Commons:Village pump/Archive/2016/01

US Govt works being categorised as CC-PD-Mark

I have noticed that files using {{PD-USGov}} (and associated templates) are being categorised into Category:CC-PD-Mark. It would appear that the template has had "This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights." added to it. This is not correct, as US Govt works are only PD in the US. Can someone with the necessary permissions please make the necessary changes to have this removed and fixed. 177.67.82.190 04:38, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

US Govt works are PD every everywhere. Ruslik (talk) 13:05, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Ruslik0 that is not correct at all. US Govt works are only PD in the US. You can read more about that here. {{PD-USGov-CIA}} is somewhat closer to what the reality is. However, re-users from outside the US of US Govt works could be put into a very false of security by Commons US-Govt copyright tags here on Commons. All PD-USGov templates should have 1) a disclaimer that the work is ONLY PD in the US and 2) a disclaimer that re-users outside the US are warned to check the status with the relevant agency before attempting to use the content. Pinging: Odder to look at this. 106.68.153.3 16:11, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I have changed a number of the license tags in the PD-USGov category to state that the work is "in the public domain in the United States." as opposed to the work being "in the public domain." (Some of the PD-USGov license tags are protected and would have to be edited by administrators.) Even if it is unclear as to whether US government works can be copyrighted outside the US, this change should help clarify the situation. Perhaps adding a statement along the lines of "This work may be copyrighted in countries outside the US. See this article for details." to PD-USGov license tags could be useful. --Gazebo (talk) 21:06, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Can we get the necessary changes made to these templates? A change was requested here but Jarekt thinks we need discussion (the ping is for his benefit). It would appear that Multichill made these changes way back when. Firstly, we need to get a list of ALL PD-USGov templates for these changes to be implemented. 217.170.207.86 15:38, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

By the way, Category:CC-PD-Mark is added by {{Cc-pd-mark-footer}}, which just links to http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/. That page states clearly that "The work may not be free of known copyright restrictions in all jurisdictions. " which is consistent with the use in {{PD-USGov}} templates: It is PD in the US and it may or may not be free outside US. We could change "This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights." to better reflect http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/, but that might make it too wordy. --Jarekt (talk) 18:40, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Though the PDM (Public Domain Mark) license deed does not mention any specific jurisdictions, the information at the Creative Commons FAQ for the PDM states that "the PDM is recommended only for works that are free of known copyright restrictions around the world" (emphasis mine.) At the same time, the FAQ states that a user who applies the PDM to a work is not actually warranting or promising that the work is out of copyright worldwide unless the user chooses to make such a guarantee or the law requires that the user do so. Given that there are definite indications that US government works are not definitively out of copyright worldwide, it would seem that the PDM should not be used for PD-USGov license tags. (A situation where a work is hundreds of years old, for example, might be a more appropriate application for the PDM. This is mentioned in the CC FAQ.) --Gazebo (talk) 07:49, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

CommonsDelinker

Malfunction maintaining entries of deleted dupes: [1] and [2]. Didn't find another one looking back until december 20th. --Achim (talk) 13:46, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

@Magnus Manske: --Steinsplitter (talk) 15:29, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

January 02

Idealized images of children

• 
• 

These are idealized images of children from long past and are therefore interesting. Is there any classification for these kind of images? And who is Sylire Wilmotte?Smiley.toerist (talk) 15:48, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Une des multiple Sylvie Wilmotte [3]. --Havang(nl) (talk) 16:31, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately, not the Sylvie Wilmotte of 1904. When Google has a modern day version the ancient õnes are swamped.Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:46, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

January 03

Happy Public Domain Day 2016!

Logo Public Domain Day

On January 1 we celebrate Public Domain Day as many works of authors who died 70+ years ago now enter the public domain and can be used freely.

Let us be aware: copyright is temporary. It only lasts during the authors lifetime and 70 years afterwards (in most countries). During those years it is limiting Wikipedia and her sister projects in showing works of art, literature, public art and buildings in countries without freedom of panorama, and more in the articles. But now a new batch is freed from copyrights!

An overview of images and texts that are restored or added to the Wikimedia Commons, are collected on: this page.

Many of these files still need a place in articles. You can help!

You can also help by uploading new files of subjects that are freed of copyrights.
You can also help by tagging all requests for deletion pages with the category when the file can be restored, which will be/was deleted.

As I follow the log of restored files this week, more images and texts will follow. If still files or texts are missing in the list, let me know or add them yourselves.

A very happy Public Domain Day! Romaine (talk) 13:41, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Again, life+70 is not most countries. I doubt it's even the majority of countries. Of the ten countries with the highest population, five (China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan) are life+50, India is life+60, the US is publication+95, and only Brazil, Nigeria and Russia are life+70. That's 2.1 billion life+50, 1.3 billion life+60, 0.3 billion US, and only 0.5 billion life+70. We already have more than half the world's population (3.7 / 7.3 = 51%) not life+70 and we've only considered 10 countries.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:36, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

• Some of the freed files:

• 
  Leifur Eiríksson
• 
• 
  El Lissitzky
• 
• 
• 
  Alfred Ost
• 
  Leonid Pasternak
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Whinge —Quality of images after uploading

Over the last few months I've uploaded a number of scans of photographs from old magazines. When I upload them for at least a few minutes they remain in a state where great detail is discernible. Then a few minutes later the nice picture goes dark and I imagine readers asking themselves why the ... would anyone bother to upload this picture let alone display it with an article. I thought this might be temporary but evidently it is not. Here is one of the images that has almost completely lost detail. Eddaido (talk) 08:44, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Some kind of thumbnail generation problem - the full-size image seems fine. Looks like the levels are getting blown out for some reason? Maybe you should file a bug ([4]). BMacZero (talk) 01:45, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

The full size image is very far from "fine". I have the original still on my computer. I think the thumbnail is an accurate representation of the full size image. There is something that adjusts the image while I watch after the upload is done, some sort of automatic contrast whatsit. Eddaido (talk) 19:10, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

By "full size image", I mean the one that you get when you click the "Original File" link. The image on the file description page is still thumbnailed. That one looks lighter to me - is it right or is there still something wrong with it? BMacZero (talk) 19:51, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

A similar issue has recently been discussed in the german language forum. --Magnus (talk) 07:29, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

This is known bug: phab:T107706. Yann (talk) 17:37, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Yann. I'll just wait now unless there is something I should do? Eddaido (talk) 19:10, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Black and white scanned image quality

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T106516

Thank you! so much nicer!(jpg)

I've just uploaded two more that were shaded out instantly, no delay, and with lots of cross-hatching added. Eddaido (talk) 02:30, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

I’m sure part of the problem is the use of the PNG format. While also PNGs should be properly thumbnailed, in this case the type of image (scanned photograph, even if claned up) recommends JPG, a format whose thumbnail behaviour is much more satisfactory. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 06:41, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

One should never be forced to choose a lossy format because it won't thumbnail right. Anyone can convert the PNG file to a JPG and not loose anything, but not vice versa.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:23, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

You are right in principle, User:Prosfilaes: We should not be allowing hackjobs to compensate for glitchy software, and indeed there’s a special place in Hell for those who use the JPEG image file format to export from vectorial originals, or to create resampled versions of clean originals in PNG or GIF or other such losseless format (assuming such format was properly used). Yet we do have in Commons thousands of JPG flags, maps, and assorted diagrams — that needs to be fought against.

But when the original shows a scanned or photographed real life object, then JPEG, albeit lossy, is a good choice for final formats (and even suitable for some derivative work, such as lossless cropping). In this case of monochrome image files (that is, 256-level greyscale), other options are worth checking, as GIF and PNG offer good compression ratios, too, but JPEG is not wrong for this case, either.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 18:13, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

There was last year the same topic. I linked the Phab-task. ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)  21:31, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

December 29

Information: Author

There seems some ambiguities, concrete for logos of companies (or signs, flags etc.). So can be in the author field the (copy)right holder, like File:BenQ-Logo.svg (and dozen other) or must it be reverted like this? Can we do write something like more concrete in the Information documentation? ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?) 19:51, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

There’s so many meaningful differences between an author and a copyrights holder that treating those concepts as one would only obfuscate the matter. Think of PD works, those with transfered rights, those managed by deceased authors’ estates, etc. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 21:43, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

@Tuválkin Thanks for answer, but I'm just as smart as before. Can you be more clear, can the copyright holder be there or not? As we can see User:Yann restored the copyright holder now. So it's simply for both? ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)  17:24, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

In my opinion, no. The field |author should be filled with an identification of the creator of the work (even in special cases of multiple authorship). If that’s different from the copyright holder, then its identification should be stated separately (with |other_fields, or even in running prose within the file’s description). Of course Commons keeps only free media, so most of our files do not have a copyright holder in the true sense of the word (to make a long story short). All this i.m.o., though I’m surprised this is not consensual. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 17:16, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

It seems to me to be a collective work (the company). Sometimes a logo is designed by an external agency but then the company becomes the copyrights holder as this is an integral part of its identity. I would like the Commons to treat collective works separatly for licencing purposes. There are many more collective works: newspapers (non-signed articles), maps (example Michelin roads maps. Lawyers always try to split hairs and try to rescramble the eggs out of an omelet for works created by many people.Smiley.toerist (talk) 22:52, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

It might be a collective work, but of BenQ’s itself? Or by some advertisement agency? (Or, better said, by some specific team of designers working for said agency at a given time? Why not put their names, if known, instead, then? Ditto for the case of this having been internally design by BenQ’s own design department.) While the fact that BenQ’s trademarked logo belongs to BenQ is obvious (and therefore not warranting a specific separate mention as such), assigning authorship to this merely commercial ownership degrades the semantic value of data we store in the |author field. In this case, |author = {{unknown|author}} would be the right way to do it., i.m.o. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 17:16, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Okay, the BenQ logo is maybe not that good example, in the point that there are companies or organizations with different name as copyright-holder of the logo calls. I'm also very surprised that there is no clear consensual on Commons. The |other_fields field seems strange for me. The documentation of {{Information}} tells us, that we can give multiple authors. So would this be the solution |author = {{unknown|author}}; BenQ!? (Maybe MaxxL can also tell something) ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)  21:47, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Question regarding content displayed in categories

Hello and happy new year. I'm wondering if anyone can clarify for me whether there is any policy or guidance regarding the content that categories can display. A few weeks ago I had a discussion with another user who is inserting location maps in every category of Spain's regions and provinces, which are plenty, like in the following example: Category:Buildings in La Rioja (Spain). In my view this only leads to clutter and I think it has no use at all, except maybe in the province/region main category. Has this been discussed before? Any opinions welcome. Thank you, tyk (talk) 09:17, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

I am not aware of any specific policy except Commons:Categories#Creating_a_new_category, but it does not forbid additional content. Ruslik (talk) 16:43, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Ok, thanks Ruslik0, tyk (talk) 22:13, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

January 04

Caption challange..

This weeks image :

is at Commons:Silly things ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:20, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Looking for a tool to help find a home for images

Hi all

I'm not sure if what I want exists or not, I'm looking for a tool that will show which articles related to a subject (over different languages) do not have an image. E.g UNESCO have released some of which may be the only photogaphs of that subject on Commons. My assumption is that this could be done through Wikidata e.g which articles linked to items with the proprty World Heritage Sites do not have an image but a Commons category linked to the Wikidata item exists.

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 16:09, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

January 05

Wikimania 2016 Scholarships - Deadline soon!

Please help translate to your language

A reminder - applications for scholarships for Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario, Italy, are closing soon! Please get your applications in by January 9th. To apply, visit the page below:

• Wikimania 2016 Scholarships

Patrick Earley (WMF) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:49, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

unesco.org

Hello. I wonder that pictures from unesco.org are free to upload to the commons? For example, from here.--Shahrux (talk) 07:53, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Why should they? --Magnus (talk) 08:31, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

@John Cummings: ! Andy Mabbett (talk) 19:20, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi @Shahrux: , thanks @Pigsonthewing: , UNESCO has made around 1000 files available under an open license which I've uploaded to Commons. I created a set of pages on Meta to help people navigate the content and see which content is used and where. There's quite a wide range of content including photographs from the UNESCO image archive and of World Heritage sites, infographics, illustrations, video documentaries and news b-roll. If you know of any Wikiprojects that you think would be interested in it please do let them know, here's a small selection:

• 
  Mohana fishermen hunters use lures from real birds to catch more birds
• 
  Primary school-age population, in school vs out of school, girls vs boys in Guinea
• 
  Illustration from Nzinga Mbandi Queen of Ndongo and Matamba
• Visit of Mr Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations to UNESCO

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 12:30, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi, @John Cummings: . Thank you for information. I will begin to upload Azerbaijan-related photos from unesco.org to commons.--Shahrux (talk) 19:06, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I uploaded some photosː [5] for chovqan game. But I have problem about permission. Commons gives this warning to meː

Warning You are trying to add a OTRS permission tag to this page. In general, such tags should only added by OTRS members. You should not add such tag unless explicitely instructed to do so by the OTRS member. You may press "Save page" again if you like to save this edit. If you do so, your edit will be tagged for review. In case you aren't sure if your edit is okay, it's best to ask for help, on the OTRS Noticeboard.--Shahrux (talk) 19:38, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Shahrux: please do not add images from unesco.org to Wikimedia Commons, the only images that are available under a Wikimedia compatible license have already been added to Commons. More will be added in future once the permissions are agreed. The images you upload from UNESCO.org will just get deleted. Thanks John Cummings (talk) 22:55, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Videos of live dissected animals

I came across a series of videos of Earthworms that were dissected whilst still alive. Is this permitted? RSLlGriffith (talk) 08:59, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes. See COM:Scope. --Fæ (talk) 10:02, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Of course, the usual licensing issues would apply. - Jmabel ! talk 16:41, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

The only reason I can think of to NOT host the items are 1) Project:Project scope issues, 2) licensing issues, 3) provenance issues (aka Flickrwashing or similar, which are really a special case of "licensing"), and 4) "contraband" issues ("crime scene photos" or, in some countries, photos of "government sensitive" locations, photos of "government sensitive" people, etc.). Live dissections of lower animals are typically not illegal in the United States if they are done for "legitimate" research or educational purposes (IANAL, there may be cases where these are illegal in some US states or nationwide) so unless the photo was taken in a manner or in a country where such laws would make it a "contraband" photo I don't see #4 being an issue. I'm not sure what the animal-cruelty laws are for lower animals when it comes to non-"legitimate" reasons (e.g. a guy pouring gasoline on an earthworm and lighting it and posting it to YouTube with a voiceover of "I can almost hear them scream bwuhahaha" - if it were a cat or dog it would be a felony in most states). As a general rule of thumb, if the person or institution that did the dissection was not afraid to put it online and attach their name to it, they are probably not afraid of being arrested for cruelty to animals. I agree with Fæ, they are very likely within-scope. So, unless there is some reason to believe it is a "contraband" photograph, that just leaves licensing and provenance issues. Davidwr (talk) 22:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

{{Must be substituted}} and automatic substitution

Good day, I would like to get an issue sorted out as it pertains to my approved bot task for substituting templates that must be substituted. Having recently gone over the code for this task, as well as some logs, I had come to notice that a lot of substitutions were being missed, because there was a stage at which the bot would check a certain page which raised an uncaught exception. After fixing that and supervising the first part of the big run following that, all went well, until some templates that were not expected to be substituted got substituted.

I post was made here in the village pump before the task was originally approved, but it received to comments, and apparently drew no attention to the bot request. In an attempt to get the current situation sorted as-is, I had analyzed the cause of the "malfunction" per User talk:Hazard-SJ/Archive 2#Malfunction, and responded there as well, after which the thread eventually got archived from inactivity.

I would like to resume the task, but can't until the issues get sorted out. If you had read my previous response, you may see what I'm getting at, but what I'm trying to gather some sort of consensus on is if I should simply ignore what I find to be issues with the use of |page= and skip substitution of templates with that parameter, or, my personally preferred option, make the changes I suggested, then continue everything as-is (and possibly minimize future risk of confusion).

I look forward to your input.  Hazard SJ  18:43, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

This was a bad edit. Maybe there should be a opt-in for templates? And likely the script should run every day, this would minimize that new templates will be substed wrongly (your bot was down for a while). :-) --Steinsplitter (talk) 18:50, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Steinsplitter: As I said, from my review while reverting the edits, the problematic templates were {{Category for discussion}} and {{Verified account}}, and maybe 1 or 2 others. As per the bot approval, it checks for {{Must be substituted}} (it doesn't check {{Should be substituted}} or anything else). If a template is tagged saying that it must be substituted, why shouldn't it be substituted? That was the logic we followed in the approval, and I'm still in agreement with that logic, but then, what breaks this is when the template says is tagged with {{Must be substituted}}, but that template mustn't be substituted. That defies logic. Even the very wording of {{Must be substituted}} with |page= says "This template must be substituted...", so obviously (to me at least) there is some confusion, since there are two different templates, one of which shouldn't be substituted even though it's descriptions says is must. As for the script running everyday, I believe that's how I had it, but as I said, it never got to complete it's run before, only the first part of it because of an exception that the script didn't handle. Since I had just recognized the issue and got it fixed, it just became able to check all the pages without being killed part-way. As for opt-in, it is possible, but then, back to the statement I started with: why say a template must be substituted if it mustn't? P.S. as I said, it's the minority of templates that cause this issue, so technically you might be opting in almost all of the other templates, the ones without |page= at least).  Hazard SJ  19:43, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: Template:Verified account must be substed as described, using {{subst:+va}}. Not substing the template itself. As aforementioned, your bot was inactive for a while. If you run the script daily, it is unlikely that such things happen. A opt-out/opt-in for template would be helpful. I personally see no problem if you run the bot daily, so user will see that there is a bot substin templates containing a must be subst template :-). --Steinsplitter (talk) 20:05, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Steinsplitter: And what I'm saying is that Template:Verified account and Template:+va are two different templates. Template:Verified account must not be substituted. Template:+va must be substituted. I don't think you get what I'm saying. They are two different templates. It's like saying a car must be driven using a tow truck, when the tow truck is what is being driven, and the car is just being pulled around. I also guess you don't understand what I've been saying about the exceptions... the script was running regularly (until I disabled it following this issue), but it wasn't able to complete it's task. As for opt-in/opt-out, that'd definitely an option, though I don't believe it solved all the problems, such as the wording etc. I already have per-inclusion opt-out (via |nosubst= and |demo=) in place, and {{Nobots}} prevents the bot from editing the pages with the inclusions, but I could definitely do an entire template opt-in/out for perhaps an |auto= parameter to {{Must be substituted}} as well.  Hazard SJ  20:19, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Now i got it. Thanks. (Sorry for spamming the VP). --Steinsplitter (talk) 20:24, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

January 06

Which base map?

Does anyone recognise which base map File:TurdusMerulaDistribution.png is a derivative of? I can't find it in Category:Maps because there's far too many subcategories to search through and they're not organised well . . . thanks! - MPF (talk) 13:43, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

There is a Category:Blank SVG maps of the world which can be used as templates for derivative maps. --Alexrk2 (talk) 14:11, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

I know! But the particular base map I'm looking for isn't there (for starters, it's a .png format, not .svg ;-)). I need to know which exact base map it is from, (a) to add the necessary derivation link required by the derivative's cc-license, and (b) to do some clean-up work on the map. - MPF (talk) 14:32, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

The uploader @Cactus26: is still active. I think it's easiest to ask him. --Alexrk2 (talk) 14:50, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Alexrk2: Thanks for notifying me.

@MPF: I don't understand why you modify the map without duplicating it. Not all authorities have split the species yet. Of course the text regarding the distribution in various languages also still describes the "old" more comprehensive point of view. If you change the map directly, the text in some languages doesn't match to the map anymore. Moreover the authors of pages in these language have no opportunity to detect your modifications using their watchlist. I have reset your changes of the map. Please duplicate it before modifying. I assume, I used this base map [6].

--Cactus26 (talk) 12:08, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

File:Blank map world gmt.pdf is not the same map as that has lat. & long. lines (which yours doesn't), and is a pdf not a png - I have seen the original before, but just can't find it in the labyrinth of ill-sorted map categories. Most of the wikipedias follow IOC, and therefore use the up-to-date taxonomy, so it means your revertion of the map causes an inappropriate four-species map to be used on numerous pages about just one of the species. I will upload a new map but it is very annoying to have to do it like this; updates to maps are a accepted reason for uploading new versions of an image file; yours should also be renamed to reflect that it is now covers an amalgamation of four species. - MPF (talk) 22:55, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm afraid, nevertheless this was the base map. I converted it to png and removed the lat/lon lines. You can rename the file if you want, please don't forget to adjust pages relying on that map.--Cactus26 (talk) 09:04, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Old postcards uploaded under self licence

I frequently come across old postcards uploaded under a self licence, with the name of the collector. (As a curtisy I add the collectors name) I have added the correct licence, but wat should I do with the ols self licence? Change to: Custom license marker? And if so with wich date? Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:00, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Old see https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Caluire_Gare_1910.jpg&direction=prev&oldid=183903255 and as proposal, I adapted author and license, visualising as https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Caluire_Gare_1910.jpg&oldid=183903255 , it may be undone. --Havang(nl) (talk) 11:26, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016: call for proposals extended

Dear Wikimedians,
the deadline for the call for proposals for Wikimania 2016 has been moved on 17th January 2016, so you have 10 days to submit you proposal(s). To submit a presentation, please refer to the Submissions page on the Wikimania 2016 website. --Yiyi (Dimmi!) 09:28, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Pictures in "Google Art Project" and wikidata

How to add wikidata to "Google Art Project"-files? like this one were I have added wikidata, but it is not visible File:P.S. Krøyer - Summer evening on Skagen's Beach. Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer walking together. - Google Art Project.jpg and File:P.S. Krøyer - Roses. Marie Krøyer seated in the deckchair in the garden by Mrs Bendsen's house - Google Art Project.jpg --Villy Fink Isaksen (talk) 12:51, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I went ahead and added it as "commons:wikidata" to stay in line with the rest of the templates parameters there. See my edit to File:P.S. Krøyer - Summer evening on Skagen's Beach. Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer walking together. - Google Art Project.jpg. BMacZero (talk) 17:17, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Google Art Project already has it as 'wikidata', Google Cultural Institute was the one that was missing it. BMacZero (talk) 17:19, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Time to split upp some UK categories?

For example: “2008 in rail transport in the United Kingdom” into: “2008 in rail transport in England” and “2008 in rail transport in Scotland”? Their are some station split offs but they are minor. In this example there are more than a thousand images. Years with much less images can remain UK. Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:17, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I made the category Category:2008 in rail transport in Scotland, but I found very few pictures of Scotland, but maybe I missed some.Smiley.toerist (talk) 00:36, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Problems with Exif

I moved the watermarked Russian description of this image (Розетка РП-2Б ~10А 42В) to Exif, according to Commons guidelines, but a series of ? appear. Doesn't Exif accept Cyrillic characters or is it just my software fault?--Carnby (talk) 20:54, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Some of the fields in the exif standard are defined as only allowing ASCII characters. Try encoding the metadata as XMP instead of ascii. The exiftool program should support doing this. (for some fields, xmp has the addirional benefit of allowing someone to give multiple language versions of a field). Bawolff (talk) 16:22, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I have added an IPTC field and it seems to work. Do you think it's OK now?--Carnby (talk) 22:24, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

January 08

Thumbs of SVG doesn't match the SVG

File:Diagram_Modern_symphony_orchestra-zh-cn.svg--fireattack (talk) 02:26, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

For me it's looking okay.

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Apple Safari	Hold down ⇧ Shift+Alt while clicking Reload
	Press Ctrl+R	Press ⌘ Cmd+⌥ Option+E (clear browser cache) or ⌘ Cmd+R (update)
Chrome	Press Ctrl+F5 or ⇧ Shift+F5 or hold down ⇧ Shift while clicking Reload	Press ⌘ Cmd+F5 or ⇧ Shift+F5 or hold down ⇧ Shift while clicking Reload

If it's still different, please have a look at COM:SVG. -- Rillke^(q?) 02:50, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Did you look closely? On this png thumb the Hanjis on the right orange box are stacked together and the ones on the left orange box are out of the box.--fireattack (talk) 03:58, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Now I see the issue. Perhaps someone from the COM:GVP can help. -- Rillke^(q?) 06:12, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Fixed Removed all Inkscape garbage codes and tspan and reorganized the code structure. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 07:13, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I am still having a problem with the PNG rendering of SVGs. There is a bug report I believe. Since a software update around May or June 2015 these are not rendered properly. Delphi234 (talk) 14:55, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Fixed The problem is that this SVG relied on scaling up for more than 20 times from a relatively small native dimension (36.54 by 27.2 to 750 by 560). Text scaling of Librsvg is known to be extremely inaccurate, therefore all SVG on Wikimedia should be shown at its true native dimension. I gave the font-size the resultant value of 23.5px, redefined the viewBox values and manually scaled up all position values and other graph elements by 20.5 individually. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 15:30, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you very much! --fireattack (talk) 16:48, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia mobile app not providing the license of images

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T100335

I raised an issue with the iOS-verion of the Wikipedia app on Phabricator (phab:T100335) back in May 2015. The app currently only dispays the name of the copyright holder (or rather the name in the author field), not the license, nor a link to the license or a link to the description page. Just wanted to make the community aware of this issue. What were to happen if another copyright provider were to file a DMCA-takdown for a file proveded on Commons for the apps inability to properly fufill the licensing agreements for the files? (Android however offers a link to the description page if the menu button is pressed, so kudos for Android). Josve05a (talk) 14:20, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I am not sure there is any legal basis for a DMCA-takedown. This is a problem for the application, not Commons. Ruslik (talk) 19:13, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

True, but was a retorical question for the developers. Still, they are using "our" (using that term in a non-legal way) files, and we should be outraged. Josve05a (talk) 20:07, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

2 templates do the same thing and poorly documented

Template:Tlsx and Template:Tlxs do the same thing with small differences: 1) tlxs supports 8 params, tlsx supports only 6 params; 2) tlsx is a little smarter 3) tlsx has a link for "subst" word. Why do we have 2 of them? Why 8 vs 6 ? Could we merge them into one ? Нирваньчик (talk) 21:42, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Another problem. They are both poorly documented and don't mention each other btw. I'd like to add more documentation but Template:Tlxs is protected and documentation is in template code. What to do? Нирваньчик (talk) 21:42, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

• "Tlxs" is probably the better name. I'd go to its talk page and propose your specific changes there. If no one is paying attention, then probably ping whoever applied the protection. (Ultimately, "Tlsx" can just become a redirect to "Tlxs".) - Jmabel ! talk 01:29, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

January 11

Huge collection available from NYPL

Example NYPL manuscript upload, c. 950 illustration of St. Matthew. 3,490 × 4,412 pixels, file size: 44.27 MB

See here If anyone is good at batch uploading, this is a great collection. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:43, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Maybe @Fæ: can assist here? --Steinsplitter (talk) 13:10, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Small test run of full size tiffs at Category:NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division. Dcoetzee populated the parent category with 80,000 files from the NYPL a few years back, before they had the full size tifs available. There's a batch upload page documenting what happened, but as what I'm doing is so different with the API, I'm skipping past that for now.

Unfortunately the colours in the TIFFs may not display correctly on Commons, though they are fine in local preview or image editing software. Addendum freakishly, they display correctly when I look at them in Chrome, but with a pink cast when looking in Firefox on the same machine. This might be something to raise for investigation in Phabricator. From past experience the colour profile may need to be stripped from the files. I cannot remember how I sorted this out before, it may not be something I can fix in any efficient way before upload and might need to be automated or hand-flagged for a bot to strip.

This is a test run, just on collection UUID d533f0b0-c5ca-012f-d4a0-58d385a7bc34 on a fairly random basis. I have to revisit how this works as it does not cope with multiple photographs of the same object (i.e. identical NYPL b numbers for the same book illustration) and may be unreliable for other collections as the metadata is likely to shift structure. Feedback on my user talk page would be handy @Koavf: . --Fæ (talk) 23:51, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Phab:T123210 raised for the colour problem. --Fæ (talk) 01:03, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

A note about numbering, which is probably worth recording here as I have yet to start a project page. The UUIDs are unique and are used for both Collections (of Items) and individual Items. There may be many images of an object. To give the file a unique reference, I have started using <NYPL "b" number>-<imageID>, the "b" number is unique to the object and easy to Google for results, while the imageID is unique to the scan or photograph and probably a lot harder to search for relevant matches on the internet. The item UUID could have been used, but it is so large and ugly, this would overwhelm the image pages. Unfortunately the imageID is not used on the library MODS records, so this makes the API queries a bit more convoluted as both "items" records and the "mods" records need to be pulled separately.

The JSON metadata structure is unpredictable, a bit like the Internet Archive API, so this means more effort has to be invested as different collections are tested out. For example, "date" may be available as part of the origin details in a list or a nested dictionary with multiple matches. This means the parsing gets rapidly complex if a general workflow is to be used, rather than devising a mapping for each collection. --Fæ (talk) 14:37, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

January 07

Category for one item

Is it ok to create a category that contains just one image so it can be linked to Wikidata? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 16:36, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

• Yes. - Jmabel ! talk 16:50, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Is the link visible? And wath happens when the Category is renamed or split up?Smiley.toerist (talk) 21:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

S.t., by "linked to Wikidata" Richard presumably means having the category used in a Wikidata item: that is, there is presumably already a Wikidata item to which this one image relates, so I don't see how this would be any different than for any other category. @Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): just for clarity, could you say what image this is about? - Jmabel ! talk 01:07, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I think this example illustrates it best: Category:William C. Gover. He does not have an entry in Wikipedia, but he has an entry in Wikidata. Wikidata only gives one slot to link to Wikicommons, it can be a Person-page or a Category, so I create a category for that person. Person pages tend to get deleted as "not notable" and they tend to not contain all the items in a category. For now there is one item. There is a bit of text to help link them back up, if the link to Wikidata gets broken. When there are multiple people with similar names, a birth and death date and a little context in Commons is helpful. Sometimes when Jr and Sr or I, II, III, and IV have the same name, it isn't obvious to whom the documents here belong. Many times Wikipedia links to the wrong generation at Commons. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 20:18, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

January 09

The Caption Challange

This weeks photo is up at Commons:Silly things

I'd like to see some suggestions this week , last week didn't get any. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:46, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

photos from the exhibition

Taking photographs from the exhibition sometimes creates problems because of large frames that create shadows on the paintings. How should such shadows treated? I normaly crop the shadows away. see the uncropped photo here File:Camille pissarro med mørk skygge.jpg and the cropped here File:La Rue Saint-Honoré, matin, effet de soleil.jpg. The cropped photo is ofcourse missing some of the painting.

How should such problems be treated? --Villy Fink Isaksen (talk) 11:34, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Proper display of "other versions" of files in Wikipedias

For some reason, other versions arranged using <gallery> tag in file description of file pages, appears differently in other projects like Wikipedias. Is that intentional? (if so why?) or a bug? Please see these examples: in commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hump_Nosed_Pit_Viper_@_Kanjirappally,_Kerala_01.JPG , in en.wp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hump_Nosed_Pit_Viper_@_Kanjirappally,_Kerala_01.JPG, in ml.wp: https://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hump_Nosed_Pit_Viper_@_Kanjirappally,_Kerala_01.JPG . Regards--Praveen:talk 12:52, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I assume it is not intentional, but that is more of a question for people at the other wikipedias, since I assume that we do not control how things are displayed on other Wikipedia projects. Also I am confused why other projects even need a page to re-display commons content. Would not it be easier to just display the file at Commons? --Jarekt (talk) 21:18, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

page specific css/js doesnt get transferred properly, which includes css for galleries. Bawolff (talk) 15:43, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

I mean this is a bug, because I also remarked that newly. All images on galleries get vertical instead of horizontal. If I refresh the page, it appears as expected. ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)  16:41, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes I find that annoying too. I guess, the reason why Wikipedia doesn't links to Commons per default is because of the MediaViewer gadget. Because the user option wether someone would like to use MV or not would be bypassed that way. --Alexrk2 (talk) 17:03, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Fails to load lots of images on all wikis including Commons (net::ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR)

I now extremely frequently experiment this bug: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T115563

In Chrome inspector, the console shows this kind of errors (e.g. for one of the images):

"GET https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Applications-office.svg/50px-Applications-office.svg.png net::ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR"

The bug in fact appears almost immediately after loading successfully only a handful of images (or javascripts or CSS stylesheets). If a page uses more than about 12 HTTPS ressources, only a few will load successfully and all the others are not correctly pipelined.

Extremely rapidly after there has been enough errors (a few minutes of navigation), I also experiment HTTP error 400 (bad request), on any URL pointing to any Wikimedia server (wikis, image servers, phabricator, etc.) including for just loading the home page.

Then I can no longer browse any website (including from another device such as my Android smartphone). My router has all its allocatable TCP ports occupied.

Visibly, the HTTP/2 (SPDY) protocol has severe problems with HTTPS, its sessions are corrupted.

Google seems to deprecate now its early developement of SPDY, since HTTP/2 as been standardized. So it's possibly that there's an unsolved compatibility problem between SPDY and the approved HTTP/2 standard, within specific contexts, notably when connecting with HTTPS. Affected sites: all Wikimedia wikis, as well as Reddit and a few others (this does not affect Google sites such as Google.com itself, Youtube, Google+, or its Play store). Apparently the affected sites are using the same kind of front proxies.

I get the same error with any browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome) on Windows 10, either 32 bit or 64 bit, and even on my Android smartphone.

Something is wrong and seems to be also related to the fact that I'm connected to the net via a NAT router (with about 24 devices connected to the same router, number varying, most of them Android smartphones, a handful of PCs, an XBox). Apparently the number of NAT-routed TCP ports gets rapidly exhausted, there's no more any port available. The router sees a lot (thousands) of port numbers still occupied but with ending sessions. Then the NAT router rejects lots of incoming packets notably TCP packets for new sessions (such as "First packet in connection is not a SYN packet: TCP 192.168.1.15:52550->173.194.(masked):443 on ppp0"). And Internet becomes unusable. (I must then reboot the router to cleanup the occupied terminating TCP ports).

Almost all the occupied dead ports are those from Wikimedia HTTPS servers.

Really someting is wrong in Wikimedia servers with HTTPS + SPDY: sessions are not properly terminated and this causes severe havoc in NAT routers.

My opinion is that it may be a bug in HTTPS in your front proxies. They don't work correctly with SPDY and don't terminate the sessions properly (the last packet closing the sessions is apparently not transmitted, our client TCP sessions will only terminate after a very long timeout, it's possible that the last packet is transmitted but not encrypted properly in the correct TCP session for HTTPS, so it is not received or invalidated on reception). I suspect the bug is somewhere in Squid which equips Wikimedia sites.

For now if I'm lucky enough, I can browse and edit the wikis for some minutes, but I see almost no thumbnails for images or icons in the page; most of theSE IMAGES are missing and show this "net::ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR" when looking at details. But very frequently I see now CSS stylesheets not loaded and well and lots of presentation errors. For Wikipedia it is not dramatic, but for Commons, the site is almost unusable without the images.

This has started since about mid-december. Rebooting the NAT router has no effect on this issue, it comes back immediately after when reloading the same pages, and even when my PC is still the only one connected to the router (after the reboot there may be a few Android devices connecting to it in a few minutes, none of them ore visiting Wikimedia websites, but they may connect to other websites depending on their loaded applications, but they don't perform a lot of request and their traffic is very small).

Additional request: Is there an option to navigate on Wikimedia without HTTPS ? Visibly if I use HTTP, the sites now forces the redirect to HTTPS.

There's also no option for me to connect with IPv6 (to avoid the NAT routing if the combination of [HTTPS+SPDY+client-side NAT] on IPv4 causes such unsolved problem), as my ISP still does transport IPv6 to the router. I could test that using a third-party IPv6 tunnel, but these tunnels are really too slow. verdy_p (talk) 16:22, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Related bugs reported elsewhere (search on Google with "Squid net::ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR"):

• http://superuser.com/questions/489042/using-secure-proxies-with-google-chrome
• https://ma.ttias.be/nginx-spdy-error-neterr_spdy_protocol_error/
• https://support.zenmate.com/hc/en-us/articles/204423722-Chrome-error-ERR-SPDY-PROTOCOL-ERROR-
• https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/190 (interesting hint: there's a bug in SPDY v2 solved by Google in SPDY v3, and fixed with a workaround in the Nginx server for clients using SPDY v2)
• http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/wikipedia.org.html (various reports of problems affecting Wikimedia sites, notably "net::ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR" with HTTPS)
• http://wm-bot.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23wikimedia-operations/20150913.txt (saved IRC discussion, including some details about the configuration blocking filters on Wikimedia servers against some kinds of attacks)

It looks like this is a problem of certificate validation for HTTPS when using server-side or client-side proxies and client-side NAT. Something is wrong with Google's SPDY (but that does not affect HTTP/2 itself), the secure sessions are not properly terminated with SPDY and an incorrect certificate or secure key is used for the first (SYN) or last packet of the session, leaving many idle/dying TCP ports, and causing various other symptoms (such as in firewalls, blocking invalid sessions as if they were SYN-flood attacks, or attempts to inject data in a secure session that is not first authenticated).

This bug was apparently a possible cause of DOS attacks against Wikimedia servers. A workaround/patch was setup against those attacks, but normal users may be affected (the workaround does not seem to be fully compatible with the SPDY v2 protocol: what caused a bug on Wikimedia servers or Squid proxies now causes severe bugs on clients in their routers/browsers).

For Wikimedia Commons, this bug (that I see now very frequently since mid-december) has a very severe impact (more severe than on Wikipedia) as this affects the loading of almost all images and medias (we can still use Wikipedia with the non-loaded images). verdy_p (talk) 17:13, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

• I can't really comment on the technical aspect of the error but I can report that I have the same issue fairly regularly too. Diliff (talk) 18:42, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
• I have this problem a lot. Firebrace (talk) 00:08, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Update for Upload to Commons Android App

Hi,

I have been working on a project to improve the categorization of pictures in the Upload to Commons Android app as part of the Outreachy Dec '15 program. Phase 1 of the project has been implemented, and the app should now suggest nearby categories when a picture is uploaded.

Feedback on this feature would be greatly appreciated, so please feel free to download the updated version of the app and to post feedback/issues on the GitHub page.

Please note that to use this new feature, you will need to have location tagging enabled for your camera.

Thanks!

Misaochaaan (talk) 04:05, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

move a pages generates a redirect?

Is this a bug? I have chosen "move" to transfer a gallery page to another with alle the versions. But the execution resulted in a simple redirect. Could someone please do that properly? Gallery Sandro Botticelli Redirect to: Sandro Botticelli. Now it's a mess. History of events:

2016-01-05T11:45:30 (diff | hist) . . (0)‎ . . m Sandro Botticelli ‎ (Mattes moved page Gallery Sandro Botticelli to Sandro Botticelli) (current)

2016-01-05T11:45:30 (diff | hist) . . (+31)‎ . . N Gallery Sandro Botticelli ‎ (Mattes moved page Gallery Sandro Botticelli to Sandro Botticelli) (current)

Thanks and happy 2016! --Mattes (talk) 10:57, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

At 20:41, 3 January you moved Gallery Sandro Botticelli to Sandro Botticelli/Pa. This created a redirect at Gallery Sandro Botticelli to Sandro Botticelli/Pa. Then at 20:43 you requested speedy deletion of Sandro Botticelli, which at that time was a redirect to Gallery Sandro Botticelli but had a non-trivial history. At 07:26, 4 January 2016 Túrelio deleted it. After that at 10:10, 5 January 2016 you moved the redirect at Gallery Sandro Botticelli to Sandro Botticelli. Then at 10:12, 5 January 2016 you blanked Sandro Botticelli page and immediately requested it to be speedy deleted the second time, which was accomplished by Taivo at 10:20, 5 January 2016. After that you again moved the redirect at Gallery Sandro Botticelli to Sandro Botticelli. So, now we have the gallery at Sandro Botticelli/Pa and two redirects to it at Sandro Botticelli and Gallery Sandro Botticelli. In the process the history of Gallery Sandro Botticelli page was merged to the history of Sandro Botticelli (it is currently deleted). Is my explanation sufficient for you? Ruslik (talk) 17:56, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! But Sandro Botticelli/Pa should be moved to Sandro Botticelli, for some reason I'm not able to do that. --Mattes (talk) 09:13, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

You can not move because the redirect has a non-trivial history. You request assistance of an administrator. Ruslik (talk) 19:30, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Warning for the display of colours for TIFFs

Phab:T123210

Test image showing different colours displayed for the same image on Chrome (left) and Firefox (right).

Though I was aware of an ongoing colour profile problem for TIFFs on Commons, I did not realise how extremely misleading the colours are, until I started batch uploading some scans of manuscripts from the NYPL this week. The sample screenshot right, highlights how browns are turned into reds, and the image is significantly over bright making the black background grey.

Perhaps someone more skilled at investigating TIFFs could investigate and write up a guideline for displaying or correcting apparent problems with TIFF colour profiles on Commons? As the display results are off-scale to a dramatic extent on Firefox, until the browser developers come up with a fix, perhaps we need to warn our viewers looking at a TIFF with Firefox should try viewing in Chrome? I am especially concerned that researchers and students viewing our archive quality TIFFs of historical documents and artworks with Firefox (or to a lesser extent Safari) might presume in good faith that what they see on their monitor is a fair representation unless we give a warning. --Fæ (talk) 16:10, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Suggest a template

Can't find desirable template! I want template that indicates, that this picture is derived work from another one on WikiCommons. (This description is necesarry cause original is SVG and dervived is GIF). Here they are: File:Huffmantree ru animated.gif and File:Huffman-codetree.svg Yanpas (talk) 22:37, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

{{Derived from}} —LX (talk, contribs) 22:41, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

thx!Yanpas (talk) 22:43, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: BMacZero (talk) 02:04, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

File renaming

Hello. The day before yesterday I noticed we have several paintings called File:NAMEOFTHEPAINTER_NUMBER.jpg (e.g.: File:Nicolas_Poussin_073.jpg). I renamed some of them under the second file renaming criterion (ambiguous names) to a name which included the work title and, if needed, further disambiguation. @Multichill: didn't agree e we started talking about that (you can find our debate here).

My point is:

1. these filemoves are useful, because when I create an article on a Wikiproject I search for the subject on the Commons searchbar. If the image illustrating Et in Arcadia ego is called "031" I won't find it.
2. these filemoves are covered by the policy. One of the example provided in Commons:File renaming is File:Paris 319.jpg->File:Paris 75018 Rue Norvins no 018 Le Consulat z.jpg, which is the same thing as File:Nicolas Poussin 031.jpg->File:Nicolas Poussin - Et in Arcadia ego (première version).jpg

As Multichill and I weren't able to reach a consensus, I'm here to ask to you all--Formica rufa 10:47, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

• In my opinion, both cases above (Poussin and Paris) were both renamed to better names, but they shouldn’t have been. The spirit of COM:FR is to ensure filename stability; it does open to a few exceptions where the current filename is so bad that improving it is a superior gain than ensuring filename stability, but that’s just that: exceptional circumstances where filename stability can/should be breached.

But replace a not-so-bad filename with a better one? No, don’t: That’s bad for Commons, as anybody can think of an improvement and fight for it. COM:FR wisely (though less so in its current, revised form) blocks this snowball effect of file renaming done for improvement sake.

Any (further) change of COM:FR should be discussed as such, not prompted by random particulars.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 15:28, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

• —

1. Adding the title is enough, no need to rename here. Why didn't you just do that?
2. Comparing a city where millions of people live(d) with one single person is trying to stretch the policy too much. The whole point of the renaming policy is to use it sparsely because of the impact. Your proposed renames would impact about 10.000 highly used files that had these names for over 10 years without any problems.

Multichill (talk) 15:35, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

I think Multichill is right. In general, name stability is good. It would have been better if the uploader had used great names rather than good names, but in general we don't mess with good names. Just get the information into the text associated with the image, not necessarily the filename. - Jmabel ! talk 01:09, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

• I agree with Jmabel and Multichill, those files should not have been renamed, those were not good names but not "ambiguous". User:Formica rufa were much better names but we do not need perfection here just uniqueness and not being wrong. --Jarekt (talk) 21:26, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

• User:Jmabel hits on the nail head on: «It would have been better if the uploader had used »these better names, but the uploader didn’t. The way I see it, that’s the main difference between naming guidelines and renaming guidelines: The former is about how to make “perfect” filenames, the latter is about which filename errors are so glaring they trump the need for stability. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 04:05, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

January 10

Wikidata: List of airports with Commons categories

For everyone that's interested: I have been playing around a bit with Wikidata and how it can help Commons and this is one thing I have come up with. Recently we deleted lots of airport categories that had names like "ABCD (airport)", where ABCD was an ICAO code (international airport code), because it was felt that categories should be named using the "common name" of an airport. (And the fact that not every airport has an ICAO code.) Nevertheless participants in the discussion also had the opinion that a list of airport by ICAO code would be useful. Using Template:Wikidata list and a SPARQL query I came up with this list, which is updated daily by a bot. This is far from perfect, for various reasons:

• Template:Wikidata list is limited to 5000 entries. Currently these lists have over 2000 entries, but the total number of airports in Wikidata is over 20000. The lists should be split into sub-pages (by continent?) anyway.
• The Commons categories are not directly linked (except on the name, when the interwiki link in Wikidata points to a Commons category).
• The link to Wikidata is in the form of an ugly number, instead of a neat little icon or something similar.
• The biggest problem is that the data quality is still not the greatest. I am sure we have more than 2000 airport categories on Commons, but the items on Wikidata are missing the appropriate links. (For reference, I am going by the Commons category property, not by any of the alternative schemes suggested for linking to Commons). Also, many airport items on Wikidata are missing information like the country, the ICAO code, or the IATA code.

Nevertheless, I think these lists show the potential of Wikidata for Commons, so I just wanted to throw this out here. --Sebari (talk) 22:22, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

You could use SELECT ?item ?icao ?iata (CONCAT('[[', ?cat, ']]') as ?link) {... to create some basic wiki markup (images, links) with sparql. --Lockal (talk) 13:37, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

That is a good hint. I included it to link to the Commons category. It only took one or two (or 25) tries, but the Commons category is now always linked. --Sebari (talk) 15:19, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

January 12

What goes in the source field of a filepage?

Prompted by this, I would like to see a matter discussed and clarified: What should be used as the |source argument of the {{Information}} template (and other such templates)? In the past I was asked to put there only one single url, as opposed to a direct image link and one or several context pages, or even multiple urls for PD-old images (by User:Yann, if I recall correctly). In contrast User:Sevela.p (and possibly many others) insist that such disparate information such as camera model and uploading software, only remotely related to the source of a file, should also be refered to in this field, not just {{own}}. Who is right? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 19:43, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

• I'm not sure we have any clear policy, but I find it very useful to have but a direct image link and one context pages (especially if the latter helps clarify copyright status); several context pages is usually overdoing it, though I guess it might sometimes be useful. Camera model and uploading software certainly don't belong in this particular field; indeed, I find it hard to imagine why anyone cares at all about uploading software.
• In general, however, on other people's uploads I tend to defer to whatever the uploaded chose, unless it is clearly wrong.
• Also, for what it's worth, I've never liked {{Own}} at all. I suppose it's OK for people who casually upload a few photos and aren't at all concerned about being credited by reusers, but it is almost guaranteed to result in incorrect attribution for any derivative works, and often results in incorrect attribution on reuse by newspapers, etc. I'd guess that well over 1000 of my pictures on Commons have been republished outside of WMF projects, so at least for me this is no small concern. I always use "Photo by [[User:Jmabel|Joe Mabel]]" and I revert on the rare occasion someone tries to change that to {{Own}}.

- Jmabel ! talk 20:06, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

• The exhaustive instructions are in the {{Information}} documentation. Ruslik (talk) 20:08, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

• @Tuvalkin: I doubt I said there should be "only one single url" in the source field. Regards, Yann (talk) 21:37, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

User:Yann, in that case I misunderstood what you meant here with «please do not add the direct link, it confuses the review script, and I don't think it adds anything. Then it takes longer for an already tedious task.» In that Fotopedia batch upload I had been filling up the source field with a page link and a direct link for the image itself (and too bad I stopped doing that on your advice, as the pages went offline as announced, but the image files lingered in the server for a few days more). -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 20:54, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

• As Ruslik mentioned above and in detail at Commons:Essential information. The link(s) should be enough for a viewer or license reviewer to verify the media depicted has a valid license. If everything is in a single source, one URL is enough. But some sites mention license in a special page; then it should also be mentioned. In some sites, the media is listed as a slide view or other similar mechanism where it is difficult for a license reviewer to find it quickly. In such cases, mentioning the direct file URL too is advised. I had fixed several failed reviews from that site alone. (BTW, it seems that "note" at Commons:Essential information seems outdated considering recent developments from CC.)

Jmabel: {{Own}} has translations. When we replace it with our own words like "own work by <author>", we will loss that feature and <author> become redundant. If {{Own}} is ambiguous, it can be discussed. "Own work by the author mentioned below" may looks better. But in my opinion, a simple mentioning of "Original" is enough as it is "original source".

Jee 03:35, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

@Jkadavoor: Other people are welcome to use {{Own}} on their uploads, I have no problem with that. However, I found when I tried using it for a while a few years back that I got a very high percentage of misattributions, and I'm no longer willing to go that way with my uploads of my own photos. - Jmabel ! talk 04:44, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Maybe this could be fixed by simply add to {{Own}} an additional field to store the author’s name for accurate an unambiguous display? Instead of «Own work» in whichever language, the same but clarified as «Own work by John Doe» (in whichever language)…

Meanwhile, a acceptable alternative would be, I think, something like

|source= {{Own}} (John Doe) or |source= {{Own}} ({{User|John Doe}})

A good idea, Jmabel? (Granted that kind of duplicates the info already in the author field.) -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 21:14, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

It is now possible to patrol files

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T11501

It will soon be possible to patrol files, see gerrit:251795 which should be deployed on Commons within a few days. You may test this at Testwiki: already. New files and new file versions will be patrollable, and you'll be able to search for unpatrolled new files at special:newfiles. Cenarium (talk) 13:00, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

This is, in fact, live now! The help page is Commons:Patrol (which could probably use updating now). Matma Rex (talk) 22:10, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Great. It's also live on enwiki now. Cenarium (talk) 23:27, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

It was also announced in Tech News 2016-02 – I would really love if they would be delivered here instead of that fairly obscure page. :( Matma Rex (talk) 22:34, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

How is filtering working on Special:NewFiles? Does it take a long time? Cenarium (talk) 23:27, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Batch download by category

Is there either a tool which will download all the files in a given category, or which will show me a list of links to all the files (as opposed to their pages) in a category, on one page? Andy Mabbett (talk) 16:51, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Commons:Imker (batch download) --Steinsplitter (talk) 17:01, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Just the job. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (talk) 18:58, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Howto for tagging copyvios

Hi, I see quite often users tagging copyright violations without informing the uploader, even after repeated messages asking them to do so. So I think we need a HOWTO or a "Best practice guide", and in many languages. Opinions? Yann (talk) 19:03, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Are not uploaders supposed to watch their uploads? Ruslik (talk) 20:03, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

That's not a reason for not informing the uploader. Beside heavy uploaders may have ten of thousands of uploads, so including them in one's watchlist may not be practical (I generally don't). Regards, Yann (talk) 20:08, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

I really doubt someone who doesn't read the instructions in the actual template they just added is going to bother reading a howto or best practice guide. But maybe hiding the instructions in a collapsible section was a mistake. —LX (talk, contribs) 00:49, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

I think the issue comes when people adds these templates manually. We should encourage them to use the gadgets. Regards, Yann (talk) 01:01, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Our information pages misleads visitors

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123184

Our {{Information}} template misleads visitors, who subsequently credit images from the wikipedia to the uploader, not the actual photographer.

I am not vain, but I do google myself, occasionally. Through those searches I do find images I took myself, and uploaded here, which have been re-used elsewhere. But, by far, most of the images credited to me are images I merely uploaded.

I am sure other prolific uploaders would find that they too are routinely credited by visitors who re-used images from the commons, and were confused as to who to credit. These third party re-users are acting in good faith. They want to honor the IP rights of the actual photographer. The problem is that our Information pages place more emphasis on the uploader than the photographer. Geo Swan (talk) 17:34, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Please, identify a specific problem with {{Information}} template, which can be fixed. Ruslik (talk) 18:39, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I am also not sure, how the template can mislead reusers to credit the uploader, since it does not even contain a field for the uploader. --Sebari (talk) 19:37, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

• The template renders the actual photographers' name so it is much less prominent than that of the uploader. Good faith re-users should be forgiven for overlooking the actual photographers' name, and mistaking the contributors who merely uploaded the images are the ones who deserve to be credited.

examples of good faith re-users who confused uploaders with rights-holders

image and proper credit	re-used at url and credit as used
Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class William Weinert	http://www.movienewsguide.com/a-timeline-of-victorias-secret-angels-watch-video/38860 Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons/ Geo Swan
MOs810	http://kddidit.com/2015/02/16/word-confusion-tort-versus-torte/ Image by Geo Swan (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
John Haslam	http://www.boomsbeat.com/articles/8166/20140901/36-gorgeous-photos-of-grand-harbour-in-malta.htm (Photo : Source: Wikimedia/ Geo Swan)
Mercado Italiano from Philadelphia, United States	http://www.routeyou.com/en-us/route/view/2060062/cycle-route/east-coast-greenway-pa-nj-ny Source: Geo Swan Copyright: CC 3.0
[[

• This is less a problem with the Information template and more a problem with the file page, which is overloaded with a lot of junk. The media viewer is much better for end users/reusers for that reason. The best solution would be to have much cleaner file pages that hide a lot of the extra information by default. (Some templates are also at fault here. The current picture of the day has one complete page only with "badge templates". This is ridiculous.) --Sebari (talk) 07:20, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

• User:Geo Swan, looks like you discovered that the internet is full of stupid — who knew? What you call «Good faith re-users» are people who cannot read: those cannot be helped, not with text.

I worry about your own compreension abilities, though, User:Geo Swan: You singled out the {{Information}} template for this complain: you mentioned it in the title and stated repeatedly that it «renders the actual photographers' name so it is much less prominent than that of the uploader», even after you were warned that uploader’s name is not even covered as a field of this template. Apparently you think that the section #filehistory of a filepage is somehow triggered or generated by the {{Information}} template. Well, it is not. It is a mediawiki default (and no, User:Srittau, it should not be hidden).

When correctly filled out, the {{Information}} template will display the file’s authorship byline correctly, and even the clumsy kludge that is MediaViewer is able to read that information and present it correctly in its dumbed-down interface. The fact that the uploader’s name does show up in MediaViewer at all, though, might be the explanation for the mentioned misattributions, as for the casual re-user it may not be obvious that a square smiley on the left marks the author while a square smiley with an arrow at the right, along all other info, marks somtehing meaningless for re-use. (This, User:Srittau, is what should be hidden: the uploader’s name in MediaViewer).

So looks like what needs to be changed, maybe even questioned, is not {{Information}} but Media Viewer. Good luck with that.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 08:33, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I didn't even notice that the uploader is mentioned in the Media Viewer. That is indeed ... strange and probably the source of the problem. --Sebari (talk) 12:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

• User:Tuvalkin, first, have you ever heard the advice "don't shoot the messenger"?

With regard to reading comprehension and intelligence... Have you ever studied human factors? I am not an expert, but I know enough to know that even PhDs prefer to read documents written at a primary grade comprehension level. This is particularly true if it outside their area of expertise. When lots and lots of otherwise intelligent people make the same mistake, over and over and over again, should we really just write them all off as "stupid"?

You wrote: "you discovered that the internet is full of stupid ... people who cannot read ... cannot be helped, not with text." This is why I asked if you knew anything about human factors. Error-prone interfaces are redesigned, and replaced by less error-prone interfaces, all the time -- including text interfaces. Geo Swan (talk) 03:47, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

So, you got offended and misunderstood what I wrote (shoot the messenger indeed), and even changed the section title. Still, so far you only managed to add wood to the fire about the “fact” that user-generated templates are bad (in this case, the blameless {{information}}) — someone will use your diffs futurely as “proof” that Commons is broken and all you need is Frankenwiki Wikidata…

Meanwhile, are you going to address the actual problem? That the Most Holy and Exalted Mediaviwer does include a very proeminent field displaying the completely unnecessary and misleading data entry about a file’s uploader, causing the problem you encountered? Are you going to ask the WMF to fix Mediaviwer so that it doesn’t include uploader’s name? If so, pls link here the relevant url, so we all can pile on help out. If you’re not, well, …I’ll go back to categorize photos of trams or clocks or whatever.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 04:57, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Created as Phabricator task. --Sebari (talk) 11:52, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I note that the uploader name is displayed as "Uploaded by <name>", so jabs at the smileys are somewhat dishonest. Anyway, Pete Forsyth already pointed out the problem a few weeks ago, and it's fixed in the version that will go live next week. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 12:36, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

While I’m all for having the word "dishonest" in sentences pertaining MediaViewer, you seem to have it backwards: On one hand, the fact that the interface displays "Uploaded by <name>" reinforces the jab about this being a problem caused by reusers who cannot (or do not bother to) read, and also on the other hand it is still a piece of information that, in the dumbed-down UI of Mediaviewer, should not be displayed at all (though, in the context of its announced removal, yay!, it would be interesting to find out how come it was even ever included, especially at the expense of other things such as, to name but one glaring lack, file size). -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 18:30, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Above I accused User:Geo Swan of having changed the title of this section during the discussion. That’s not true (and I only noticed after being warned by Geo Swan), and I want to publicly apologize for that. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 20:28, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

and here some of the confusion of uploading others work could be mitigated by using artwork or photograph template; but this is not an option for wizard and vicuna uploader. information template is clearly inadequate. institutions are driven to using custom templates with GWupload tool. Slowking4♡Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 00:08, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

For reference: It seems the uploader field was now removed from the MediaViewer. Let's see if attribution by reusers improves. --Sebari (talk) 17:33, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

"Crop for Wikidata" template

Contrary to Wikipedia and other wikis, Wikidata does not allow for "thumbnail notes" when using Commons images. That requires images used in items to be predominantly about the item in question. This is problematic when Commons has, for example, an image of a group of people, but the Wikidata item is about just one of the people depicted. I have thus started {{Crop for Wikidata}} (not quite successfully, as far as proper 18n is concerned) as a categorized request to create a new file (probably via CropTool) to be used on Wikidata. My angle is that my WD-FIST tool could add this template with a single click to the image page, thus creating a "this sub-image could be used here" trail. Please tell me if there are any objections to this; also, help with template i18n and layout would be much appreciated. --Magnus Manske (talk) 15:44, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Magnus Manske if it is easier just create the template without i18n and we can change it. If you do that just ping me. --Jarekt (talk) 17:13, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

@Jarekt: Yes, please! --Magnus Manske (talk) 11:54, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Requesting the removal of an old logo

Hi All,

This page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cloudera_logo.png contains an old logo that is still showing at the top of google's search results, I've uploaded a newer version and requested the user take down the old one but have had no luck so far. Is there anything else I can do to get this old logo removed?

Thanks,

We do not remove old version of logos etc. Please upload the new logo under a new name. We are not the right place to influence Google's search results. --Sebari (talk) 19:43, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

I cleaned it up and now there's both File:Cloudera old logo.png and File:Cloudera logo 2015.png, and File:Cloudera logo.png redirects to the latter. Matma Rex (talk) 21:33, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. --Sebari (talk) 23:41, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: Sebari (talk) 22:55, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Location close to Manchester

Where is this? This was not far from a railway station on a railway line to/from Manchester. At the same time these pictures (File:Close to Manchester (1).jpg, File:Close to Manchester (1).jpg) were also taken. About one hour later this picture (File:SPT livery train in England.jpg) was taken. Any idea wich station? Not a Scottisch one as the SPT livery would suggest.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:36, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Solved. Not in Manchester but Carlisle.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:33, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Global ban request for User:Messina

A global ban request] for User:Messina has been placed. He is infinitely blocked on commons for copyright violations and sockpuppetry.--Gonzo.Lubitsch (talk) 11:44, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

You surely mean indefinitely blocked, yes? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 18:04, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Messina (talk · contribs) has been globally banned [7] by community decision.--Gonzo.Lubitsch (talk) 16:03, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Notification of DMCA takedown demand - Bernie Sanders Logos

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:Bernie_Sanders_2016_Pride.jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
• File:FEELTHEBERN.svg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
• File:FEELTHEBERN.png (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
• File:Bernie_Sanders_2016_logo.png (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
• File:Bernie_Sanders_2016_logo_with_year.svg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
• File:Bernie_Sanders_2016_logo.svg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

To discuss this DMCA takedown, please go to COM:DMCA#Bernie Sanders Logos Thank you! Jalexander--WMF 21:17, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

• Just to note here for those not following the discussion on COM:DMCA, after a counter notice by odder the campaign withdrew the DMCA and these images were placed back up. Jalexander--WMF 19:34, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

January 15

Category:Nadar

How does one set things up so that the bot redirects things into the correct category (apparently Category:Félix Nadar, though I'm not entirely convinced that isn't a misnomer) Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:13, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Not sure if you're refering to a specific bot, but you can create the page with a {{Category redirect}} template and some bot will do it eventually. You can also use just Cat-a-lot if you don't think future uploaders will try to use this name. BMacZero (talk) 18:05, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

There never was anyone called "Félix Nadar". His full name was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, and his pseudonyme only Nadar. This category should be changed. Regards, Yann (talk) 20:58, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

@Yann: Now that's what I thought.... Adam Cuerden (talk) 16:06, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

January 16

Double images

I forgot the name of the template to deal with double images (mostly from different sources). I could not find anything in the FAQ or help pages. This should be added.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:37, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

{{Dupe}}, {{Duplicate}}? I think they're mentioned in the deletion policy and at COM:DR. -- Rillke^(q?) 09:58, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Use image on page but prevent it from showing up under file usage

Hi Commons,

I maintain a page on enwiki to keep track of/organize my media uploads to Commons and to WP. It's mostly for my own sake (it's not linked to from anywhere other than a tiny link on my userpage..and now from this thread). Is there any way to prevent images I display on that page from showing up as "File usage on other wikis"? The primary reason is to avoid "usages" from registering when I use the gadget which shows usages in MyGallery (or other tools which do so). I know that I could move the page to Commons (or, you know, not have the page at all); I'm hoping for an alternative (something like a magic word). — Rhododendrites ^talk |  21:13, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: I am afraid there is currently no method inside MediaWiki itself to avoid this, however you could add files that you created (seeing as you have also uploaded other people's works, too) to a hidden user category (using {{User category}}) and then track their usage in main namespace only with the GLAMorous tool. It should be pretty easy and quick to do mass-categorize your files using Cat-a-lot. Hope this helps! odder (talk) 21:34, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

@Odder: Thanks. To clarify, by "created" do you mean created the file on Commons or do you mean original work only? (I can't tell if "uploaded other people's works, too" is distinguishing what can be included from what cannot or an explanation that this method could include other people's work). Thanks again. — Rhododendrites ^talk |  15:49, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: Apologies for not being clear enough. This method works for all of categories, so if you want to use it just for files that are your own creation, then you should create a category like Category:Images by User:Rhododendrites. Or if you want to track usage of all files that you uploaded to Commons, then Category:Images uploaded by User:Rhododendrites is a better bet, etc. odder (talk) 18:27, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

@Odder: I can't seem to figure out how to do this with Cat-a-Lot. I don't see any way to categorize from a user uploads page or to draw from user uploads when it does appear on a category page. I know Commons Commander could theoretically do this, but it doesn't load all user uploads for me (regardless of the user -- eternal scroll stops at a particular point each time). I thought I could do this via AutoWikiBrowser, which I have much more experience using, but now that I have the rights in place to do so on Commons I see there's not actually an option to create a list based on uploads. I've left a message on the CC talk page about the eternal scroll issue, and perhaps we're getting into an area where it would be better for me to ask elsewhere, but I'll respond here first in case there's something relatively straightforward with Cat-A-Lot I'm missing :/ Thanks. — Rhododendrites ^talk |  15:32, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I did find that Cat-a-Lot works on search pages, but that seems to rely on my name being listed in the author field (and returned at least 1 false positive in which I was not the uploader). Perhaps there's no perfect solution and this is the best approach? — Rhododendrites ^talk |  15:43, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: Hm, I think you might be onto something. Now I that I've looked at it in detail, it does appear you can only use Cat-a-lot on Search results. I'll try to do this using Pywikipediabot, hang on in there :-) odder (talk) 16:02, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

@Odder: I see you've started categorizing. That's appreciated. To clarify, though, the Cat-a-Lot via search, taking out the exceptions, and then finding those that I'm not listed as the author for is an acceptable partial solution for this occasion, but I'm more interested in figuring out how to do this on my own -- or if it's possible for me to do without writing my own bot. That said, I might just be getting indulgent, trying to get to the bottom of something that, once my own images are categorized and thus easy to wrangle with cat-a-lot, I may never actually need again :) — Rhododendrites ^talk |  16:15, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: No worries; the bot finished going through all your uploads about two hours ago, so this is now done. I'm no longer sure this is actually possible to do in an easy way; I went through a list of all your uploads and did it this way, however I do agree that being able to do it in a more user-friendly way would be handy. odder (talk) 18:30, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

30M milestone

Looks like we are going to hit the 30M milestone pretty soon. :) Jean-Fred (talk) 22:55, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, only 6845 files to go! 70.30.41.112 00:35, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

The 30M file will probably be one of Hansmuller's dead birds... INeverCry 01:49, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

When I uploaded this one, at 2016-01-13T06:13:32, it got stamped as the 29,997,316th file… -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 06:50, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

We passed it now. Pyb twitted I believe the NewFiles at that moment. Jean-Fred (talk) 10:10, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

It's correct. "We" should probably select a file from the dead birds batch upload. Pyb (talk) 10:13, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Ah, at least one of my long term slow large NYPL tiffs made it onto that screen cap as well as the Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador project. If there's a press release, maybe we should give honourable mentions to the nearby files/interesting projects rather than limiting the interest to one photo? --Fæ (talk) 10:41, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Commons:Press releases/30M? Sławek Borewicz (talk) 05:05, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

For those interested in the 50M milestone, I suggest it is flagged/forecast a bit earlier than this one, if we would like to see blog posts and press releases. Most of us need at least a couple of weeks to discuss and write it up. --Fæ (talk) 16:42, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

January 13

Watch changes in category membership

@User:Birgit Müller (WMDE) Back in August 2015, this very promising feature was introduced here on Commons. It made my life much easier, but had to be retracted shortly after due to bugs. It's now been nearly half a year. Any chance that this feature will come back at some point? --Sebari (talk) 16:58, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Watch this space! Redeployment should be happening in the next 30 days (ish) and should be announced once a date is confirmed)! ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 20:06, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

• Thank you! --Sebari (talk) 14:10, 14 January 2016 (UTC)
• Yay! -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 21:18, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

See this gerrit change and the schedule on wikitech. I expect there will also be another announcement soon! :) ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 11:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

January 14

NEMA: hyphens vs. n-dashes

I'm categorizing mains connectors and I discovered that NEMA uses n-dashes in its standard names: i.e. 1–15R. I could use these dashes in categories, but I think there could be problems for users who upload new images of plugs and sockets; hyphens could be less troublesome. What do you think about?--Carnby (talk) 12:15, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Nothing wrong with having cat. redirects spelled with hyphens, I suppose. That would keep both the accurate exact typography as prescribed and the easiness of typing. (Though we gotta love how the same entities who come up with these fancy, yet unneededly so, characters for their labelling while still using "x" for "×" or "Km" for "km" — not unlike those oh so clever netizens who name themselves Ĥâňňǎ or Ẓẹḳẹ in social media just for the lulz but still with wish their Spanish friends a «feliz ano nuevo»…) -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 14:45, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Blame Hawkwind... -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:09, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

The Caption Challange

This weeks image is up at :Commons:Silly things

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:03, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Photo Permissions Question

I'm creating a Wikipedia page for a client's product and am disclosing that relationship. Unfortunately, before I understood the rules for posting imagery, I tried to upload images for the article.

I now understand that the copyright holder needs to send a Creative Commons License request using a Wikipedia email permission template. Once they have submitted emails to confirm that they are the copyright holder, what's the next step? How do I reinstate the images and ensure that Wikipedia knows they are now copyright free?

Medscrib (talk) 01:20, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

• They are not copyright-free. You can provide a very generous license, even {{CC-0}} (which says, in effect, "anyone may treat these like they are in the public domain"), but that doesn't make copyright vanish.
• Assuming that the email to the OTRS folks mentioned the URLs at which you uploaded the images, then they should be undeleted once permissions are cleared. Unfortunately, with the current backlog that could be a couple of months.
• In the future, if you send permissions in a timely manner or discuss it all in a timely manner so the images are kept, {{OTRS pending}} on the file page can make that clear. At this point, though, we've moved on to restoring images that have already been deleted, so I don't think there is much anyone can do until the permissions clear. - Jmabel ! talk 02:29, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Is this an over-categorization?

Hi. Sometimes I see images that have many categories that describe everything in the image. For example, this or this image. Is it a good idea to try and describe everything and for an image to have that many categories?--Дима Г (talk) 21:58, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, both pictures are overcategorized. Pictures that are in a category and its parent category are overcategorized.

• In the first picture, Sitting is the parent category of "Paintings of girls sitting on the ground outdoors", through "Paintings of sitting girls" → "Sitting girls in art" → "Sitting females in art" → "Sitting people in art" → "Sitting in art".
• In the second picture "Females facing left" is the parent category of "Women facing left and looking left".

--Snaevar (talk) 22:58, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

While User:Snaevar aptly applied COM:OVERCAT to the images mentioned by User:Дима Г, the latter’s question remains unanswered, and the short answer is — yes, it is:

Please note that overcategorization doesn’t apply to “many” categories, but to redundant categories. A file with with only two categories might be overcategorized (if those two are redundant — only one, the more specific one, would convey the same exact meaning), while a file with 50 categories (like a typical Mordillo cartoon or a page from Where’s Wally?) might be not overcategorized.

So, yes, it is «a good idea to try and describe everything», and therefore «for an image to have that many categories» is a mere result of that curation practice. In some cases, suitable sections of an image may be extracted/cropped and become a separate image, for which some more detailed categorization may be moved from the origina, laerger image.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 05:20, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

API to search for a Commons category "smartly"?

Our app Upload To Commons lets the user search for categories to add. Unfortunately, a search for "Fortress in Holland" does not return the actual category "Castles in the Netherlands", so searching for the right category is painfully difficult.

Is there an API that would "guess" the right category? Possibly an external usable API.

What I have tried so far, with did not work:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srwhat=text&srenablerewrites=1&srnamespace=14&srlimit=10&srsearch=Fortress%20in%20Holland
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&limit=10&suggest=1&search=Category:Fortress%20in%20Holland

If it is too hard, at least finding the category "Power plants in New Zealand" from "new-zealand power plant" would be great already.

Thanks a lot! Syced (talk) 06:19, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

How do you envision creating and editing the heuristics for such functionality? Central mapping of related concepts? This would be unwieldy and error-prone due to lack of context. Additional keywords in each category? This would be a nightmare to maintain, resulting in totally unpredictable behaviour depending on the state of each individual category.

As for your first example, there's nothing that says we couldn't have a Category:Fortresses in Holland as a subcategory of Category:Holland and Category:Fortresses in the Netherlands. If you somehow map searches for a region of a country to show results for the country it is in (or a specific building type to a more general one, Category:Castles being a subcategory of Category:Fortresses), how do we encourage users to pick categories that are both appropriate and as specific as possible? How can you tell if a user searching for Holland has conflated the region with the country or if they really mean the region?

As for your second example, Category:Power plants in New Zealand is the third result when searching for new-zealand power plant. The two first results (Category:Hydroelectric power plants in New Zealand and Category:Kawerau Geothermal Power Plant) probably score higher because the search words appear both in the title and in the category pages themselves (in reference to parent categories). I don't know what the search algorithm looks like, but I could see a case for boosting the score of results that have a high degree of bidirectional correlation between the title and the words in the search string over results where the words in the search string appear more frequently overall – in other words valuing signal-to-noise ratio over signal strength. —LX (talk, contribs) 13:52, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Google can infer Netherlands from a Holland search, and there are semantic tools and data sets available out there, so a motivated team could build such a server :-) While automatically finding THE right category might be difficult, an API could at least give 10 or 20 suggestions and let the user pick the right ones. Actually, that's exactly how the app will work. Syced (talk) 12:15, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Incomprehensible error message does not let any Campaign edits

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123840

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123842

Hello, I have a kind of showstopper. I tried to create one campaign and got a strange error warning: Value "cc-by-sa-4.0" not in enum for property cc-by-sa-3.0 that didn't let me save the edit. I have realised that the problem is general if I want to edit any existing campaign. Examples are Campaign:wlfolk, Campaign:wle-es, Campaign:wlm-es, ... can somebody give me a hint how to cope with this problem? Poco² 17:52, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Interesting. Just to verify, can anyone else reproduce this? (I can't try myself, don't have the rights to edit these pages here.)

"enum" is an abbreviation for enumerated type, so the error message means that "cc-by-sa-4.0" is not a valid value for whatever you're trying to use it for; looks like something suddenly decided that it's not a real license. I don't see any configuration changes that would do this. And the "cc-by-sa-3.0" part does seem bogus regardless of whether the rest of the error message makes sense, it should be something like licensing -> ownWork -> licenses -> 1 to indicate where the invalid value is in the JSON… Matma Rex (talk) 18:54, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Nevermind, I was able to reproduce the problem on my testing wiki. I'll find out what went wrong and fix it. The soonest we'll be able to deploy the fix is on Tuesday, though (we don't do deployments on weekends, and Monday is a holiday in the US), see deployment schedule. Matma Rex (talk) 19:32, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Matma Rex for your feedback and bug report! Poco² 19:52, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

This should be resolved now. Matma Rex (talk) 18:15, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Shipping container category name needs review

In the name Category:Dry Specially Container by type Cord( 09 ) ＆ Cord( G9 ) I can see a few problems:

• spaces separating brackets from their content
• ampersand encoded as "＆" U+FF06 FULLWIDTH AMPERSAND instead of "&" U+0026 AMPERSAND (its Unicode canonical equivalent)
• incorrect capitalization
• concordance error (adverb qualifying noun)
• possibly bad word choice ("specially" instead of "especially"?)
• misused preposition ("by type" instead of "of type")
• possibly a misplaced synedoche ("dry" for "dry goods"?)

I’d move it to Category:Special dry-goods container of type Cord(09) & Cord(G9), but I haven’t the foggiest idea whether that’s an even remotely correct term. Any shipping buff around? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 03:56, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

A CfD page was created. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 22:45, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Stratford instead of Straford

The Flicker user Hugh llewelyn misnamed a lot pictures with straford. I renamed some pictures and corrected some texts but someone please help or automate the proces? Some pictures are not fully categorised with (Trains at Stratford station) and (20xx in rail transport in London). When renaming I also try to use more sensical names: Class xx number yyyy at Stratford.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:37, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

As long as we limit it to just the one user's files, and ideally to a quick skim for any cases where it might be intended to be something else (Strefford, say), I don't see a problem. Wouldn't want to go to a general search of all files by all users, as it increases the false positive/incorrect fix possibilities (for example, it's a plausible surname). Adam Cuerden (talk) 16:12, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Such as: File:An Answer to the Earle of Strafords Conclusion 1641.jpg. I cleaned upp the rail pictures (except for the US: I am not certain about a Straford branch). Unfortunately a lot off the files have meaningless namens and numbers serving no purpose.Smiley.toerist (talk) 20:33, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

The Caption Challange

Commons:Silly things has the caption challange.

But I'd like some feedback from Commons people about it. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:32, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

What kind of feedback are you looking for? BMacZero (talk) 22:17, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

It's continuation and some processes so I don't have to rememberer to upload a new one continually each week :) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 22:19, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

An easier way to add a caption would be great. (See how the Signpost does for comments (has a "+Add a comment") and polls (subpage as stuff)) Josve05a (talk) 22:24, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Approve a change

Could one of the translation administrators approve a change I did on Commons:Rename a category, please? Compare Special:Diff/165159830/185658430. I did not add new content, but this sentence can until now not be translated. --Speravir (Talk) 16:34, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

OK --Steinsplitter (talk) 16:48, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Danke, Steinsplitter.--Speravir (Talk) 17:09, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: Speravir (Talk) 17:09, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

I can't leave a "Happy 15th" birthday message...

... because it has to be tweeted!

I don't "do" social media, and doubt if I am alone in this. So the happy, postitive message I wanted to send has no 'place' on Wikipedia because I am, in effect, discriminated against. Cheers! Shir-El too (talk) 09:01, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

• Same here, to make a long story short. Not that I would ever spam anyone about Wikipedia’s anniversary, anyway: The Xth most visited site on Earth doesn’t need my (or anyone’s) handful of “followers” to gain visibility — the promo banner that plagues every page is more than enough. But this is one more datapoint to mark the trend followed by the “powers that be”: A trend essentially inimical to the worldview of those who contribute daily to create something that’s worth tweeting about. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 16:48, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

• +1 Shir-El too !!--Jebulon (talk) 15:54, 21 January 2016 (UTC) (French)

Communicating with misattributors of images from Commons

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/generalmoney/the-poorest-county-in-each-state/ is a MSN Money page that has 50 pictures, many of which from Wikimedia Commons labeled "© Wikimedia Commons". Chasing down every blog on the net for correct attribution is impossible, but this is MSN Money; surely we can get them to properly attribute their images. They've got style guides to get this type of stuff right. I understand only the copyright holder can sue, but I seriously doubt they contacted a dozen people and everyone said they didn't want their name on it, and I don't think a lawsuit is the right approach. Could we get a letter from the Wikimedia Foundation politely thanking them for the attribution, and pointing out what they should have done to follow the license? It is an issue for us; we have, not infrequently, highly upset users complaining about failures to follow the licenses and sometimes demanding all their files be removed from Commons, and personally I find it a little demotivating that if anyone used my images, there's a good chance I wouldn't even get the attribution I asked for.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:15, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

(Can't the ToU be changed to add that "by uploading your own files to Wikimedia Commons, you allow other users, and employees of WMF to send DMCA-notices to third-parties" or something like that...would be grat :p) Josve05a (talk) 23:26, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

• I don't think that should be a ToU issue. (1) It's perfectly OK for someone not to want to pursue a violation of their copyright, so at most this should be an opt-in. (2) How are we supposed to deal with the possibility that the user may have given separate permission for a usage that we might not know about? - Jmabel ! talk 16:39, 20 January 2016 (UTC)
• Also, in a case like the one you point at, you can write them a letter indicating that the images appear to be misattributed, and giving a general explanation. And/or you can inform the individual contributors whose copyrights appear to have been violated, and/or use the {{Published}} template on the respective file talk pages with an indication that it appears to be illegal use. - Jmabel ! talk 16:43, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

And remember that part of OUR protection is the fact that Wikimedia and it's employees can operate under 'safe harbor' provisions. If WMF start communicating with people on behalf of the rights of individual contributors, that would likely infringe their ability to not get sued over the actions of a single contributor. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:59, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Good point. And what we can and the copyright holder can do is documented at COM:ENFORCE. Jee 15:50, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

January 21

WMF Trustee Arnnon Geshuri

A vote of no confidence has been raised centrally at m:Vote of confidence:Arnnon Geshuri. Please vote or add comments there. --Fæ (talk) 00:24, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Backgound for uninvolved users: en:User:Cullen328/Arnnon Geshuri --Steinsplitter (talk) 14:41, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Has been formed into a formal RfC now: m:Requests for comment/Vote of no confidence on Arnnon Geshuri --.js^{[democracy needed]} 07:47, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Uploaders per category

Is there some tool to get a list of the uploaders of all files in a category? -Geraki ^T_L^G 11:46, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

No, but you can get the report by looking at http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/6968 - just change the category name in the script (the "c.cl_to="). --Fæ (talk) 12:08, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Über cool tool! -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 04:01, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Undeletion request

I opened an Undeletion request of two images with FOP. If you're interested please consider visit Commons:Undeletion_requests#Caliwood_-_03.jpg_and_Caliwood_-_04.jpg --Sahaquiel - Hast du eine Frage? 16:30, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

January 22

Mass influx of selfies from Christ University, Bangalore

Hello. It seems like a very large section of students at Christ University has some sort of assignment to create a userpage on a WikiProject (sadly, they haven't created any content which is actually useful for any of the projects). It appears to be through the Wikimedia Outreach program. The result has been an absolute flood of {{Userpage image}}s. Patrolling the past 24 hours of uploads:

• I've tagged 107 images for deletion, as they were unused.
• I've tagged another 100 or 200 with the {{Userpage image}} template.
• There are many more uploads which I haven't gotten to, and may not get to.

I thought we should be aware of this. I will leave it up to the community whether we consider this to be a positive or negative thing. Magog the Ogre (talk) (contribs) 23:35, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I suppose it's up to the rules of the Wikiprojects what sort of user pages they allow. The images seem OK for Commons as long as they are used somewhere. --ghouston (talk) 10:46, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Identifying and nominating unused user page images for deletion

Do we have a good way to search for unused files tagged with {{user page image}}? https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php can tell me which files in Category:User page images are being used (the most), but not which ones aren't. —LX (talk, contribs) 18:58, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Likely with a query on quarry, I can look into that on a later moment. In similar situations in the past I've used visualfilechange, which can indicate if a file is in use or not. However can not automatically select on this property, thus 1-by-1 selecting would be needed if you wanted to nominate the files. Basvb (talk) 12:34, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, I can't find an easy way to look for global usage. this works for local usage (credit [8] for most of it). The only way I could currently think of is to check for the il tables of each wiki using quarry, which is not a nice solution. However as there are multiple locations using global usage (the file itself, the glamorous tool, the visualfilechange tool) something must be possible here. Maybe somebody who is familiar with those can be asked. Basvb (talk) 13:15, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

How about https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/6923 ? (Note, that happens to also exclude things used on pages like User:OgreBot/Uploads by new users/2014 January 30 00:00. An even better query might be https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/6924 ). Bawolff (talk) 05:50, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

That seems to work, couldn't find the globalimagelinks table myself somehow. Mvg, Basvb (talk) 12:01, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Some are valid regular images (with other categories), maybe we should separate those (and remove their user page image template) while nominating the other batch. LX, any thoughts on what to do with the info? Basvb (talk) 12:08, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Basvb: Yes, my thinking was that we should identify user page images with no content categories and nominate them for deletion. Files newer than one week or so may be spared for those who need some time to figure out how to include images on pages. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:11, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

[9] has everything older than 1 week and with only 1 category (thus no others than the user image category). adds up to almost 1400 images. I agree that these images are out of scope to my best knowledge and therefore nominating seems like a good idea. I know mass nominations (1400 images from ca 1000 users) are not always welcomed, but that seems like the most suitable way, any things we should consider in this list? Basvb (talk) 18:57, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

(I decided to create a separate subheading for this related, but broader discussion.)

Basvb: Thanks for that! I'm thinking the way to go about this is to set up some gallery pages in my user namespace (of course this will mean that they are technically in use), and then use VisualFileChange to nominate files on those pages for deletion. I sorted the list by upload date, and if we split it by year, the largest batches will be 2011 (258 files) and 2012 (253 files), which seems more manageable. 2005–2008 can be combined for a batch of 137 files, which is close to the average for the rest (176 files; ignoring 2016 with only two files). Any thoughts before I go ahead? —LX (talk, contribs) 23:33, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@LX, sounds like a plan. I added the images to galleries at User:Basvb/UnusedUserImages, you can move them/the page or use the page however you like. Maybe we've to walk through a few edge cases first (not all are simple selfies/headshots). Mvg, Basvb (talk) 18:31, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Basvb: Looks like we were both working at this at the same time. The first batch is here: Commons:Deletion requests/Files on User:LX/Unused user page images, 2005–2009. Thanks again for your help! —LX (talk, contribs) 18:59, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Aah, I should've looked to your edits first. Well nevermind my page then. Basvb (talk) 19:16, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

January 17

2016 WMF Strategy consultation

Please help translate to your language

Hello, all.

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has launched a consultation to help create and prioritize WMF strategy beginning July 2016 and for the 12 to 24 months thereafter. This consultation will be open, on Meta, from 18 January to 26 February, after which the Foundation will also use these ideas to help inform its Annual Plan. (More on our timeline can be found on that Meta page.)

Your input is welcome (and greatly desired) at the Meta discussion, 2016 Strategy/Community consultation.

Apologies for English, where this is posted on a non-English project. We thought it was more important to get the consultation translated as much as possible, and good headway has been made there in some languages. There is still much to do, however! We created m:2016 Strategy/Translations to try to help coordinate what needs translation and what progress is being made. :)

If you have questions, please reach out to me on my talk page or on the strategy consultation's talk page or by email to mdennis@wikimedia.org.

I hope you'll join us! Maggie Dennis via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:06, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

• @Mdennis (WMF): The layout is a little crazy. The link above forces you to slowly navigate through four pages, when what I wanted to see was what the proposal looked like overall before making any comment on individual parts of it. Then when you wonder where user comments are, the big link to make a comment forces you to make a comment before being able to look at what everyone else has written. This all means that users will be driven to comment on the first page of three and may never get to the other two even if the other topics interest them more, and users will duplicate each other's thoughts and only realize they are doing so later.

It's all very "un-wiki" compared to how we normally treat proposals or assess consensus and seems to be trying to behave like a user survey, which fundamentally it is not. --Fæ (talk) 22:48, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Fæ. It is odd, I know. It was the best approach we could come up with under the circumstances of three topic areas, three broad questions, and potentially 21 approaches (6 defined; one suggestion). Unfortunately, there's real challenges in asking such a complex series of questions in multiple languages. Each page and every preload is marked for translation, so we can't have responses on the same page where the questions are asked without invalidating those translations or having separate consultations in every language (which has other issues, such as ghettoizing responders). We considered doing an actual poll, but there were challenges with that as well, including that people would not be able to see what others were saying until the poll was over and that languages would have had to have been locked down in advance. Given our time limitations that seemed like a really bad idea in itself. Stuff is still being translated. :/ I could add a link to the pages where the discussions are hosted (nothing esoteric there - it dumps comments onto the talk page), if you think that would help. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:59, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

The issue is navigation, so that users that want to jump to a one page overview or to the current discussions about the strategy, see an obvious way to get there without being forced to answer questions first. So, yes a link would be helpful, but perhaps you can factor these options into the navigation box and make it highly visible on the landing page? --Fæ (talk) 18:02, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Fæ. A link to the discussion has been added to the navigation box, at least. I'll talk about changing the landing page. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

• User:Mdennis (WMF), which steps will be taken in 2016 to avoid the problem mentioned above at Commons:Village pump#Mass influx of selfies from Christ University, Bangalore? The way I see it, if indeed an Outreach program was the the cause of this problem, WMF employees created a mess that unpaid volonteers need to clean up. Said unpaid volonteers’s time and efforts was thus moved away from more useful tasks, and a guarantee that such event will not be repeated is needed from the responsible party. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 05:30, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

• Hello, Tuválkin. Fortunately, Outreach is not simply done by the WMF; there are many volunteer and affiliate groups leading outreach efforts. I also can't tell by the section above if it is an outreach project or perhaps simply a Facebook drive these students have created or something else. Do you have any more information? You're welcome to reach out to me on my talk page, since it's unrelated to this discussion. :) Or ping me in the relevant section. If it's a staff program, I'm happy to reach out to the relevant staff to see how they may assist. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback, Maggie Dennis. It’s a relief to know that the “outreach” action that caused a flood of off topic image files to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons was not triggered by the WMF. In that case the community feels free to investigate the matter and dully deal with it. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 07:00, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

January 19

Get rid of the Original upload log section

Hi village pump, all files that have been imported from other wikis (e. .g La nave Vlora in arrivo al porto di Bari - 8 agosto 1991.jpg) contain the mentioned section to have some kind idea what happended to the file before uploading it to Commons. I would like to remove it due to two reasons: (1) it is not interesting for the viewer of the file description, (2) it creates problems for searches and automatic replacements (e. g. by bots). In both cases the problem is that the history is treated like the acutal content of the file description. So you (1) either find things that you do not search for or (2) you must be very careful to not modify the upload log section when doing modification on the file content.

My idea is that OgreBot 2 could remove that upload log section when it cleaning up new uploads. This way interested user can still access this information by switch to a previous version of the file. Of course we need a full cleanup if all already cleaned files. --Arnd (talk) 09:41, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Why not put it on the corresponding talk page, like BetacommandBot used to do with file description page histories?

While we're on this topic, here are a few other things I'd love to see for moved files:

• File description history information for files moved from other projects. Copying descriptions without preserving their authorship information may constitute copyright infringement.
• A link to the original page log, which in most cases would be far more useful than the original file description. In most cases, the original file description has been deleted, making the link point to a mirror of the same file description you're already looking at.
• Proper English. "All following user names refer to en.wikipedia" doesn't qualify (and it's not particularly relevant now that we have SUL). :-)

—LX (talk, contribs) 12:44, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks LX, for me the discussion page solution is also fine. The effort to implement seems to be similar to what i suggested. I also agree with your other points. However, in my opinion we should try to first start with an easy solution and then think about improvements. But in any case we need some form of agreement if the proposed changes make sense. But where to get that? Or should we just open a ticket ... as always? --Arnd (talk) 16:53, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

This seems to be as good a place as any to develop consensus. Once that's done, Commons:Bots/Work requests can be used to request assistance from a bot operator. —LX (talk, contribs) 17:06, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

"Open a ticket": do you mean Phabricator? As I see it, this isn't a software issue, so there's no need to do that. I've always found this section a bit clunky, and as all Commons-acceptable licenses require nothing beyond the names or pseudonyms of authors, it's not license-required: if we provide the names of the authors of previous editions in the |author= section of {{Information}}, we satisfy the license's requirements. I like the idea of moving the log entry to the talk page and removing it from the file description, and I'd also agree with the idea of linking to the log on the source wiki. Nyttend (talk) 18:27, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

+1 --Achim (talk) 18:32, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

I am not in favor of this.

• Sometimes a file has multiple versions, with multiple uploaders adding a piece. This is important to keep readily visible for attribution purposes (like the local upload log)
• Occasionally the authorship is only properly conveyed on the description page through upload log.
• Even when the file is not self-created and has only one uploader, sourcing the time and user for the upload is important. This can help users track down when a file was originally uploaded to a wiki (e.g., for sourcing, to figure out proper attribution in case someone made a mistake, to attribute the uploader in case s/he had a part in digitizing the upload, etc.).

I would be open to other proposals. But it should be worth noting that I had originally had OgreBot add the upload history to the talk page of the file in question for this task, but encountered resistance from the community. Magog the Ogre (talk) (contribs) 04:00, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata & GLAM 'down under'

In February, I'm undertaking a three-week tour of Australia, giving talks about Wikidata, and Wikipedia's GLAM collaborations. Do join us if you can, and please invite your Wikimedia, OpenData, GLAM or OpenStreetMap contacts in Australia to come along. Andy Mabbett (talk) 13:38, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Community Tech status report

Hi, a short update from the WMF Community Tech team. We did a community wishlist survey in December and got a list of things the community wanted to prioritize. We're currently investigating all the top ten wishes, but are also looking at two in more detail: migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine and pageview stats. The dead links are less of a problem for Commons, but there's at least one project in the top ten (trying to find a way for multilingual categories on Commons) that's specifically relevant here. For more details, see the status report. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:33, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Should "Photographs by photographer" subcats be hidden?

I just un-hid Category:Photographs by Georg Pahl because it seemed to me that most subcategories of Category:Photographs by photographer are not hidden categories, and I also thought that users very well may wish to see photographs by a specific photographer, so I didn't see why it should be hidden. However, I notice now that many of these categories are hidden - though not all. For famous photographers, they typically aren't hidden, e.g. Category:Photographs by Nadar. For (probably) non-notable photographers, e.g. flickr users like Category:Photographs by Antti, the categories seem to be typically hidden. That makes somewhat sense, but there is a large grey area: For example, the categories in Category:Images from the German Federal Archive by photographer (to which the one I un-hid pertains) are hidden, but many of these photographers are probably notable or otherwise of historical interest. What to do? I would lean towards removing "hidden category" from all these... Gestumblindi (talk) 20:45, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

See Commons:Village_pump#.22User.22_categories too. The "hidden category" concept seems outdated as those are no more "hidden". Only some smaller font is used. Further, it is very difficult to distinguish notable people from others. Jee 03:20, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I thought these categories still aren't displayed to non-logged in users. So, if they're now just "smaller font categories", they don't seem to make much sense, indeed. Gestumblindi (talk) 16:21, 23 January 2016 (UTC) Addition: But maybe renaming them e.g. to "maintenance categories" and creating a clearer distinction would be useful, see here... Gestumblindi (talk) 16:33, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

When will POTY 2015 start?

POTY 2013 and 2014 round 1 started in Jan. 17. but it's already 18th. any plan?-180.67.45.91 16:03, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

@Rillke: @Odisha1: @Mono: @Beria: You know how to setup lists etc.? --Steinsplitter (talk) 16:17, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

No, no plan, sorry. I'll have no time before Feb 6. -- Rillke^(q?) 18:47, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I was in vacation in December and I thought the rest of the team had taken care of it. I can sort the FP and create templates and all, but the script for voting was creating by @Rillke: and I have no idea where it starts and ends :D Will do all I can and Rillke can correct my mistakes later :D Béria L. Rodríguez ^msg 03:22, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

For easier sorting of candidates, you may use the idea from User:Rillke/gallery-sort-demo. Perhaps someone has time to compile a list of all potential FPs like we had last year (warning, huge page)? -- Rillke^(q?) 12:35, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

So all of Commons:Featured_pictures/chronological/2015-A and Commons:Featured_pictures/chronological/2015-B? --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 04:48, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes. Jee 05:17, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, missed that we had already two diligent elves: Commons:Picture of the Year/2015/Candidates, User:Uğurkent/deneme. -- Rillke^(q?) 09:17, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

@Rillke: Looks like the gallerys has been created before 2016. Wondering if all files are in. --Steinsplitter (talk) 09:15, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Image deletion (NehalDaveND)

Can anyone guide me what is the reason behind this deletion ? here, here and here I put my point no one responding. Please guide me. NehalDaveND (talk) 18:33, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

It is not clear what you mean by "open source"? The images must be either in public domain or, if not, they must be released by their authors under an appropriate licence. As to your friend's images. Nowhere on the file pages you said that the images were made by other persons. You just asserted your own authorship. Ruslik (talk) 20:15, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

1. @Ruslik0: Thank you for response. By "Open Source" I want to tell you that, text in that images are open source. I am not a creator this is true. But the text written before 5000 years ago. I had mistaken that, I uploaded those images with "Own" tag. After that I put a link, where those Shlokas (that text) are written. Here you can see all text. I took the text and I made easy translation of the text. After that I put that text in PPT and export those images.
2. About my friend's images. I called them and spend money for those images. So I took as for "own". If that is the problem, I am ready to upload those images with my friend's work. Please tell what I should do for that ? NehalDaveND (talk) 08:28, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi, "Open source" is the wrong term here. Old texts are in the public domain, but the artistic rendering may get a copyright. As the drawings seem recent, we need to have a formal written permission from the author. I also wonder if these are in scope. Regards, Yann (talk) 10:46, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi @Yann: , Till now I couldn't understand that what is the main problem in image? Text or Design ? Text is as you say in public domain and image design like अर्थः, flowers etc are made by me in my computer. I have row files of those images. I don't know about "artistic rendering". Please send link if there is some policy about that. NehalDaveND (talk) 13:07, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Taking the first image in the list as example (File:तं तथा कृपयाविष्टम्.JPG), it is a artistic rendering of Krishna copied from [10]. Se we need the artist's permission. Idem for the third. File:विदेशे योगदिवसः.jpg (2015 International Yoga Day) is certainly in scope, but we need the photographer's permission. Regards, Yann (talk) 17:14, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Oh ! Now I understood what is the root of this problem. @Yann: Thank you to clear this. I will remove that Image from my image. I spent money to get Yoga day images. Now If I will go to permission, again I will have to spend money in calling all that. So It is okay with Yoga Day Images Deletion. This Year I will click some images my own. Please guide me if I am wrong in this or You want to add something. NehalDaveND (talk) 02:23, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks to {{tps}}, I read in this last couple of days User:NehalDaveND’s plea in the talk pages of several users envolved in the mentioned DR, but he left the DR page itself mysteriously alone: Anyonme checking it will find an uncontested DR filed by one admin and dully closed by another 7 days later. Not that this user’s arguments for keeping these files, blameless as he is, would have caused a different outcome, but still it boggles the mind. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 05:04, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@Yann: @Tuvalkin: Please see this image. After your conformation I will make other images like this. NehalDaveND (talk) 10:05, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

• @NehalDaveND: Can you explain how you plan to use such images? Why is this in SCOPE? Regards, Yann (talk) 10:42, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

• @Yann: The shlokas are spoken by Lord Shree Krishna, so with text I want to put an image of Krishna and Arjuna. So I putted this file in image. This file is on public domain. So I used that. Now text and images are out of copyright. Both are public domain. NehalDaveND (talk) 11:01, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
• User:Yann, this is akin to stuff like this: What makes some puke, makes others’ hearts sing, and vice versa — it’s all in scope. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 08:08, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Tuválkin: Well, not really: Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Eugenio Hansen, OFS. Regards, Yann (talk) 11:52, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

• User:NehalDaveND, not sure why you ping me on this, except maybe to prove me right once more: I noted that you chose not to add a single word to the DR discussion about your files, which was open for 7 days and of which you were aware, yet to managed to, within that week, write about the matter in several unrelated user pages — and now you keep doing it here now in the VP.

Now you ask me to look at [[:|your new image]] and you offer to create more like it after my evaluation? Don’t bother — I personally abhorr religious imagery of any kind, and this one doesn’t even enjoy the usual attenuants: It’s neither historical not artistic. Make more if you want, but I don’t want to even know about it.

Technically, though, I need to ask:

1. Who owns the copyright of the included photo? (You expected to present proof if it is yours or authorized from a 3rd party — your COM:AGF score is exhausted.)
2. Why is the photo’s aspect ratio distorted?

(I assume that the depicted monument architecture has no PD/FoP issues, that the text is PD, and that the non-trivial typographical arrangement is yours.) -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 08:08, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Okay, I get it now. The photo is publicly licensed as CC-BY-SA in Flickr — good then. But you made a mess of the attribution. I have to finish cooking a logo for a client (on a satuday!), but will fix this after breakfast if nobody does it first. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 08:11, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

 Done (The included photo you chose to source to Flickr was already in Commons — good thing I checked before uploading; this just keeps getting “better”.) -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 10:40, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

@Tuvalkin: Sorry to disturb you again. But that file again deleted by other admin. You told me that don't leave DR page alone and I have done same. But an admin deleted my file. I want to use that file in sa.wikipedia's page कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते page. It is educational image. Because It is taught Sanskrit Shloka of Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. That deleted image was in this page only. See here... I know for you I am {{tps}}. But I need help. I want to work in sa.wikipedia. NehalDaveND (talk) 15:23, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

User:Ellin Beltz and User:Yann are helping you (or at least trying to) much more than I could (or would). Good luck. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 01:21, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

And if an admin trolls you... just suck it up

Or what’s the lesson here? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 15:05, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-04

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 now follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [11][12]
• Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [13]

Changes this week

• You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [14]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (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 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [15]
• The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [16]
• Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [17]

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

16:38, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

(I have subscribed the Village pump to receive the weekly Tech News, it was previously only being delivered to Commons:User scripts/tech news. I'm hoping you'll find it useful. Matma Rex (talk) 17:05, 25 January 2016 (UTC))

Notification of DMCA takedown demand - Takedown of File:Fashion-Designer.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:Fashion-Designer.jpg

To discuss this DMCA takedown, please go to COM:DMCA#Takedown of File:Fashion-Designer.jpg Thank you! Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Caption Challnage...

This weeks photo is up at Commons:Silly things

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 18:23, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia world maps with lines to dependent territories

Can anyone locate and compile all the world maps with lines to dependent territories into one area - or the links to thereof? There is one I'm looking for in particular, I discovered it a few months back, and now I can't find it anywhere. --Abbazorkzog (talk) 19:25, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Jpg to png

I have added the new extentions to the map File:Netzplan Köln technisch english.jpg. However I changed the format to the stable png format (with jpg there is local rendering by every change). Normaly a small map change is made with uploading a new version. This time I have uploaded a new file, File:Netzplan Köln technisch english.png. I have mentioned the original author, but maybe the administration is not complete. I have changed the links so that the Wiki articles get the correct version. I am aware that a svg version should be made, but I dont have the time or software to make a completely new file.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:24, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Need help finding a map

Hello, I used a specific map to make a chart of WW3 alliances, seen here: I decided to make a new one to replace this old one, but I can't seem to find the map I used. I did not make the lines to join dependencies as they were already there, and I can't find the map and was wondering if someone could help me find it. Thanks,

--Abbazorkzog (talk) 14:05, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

If you don't know which map you used, how do you know that it was freely licensed? Also, how does an imaginary map of alliances in an imaginary war fit within the project scope? If you need freely licensed blank maps, take a look at Category:Blank maps of the world. --rimshot^talk 20:36, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I thought it was in there, but I do know I pulled it from a similar page. This is a private project of mine, I was just wondering if someone here might know where to find said map (the original copy before I edited it). As you can see it has rather detailed coastlines and lakes/bodies of water, along with lines to join dependencies for one-click coloring (I didn't add these features, they were already there, and it would take entirely too long for me to recreate it along with the national borders and whatnot. I was just hoping someone would help me find the map. --Abbazorkzog (talk) 14:35, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

PS: It isn't on that page anymore (if it was in the first place).

EDIT: Nevermind, I found it. Ya'll can delete the image. --Abbazorkzog (talk) 14:44, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Upload bots

the problem

some upload bots will generate commons categories from the source tags. A common tag used in German is 'Favoriten' (favorites) which I run across from time to time and which never never means the Vienna district Favoriten in the upload case. e.g. [18]. Maybe there are some others (also in other languages).

the question

is there a way to list such unwanted categories for any upload bot and to avoid creating them?

the request

can somebody direct me to the right place and tool?

thanks a lot, --Herzi Pinki (talk) 09:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

An easy solution, which my uploads comply with, is to ensure that either of the templates {{CatDiffuse}} or {{Categorise}} are on the problematic categories. If upload tools which include category identification are smart enough, they should skip categories using these templates.

Though this might be thought of as good practice, it is not a "rule" for botwriters, so is something to politely raise with operators when you find an issue with current upload projects (for uploads that are a year or more ago, it's probably better to try to go ahead and fix it yourself with VFC). --Fæ (talk) 17:07, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

January 28

Featured picture sets are invisible

Please read Commons talk:Featured pictures#Featured set invisible, which no-one seems to monitor at all. This is a very bad ongoing problem. As long as featured sets don't display, we shouldn't pretend to show them on Commons:Featured pictures, and we shouldn't support any further nominations of featured set candidates until this problem is corrected. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:56, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

This is a problem with FPCBot, which updates the list. You should raise this issue on the bot's talk page. Ruslik (talk) 20:13, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

IMO the first image is the set should be used. Regards, Yann (talk) 21:53, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

This is the third place I've posted about this, after over a month with nothing being done. OK, I'll post on a 4th page, but it would be nice if someone cared enough to do something about this, instead of sending me from one place to another like an operator at a large corporation. And while I've got your attention, please have a look at this thread about a fraud who is making a laughingstock of our Valued image listings and do something about that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:47, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Done, and sorry for being crabby. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:57, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

OK, now I'm a lot crabbier: Look at the reply I got at User talk:Daniel78#Featured picture sets are invisible. Are all the admins and other technical people on this site asleep at the wheel? Who cares enough to deal with these problems, or should I just throw up my hands, say "Fuck it" and stop spending time on this site? Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:33, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Actually, the VI problem was dealt with (thank you, El Grafo!). However, the FP display problem is of longer standing and needs to be dealt with. Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi, This is a symptom in a larger issue. Daniel78 is not currently doing any development on the FPCBot. So we need more people involved.

We don't have many set nominations, so this issue doesn't occur often. So it should be fixed, but for me, it is a lower priority.

However the bot doesn't remove and archive withdrawn nominations, even when confirmed with {{FPC-results-reviewed}}. That happens quite daily, and it is a higher issue. Regards, Yann (talk) 11:00, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

That sucks! On User talk:FPCBot, it says "I am a bot, talk to Daniel78 instead." If User:Daniel78 is not supporting the bot anymore, that text should be removed. But from what you're saying, no-one is supporting that bot right now. So that means the site is truly asleep at the wheel. Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:06, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Well, we are all volunteers here, including Daniel. Regards, Yann (talk) 12:28, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I understand how Wikis work (or in this case, don't work). I'm an admin at Wikivoyage.

Regards,

Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:12, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

The bot is currently supported (mostly by me) in the sense that if it goes down, I log on to Labs (where it's running on), and give it a kick to get it going again. No development is being done by Daniel, but that doesn't prevent anyone else with the required technical skills and interest from doing so. If code changes are pushed onto the codebase on github, the bot will then use the updated code. -- KTC (talk) 01:14, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

If you know what code to write to solve this problem, please do. In the meantime, I will keep the possible manual solution in mind. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:46, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm afraid I have no knowledge of Python. My knowledge of C-based languages wouldn't help here at all. -- KTC (talk) 14:31, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi everyone, indeed I am not doing any development of the bot currently. Frankly I did not expect it to be alive for so many years (> 6 ) :). I do however read some incoming messages from time to time. I am sorry I have no time or enough motivation for fixing some issues now. But I do think FPC is great and if someone would like some pointers in patching the bot code - I would be happy to help out. /Daniel78 (talk) 22:09, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm very glad you're alive! Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:36, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Manual solution?

Could this problem be solved manually at Commons:Featured pictures/chronological/current month? See the infobox near the top of the page:

Note that set-nominated FPs would sometimes fail to show thumbnails - please don't remove them but choose one of the set photos (maybe the first and/or the best one) to show in the gallery here　with additional description like " - a set of X files".

Can these be inputted manually? Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:29, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

I already do that if/when I move images from Commons:Featured pictures/chronological/current month to e.g. Commons:Featured_pictures/chronological/2015-B. Anyone else are also free to do that to the pages under COM:FP.... -- KTC (talk) 01:14, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

January 25

A minor improvement

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T124425

It would be really great if the link found in the text "(must contain a valid copyright tag):" in the upload wizard was set to open it in a new page. As it is, clicking this link navigates away, and, depending on your browser, might ruin everything. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:38, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Whoops, indeed it should work that way. Filed as phab:T124425, should be easy to do. Matma Rex (talk) 15:40, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you; I've lost a lot of upcoming description pages by clicking this link accidentally. Nyttend (talk) 18:24, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

@Maury Markowitz and Nyttend: I looked into it now and discovered that the link I was thinking of [19] already behaves this way. Please explain where exactly you encountered this problem. (Also, what browser/OS are you using?) Matma Rex (talk) 18:03, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking of slightly the wrong thing. I meant the link to Commons:Copyright tags, the link in (also add a license tag if those below do not apply) at Special:Upload. IE 11 in Windows 10. Nyttend (talk) 20:07, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Well, I don't even have that text anywhere on Special:Upload. (What I see: [20].) But some of the links do have this problem. That form is generated by something specific to Commons and probably somewhere in the MediaWiki namespace here. Is there anybody maintaining the on-wiki scripts who could be asked to look into this? I don't want to step on toes. Matma Rex (talk) 21:08, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Now I'm really confused. See File:Special Upload as Nyttend sees it.png; it's zoomed out because otherwise I can't get all the important stuff in the scene, although I've included an inset of the critical area at bottom right. I'm talking about the license tag link in the inset. Nyttend (talk) 23:44, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Okay, the form I was seeing seems to come from the ImprovedUploadForm gadget, which you must have disabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. Those who have the gadget enabled can still see the basic form at Special:Upload?uploadformstyle=basic. The link is defined at MediaWiki:Fileuploadsummary. This is rendered by the MediaWiki software (and is not specific to Commons), but the default text doesn't have any links (MediaWiki:Fileuploadsummary/en) and so no one thought to implement opening links in a new window here. I filed phab:T125213 about this, but to be honest, it looks like a bit of a pain to implement. Matma Rex (talk) 15:12, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Login

I have issues with my Login on Commons. Everytime I try to login, I get a error warning "Login error - Wikimedia Commons uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again." Cookies are enabled. On all other Wikipedia sites I can login with username and password. I tried changing my browser (Firefox 43.0.4) and Safari 9.0.2, nothing happened. --79.192.255.106 21:53, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

• Are you saying that when you log in on a different WMF site, it doesn't implicitly log you in on Commons (under unified login)? - Jmabel ! talk 03:44, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

• I can confirm this was an issue for me earlier. I tried a second time and it worked. I just assume it was temporary headache due to the login upgrade. See also the threads at en:WP:VPT. Magog the Ogre (talk) (contribs) 03:48, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
• I can confirm that these last 10 h or so login has been messy. I got logged off a few times, and at a given moment I was logged in in Coomons (actively, with pageviews and edits going) while logged off in Meta. Looks like it’s better now. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 08:15, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
• +1 - Likely phab:T124453 --Steinsplitter (talk) 17:21, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

• It’s going at it again, even though comparatively less glitchy today. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 08:44, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

January 23

New feature “Watch changes in category membership”

Hi, coming with this week’s software changes, it will be possible to watch when a page is added to or removed from a category (T9148). The feature has been requested by the German Community and is part of the Top-wishes of the technical wishlist. The feature has been deployed to Mediawiki.org and German Wikipedia already and will become active on Commons on Thursday, Jan 28th between 4:00 and 5:00 pm UTC. It will also become available on all Wikipedias at the same time. The feature is configured as “opt-in”. It is switched off by default and needs to be switched on individually in the watchlist and recent changes preferences. You can find a detailed explanation of the feature here. If you have any questions or remarks about the feature or if you find a bug, please get in touch! Bugs can also be reported directly in Phabricator, just make sure that the project “TCB-Team” is added to the task. Cheers, Tobias Gritschacher (WMDE) (talk) 12:58, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone for bringing this feature back. The "teaser" we got half a year ago showed me what a useful feature that was. --Sebari (talk) 04:44, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

You said "It is switched off by default and needs to be switched on individually in the watchlist and recent changes preferences." It is "switched on" spamming my watchlist. Jee 03:00, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm watching Category:CC-BY-SA-4.0; but I don't want it popup whenever a new file is added to it. How can I stop it? Jee 03:06, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Similarly. - Jmabel ! talk 07:42, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't see the "Hide categorization of pages" options in my recent changes and watchlist preference pages. Do I need to do something to get them to appear? --Auntof6 (talk) 06:10, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi. Please see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T125171#1980571 . There is an option to hide the changes, and they are hidden by default. But as the feature has been rolled back on commons the option to hide the changes has been removed. Follow Commons:Village_pump#.E2.80.9CWatch_changes_in_category_membership.E2.80.9D_deployed for updates! ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 09:44, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. --Auntof6 (talk) 05:00, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Are people getting redirected to wikimediafoundation.org?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T124804

Many of the pages on Commons are redirecting to wikimediafoundation.org. The Village Pump only started working a few minutes ago, and the front page (commons.wikimedia.org/) is still not working properly. What's up? grendel|khan 19:14, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes. Very annoying. I believe the same problem caused a drop-out for bot accounts too. --Fæ (talk) 19:16, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Phab:T124804. Matiia (talk) 19:18, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, Matiia, that was a "silent" edit conflict. Rgds _{•  • hugarheimur} 19:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! Note that status.wikimedia.org reported that everything was functioning perfectly at the time. Perhaps the monitoring has a gap in it? grendel|khan 19:21, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

RC link. The direct link Special:RecentChanges is leading to the WMF wiki. Discussion at German Wikipedia: de:Bildereinbindung spinnt?, de:SUL-Login spinnt auch und wieder, de:Commons ist weg!. Also Login Wiki and Meta were/are affected. --Bjarlin (talk) 19:26, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T124812

I apologize for the problems caused. I can explain the issue with the status page. That is handled by an outside resource which provides us very little flexibility on what to show. For this particular problem, commons.wikimedia.org wasn't failing, but redirecting to the wrong page, something that that control panel cannot detect. For this reason, we are obsoleting that page. The Operations team was aware of the problem immediately and started working on a fix immediately, that was complex as it had issues with the varnish caches needing purging. The total outage time was of a bit less than one hour. We are now gathering information of *why* it happened and present a report to all of you. Regarding the status issue, we have created the issue on the side. (please note this is not an official message) JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks for keeping us informed. Regards, Yann (talk) 22:08, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

• User:JCrespo (WMF), can you (officially or otherwise) expand about the «outside resource» you mentioned? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 00:54, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
  • It appears the status site is ran by https://ca.com/ (https://asm.ca.com/en/feature/public-status-page.html, they even link back to us). I don't know any more details than that (I just noticed that http://status.wikimedia.org/ has a "Powered by" link to them, currently hidden). Sounds reasonable to me, as this hopefully means the page stays up in the face of otherwise catastrophic disruption. It was unaffected in this case, for example, while most other things under *.wikimedia.org were broken (although it wasn't very useful). Matma Rex (talk) 12:34, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks for finding it out, Matma Rex. A glimpse at https://ca.com/ is enough to ruin your day if you’re allergic to bovine manure. But even if it were even remotely likable, why this? Why can’t the WMF set up a fall-back site in case of failiure of all else? And how much does this cost? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 07:45, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
  • @Tuvalkin: I imagine it costs peanuts compared to the cost of man-hours and equipment necessary to set up a truly independent status page of our own, that would be able to track the disruption of our services without being disrupted itself even when everything else is down. As for why CA, from some scarce documentation I found it would appear that we had that set up back when it was called Watchmouse, a likable startup with a cute logo acquired by CA a couple years ago. ;) Matma Rex (talk) 13:20, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks again, Matma Rex: It makes sense. (And you’re so right about Watchmouse!) -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 06:36, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Contributing as a company

I recently talked to a friend of mine who heads a construction company and found out they have a lot of high-quality professional photos of en:Riga and other Latvian cities that they would be happy to contribute them to Wiki projects by uploading to Commons. Now I hold a DVD full of pics and my question is, how do I go about it? What should I indicate when uploading to avoid someone from deleting them by accident because "they look professional and probably weren't made by you because an average wikimedian does not own a helicopter to take aerial pics". I appreciate any suggestions. --SSneg (talk) 12:21, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

• Please see COM:OTRS for the permission we need (the copyright owners need to specify how they want these licensed, and we need to hear it from them in an email). They can specify that you will be uploading on their behalf, and you can tag your uploads for now with {{OTRS pending}}. Eventually you'll have an OTRS ticket number. - Jmabel ! talk 17:06, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
• Also keep in mind that there is no freedom of panorama in Latvia, so photographs of current buildings might be problematic. --rimshot^talk 00:08, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Copyright text on the picture

Hello,

What are the good practice when a picture contains a text copyright on it? (example)

1. Is it acceptable on Commons?
2. Should I/we remove the copyright?

Thank you in advance for your input

--Scoopfinder^(d) 12:26, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

It is permitted but very much not wanted or encouraged. The best solution is to ask the photographer to supply a version without the watermark or text. They can use EXIF data to record their details, and the page-description page can further indicate the copyright/owner situation. Even better ask them to join Commons and upload themselves. Removing copyright notices on other people's images by cropping has been discussed (someone may find a link, or try searching the archive) but IIRC there was no clear legal advice that this is always safe to do. The usual consult a lawyer if in any doubt / don't trust random people on the internet rules apply. What is clear is that anyone uploading a cropped version takes on that legal risk themselves. -- Colin (talk) 12:43, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't see where the problem is, since the picture is published with the derivative permission. Removing the copyright by cropping or overwriting the pixels is creating a new derivative and can't be subject to any legal claim. --Scoopfinder^(d) 12:54, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

No need to ask if you already know the answer. BTW, you can see the general opinion at Commons:Watermarks#Legal_issues_with_the_removal_of_watermarks. Jee 13:23, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

See the proposed guideline Commons:Watermarks (which doesn't seem like maturing into a real guideline any time soon). It's the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act you have to fear. Remember that one cannot rationalise the law (though plenty internet discussions are full of amateurs trying), the law is what it is and if you are in any doubt don't upload. I wouldn't. It is always best to respect the creative artist who's work you wish to use, and simply ask them nicely. If they won't remove it, that's a pretty big warning sign they might be upset if you do. -- Colin (talk) 13:25, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Perfect, thank you both for the links that is what I was looking (and asking) for. @Jkadavoor: Sorry for asking for a second opinion when I am unsure... --Scoopfinder^(d) 15:35, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

January 30

European parliament images

Good day to you all,

I have been looking for some former EU-parliament members (for example, Charles de Gaulle, and found some on the institution website. From my reading of the copyright policy, I gather that it is compatible with CC-BY-SA. (As a general rule, the reuse (reproduction or use) of textual data and multimedia items [...], is authorised, for personal use or for further non-commercial or commercial dissemination, provided that the entire item is reproduced and the source is acknowledged. [...] Any partial reproduction of data or multimedia items from this website must also cite the URL link of the complete item or the web page from which it was sourced.)

However, since the pictures are not on Commons yet, I figured there were a reason. In the archives I found a 5 years old conversation, but is seems the terms have changed since. I tought I'd better ask before doing anything stupid. So here I am.

Thanks for your help, Defunes43 (talk) 14:46, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

• The problem is "provided that the entire item is reproduced". Doesn't allow derivatives. - Jmabel ! talk 17:31, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
  • The following sentence says: " Any partial reproduction of data ...". So, derivatives are allowed in the end? Ruslik (talk) 17:48, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Irrespective of whether their terms are free and compatible with the licensing requirements of Wikimedia Commons, the phrase "compatible with CC-BY-SA" doesn't really make any sense. A work is covered by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license if and only if the copyright holder explicitly mentions that license (or another license that in turn specifically mentions it). —LX (talk, contribs) 21:13, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, my question was poorly formulated. Given these elements, entire item OK, derivatives OK, do you believe that I can upload these photos here? Defunes43 (talk) 09:55, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

January 31

Harzer Schmalspurbahnen

Someone under Pnr 31.1.24.78 started removing the category Deutsche Reichsbahn (GDR) from Harzer Schmalspurbahnen train pictures taken in 1991 when these trainservices still belonged to the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The locomotive classification has a mention of DR (example: DRG Class 99.73–76) but this is highly confusing as there a lot of pictures taken after 1993 of the current HSB period. I am reversing the change.Smiley.toerist (talk) 23:28, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for this hint! It is part my request here. Kleeblatt187 (talk) 23:33, 31 January 2016 (UTC)