interested in "images in use" as shown by GLAMorous [10] . Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:44, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

You are more focused on Wikimedians, but I would like to get most productive non-Wikimedian sources (Photographs by photographer). @Multichill: May you please help me with a query? I'm a non-technical user and don't know where to start.--Tostman (talk) 12:37, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

you have Category:Photographs by Carol M. Highsmith and Category:Photographs by Jack Delano, but the categories need cleanup, and you are at the mercy of uploaders. you might want to talk about effectiveness and reach, not productivity. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 14:10, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

You might also want to check out Category:Flickr streams and Category:Photographers on Flickr, some of which have thousands of files, although many of these may be transferred by bot or script (e.g. via Flickr2Commons). -Animalparty (talk) 21:01, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

percentage of uploaded photos in use is a really poor metric, analogous to $ per photo at wiki loves monuments. if a photographer did a pull strategy of uploading photos only to use them in articles, then they would be your champion, but that would mean commons is a walled garden where people upload here only for wikimedia re-use rather than re-use everywhere else on the internet. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 15:27, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Is there a way to look for images of world heritage sites that were either national winners in wiki loves monuments, wiki loves earth or are quality or featured images?

Hi all

I'm researching the possibility of doing a physical exhibition of World Heritage site images from Commons. Is there a way to look for images of World Heritage sites that were either national winners in Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Warth or are quality or featured images? I'm not sure how to get a list of all the categories for all the WH sites. Whilst there are Wikidata items for all WH sites, not all have Commons categories attached. All advice or suggestions very much appreciated.

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 20:50, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

@John Cummings: we do have Category:Quality images of World Heritage Sites. Category intersection could be used to find other images:

• Featured images
• Wiki Loves Monuments winners and nominations
• Wiki Loves Earth winners

MKFI (talk) 07:04, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Perfect, thanks MKFI. --John Cummings (talk) 12:41, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

April 10

Laniakea

Reposting here from "category talk:local supercluster." I am not sure how to clean up after a category page move. The correct organization should be:

• galactic superclusters
  • Laniakea Supercluster
    • Virgo Supercluster (formerly known as the Local Supercluster)

Nicole Sharp (talk) 09:00, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Wieralee: thank you! Dziękuję ci! Nicole Sharp (talk) 09:27, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-15

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Tidy is going to be replaced with an HTML5 parsing algorithm. Bad HTML in wikitext would cause problems on a number of wikis. There is now a ParserMigration extension on all wikis that you can use to help clean this up. You can read more about how you can use it. [11]

Changes this week

• Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [12]
• New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [13]
• The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [14]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
• RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

April 11

MediaWiki:Gadget-QuickDelete.js

Could someone with Javascript knowledge please make this gadget prompt the user before tagging a file as "no source/permission/license"? I sometimes accidentally click these links since I am always using an iPad, and it is embarassing to make a mistake because of this gadget. Thanks, ★ Poké⁹⁵ 07:20, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Problems with valued images infrastructure

Template:VICpromoted and reviews

[No] Currently unresolved.

First problem: supposedly {{VICpromoted}} is meant to work like {{QICpromoted}}, in which the itemised list of reviews of a valued image which led to its promotion are shown as a collapsible list that's collapsed by default. However, inputting anything into the "reviews" parameter only results in the word "review" being placed at the bottom right of the box that serves absolutely no purpose but the sit there and occupy the corner. Any person wanna have a crack at fixing this, or at least try to diagnose the problem? —Philip Terry Graham (talk) 00:22, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Pinging @Slaunger: , who has been a major editor of {{VICpromoted}}, and @Butko: , who had been a major contributor to both {{VICpromoted}} and {{QICpromoted}}. —Philip Terry Graham (talk) 11:08, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Template:Assessments and valued images

[OK] Resolved by TintoMeches.

Second problem: {{Assessments}} doesn't have a satisfactory way of displaying Valued image promotions properly. A good example of how this template reacts to its "valued" paramater, in which typing "1" will activate it, is on File:National Carillon, ACT - Rectilinear projection.jpg. It is inappropriately italicised, along with the Quality image line, due to a syntax error in the Featured image line, in which the blod fonting for "Featured image" was left open and accidentaly italicised the rest of the text. Further more, the sentence leads off with "...most valued image on Commons within the scope '", suggesting that there is a parameter here for a scope, but according to its documentation, there is none. Furthermore, there is no parameter that allows the Valued image subpage name to be changed, in case the subpage differs from the name of the file itself, potentially leading to red links when one clicks on "considered". It would be great if one could help fix these problems —Philip Terry Graham (talk) 00:22, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Pinging @Berdea, Poco a poco, TintoMeches, Medium69, and Steinsplitter: , whom have all contributed to {{Assessments}} anytime in the past two years. —Philip Terry Graham (talk) 11:11, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I looked into this code but couldn't see any problem with italics, sorry. Poco² 17:41, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

@PhilipTerryGraham: the code is correct, as you must also specify the val-cat parameter. — TintoMeches, 13:43, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Also, val-nom exists in case the subpage differs from the name of the file itself. — TintoMeches, 13:48, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@TintoMeches: Can you update the template's documentation? It most certainly did not mention any "val-cat" or "val-nom" parameter. I'm almost certain this template is also hiding much more that the documentation fails to mention... -- PhilipTerryGraham (talk) 14:34, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@PhilipTerryGraham: done. — TintoMeches, 16:27, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

VICbot skipping and failure of images to show up in FastCII search

[No] Currently unresolved.

Third problem: VICbot has a habit of skipping out on my promoted nominations when the time comes to clear the Commons:Valued image candidates page. This has often led to kind users such as Archaeodontosaurus having to do the work for it. I've also found that these same images that VICbot skipped out on are also the same images that are missing in action whenever one tries to make a FastCII search of "Good" images under my name. So far, I have 3 Quality images and 4 Valued images, with one currently sitting at the nominated list as promoted, but once again skipped out on by VICbot. All 3 Quality images show up, but only 1 valued image does. I'm not sure if this is exclusively a problem happening to me because of a mistake I've made, which is possible considering I am one to make all kinds of mistakes, but either way, it'd be great to know what's going on, whether its happening to me only, or to others as well. —Philip Terry Graham (talk) 00:22, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

This is a recurring problem. In the past month I also had two images blocked. Nothing abnormal in the procedures or in the appointments of these images. One hypothesis would be that there are hidden characters introduced by word processing programs, which block the Bot. Anyone who answers this point will be entitled to a general ovation. --Archaeodontosaurus (talk) 06:07, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

VICbot and custom signatures

[No] Currently unresolved.

A smaller issue, but VICbot won't process VICs that have a custom signature in the nominated by field and won't notify the nominator after promotion. I've been copying and pasting my standard signature over my custom one on the advice of INeverCry who had this problem a few months ago. Pinging @Dschwen: who may be able to figure some of these out. Daphne Lantier 08:44, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Defaulting to gender neutral language in policies and help pages

The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Although opinions are not unanimous, the consensus is that this proposal should be approved. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 06:34, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

---

Based on recent discussions about how words used on Wikimedia projects in various languages can feel unwelcoming for some trans contributors, or those that just want to feel it's okay to stick with a gender neutral status on our projects, I propose that pages in the main Commons and Help namespaces, which includes policies and help pages but not their associated talk pages or subpages used for discussion, adopt a principle of being written as gender neutral throughout. This proposal means that we automatically support changes to ensure this is implemented, rather than expecting a separate consensus or authority to edit every page or policy.

Examples for illustration

• Commons:Administrators/De-adminship - "his or her status" may become "their status"
• Commons:FAQ - "every time his or her picture is used" may become "every time their picture is used"

Thanks --Fæ (talk) 13:33, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Minor amendments for clarity by adding the Help namespace and suggested neutral wording for examples, diff. --Fæ (talk) 20:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Or in the second case you could avoid a pronoun entirely. --SJ+ 11:33, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Support As proposer, and a contributor who is gender neutral on all Wikimedia projects. Honestly it's really easy for us to adjust language, and it would be nice to make this an easy change without lots of on-going debate and explanations. --Fæ (talk) 13:33, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

is it possible to refer to people by their preferences setting? (gender neutral default) i note there is no "they" option. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 14:12, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

In English preferences we have neutral, 'he' and 'she', and these should be respected by the system and other users on talk pages (the preferences are public on the wikidatabase). However this proposal is not about individuals or talk pages, but how we write main pages in the Commons namespace. So, policies, help pages, guidelines etc., do not refer to specific individuals and have no real need to apply gendered pronouns. --Fæ (talk) 14:20, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

a template that pulled the preference selection would be nice. when you have editors, or article subjects with a known preference for "they" , that would be nice also. w:Singular_they [15] Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 14:44, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

This can be done, but a self entered pronoun beyond the check list is not here yet. Out of interest see your own settings here, however this is more a tangent to raise as a sub-discussion. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 14:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

For cacheability reasons, in normal pages, you can only pull out the gender if you know the username ''{{GENDER:Bawolff|Bawolff is a boy|Bawolff is a girl|Bawolff is an unspecified}}'' = Bawolff is an unspecified. (And there's the whole problem of the preference being very binary. The system was very much meant for grammatical gender not human gender in languages that make a big fuss over grammatical gender. Typically such languages only recognize masculine, feminine and neuter). In system messages (MediaWiki namespace), you don't need the username most of the time, and can just do: {{GENDER:|Current user is a boy|Current user is a girl|Current user is an unspecified}} but it won't work in normal pages, since multiple users share the same rendering of a wikipage. Bawolff (talk) 15:29, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Support --Thibaut120094 (talk) 15:00, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Comment I think your examples are confusing. For example "his picture" -> "his or her picture" -> "their picture". Our current text does not assume the photographer is male ("his picture") but still retains binary gender assumptions ("his or her"). I guess you are proposing the text should say "their picture", but this is not clear. Honestly, our policy and help pages are so fossilised that it would be quicker just to fix the few cases where the writing isn't ideal, than to have some community discussion. If you just went ahead and fixed it, would anyone object?

Further I note that "Commons namespace" includes deletion discussions, QI, FP, VI, Photo Challenge and the other community forums such as this page. Are you really proposing to police how people write when discussing and using conversational prose? That doesn't seem to fit with COM:MELLOW, particularly if a person is attempting to communicate in poor English. -- Colin (talk) 15:01, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

This is an example of poor wording - help pages are also not in the Commons namespace. Ruslik (talk) 18:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Clarified wording, this is referring explicitly to namespaces 4 and 12, per Commons:Namespaces. --Fæ (talk) 20:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Comment Support i will second Colin's comment. It is unclear if "his or her status" is an example of a problem or a solution (my guess the problem). Also could you provide examples of the problem sentence and corrected sentence? Otherwise I think it is a very good suggestion. --Jarekt (talk) 18:34, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

  Examples now extended picking up on this point. It may be useful for editors to refer to Singular they and be reassured that this approach used in the examples is as recommended in the The Chicago Manual of Style. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 20:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Oppose Glrx (talk) 16:20, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
• I've long noticed that singular 'they' tends to cause some confusion even among native English speakers, so I'm not sure it's the best idea to require its usage in a multilingual environment like Commons. In the community feels that an administrator is acting against policy and routinely abusing their status, for instance, those with a less-than-perfect grasp of English may interpret "their" to be in reference to "the community." I am sympathetic for the desire to have gender-neutral wording in our policies and project infrastructure. I agree with Colin that objections are unlikely if folks decide to go ahead and make any pronoun changes they see fit. There are many different ways to substitute gender-specific language, depending on the context. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 03:44, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I think Julian's comments are a perfect example of why Commons should have discussions, not votes. The proposed text is still confusing in that really it is not "namespaces" that matter at all, but probably more accurately described as "Formal pages such as policy, procedure and help pages". The vast majority of the Commons namespace is used for discussion, and such formal pages reflect only a tiny consideration, mostly it seems to me, unread even by our admins. I wonder if Julian could advise how to phrase that sentence so that the ambiguity does not occur. Perhaps the best thing would be if someone (Fae?) locate those policy/help texts that contain text that could be improved wrt gender, and either directly edit them, giving diffs here, or present proposed changes. Then people who have a good eye for grammar or the difficulties facing non-English-speaking readers, can either directly tweak them, or offer alternatives. Do I need to point out this is a wiki? Just edit. -- Colin (talk) 07:54, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
  • @Juliancolton: Sentences like this can be correctly phrased to avoid confusion, in fact the grammatical problem was there even without changing to a neutral pronoun. In this case your example could be written as the community feels that an administrator is abusing their status, and acting against policy, giving less potential confusion as to the subject in the sentence - it is reasonable to presume context and apply common sense, otherwise we taking on the impossible by catering for an almost wilful level of misreading. The proposal is recommending writing in a gender neutral style, not simply swapping one set of words for another, so these editorial issues can be coped with fairly easily. --Fæ (talk) 10:15, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I am always sympathetic about this issue, but I feel quite uncomfortable using the singular "they", as Julian mentioned above. In addition, each language has its own gender-neutral issue, and you only speak about English here. What about translations? Regards, Yann (talk) 09:32, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
    • As per the reply to Julian, the proposal is not just using 'they'. Often sentences can be written avoiding any direct pronoun, in the history of English usage, it was common to use a singular 'they' in past generations, and British English is more comfortable with 'they' than American English (refer to Singular they). Let's not make a big deal out of it, as this is already a recommended practice for other organizations and it is widely recognized as a worthwhile best practice for modern English usage. The question of non-English translation is a separate issue. I did have some discussions with German and Spanish speakers over the weekend about precisely the issue of handling gendered languages and their default bias to male forms. These questions are for those language communities to reach a consensus on and is a technical translation and cultural issue. This proposal is focused on our default policy language of English, I recognize that moving to a more gender neutral form for other languages is much harder, but that is not a reason for our community to avoid showing leadership within our Wikimedia projects, and we should forge ahead where it is possible and reasonable to do so. I'd even say this is worth a little 'discomfort' in order to adopt modern best practices and take positive steps to feel more welcoming for women, trans and genderqueer future contributors. --Fæ (talk) 10:15, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
      • As long as we have a consensus that singular 'they' is understood by most and generally the most widely accepted form of gender neutral language, I have no objections. Comments by Mozucat, Bluerasberry, et al. help allay my concerns. I just thought I would ask the question based on my personal experience. As you say, this is a good chance to lead the way in helping to make Wikimedia a more inclusive community, so I certainly won't be the one to stand in the way. I'm sure some additional minor improvements could be made to the scope and parameters of the proposal if we really wanted to get pedantic, but the general sentiment is reasonable enough to get us where we need to be. Thryduulf's assessment seems spot-on to me. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 02:09, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
        •  Support to be clear. My message was more about language. Personally, I rather write "her/his" than singular "they" when I uncertain of the gender. Of course I am open to discuss this. Regards, Yann (talk) 17:46, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
• (Edit conflict)  Support. Singular they should be used where the meaning is clear. Where it isn't clear then it should be reworded to avoid the use of "he/she" (and similar constructions) in a different way wherever possible. In some cases this might require discussion to get right, but we don't need to get into that level of detail here. As for other languages, the solutions will be different but the goal - use gendered language only where unavoidable - is the same. Thryduulf (talk) 10:19, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

In the past, we used the male pronouns in situations where it could apply to anybody. Then people started thinking it was sexist, and we've been somewhat confused ever since. A simple solution would have been to abandon "she" and "her" completely and use "he" and "him" in all situations. I don't think you gain a lot from gendered pronouns, and I've heard Chinese doesn't use them. Now some people also think that words like "actress" are sexist and suggest using "actor" exclusively, which is the same idea. --ghouston (talk) 10:28, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• Support - Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Mabalu (talk) 12:12, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
• Total  Support This is not only useful to the trans community, but in the case of French, it is more inclusive for women also, as the French (I'm writing French and this does not mean francophone) have the disastrous tendancy to masculinize everything pretending this is the way the french grammar adresses "gender neutrality in French". I would really like us to reflect on writing a best practice manual for all those who want to have an inclusive language (coupled with a non violent communication guide for online practices). Actually on the French wikipedia, most pronouns are in the masculine form even on talk / user / help pages, and when one raises the issue, one gets insults and very silly remarks. --Nattes à chat (talk) 14:23, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

  I know the French community is vibrant and diverse, so I'm sorry to read the experience that it does not work so nicely with gender. A more respectful approach to the issue, where topics like non-binary identity can be discussed openly with all viewpoints, but in a friendly way, is encouraged by having good policies. It's not a solution to cultural or linguistic barriers, but shifting to an environment where everyone feels welcome, rather than just stated to be welcome, is a perfect starting point for creating a space where everyone is free to be themselves. --Fæ (talk) 14:44, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Support. I definitely support using gender-neutral language wherever possible, especially since I'm agender and prefer being addressed with "singular they" pronouns. Funcrunch (talk) 14:41, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Oppose --Nikos Andronikos (talk) 15:17, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support. This is a needed recommendation. I think any confusion about use of Singular they will be reduced in the near future given that an increasing number of sources support its use, i.e. Associated Press Stylebook. --Mozucat (talk) 15:22, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support This proposal is about using gender neutral language in gender neutral discussions. This is already an established practice in LGBT community writing and it replaces other common practices, like defaulting to use males in all examples, trying to use male and female pronouns equally or interchangeably, or using awkward grammatical constructs like "his/her". Mozucat above cites the AP stylebook, which is a major conservative international news guideline and which in March 2017 published new support for gender neutral language. If this proposal is enacted then I do not see this as necessitating any major change in anyone's routine behavior here, except that as a default the Wikimedia community avoids seeking to insert gender in discussions where gender ought not be a factor in the discussion. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:38, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support. This is long past due. Libcub (talk) 17:23, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Oppose There are good reasons to keep things unchanged.--Nihar Jindal (talk) 17:45, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support. Mssemantics (talk) 17:52, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support, but with the caveat that if issues during the implementation arise on individual pages, then those should be discussed there rather than defaulting to some sort of absolute rule established here. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 17:58, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support using gender neutral pronouns and language where it isn't confusing. "He or she" is awkward and doesn't cover everyone anyway. Kaldari (talk) 18:07, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Support Totally agree. Singular they is generally better than "he/she" but as User:Kaldari mentioned, checking largely for any confusion that might arise is needed. --Subhashish Panigrahi (talk) 18:33, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Support Long overdue - I would even support doing this in articles. As was linked above, Singular they has a long history in the English language, and there is no reason not to use it universally. The argument that it is "confusing for some", in this case, is not relevant, as almost everything is "confusing for _some_". Tduk (talk) 18:18, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
  • and avoiding using pronouns entirely is often feasible, making this even less of a sticking point (as stated above). Tduk (talk) 02:21, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support, long overdue.   — Jeff G. ツ 05:52, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support. Great idea! QuixoticLife (talk) 07:29, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support, thanks for this concise proposal of an overdue idea. As with Tduk, I think this isn't a bad idea for articles; at least noted as an acceptable style [when consistent throughout] if not the default one. Cheers, --SJ+ 11:33, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support and thank you for proposing. This is a step towards being more inclusive of people from all genders. = [[User:Paul2520|paul2520]] (talk) 12:32, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support per nominator. LauraHale (talk) 15:14, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Oppose I don't support such genderism.--Tostman (talk) 17:20, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Your vote is the opposite of your comment, see genderism. You may want to fix that, without raising whether transgender people exist, that's not what this proposal is about. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 17:24, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Support Oh yeah! Strong support as a nonbinary. kvardek du (la plej bela nombro) 19:11, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Oppose Problem is that in the context of most older web-projects (of which commons is one) "they" isn't gender neutral. Its "male until otherwise". She/he is attempts to be actively inclusive while "they" is passively exclusive (it implies that the default is "passing for male").Geni (talk) 19:16, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Could you provide some context, such as a link to the definition you have in mind. There may be a mismatch between an understanding of, say, the technical system preferences and modern English use of singular they, it is the latter this proposal refers to, and it is gender neutral by definition. As for "she/he", it excludes and is unwelcoming for those that wish to be identified as neither, such as genderqueer users. --Fæ (talk) 19:23, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

"Man" is gender neutral by definition. Dictionary definitions are not what we are talking about here. On much of the old web (and wikipedia and related projects are old web) the standard was/is "male until claimed and or proven otherwise". The use of of the singular they doesn't challenge this resulting it not being gender neutral in this context. "his or her status" actively raises the concept of woman admins where as "their" does not. "his or her picture is used" again explicitly raises the concept of women photographers where as "their" does not. Sure its inaccurate but a FAQ isn't the place to raise the issues of third party copyrights and legal persons.Geni (talk) 19:52, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Geni, you are younger than me, but I find these views oddly regressive. This proposal is based on current best practice, which I suggest you read up on. I see no reason why the community here should feel constrained by some 1980s ideas about gender. Unless you can provide some sources to illustrate the issues you are putting forward, I doubt there is much more to say. --Fæ (talk) 22:38, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

But aren't your views oddly prescriptive? Thou shalt write text not as thou wouldst normally, but rather as we commandth thou to write it? To me, the singular "they" is jarring and long runs of genderless prose stilted. Glrx (talk) 23:14, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

This proposal applies to policies and help pages, unless you are working on those, your writing is simply not affected. The proposed policy encourages avoiding pronouns, it's almost always possible to rewrite in this style in English, so if a policy has an odd use of 'singular they', just say that on the talk page and suggest how it can be written out. --Fæ (talk) 07:27, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Oppose as draft as written, but  Support principle. It goes too far in some cases, as discussion venues like the village pump, the AN and Commons:Help desk are listed as help pages. A policy that applies to any discussion venue is unreasonable, as good faith editors can and will make comments in violation of it as a matter of routine. Forcing editors to recast sentences to be gender neutral can make it harder to write, especially for non-English speakers, and that might lose clarity on the actual point of the message. And when guidelines quote laws, that should be provided verbatim even if, like at COM:FOP#Egypt), that law uses "his" inappropriately.

At the same time, restricting this to a restricted number of pages doesn't go far enough. Policy, guideline and help pages is a small subset of pages that could be covered. For instance, copyright templates should be gender neutral too. As an example, its easy to imagine {{PD-USGov}} being written with the "his or her" formulation. Also by excluding discussion pages, a user showing flagrant disregard for gender identity (ie referring to a declared trans-female as "him") is not acting in breach of the proposal.

IMO, this would be better treated as a guideline that applies to the entirety of Commons, on all pages, as opposed to a policy that applies to a restricted number of locations. The information targeted by the proposal would still be covered by such a guideline. But it also extends it to general user behaviour, anywhere else on the project.--Nilfanion (talk) 09:15, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi Nilfanion, you may have misunderstood. The draft policy specifically "does not apply to talk pages or other discussion venues", so the Village Pump, AN and the Help desk are not affected. The draft policy also uses the word "reasonable", so yes if you want to quote a copyright act where a verbatim translation includes "him", that's exactly the right thing to do rather than lose meaning. With regard to templates and other spaces, these are good suggestions that nothing stops us adding on later as they arise, we just need a reasonable consensus for specific proposals to do so. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 09:54, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Possibly, but I would prefer to get the end result (all of Commons covered, including user behaviour) right away rather than in increments. However, the text of the proposal as it stands includes certain discussion venues. "This policy applies only to the language of official policy, guideline and help pages on Commons" includes all pages listed at Help:Contents. The subsequent "user pages and other discussion venues" does not then clearly exclude those discussion venues that are help pages, it only appears to exclude other discussion venues that are not help venues (eg RFA requests). As the VP is listed as an official help page, it is included. Different phrasing is needed for that exclusion to work: Something like "all discussion venues are excluded, even if their purpose is to provide help to users".--Nilfanion (talk) 10:18, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

 Done diff. Feel free to continue editing the draft, you get the sense of where we want to end up. --Fæ (talk) 10:24, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Oppose Transgender people only make a fraction of mankind. Do we have to change everything for the benefit of a small minority?--Sascha GPD (talk) 09:42, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, pretty much that's why in America black and white segregation became illegal in 1964, despite the cost of change. Anyway this vote is not about transgender rights, it's about making the project feel more welcoming. Tweaking a few words seems a minor hassle to achieve that. --Fæ (talk) 09:54, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Comment They is not a good term, because it's a plural form. Instead people could use the word ze as the gender-neutral third person singular pronoun.[16] (The inflected forms of the word ze are: zir=him/her, zir=his/her, zirs=his/hers, zirself=himself/herself.) --Kulmalukko (talk) 11:39, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Kulmalukko, there is a reason you linked to a Wordpress blog rather than a published respected dictionary. Such words are not part of the English language. We need to use simple English terms that can be found in a dictionary, work with Google Translate and are not confusing to people with English as a second language. Very few people in the UK would even be able to read that. -- Colin (talk) 12:33, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kulmalukko: If you are researching references, it would be handy to improve en:Genderqueer#Pronouns_and_titles, though as an example of a neutral honorific, I note that the genderqueer-friendly "Mx" has standard usage and is in the OED. Anyway, this is slightly off topic, if you would like to expand on it, the new draft policy talk page would be a good place, or Wikipedia:WikiProject LGBT studies. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 16:51, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Oppose It simply confuses things more to new users by saying "their". As juliancolton mentioned, and Fae further demonstrated, unless you're quite familiar with WP it's hard to read this any way but wrong: the community feels that an administrator is abusing their status, and acting against policy. I respect the motivation, but the resulting transmogrified sentences are kludgy at best and wholly incorrect at worst. There's a reason why nearly every publication uses his / her — for clarity. Unfortunately, they carry the side-effect of assigning gender. Drewmutt (^ᴥ^) talk 21:43, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@Drewmutt, have a look at the draft policy at Commons:Use of gender neutral language. It does not recommend using "their". --MichaelMaggs (talk) 02:31, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Question MichaelMaggs, this only a small part of the commons community. Why this proposal, especially about language, running here? Does it only applicable to the policies and guidelines (and help pages) written in English; not for any translations? Jee 06:22, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

While it would be great if this conversation could be run simultaneously in multiple languages, the almost invariable practice on Commons to draft strategy initially in English, and then invite editors to translate it. The proposal has been worded so that it can be translated exactly as-is: the specifics apply to English only, with other languages being asked to comply "so far as is linguistically reasonable". --MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:33, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

That's why we have COM:VPP for proposals. Here not any people from DE or FR participating. But people always forget it and post here. :) Jee 11:43, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Commons:Village pump/Proposals#Defaulting to gender neutral language in policies and help pages. --Fæ (talk) 14:41, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Support the policy as currently drafted.  Strong oppose making up new words. BethNaught (talk) 12:17, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support -- Freddy2001 ^talk 18:42, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Support. Good to be more inclusive, and it doesn't do any harm as far as I can tell. —Granger (talk  · contribs) 11:44, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
•  Oppose will make our policy's much harder too read for non native English speakers. I understand the desire for gender neutral language but easy to read policies are more important in my opinion. Natuur12 (talk) 12:50, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

  In truth, though this has been claimed before, there is little evidence of it. The use of "singular they" is taught in modern English classes aimed at non-native speakers (TEFL), because it is a part of normal English, have a read of this article by an experienced TEFL teacher from 4 years ago, that includes a list of excellent sources post. Further, if some key policies are difficult for non-native readers, which is easy to imagine for our longer and complex copyright policies and guidelines, we should do more to encourage translations, if necessary by asking for some grant money. In practice the changes to "he or she" type phrases are going to be a tiny number, and if those changes are poorly done, they should be reverted and discussed to deliver better copy editing. --Fæ (talk) 13:35, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Taking the principle to other projects

There have been a couple of mentions of 'articles', so some participants here may be interested that I'm planning on taking this principle of gender neutrality, initially at the policy and help level, forward to the English Wikipedia. The current practice is quite heavy use of "he or she" in the most used policies, so this could become a bigger change for that project compared to this one. I have started an initial research discussion stage at en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject LGBT studies#Research for proposing a gender neutral principle for Wikipedia policies and guidelines. I suggest keeping the draft stage low key, there's no point in attracting general debate until the RFC text is ready to publish.

By the way, I am most encouraged by the majority of comments here, including those with doubts changing to support opinions. So, I'm taking this as a sign that this is the right time to push on an open door. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 11:39, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

The RfC on the English Wikipedia is now running, RFC GNL. The suggested policy is almost identical, but it's a more bureaucratic process on our fellow project to reach a consensus. --Fæ (talk) 10:48, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Assuming a user with a male name identifies as male gender

At BN, Fæ writes "BTW, a tiny reminder to everyone that Jcb has no gender identified on their account, they probably don't care because they are so open about their name, but it's easy to write in a gender neutral style, I always do and nobody notices." At User:Jcb, Jcb identifies as "Johan Bos". AFAIK, this is a masculine name in the same way that Colin is. In this discussion Fae refers to Jcb as "he" once, "his" five times, "him" twice. Examples can also be found for Fae referring to me as "he", etc. So I'm confused what Fae means by this. Has Jcb asked for us to refer to him in gender neutral terms? My understanding of the style guides mentioned is that we should seek to use gender neutral language when referring to examples of people of indeterminate (and unimportant) gender, and also when the subject has requested it for themselves. I do not see guidance that we should not refer to people who are likely to identify as male or female with appropriately gendered pronouns. Is there such? I would think most people, like myself, with a user (or publicly stated real) name that implies a gender, feel no need to be explicit about this on their user page. And in every day life, most of us do not make any explicit statement about our gender. Could you clarify what you mean by this, please. -- Colin (talk) 12:08, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Not being a native speaker, it's difficult for me to understand whether "they" in they probably don't care because they are so open about their name refers to "everybody" or to "Jcb". In fact, only by context you can understand that it refers to Jcb. IHMO it's totally counter-intuitive. --Discasto _talk 12:14, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Should anyone be confused as to why I am not engaging in this section, please refer to my statement at User_talk:Fæ/2016#Colin. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 12:18, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

I ask those questions in good faith, trying to understand a difficult topic. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding this language terminology hard. Who is being unreasonable? Anyone can find a way to work together, if they do so in good faith, respect, and honesty. -- Colin (talk) 12:27, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

For those who are curious, I am male :-P. I don't care whether people leave their messages to me in male form or gender neutral form. If I don't know the gender of the user I am talking with/about, I try to write gender neutral. I must admit it took me some time to get familiar with the weird usage of 'they' as a gender neutral singular third person, but it's so widespread at Wikimedia/Wikipedia, that a lot of Wikimedians won't even notice anymore. But I totally understand that it may be confusing. Jcb (talk) 16:44, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

The masculine/feminine name issue is actually something I run into a lot (especially while referring to the authors of sources I use in Wikipedia articles). It's a complex topic, and I definitely don't condemn people making assumptions that way. Of course, if a name isn't gendered, using singular they is generally just the best way out. ~Mable (chat) 19:29, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

My understanding when I saw this proposal was it is talking about the language in Commons:Policies and guidelines. That's why I didn't oppose it. But I felt insulted when I see someone asking me to avoid using "him" to address Jcb. That's why I replied "him" is perfectly gender neutral in EN-IN. It will be very unfair to ask somebody to change him, her, mankind, gentleman, chairperson etc. in their comments to the something else. It is purely gender-phobia. Jee 07:18, 7 April 2017 (UTC) o policy,

The main proposal is indeed restricted to policy, guideline and help pages. As this particular sub-thread has no relevance to the proposal and is getting a little heated it would be best not to add any more to it. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:23, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! :) Jee 08:30, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

MichaelMaggs, I don't see why discussion on requests like this have to be killed off just because one user has personal issues that prevent him engaging in civil conversation. This proposal was extended, ad hoc, at the BN discussion, to how we should refer to other users in Commons discussions. If Fae wishes to make requests of the Community like that, then we can expect the community to discuss it. Does the community agree with that or not? It seems currently that for cases where a user's gender can be assumed with some degree of probability that there is no support for insisting we default to agender. But if there are reliable sources / respected bodies that disagree with that, I'd like to know. -- Colin (talk) 08:51, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Colin, it may be a joke (which was highly inappropriate in BN); just ignore it. Jee 09:07, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

This is all well and good but...

While I support this, it's an internal matter. Meanwhile, we have a lot of categories that are split by gender for no reason that I can think of other than a tendency to split, split, split, e.g. Category:Male writers. - Jmabel ! talk 15:18, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Jmabel, that's a good example of how broken our category system is. The concept of "writer" and the concept of "identified gender" are completely separate. I wish your UI provided an easier way of combining categories at search-time rather than encouraging folk to combine unrelated categories at archival-time. -- Colin (talk) 06:45, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Jmabel -- this probably exists due to repercussions of early attempts to break up categories with very large numbers of subcategories, more than a mania for subclassification as such. Anyway, the more pivotal category now is Category:Male writers by country... AnonMoos (talk) 16:04, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Draft policy

As this suggestion has gained wide acceptance, I have prepared a draft policy at Commons:Use of gender neutral language. Although it could be argued that we don't need a formal policy on this subject, writing down the conclusion of this discussion means that we won't forget it for the future. It's also helpful to set out the welcoming ambitions and expectations that we have as a community. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 19:30, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

For clarity, at which point do we consider the draft agreed? Is this section the place to reach agreement or the talk page of the draft? --Fæ (talk) 20:07, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't think it really matters where people post; I'll try to update the draft as needed wherever consensus emerges. As this is not likely to be particularly contentious (I hope), we could make the page policy when this thread is eventually closed, assuming of course the consensus still holds. Editors are not surprisingly often reluctant to have to go off to another page to repeat an opinion they have already given, and I don't think there's a need to demand a separate vote on the other page. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 20:26, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Low key is good. I suggest minor wording changes are added without discussion unless reverted. I'm working on a similar proposal on the English Wikipedia, I suggest any lessons learned there are considered later here, however the communities are quite different in approach, and there may be far more discussion about definition on Wikipedia than we need here on Commons. --Fæ (talk) 20:52, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Closing

Discussion and voting on the proposal has more or less run its course, and I'd suggest that this section could be closed later tomorrow once we reach the end of the usual 7 day period. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:41, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

• This is quite a major chang and the sample off users who participated isn't exactly random which is unfair. A part off en-wiki has been informed but there are more communities in the wiki realm. Natuur12 (talk) 12:51, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I feel this is a Commons decision for our community. It would be less fair to dilute the current representative Commons community voices with those who rarely participate or have little commitment to our community or little grasp of the way this project works. It should also be noted that this vote was announced on Wikimedia-l and had significant engagement on that list from both non-English writers and non-commonsers. Compared to other votes, some with far more tangible impact to our content than this one, we have already seen a healthy level of participation and the number of votes per day has dropped to a trickle, so I don't see anything inappropriate with closing soon. --Fæ (talk) 13:25, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

It's quite usual here for most users to avoid policy discussions. While it is always nice to get more interest, we can't force people to come and, as Fae says, this discussion has been widely advertised. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:43, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May

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The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data center in Dallas. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

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• You will not be able to edit for approximately 20 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 19 April and Wednesday, 3 May. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 20 April and Thursday 4 May).
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:33, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Request to convert SVG

I will not draw SVG, so request convert File:ธงแขนสั้น.png to File:Flag of Short Sleeve.svg, please keep the original file, thank you. --Thyj (talk) 16:24, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Hey Thyj, please maybe see COM:GL/ILL. -- User: Perhelion 09:39, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: -- User: Perhelion 09:39, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Difference between Shoes boxes and Shoe packaging categories ?

Hi,

It is unclear for me what is the difference between Shoes boxes and Shoe packaging categories.

It may be so because I am not a native english speaker.

Could some native english speaker put a note to clarify the difference, if any ?

Thank you in advance. Lionel Allorge (talk) 22:44, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Everything in Shoe packaging shows a box, so can be moved to Shoes boxes. That would leave Shoe packaging empty, unless someone can find a picture of a shoe bag or something. --ghouston (talk) 23:29, 11 April 2017 (UTC) A shoe bag exists: File:Shoe bag.tif, but it's for storage, not packaging. --ghouston (talk) 23:31, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

By the way, ordinary usual English would be "Shoe boxes", not "Shoes boxes"... AnonMoos (talk) 21:52, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

I merged them to Category:Shoe boxes. --ghouston (talk) 23:55, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

April 12

CFD: 1900s > 1900s (decade)

At Commons:Categories for discussion/2017/01/Category:1900s, Pigsonthewing has suggested that we disambugate all category name instances of "1900s" (including "X in the 1900s") to "1900s (decade)". (So Category:1900s becomes Category:1900s (decade) and so on.) This would be clearer because in the English language, 1900s can equally refer to a decade or the whole 20th century. Naturally, this would also apply to Category:1800s and other decades starting from Category:0s, so it would be very far-reaching.

I'd appreciate it if anyone with thoughts on the matter would comment at the CFD rather than here. Thanks. - Themightyquill (talk) 08:01, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Deletion request by uploader

Last Saturday we had an uploading activity and some newbies uploaded pictures. One of them wanted to have five of them deleted. She has somewhat managed to have four removed, but not the other one. Those are File:Niña vestida de valenciana en el "Cant de l'estoreta Velleta".jpg Can you help? B25es (talk) 07:26, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

• File:Niña vestida de valenciana en el "Cant de l'estoreta Velleta".jpg has been deleted. - Jmabel ! talk 15:29, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

ResolvedJmabel ! talk 15:29, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Copyright issues with my own picture

Hello! I am new here. I have problems with my picture. Here is the link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Snimka_na_pametnika.JPG The image has been created on 9.04.2017 and uploaded on 12.04.2017. The source of the picture is Dryanovo Monastery, Bulgaria, the monument of Kostnica (Monument to the April Uprising by Arnoldo Zocchi) You can see here the monument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryanovo_Monastery May be i must edit the description ? I need your help! I apologize for your ignorance! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dimitar Kolev (talk • contribs) 08:15, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

• Convenience link: File:Snimka na pametnika.JPG - Jmabel ! talk 15:31, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
• It looks like the copyright issue may have been sorted out. However:
  • What basis do you have for presuming that the sculptor of the statue died at least 70 years ago?
    • Got it, Arnoldo Zocchi died in 1940 so this is correct. - Jmabel ! talk 15:38, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
  • It still needs appropriate categories. Category:Паметник, Костница, Дряново, Манастир, България does not exist, and since Commons categories are normally in English it is not likely ever to exist. - Jmabel ! talk 15:34, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
    • Looks like someone got on the categories issue almost as soon as I wrote that. - Jmabel ! talk 15:38, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

welcome to taking pictures of art. using Template:Artwork is better. it allows an artist field separate from author / photographer. you do not have Commons:Freedom_of_panorama#Bulgaria so it was necessary to look at artist's date of death. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 15:45, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

April 14

Interest in testing the Timeless skin

Hi, I've been working on a new responsive skin somewhat based on Winter (though a lot of that has yet to be implemented), Timeless:

• I have a labs wiki where you can test it out easily without logging in, though there is admittedly not a whole lot of content directly on it (but it does have instantCommons enabled): https://timeless-skin.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
• To see what it might look/act like in production, there is a copy of the Simple English Wikipedia on the Beta Cluster, where Timeless has already been deployed: https://simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page - you can create an account, set your skin to timeless, and go through some of the things you might do here, and maybe get a feel for the skin.

My question for you all is thus: would you be interested in trying this out as an available skin on Commons? And, because it's still very much in development, would you be interested in working with me to help develop it into a product that might help to address address problems faced specifically by your project? (For instance, the focus of Commons is media, and one of the planned features for Timeless is a dark mode. Would this be something you would be interested in order to place more focus on the media itself, as opposed to the surrounding chrome?) I would love your feedback - I have a grant proposal on meta to continue development work on Timeless with proper funding, and if it might be able to solve problems you all face in practice, that would be great. So please, feel free to read through that and let me know what you think.

In the meantime, would you like to test out Timeless, have it available as a skin for use on your project, receiving updates as I continue to work on it? Note that any deployment to Commons or other wikis would make it available as an option, and it will not be replacing the default unless there is specific consensus to do so down the road.

Thanks! -— Isarra ༆ 23:22, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

+1 too that please. Paladox (talk) 15:21, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

+1 more from me too. I think this is a very good start at a new more attractive skin for the site. Defianta (talk) 19:32, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

+1. You might want to get in touch with the people working on COM:Structured data, as that may well bring some changes UI-wise. Also maybe a chance to fix phab:T102776? --El Grafo (talk) 19:57, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Just a recommendation but I think allowing the person to decide where the categories show up might be a good thing. I prefer them at the top right now myself but with this skin I could easily see them somewhere else, maybe in a categories section on the side under More. Others might feel differently. If possible I also think it would be good if editors had the ability to control the layout. For example I would probably prefer to have the More options under Navigation and the Wiki tools under page tools but that's just me. Defianta (talk) 20:02, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Well, the idea behind this was that (on Commons) categories are too important to be hidden at the bottom of the page, so they should be displayed at a prominent place by default. If it's possible to give the user additional options, that's of course a welcome bonus! --El Grafo (talk) 20:14, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

I completely agree. I like the cats at the top myself. It might be worthwhile to see if this new skin layout affects the display or functionality of other things as well like Hotcat. Defianta (talk) 20:22, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

These are some excellent points about the categories - what makes sense is very likely to depend on the project and how they actually use the categories to begin with, but also specific users are going to have rather specific use cases. Might also vary a lot by namespace, too, potentially in relatively consistent ways across projects (so perhaps we can make some sane defaults)... -— Isarra ༆ 04:34, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

As an addendum, stuff like this about the categories would be great points to raise on my grant proposal, or any other specifics about needs or concerns that Timeless might be able to address, as this will not just help me get funding in order to work on it, but on these issues specifically. Thanks! -— Isarra ༆ 13:18, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

+1, I also concur that this is a great looking new skin. Good job Isarra. Reguyla 138.162.0.41 16:12, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

"some sane defaults", that's what I meant. Left my endorsement over at meta. I've been playing around with the prototype a bit now: There's some pretty neat stuff going on there. I like how some of the elements change dynamically when you change the width of you browser window … --El Grafo (talk) 14:59, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! And if we can actually tailor some specifics, that's always good too. -— Isarra ༆ 18:13, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

@Isarra:

• With a window width of around 1000px, there’s this tri-colored bar on the top with the menu items like „Getting around“ or „Languages“. Those texts are in front of that bar for me (using Firefox 52), from the spacing above the bar I’m guessing they should be above it instead?
• With a window width of below aprox. 800px, there’s a grey bar on the very top, which also overlaps things. It has a link „Add links“ with the title text „Add interlanguage links“ in it.
• Menus don’t work without JS on windows widths below approx. 800px. (The other two issues occur with JS enabled as well.)
• With a window width of below aprox. 800px, the focus lines when tabbing through the links are going to (at least) the left border of the screen, which makes it harder to tell which item is selected.
• On the history page, a lot more space is wasted. Now I have to scroll to see content, instead of half the visible page beeing content already. Also because of wasted space on the left, there’s now only a quarter screen width available for the change summarys, instead of a half screen width. Due to this, they tend to fill more than one line, making them harder to read (and requires yet more scrolling). This also occurs on the user contribution page, where there is a rather large white space between the headline and „For (Username)“.

Btw (not related to the new skin obviously): Does someone happen to know whether the mixing up of the timestamp for bidirectional usernames (like in the section below this one) is already reported somewhere?

--Nenntmichruhigip (talk) 06:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

@Nenntmichruhigip: Where are you seeing this happen? Can you post screenshots? Most of that sounds like it might be caching problems, or some rather serious bugs.

js is required for the mobile version (under 850px). This is because I couldn't come up with a good way to make the menus into consolidated items without seriously rearranging the dom, so they're instead just tied to some completely separate toggles here. Since this is meant for mobile, however, the assumption is that devices will support js as it's kind of key to the mobile experience anyway. Do you know of use cases that would invalidate this assumption? -— Isarra ༆ 14:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Forgot to mention: Using Firefox 52 on Linux. I doubt client-side caching issues, because I used a private mode window (and don’t think I’ve ever visited simplebetawiki before). Just tried it again: The first two happen on simplebetawiki, but not your dedicated labs wiki. Also occurs with a everything-default Chrome on Android at simplebetawiki.

Usecase for JS beeing not enabled: There are users who for security reasons haven’t allowed any random JS to be executed, even on mobile devices. Also there are desktop users with browser windows that small (i.e. on a small secondary display) for whom "mobile users are more likely to agree to everything" doesn’t apply.

Also the JS requirement seriously delays interaction. I literaly just waited for the page to be fully load, got annoyed by the waiting time, and wrote the sentence before this one before I switched back to my testing window and could finally click on one of those items a second later. The JS-less solution for larger window sizes works right away.

In addition to that, there are things in those menus (login, register, page info, permalink, wiki help, user talk page) which would seriously exlude the affected users, which imho wouldn’t be good, even if it’d be just a few users.

One more thing: I don’t get those icons. But I also don’t get them on most other sites with such icons, so this may very well be a personal thing. Like they’re obvious once you know it, but very hard to understand at first/rare use. Just thought this shoudn’t remain unmentioned, but it’s more a general rant on "modern" stuff than an issue with that specific skin :-) --Nenntmichruhigip (talk) 07:40, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Oh, yes, I see it now. Looks like the beta cluster really is just like production, so I think I know what happened there. Something about how the css/js is cached separate from the html output? Need to make intermediary changes when changing the dom, or something... (In the meantime it's probably just going to remain broken. Oops. Good thing this happened there before I started editing something actually deployed in production, though!)

As for the icons, yeah, they kind of suck, but I haven't been able to come up with a better way to handle it. But the whole mobile layout probably needs to be redone anyway, now that I look at it more closely. Making it clearer at the same time wouldn't hurt, if doable...

Anyway, thank you. This is all very useful. -— Isarra ༆ 16:51, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Cropping - have I just made a bit of a blunder?

So, I discovered the cropping tool, and thought I'd test it out, thought "ooh, this is fun!" and then got a little carried away working through all sorts of images on Category:Images with watermarks. I think I've cropped a few hundred. Anyway - I'm suddenly having doubts as to whether I'm doing it right, so I just wanted to check that I hadn't done anything too dreadful. I've been trying to maintain the original file ratio and keep as much as possible of the non-watermarked parts of each image, and where it hasn't been possible to crop without losing key parts of the image I've moved on and left alone, or uploaded the crops as a separate file in some cases (which I know is definitely acceptable, so not worried about those). However, I am worried as to whether I ought to have been overwriting the original files? If I shouldn't have been, let me know and I'll go back and revert, but before I do any more, I just wanted to check in before angry editors started going ape on my Talk page. Thanks so much, and apologies in advance for wasting anyone's time - if I have blundered, let me know and I'll do the necessary reverting myself. Mabalu (talk) 17:26, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Just my opinion about images with watermarks. If it is a very small and/or bad image that is not used in any Wikipedia I do nothing. It is not worth the effort. If it is a good quality image and in particular when used in a Wikipedia I will in first instance use Photoshop to remove the watermark. If that works well I upload the image as a new version. If that is not possible I use the crop method and upload the cropped version as a seperate new file. If the image was used in Wikipedias I replace there the link to that of the new file. If the watermark cannot be removed without deleting an important part of the image, I often nominate the image for deletion because it is useless. Wouter (talk) 19:10, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Sounds fair enough. I've already nominated a few for deletion (I found at least one blatant copyright infringement) including a couple for the reasons you cite above. I'm not great with Photoshop so if the image is decent and can't be cropped, I've been leaving it alone. It's also a good way of finding public-domain artworks that need to be overwritten with watermark-free images, which I've been doing as I find them. As nobody has raised any problems with what I'm doing, I'm not worrying too much. Mabalu (talk) 22:49, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

please do not crop archival images. please make a copy for even minor watermark removal. (this is a judgement thing but polite to the donor institution) - see also Commons:Overwriting existing files. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 02:51, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

OK, fair enough. It does seem that they rather do flood the category though. Mabalu (talk) 09:12, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

So what's the best way to go from here? Revert all my archival crops? Was hoping to make a dent in that rather massively bloated category of watermarked images, surely there should be a separate automated-addition category for watermarked images that have had an extract cropped from them? (And also should we really be encouraging people to crop these images if it is going to be problematic?) Mabalu (talk) 09:19, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

no, i would leave them alone, and people can revert if they object. i would concentrate on images in use. if we are not using the image online, i do not see the priority in cropping them.

the real archival ones are tiffs, the jpegs are more the "web friendly version". (which are all some institutions will let go of). watermarks are positive in that they establish provenance for the older ones. good to keep the parent image so that image editors can show a provenance chain which overwriting muddles.

keep up the good work. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 14:20, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

i see that user:Monopoly31121993 and user:HerrAdams are cropping away a storm as well. please review the tool talk page Commons_talk:CropTool ; please start with the low resolution ones in use. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 02:37, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

If the image has a watermark then the first thing I would suggest is to make sure that it's not violating the rules about promotional content. If that's not the case then it's encouraged to crop out the watermark. It's not possible to crop a tiff file so you don't have to worry about that and the NYPublic library's Changing New York collection which I was cropping recently has uploaded all files in duplicate (one Jpeg one Tiff) so I've only cropped the Jpegs. The originals (tiff and jpegs) are still available for cropping if my crop didn't work out and someone wants to redo them. The benefit though is that other users (most of whom have no idea how to crop) will be far more inclined to use these images in the near future than they would have if the image wasn't cropped and enlarged. As far as starting with low resolution images first, that sounds fine but I have no idea how someone could filter for that so please let me know if there are some techniques for that. Thanks and happy cropping!Monopoly31121993 (talk) 16:51, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

i would suggest not cropping when it is over 10 MB and not in use. it's all good, i will upload the tiff file that i want to remain uncropped, for the Army Signal Corps watermark, which resulted in it not being deleted. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 20:44, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

April 13

Renaming videos

(this is really intended only for filemovers) When moving a video, please remember to purge the file page afterward, and then reset all the transcodes (down at the bottom of the page). Video transcodes are not moved when the file name is changed. Thanks. - Revent^talk 17:01, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

• Does anyone know how hard it would be to provide a technical fix for that? - Jmabel ! talk 18:18, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Question about photo origin and/ or copyright.

This photo file's information states that it was the "own work" of User:Raintwoto. However, I think that this rare and unique political artifact photograph is most likely sourced from the government of the People's Republic of China. What is the process, if any, to have this photo's evaluated? File:Chop_of_Panchen_Lama.JPG|https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chop_of_Panchen_Lama.JPG A ri gi bod (talk) 02:42, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi A ri gi bod. If you believe an image may not be freely licensed for use on Commons, you may start a deletion request for the file. That said, I see no reason to doubt the validity of the source and license information in this case. If you look at that file's EXIF data, it shows that it was taken using the same digital camera as most of that user's other uploads, including some photos of completely different subjects (see here, for instance). A reverse Google Images search reveals no evidence of a copyright violation. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 04:24, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the answer. I did not look at that EXIF data. I learned something new. What is a "reverse google image search?" Could you point me to an example or "how to" page? Thank you again User:Juliancolton

I do not think anybody wrote How to page for it yet, but find pull-down menu called "more" to the right of View, Edit and history at the file page and than click google image and you will see where on the web the image was used. --Jarekt (talk) 02:17, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

There’s also the TinEye Gadget in your user preferences, which queries a dedicated image-search site.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 08:00, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Jarekt for this "how to" and Thank you also Odysseus1479 for your suggestion as well, SincerelyA ri gi bod (talk) 01:11, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Notification of DMCA takedown demand - File:Mt. Vesuvius.jpg

In compliance with the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and at the instruction of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal counsel, one or more files have been deleted from Commons. Please note that this is an official action of the WMF office which should not be undone. If you have valid grounds for a counter-claim under the DMCA, please contact me.The takedown can be read here.

Affected file(s):

• File:Mt._Vesuvius.jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

To discuss this DMCA takedown, please go to COM:DMCA#File:Mt. Vesuvius.jpg Thank you! Kalliope (WMF) (talk) 16:02, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Pleae note that this DMCA-deletion was undone by WMF Legal. Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 01:50, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm guessing because it wasn't a DMCA takedown, and they decided they were legally better off not deleting the file given the nature of the claim. It was deleted shortly after by an admin as a copyvio.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:14, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Problems with Exif (Author field)

• 

I have uploaded a new picture from the same source; I have removed the watermark and written it in the Exif Artist field. However it does not appear on the Metadata field in Commons.--Carnby (talk) 19:50, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

• EXIF says "Alcuni diritti sono riservati a Marilena Norato", which seems vague. How can you reserve "some rights" without saying what they are? - Jmabel ! talk

That's exactly what the Flickr page says. Anyway I was speaking about the Exif artist field, not the copyright one. I discovered the problem was the accented e (è) used in the field itself (marilèna): Exif seems not to manage extended characters out of ASCII range (not only Unicode, but also ANSI or ISO 8859-1).--Carnby (talk) 12:33, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

• OK. By the way, when changing a comment that someone has already responded to, consider using strikethrough (like this) so it doesn't look like someone misunderstood something that was already clear. - Jmabel ! talk 21:13, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

April 15

Equal sign in URLs within templates

Is there a way that a URL which contains an equal sign can be placed within a template? There is apparently no problem with this inside Template:Art photo, but did cause an error in Template:Fr (French template based on Template:Language). I also encountered this problem when trying to use Template:Quote here in the village pump. The policy I quoted included the URL of a page revision change, which includes an equal sign in the URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Village_pump&diff=prev&oldid=82669339. While the equal sign can be replaced with {{=}} in most situations, that does not work within a URL.

While I avoided the problem by not using the language template (in the "date" section of File:Bouxwiller chateau.jpg) or quote template (above in #FoP on international bridges), I am curious if there is a solution for this problem. AHeneen (talk) 04:35, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

• You can substitute %3D for the equal sign. - Jmabel ! talk 06:58, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Look on the template documentations. In these cases you have to use the unnamed parameter, here {{fr|1=something with an = sign}} or {{quote |1=quoted text containing an = sign}}. In case of {{Quote}} you could (preferred) also use {{quote |text=…}} or {{quote |quote=…}}.

Side remark: Into the date field no language template has to go in, add the remark into the description. Use {{Other date}} or {{Complex date}} for the date attribution.

— Speravir – 03:07, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

April 16

Rejoice! For we are free

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T162395

Today this Sunday 2017 in the year of our Lord is a special day. For we are finally free. No longer shackled by licensing fees. We can all rejoice as MP3 is patent free. You may take this afternoon to re-transcode your music collection back to MP3. — Dispenser (talk) 04:32, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

\o/ Yann (talk) 05:51, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Can I get a Hallelujah? Dispenser (talk) 14:49, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Hallelujah. But we have to thin about how to create a automated copyvio detection, we will likely get a number of copyvios. --Steinsplitter (talk) 15:00, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Catholicpedia?

Some days ago, Wieralee moved all the categories below Category:Mass (liturgy) to categories named Category:Holy masses in.... Although I can acknowledge that "holy mass" is the formal? term used by the Roman Catholic Church, I can't see any single reason for following the specific jargon of an organization instead or a neutral term. Category:Masses (liturgy) in..., Category:Roman Catholic massess in... and even Category:Masses in... are perfectly valid terms and follow not only the consensus for years, but a neutral poitt of view. Opinions? --Discasto _talk 16:10, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

In my opinion, the categories were correct the first time. "Holy" is a point of view statement, what is holy to one religion might be anathema to another. There is no reason to put pointy terms into the category names. Ellin Beltz (talk) 16:48, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Discasto: it was on the list of requested moves: look here. Two weeks are considered as adequate time for possible objections. Six weeks had passed and there was no objections, so the procedure had to be fullfilled. Wieralee (talk) 17:09, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

@Wieralee: No, it isn't. It clearly states (bold is mine) that "If the proposal is clearly or potentially controversial or requires a broader discussion, you can transfer the discussion to Commons:Categories for discussion (replacing this template with {{tl:cfd}})". If you're not able to acknowledge that this is a controversial movement, maybe you should stop renaming categories. Anyway, I'm goint to revert your movement and list the category for discussion. Feel free to argument the movement there. --Discasto _talk 19:59, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm of the mind that if nobody objects in six weeks of a proposition being live, the chances are it isn't going to be a contested or controversial decision. As for the term "Holy", I don't think we have any requirement for neutrality on Commons, especially when the organisation themselves use a term. Not religious myself, but the Holy/anathema distinction is fake if the roman catholic church calls them "Holy" and nobody calls them "anathema". Like most religion, whether they are in fact "holy" is unworthy of debate since one might just as well try to compare the customs of two African tribes for "correctness". I'd advise against any reversion of this move before a CfD has been fully argued, that's just begging the question and wasting resources. Rodhullandemu (talk) 20:25, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Discasto: This category has gone through a complete Commons procedure: everyone could express their opposition, but no one did. Everyone could mark this proposal as controversial, but no one did. So the category has been moved.

"You can transfer the discussion" means the opportunity, not necessity (you have to, you must)... I'm not involved in this subject personally: I'm completely indifferent about what the final name of this category is. It wasn't my request, you should talk with ŠJů who has proposed this movement. I only saw the movement request without any oppose.

If you disagree with this, why did not you raise your objection at the appointed time? If there was at least one vote of objection, I would never have moved this category :( Wieralee (talk) 20:38, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

I didn't disagree just because the renaming, being "controversial" (see above) wasn't were it should be, in Commons:Categories for discussion. Controversial renaming should be in the proper place because people usually doesn't review non controversial renamings. Pretty easy to understand. Again, if you've not able to see that this is a potentially controversial renaming, maybe you shouldn't dare to carry out category movements. --Discasto _talk 20:42, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

What indication should we expect that a move might be controversial? Somebody objecting to a proposed move? Or somebody coming along six weeks later after the move? Sorry, we are not expected to be pyschics here. The reason we list proposed moves for two weeks is precisely so that they can be tagged as controversial, and if you come along later, I'm afraid you really have nothing to complain about. Rodhullandemu (talk) 20:51, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

The main reason for the rename request was the change from singular to plural. A secondary correction was a change from a non-standard (unpreferred) format (dissambiguation brackets in the middle of the category name) to more standard one (commonly used unambiguous adjective). Generally, for items from any specific field we prefer a common terms and nomenclature of the field - including religous terms and titles as Holy Cross, True Cross, Virgin Mary or Our Lady etc. No need to start endless discussions each time. --ŠJů (talk) 20:57, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

@Discasto: for absolutely non-controversial renames, rename command should be proposed directly instead of {{Move}} proposal. A {{Move}} proposal is at least two weeks displayed in the Requested moves. If somebody is concerned in category naming, he need to periodically monitor all these proposal pages and categories. This proposal was a routine correction which requires not a broader discussion. --ŠJů (talk) 21:10, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it requires a broad discussion, as I've mentioned (and I'm not the only one) it makes no sense to use Catholic terminology for something that anyone not being Catholic does not understand. "Mass" is the term broadly used by any English-speaking person, but not "Holy Mass". It's pretty obvious. The point here is that, from a methodological point of view, the request hasn't been warned in any of the categories inheriting from the root category. That's the reason why nobody has noticed. The categories have been there for years and some discussion won't be useless. I'll take care of the renaming and movement if a consensus is finally reached. Feel free to provide your arguments here: Commons:Categories for discussion/2017/04/Category:Mass (liturgy) by country. Best regards --Discasto _talk 21:22, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Request for comment

Hi For the flag of Algeria, there are problems. Could you help us to reach a consensus ? We are in the presence of contributors of circumstances, who are in hibernation for months and then all come back at the same time when a discussion is revived by one of them. I take the initiative to argue but they just come to oppose without arguments. It can not go on. --Panam2014 (talk) 16:39, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Category:Gare de Haren (Belgique)

Someone created a French category and moved the files from :Category:Haren train station. It is not conform the naming conventions of Belgian train stations. Can the category be removed?Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:00, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

April 17

Help to activate the Perform batch task tool (VisualFileChange)

Hello everyone, I would like to know how to activate the Perform batch task tool (VisualFileChange) on the Commons platform? Thanks in advance. - Lucas.Belo (talk) 16:52, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Please, see Help:VisualFileChange.js. Ruslik (talk) 19:54, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

@Ruslik0: Thanks, but This page does not teach to enable the tool on the commons platform, at least this is not clear in this entry. -- Lucas.Belo (talk) 17:04, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

It does, please read the page linked by Ruslik again. Especially Step 1. --Steinsplitter (talk) 17:20, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

It's all right now, just enter a Java code and the Perform batch task will appear as a commons tool. Thank you all -- Lucas.Belo (talk) 17:41, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

FoP on international bridges

For this new trambridge Category:Trambrücke Kehl/Straßburg there is some fun for the legal experts: There is no FOP in France but there is FOP in Germany. Am I correct that this bridge can only be fotografed from the German side? So File:Kehl-Straßburg brug 2017 4.jpg (from the French side) would be not OK?Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:43, 14 April 2017 (UTC) PS: The tramline will be inaugurated 29 april.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:43, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

That's a tricky one. To use a simpler example, let's say we stand in Germany and take a photo across the river to a building entirely in France. Under French FOP that would be a no-no, but under German FOP it would (probably) be ok. Which rule applies in that situation? What rule applies if we take a photo of a German building from France? Then we can model the bridge as two abutting buildings, one in each country. My intuition would be that, to prevent any worries, we should just apply the more restrictive one (aka kill it with fire). -mattbuck (Talk) 12:43, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

That's quite a good example of why Commons FOP policy is broken. Nobody really cares about no FoP in France, except for a few famous monuments. So apllying the most restrictive rule is just shooting oneself in the foot. Regards, Yann (talk) 12:52, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

The precedent we have used in the past is to accept the image if it's taken from a public place in a country (here, Germany) where FoP exists. The image copyright has come into effect in a place where German law applies, and the fact that the courts in France might locally apply restrictions should not prevent us from hosting the image. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 13:36, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Isn't we respecting country of origin copyrights law (France on case of building)? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:14, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

We don't have any community guidelines on this. We probably should, as the question comes up regularly. I can't find it just now but there was a previous discussion about taking pictures of embassy buildings. The community simply needs to make a decision based on what we think is right, as there is no definitive international rule of law that we have to follow. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:38, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

I think both countries laws (object and subject locations) should be considered. But aren't embassy buildings in most cases works of local architects? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:44, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

The issue there is that they invariably stand on land which is, under international law, considered to be subject to the law of the embassy's country. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:26, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Not even the ground. The Ecuadorean embassy in London (welknown for a famous resident) is only on one floor.Smiley.toerist (talk) 19:55, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

There was at least this case of South Korea (no FoP) taken from North Korea (FoP), closed as deleted, and later restored: Commons:Undeletion_requests/Archive/2015-12#Panmunjom. Actually there are more: Commons:Deletion requests/File:Joint Security Area from North Korea.jpg. Regards, Yann (talk) 18:54, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Sounds like French laws apply. If I stand in Germany and use a rifle to kill somebody across the river in France, then I should be subject to French law. I'm not going to argue that the French half is unimportant/incidental when the intent is to photograph the entire bridge. Glrx (talk) 22:05, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Again, this is a very bad comparaison. Nobody is going to die when publishing pictures. You are free to shoot yourself in the foot, but don't complain if it hurts... Yann (talk) 23:49, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

or if a border patrol agent shoots and kills a teen in Mexico, you would expect Mexican law to prevail, except when it does not.[17] since we're telling the French to get stuffed, maybe we can tell Fried about the Air Force Memorial.[18] but then no reason to tell an american architect to get stuffed. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 00:36, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

The problem here is not simply which country's copyright applies (France or Germany), but what the Commons policy is in this situation. According to Commons policy (Commons:Licensing#Interaction of US and non-US copyright law): "Uploads of non-U.S. works are normally allowed only if the work is either in the public domain or covered by a valid free license in both the U.S. and the country of origin of the work." The original question is clearly answered at Commons:Freedom of panorama#Choice of law:

The question of what country's law applies in a freedom of panorama case is an unsettled issue. There are several potentially conflicting legal principles, any of which might be used to determine the applicable law (see en:Choice of law). The law used is likely to be one of the following: the country in which the object depicted is situated, the country from which the photograph was taken, or the country in which the photo is used (viewed/sold). Because of the international reach of Commons, ensuring compliance with the laws of all countries in which files are or might be reused is not realistic. Since the question of choice of law with regard to freedom of panorama cases is unsettled, current practice on Commons is to retain photos based on the more lenient of the country in which the object is situated and the country in which the photo is taken. For example, North Korea has a suitable freedom of panorama law, while South Korea's law, limited to non-commercial uses, is not sufficient for Commons. As a result of the practice of applying the more lenient law, we would generally retain photos taken from North Korea of buildings in South Korea (e.g., File:Joint Security Area from North Korea.jpg) as well as photos taken from South Korea of buildings in North Korea (e.g., File:070401 Panmunjeom3.jpg).

• Related reading: Infringement in the Internet Age - Primetime for Harmonized Conflict-of-Laws Rules? by Anita B. Frohlich, 2008.
• Note wmf:DMCA Oldenburg (November 2012) and WMF response to it on the application of US freedom of panorama, not source country freedom of panorama, essentially endorsing lex loci protectionis for FOP.

Now, as for photos of embassies, the land on which an embassy stands is not the territory of the embassy country. (See [19], [20], [21], [22]) Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), the land on which an embassy is located is "immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution." (Article 22 §3) Furthermore: "The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission." (Article 22 §1) So the land of the embassy is not officially sovereign territory of the embassy country, but is immune by treaty from entry by law enforcement agents of the host country. So, if the German embassy in Paris displayed a statue that is copyrighted by the author, France's copyright applies to taking photographs of the statue when displayed at the German embassy in Paris. France's copyright laws also apply to photographs of the embassy, whether taken from the street or from inside the embassy fence. AHeneen (talk) 04:18, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

There may be another way to approach the subject. In the the discussions the subject is treated as one indivisible object, ether being in one country our the other. The border is in the middle of the river so there is a French and German part of the bridge. If the bridge is fotographed from the German side such as in File:Kehl-Straßburg brug 2017 1.jpg only the German part of the bridge is visible, with maybe a minimalis French part in the background. Depending on the viewpoint some pictures wil always be accepted.Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:48, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Sidebar "Countries of Europe"

It is fine to have this new bar re. countries of Europe. But I have some remarks about it: Isle of Man is not a country on its own, i.e. state, but depends on the United Kingdom esp. re. foreign politics. On the other hand, I missed Vatican City (an independent state) and San Marino.Reykholt (talk) 06:50, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City are officialy independant states, but in practice they have all strong institutional agreements with the surrounding country. By the way in the sport world, Wales and Scotland are independant countries.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:37, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Categories being deleted

Special:Contributions/Black_Morgan shows that this user has emptied out categories such as Category:Illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Category:Arthur Rackham's illustrations of Wagner's operas and Category:Alberich, dumping everything into Category:Arthur Rackham, even where it contains works of multiple artists. Someone up for talking to this user and trying to get these categories back in order?--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:39, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be more effective to first contact/notify (User talk:Black Morgan) the culprit directly? --Túrelio (talk) 08:51, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

No. If you don't care, fine, but the best I could tonight was dump it in someone else's hands.--Prosfilaes (talk) 09:23, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

if you do not care enough to actually collaborate, then no i do not either. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 16:23, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

65.000 uploads originating from Facebook.

Hi all,

On User:Basvb/FBMD I have published lists of all 65.000 files which contain FBMD in their exif-data. This is an indication that they were uploaded to Facebook previously and downloaded from there. See this previous discussion. Some of these files are truly free, either because the Facebook uploader is the same person as the Commons uploader; because the files were accompanied by an explicit permission statement; because the files are in the public domain; or because we received permission via OTRS. However taking that into account we are left with thousands of simple copyright violations. Most often portraits from notable persons taken from their Facebook without evidence of permission. If anybody is interested in going to (parts) of these lists that is highly appreciated. Greetings, Basvb (talk) 18:00, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi,

For most of these files, we should ask for the original file, not a copy from Facebook. Regards, Yann (talk) 18:22, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Why does everyone use the same botched query? FBMD* matches FBM and results in 1,887 false positives in your report. You can see a much improved query User talk:Dispenser#Facebook FBMD Reports. And group/sort them by uploader rather than filename. Finally, Bureau of Land Management seems to be using Facebook to store and organize their photos. —Dispenser (talk) 13:25, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

I simply forked the older query, so that's why there is the same regex error (found it weird but didn't think to much on the *). Thank you for showing your query with some additional improvements. Working from an onwiki list was a bit easier to me than working from quarry. Putting both the users and date before the filenames in the table was another improvement which could still be made. One question on your query. Why exclude FlickR images? Aren't those potential (unintentionally) FlickR-washed images? There seem to be quite a few (larger) collections between those images that are ok. Thanks for your suggestions. Basvb (talk) 14:46, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Seemed like an easy way to exclude the Bureau of Land Management photos and any other large group we copy off Flickr. Certainly easier for SQL newbies to understand than shoving the data into a temporary table, creating another temporary table of the users >100 photos, then querying both tables. Dispenser (talk) 15:56, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Help requested in finding good quality images of Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property for exhibition at UNESCO HQ

Dear all

I'm currently in the process of sourcing photographs for an exhibition at UNESCO HQ in Paris. The Exhibition covers many kinds of cultural heritage, I have managed to source images for most of the subjects we aim to cover except Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property. If anyone could suggest any images that would illustrate the following themes, one image for each of the themes I would be very grateful, it would be very helpful if the images chosen were overall geographically diverse.

• Illicit trafficking in cultural property and the financing of terrorism
• The looting of archaeological sites
• Role and importance of documentation (importance of inventories)
• Importance of specialized police and customs units (for example, the Guardia Civil or the Carabinieri)
• Engaging with the art market (collectors, auction houses) regarding due-diligence practices and provenance check
• What can the general public do to stop illicit trafficking (role of awareness-raising and education)
• Online sales of cultural goods and the role and duty of Internet Service Providers

Many thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 17:26, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

The only possibly-relevant photo I know of offhand is File:Pesne Girl.jpg (an old B&W photo of a painting considered lost after having been confiscated by Nazis)... AnonMoos (talk) 23:15, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-16

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [23]
• You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList. [24]
• The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [25]

Problems

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this. This will also happen on 3 May.

Changes this week

• There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• stats.wikimedia.org will be replaced. You can see the new prototype. You can leave feedback on this change.
• Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback. [26]
• From next week, user scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions will show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. [27][28]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:31, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

April 18

Error with geo-coordinated

I wanted to know why some of my own images with geo-coordinated don't appear on maps. This file appears (1), but this other, in the same city, doesn't (2).

--HVL talk 15:55, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

ファイル‐ノート:Suzuka-river Ise-rw.jpg

Please, transfer ja:ファイル‐ノート:Suzuka-river Ise-rw.jpg to Commons. Thank You for help. --Kusurija (talk) 19:51, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kusurija: I found a neat tool that can help: https://tools.wmflabs.org/commonshelper/ WhisperToMe (talk) 22:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

@WhisperToMe: I tried it, but it does not work for me... --Kusurija (talk) 10:20, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kusurija: is there an error message you received? Remember that you have to authorize it in OAuth first before you use it (the page gives a link to the authorization page) WhisperToMe (talk) 21:02, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

@WhisperToMe: It is OK now. Thank You. --Kusurija (talk) 21:14, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: ★ Poké⁹⁵ 08:31, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Template for a category merge?

I started Category:Dr. Carlos d'Assumpção Park not realizing that Category:Parque Dr. Carlos d'Assumpção already existed. Is there a particular template I could use to ask for a merging of the two categories?

Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 22:16, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

• Uncontroversial category moves/merges can be requested at User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands. It's also usually really easy to do something like this yourself with VisualFileChange to edit all occurrences of one category name to the other, then change the one you are moving away from to a {{Cat redirect}}. And I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to do this. - Jmabel ! talk 01:04, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Thank you! WhisperToMe (talk) 21:02, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: ★ Poké⁹⁵ 08:30, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Imagen Jardin des Plantes (3189983467).jpg

Señalo que en esta imagen, en Commons, tanto en alemán como en francés se indica que se trata de la zona de monos de la Ménagerie, pero esto debe estar equivocado, ya que lo que se observan allí son tigres. Es por ello que al agregar la descripción en español de esta imagen en Commons, indiqué precisamente eso, que se trata lo que en francés se llama Fauverie (albergue de fieras, o albergue de grandes carnívoros), y que probablemente se encuentre del lado de la zona de jaulas, del edificio que se muestra en Commons en la siguiente imagen Fauverie - Jardin des Plantes de Paris.jpg. Me parece importante corroborar lo que señalo in situ, lo cual puede hacerse a través de los wikipedistas que se encuentren en París.

Por otra parte, reafirmo mi posición por el uso que a esta imagen se le da en la Wikipedia en francés, en el artículo que se titula : Ménagerie du jardin des plantes. Allí, en la sección que lleva por título Grande fauverie, se ha insertado la imagen Jardin des Plantes (3189983467).jpg, y el respectivo pie de imagen indica : La fauverie côté cages en 2009 lorsque des tigres étaient encore présentés.

--Juan C Anselmi (talk) 13:13, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

• Convenience link: File:Jardin des Plantes (3189983467).jpg. - Jmabel ! talk 14:34, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
• Clearly the caption is wrong and should be corrected. @Bohème: It looks like the error was introduced here. - Jmabel ! talk 14:34, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Rectification  Done. --Bohème (talk) 18:16, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: ★ Poké⁹⁵ 08:28, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

fonts

• I noticed that Wikimedia Commons does not seem to have any font files. If possible, I would suggest allowing uploads to Commons of free open-source font files. This will allow a centralized way for MediaWiki installations to utilize custom fonts with CSS by importing them from Commons (like we already do with images and videos). This is particularly useful to be able to display characters not in the Unicode standard on wikis (such as Klingon letters). Nicole Sharp (talk) 12:47, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
  • In which format do you think they should be uploaded? Ruslik (talk) 20:06, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
    • I haven't tried myself, so I don't know what file formats are supported here for uploads. But I would think to take the same approach as with images, i.e. any file format should be fine, as long as the licenses for the fonts are free and open-source for public redistribution. As open-source, they should be able to be converted into any format. Ubuntu Fonts and Google Fonts might be good places to start. Nicole Sharp (talk) 20:50, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Nicole Sharp -- The http://openfontlibrary.org/ site exists as a site for freely-licensed downloadable fonts, so we would be going into competition with them. Wikimedia Commons doesn't currently have downloadable fonts, but it does have fonts installed for rendering by RSVG of vector SVG files to PNG rasters. Fonts used to render text on web pages have to be in the highly-specific WOFF format... AnonMoos (talk) 23:10, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

For using downloadable fonts with CSS, we have the ULS mediawiki extension. Bawolff (talk) 01:37, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

User:Nicole Sharp is 100% right that we should offer fonts. Since those are open repositories, we can mirror one another and expand upon them--that's a good thing. By your thinking, we are in "competition" with Flickr which allows free media and YouTube which allows free video. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:47, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Flickr and Youtube are not special-purpose repositories of freely-licensed / reusable files, so I completely fail to see what purpose your attempted analogy serves. I'm not saying that the fact that Open Font Library exists means that we shouldn't expand into fonts, but it would be courteous to inform that site if we plan to do so, since they probably have a lot of specialized expertise to offer, if asked nicely... Another thing to think about is that Open Font Library accepts ZIP file uploads, since font files are often distributed together with associated licensing, documentation, sample image, etc. files. (In this respect, a font is more like a software package than a single media file.) What would be the Wikimedia Commons equivalent of this (since ZIP files are unlikely to be allowed to be uploaded here)? By the way, the vision of uploading fonts here which would be immediately available to render Wikipedia article text is unlikely to be realized, since that would be a kind of security hole. -- AnonMoos (talk) 01:08, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Notification of DMCA takedown demand - Rainbow Falls Hilo

In compliance with the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and at the instruction of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal counsel, one or more files have been deleted from Commons. Please note that this is an official action of the WMF office which should not be undone. If you have valid grounds for a counter-claim under the DMCA, please contact me.The takedown can be read here.

Affected file(s):

• File:Rainbow_Falls_Hilo.jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

To discuss this DMCA takedown, please go to COM:DMCA#Rainbow Falls Hilo Thank you! Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 23:08, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

• If that has merit, then all the contributions of AlaskaDave~commonswiki (talk · contribs) should be reexamined. I see that several have been nominated for deletion, but why not all? - Jmabel ! talk 01:07, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Jmabel: I had looked at them all... some where already tagged for speedy, and I marked more. A number of them, however, have EXIF info from a specific camera and cellphone, and were taken in Hawaii over a short period... I did not find any indication those were copyvios. I suspect the editor uploaded some vacation photos, and then added a few more 'better' ones from the web. - Revent^talk 11:51, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

April 19

New filters for Recent Changes - Beta deployment schedule for your wiki

Hello!

Sorry to write in English. Please help translate to your language! Please also inform everyone about this change.

The Collaboration team is going to launch a new Beta feature on your wiki, ⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽. This deployment would happen on April 24 (hour to be precised). This new feature will be listed with all other Beta features.

What it this new feature?

This feature improves Special:RecentChanges and Special:RecentChangesLinked by adding new useful features that will ease vandalism tracking and support of newcomers:

• Filtering - filter recent changes with easy-to-use and powerful filters combinations.
• Highlighting - add a colored background to the different changes you are monitoring, to quickly identify the ones that matter to you.

Some wikis have also access to Quality and Intent Filters, user predictions based on ORES that identify real vandalism or good faith intent contributions that need assistance. A separate process has to be performed to have access to those predictions that will make Quality and Intent filters working.

What will happen?

When the deployment will be done, users who want to try the new filters will be able to do so by activating them in their Beta preferences. Other users who don't want to try the new filters will have nothing to do. They will see no changes in the Recent Changes page.

How to prepare this change?

You can discover the purpose of this project by visiting the quick tour help page. Also, please check the documentation (and help to translate it).

For an early trial, the new filters are available on mediawiki.org's Beta features.

What will happen next? At the moment, we are deploying the New filters on all wikis? Then, our focus will be to look at what changes will be needed to spread the new filtering interface to other review pages, especially Watchlist. We're also exploring how to incorporate the tools we didn't include in the new interface in this round, like the Tag Filters, time-frame selector and Namespace filter (File, Categories...).

You can ping me if you have questions. You can also check the FAQ.

All the best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:44, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

PS: if this message is not at the right place, please move it and ping me. :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Trizek (WMF) (talk • contribs)

The deployment will happen at 14:00 UTC. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:32, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Category disambiguation

I have started a guideline on disambiguation at Commons:Category disambiguation. To try and reduce the amount of conflict this causes with the views of Auntof6, Foroa, Blackcat and Nilfanion I am proposing that this becomes a proper guideline rather than an essay. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:24, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

April 23

Help

Hi As I am redesigning the main page of a local Wikipedia I wanted to add the picture if the Day and the media of the day of Commons to the local Wikipedia. How can it be done is there any codes or something so it can be directly linked to the local version of Wikipedia --✝iѵɛɳ२२४०^{†ลℓк †๏ мэ} 01:58, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Template:Potd and Template:Motd should work. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 02:17, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

@Slowking4: will it work in a local Wikipedia project? If I copy paste it there --✝iѵɛɳ२२४०^{†ลℓк †๏ мэ} 02:50, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

no, but you can create a local template that transcludes the template on commons. i.e. w:Template:POTD. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 11:09, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Template transclusions are not currently cross-site. You will have to make a bot to do automated updates. --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 11:26, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

@Tiven2240: You can get POTD locally, it just needs to be trough wikidata instead of commons. POTD is replicated to wikidata with an bot in the item d:Q14334596. Unlike commons, you can get the data from wikidata to your local wikipedia project, in this case with {{#property:P18|from=Q14334596}}.--Snaevar (talk) 14:22, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

@Snaevar: Is MOTD too replicated on wikidata? If so do give me the item code and property code too...--✝iѵɛɳ२२४०^{†ลℓк †๏ мэ} 06:12, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Pride featured picture drive

Comments and feedback on the planned international LGBT+ Wiki Loves Pride featured picture drive are welcome on the meta discussion page, see link. The drive will be promoted on 31 different language Wikipedias.

The drive encourages high quality photographs from Pride events and other LGBT+ cultural related images to be released to Commons. The goal is to see a jump in the numbers of LGBT+ cultural related photographs nominated for Featured Picture status on all Wikimedia projects.

Help is needed to prepare a banner in your language! See banner translations.

Thank you! --Fæ (talk) 12:43, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Submission about OTRS for Wikimania conference

There is a submission for the Wikimania Conference in Montreal to address issues with OTRS. Currently, the submission is reviewed for approval. --George Ho (talk) 04:55, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Papal seminary Sri Lanka

Does this building stil exist? I suspect the postcard is pre WW I (standard Post Card backside). I cant find any relevant Sri Lankan category. The place Ampitiya, close to Kandy mentioned in en:Papal Seminary I didnt find in the Commons, or any catholic buildings in Kandy. Is the UK licence template good for Sri Lanka colonial time?Smiley.toerist (talk) 17:43, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Today there is Monte Fano, Sylvester's Monastery in Ampitiya, but don't know if that is the same building. The website of the Sylvestro Benedictine Monks Sri Lanka has a long history section, though … Then there is the Kandy diocese with the St. Anthony’s Cathedral located in Kandy (→ en:Roman Catholic Diocese of Kandy). --El Grafo (talk) 07:52, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Wait, I think I've got it: It's part of today's "National Seminary", which lies to the north-east of the Montefano Monastery [29]. Here's a recent indoor-shot of the building. --El Grafo (talk) 08:23, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

I modified the en:Papal Seminary article with the mention of the National Seminary. What is this ´Lady of Landa´ thing in the name. A local saint?Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:43, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

@Smiley.toerist: afaik, "Our Lady of [Something]" usually refers to "Virgin Mary" in the sense of a en:Marian apparition. Based on that pattern, "Our Lady of Lanka" probably refers to a vision of Virgin Mary someone had in Sri Lanka. There's also the en:Basilica of Our Lady of Lanka in Tewatte, Sri Lanka. Cheers, --El Grafo (talk) 13:18, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Subsequent research seems to suggest that there was noone having a vision and it was just a way of naming your church after Mary. --El Grafo (talk) 13:29, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

April 20

Tech News: 2017-17

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• New filters for recent changes are now available as a beta feature on most wikis. You can turn it on in your preferences. Remaining wikis will have the new filters on 9 May. [30]
• When administrators, bureaucrats and stewards make a user a member of a user group they can now set an expiry date. A user group is for example "administrators" or "bots". This means that they can give someone user rights for a limited time. This is similar to how blocks and page protections can be limited in time. Special:UserRights will have new options for this. You can read more about user groups. [31]

Problems

• Since the data centre test last week the content translation tool has been disabled. This is because of a database problem. It will be back as soon as the problem has been solved. [32]

Changes this week

• The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [33]
• Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [34]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

April 26

Review of initial updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. Message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

The Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. For 15 years, Wikimedians have worked together to build the largest free knowledge resource in human history. During this time, we've grown from a small group of editors to a diverse network of editors, developers, affiliates, readers, donors, and partners. Today, we are more than a group of websites. We are a movement rooted in values and a powerful vision: all knowledge for all people. As a movement, we have an opportunity to decide where we go from here.

This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve. We hope to design an inclusive process that makes space for everyone: editors, community leaders, affiliates, developers, readers, donors, technology platforms, institutional partners, and people we have yet to reach. There will be multiple ways to participate including on-wiki, in private spaces, and in-person meetings. You are warmly invited to join and make your voice heard.

The immediate goal is to have a strategic direction by Wikimania 2017 to help frame a discussion on how we work together toward that strategic direction.

Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Beginning with this message, monthly reviews of these updates will be sent to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.

Here is a review of the updates that have been sent so far:

• Update 1 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (15 December 2016)
  • Introduction to process and information about budget spending resolution to support it
• Update 2 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (23 December 2016)
  • Start of search for Lead Architect for movement strategy process
• Update 3 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (8 January 2017)
  • Plans for strategy sessions at upcoming Wikimedia Conference 2017
• Update 4 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (11 January 2017)
  • Introduction of williamsworks
• Update 5 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (2 February 2017)
  • The core movement strategy team, team tracks being developed, introduction of the Community Process Steering Committee, discussions at WikiIndaba conference 2017 and the Wikimedia movement affiliates executive directors gathering in Switzerland
• Update 6 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (10 February 2017)
  • Tracks A & B process prototypes and providing feedback, updates on development of all four Tracks

More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 20:31, 15 February 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

Dummy sig for archiving ★ Poké⁹⁵ 08:33, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

February 16

Overview #2 of updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

As we mentioned last month, the Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve.

Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Each month, we are sending overviews of these updates to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.

Here is a overview of the updates that have been sent since our message last month:

• Update 7 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (16 February 2017)
  • Development of documentation for Tracks A & B
• Update 8 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (24 February 2017)
  • Introduction of Track Leads for all four audience tracks
• Update 9 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (2 March 2017)
  • Seeking feedback on documents being used to help facilitate upcoming community discussions

More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 19:43, 9 March 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

Dummy sig for archiving ★ Poké⁹⁵ 08:34, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

March 10

Start of the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections

Please accept our apologies for cross-posting this message. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections.

The Board of Trustees (Board) is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long-term sustainability of the Wikimedia Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. More information about this role can be found on Meta-Wiki. Please read the letter from the Board of Trustees calling for candidates.

The candidacy submission phase will last from April 7 (00:00 UTC) to April 20 (23:59 UTC).

We will also be accepting questions to ask the candidates from April 7 to April 20. You can submit your questions on Meta-Wiki.

Once the questions submission period has ended on April 20, the Elections Committee will then collate the questions for the candidates to respond to beginning on April 21.

The goal of this process is to fill the three community-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The election results will be used by the Board itself to select its new members.

The full schedule for the Board elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.

• April 7 (00:00 UTC) – April 20 (23:59 UTC) – Board nominations
• April 7 – April 20 – Board candidates questions submission period
• April 21 – April 30 – Board candidates answer questions
• May 1 – May 14 – Board voting period
• May 15–19 – Board vote checking
• May 20 – Board result announcement goal

In addition to the Board elections, we will also soon be holding elections for the following roles:

• Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
  • There are five positions being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.

• Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson (Ombuds)
  • One position is being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.

Please note that this year the Board of Trustees elections will be held before the FDC and Ombuds elections. Candidates who are not elected to the Board are explicitly permitted and encouraged to submit themselves as candidates to the FDC or Ombuds positions after the results of the Board elections are announced.

More information on this year's elections can be found on Meta-Wiki. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the election talk page on Meta-Wiki, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-electionswikimedia.org.

On behalf of the Election Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, 03:36, 7 April 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

Dummy sig for archiving ★ Poké⁹⁵ 08:34, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

CropTool Down?

I'm getting a "502 Bad Gateway" page whenever I try and use the CropTool . Any idea how I can alert the appropriate owner? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:43, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Tool owners are listed on https://tools.wmflabs.org/?list --Malyacko (talk) 10:17, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

File Moving Interface Error?

Hi everyone, it seems I'm suffering from a strange issue with the File Mover script. Please see this screenshot. The move option doesn't show up on page load and shows after a refresh. Rather tiresome for batch moving. I have tried with Chrome, Chromium and Firefox yet it persists. Any solution? Cheers, ƬheStrikeΣagle 17:32, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Such errors are usually related to a conflict of scripts that you are using. Please, review them. Ruslik (talk) 20:34, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

I haven't added any new script for almost 2 years now! Definitely not the reason as it has been around since the last 3 days and no changes were made in this time! ƬheStrikeΣagle 02:55, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Ruslik is nonetheless right: In latest update of Mediawiki software is a breaking change: Some Javascript functions, that had been functionless for years (the developers call it no-op) and deprecated even longer, have been removed. The problem now is, that a script using one of these removed functions will result in errors, and this will also prevent valuable scripts coming later in the chain from loading. So, you have to research now which one or more of your scripts is/are the culprit/-s. — Speravir – 18:26, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Twinkle is the only script currently active for me. And it happens only when I try to open all the files in simultaneous tabs for inspection. Opening the files painstakingly one by one works fine. ƬheStrikeΣagle 08:29, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Which version of Twinkle? The one linked on Commons:Twinkle? Apparently this is loading other scripts in background. So, actually every loaded script has to be checked. (The original on Enwiki seems to be rewritten, but I am not a script expert.) — Speravir – 16:52, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

@Maxim: Could you, please, check your scripts belonging to your old (?) user Maximr, whether they have to be updated after recent breaking changes? And perhaps also the scripts of User:Kanonkas loaded by User:Kanonkas/twinkle.js, because he/she is very rarely active here. — Speravir – 17:02, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm surprised anyone would use an old version I copied 8/9 years ago. The version on enwiki was rewritten completely a while back. I vaguely understood what I was doing 9 years ago but it would beyond me to start debugging it now, plus I've not kept up well with technical changes (e.g. if anything's strongly different with the API). Apologies for not being more help. Maxim_(talk) 17:45, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

I would be also helpful if you reported any other information mentioned in en:Wikipedia:Reporting_JavaScript_errors. Ruslik (talk) 19:34, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Fixed Thanks everyone! I've commented the Twinkle script and everything seems to work fine! My bad I didn't bother to check the Twinkle script after adding it 2 years ago..Best, ƬheStrikeΣagle 15:56, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by:   — Jeff G. ツ 16:23, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Non-clear images

Hello.These images are useless due to lack of clarity

1. File:ORANGE-VESTED TRAFFIC COP KEEPS CARS MOVING AT BUSY INTERSECTION - NARA - 546656.jpg
2. File:ORANGE-VESTED TRAFFIC COP KEEPS CARS MOVING AT BUSY INTERSECTION - NARA - 546656.tif
3. File:TRAFFIC COP HEMMED IN BY HOMEBOUND TRAFFIC AT INTERSECTION OF 16TH AND K STREET NW - NARA - 546639.jpg
4. File:TRAFFIC COP HEMMED IN BY HOMEBOUND TRAFFIC AT INTERSECTION OF 16TH AND K STREET NW - NARA - 546639.tif

What do you think?Thank you --ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 11:13, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2: I suppose you could have done better with a color photo of moving traffic in 1973?   — Jeff G. ツ 14:44, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jeff G.: What do you mean?Do you mean they are rare and high-value images? ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 14:49, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2: They are at minimum examples of the blur you get with low-speed film, even when the camera settings are near-perfect, as well as examples of how close traffic officers got to hazardous vehicle emissions.   — Jeff G. ツ 14:57, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jeff G.: Well, can we add categories about these things?Thank you ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 15:12, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2: Yes, you can, but each of these files already has half a dozen categories.   — Jeff G. ツ 15:49, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

I disagree that their lack of clarity makes them useless. They may not be the best possible images of their subject, but their historic and visual value is worth more than their deletion. -Animalparty (talk) 18:30, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Pictures by Yoichi Okamoto, a rather famous photograper. That's reason enough to keep them! -- Herby (Vienna) (talk) 11:56, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

please do not delete archival files, that do not meet your aesthetic criteria as useless. the criteria is encyclopedic. fuzzy shots by notable photographer are notable. Slowking4 § Sander.v.Ginkel's revenge 11:59, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

@Jeff G., Animalparty, Herbert Ortner, and Slowking4: I am convinced of their importance. Thank you. ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 09:41, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by:   — Jeff G. ツ 15:53, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Lua version of {{Creator}} is now live

I just switched {{Creator}} template to new code written in Lua: Module:Creator. Please report any problems at Template talk:Creator or at Module talk:Creator. --Jarekt (talk) 15:05, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Thx Pyb (talk) 07:59, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, good work. Strakhov (talk) 17:24, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

April 22

Question about SVG files displaying oddly

Hi

I'm working on extracting graphs from UNESCO open license publications and uploading them to Commons with a few other people. I'm having problems with the svg files, for some reason when they are uploaded both thumbnails and the Commons page for the files crop the images and does some odd things with the formatting but when I click on the image to see the full size versions they look fine. We're using the latest version of Inkscape and saving as Plain SVG format. Is this a fault on Commons?

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 14:35, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T35245

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T55899

I see one "warning issue" and one "error issue" with the one file I checked. The error issue is: "Text element found with list of coordinates." (See phab:T35245 for details). The "warning issue" is "Mask element found with maskUnits set" (see phab:T55899 for details). Both these issues make the files not be rendered properly by Wikimedia's SVG renderer. --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 17:17, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Fixing source code ("derived from")

Hi everybody,

I've found a user, which translates maps + charts into Arabic, but he generally uses

Derivative from: [[:File:Kingdom of Aragon-1037.svg|this file]]

instead of

{{derived from|Kingdom of Aragon-1037.svg}}

Is there any way to automatically fix this?

Cheers, Transifex (talk) 16:40, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

You can consider en:Wikipedia:AWB. Ruslik (talk) 18:01, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

It works with also with VFC, see Help:VisualFileChange.js. This can be activated by any user, for AWB you need a special right. With VFC it could be done using this search: file: insource:"derivative from" insource:"this file" insource:/"derivative from [[:"[^]]+"|this file]]"/i (I could do this, if wanted). But the bigger issue is, that the counterpart {{Derivative versions}} cannot added that easy (though it's also with VFC quite complex: the regex has to be more elaborated than shown here for search). — Speravir – 22:42, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

The strategy discussion. The Cycle 2 will start on May 5

The first cycle of the Wikimedia movement strategy process recently concluded. During that period, we were discussing the main directions for the Wikimedia movement over the next 15 years. There are more than 1500 summary statements collected from the various communities, but unfortunately, only 1 from your local discussion. The strategy facilitators and many volunteers have summarized the discussions of the previous month. A quantitative analysis of the statements will be posted on Meta for translation this week, alongside the report from the Berlin conference.

The second cycle will begin soon. It's set to begin on May 5 and run until May 31. During that period, you will be invited to dive into the main topics that emerged in the first cycle, discuss what they mean, which ones are the most important and why, and what their practical implications are. This work will be informed and complemented by research involving new voices that haven’t traditionally been included in strategy discussions, like readers, partners, and experts. Together, we will begin to make sense of all this information and organize it into a meaningful guiding document, which we will all collectively refine during the third and last cycle in June−July.

We want to help your community to be more engaged with the discussions in the next cycle. Now, we are looking for volunteers who could

• tell us where to announce the start of the Cycle 2, and how to do that, so we could be sure the majority of your community is informed and has a chance to feel committed, and
• facilitate the Cycle 2 discussions here, on Wikimedia Commons.

We are looking forward to your feedback!

Base (WMF) and SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:52, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

April 28

Astronomy expertise needed to correctly identify a file

File:M31 galaxy.jpg says M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) and galaxy in its title and is categorized as a galaxy. On the other hand, it says M13 (a globular cluster) in the description, and it looks more like a cluster than the galaxy. I wasn't sure if it might be just focussing on the core of the galaxy. Pinging @Mikeben4420: (the creator) to get his input. --Auntof6 (talk) 17:32, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Auntof6, it is definitely Messier 13. Compare the positioning of surrounding stars in this clearer photograph. I'll take care of the renaming and such. — Huntster (t @ c) 18:10, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

@Huntster: Thanks! --Auntof6 (talk) 18:52, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I must disagree; the surrounding stars do not match those around the M13 photo linked above. Compare with File:M 31 Andromède.jpg, for example (which has a similar orientation and limiting magnitude for foreground stars); note in particular the stars between the bright central region and the small satellite galaxy at lower right in the image in question. I’m quite confident this is a closeup of M31’s hub, and that the description, not the title, was incorrect.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 23:17, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

I could certainly be wrong, but to me the patterns match up. Regardless I yield to more experienced minds. — Huntster (t @ c) 02:59, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I’m no authority either, so I think it would be fair to ask for more pairs of eyes before deciding. I have another project I should finish first, but I’ll see if I can make a photo-overlay to demonstrate the match (or perhaps prove myself wrong). I might add that, although the image in question is pretty crude compared to the much larger & deeper exposures we have from high-end instruments, it has the virtue of approximating the view one can get through a small telescope or high-power field-glasses. But in the meantime, may I also draw your attention to the way many of the stars on the fringes of M13 appear to be aligned in arcs; this tend to give the cluster a furry outline when unresolved, while the bright spot in the photo under discussion has pretty smooth contours (and is surrounded by a faint glow, which I attribute to the disk of the galaxy).—Odysseus1479 (talk) 03:36, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, that's certainly M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. The nucleus is much too bright to be a globular cluster. Further to the point, the image in question appears to be an exact copy of this view of M31 from this source... which solves the identification but gives rise to another set of issues. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 04:19, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I am an astronomer. It is M31. The photo here is much easier to match up. But it does appear that it is not the work of the uploader. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:56, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

April 24

Andrew Anthony Angus

Andrew Anthony C Angus was born in the Philippines. He is a poet, playwright and scientist. — Preceding unsigned comment was added by 2602:306:CE1B:E8F0:75A0:ABCE:6AF1:1D63 (talk) 05:57, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

• What does that have to do with this site? - Jmabel ! talk 06:13, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

April 30

Office houseboats

How do you classify floating buildings used for other purposes than housing? Buildings are by definition not movable.Smiley.toerist (talk) 07:51, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@Smiley.toerist: Category:Floating buildings in the Netherlands.   — Jeff G. ツ 14:50, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Permission requests

If i'm wrong here to ask, plx could someone point me in the right direction: namely, i'm looking for a/the list of accepted permission requests you usually send if u want to upload pictures from some website. I really would like to know if this site is on the list /freestampcatalogue.com (kinda wanna upload some pics from there, and if there is no permission, would like to send some). Tnx in advance for the answer :) --Ivan VA (talk) 23:18, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi Ivan VA. This website is a stamp shop's online catalogue and its purpose is to sell stamps. Yes, it is free, as in you are free to look at the stamp images but many will likely still be in copyright so we will not be able to keep any images you upload from there and at an initial glance the quality if not great. There are some better sources. Postage stamp copyright is rather complex and varies greatly from country to country; all stamps of some countries are in the public domain while others are copyright for various lengths of time. Some countries have a fixed copyright term while other depend on the latest death date of the artist or engraver plus, most often, 70 years. You should refer to these two pages for additional information: Commons:Stamps/Public domain and Commons:Stamps/Public domain templates. We already have quite a large amount stamp images and you can browse them by their various sub-categories at Category:Stamps. Don't bother uploading stamps images unless you know they are freely licensed otherwise they will just get deleted causing you frustration. If you have some specific stamps in mind, just ping me or post on this talk page: Commons talk:Stamps/Public domain. Ww2censor (talk) 23:50, 30 April 2017 (UTC)