Commons:Village pump/Proposals/Archive/2014/05

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More Editors

If you want more editors, lose the necessity of knowing computer languages. I would edit if it did not take quite so much time. 02:44, 30 March 2014‎ 99.108.214.161

Wikimedia projects are on a slippery slope down to Talkingpaperclip Town with Visual Editor. Isn’t it dumbed down enough for you? What else the dimwitted need? -- Tuválkin ✉ 03:45, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
I think that WYSIWYG tools are not bad per-se and I believe there is a lot that could be optimized in regard to how we are managing our media files. Hope Wikibase for Media files will be available soon so we can have structured data and more friendly file description editing. -- Rillke(q?) 20:35, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
How much computer-knowhow do you need in order to edit a wiki? It's hardly rocket science we're talking about, with the most difficult bit being the use of square brackets and curly brackets. If you struggle with that, then you're going to struggle with computers in general and you have more pressing needs than editing a wiki. I'm not knocking the technical effort that has gone into developing it but Visual Editor is a product that was not really needed. I shudder to think of the day the paperclip takes over completely at Wikimedia. As any successful businessperson will tell you, the key is advertising, advertising, advertising, and not necessarily of the commercial type. The word "Wikipedia" is already one of the best known in the world and all it needs is to be promoted to a wider and wider audience. Green Giant supports NonFreeWiki (talk) 12:49, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

New editors should not be able to create userpage

The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
There is a clear consensus against disallowing new users to create user pages. Sven Manguard Wha? 17:16, 16 May 2014 (UTC)


New page patrollers are worried about self-promotional accounts, who make nothing in Commons except userpage and maybe uploading photos for it. This is bad. They get speedily deleted, but anyway.

User:Motopark sent to me a personal e-mail, where explained, that there is an easy way to diminish that bad habit. New users should not be able to make an userpage. For making a userpage, you should have some number (5? 10? 20?) edits. And maybe not on the first day, but the account must be some days (3? 4? 5? 7?) old.

But there is a problem. Some users with very few edits make userpage, which says: I'm mostly active in some other wiki. This can be done in form of soft redirect. This will be also prohibited, if new users are not allowed to make an userpage.

What do you think about the idea? Taivo (talk) 11:56, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

  •  Oppose You mean, one own user page? That should obviously be allowed. If you mean something else, please explain. The solution to this kind of issues is not to restrict what users can do. It is to increase patrollers and admins, as I have already said. Regards, Yann (talk) 15:16, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Official and funded new editor campaigns actively encourage new editors to create a user page as their first edit, even uploading a selfie to Commons as part of that process. I am not suggesting that is a good thing, but it is currently how many new contributors start out. I do not like the focus on "self-promotion" like it was spamming or vandalism. Frankly if someone creates a user page with their photo on it saying what football team they like, I do not care, good for them, sometimes those contributors go on to become regular contributors to this project. --Fæ (talk) 15:25, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
One would think. However, see User:Augusto De Luca. This person, a possibly notable photographer, -- if not an imposter -- with many uploads (by others) to Commons, see Category:Photographs by Augusto De Luca, apparently decided to create a user page on most WMF wikis. At the time, there were articles on him on most wikipedias. They had been standing for a long time. He'd have thought that stable. There is no policy against what he did, and nothing that would warn a user not to do it. All those user pages were a single image, from a file hosted here, no external links, no text. All those files are still standing.
The articles had been created by other editors, mostly single-purpose accounts (I call them "fans," and two of them seem to be professional photographers themselves, from evidence found with images at Category:Augusto De Luca. One of the editors was De Luca's daughter, who never edited cross-wiki, but uploaded some of the Commons images, first, to it.wikipedia. These were obviously not highly skilled Wikipedia editors, for they didn't understand the essential requirement for a Wikipedia article, reliable sources indicating notability. From what I can see, ADL is likely notable, (i.e, because of his access to subjects, and the shows he has put on, over many years), but it may take reference to print archives, in Italian, to establish it. ADL had no idea, my guess, as to what would happe, nobody expects the Spamish Inquisition. If anyone is interested, see my study on this case at wikiversity:en:User:Abd/Augusto De Luca. I've been waiting to go to meta with an appeal until I'd studied the affair thoroughly.
The opinion expressed at the top of this topic is a common one. Self-promotion is BAD. Yet w:Wikipedia:User pages allows a level of self-promotion on user pages. My own opinion about user pages is that we should leave them alone unless they are actually harmful. If the user page could cause Commons or the WMF to fall into ill repute, then, sure, they may be deleted. Otherwise, it's a waste of time to even consider them. --Abd (talk) 00:49, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
Why are you still pushing the ADL agenda? It's been proven to you countless times that the consensus was Augusto De Luca's userpages were considered to be spam, and you still choose to ignore this consensus to push your own agenda around. In spite of that, we have kept his images because they were also proven to be in scope for Wikimedia Commons. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 19:36, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
  •  Oppose. Another possible solution. Another way that would help deal with obvious spam pages would be to create an intermediate admin level. Kind of like template editors. Except their only admin ability would be to delete obvious spam pages. They would have to be carefully watched at first to make sure they understand what an obvious spam page is. They are obvious in how the bios are so bogus, and there is always a link. See: Wikipedia:Template editor. I have to deal with these spam pages on a wiki elsewhere. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:05, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
    • How would that help? First of all, there's a question of technical feasibility as far as per namespace deletion goes, and secondly, I'm not sure having a "special" class of users patrol other people's userpages is a good use of our resources. Sure, we may come across them once in a while and nominate them for deletion or speedy deletion, but they're usually left alone for their associated self-indulgent user account to play with. And furthermore, users who are qualified to "judge" the userpages of other accounts for deletion are also often qualified to be given the whole administrator toolset, deletion and all, anyway. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 19:36, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
  •  Support a low limit - if a new user is going to be a useful contributor, it will depend largely on how their first edits are perceived and what kind of welcome they get. From a Wikipedia point of view, I've known many good editors who didn't create a userpage until they had made a few useful edits. I would favour the lowest possible limit, about 5 non-reverted edits before they can create a userpage but no time limits. If a new user makes 5 good edits in 5 minutes (even if they are minor), I don't see why we need to ask them to wait a day/2 days/more before creating a userpage. In the long-term we might need to have a Wikimedia-wide debate about such userpages because this phenomenon affects many other wikis especially the higher-profile ones like Commons and Wikipedia. My own personal preference would be to move userpages off the content wikis altogether and into a single central location, where a new user could create a userpage after they have edited a content wiki, and maybe upload a couple of size-limited photos. This would keep Commons free of some of the dubious images that self-promoters are keen to add. Green Giant supports NonFreeWiki (talk) 12:36, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
  •  Oppose A lot of valuable and long-term contributors created a user page first. I think it would be quite demotivating. If, at all, I would support a strict restriction i.e. only allowing interwiki-links, language links and babel. Babel information is often very important and I am always positively delighted when I see people creating their pages with babel templates so I know whether they'll be able to understand me. -- Rillke(q?) 13:05, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

RFC: Merging CheckUser and Oversight requests

The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
It is clear that there is not sufficient support for this change. The RfC is closed as no consensus, although had there been more participants, "consensus against" might have also been the outcome. Sven Manguard Wha? 17:13, 16 May 2014 (UTC)


I've had a brief read over at Commons:Checkusers and Commons:Oversighters and it seems the policies governing their activities are quite similar, and they both are derived from the access to nonpublic data policy. Their work concerns sensitive data, and there's bound to be a lot of overlap between each of the roles, but the difference is that respectively CheckUsers and Oversighters prefer to be proficient only in the scope of their assigned permissions roles. However, judging from the checkuser election archive and oversighter election archive on average totaling much less than the frequent successful and unsuccessful requests for adminship archives, unfortunately there does not seem to be a whole lot of demand for their services. Therefore I propose to merge the requests pages to a single "Requests for advanced permissions" page, or something similar concerning rights access to nonpublic information. We can still keep the checkuser and oversighter request archive logs respectively, but I feel this simplifies the process and oftentimes the trust required for one permission is sufficient for handling the other. On English Wikipedia for example both CheckUsers and Oversighters are appointed by Arbitration Committee; not saying that's good or bad, but illustrating an example process on another wiki of assigning these permissions for comparison.

P.S. I'm thinking about merging the roles of CheckUser and Oversighter so a successful request for one permission is automatically granted the other, but it might be too much for right now. This is only a proposal to consolidate the election process into one; nominees could still indicate preference for one role over the other, by indicating whether the "request for advanced permissions" is for CU or OS. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 05:23, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

  • Support - with so few requests it makes sense to have a single request page. Green Giant supports NonFreeWiki (talk) 03:03, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
  •  Oppose In my view checkuser is a highly specialized right with distinct legal implications that does not exist for oversight rights. I could see circumstances in which someone may be prepared to volunteer for oversight duties who would not be interested, or possibly be unsuitable, for checkuser. --Fæ (talk) 04:05, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Can you elaborate under what circumstances you see this happening to have cause to oppose? IMO, I have not seen a case where trust with one set of tools did not automatically confer trust with the other set, per the foundation's privacy and access to nonpublic data policies, but I could be wrong. (Furthermore, this proposal is technically only about simplifying the requests page for the rights, not merging their roles completely, but I'd like to explore this line of thought you've brought up.) TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 15:29, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
    I don't want to dig too deep, there are so few oversighters and checkusers that I don't want to be seen to be discussing them, in addition I am open to correction as I consider myself to have basic knowledge of these systems, having never been an oversighter or checkuser myself. The way I naively conceive of the distinction is that Oversighters have the power to remove data from some of our logs in specific circumstances, such as extreme cases of privacy invasion or credible complaints relating to likely criminal images; Checkusers have the special power to investigate otherwise hidden IP addresses and access data (for a limited time) as part of necessary investigations of abuse and patterns of abuse of our projects, the circumstances under which this is allowed to happen are limited strictly by policy and the data itself is considered to have serious legal implications, for example after 90 days even a subpoena to WMF legal (for example as part of a police investigation) will not and should not ever result in the data being produced. Among our current community of administrators, for example, there would be a few I would trust with Oversight rights, but I might have questions that would need to be addressed before believing that they both understood the implications of holding Checkuser rights and the mature outlook and experience that would be required when being under pressure to conduct investigations. --Fæ (talk) 15:48, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
  •  Oppose No need. --Steinsplitter (talk) 16:51, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
  • You are right, these are indeed 2 groups with access to private data but in my view their field of work differs too much; while a checkuser usually deals with sock puppetry investigation and blocks, oversighters are supposed to suppress private data -- and we have only one user who has requested both rights; I think keeping 2 distinct groups is not so much about trust but more about anticipated competence and interest of the candidates. Consequently  Weak oppose. -- Rillke(q?) 09:04, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.


Deleted image information

Screenshot of File:Himmel 2014-05-13 07-29.jpg

There should be some way of recovering a deleted image's source where present. What I mean is, say some image says where it was obtained and such (it gives URL), but it does not give proper attribution to the creator and so is deleted. Now, no one knows where the image originally came from, so for editors who have not already looked at the specific URL of image already, the image is potentially what may be considered as unrecoverable! There should be some sort of log given that states what the content of the page had been or what references had been on the image prior to its deletion. Currently, if a file is deleted, then when going to its page on Commons, there is no evidence given that the file had ever existed in the first place. This should be changed. If clarification is needed, please ask. Dustin (talk) 22:16, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Do you see the red bar? -- Rillke(q?) 11:45, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Wanted: coordinators for Cameras for Commons photographers grants

I am looking for one or more experienced and frequent Commons editors to coordinate the on-wiki side of the proposed Cameras for Commons photographers grant program. The coordinators will announce the availability of camera grants and possibly close the discussions on Commons that determine which applicants receive camera grants. They will also work with Siko from WMF to evaluate outcomes of the grants. If you are interested please contact me on my talk page. --Pine✉ 23:41, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

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