Commons:Village pump/Archive/13

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Village pump (Archives)

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If you want to restart an old topic, copy the entire topic to the Village pump and add your post like you would normally.

Contents


Images with insufficient license infos: Template:Incomplete license

I just created Template:Incomplete license to tag images that have been marked as being under a free license but are missing information requred by the license (or required to verify the license). Please use it instead of Template:Unknown where appropriate. I have linked the template on Commons:Copyright_tags#Unfree_copyrights - if you can think of another place to link to it, please do so! -- Duesentrieb 13:51, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hey, good work! I was looking for such a template a few days ago --Baikonur 17:21, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
There's a risk that legitimate images get deleted simply because the uploader forgot to add the information that they took the photo, created the drawing, recorded the sound, etc. In my opinion, we should assume good faith, and unless common sense suggests that the uploader is not identical to the creator, a photo tagged with the appropriate license template is acceptable even when that information is not made explicit.
Also, why is the date when the photo was taken important?--Eloquence 17:55, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Copyright expiration clock? Stan Shebs 18:34, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
While the information is useful for that purpose, I do not see its absence as a valid reason to delete an image.--Eloquence 08:52, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The template does not say that an image will be deleted if there is no date provided, but that a date would be useful ("If available ..."). In addition to the license, author and source are important and concerning public domain images, there should be an explanation why this work is in the public domain if it isn't self-evident. As you can see below, there are people who upload arbitrary images and just place a free license on the description page. Two distinguish between those and really free images there should be a minimum of information provided by the uploader that makes the license stated on the description page a bit more transparent and traceable. --Baikonur 18:55, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The template does not say that an image will be deleted if there is no date provided, but that a date would be useful ("If available ..."). That's because I changed it, see the earlier version of the template for the original wording.
Of course it is useful to have a maximum of information about the uploaded files, but it is highly problematic to retroactively change the criteria under which images are considered acceptable. First, there was just a checkbox which needed to be clicked to confirm that you are licensing your uploads under the FDL. (That checkbox is still around for no good reason.) Then images which weren't "tagged" properly were deleted, even if the original uploaders had followed the instructions and, by clicking the checkbox, agreed to put their uploads under the FDL. To apply even more rigid criteria now has the potential to make lots of people angry, especially if their images are deleted without personal notification and a substantial grace period (as in months, not weeks).--Eloquence 14:50, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

First of all, thanks you, Eloquence, for changing the bit about the date. Indeed, that is, strictly speaking, only neccessary for images that are PD by age. Also, I want to encourage anyone placing this tag on an image page (or the well established Template:Unknown) to always notify the user of what s/he should put on the image description page. I have (long ago) created a templates for this: Template:Please tag images. I would like to encourage everyone to use it or a similar text. Also have a look at Template:Please link images, so we don't get so many unsorted pictures.

Please note that I'm not trying to change the rules here - I just made a template that explains to others what I understand to be the rules. For example, using a GFDL image without stating the author and source is a copyright violation. As many images uploaed here are moved from wikipedias, we have no idea if the uploader is also the creator of the image - assuming good faith is fine, but my experience tells me differently. I agree that changing conditions is a problem. But as far as I know, on the commons tagging has always been policy, at least as long as I have been here. Also, the vast majority of images in question have been uploaded at a time when there where detailed instructions on the upload page of what needs to be on the description page.

About PD images: Uploading some image and just claiming it to be PD is simply not good enough, and I belive this is consensus. The description page must always contain information suffiecient to verify the license status, most importantly author and source, and, for images PDed by Age, the date of creation and/or the date of the death of the creator of the image. If the author is not know, the image has to be indee very old to be allowed - 70 years after the death of the author could be well over 100 jears after the creation of the image.

Regards -- Duesentrieb 17:47, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There are many cases, such as your own upload Image:Blake-Abel.jpg, where anyone can use common sense to verify the information that is not provided on the description page (in this case, when the painter died). Source information is not needed for a photograph of a public domain work and may, in fact, be detrimental to our cause (as our position is that photographing such works is not a creative act). An uploader may reasonably assume that by uploading the file, they do implicitly provide the information that they are the creator. I agree that this information should be made explicit, but I find it of utmost importance that the uploader be notified about this.
I am not categorically opposed to deleting images with slightly incomplete information, I just believe that we should 1) use common sense -- resist the temptation to tag instead of researching whether the license information could be correct, 2) notify and only delete if the response is negative, or there is no response within a long grace period.
Of course, the main thing we need is a better upload form that makes it clear what information is required. Such a form was part of my original project plan, but nobody else has helped with it. I'll see if I can get something done in this department soon.--Eloquence 03:19, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I agree with you almost completely. First of all, the uploader should always first be asked to add any information missing, and should be granted some time to do so - I normally do not delete images with incomplete licenses until one month after the uploader has been notified - I belive that should be enough. For that period of time, I think the image should be tagged as problematic - the unknown-tag is very unspecific, that's why i created the new template. The alternative would be to put time image up for deletion by a normal deletion request - which would give the uploader only on week to reakt, and also "feels" worse to new contributesr, I think.
I do not suggest to slap the incomplete-license template onto everything that is not labeled perfectly - I use if for cases where some license is claimed, but i can't see any way to verify that claim. Especially, I often see random images (especially scans) labeled as PD or GFDL; Also, I often see GFDL-images without an author name, but with something like "from wikipedia", indicating it is not the work of the uploader - which makes it a violation of the terms of the GFDL.
I also do not suggest we should delete images just because they are missing the date of the death of the author, if that date is non-critical to the license status or can easily be researched. Especially for works of well known artists or very old works, the date is not critical. It is critical however for anonymous photographies from the 1930s and the like - many people seem to think black-and-white photos are PD automatically or something. I think the new wording is ok now - dates are helpful, but (usually) not strictly neccessary.
Sorce information is always a good idea, and I can't think of any reason not to give it. It's simply the easiest way to verify the license status, especially in cases when someone elses work is uploaded and claimed to have been released under some free license. But I would not just delete images that do not have that info - asking the uploader first is always best.
I would indeed like to have a better upload form too. The problem is that we need different info depending on what kind of image it is, or if it is an image at all. The details become rather complicated... but a technical solution would be excelent. In the meantime, we should try to make the info shown on the upload form as detailed and clear as possible, and to tell people exactly what should and what must be on the image description. I tried this before with MediaWiki:Fileuploaded, but that text is no longer used. For now, we should try to make MediaWiki:uploadtext as expressive as possible, and to provide translations of the full info in many languages - at the moment I see english, german and french - that's not enough...
I would be happy to help to develop a better system for getting the appropriate infos for each image. The incomplete-licence-template is just one piece in the puzzle.
Thanks again to everyone, and especially to Eloquence for their work on the commons! -- Duesentrieb 12:44, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Addendum: please have a look at Image:Ant logo large.gif to see how/when I think this template should be used -- Duesentrieb 13:10, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
OK, I have created Commons:Incomplete license as a proposed policy page for this template.--Eloquence 17:31, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Great work, thank you very much! So lets take any further discussion to the talk page there: Commons talk:Incomplete license. I've already posted a few questions there. -- Duesentrieb 22:33, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Template:Non free content/En

I created this template to list some well known case of non free content frequently uploaded.

Template:Non free content/En

I would like some feedback on it (ex: errors, missing stuff ?) before adding (or not) it to various page like Commons:Criteria for inclusion. —FoeNyx 23:03, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I would add logos and screenshots of copyrighted programs (fair use) - we see both fairly often. -- Duesentrieb 01:37, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Good move Foenyx. villy 06:18, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Do not forget do delete ALL PD-US fotos as long as pictures on commons must be free of use in any jurisdiction. You have no idea of what you are starting here. Have a nice day. -- 80.145.27.221 05:50, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

when in doubt of Latin names ...

I fully support the policy to use latin binomial names for animals and plants. But what if you've got a picture of a mushroom or a spider and you don't know which one it is? Could we have an area for pictures to be uploaded pending their identification by an expert? -- Tarquin 15:57, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There was a category to identify but it seems that it has been deleted recently or I confuse something. --Baikonur 16:25, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
However there is Category:Unknown subject with subcategories. --Baikonur 16:31, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You could also place it in a category of a higher level, like Category:Agaricales for mushrooms etc. HenkvD 19:07, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

About the organization of the species

I'm interested in making photos about trees. When I've uploaded this photos, I've seen there's a little bit disorganization. I don't know if exists a section where organizate this question. I think it would be a good idea make where the photographs of nature could talk about classifications and organization. --Arturo Reina 09:30, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

New image description template

I have created a simple template Template:Information to create uniform and better image descriptions within the Wikimedia Commons. At the moment most descriptions are very poor, very individual and need to be larger, more clear and better. In many cases people only add a license template without explaining why they can do so. As an example how this template gets embedded you can look at Image:Gammarayburst-GRB990123.jpeg, Image:Konqueror-Screenshot.png and Image:Magic-Telescope.jpg. The template is kept very simple in layout so that it can be adopted smothly without large optical changes. It's advantages are:

  • It is machine readable (the single variables as e.g. author and description text can be extracted easily).
  • It gives uploaders a hint what information they need to add to the image.
  • A uniform look of the description texts as it is like in other large image databases. So this template would also improve the Commons itself for third parties that want to use them as image database.
  • If the Template gets changed in layout all files using it will get changed immediatly without the need to change them all individually (only the number and the names of the variables need to be the same, but not the order, layout and so forth).

I would like that this template gets adopted widely within the Commons. Arnomane 12:18, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

theres already one: german FAQ site. Other versions of this file are totally unnecessary in the commons, where's only one version of each file. the "template" i've creaded is only on the german sites, because no one is interessted in working in/on/at the Commons:Translation coordination core! Schaengel89 @me 13:07, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A few comments. Although I praise the initiative and I am in great favour of that kind of information displayed on ALL our material, I find templates a bit complicated to use for newcomers or people who are not used to the Wiki syntax for one, and second, remember that if the template is changed (ie. one field added or taken away), it will break all the information posted on the information page. This said, I have explained on the Talk page how to use the template. notafish }<';> 13:23, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC) PS. Schaengel89, where is your template exactly? This seems to me to be only a recommandation, or I missed something. :(

@Schaengel: thanks a lot for your sensitive comments. I'm aware of the FAQ-page. And you would have known that there is nothing like this template on this page if you had read my comment really. @Notafish: Yes I'm aware that these templates are not that intuitive for newcomers. But most people using the Wikimedia Commons are long time Wikipedia editors and know a little bit about the system. But I think that this template is as easy as possible and is worth using it widely as it has many advantages over the current system. Thanks also for your using explanation at the talk page. I had added one in HTML- comments directly within the template code (which will not be read by everyone ;-) ). Arnomane 14:06, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

oh come on, arnomane. i didn't say your work's bad. i just think, that Other versions of this file is unnecessary - that's all i said Schaengel89 @me 17:40, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Well in many cases you won't need it but it is very helpfull in cases where you hav another version of the same image e.g. a detail cutout and the full image, see: Image:Anders-Celsius-Head.jpg and Image:Celsius.jpg. Arnomane 09:50, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Templates for galleries

i've creaded some templates for the multilingual gallery-description. would be nice, if anyone could translate this into english. and it would be very nice, if y'all use them! Schaengel89 @me

Nice job but...If French is designated with a French flag and a French flag only...well, it's a bit French oriented What about the Canadians (oops, Québecois), the Belgians and all the other French speakers? ;). I'm more in favor of using the codes, ie. fr/de/en/zh etc. notafish }<';> 13:27, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC) (who is French, btw)
it's the same with german in austria and swiss, or english in the usa, the uk, eire, australia asf. where's the problem? Schaengel89 @me 17:37, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Yes, it's the same. The problem is, the French don't hold any kind of "right" to have their flag displayed as a token for the language, neither do the Germans over die österreicher ;). Keeping to letters makes it "neutral" in my opinion. notafish }<';> 11:00, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have investigated these templates a little bit and I fear to say that nonetheless it looks nice this is not such a good solution. Look at the page and the page code of Koblenz. At first you have a large hand coded table that embedds the inddividual flag templates and short descriptions. The flag templates only embedd an image and are only a short substitute for an image link and don't provide extra value. So in the current way these many flag templates are a lot of hard work which could also be done better with only one single template that has wo values: flag image and description sentence. Arnomane 14:24, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
yes, until we've got enogh people, who speaks all the languages listed here. i think it's very less work, instead of writing [[Image:flag of any nation.png|20px|name of language in this language]]. you understand? it's just less work - that's why i've creaded this templates Schaengel89 @me 17:41, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Arnomane that a two-valued template (or maybe three valued) would be better than the current solution in Koblenz. Also, I don't think it would be much work to enter. It is not necessary to enter the Image: and the 20px - the template code will do that for you. Maybe these examples will explain.

  • {{lang|code=de|text=Dies ist etwas anders}}}

or:

  • {{language|Uk_flag_300.png|en|This is something different}}}

or:

  • {{language2|Germany_flag_300.png|Dies ist keine Pfeife}}}

If it is possible to create Image:de.png as a redirect to Germany_flag_300.png then one can make the template select the flag too:

  • {{languagef|de|Dies ist etwas anders}}}

I've created temporary templates Template:Sandbox_lang, Template:Sandbox_language and Template:Sandbox_lang_flag to show what I mean:

Template ideas for language code and text (no flags): Template:Sandbox lang Template:Sandbox lang

With flags: Template:Sandbox lang flag Template:Sandbox lang flag Template:Sandbox language

after i've seen the animation made by Nuno Tavares, i made a copy with the flags of germany, austria and switzerland. from now on, theres no problem with the same languages in different countries! Schaengel89 @me 12:23, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Please do not use these animations. In my opinion they are very annoying. Isn't it possible to have a gallery page in each language instead of having a bunch of descriptions in every language on the top of the page? On an extra page it would be also possible to have image descriptions in different languages. If this isn't possible I would really prefer short codes for languages according to ISO 639 instead of animated images. A static tripartite flag for e. g. German would be okay though. --Baikonur 11:06, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
what? one gallery page in over 30 languages? you ask, if that is possible? in my opinions, it isn't annoyoing. why is is annoying? just three flags! Schaengel89 @me 18:25, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Animated icons like this are extremely distracting. Please don't do that. Thanks to whoever changed that. -- Duesentrieb 19:16, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
so, you find more than one flag extremly distracting? and why? do you have another (better) idea? Schaengel89 @me 14:26, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As I already said: short codes for languages according to ISO 639 (de:, en:, fr: etc.) or a static tripartite (sollte "dreigeteilt" heißen) flag. However I would prefer gallery pages in different languages if it is possible (see above). --Baikonur 18:43, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Who was the braniac that deleted all the Euro-Banknotes?!?

Well Done, really. Ever tried to read this?!? This really hurts you know..."Template:CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat the picture can't be used to produce false money." would have been it. Please restore them! ((o)), Ja, bitte?!? 16:44, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Indeed, I assume this has been discussed before but I can't find any such discussion. In English, the EU says photographs of Euro coins are authorised. DoubleBlue (Talk) 06:09, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This was put up as a deletion request at Commons:Deletion requests on March 23. The arguments for and against deletion can be read at Commons:Deletion requests/Archives02#Euro commons face coins photos. It would have been helpful if all concerned would have submitted their opinions before deletion. All Euro-related images were deleted April 4. Thuresson 06:18, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for the link. I knew there had to have been discussion somewhere. From what I can gather, the problem here is the non-derivative clause in the copyright terms. i.e., you can't take a part of the face of the coin for another use. They are therefore not allowed under WM Commons policy. Not that the policy is necessarily right. Surely using a tag like ND would cover the copyright terms requiring people not to use it for derivative works. DoubleBlue (Talk) 12:36, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
They were deleted because they were released under gfdl while the copyright is hold by the ECB and that the restrictions on reproductions/derivative works are not compatible with GFDL or free CC licenses. CC-ND-* tags are classified in "Non-Free Creative Commons Licenses" in Commons:Copyright tags. FoeNyx 08:03, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • I mean I know how "my" money looks like. I even have a Poster of all the Notes and Coins. But I think its pretty dumb to delete this just because the pictures may not be used as templates for falsification.... then you could write "void" or "ungültig" across them. But thats just my opinion... ((o)), Ja, bitte?!? 20:05, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

All pictures with tag {{PD-US}}

...because they are copyrighted in germany and probably many other countries. Many of them have usage restrictions, too. This is against commons criteria for inclusion: uploaded must be free of use in any jurisdiction. Thank you. -- 80.145.27.221 06:27, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Is this User:King who "forgot" to login? IP belongs to Deutsche Telekom AG. Thuresson 06:39, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This is according to german law, in which copyright is pending to persons instead of institutions. Sorry for this. -- 80.145.27.221 06:46, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Wrong! Every german software company only says "code copyright XYZ-company". Institutions can have all relevant using rights. Even if you are the author you give all using rights to the instituion you are working at, you even sell the right beeing namend as author (yes of course in german law you can want other people not beeing namend as author). Although in priniciple you are still the author according to law this is of no relevance as you have no right beeing namend as author. So please stop this silly theoretical debate. Arnomane 07:56, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Wow, are you fighting a war? We are on images not computer programms. Please believe: The originator and it´s work is protected by german copyright law. btw.:AP, for example is always naming the originator -- 80.145.27.221 08:27, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'm not fighting. I'm fed up that this silly discussion is swapping over from de-Wikipedia. And yes I'm aware that AP and other press agencies are naming the fotographer (in most cases those jormnalists only have a loosly bound to the press agency and of course the name of the fotographer can also be a sign of quality and proof of correctness of the content provided) but this has nothing to do with the fact that your employer can want you not beeing namend as author even in Germany. Arnomane 09:00, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I think you bend copy-right to Arnomane-right. This is very dangerous. -- 80.145.27.221 11:23, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Hi Thuresson, very friendly. When I am being sarcastic, ironic, talking nonsense or whatever, I take responsibility for what I'm saying! Always! There is no need to sniff because I do not log out to say anything dangerous. When I forget to log in, I correct it. Man...Commons is drivin' me crazy...  :-) —King 10:03, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sorry anonymous you are completely ignorant. You simply know nothing! Even if some people think so (Historiograf in german wikipedia) the images of NASA and other US-gov agencies are PD worldwide as their legal disclaimers speak generally to the world and not to the US. Look for example at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/policy/ There you can read for example. "JPL does not issue image permissions on an image by image basis." That says: Please don't go on our nerves with such questions. This whole PD-US thing is a polemical and stupid argumentation of people who want to have all kinds of exeptions or even fair use or something like that in german wikipedia and are now upset as that what they want is not going to be done. Arnomane 07:50, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Would you please STOP misinformation. Each reader is able to read http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2004/09/copyright_in_go.html where is a lengthy discussion of the topic. I am against deletion requests of PD GOV pictures but NOBODY should falsely say that they are PD worldwide. Historiograf --217.226.45.158 00:36, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Yes, this is correct. There is a widespread misconception that because U.S. law denies copyright protection to its government's works, that those works automatically fall into the public domain outside U.S. borders too. Unfortunately, the Bern copyright convention says exactly the opposite, that foreign works enjoy full copyright protection even if the country of origin does not offer that protection. In practical terms, the U.S. government doesn't bother to exercise those rights, but it has them whether it likes it or not. --IMeowbot 07:16, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Sorry Arnomane, I don't understand why you are so upset. It is not a question of NASA or whatever policy, it is a question of german copyright law (and many other juisdications). To the jpl-issue: that Caltech makes no representations or warranties with respect to ownership of copyrights in the images and, even more interesting: contractors and vendors who wish to use JPL images in advertising or public relation materials should direct requests... means non-commercial, it is simply non-free-material. You must not print it on a T-shirt! -- 80.145.27.221 08:06, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You forgot to quote the whole paragraph: JPL/Caltech contractors and vendors who wish to use JPL images in advertising or public relation materials should direct requests to the Television/Imaging Team Leader, Media Relations Office, Mail Stop 186-120, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena CA 91109, telephone (818) 354-5011, fax (818) 354-4537..
The license speaks of "JPL images" but do not define what JPL images are. Images of JPL buildings and staff? I find the NASA license more relevant. Thuresson 08:26, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Are you nuts? You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages. Anything else is restricted!! You may not sell fireworks with a space shuttle on it! -- 80.145.27.221 11:23, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
No this is no issue of german copyright. See my second comment above. An instituion can also be in Germany the only "person" that has to be namend. Everything else is a strange interpretation. If it would be otherwise you would have to change all credit lines of ESA on their website for example. Feel free to ask the NASA via email if you don't believe me but please stop spreading FUD here until you show me the email answer of NASA. Regarding the requests at JPL. This is a service of JPL. They want you to use the best available material so that they are represented in the best way. You can also ask JPL if you don't believe that. Arnomane 08:34, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Show me your general policy e-mail from NASA/JPL first. Both parties (and you, too, sorry) will not understand this issue. -- 80.145.27.221 11:23, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't need to be teached by a anonymous random IP. If you would know me you would have known that I take copyright issues very serious. I can't ask the whole world. You can also do your homework! I have asked several big institutions e.g. ESA (I'm in contact with them and if you can read German you can read the proof that I don't make jokes here). So you are in no position demanding from me asking NASA. If you have done this homework yourself as I did it several times we can discuss again here. Until that: End of discussion here. Arnomane 13:05, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Neither of you is making that much sense. {{PD-US}} is not for US Government stuff (which is PD worldwide, though government-funded but privately created stuff like Amtrak is not PD); that's what {{PD-USGov}} is. {{PD-US}} is for stuff that has passed into the PD in the US but possibly not elsewhere. It is a matter to be discussed, but should not be confused with the US Government. --SPUI 23:24, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Right, and that stuff gets really messy because the U.S. was so late to sign onto Bern. It really needs to be looked at on a country-by-country basis :( --IMeowbot 07:24, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Not that I really want to bring this up again but.... For pictures like this. What copyright tag should they get if they were moved to the Commons. Is there a country that would enforce copyrights frin 105 years ago? Would they get {{PD-old}}, {{PD-US}}, {{PD}} or what? I think it'd be good to know because those images should be on the commons and not just EN. Grenavitar 01:42, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

RCBot

I am developing RCBot, a bot whose main purpose at the moment is to crawl all Wikipedias in all languages and automatically replace filenames that have changed or will change on the Commons. There are several situations where the bot would be useful:

  • Suppose there were two identical files on the commons. This happens quite frequently as most images were created for one specific language Wikipedia and then uploaded to other languages where different people think it might be a good idea to have this image on the Commons and thus upload independent copies of the same image. Someone now discovers identical images and decides that one of them should be deleted. RCBot helps here by changing all links to the to-be-deleted file to the one that will "survive".
  • RCBot can help to rename an image on the Commons. Of course, the actual renaming of the image -- by uploading it again using a different file name -- needs to be done manually. But RCBot can change all links from the old file to the new file.

Up to now, RCBot is still in development and testing, but I'd like to receive some feedback about it. Do you think it is or will be useful? What functions do you miss?

Up to now, RCBot operates in 200 different Wikipedias. But I don't know whether files on the Commons are used by any other projects I need to be aware of? — Richie 10:10, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Wow this feature is really needed. I'm very interested in seeing this bot in operation. The Commons are used by all Wikimedia-projects. Especially also Wikinews (see: http://www.wikinews.org). Arnomane 10:58, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Sounds like even more work. I noticed something strange about wikinews. If you look at the current weather you'll see several maps uploaded here on the Commons that are used there. One of them was wikinews:en:Image:World_C_8Apr2005at0800UTC.jpg at the moment I wrote this, but the image page says that There are no pages that link to this image. Is it because of weird template construction they use? Most other images work. Apparently, if you want to upload a file to wikinews, you are redirected to the Commons. So they need to be included. — Richie 17:04, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
great idea! could help in standardizing image names. I do not know whether one can set up project pages at commons, but if so maybe do this and let me know so I will put the page on my watch-list. regards. Tobias Conradi 12:58, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Halló Richie! Great idea! I want to let you know about
  1. en:User talk:Patrick#Did you know that ...
  2. en:User talk:Patrick#inline links at commons: to nonexisting images
Thanks Gangleri, I haven't thought about changing inline links to images yet, but the bot should be able to handle these as well since it just replaces Image:OLD by Image:NEW.
What is wrong about changing the link colour to red after an image is deleted? It just indicates that the image doesn't exists. No problem in my opinion, but I might miss something.


Vina
I see it as a problem that you can not follow any more / could never follow talks (and other inline references) about images that have been / will be deleted.
Example: Image:Satellite image of Romania in December 2001.jpg is now referenced at (commons:)Commons:Village pump. If you look at Special:Whatlinkshere/Image:Satellite image of Romania in December 2001.jpg you will not see Commons:Village pump in the list. Please compare Category:PD NASA and Special:Whatlinkshere/Category:PD NASA and you will see a different behaviour.
The "Image talk" namespace behaves as most others
  1. link colors: Image talk:Satellite image of Romania in December 2001.jpg - Image talk:Vina vom Schloss Neubronn 2004-07-E-08-300.jpg
  2. Whatlinkshere: Special:Whatlinkshere/Image talk:Satellite image of Romania in December 2001.jpg - Special:Whatlinkshere/Image talk:Vina vom Schloss Neubronn 2004-07-E-08-300.jpg
Another inconsistency in MediaWiki is that the link Image:foo bar blabla.png is allways blue. This is confusing especially for "newbies" and but also iritating for everybody.
Special:Whatlinkshere/Image:Vina vom Schloss Neubronn 2004-07-E-08-300.jpg does not list (commons:)Commons:Village pump either - the image is shown at the right.
Conclusions: For normal pages you can "fix" references either by having a redirect or changing the link. For categories you have to change the link because redirect of categories is not functional. For images you have no chance to detect (with standard MediaWiki functions) the pages where they are refered. You can compare the references with full http:-links / links using {{SERVER}} etc. Best regards Gangleri | Th | T 19:29, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Your NowCommons page includes all templates I've found so far: JP, ES, NL, IT, DE, SV. I bookmarked the page and will append the list if I find new ones. — Richie 09:21, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Gangleris list moved to Template_talk:NowCommons Tobias Conradi 14:16, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Public domain bullshit

en:Wikipedia:You can't grant your work into the public domain Discuss. --SPUI 00:28, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I have not looked at the page but as far as I know, realeasing your work as PD is impossible by EU law. All you can do is grant unlimmited usage rights to everyone - which is similar, but not the same. -- Duesentrieb 00:37, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This is splitting a very fine legal hair. I fail to see any major difference between public domain and I-own-the-copyright-but-you-can-do-anything-you-want-with-this. Raul654 02:03, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Tag new images however you like, but re-tagging old images which are labelled PD would be an enormous waste of time and effort for such a pedantic distinction. — Dan | Talk 03:00, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
We discussed this topic almost half a year ago in de-Wikipedia and we had the same silly debate. In de-Wikipedia we finally settled down to tag the images despite that with a PD tag as there is no effective difference (you even can deny beeing namend as aouthor in accordance with continental european copryright laws). I fear that one of those FUD persons from de-Wikipedia brought it into en-Wikipedia... So this PD (or as it is called im German "Gemeinfrei") versus copyright is a highly academical debate and I'm very much against tagging the images with the copyrighted tag (this red C) but tagging it still only with the PD tag as there is no difference to public domain as it is in priniciple "name the source and do whatever you want". Arnomane 09:31, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Picture in Commons with same name in wikipedia

How can I link to a picture in commons if there is a picture with the same name in e.g. the Dutch wikipedia? If I link Image:Tereshkova.jpg from commons in the Dutch wikipedia I get the Dutch picture nl:Afbeelding:Tereshkova.jpg which is not the same. I know that uploading the picture under an other name is possible but it happens so often that I would like to know if there is an easier way to get it right. -Svdmolen 08:37, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Other than deleting the local copy (the copy on that language wikipedia), I don't think you can. Raul654 08:43, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
That or reuploading the Commons picture under a better, and different, name. --Oldak Quill 12:27, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This stresses the importance of giving images unique file names before uploading them. Thuresson 13:13, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I think this issue can only be mitigated over time as image files are uploaded less and less locally, in favour of the Commons. This could be stimulated by lovcal Wikipedias. (I've added some lines to this effect in the Help pages on the Dutch one.) Downside: the fact that copyright issues are (far) more strict on the Commons, which undoubtedbly deters some contributors. But I think that over time people will get used to this "fact of life": if you upload your own pix, it's either PD, GFDL or CC-by-whatsit, if you upload anything else, make sure you have done your homework first. MartinD 09:08, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Metadata needed

The file upload process only asks for a general description. This is not valuable for later discovery by someone else. When Commons is really used we will have the problem of finding suitable files. Without appropriate metadata this will be difficult. We really need to some default category fields for photo's and videos:

  • What? e.g. Einstein
  • Where? e.g. New York
  • When? e.g. 17th June 1944

Obviously these field should be optional; but it will make the image/video more likely to be used.:ChrisG 14:35, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hm some paragraphs up I suggested a already working solution. ;-) Look at Template:Information. I have added it to several images and would be happy if it can be used by others too. Arnomane 18:16, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I did see your template; but it seems to be concerned with information narrowly concerned with the upload process. I'm concerned with real world information that would make the media useful for others. In addition it should be built into the upload process, not attached via a template. The upload process is a webform; so it should be fairly easy to add further fields.  :81.155.255.8 19:45, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Okay you are interested in machine readable Metadata what kind of information a file provides. You could embedd it for the time beeing manually within the image description text (which should always be done). There already exist categories and gallery articles for a systematic categorization but the system is in work in progress and in discussion at the moment. And regarding changing the upload form, well this topic is beeing discussed for a long time in various places with no real sucess. :-( If you are interested in the other ideas and in helping finding a good solution look at the Meta-Wiki http://meta.wikimedia.org and search for "upload form" or something similar. Here within the Commons I fear you wouldn't find the right persons that do the software coding. In the meantime we should focus on good and correct image descriptions and enter the information you want within the descriptions as there is much work to do... Arnomane 20:11, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I also think this needs to be resolved quickly. While I can understand the idea of not forcing a specific categorisation upon commons, I think we can should separate 'concrete' and 'abstract' categories. For example the content of a picture/video can be described in many different ways, so the idea of allowing multiple categories makes sense. But their are concrete facts about the picture/video: date taken/made, author, camera used, aperture, shutter speed, etc. These could also be used to make a better search interface. I suggested a new upload form a while ago, see User:Wombat/Upload. I don't think it would be much work to add the code to mediawiki (says he without looking), is their any objections ?. -- wombat 08:22, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well Metainformation could and can be added with categories provided the following two golden rules:

  1. At maximum 5 categories per article/image whatever.
  2. No double categorization (e.g. don't add two different categories out of the same thematic field to it)

I would suggest the following (in parts already existing) Meta structure:

  • License category (gets automatically added via the license template), see Commons:Copyright tags
  • Data type category: as image, video, audio, and source
  • Content category that fits best to the content of the file (and take care of golden rule 2). One very good example categorization structure is: Commons:Category scheme astronomy. So there are at maximum 3 categories left for content description.

Any ideas that go beyond that are quite pointless as we would have enough work until we reach this proposed stage. Of course at the moment we have still a problem with categories and gallery pages. There is a nice idea merging article and category namespace but this needs work in MediaWiki software and up to now nobody knows if and when this feature will be done. Arnomane 14:51, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Template:OwnWork

I have create the above tag to makr images that have no license info but are claimed by the uploader to be his/her own work. I fell that this is mire specific than the normal {{unknown}} tag and helps users to understand what the problem is and how to resovle it. Furthermore I hope this will help to deal with the images listed on Commons:Untagged images more quickly and in a better way - please comment, or just use the tag if you like it. -- Duesentrieb 16:35, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

InterWiki links on categories

Is there any reason why Categories should not have InterWiki links to their relevant articles on Wikipedias of different languages? There is a user who has been deleting them, because those articles may link to articles on Commons, but not to categories on Commons, and he argues those links must be two-way. I disagree, and feel that Interwiki links need not be reciprocal, because they help users find articles. Comments? Kevyn 16:41, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Agree. The links help users, so we should keep them. --Mormegil 16:05, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I also agree. Ideally categories here link to corresponding categories, but a category->article is a perfectly acceptable alternative. Stan Shebs 17:01, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I didn't say interwikilanguage-links are stupid. I said sth. like stan shebs: categories here (have to) link to corresponding categories of course we need those InterWiki links! they're as important as categories and absolutely necessary! Schaengel89 @me 13:00, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I disagree. Category InterWiki links to articles are OK. Kevyn 02:25, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
and why are they OK? Schaengel89 @me 14:02, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
commons is a bit different from other wikis in that we have no real articles/content pages we just exist to index and manage images. Also in Wikipedia it is normal practice to have a category and an article for the same thing, here its something we generally try to avoid and indeed . Wikipedia articles should IMO definitely link to categories on commons if there is no relevant normal page though there are some issues with doing so due to the design of the current template on en. Similarly all pages here whether category or normal should IMO take the user to the best place on Wikipedia to find out more about what is being discussed. That generally means a page on Wikipedia not a category (categories on Wikipedia seem to be very much treated as an extra not as the core structure like they are here). Plugwash 14:18, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
In my opinion the interwiki links should go from article to article and from category to category. In the absence of a preferred link alternative links of articles to categories (or vice versa) are perfectly acceptable. I have started a few main category links like Category:Fundamental and Category:Science and links back too. HenkvD 19:06, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I even thought of a wikiprogram update that interwiki links from Wikipedia to commons (and other Wikimedia) should be exactly the same as interwiki links in Wikipedia. Example:
(en:)Categroy:Fundamental would have interwiki links like:
[[de:Kategorie:!Hauptkategorie]]
[[fr:Catégorie:Principale]] and also
[[commons:Category:Fundamental]]
In that way the interwiki links to commons are more easily maintained throughout Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia). Currently the links back are by using templates like {commons} or {commonscat}. Placing these in the right position, with different layouts and parameters makes this a tedious job. HenkvD 19:06, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Please help to make Commons:Licensing official

I have started to rework the licensing policy page to reflect what I understand to be the current policy of the commons. Please have a look and help to fill in the gaps. I hope we can make this into a official policy page soon, we need one badly. -- Duesentrieb 19:30, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Fantastic. See my comment on the talk page notafish }<';> 11:03, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Bot status

Is there a page somewhere to get bot status for a user (e.g. User:File Upload Bot (Dori)) so I don't clutter up RC anymore? Dori | Talk 02:29, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

See meta:Requests for permissions#Requests for Bot status --Mormegil 11:34, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, thought that there might be a local one here in commons. Dori | Talk 05:04, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Copyright issues with songs

On the Foundation-l mailing list, I have learned about the beautiful w:Wikipedia:Sound/list page containing links to full-length songs that are on Commons. This really is perfect (just now listening to Le quattro stagione ;-) ), but I have concerns about copyright issues with some of the songs. AFAIAA (and IANAL), with a song recording, you have to take care of the rights of: composer, lyrics writer, performer and recording company. E.g. for Image:01 - Vivaldi Spring mvt 1 Allegro - John Harrison violin.ogg, Vivaldi's work is in the public domain and the performer has licensed his work under cc-sa. OK, no problem here. But in case of, e.g. Image:Bernstein- Symphonic Dances from West Side Story - 4 Fugue.ogg, I understand the performing U.S. Air Force Bands Program released its work to public domain, but what about the copyright of Leonard Bernstein, who died 1990?

I do not want to spread any FUD, as, I repeat IANAL, so, could someone please comment on the issue?

--Mormegil 16:19, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I believe that you are right. --Baikonur 20:10, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Template:Wikipediaimage

Hi, I have often found it annoying trying to find if an image is linked by a certain Wikipedia version and therefore in all of my uploaded images I have done [[en:Image:{{PAGENAME}}]] although hard linked in order for me to check where my images have been used and also on other great images to see if they have been used or if the wikipedia articles are using an inferior version. This led me to create the above template in order that all images have quick links to their Wikipedias so people can see if they have been used in the articles by whichever Wikipedia. I think this is very helpful however I figure I should now mention and hear what the community things... I am not sure what people will think and maybe VfD will be the consensus, but.... what do you think? am I a moron? you tell me..... Grenavitar 07:20, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC) oh, or has it been done... that's possible too.

Hmmm... I don't think it is really a good thing to do. You know, it might be useful now, but the proper solution would IMHO be some kind of software support to directly list all references from all projects, this is too much of a workaround for me. Just my $0.02, though. --Mormegil 11:14, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There are several issues with your approach:
  • The image tagged with your template is not necessarily used in every language you include as interlanguage link.
  • There may well be languages that use your image, but you don't list. There are about 200 languages of Wikipedia around.
  • Images on the Commons can also be used in other Wikimedia projects like Wikinews. You don't list those links.
Therefore: don't use this template, place interlanguage (or inter-wiki) links manually to languages (or wikis) known to use the image only. — Richie 11:49, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The ideal would be that MediaWiki makes it such that if it's used on any Wikipedia a link is displayed. So, yes, this is a work around. I did select the languages that were used for the Wikimedia translation found on Commons:Translation_coordination_core. I do think that there is some value in this although I believe it should not be done in such a work around form. I do think I will use this on images I upload but nowhere else. I hope this at least gets the idea out that maybe there should be some better form of this idea implemented in the future. Grenavitar 19:33, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Searching Commons

Does Google search image pages? Fg2 22:13, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

I don't think so. It searches articles, categories, user pages, etc., but (for some reason unknown to me) it seems to ignore the image pages themselves. See for yourself: google:Telephone,site:commons.wikimedia.org --Mormegil 08:02, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thanks. I'd been writing keywords into captions, figuring that Google would always be able to find them, but when I searched, the image pages didn't come up. I got articles and even an upload log, but no hits for the image page. That's unfortunate. Do you know of a way to keyword image files? For reference, a supplement bundled with PDN magazine this month covered stock photography, and keyword searches figured very prominently in both the methods stock photo agencies provide for users to find images in their libraries, and methods that users cited as useful for finding them. Commons is a lot like stock photography... without the money... Fg2 10:29, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)
It seems to be a general issue to solve - just as we want WP articles to appear at the top of appropriate Google searches, I think we'd like to have commons images appear at the top of Google image searches. What's needed to make that happen? Stan Shebs 02:32, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Stan, I agree. That's a good goal. Achieving it with Google outside of the Wikimedia Commons context should go a long way toward achieving it inside (which was my goal). Wikipedia made it happen. Can an administrator comment on what's needed to make it happen in Commons? Fg2 06:50, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

A question

Hello, I'm new to the commons, and I was wondering, is it possible to download images directly off the Wikipedia database, or do I have to download them onto my hard disk and then on to commons, which is a bit of a pain?. G-Man 19:57, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

AFAIK you have to go the longer way. Or, you might ask someone to do that (semi-)automatically, using a bot, but I don't know about anyone who offers such service (there is Commons:File upload service, but it offers other help). I just want to remind that you should copy all information, especially license, source, date, and original author in the transwiki process. (As a completely unimportant side note, the images are not stored in database, but as separate files in filesystem.) --Mormegil 19:48, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Are there any plans to transfer (for example) all images having the PD tag from the Wikipedias to Commons? Fg2 22:27, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commonplace by Ilya Haykinson

Commonplace-screenshot.jpg

The above image shows a new program called Wikimedia Commonplace, written by User:IlyaHaykinson. It's an application for Microsoft Windows to upload images to the Commons. I think it's quite neat and could make uploading much more convenient.--Eloquence 00:40, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes indeed. This programm is very nice. I also suggested to him adding the Template:Information, as this would nicely fit into the structure of the program and would increase the quality of image descriptions at the Commons quite a lot. Arnomane 15:41, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Template for updated Spanish cc licenses

Hi! I will start uploading my photos to Commons and I found that templates for cc licenses are for 2.0 version. Some months ago Spanish cc's were updated according to Spanish law to 2.1 version as for example Reconocimiento-CompartirIgual 2.1 España ( Attribution-ShareAlike 2.1 Spain).

Can I make a template for this license myself? How?

As I will use images (also) for Spanish Wikipedia articles, It is possible to show license text (the one in template) in Spanish or multilanguage?

Thanks! --Colegota 12:54, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You definitely can create a template. Take a look at e.g. Template:Cc-by-sa-2.0-de, copy&paste its source into Template:Cc-by-sa-2.1-es with the required changes and save. Then, add the license to Commons:Copyright tags#Free Creative Commons Licenses.
I don't know if there was a discussion about multilingual templates on Commons, but I am afraid that at this moment, all copyright tags are English-only. It would probably require some nontrivial new features in the MediaWiki software to properly support more languages in that way.
--Mormegil 18:41, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Ok, I did it. I've created Template:Cc-by-sa-2.1-es and also Category:CC-BY-SA-2.1. I've tried to create an entry at Category:Creative_Commons_licenses but I don't know how to do it.
I've also added an entry at Commons:Copyright tags#Free Creative Commons Licenses.
This are my first steps at Wikipedia, so please take a look to check if it's correct.
Thanks! --Colegota 19:45, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Yes, your work seems fine. --Mormegil 12:54, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Transportation-related articles categorisatin manifesto

Here follows my view on how the transportation-related articles should be classified. Please, let me know what do you think about my proposal! Kneiphof 15:21, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Using the same category structure as en: Wikipedia is also an option. The English Wikipedia has most likely evolved to a structure that has been agreed upon by many users. I don't know if there is a rule for (or against) it. Exception is for Category:Tree of life to use the Latin names. As for transportation I don't see an objection to use the English structure. HenkvD 11:17, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
My proposed system is in fact more or less the same as used in English Wikipedia. As you see, root categories are just the same as categories of transport listed in Wikipedia w:en:Transport article. The greatest difference is that my system is more hierarchical. I strongly believe, that hierarchy makes search easier, because there are not too much subcategories and articles in each category. Just take a look at w:en:Category:Transportation! There are 113 articles in this category, and 27 subcategories, while according to my system, there should be only +/- 15 root categories. Where would you find your way easily? Do really need to put, for example, article Helicopter directly into category:Transportation, while, quite logical, it belongs to subcategory:Aviation? Kneiphof 11:51, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Your explanation is indeed quite logical. It is fine by me. My point is more in general: look at something existing and don't invent your own scheme. HenkvD 18:02, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Newbie Q on policy

Just about to start releasing some pictures I've taken (first lot). Problem is they're 3000x2000 or so. Is there a policy on max file size? I'd quite like to release them at max so people can use it for any Photoshopping under GFDL, but at the same time I know that pics up to 5 megs might be a waste of disk space.

For general information I'm primarily planning on using them in Wikipedia (which I'm quite active in). Again, they are all my photos. -- Tomhab 20:36, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I asked this same question a while back, and I was told that the maximum resolution (minimum loss) should be used. Dori | Talk 20:47, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You can upload images up to 20 MB to the Commons, as long as you convert them to png (graphics) or jpeg (photos) and in case of animations you can also use gif. Please use the maximum available resolution that makes sense (e.g. if you image scanner or digital camera has a physical resolution of 600 DPI don't use the 1200 DPI "digital resolution/ zoom" whatever ;-) ) as e.g. the Wikipedia also gets used for printed work. Arnomane 15:52, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As far as I know, storage space is not currently an issue. David.Monniaux 07:05, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Function needed: "What are my pics"

I would appreciate, if the function "my contributions" could have another specification for "Image new"? -- Simplicius 11:15, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Have you tried confining contributions to the image namespace? It will also show other image pages, but it's a bit better. Dori | Talk 11:44, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Copyright of Fac-Simile

I have a question regarding a book I have: “Schriftzeichen und Alphabete aller Zeiten und Völker“ from Carl Faulman (died in 1894). This is a new edition from 2004, but it’s just a reprint (originally printed in 1880). Can I use the book for the Wikipedia or do I have to look for the original to scan? Thanks Ecelan 18:29, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Feel free to use all parts of this reprint. They are public domain as copyright is clearly expired for this work. A reproduction of a old work has no own copyright. You might also want to look at w:de:Wikipedia:Bildrechte and the talk page where this question has been answered for eternity ;-). Arnomane 15:58, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Must I link to images in Commons from Wikipedias?

Hi! I've uploaded an image to Commons (Image:Pingyao-calles-c02-f.jpg). Then when I insert the image in Spanish Wikipedia article (es:Pingyao) such as [[Imagen:Pingyao-calles-c02-f.jpg|thumbnail|300px|Calle del casco antiguo]] it really points to an empty image page at Spanish Wikipedia (no to the Image at Commons).

It this correct and must I fill the Spanish Wikipedia image page, or there is some way for link the image directly to the one in Commons?

Thanks! --Colegota 08:54, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this is the way it works in the current version of MediaWiki, AFAIK. The image description pages are taken from the local wiki (+there is displayed a message about the image coming from Commons, and linking to the Commons' image description page), while the image itself is taken from Commons.
There are various policies regarding images from Commons on various wikis. You might want to copy/translate the description of the image to the local description page, or you might just leave the page empty and depend on the link to the Commons' description page.
(Note that you could make a link to the image page of Commons, e.g. [[commons:Image:Foobar.jpg]], but you probably would not want that.)
--Mormegil 09:24, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

El problema está en que estás escribiendo mal la referencia, debe ser: [[Image:lo que sea]] ,no [[Imagen:lo que sea]] --Arturo Reina 16:04, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Los dos posibilidades (Imagen o Image) deben funcionar. Lo que es importante es el nombre del imagen. --Baikonur 18:44, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The idea is to provide a local description page in every wiki, so the description is available in the local language. It's IMHO always best to translate the description from the commons and put it in the local wiki. -- Duesentrieb 16:27, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ok! I did it this way. Thanks everybody. --Colegota 13:44, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

About html comments in generated code and Creative Commons licenses

Hi! This is a question that affects to all Wikipedia pages but as I found as a major problem for CC licensed images I talk here about it. I first opened a question at Commons_talk:Copyright_tags#Templates_updated, but after study a little the code I think I understand the problem.

Well, as I can see, when a page is generated on wikis to be shown in a browser, html comments are removed. Maybe in a effort to decrease traffic, maybe another reason. But the problem is that in Creative Commons licensed images there is some lines of code for RDF tags that tells search engines what kind of image/document and licenses/permisions correspond to that image/document (please take a look to the link above).

I think that it's important that this code can be on page source as a way for search engines can find free images at Wikipedias. So, if it is no possible to change generating code to dump comments to the pages, maybe there is some way to "force" that in some cases comments can be generated with the rest of html code. For example, something like "nowiki" tag.

The comments code I'm talking about is already embedded at Commons:Copyright_tags#Free_Creative_Commons_Licenses so it's easy to change for all media pages.

Regards! --Colegota 07:24, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Image gone

A while ago, I uploaded an image to the commons with the name University_of_Wisconsin_Milwaukee_Mitchel_Hall_lp.JPG. It appears to be removed, but I cannot find any note in the deletion request pages or in the page about the image itself. Can anyone provide information as to what happened? How does one find out information about deletions in the future?

Many Thanks!

--Shadowe 11:08, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Your image has been deleted because it was marked as limited to noncommercial use only, which is not allowed on Commons (see Commons:Licensing).
If you want to learn why an image has been deleted, go to Deletion log, write its title (Image:University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Mitchel Hall lp.JPG) to the Title: box and click Go, you'll find its entry.
--Mormegil 13:05, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

License for pope's coat of arms

is there anyone, who can say me, which license is the best for this, this, this, this and this? all are coat of arms of popes from http://www.araldicavaticana.com/Pontefici.htm, in it they are GFDL, but I’m not sure if this the right license. Schaengel89 @me 18:33, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Generally speaking, only works you create yourself or that have been licensed by its creator as GFDL should be marked GFDL. Papal emblems from the 19th century and earlier are likely to be PD because of age. Thuresson 19:00, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
but Johannes Paulus II died one week ago and he used his COA until his death. what shut happened with his zeal? and by the way, {{pd-old}} is used for images, whose author died 60 years ago, isn't it? Schaengel89 @me 19:29, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You can email the Vatican and ask them if they - or whoever owns the design - are willing to release the COA under a free license. Thuresson 20:13, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
this means, {{pd-old}}. okay, thanks. Schaengel89 @me 19:53, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Why the Wikimedia projects (and especially commons) should not use the GFDL as a stand alone license

I did not want to flood the Village Pump with this, as my "essay" is quite long, hence my putting it here. I know this has been discussed extensively about text on en, but comments about this "real life" experience with images would be greatly appreciated. And remember, I am not a lawyer. notafish }<';> 09:49, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

A short summary: publishing an image licensed under the GFDL in a newspaper or such would require the paper to print the full text of the GFDL also, which is impractical. Thus, we should encourage people to put their images under a license that allows not only free but also easy use of the images by other, such as CC-by-sa. I support that and would like to suggest to put up a notice on the relevant pages that CC-licenses are preferred to GFDL for images and other multimedia files. For text, the GFDL may still be the better option. Thanks to Notafish for pointing this out! -- Duesentrieb 11:16, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

GFDL wasn't really intended for short texts or images but for software manuals. The fact that cc-by-sa is more useful than GFDL is worth repeating. Thuresson 11:21, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I have added a short notice to Commons:Licensing#Well-known licenses about CC being preferred over GFDL. Please have a look, I hope you agree with what I wrote there. -- Duesentrieb 16:01, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Hey, thx Duesentrieb for the summary, should have done that myself. ;-) This said, I don't think we should give the preference of one over the other, but rather encourage dual licensing. The problem with any CC license or GFDL is that they exclude each other. Which means that a book with Wikipedia text and Commons images would be a mess if the licenses are not the same. Dual licensing allows for "easier use yet". Until as said in my little piece, all those guys agree... notafish }<';> 16:27, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC) PS. I changed your sentence to dual licensing preferred.
I also prefer dual licensing out of another reason: The GFDL has two very nice features:
  • You only have to name the 5 main authors, which is perfect if you want to make a derivative work of content produced in a wiki by lots of authors. The CC licenses of now all want you to name all authors... Of course Creative Commons is aware of that and is in preparation of a "Wiki-CC-BY-SA".
  • You can use the actual GFDL "or any later version". CC licenses need to be relicensed to the current version by the authors themselves which is also near impossible within a Wiki.
Of course I'm aware of the problems of the GFDL (there was an PR agency asking de-Wikipedia for usage of an image released under GFDL for a big promotion poster, as the uploader was inactive and didn't leave an e-mail address we had a problem...) Arnomane 17:10, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This said, the "and any later version" is one thing that, after a talk with soufron, is completely "illegal" as such. Very nice, but illegal. Apparently you cannot agree to a contract you have never seen, which makes a lot of sense, for the next version of the GFDL could be a piece of rubbish for all you know, confiscate all your rights etc. So that may even be something that we should get rid of at some point. villy, I'd like your input on this? notafish }<';> 14:17, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I don't think this is correct - the GFDL does not say that you agree to any later version - you just allow authors of derivative work to license their work under any later version. If that later version would be evil, it's not your problem, because you did not agree to it, the author of the derivative work did, after having a chance to review that later version. Or am I missing something? -- Duesentrieb 14:35, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Do I understand correctly that when a contributor uploads a photograph he took himself, any of the cc-by licences would be preferable over the GFDL licence? If so, it might be useful to add some text to that effect to the Copyright tags-page, since at this moment there is only a list of possible tags (and of illegal ones), without an indication which one should be used when, if I may say so... Another question: I have uploaded a handful of photos, under the GFDL licence. Can/should I add the cc-by-sa-2.0 licences to this? Regards, MartinD 14:48, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As pointed out above, it would be preferable to dual-license all images under GFDL and some free CC-license (note that CC-nd and CC-nc are not allowed on the commons). I agree that this should be pointed out on Commons:Copyright tags and a few more places, but let's wait for the outcome of this discussion until doing that.
As to your own work: yes, it would be great if you would add cc-by-sa-2.0 to them and encourage others to do the same. I have already added that license to all my images after the discussion here. -- Duesentrieb 15:32, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, Duesentrieb, I'll do that. Regards, MartinD 09:16, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
With respect to the CC-licenses we have another problem I want to get solved: The 1.0 versions of CC licenses have the CC-BY and CC-BY-SA tag but the 2.0 versions have the CC-BY-SA-2.0 and so forth. So many people aren't aware of the version number distinctions and tag simply CC-BY or CC-BY-SA and thus use an outdated license. I notice this in about the half of all cases of CC-tagged images (I'm currently working on unifying and improving the image descriptions of all images within the commons with the Template:Information and would be very glad if even more people add it to their images and could change the license for their images to the latest version as only the authors can do that). Arnomane 16:37, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Fair Use

Please have a look at this discussion and comment if you like: Commons talk:Licensing#Fair Use. Thanks -- Duesentrieb 09:57, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Non-anglophones

I created Template:User en-0 for users that do not speak English (or understand English very, very badly). The reason is that, by default, many assume that they can leave messages in English on talk pages, and this may lead to bad misunderstandings; we had an elderly French-speaking user that was blocked because he could not understand the English messages that were left on his talk page.

Agreed? David.Monniaux 06:54, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

en-0
This person does not understand English (or understands it with considerable difficulties).


It is a good idea, IMHO, but I would suggest to remove the category. Categories like Category:User cs are suitable for finding someone who would be able to speak with me in my mother language, but I see no point in looking for people who are not able to speak with me. --Mormegil 10:55, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
ACK: I like the template, but I do not see how the category would be useful. -- Duesentrieb 12:43, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Done. David.Monniaux 14:34, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Another idea: it may be more useful to place this tag on the users talk page, or on both the user page and talk page. Otherwise it may be overlooked. -- Duesentrieb 15:52, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The text in the box is a bit long (6 lines with me), it shouldn't be longer than 3 to 4 lines in my opinion to conform with the style of other Babel templates. — Richie 10:00, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Also the bolded red text is jarring. It isn't a crime not to know english. BrokenSegue (not logged in)


Photos of logotypes

What is the policy for photos of copyrighted content? These logos of car manufacturers are copyrighted and probably also these COA:s of German cities. Is this allowed? Is it OK to GFDL the design of one of the world's biggest car manufacturers? Thuresson 08:20, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Those images are borderline cases - reproductive photos or slavish imitations of such logos would be a copyright violation, showing the logo "in context" on a product would be OK. As the pictures show only the logo I would consider them to be critical - they may or may not be legal, it would be better to show them with more context. (IMHO/AFAIK/IANAL/HTH/BBQ/HAND) -- Duesentrieb 12:48, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Template:Copyrighted considered harmful

User:silsor filed a deletion request for Template:Copyrighted arguing that the working and name of that template is misleading: all images not PD are copyrighted, copyright is not the problem - the problem is lack of a free license. I agree with him and would like to suggest Template:Copyvio as a replacement - please have a look at the templates and the deletion request and comment. Thanks! -- Duesentrieb 14:45, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As there have been no objection, I have marked Template:Copyrighted as deprecated - please use Template:Copyvio from now on. Likewise, Category:Copyrighted is replaced by Category:Copyvio. Cheers! -- Duesentrieb

Changing a license

I have added some photos to Commons under GFDL. I'd like to change the license to CC-BY-2.0 but before I do that I'd want to make sure that it is allowed. --CSamulili 17:49, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes and no. Since you are the author, you can put your work under any license you want. However, you can not revoke a license: if you put it under the GFDL, it remains under the GFDL (but you can remove the tag, there's no rule about that as long as the file is tagged with some tag of a free license).
Anyway, for the reasons stated in the lengthy discussion above, it is best to license your work under both, the GFDL and CC-by-sa-2.0 (or CC-by or whatever) - this is possible and even quite wide-spread, and it avoids most complications effectively.
Thanks for your concern - maybe we should but the answer to this question into the FAQ. Oh, and IANAL -- Duesentrieb 18:30, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

A suggested category naming scheme

I've been doing a lot of thinking about organization of categories lately.

It is Commons policy that place names should be in the native language of the place (See: Commons:Language policy). So we use Deutschland not Germany, Brasil not Brazil, México not Mexico.

I have argued that we should also not use English adjectives for things related to places, because this makes things more confusing for non-English speakers. Category names like French Cuisine, Dutch Architecture, Fijian Culture should not be used, because English place name adjectives follow illogical and inconsistent formation rules, making things harder for non-English speakers.

And, with the policy of using native place names, you cannot use English adjective constructions anyway. There were a couple of attempts at a mishmash of English adjective construction and native place name - like the horrid Category:Brasilian instruments, but this isn't going to work.

Initially, I advocated for a Noun-Preposition-Noun formation to get around the adjective problem: For example, Cuisine of France, Architecture of Nederland, Culture of Fiji.

The strength of this approach is one avoids confusing English adjectives, and uses the official policy of native place names.

However, the weakness of this approach is that You have to use an English preposition ... and which one should you use - in or of? Churches of France or Churches in France?

Now, I think I have a solution: Do away with the preposition altogether, and attach the place name with the subject name by a colon.

What if we named the categories by placename:subject?

For example: France:Cuisine, Nederlands:Architecture, Fiji:Culture.

This would fit within the existing category scheme, and sidestep the issue of English adjectives and English prepositions.

I argue that the place name should be placed first for sorting purposes, so that when you are looking at a list of a subject by country, it will easily sort by country name.

I'd like to hear reaction is to this idea.

Kevyn 17:02, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

For non-English speakers, ":" seems no more or less meaningful than "of" or "in". The real solution is category redir + multi-language titles, which I think are in the works in Wikimedia. I don't see much value in spending a lot of time on recategorizing right now - it would be better to find and organize the thousands of orphans, and build interwikis so that the 'pedias know that all these images are available. Stan Shebs 20:08, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

License Affirmation on Upload From - Wording Changed

I was so bold as to change the wording of MediaWiki:Affirmation and MediaWiki:Affirmation/de as well as Commons:Copyrights. I feel this was necessary to avoid confusion. Please have a look and change if necessary. The affirmation notice is the text that appears at the checkbox on the upload form and may be 'legally binding in some jurisdictions, so this is important! This message should also be changed in the various languages, as I already did for German. Thanks! -- Duesentrieb 19:02, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)


People in Photos

What is the policy about people in photos? Do we need some sort of consent, or can I upload pictures of anyone I like regardless of consent? Peregrine981 04:46, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As long as they're in public spaces I don't see what the problem would be, but I could see how some countries might have laws covering specific situations. In the US I don't think there would be a problem. Dori | Talk 04:52, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The law in all states and territories of the United States is that if a photograph was taken in a public place, the photographer does not have to have permission to take the photo (and the laws governing ownership of the photo are the same as always.) A photo taken of someone in a private location would require that person's consent, but it would be implied that you had it anyway unless you're going around taking covert photos of people against their will. Use common sense; if you have a photo and you think someone would object to your distributing it, then don't! :) Pacian 05:01, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
In Germany (and other European countries?) the law is more strict: if a picture shows a person recognizably, that person has rights to the image and can object to its use and publication ("Recht am eigenen Bild"). The only exception to this are people of "public interest" (like politicians), but (as by a recent ruling of the European Court) only if the picture shows them in their official capacity.
For this reason, the German Wikipedia does not allow private images of people, unless they consented to the publication. I believe we should have a similar policy on the commons, but this needs some discussion I guess. -- Duesentrieb 11:27, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As of now I suppose there is no specific Wikimedia policy, so one must act according to the laws of the country the photo was taken in. In a brief search I note that in Canada the law can be summarized like this, "First, one does not need consent from those photographed in crowd scenes, or from those who because of their position, professional duties or due to some unique circumstance are brought into the public arena. Second, one may well require consent to publish the photo of anyone else." [1] Is there somewhere that we could compile Wikimedia policy on this issue for future reference? Peregrine981 12:18, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I believe the best place to compile the policy would be Commons:Licensing, even though this is not really a licensing issue. As some point, we may have to create a separate policy page for this, but for now a central page seems most useful. I would suggest to put the general policy into a new section next to the (now empty) "Insignia" section. Country-specific things should go into the section about country-specific laws. -- Duesentrieb 13:21, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

We could always add a new template for it, saying that consent was given for publishing this photograph, in addition to licensing templates. Ausir 18:54, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)


About all this, please see also #Copyright vs. other laws: problems with commercial use, etc below. -- Duesentrieb 19:12, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Show/concert photos

I think similar question about show/concert photos (for example Rammstein).

On my experience cameras/VCRs were banned for general admissions on concerts in USA (San Francisco/Bay Area). Indeed it\u2019s not the case for press VIP admissions.

If such kind of images were made without permission what is Commons policy in this case?

EugeneZelenko 15:43, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think it could be argued that they are not public spaces (unless it happened in a public park). When I went to a circus, they specifically mentioned that it shouldn't be taped. Dori | Talk 15:46, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Generally, when you take a picture of a piece of art, the creator of that art has rights to the image (in some jurisdictions however this is not true if the piece of art is publicly accessible). This is true for paintings and sculptures, movies and theatre performances. I believe it is also true for shows and concerts, especially if taking pictures is forbidden explicitly. In any case it would be best to ask the performers before publishing the image. -- Duesentrieb 18:10, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Links to photo in Commons

Is there any automatic procedure that would tell which pages (which Wikipedia's) link to a specific photo on Common? AndrejJ

No, regrettably there is not. This is not as easy to do sotware-wise as it would seem... Everyone agrees that we need it, but it will take a while until we get it... -- Duesentrieb 11:22, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Create an account on Bugzilla if you do not already have one then vote for this bug or patch it ;) --FoeNyx 12:45, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Copyright vs. other laws: problems with commercial use, etc

We have a lot of images on the commons and other projects that are under a free license or in the public domain, but are restricted in use by other laws. This has led to confusion in the past, and I feel we need a clear policy for those cases. I will try to explain some common cases below, please give this some thought and comment -- Duesentrieb 13:12, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Seals, Coats of Arms and other Insignia and Symbols

We have a lot of insignia on the commons. From the viewpoint of copyright, they design is usually in the public domain and the picture is either PD or under a free license (if not the image would have to be deleted anyway). However, the use of official insignia is, in most jurisdictions, restricted by laws unrelated to copyright. To signify this, we have Template:Insignia, etc. It remains unclear however if an images that has no copyright restrictions but is restricted in use otherwise can be considered free. The most important restrictions are:

  • Insignia can often not be used in a way that suggests endorsement of a group or product by the entity that the insignia refers to.
  • Especially, commercial use of insignia usually requires written permission from the agency etc who uses the insignia
  • The use of some symbols is completely illegal in some jurisdictions (like the flag of Taiwan in the PR China), or is restricted to informational and scientific use (like Nazi symbols in Germany - see Template:Nazi symbol).

We should have a clear policy for this.

Logos and Trademarks

Most logos and trademarks are copyrighted and non-free, so they don't belong on the commons anyway. Some logos however are so old that they are in the public domain (I think the Volkswagen-Logo is such a case), but are still protected as a trademark. Are those logos free and usable on the commons?

Portraits of People

In many jurisdiction, people shown on a photograph have a right to restrict the use of the picture. That is, if I take a photograph of someone, I have to ask that person before publishing the image. There are several cases to consider:

  • The person shown on the image allows the use of the picture in mediawiki projects only, or only for informational/educational/non-commercial use. Note that this is not' a restriction imposed by the copyright holder or the license. Are those images "free" for use?
  • The person agrees to publication for any purpose. In most jurisdictions, this person would still have a right to sue you if you use the image in a derogative context. I believe there is not even a way to disclaim this right.
  • If I publish a picture I took of myself and release it under a free license, do I still have the right to veto the use of this image in a derogative context? Or use of the image that implies I for instance support a political party I do in fact not like at all?

This seems quite complicated...

Another question is - if I take a picture of a person in a public place, do I need permission to publish this photo? (this question is already discussed in a section above). Laws seem to doffer quite a bit here...

I am of the opinion that freedom in terms of copyright should be all that we are highly concerned about on Commons. If we are to concern ourselves with every other type of law that might restrict what we can show, we will have precious little here.
Also, copyright is the "invisible" restriction. You cannot know, from looking at a picture, what its copyright is and the restrictions on its use through copyright law are. It strikes me that the vast majority of other restrictions are restrictions on content - one can look at the picture, and evaluate its content against the laws that apply to one's personal situation.
For example, I have placed many pictures of cars into the Commons. Cars display trademarks; the logos of their manufacturers and the trademarked names their manufacturers give them. For this reason, there are limits on the commercial use of my photographs; they could not be used in another company's advertising, for example, without digitally editing them to get rid of trademarked logos. This is not a restriction imposed by the photographer or copyright holder (me) nor the owner of the car itself, but is rather one that is open to the trademark holder. Morven 22:04, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I fully agree with you. But adding an additional template for pictures where we definitely have the consent of the photographed person won't hurt. I object strongly to deletion of Coats of Arms only because of non-copyright laws. Ausir 16:58, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Crown Copyright is non-free

I just noticed that Template:CrownCopyright, Template:LearningandSkillsCouncilCopyright, Template:NationalAuditOfficeCopyright, and Template:NHSCopyright require accurate reproduction, which makes the crown copyright non-free for the purpose of the commons, as derivative work is not allowed. According to en:Crown Copyright, this also applies in Canada, thus to all images tagged with Template:CanadaCopyright (see also the deletion request).

If this is true, all images using those tags will have to be deleted, unless they are PD by age. Any comments? -- Duesentrieb 14:11, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Any limitation on filename-chars?

The image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Gjøa.jpg is linked to from the Gjøa article on en: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gjøa but the pic doesn't show up in the article. Is it because of the "ø" char in the filename? 83.227.105.210 15:21, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes, probably - the problem is that the en:wp uses ISO-8859-1 as encoding, all other projects use UTF-8. Also, there was a bug with non-ASCII filenames in the past. For now, please use ASCII-chars only for filenames (gallery pages and categories can use the full UTF-8 range). -- Duesentrieb 15:53, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
that char is in the range that is present in iso-8859-1 but is encoded differently in utf-8. It seems to be showing ok in the article but not on the image description page. I would strongly recommend sticking to 7 bit ASCII for filenames at least until such time as ALL wikis are converted to utf-8. Plugwash 15:56, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Some of the issues seem to be fixed now (brion is the best!) - i'm not sure though that all problems with special characters are solved, but it seems much better now :) In the en:wp you will have to use HTML entities to link to such images though, untill it goes UTF-8, too.

The devs where a little disgrunteled that noone told them about this. Please make sure to report any charset related bugs to bugzilla imidiately. Thanks! -- Duesentrieb 11:07, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Formalities for featured pics and candidates

Hi,

I thought, it could be useful to have some formalities for candidates and becoming a featured picture. I created a page to discuss it: user:norro/Featured pics and candidates. I would like to here your opinion. Feel free to comment/edit. Kind regards, norro 15:34, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

10,000 paintings and a bunch of new categories

Perhaps you already noticed the article 10,000 paintings from Directmedia. There is some work to do with categorization. Please take a look here: User:Avatar/Categories. This is my first proposal for new categories regarding the paintings. If nobody disapproves or has further proposals, I'll create this categories in the next few days. --Avatar 22:11, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I share your interest in categorization schemes, but IMHO, your proposed approach looks way too detailed. You might want to have a look at Meta:Categories; one of its prime directives is "Try to keep the number of categories on Meta-Wiki as low as possible." -- Mwanner 22:19, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Well, the problem is - how to keep it simpler? I think there should be at least categories for painters and for paintings. And IMHO the best approach to sort them is the classification into art/cultural movement. And exactly this is my proposal. --Avatar 22:36, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Avatar: Have a look at Commons:Category_scheme_astronomy which is derived from the equivalent category scheme of de-Wikipedia at de:Portal Astronomie/Kategorien. I think creating such a tree first and these design ideas there help quite a lot. Another Category related idea with respect to meta data was proposed by me somewhat up in village pump, see my proposal at Commons:Village pump#Metadata needed. Arnomane 23:09, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have to say, I very strongly disagree with "as few as possible" as a categorisation schema, Mwanner. We should instead provide all useful categories. Our purpose, after all, is to provide a very large amount of media to the world. This is useless if not easily locatable.
James F. (talk) 23:52, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'm not the author of the "as few as possible" directive. I do understand the rationale, though— have you tried browsing through the categories on en.wikipedia.org? Even in Commons (all of, what, seven months old?) we have situations like the one in Category:History where subcategories of Category:History by country and Category:History by nation both exist, and both are in use. At the same high level are Category:Battles and Category:Revolutions which, I would suggest, ought to be subcategories of individual country categories.
Basically, categories get out of control fast if people aren't very circumspect in their creation. I don't know what the answer is (I've been thinking about it a lot lately, without coming to any really useful conclusions) but I do know that there is a lot to be said for being very cautious about category creation. I suspect that it will be a lot easier to break a few higher-level categories down into subcategories after they become too big than it will be to combine a lot of very specific categories after it turns out that many of them are underpopulated. -- Mwanner 17:53, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Well I would recommend you to look at Commons:Category_scheme_astronomy. This systems helps very much in controlling categories. Arnomane 14:10, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
That's a great idea! Makes things much easier to grasp, like a site map. I almost hesitate to point out, though, that there are already two bogus subcats under Astronomers and two subcats under Astrophysics that, while they look reasonable, were not added to the map. Even so, the map makes it easy to see when things change, so one can then either fix the map or delete/fix the new categories.
Now, what would be really great would be a way to automatically generate such a page along with a page history. Then you wouldn't even have to periodically check the map against reality-- just add the map to your watch list and you're home free. This has the potential to really solve the category mess. Anyone know if this is do-able? -- Mwanner 13:00, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
I doubt this will be possible. An automated approach should work with an implementation of strict hierarchical categories. But the categories aren't structured in wp. You can even create loops, beside tree-cross-links. --Avatar 14:04, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
True, but it should be possible to program so that it accommodates loops and cross-links-- keep a list of where you've been, and when you hit the same point again, indicate the fact by reference to the first occurrence and stop tracing that branch. Or am I missing something here? -- Mwanner 11:47, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
This is highly non-trivial. Where to start, if there isn't a root or a hierarchy of some branches. And would you draw all branches? Each branch will multiply fast (if Cat:WW 1 is a sub cat of Cat:History and Cat:War you have to draw all branches - which leads to massive duplications of all sub cats of Cat: WW 1 like Cat: WW 1 people and all children. They have to be drawn under the History and under the War branch). Or would you like to kill all but one branch? Which to keep? How to visualise cross-linking under many branches? It's a very hard problem to check thousands of categories for existence of circles and eliminating them. And you have to do this constantly. I believe it's not possible at all. --Avatar 12:35, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Where to start need not be an issue-- the process could be triggered by a tag in the category you want to map (after all, you don't want to run something like this on the whole category structure). Or you could make it a process you could select from within a given catalog page. And the problem of which branch to keep seems (to me) trivial-- you keep the first branch, and when you find yourself back at a node you've already been to, you indicate that you are not going to retrace it by displaying a message refering back to the earlier map of it. This might make more sense looking at an example, which I have extracted from the map of U.S. history categories (which I've been working on following your example). One thing which helps is that I've used a full numbering system in lieu of the truncated one in your example-- it makes it easier to refer back to a higher point. Have a look; it's at [2] -- Mwanner 17:13, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps I am only thinking too complicated. Of course I will also like this feature if someone is able to realize it. Your example looks promising. --Avatar 18:18, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Well of course a software based solution would be very nice, but this is a thing that isn't availabe anytime soon. So we should now focus on using the hand crafted approach which "works right now" (TM). Despite that there are several interesting proposals regarding categories at the Meta-Wiki (and here in commons is also one regarding mixing the category and the article namespace), perhapes you should also put your ideas there so that they are collected with the others and get noticed by developers. Arnomane 19:07, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Images of Euro-Banknotes and -Coins

Ok, now that I calmed down a bit (sry FoeNyx and the others ;), I want to dare a new try. My plan is to upload again:

  • my own pictures of the top of Euro-Coins
  • my own pictures of the edges of Euro-Coins
  • collage about the Euro-Banknote's security features, created by myself from pictures of Euro-Banknotes made by myself
  • collages created by myself using pictures from www.ecb.int, looking similar to the pictures on the top of the Euro-Article in the English Wikipedia (looking similar to these)

In the past, there were several arguments on this matter, so before talking about the same stuff again, please keep these facts in mind:

  • There has been a deletion request on all these pictures mentioned above on March 23th '05 HERE is it
  • I created a deletion request on another image of the edge of a Euro-Coin, which is as "illegal" as the others, but which has been forgotten. The image in on commons by now - (why?) HERE is it
  • User:Dickbauch asked here, in village pump, why the Euro-Coins and -Banknotes had to be deleted HERE is it
  • (feel free to add sources and old discussions on COMMONS here!)

So, after considering all these I think I should be able to upload legally the images again, labelling them with this Template: Template:CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat, adding the information that the pictures must not be used to produce false money. What do you think? To keep the overview, I split the following into "Yes", "No", "Longer comments". \u2014King 09:44, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes, upload the pictures again

(sign here, evtl. +short comment)

No, please do not upload them

(sign here, evtl. +short comment)

  • --FoeNyx 01:58, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC) (see longer text down)
  • ECB do not allow use by anybody for any reason. Thuresson 19:22, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • notafish }<';> 18:50, 3 May 2005 (UTC) The law does not allow you to. See below.

I want to comment the matter with a longer text

  • The use of your own pictures of Euro Coins and Banknotes is no problem according to the German Bundesbank (link in my comment above), which is a branch of the European Central Bank. My suggestion would be to write a big "specimen" across the pictures, so there is no argue about the danger of false money. ((o)), Ja, bitte?!? 12:19, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • The banknote images are already uploaded, see Euro, with a correct template, Euro banknote. Per Johansson 12:42, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Whoops, I didn't realize this! So, this template is fitting, no discussion? Hm, I think I should dare uploading at least the banknote-related pictures. What about the Coins, any problems with these? \u2014King 13:52, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You have to check what images you can use. For instance, those I uploaded are provided by ECB for this purpose, having low resolution and the word "specimen" across. The coins need another template since ECB reproduction rules are different for coins. Also, copyright for the design of the national side of the coins belongs to the country in question, so we need to find out each country's rules before using the images of the national side. Per Johansson 14:21, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • <start of the answer of annoying FoeNyx>
First of all I want to say I have nothing against you King, I found your picture really nice and I'm sorry if you are being upset because of my remarks =\
\u2192 My previous RfD was (1) as there are copyright holders for banknotes design (ECB), coins common face design (European Commission) and coin national face (the artist who made it?) photos couldn\u2019t be realised under GFDL. (2) The lot of restrictions on reproductions right prevent the « allows anyone to use it for any purpose provided that ..», and prevent a full derivative works.
\u2192 The point (1) is cleared, but the point (2) is still there.
Here the reasons why I'm opposed about uploaded of those materials, which are I think non free:

(3) As successor to the EMI the ECB holds the copyright on the designs of the euro banknotes originally held by the EMI. The ECB and the NCBs, acting on behalf of the ECB, may enforce this copyright with regard to reproductions issued or distributed in breach of this copyright, such as, inter alia, reproductions which might adversely affect the standing of euro banknotes.

You ask to other people to respect a moral guideline about the standing of euro banknotes : I do not call that free total use. Moreover READ THE 20 LINES (3.5Ko) OF « Article 2 : Reproduction rules for euro banknotes » in the previous url ...
\u2192 If accepted, the template for image have to remember that full text and the copyright holder anyway.
  • About the euro commons face coins - copyright held by European commission or member states -, as stated here, there is a lot of rules in the « Reproduction regime » section (read them all too).

for photographs, drawings, paintings, films, images, and generally reproductions in flat format (without relief) provided they are in faithful likeness and are used in ways which do not damage or detract from the image of the euro.

\u2192 Same moral guideline about usage : so it does not fit with wording of the template « allows anyone to use it for any purpose »
  • About the national faces ( here ):

Member States have authority over copyright issues regarding the national face of euro coins, and must apply national legislation.

Does that means it's under the copyright of each designers according to each national laws (probably)
but IANAL ... I would like the comment of other ppl and especially judges/lawyers as villy (who is on vacation until 7th of may) or soufron about that.
\u2014FoeNyx 01:58, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC) (I probably made some mistakes it's 3am here -.- & please answer after, not inside)

</end of the answer of annoying FoeNyx>

  • Ah now I understand. You can´t read official papers in german language. Well, bad luck, so you won´t find out, that you are a little wrong...every side of the Euro is free to use, as long as there is spcimen written over it, or its resolution is pretty low. The only problem of the bank is the danger of false money or fraud! ((o)), Ja, bitte?!? 18:06, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

But why do I bother anyway?!? I can see the stuff every day in real life...just forget my opinion...((o)), Ja, bitte?!? 18:09, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Machen wir das auf Deutsch, dann. bitte das (Artikel 2) sehen. Sogar wenn die "reproductions" schon gut sind, und wir ein offizielle OK von der BCE haben wir können nicht sagen, das "derivative works" von unsere Bilder eigentlich OK sind. Das heisst, wir können nicht derivative works erlauben von die Bilder, die hier sind. Das heisst das diese Bilder nicht auf Commons bleiben können. Punkt. Aus.
Ok, let's have this in English now. Please see this, Article 2. Even when reproductions we provide here on Commons are OK with all that, AND we have an offcial OK from the BCE, we can't say that derivative works from our pics will be OK. Which means, we can't allow derivative works from the pictures we provide here. Which means those pictures cannot stay on commons. The end. notafish }<';> 19:10, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Pictures of fonts

Is there a policy on pictures (raster graphics) of fonts? I'd like to upload self-created pictures that include text written in a "freeware" font tengwar parmaite which has the following licence:

"Tengwar Parmaite is created by Måns Björkman © 1998-2005. It is licensed as freeware, meaning you are free and even encouraged to make copies of this font and share it with others. The accompanying files, including this documentation, should for practical reasons always be distributed together with the font. You may not alter the contents the font or any of its accompanying files without written consent of the author. Distributors of shareware collections are asked to contact the author before including this font and its accompanying files in any of their distributions."

I think that the constraints expressed in this licence will not concern any images I create using this font, since they apply only to a redistribution of the font itself, not to its use. Can I release it as {{PD-self}}? Should there be an attribution to the creator of the font? J. 'mach' wust 08:03, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As I already said it to you at this page de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Bildrechte#Verwendung von Schriftarten you don't need to worry about that topic. By the way Image:Konqueror-Screenshot.png (screenshot taken by me) uses for displaying the website the font "Verdana" (owned by Microsoft) but you never can extract a Verdana-font out of that screenshot. Most modern fonts are vector fonts with complex internal algorithms and instructions that can really be seen as small programs but this is a bitmap you cannot reconstruct the same or even similar Bezier curves out of a bitmap. The second point is that even if you could reproduce a single letter you don't get the font with its specific information as Kerning, Hinting and so on as it can't be extracted. And of course you use only one (or some sizes). So even with Bitmap fonts you don't need to worry. Arnomane 17:45, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I agree - just think about paper publications: If I write a paper in MS Word using the MS owned font "Times New Roman", I do not need permission from Microsoft to publish, neither because I used their Program, nor because I used their fonts. It's the same with screenshots, I believe. Anything else would not make sense - proprietary fonts would not be usable at all if this was handled differently. Distributing the font files themselves is a different thing - fonts are essentially programs (machine-readable definitions of algorithms). You need permission to distribute the program, but you do not need permission to distribute work you created using the program (unless this is explicitly required by a contract). -- Duesentrieb 13:39, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Categories vs. Articles

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Qatar_Airways&curid=123392&diff=0&oldid=0

For images and categories that have become articles user User:Denniss is deleting their category tags. I am completely against this and User:Gunter.krebs and User:Bricktop have also complained about this practice. Since he still is doing this I suppose arbitration (which I can only presume will yield an answer of keeping category tags) and then a message from an admin (or 20) telling whichever side is wrong to stop. This should be a simple issue which does not lead to many of reverts. Also, if an admin responds could you please also do so on my talk page. Thanks Grenavitar 23:09, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm currently working to create articles and link them to the international version, that's not possible with Categories as they mostly do not exist there. It's better to have images linked from articles and not categories filled with lots of them, especially in the aircraft manufacturers section (then you'll have 400+ in Boeing). The other users complained about action in the rockets/missiles section and I stopped there but look at their categories - try to find images not linked via articles in between these many linked images. --Denniss 23:25, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've been pondering this too - Denniss' point is good, but categories with lots of images are useful for searching for an image visually, for instance if I'm looking for a good depiction of deployed multi-wheel landing gear. This would be quite time-consuming if I had to look through dozens of articles each with 1-2 pictures, and very fast if I have just a handful of big category galleries to scroll through. Another way to put it is that articles and categories have different strengths when looking for pictures, and commons is more useful as a picture resource if there are several pathways to finding a useful image. Stan Shebs 00:01, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I do not deny the use of articles. I deny the disuse of categories. What about images that aren't in articles or many cases when things change. Looking at an article is a good way to to get the images, but the category is meant to be for whether it is in an article or not. An article is not a category, a category is.... Grenavitar 00:03, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As you can see from Commons:Images on normal pages or categories:Vote, there's not much been much agreement on "what an article is for" or "what a category is for"; what we need is an interim agreement on how to use what we have right now. Stan Shebs 02:36, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It is very ineffective to have images im both articles and categories, especially in the Airlines section with 2-3 images per Airline. It's easier and faster to have only articles and non-linked images there and it's better to maintain as you are able to see what images need to be included in articles. If there's need to have all images in this category why not creating a single subcategory for all Airline images? Should be called Airlines/Images (or Airlines/Img to use a short version). This would include both things: A category with fast and easy access to articles as well as easy maintaining and you have the option to view all images of this category. This may be used on other categories like Aircraft manufacturers as well. --Denniss 10:17, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Don't think this is effective. How do you want to search for new images of a particular airline added to such a big category? And you must assume that someday in the near future there will be more than 2-3 images in an airline category. Best way IMO is to categorize an image by aircraft type and by airline as well (if needed, don't know how its done yet). Your point of view isn't really wrong, but I think it is still better to have a single image in both an article and a category --Bricktop 13:26, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
New images should go to Airline, then added to the article, then moved to Airlines/img. That's the only way it works effectively. If there's really need to categorize images by airlines then only images should be moved to these categories but the articles should stay in the Airlines category. --Denniss 09:29, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yesterday, Denniss tagged a category I had created, Category:Boeing 777, for speedy deletion. I wrote what I think is a fairly reasonable case for having categories and pages at User talk:Denniss#Speedy deletion. Dbenbenn 12:13, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Categorise pictures or articles?

I guess that this question has been asked several times before, but I can't find the answer. The introduction tells us: "Note that the category should be inserted in your new page and not directly in the file page." Intuitively, this does not make much sense. And upon having followed this (counterintuitive) advice, my categories were removed from the page and added to the image (http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ernst_Haeckel&curid=93228&diff=0&oldid=0). So what does this mean? Is the introduction wrong? Has policy changed? Hanno 14:44, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There's no consensus, as witness the discussion thread just above. The instructions should perhaps be adjusted to reflect the current chaos :-) better. Stan Shebs 12:01, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps you're referring to this change I made to Ernst Haeckel? Although there is much chaos, in some cases things are fairly clear. I removed Category:Lithographs and Category:Biology diagrams from the article about the person. It seems unquestionable to me that these categories should go in the image description page instead. Dbenbenn 12:22, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
I went ahead and updated Commons:First steps. Perhaps it makes more sense now. Dbenbenn 12:32, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Category for pictures used at several Village pumps

  • Halló! Is there already a category with the pictures available at commons used by various wikis in their version of Village pump? If not can anyone create it and take care that missing pictures are uploaded here (at commons)? Thanks for your efforts in advance. Best regards Gangleri | Th | T 11:28, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • P.S. Interlanguage links are updated for this page. See also meta:Wikimedia projects to identify additional Village pumps. Please update there information about "your" wiki if necessary. Thanks! Gangleri | Th | T 11:33, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Commons:Categories for deletion

I have created Commons:Categories for deletion; please link/develop/modify as you see fit. --Neutrality 22:15, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Heya. I have moved it all over to Commons:Deletion requests, as we have nowhere near enough volume right now to justify the massive problems involved in splitting the deletion procedure.
James F. (talk) 23:39, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Moving (changing the name of) an image file: how to?

The file name of Image:Tsunami by hokusai 19th century.jpg is misleading, and causes confusion. The source of the confusion is that the woodblock print by Hokusai does not represent a tsunami, but rather, an ordinary (wind-driven) wave. How can I change the name of the file? There's no Move button at the top of the page. A useful title would be the English translation of the title that the artist gave it: Image:GreatWaveOffKanagawa or something similar. This would also assist people in identifying suitable uses for the image. Fg2 05:03, May 1, 2005 (UTC)

Sadly, images cannot be renamed. Just re-upload the file under a better name and put a request for speedy deletion on the page of the old file, like this: {{Deletebecause|Bad name, now at [[Image:new name.jpg]]}} -- Duesentrieb 11:34, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
Thanks Fg2 09:15, May 2, 2005 (UTC)

Pictures Image:GalanimKorb.jpg and Image:Puffspieler.jpg

Hi, someone told me, that these pictures are NOT PD. How can this be ? They come from the 13th century? If they are not PD , please delete them. Thanks --Peng 20:54, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

They are PD. Sometimes organizations that make scans of old stuff and put them online attempt to claim ownership on the strength of having done the work of scanning. However, if the scan is accurate, then there is no creative input, and thus no possibility for copyright of their own. So if anybody gives you trouble, just ask them "so that means the scan you put online is not an accurate representation? Mind if I tell the whole world about that?". :-) Stan Shebs 02:44, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
I support your view, but you should notice, there are several - contradict - decisions by german courts about this. (interesting german text, see also w:de:Wikipedia:Bildrechte) --Avatar 06:26, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Indeed. This poses a problem, because copyright law differs world-wide.
AFAIUI, because the Wikimedia Foundation operates in Florida and is thus bound by Floridan (Floridian?) law, we take the US line on PD. However, this merely absolves the Foundation (and community at large) — uploaders are still liable for their actions where they conflict with local law (so, for example, a German user might be liable if they uploaded a modern scan of a thousand-year-old work). Caveat lector and all that, or caveat scriptor, rather.
James F. (talk) 09:13, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Just to confuse a bit more... German jurisdiction is pretty arrogant. So you can break the law even as operator, operating as non-german outside germany (and get problems if you visit germany). This is a horrible situation like in many non-democratic countries where you can get massive problems, because for example showing nude women in commons. For example an australian nazi propagandist get arrested and sued (I have less pity, but the situation sucks) while visiting germany, because he operates a website (server outside germany) where he offered German language hate texts about jews. The jurisdictional logic: "because the texts are in German, his main target group are germans and he has to be judged by German law" (ignoring that other countries use German as well). If every country uses this logic, there only survive a few pics in commons... (of course this is an extreme example - a non-german user most probable won't get problems, because he uploaded stuff which is PD in US, but in germany). --Avatar 09:54, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Just a note: I do not think this is in any way specific to Germany. See e.g. w:Dmitry Sklyarov. --Mormegil 10:52, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
My grade-school German is no doubt missing the fine points, but w:de:Wikipedia:Bildrechte seems to say that reproductions of old artwork are acceptably free. One of the lawyers on en: used to caution us against "copyright paranoia" - organizations routinely have their lawyers claim more than they're entitled to, and count on people being intimidated into giving up their own rights. So let's not invent restrictions on ourselves that don't actually exist in the real world. Stan Shebs 12:56, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree: plain reproductions of a flat surface do not entitle the creator to a copyright, so if the original is PD, so is the reproduction. -- Duesentrieb 13:34, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Sound files with special characters only works for some

Hello. There seems to be a linking problem from the language wikipedias (at least from en. which I am working at). Pronounciation files (.ogg) have been reported as not working for some. They get a 404 FILE NOT FOUND message.

I think this is because they contain special characters from the Swedish alphabet. Could this be true?

In my IE 6.0 this is not a problem, I hear the files.

I hope it is okay if I link to the pages that have these files, and you can try it out for yourselves. check en:Malmö and en:Gothenburg. They link to Image:Sv-Malmö.ogg and Image:Sv-Göteborg.ogg respectively.

-- Fred chessplayer

I am afraid this is the same problem as #Any limitation on filename-chars? above. I don't know if there is any workaround (besides reuploading the file with another name, which is obviously a bad solution). I believe the problem will go away as soon as the English Wikipedia will switch to UTF-8 (which should be, I hope, with MediaWiki 1.5, i.e. sometimes in the beginning of June). --Mormegil 18:46, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Blinking Logos

I recently found some blinking logos in Berlin and i totally dislike them; they disturb watching and reading on the page. User:Richie started a poll on Image talk:Lang-de.gif - it would be great to see some more opinions on that. Maybe it should be placed on another page? Thanks -- Schorsch 21:15, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Ok, from Image_talk:Lang-de.gif, maybe some more users are interested in voting here. Please also take a look at Commons:Templates for galleries (en) or Commons:Vorlagen für Galerien (de) or Commons:用于画廊的模板 (zh).

examples: Template:Arab, Template:Portuguese (replaced: Template:Deutsch)

now i want to tell you the history of those templates: first at all, i made Koblenz. after i've seen the gallery page of Praha, i started to use flags and multilingual galleries. one day, it became to much work, and i creaded templates ([[3]]) with one flag representing the land from which the language comes from. i generated Commons:Vorlagen für Galerien and i displaced all the flags in galleries with my templates (praha wasn't the only page that used nice-looking flags in galleries) Nuno Tavares didn't agree with me and created the first animation. as you can see here, the dicussion on animations has already been started. 2 weeks down, the second animation was born and it's spreading! i think it's really nice if you see a flag representing your language instead of two letters. the point is that one flag can not represent one language. question now is: should we keep using animated nice-looking animations for languages that isn't spoken in just one country or only one flag (for the country from which the languages comes from)? another possibiltity is to slow down the animations. what do u think?

There were some remarks in the contra section, which I moved here. Please do not change votes of people by appending text or something. \u2014 Richie 18:42, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

this is a vote on animated langauge templates, not if we should use flags!!!!! Schaengel89 @me 16:16, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
and everybody is allowed to make a better suggestion - so there is no reason for this comment (no exclamation marks at all).-- Schorsch 17:53, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
but this is another question and doesn't help us to solve the problem Schaengel89 @me 18:05, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
So, what is the exact question now? Is it "do we use flags at all" or is it "now we use flags, do we want them to blink?". Or, rather, as i think flags are okay but blinking ones are not, where do i have to sign? ;-) --Magadan 10:38, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
the question is: use animations, yes or no? Schaengel89 @me 14:57, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
That is the original question - but if most of the voters also say iso-codes are preferable we will use iso-codes instead of flags. --Avatar 00:56, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
NO! we will vote another time why should we vote for/against amimations and in the end, we've gor letters? Schaengel89 @me 16:25, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Vote about animated language images

I would say that the vote started at 21:15, 3 May 2005 (UTC), so say it ends at 21:15, 10 May 2005 (UTC). \u2014 Richie 18:42, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I have a stupid question. Forgive me if it sounds innocent, but I do not come to commons very often. Since tehre are pumps in several languages on commons, but only one common page (such as Berlin), what would happen if at the same time that you hold a vote here, a similar vote was held in another pump and had the opposite conclusion ? How do you manage decisions taken by only one language in a multilingual project sharing pages ? Anthere 20:25, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

That's a good question - I don't know the answer but I suppose that, as with categories v. pages vote we would have to take a multilingual vote if there were serious disagreements between the different language communities.
PS: I believe the vote has now ended, and the consensus seems to be that animated flags are a bad idea.
-- Joolz 21:37, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
Okay. I would be curious to see such a vote next time ;-) Anthere

pro

  1. Schaengel89 @me 15:33, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  2. Get_It • 16:50, 4 May 2005 (UTC) Theres no problem if we slow down the speed of the anim. And also, this may start a war in some wikipedias, like:
    "No way! Our country was the first to use this language, so it should show our flag!"
    "Yeh, but our country has the most speakers."
  3. --E2m 23:44, 4 May 2005 (UTC) (and iso codes are better than one flag)

contra

  1. Richie 19:20, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
  2. Schorsch 14:43, 3 May 2005 (UTC) (I am so free as to add him here \u2014 Richie 19:20, 3 May 2005 (UTC)) - yes, it's right - i'm contra on this! -- Schorsch 21:09, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
  3. --AndreasPraefcke 21:45, 3 May 2005 (UTC) Flags for languages are as wrong as can be. There will always be discussions, avoidable by simply not using them at all to indicate languages. And a big NO to anything blinking.
  4. Put toys on your website but not on a serious project. --Paddy 21:49, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
  5. Arnomane 21:50, 3 May 2005 (UTC) ISO-language code as proposed earlier is sufficient. We don't need to win a price for beeing fancy. It just needs to be practical and easy to read. Update: And of course descriptions can be sorted alphabetically after ISO-Code, which is very helpfull if you have 10 or more different languages on one page. A flag does not give you this quick visual orientation. Arnomane 21:57, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  6. If there have to be multiple flags, than use transitions at least. But I strongly prefer non-animated images. --Avatar 21:52, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
  7. --:Bdk: 22:30, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
  8. --Baikonur 23:00, 3 May 2005 (UTC) As I already said at the Village Pump, I prefer ISO language codes. Please stop these animated images!
  9. --Aka 06:30, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  10. extremely distracting -- Duesentrieb 12:00, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  11. ISO language codes are far preferable. — Dan | Talk 15:21, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  12. Jebur 16:40, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  13. Animation is cute, but distracting. If USians can deal with a Union Jack indicating English language, then Brazilians can deal with a flag of Portugal, Austrians a flag of Germany, etc. This is a webside standard that is good enough for us too. Stan Shebs 16:52, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  14. I'm against using flags to represent languages, i'm even more against using annoying animated ones. -- Joolz 21:28, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  15. I, too, am against using flags to represent languages, and animated ones... eurgh. James F. (talk) 23:12, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
  16. This blinking is really annoying --Denniss 00:01, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
  17. Grenavitar 22:15, 5 May 2005 (UTC) - I'm for using flags... I don't like animated ones... but I do like flags, much more recognizable.... who memorizes ISO codes? O_O
  18. W\u03b5Ft 17:52, 6 May 2005 (UTC) on fr.wikipedia we use these symbols fr:Image:Symbole-en.png fr:Image:Symbole-fr.png
    Those look really nice -- Joolz 11:54, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
  19. --FloSch 11:43, 8 May 2005 (UTC) Animations are a big no-no in my opinion....
  20. --Magadan 15:12, 8 May 2005 (UTC) Flags: yes, animations: no. I appreciate Schaengel's intention to represent all nations using a certain language, but in this case this kind of political correctness seems exaggerated. Flags are a good language symbol, but let's follow worldwide standards, as Stan Shebs said before.
    No they are not a good language symbol worldwide, there were already a lot of discussion about that on some wikipedias (sorry I dont remember the exact pages). If they were so good, they would be used by mediawiki. --FoeNyx 10:28, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
    Perhaps when this vote has ended we should have a discussion on whether flags should be used at all, and what alternatives we have available. -- Joolz 19:43, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
  21. --FoeNyx 10:28, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
  22. notafish }<';> 19:26, 10 May 2005 (UTC) (still on time?) yeah, forgot it was UTC. And I am against all form of images. ISO codes are perfect.

Alternatives

I've created a few templates based on the system already in use on the en:wiki and fr:wiki (see above and en:Gerhard Schröder for examples in use) for people who don't want to use flags to represent languages. The ones I've created so far are: Template:en_icon, Template:fr_icon and Template:de_icon (so far). -- Joolz 23:58, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Looks much better than the flags and it's neutral: no german speaking swiss/italian/other user may be offended by having a german or german/austrian flag representing his language (used as example). --Denniss 01:09, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
I think, we should discuss this laster, after this vote finished. \u2014 Richie 16:23, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree that the policy on whether to use flags at all should be discussed after the vote has finished (see above) but I was merely providing an alternative for people to use if they don't want to use the flags. -- Joolz 16:28, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
I think this creates a problem of international recognized character sets. Flags are recognizable in a way that Romanized characters aren't. Grenavitar 01:58, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Categorization

I have been noticing that alot of the images on the Commons are not at all categorized. How does one go about finding the images that aren´t in a category? They don´t show up on Google search.--Orgullomoore 06:42, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Every image should be in a license category at least. They don't need to be in other categories, if they are in articles, which are categorised. To fix things, there is Special:Uncategorizedpages and there once was Commons:Really_unused - but the data is old now. (see discussion at User talk:Andre Engels#Really unused, Duesentrieb will help) --Avatar 09:20, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
Our search engine should be enabled, just like the ones at WP:EN and Meta. :> -- Get_It • 17:07, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

If the files have good, real-language filenames (that is, "Paris Eiffel Tower 2005.jpg" instead of "IMG2389742394.jpg"), you can also try Special:Imagelist for searching them. --AndreasPraefcke 18:50, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Can we get Google to search the text in image pages? Fg2 00:25, May 5, 2005 (UTC)
Somebody pointed out a while back that because our image description pages are called "foo.jpg" etc, Google probably has to assume they are binary files with nothing worth indexing. This is why we have to get after people to choose good names and put their images in gallery articles or categories or both; an orphan with a gobbledygook name is effectively nonexistent. Stan Shebs 12:01, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
One good approach would be to encourage people to put at least one category to their pictures, related to the subject as close as they can. From my experience, in each category some expert will look and do a more detailed categorization or add more details to the text sooner or later. -- Quistnix 23:20, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
This is what I and some others have been trying for mons, but there is no end to the flood of "lost" images, see Special:Unusedimages. Please spread the word and tell people to always put their files into categories or on galery pages. If you know a good way to encourage people, please tell us, or better still, just do it. Thanks! -- Duesentrieb 20:26, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
Make it:
  • Mandatory (upload fails without a category)
  • Easy (autocompletion on categories, and suggestions based on images with similar descriptions)
AlbertCahalan 17:35, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Using Ultimate Wiktionary for Commons

Konik-etalage1.JPG

A growing problem with Commons is finding the stuff that is there. Image:Konik-etalage1.JPG is hard to find unless someone adds a category horse or konik or whatever. Even when you speak English you will not find it when you search for "Pferd" or "paard". The proposal that I wrote on Meta tries to fix this aspect of the problem. So yes, we still have to add categories, search words and what have you. This will make it easy for people who do not speak English.. (Yes, there is work involved)  :) GerardM 14:07, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Should media count include MarketDataBot and WeatherBot?

In preparation of the 100K media press release, I've taken it upon myself to update the media count (Template:NUMBEROFMEDIAFILES). Thousands of uploaded images are the work of User:MarketDataBot and User:WeatherBot (market data and weather info for Wikinews). Indepdendently of the question whether these bots should be as prolific as they are, I'd like to inquire whether you think their uploads should be included in the media count. I'm inclined to say no, since they are of very limited usefulness beyond their one-time inclusion on Wikinews, and also because it would buy us some additional time for the press release. Your thoughts?--Eloquence 13:26, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

I'd say "no", too.
James F. (talk) 13:49, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
I say no as well. Arnomane 14:15, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
it would also be good to exlude those uploads from the new-image-gallery, they are flooding the thing. -- Duesentrieb 14:22, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
ACK --Baikonur 15:07, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
no to the media and weather charts, yes to the new images from directmedia - these are images which would anyway be uploaded in the long run (if available) and they are usefull not only for a few days. -- Schorsch 00:20, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
This seems like a good place to say that I really hate those two bots. They fill up the Special:Newimages page with repetitive and uninteresting data. AlbertCahalan 17:32, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

New free image resource site

Hi all! I hope this is the correct place to post this, please accept my appologies if it isn't. I've been a longtime fan of wikipedia (et al) and done some minor contributions in the past; unfortunately, writing has never been my strong point.

Since web design and programming are more my strength, I present to you: YotoPhoto.com This is a search engine that indexes various public domain, Creative Commons and other similarly licensed images from throughout the web. You can search several different image resources (including stock exchange, en.wikipedia and commons) at one time.

It's still beta, but currently contains over 50,000 images for your wiki'ing pleasure. Enjoy!

Hey thanks dude. :-) This is a nice web site. You should also include de.wikipedia.org and other wikipedia sections as well (if you haven't done it already, as de.wikipedia's image policy is the same as in the Wikimedia Commons and far more stricter than en.wikipedia and there are lots of free images).
Maybe you wanna include also web pages of US-GOV agencies, e.g. NASA, as their content is within public domain according to a nice US law (I wish we would have in europe such an nice law to... ;-) ). Only some photogalleries:
Another field are collections of artwork that have expired copyright. Although the website disclaimers in most times don't tell it (or even the opposite) the scans of such images are without restrictions and within the public domain, e.g.:
Keep up the good work. Arnomane 09:28, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Arnomane, I definitely will be adding a lot more images over time, including most of the US-GOV/NASA ones. As for de.wikipedia.org, it's definitely a great resource I'd like to add. Of course the problem is that the indexer uses the text description on each image page to create the keywords (Like Google etc) and those pages are of course in German. What I'd like to do is index the site and then use a commercial translating software to convert the text to English. Of course the result won't be perfect but might be good enough for this purpose.

I find it strange that sites like NYPL.org can claim copyright over some these old images because like the Smithsonion images, they should be in the public domain.

Thanks for the feedback and the links.

Photos of attractions and other constructions

I wonder about the photos of constructions and other attractions inside the Asterix amusement park (north of Paris, France; private property).

These are photographs focused on specific recent architectural works and statues and, thus, as far as I understand French law, the designers of the Park own some rights to them.

What do we do? David.Monniaux 09:11, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Does the United States recognize whatever provisions of French law are causing the problem? Either way, I say let's keep them unless we get a complaint. Let's avoid being overly paranoid about copyright. Dbenbenn 15:15, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
It could be argued that constructing exact copies of the attractions would infringe on copyright. Does taking photos of same attractions infringe on copyright? I don't think so, not more than taking photos of cars. Thuresson 00:32, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

In most countries, photographs of artwork are not free unless the artwork is free (this may also apply to architecture). But, in most countries, this is not the case if the artwork is in a public place / the photo was taken from a publically accessible spot. France (and Belgium?) is an exception as photos of protected artework are not free there, even if the artwork is publically accessible (like for instance the lighting of the Eiffel Tower at night).

I belive we should respect the copyright laws of the country the picture was created in - that is, we should not allow images of artwork from france, no images of architectural features from germany (unless publically accessible), etc. -- Duesentrieb 16:41, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

This is becoming very difficult. How do we seperate artwork from... well, non-artwork? What about cars? What about cars in France? What about building details? What if the building details are works of art? Commons have several pictures of the pyramid outside Le Louvre, Image:LouvrePyramide.jpg, are they OK?. Thuresson 04:02, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Well, I would suppose it would be best to consider the most obvious things: images of structures created as artwork (skulptures, monuments) are not allowed in france (unless old). For buildings, there are a few well known cases which are considered art, like Eifel Tower at night, said Pyramid in from of the Louvre, the Atomium (in Belgium, I known, but I belive the law's similar there), etc. For "normal" buildings we probably have to delete images when we are told that those are "art". Note that in Germany, architecure is AFAIK considered are by default if not trivial, but images are OK if taken from a public spot. Images of the interior are not free if the building not very old and the images show architectonic features (this does not applie to a blank wall, etc). But IANAL... -- Duesentrieb 10:04, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Meta Data again

I have a few day off work, so am looking at ways to add medium specific meta data to the Image Upload process.
Modifying the mediawiki PHP code does not look too bad, although I don't know how relevant the changes would be to other wikis. The main problem would be deciding on what meta data is relevant or not. A quick search of the web turns up a few projects looking at the same problem for musuems, image libraries, etc. One idea is to catalogue both the original work and the works based on it (e.g a building and images taken of it at different angles or times) (see VRA Core 3.0 at Visual Resources Association). A similiar approach is taken by the USA's NISO with the NISO Z39.87-2002 Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images. For Video/Audio there is the MPEG7 standard -- 'The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from'.
I think we could just ask for the most relevent technical data and embed it in the picture's text (in some reserved format), then later we can generate different meta-data formats. Any thoughts?. wombat 04:21, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Please note that by the next version (1.5) of MediaWiki, EXIF data will be extracted from jpegs and shown on the description page. This type of thing could probably be done for a few other formats, too. -- Duesentrieb 11:06, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Thats great. However there are still a few fields that will not appear in EXIF data: such as Location, Photographer, etc. There is also the case of scanned photographs. There should be some way for data to be entered for these as well?. wombat 23:49, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Well as long as there doesn't exist a structured solution within MediaWiki there is a solution with a template with variables (the content of the variables then can be automatically converted to a structured system directly in MediaWiki and the Database when it is available). The template solution "works right now" (TM) and helps many uploaders a lot in adding their Metadata right (thafor it is very easy and generic and does not have very special variables as exposure time for photographs but you can add it also in the description in a structured list). Have a look at Commons:Criteria for inclusion where this template and its usage gets described. Arnomane 10:18, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
Thats great, I've switched to using that template. However I created a second one for purely photographic information (Template:Photo_Information) with exposure and camera details. Perhaps a few more could be created for different mediums?; e.g. Scanner_Information for scans, Audio_Information for sound file, etc. -- wombat 00:54, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
As told you by a few people already: it contains the useless variables "other versions" and the "license". The Photo_Information template is a good idea, but I'd like to propose using only one variable for "Make" and "Modell". And I'd like to have a variable for "lense", because this is very important for (D)SLR cameras. Finally, for film cameras the film information could be put into the ISO variable, because today most cameras are digital and dont use films anymore ;) -- Aka 07:24, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
I really don't think the camera info matters, except as a curiosity. Things might be different if people were posting raw format files. Really, what good will the camera info do? The image may have been processed greatly since the camera made it. Things that come to mind: cropping, chromatic abherration and lense distortion correction, color correction, motion blur removal, perspective correction, correction of light fall-off near the edges, panorama construction... and that's not even getting into the artsy stuff that people do. AlbertCahalan 17:27, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
More useful: as I type keywords, the software suggests completions and alternate keywords. So I can categorize as "Meat" or "Meats" as needed, while getting suggestions like "Pork" and "Beef". AlbertCahalan 17:27, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Themes

Moin, i thought, would it be possible to do a call for photos of all cars? I think it would be great, if everybody would go out and take a picture of each car and soon we would have a great collection. After cars maybe it could be electronics or buildings or so.. -- da didi 09:40, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Copyright status of stamps

Hi,

  1. Stamps can't be put under GFDL licence only because we scanned them. Either there are copyrighted, then we may not upload them here, or they are in the public domain, and them merely scanning them doesn't allow us to claim a copyright of them, so they must be in the public domain.
  2. We can't claim what we deny to others. Moreover since we deny others to claim copyright on scanned public documents, we can't do that ourselves.
  3. Copyright status for recent stamps is at the minimum controversial, and uploading recent stamp scans here is in many cases probably unlegal. The case of French stamps is quite interesting in that regard. They may be in the public domain according to some informal discussions I had, but the French Postage Museum says that the copyright on all recent French stamps belongs to the drawer and the engraver upto 70 years after their death. We should get things right now about this. Regards, Yann 11:24, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
You are absolutely right - but it should also be noted that the stamps of some countries are public domain (because work of the government), while in others they are not (unless thy are so old that the copyright has expired). It's important to know for example that US stamps are not PD, because the US Postal Service is not a government agency. The same is true in Germany, for instance. I have no idea about france, but we should look closely at the situation in the individual countries. -- Duesentrieb 11:33, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
I've been slowly researching this, with the goal of writing a definitive "postage stamp copyright" article for en. The formal rules are completely chaotic, while in practice dealers and philatelic writers freely reproduce everything old and new, postal admins being happy to get the free advertising. I suggest that for the time being we only act to delete in clearcut cases, such as US stamps from after 1978. Beware of postal museum claims, get a citation of specific case law if at all possible. Stan Shebs 17:44, 9 May 2005 (UTC)



You really want big images, hmmm? Sure?

Looking elsewhere on this site, it seems people want really big images. Uh, OK, I can do that...

One of the justifications is some imaginary printed version of Wikipedia. Besides defeating the whole point of hypertext, such a beast would be enormous.

So, anyway, what should I do with my government-issue standard slice of bacon? It's given in lame DPI (why do people do this?) measurements for an undefined paper size which is I guess 9 inches by 6 inches. At 300 DPI, we get a 2700x1800 slice of bacon. Yummy! That's 1 MB. If we are cutting kilobytes though, we can eat the smaller 150 DPI slice of bacon. That is 1350x900, or about 350 kilobytes.

I suspect that the bigger slice of bacon will take longer to scale down to thumbnail size.

AlbertCahalan 00:47, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

(responding on wikibooks too would be appreciated)

It will take longer to scale down, yes, but it's only done once per thumbnail size - the results are cached. Morven 06:23, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
This is unhelpful unless the cache is very very large and long-lived. The popular images will be cached, sure, but most of the time people are looking at stuff other than the wikipedia front page. If images must be scaled half of the time, that would be awful. AlbertCahalan 02:14, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
Well the printed version of Wikipedia is no longer imaginary. It already happened if form of excerpts - the so called WikiReader in de-Wikipedia. These are collections of articles to a certain topics that gets layouted in a book style (and can also be bought in two cases). The second step of the evolution are now "handbooks" to a certain topic that will be published by Directmedia (a company in Berlin, Germany). And of course de-Wikipedia also exists in an offline DVD-version (of course there aren't all images that get used in de-Wikipedia simply because they don't fit all on the DVD). Arnomane 10:27, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
Keep in mind that technology is changing too, and when in a few years everybody is using 300dpi or even 600dpi screens on their home machines, they'll be grumbling at shortsighted Wikimedians who only contributed tiny pictures that have to be scaled UP to be visible! Stan Shebs 11:54, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
Is that so bad? I note that the larger image has 4x the area, but only requires 3x the storage space. Thus, I conclude that it is somewhat more blurry than it should be, but still offering a bit more. It just doesn't seem worth having such high-resolution images. Actually, 1350x900 is overkill. 405x270 is enough to illustrate bacon. AlbertCahalan 02:14, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
Use the highest resolution version, which is alas only 2700x1800. The biggest image I'm aware of here (anyone have anything bigger?) is Image:Africa satellite plane.jpg, at 8460x8900. Dbenbenn 14:42, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
screen display is about 75 dpi so if we want to print at full quality and same size on a 600dpi output method we could really do with images 8 times thier size on screen. assuming the widest any pictures will be used in wikipedia is 600px that means we really want 4800px wide images in storage where possible. Storage is cheap tracking down an images creator to try and get a higher quality version may be very time consuming or even impossible. Plugwash 18:54, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
Screens are often above 100 dpi now. Laptops go up to about 150 I think, and Apple's huge desktop displays are at 100. AlbertCahalan 02:14, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
My laptop, which has a 14.1" screen and is just XGA, is 91 dpi. Imagine a 12" screen with maybe 1280x1024, and you're easily reaching more than 100.
But bear in mind that the creator may not be willing to release higher-quality versions under a Commons-compatible license in any case. There's a 2k×3k version of Image:Rhode Island State Capitol (north facade).jpg, but only the 640x480 version is licensed for reproduction. 121a0012 06:29, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
I believe that we should consider what display technologies will be like in 15, 20, even 60 years. We need to have the highest technical quality possible, since we're in it at wikimedia for the long haul. --Zantastik 08:05, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Following what you write here, I uploaded the largest image I could find of Image:Carta Marina large.jpg, 5000x3700, 72 DPI, just over 5MB, and got the automatic recommendations that images shouldn't exeed 5 MB. So what is it? --Fred Chess 04:52, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It is fine :) Now smaller image is needed. --Raymond de 10:45, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)



Language Templates

There has recently been a discussion here about whether to use animated images (Lang-pt.gif) showing flags in the Templates for galleries. The overall vote was 3 pro and 22 contra, so this practice is deemed deprecated. However, there has been quite a lot of concern about using flags as language indicators, because languages are not unique to a single country \u2013 which is represented by the flag \u2013, e.g. English is the official language in about 30 states, German in about 10 etc. The main alternative that has been proposed are ISO 639 language codes, either in text form (en) or as an Image (language symbol e.g. in French Wikipedia).

I would like to start a voting an this matter later and this is why I would like to ask you to add further alternatives that come to your mind. My aim is to collect all (sensible) alternatives so that we can decide which one is the best.

I'll wait 10 days for proposals (end: midnight 25 May 2005), so there's plenty of time to ask non-English language speakers as well. \u2014 Richie 15:01, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

As I said in the discussion above these language indicators should be strictly neutral. I think the idea used in the french Wiki is great and should be used here, too. --Denniss 15:28, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
By the way, they're not just used on the french wiki, I've seen them on the english wiki too. -- Joolz 17:44, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
It was mentioned at one point that the main problem with ISO 639 on Commons is its reliance on roman letters. Seeing that commons is supposed to be as linguistically neutral as practically possible, its seems this is not a good idea. I'm a bit at a loss as to a practical alternative other than to suggest that roman letters be used for languages using the roman alphabet and that others use an identifier from their own characters if possible. This should be easy enough to do. Peregrine981 12:55, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
I mentioned that romanized letters were not linguistically neutral method. Flags, although admittedly not perfect, are universal. I know that if the commons used Cyrillic characters to represent language I would be at a complete loss. Flags are universal symbols that are commonly associated with countries and when you use the US or British flag (either) it is then associated with English. I think this only runs into problems with languages like Gujarati where no flag is associated with it since the Indian flag would be associated (probably) with Hindi. I am open to suggestions, but I don't believe ISO codes are less POV or more accessible Grenavitar 13:23, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
I personally don't see a problem with roman characters, but I do understand that there are people who are not used to them. You'll never get the Commons completely multilingually. Take for example the logo which contains "Wikimedia Commons" in roman letters. You'll not be able to get e.g. a cyrillic version in the near future. However, ISO 639 is an international standard. I also think that flags look better than text, but as said above, languages are not unique to a single country and vice versa. \u2014 Richie 16:00, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
The way I see it is that there is an inherent bias in either way (romanization or flags) and therefore we should attempt to easy accessibility. I think flags are far more accessible and the negative side of a Belgian uprising against seeing a French flag is trivial. I see no problem with doing this English (eng) and adding the ISO 639 code to the description, but I think the POV argument is bad for removing this useful tool. Grenavitar 18:55, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
I don't see why the symbols can't be used with the same alphabet which the text that is written beside them is in. -- Joolz 19:04, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Using national symbols for human languages is wrong. Please, stop promoting this "feature". It has nothing to do with accessibility, it is a political issue and we mus avoid it. If you think ISO code are a problem, use the native name of the language as we do it for interwiki links: English, Español, Français, \u65e5\u672c\u8a9e --Keichwa 20:32, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

When do you finally understand that the language templates and the solution of using flags to indicate the language are two independent things? The language templates can be easily adapted to a new solution (after community consensus) and we should therefore continued to advertise them, because they are very useful. But this section is intended to collect proposed solutions in order to start a voting on which one to use later. \u2014 Richie 16:57, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
I don't see a problem with the flags. Americans still call the English language "English", after all, the Quebecois still call French "French", and I'm assuming Brazilians and Angolans speak "Portuguese". The fact that there would be an English, French or Portugese flag associated with these should no pose any greater problem. But if we're going to do this, we should apply it consistently. No American half flag for English. Use the Union Jack. -- Kowey 19:17, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Up to now, I could extract the following proposed solutions:

  • country flags (current system, controversial), e.g. English language.png or File:Japan flag 20px bordered.png
  • ISO 639 language codes as text, e.g. en or ja
  • ISO 639 language codes as image, e.g. Symbole-en.png or Symbole-ja.png
  • Native language name, e.g. English or \u65e5\u672c\u8a9e
  • Abbreviated native language name, e.g. Eng or \u65e5\u672c\u8a9e

\u2014 Richie 16:57, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

I'd like to add abbreviated native language name as image, just to make that a clear option. Peregrine981 03:06, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I second. Aoineko 10:00, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

The "French-speaking world" (francophonie) have its own flag (white with a multi-color circle). What about "English-speaking world" (anglophonie) ? Aoineko 09:58, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't think so, unless you count the Commonwealth of nations, but this is far from representing all of the English speaking world, and also represents many non-English countries. Peregrine981 03:00, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
In fact, only few French speakers know this flag, so even if it exist, this don't help much our concern. Aoineko 03:42, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
  • when i see the union jack, i know :
    • it is written in english
    • it is more international than british ;D Alvaro
Use the native language name or nothing. I can hardly think of situation in which I need to be told which language something is in, either I know (if it is English or Japanese in my case) or I don't care.
Something more useful would be to use lang attibutes, and to give a wiki access to these. Then let the software add images or whatever. This would need some media wiki changes. It would let search engines (ours or google/yahoo/msn) index better.


Video?

The main page mentions video clips, but I can't find any other information about uploading them (e.g. preferred format, size, how to incorporate them). Are they wanted? Markalexander100 03:13, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Videos are currently allowd in ogg-theora format only (I hope this will change soon). They can be used just like audio files. As to size, I don't know what the current limit on upload file size is, you will have to try it out. Have a look at Category:Video for some examples. -- Duesentrieb 15:30, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
Which video formats do you suggest? David.Monniaux 21:01, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
Well, actually, I would like to drop most restrictions on file content. I actually have a patch in the queue that would allow us to do that without risking viruses and trojans. At least, I would like to allow the following: SVG, SXD and TIFF for images, MP3 for audio and MPEG for video. I'm aware that MP3/MPEG are not completely "free" formats and Ogg should be preferred to those. But they are the defacto standard (and "open" and well documented); they play pretty much everywhere, so we should allow them. Free and open formats are a recomendation, not a requirement, and I hope it stays that way. -- Duesentrieb 22:46, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
For SVG and PDF, we'd probably need to filter Javascript out. MPEG and AVI are "vague" formats that can use a variety of codecs, some of which are highly proprietary and incur fees just for compression (I'm not sure whether, for instance, making some file available on the Web that was encoded with a "pirate" encoder, would result in us being liable for paying royalties.). Plus, MPEG, by itself, does not "play anywhere" — it plays on the machines that have the codecs use by the file installed. David.Monniaux 05:13, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
The JavaScript detector is one of the main parts of the patch I'm working on (see bugzilla:898). It's true that MPEG, AVI etc are container formats that could contains just anything - but the same is true for OGG. In any case, we should have an eye on suche media to make sure at can be viewed without having to pay money. -- Duesentrieb 10:10, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps more to the point, some of the proprietary formats (including MPEG-2 video last I checked with MPEG-LA, although this was some time ago) charge patent royalties for every copy encoded using that technique. Theora is patented, but the license allows royalty-free use and distribution. I don't know what the various audio codec people are asking for—which makes is good policy to use a non-proprietary codec like Vorbis or FLAC. 121a0012 05:15, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies! I downloaded the codec for theora and managed to play one of the clips, but at the end an error message popped up saying "catastrophic failure". Scary. Markalexander100 03:34, 17 May 2005 (UTC)


Shell script for image usage in Wikimedia projects

Hello. I have written a small quick and dirty Bash shell script that looks for the usage of a certain image of the Wikimedia Commons within the different Wikimedia projects and its language sections.

It has two modes: One mode for looking of the usage of a file uploaded at the commons and another mode for looking for forgotten local file duplicates of a file uploaded at the Commons (so that they can be found and marked with NowCommons).

The usage lookup mode is interesting for those that want to delete a picture within the Commons, so that the broken references don't stay within a text for ages (and that the images don't get uploaded again by people that didn't realize why the file was deleted).

You can find the script code and usage explanation at User:Arnomane/Image usage. I hope it is helpfull (and that I found all bugs) and that now the comments like "hey you forgot to edit my local Wikipedia..." get reduced. Have fun. Arnomane 18:43, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

This sound a lot like the work User:RCBot is supposed to do. \u2014 Richie 20:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Yes I'm aware of your bot, but I think the scope of both are a bit different. The features that this script provides could be integrated in this bot but there are some problems with it: The bot needs an account and is only operated by one person and I couldn't find its source code. This script is easy and can be used by everyone out of the box. It is primarily thought as an assistance tool for people that delete a picture and that want to remove image links of an image in different Wikipedias (as far as I can see it this removal task is hard to do fully automatically as there are several ways to embedd an image in a page and side effects of layout and some other circumstances need to be respected) and for cleaning up image duplications which do exist in large number (in about 50% of the moves people forget to tag the image with the NowCommons tag; this task also can't be done automatically as there can be e.g. images with the same name but different content). So the edit parts of both tasks of the script aren't that easy to do by a bot. Arnomane 22:01, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
one other suggestion as an addition to the deletion policies might be to determine the wikipedias where an image is in use, check out thier fair use policies and if appropriate upload the image there before deleteing it here. Plugwash 00:36, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
Well this can be done by people that re interested in fair use images. It's simly not the job of an Commons admin to save fair Use images. It is about creating free content. I myself don't need fair use images and would be happy if en-Wikipedia would finally do the cut and restrict Fair use to what it was meant originally. Arnomane 00:53, 19 May 2005 (UTC)


Protecting images from vandalism

More and more of the Commons images are used on the main pages in the various projects and it has been suggested that these images should be protected during this time, e.g. images used on the en: main page. But protection also means that the image description page can not be edited which is a shame since the general public probably has interesting background information to contribute while the image is being exposed.

Since there are pros and cons to protecting images I'd be interested to know from others how a sensible policy should look like. Thuresson 13:58, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

heres the policy i would suggest:
make a template something like.


File:Lock-icon.jpg
This image is being or soon will be used on <link to page> which is considered to be at a high risk of vandalism. protection was requested by <name of admin on project using image> and was performed by <name of commons admin> if you have any information to add about this image please add it on the talk page
it would be up to the admins involved (one from commons one from the project using the image) to coordinate how long the image remained protected for and it would be up to the commons admin involved to move new information from the talk page back to the image description page. Plugwash 14:31, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
further to my previous suggestion the image description page should be copied to the project that is using the image and protected so that a vandalism image can't be locally uploaded. Plugwash 14:33, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
I would do it on a case by case basis, after a problem occured. Is vandalism in en-wikipedia on main page really so problematic? In de-Wikipedia we only protect the page and some important templates. As security by obscurity works often we don't need to protect all main page templates. We had occasionally trouble with some vandals on main page but this was everytime sorted out very quick. Arnomane 22:35, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
Agree with Arnomane, protect when necessary. If it is necessary to protect images displayed on en or other main pages just do it. There is no need to be to bureaucratic. -guety 00:26, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I believe images on en:wikipedia's main page were often targets of vandalism (and see above request on here for evidence of that) so as a matter of course these are pre-emptively protected now. We do need to have some sort of protection request procedure so we have a proccess to protect pages when they need to be. -- Joolz 13:14, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
Well a wiki is too slow for such kind of interaction. I want to avoid yet another policy if the problem can be solved easier and faster in another way. What about IRC? Joining #commons.wikimedia at freenode.net and asking for protection of a vandaled page should help. As there is currently no way protecting only the image this would be the best solution that also avoids blocking of large parts of the commons. So our "policy" should be: "For protection requests join the IRC channel and ask for help.". Arnomane 13:31, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
Vandalism on the main page of the English-speaking Wikipedia was a problem until the page, templates and images were all protected. We have had several very tasty cases. David.Monniaux 20:43, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
mmm its all very well suggesting irc but that means we actually have to have an active irc channel for commons which is not something we appear to have right now.
maybe a better way would be to make an admin from any wikimedia project that requires such protection services an admin here and let them handle it themselves. Plugwash 01:32, 21 May 2005 (UTC)



Yorck Project: Requests for improvement

Hello, I started Commons:10,000 paintings from Directmedia/Requests for improvement just to prevent many unnecessary or worsening trys to improve image quality. Please also have a look. You´ll find the main discussion about the 10,000 images at this talk page. --:Bdk: 09:57, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

Import of 10,000 paintings finished

See my announcement on commons-l.--Eloquence 02:41, 22 May 2005 (UTC)


We have to exercise our freedoms of speech here

If any right isn't exercised, like a muscle, it becomes stiff and unusable. The below deletion request quoted a U.S. government directive which is a blatant challenge to our freedom of speech and press; "No person may, except with the written permission of the Director.... knowingly use the words \u201cCentral Intelligence Agency".

The fact this is even being quoted by one of our admins in a deletion request shows the abysmal condition of this site.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Deletion_requests#Image:Central_Intelligence_Agency_logo.png

I think you should just close down the image section because the admins here are much too controlling over contributions and much too compliant and submissive to governments; to the point of even quoting illegal government directives such as ones like this saying :"No person may, except with the written permission of the Director.... knowingly use the words \u201cCentral Intelligence Agency" which is an obvious breach of the freedom of speech which is guaranteed by the overiding U.S. constitution. The fact that directive is even quoted here shows how some of the admins here have gone "over the top" in their application of their administrative authority and are not doing anything at all to stick up for our collective freedoms of speech and expression in this site. 64.229.28.130 12:46, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Also, its luidicrous,as a global site, to be restrained by any country's imagery laws. Suppose an Islamic "Taliban controlled" type country has a law against showing a woman's face or a bible, are we going to obey their law? Then why would we obey a German law against showing a swastika??? If we succomb to any country's censorship laws we must succomb to every country's censorship laws. 67.71.122.38 16:37, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
People should be aware of the quotation in full: No person may, except with the written permission of the Director, knowingly use the words \u201cCentral Intelligence Agency\u201d, the initials \u201cCIA\u201d, the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency, or any colorable imitation of such words, initials, or seal in connection with any merchandise, impersonation, solicitation, or commercial activity in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the Central Intelligence Agency. - To give anything other than the full quotation, as you did, is wilfully misleading. -- Joolz 16:44, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Joolz, please stop the Strawman deflections. I checked the deletion request.[[4]] Perhaps you might have a look if you haven't done so. Are you saying it was "wilfully misleading" for that quote to be used as a reason for deletion in the deletion request? If not, then what part of that verbose "bull baffles brains" government directive applies toward deleting one of our images? 65.95.149.24 23:54, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
    • I'm in no way saying that Thuresson's use of the quotation was misleading, I'm saying that when you quoted it here you chopped it down in such a way that it meant something else, which is misleading. I've made no judgement on whether it's lawful for the U.S. government to claim that the image is copyrighted, and yes, I have visited the deletion request page. -- Joolz 00:53, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
  • OK, Here is a simple explanation for the legality related to any U.S. federal government logo.

1.The USA has a constitution which vests all federal government power to the people; thus the expression a government "of the people". Our government doesn't own anything; the people of the USA own all the stuff that the government manages for the people.

2. Therefore the people own the logos of all federal government agencies,departments,armed forces etc.

3. Public is another word for "the people"

4. Therefore any US federal government logo is automatically in the "public" domain.

So, please just get the corks out and quit imagining the government has more power than it actually does.67.71.123.177 05:03, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

This line of argumentation is dubious (Most democratic countries have constitutions that vest all government power to the people, and still their governments do not put everything into the public domain. US state governments also are governments "of the people" and not all put their work into the public domain. Etc.)

Comment; I said "federal"; I don't know about the various states' constitutions; and I am only referring to what the employees and elected officials of the USA produce. 64.229.30.62 12:53, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

By the way, the US government does hold copyrights to various works. The US government, by law, cannot copyright what it produces (i.e. what its employees produce); however, it can buy copyright from contractors, or be assigned copyrights by contractors. An example is the reference manual for the ADA programming language, which is copyrighted by the US Department of Defense (yes, this is written on the manual). David.Monniaux 05:48, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
You're mixing up copyright law, and laws (akin to trademark law) which restrict the use of some emblem or name in order to avoid people misrepresenting agencies, corporations or other individuals. David.Monniaux 06:03, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
As long as the server is located in the US, Wikimedia would be well advised to play by the rules, regardless of the limitations. Also, you reasoning is flawed. Just because an item is owned by a collective ("the people of the USA") does not mean that anybody inside or outside that group can use that item as they see fit. It would not be unreasonable (or unusual) that the collective elects a group to protect the item from being used in certain ways. Thuresson 06:44, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm not a lawyer, but using the CIA logo in a manner that implies a (nonexistant) association with the agency for monetary gain DEFINITELY souds like fraud to me. Raul654 07:33, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

  • No one here is condoning using any logo in any way that implies anything not true nor for monetary gain; another deflection from the issue.

Also, if we are going to "play by (U.S.)rules" then please drop any reference to this being a global site and put an acknowledgement that this is a site playing under their rules(USA's) on the home page; and what will you do when/if U.S. rules become even more restrictive? 64.229.30.62 12:46, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

This is a global site. However, almost all our servers are physically located in the state of Florida, USA; so is our main bank account. This means that if we do something that is illegal with respect to US law, people, agencies or corporations can sue us there and possibly have our Internet connection cut or our assets (including our main server farm) seized.
We already also have servers in France, and we're installing some in the Netherlands. We will then have to sort out intellectual property issues, probably. By the way, we also have legal experts.
That's also why I think we should avoid "pushing the envelope". It's one thing to talk about free speech; it is another to risk seeing the service that we provide temporarily suppressed, and greatly disturbed, just because a court may decide to step in. David.Monniaux 05:12, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

then put an acknowledgement that this is a site playing under their rules(USA's) on the home page 70.50.77.6 18:48, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Even if the servers weren't based in the USA the position on the CIA logo would be unchanged. -- Joolz 20:05, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
What is that position, exactly? The above discussion, and that at Commons:Deletion requests/Archives03#Image:Central Intelligence Agency logo.png, seems to indicate that 1) the logo is PD, and 2) there are restrictions on its use. (Of course, similar restrictions hold for a lot of images here, including Norwegian coats of arms and any portrait of a living person.) Yet, I find that Image:Central Intelligence Agency logo.png has been deleted. Does anyone have the image to re-upload? Dbenbenn 21:33, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I've asked User:David Vasquez to re-upload the logo; hopefully he still has a copy. Dbenbenn 21:41, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I didn't specify the position because I didn't know what it was (I hadn't checked to see whether it was deleted) nor did I want to presume a position. The idea that something can be in the public domain (under no copyright) and have restrictions on it's use seems to be contradictory. The CIA Act of 1949 seems pretty clear that it's not in the public domain. You're argument is that this law is unconstitutional, and that therefore we should ignore it. However, as I understand it, the only body that decides on whether a law is constitutional or not is the Supreme Court, and they have not ruled that the act is unconstitutional, and therefore the wikicommons is (until such law is ruled unconstitutional) bound by it as a) the server's are in the USA and b) it concerns an image originating in the USA. Thus, if such image is uploaded to the commons, I shall request that it be deleted. -- Joolz 22:21, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
Let's ignore the anonymous troll, please. No one else is arguing that any law is unconstitutional.
Consider Image:David Benbennick.jpg, a GFDL photo of me. Although the photo is free, there are still restrictions on its use. For example, it can't be used commercially without asking my permission (as the person depicted in the picture, not as the copyright holder) because of privacy laws.
Thus, it isn't a contradiction that the CIA logo could be public domain and also have restrictions. Note also that the restrictions on the CIA logo are the same as the restrictions on the letters "CIA", or any image that contains the words "Central Intelligence Agency".
Regardless, this is the kind of thing that should be discussed before deletion, not after. I just hope someone has a copy of the deleted image. Dbenbenn 16:31, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
I have given this some more thought and re-read what the CIA extract says, and I now agree that it doesn't take the image out of the public domain but puts restrictions, as your example describes, on it's use which aren't related to any copyright issues, therefore I can see that it's still compatible with the commons. -- Joolz 00:31, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Forget about DV; he finally got fed up with the thought/image/article policing.

Even this 'anonymous troll' can see that given the lack of dedication to protecting the freedom of the wiki here that the momentum is toward gradual submission to arrogant control and censorship,from within and without, to the point some authorities here don't even follow the rules themselves as Dbenbenn so timidly observed;

Also, since David.Monniaux said;"almost all our servers are physically located in the state of Florida, USA; so is our main bank account" as some kind of excuse for your decisions;then I insist the front page of wiki commons state clearly that the laws and directives of the US government have final authority over every thing in this site.64.229.28.118 21:30, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

  • And by the way..why do you think Jimbo allows us "anonymous trolls" to have input???

Maybe its because some of the "regulars".. just like "Norm" at 'Cheers'(run for cover; its another copyright infringe)..have been sitting on the stools and gazing at each other's navels for so long that they can't even think (or communicate) logically any more. Have another beer Norm; and delete that photo of the constitution because somebody somewhere told you to.70.50.79.137 22:21, 25 May 2005 (UTC)


Proposal for image description

Modified after Arnomane & Richie comments...

I created 4 test templates to illustrate my proposal (don't care about their names, it's just temporary). The main ideas are:

  • Harmonize description layout (using only a common template) ;
  • ability to filter which languages to display (via CSS).

Here is an example...

{{ar|هذه الجملة عربية{{
{{en|This is an English sentence.}}
{{fr|Ceci est une phrase en français.}}
{{ja|これは日本語の文である。}}

...that will produce:

العربية: هذه الجملة عربية

Template:En2

Français : Ceci est une phrase en français.
日本語: これは日本語の文である。

Each template has a common class (description) and its own class (ar, en, fr, etc.). Then if you want to display only English and Japanese description, you just have to put those lines into your personal CSS:

div.description { display:none; }
div.description.en { display:block; }
div.description.ja { display:block; }

Actually, display all languages is not really a problem, but when each information will be translated into 100 languages we will need something to filter. I would like your opinion about this idea. Aoineko 09:23, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

I would like to support something of this sort. I've been wondering lately about the usefulness of the current template system on pages, since once you have more than a dozen or so languages, they start to overwhelm the page a bit. Also, I wonder why there is a different language marking system on article pages and on administration pages? For example, the main page has a less intrusive system than the templates. Peregrine981 11:29, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Please do not re-invent the wheel. There are already language templates available, please use them instead of including the image on your own. However, I do understand the the point you want to address (hiding languages using CSS) by putting the description in a div which is quite a good idea, altough the syntax is messy. Do not use IDs since the language templates could be used sevral times on one page which would violate the HTML standard, use classes instead (e.g. <div class="description english">). If you need any further help, feel free to ask. — Richie 14:01, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Good remarks; I modified my proposal. Aoineko 16:57, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
I like the idea of unified layout but please keep in mind tht flags are not wanted as language symbol in the Commons. There was a voting here only some days ago as someone has do such a thing already. The result was: Please only use ISO-language codes but no flags, as a language often gets spoken in different nations. Arnomane 16:08, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
I personally also prefer ISO codes, but I just wanted to illustrate the fact we can have the same rendering as actually with those templates. Aoineko 16:23, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
I would say that there hasn't been a community consensus yet. A few people said that they would prefer the ISO language code, but there hasn't been a voting about this yet. Please also read (and contribute to) the section about Language Templates above. Just use these language templates and they will be changes after a consensus has been reached. We do not want two completely independent systems to do the same job. — Richie 18:49, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

CSS cannot be only used to filter, but also to customize the comment rendering. For exemple, by puting those line in your CSS...

div.description { 
  background-color:#F0F0F0;
  border-style:dotted;
  border-color:lightgray;
  border-size:2px;
  margin:0.5em; 
  padding:0.5em;
}

...you will see that:

ar: هذه الجملة عربية
en: This is an English sentence.
fr: Ceci est une phrase en français.
ja: これは日本語の文である。

If you have some good CSS knowledge, you can even succeed to add a flag to the description (if flags use languages ISO codes). Aoineko 17:13, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

This is a very good point, I'd really like to that in action. This way everyone can use what he wants (flags or codes or both etc.). I modified the template to encapsulate the actual language code in a <span> which is quite useful for CSS purposes. — Richie
I add a class language to your span and created a new text span to allow text description customization (text size, color, italic, etc.). Aoineko 10:22, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
Okay, this all seems to make sense, but seems unnecessarily complicated to me. How many commons users are likely to have knowledge of CSS? If we want a system to become widely used it has to be as simple as possible. Is there a simpler way? Peregrine981 03:09, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I think it's reasonably simple to tell Commons users: if you want to only display English, copy the following file to User:You/monobook.css. It's not like each user would have to design their own CSS file. Dbenbenn 04:07, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
Peregrine, an important point in my proposal is that all is optional. By default, you will have the same layout than actually, but you are allowed to use filter or customize the layout. I think it's also important to site maintenance to use a common template for layout (we can then change all template layout changing only the common's one). Aoineko 10:11, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
Okay, but I think it should be made far more obvious what CSS is, and how it can be used to alter your language preferences. I have been here several months, and this is really the first I've heard of it. Peregrine981 02:56, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
CSS is a temporary solution for filtering. What we really need for future is a software solution where users just have to check some boxes in its "preference" page and software make automatic filtering on page content (all language in same page) or select the right page (1 page per language). If we adopt the temporary template solution, I will create a page to explain how to filter or customize the language contents. Aoineko 03:50, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
Language filtering support is desperately needed. Filtering with CSS sounds like the approach of Oddmuse wiki, a language extension. I agree that a software solution would be handier, but I am already happy, when it is possible to use a stylesheet for filtering. -Hapsiainen 21:12, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
One more observation: there are currently templates Template:en, Template:nl, and possibly some others, which are used to create links to the Wikipedias in question. So the naming issue ought to be resolved. I don't think that it is useful to have such interlanguage link templates because they are prone to problems after a page gets renamed here. Also, they are used only occasionally, so you'll never get accustomed to them. They confuse more than aid anyone. -Hapsiainen 21:13, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If I copy across the CSS file to my userspace to display only English description would there be any way, when there is no English description, to display all templates as well as the message "There is currently no description for this media file in English. You can create one."? --82.46.90.231 15:43, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)


Maps

map of France with location of Paris marked

I've begun some work producing quality maps using the Generic Mapping Tools, using free gridded databases from NOAA. It's still somewhat experimental and I don't quite master the tools well (I'm writing the scripts).

Examples include

I can map any area on the globe. David.Monniaux 06:51, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

WOW :) cool. notafish }<';> 12:31, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
de:Benutzer:Captain Blood has published an example script at de:Bild:Brasilien topo.png you might want to look at. -guety 12:33, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
You may be interested in the en:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maps project too. -- Joolz 15:22, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

(I'm doing maps of France because I know what they're supposed to look like...) David.Monniaux 08:00, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Maps

map of France with location of Paris marked

I've begun some work producing quality maps using the Generic Mapping Tools, using free gridded databases from NOAA. It's still somewhat experimental and I don't quite master the tools well (I'm writing the scripts).

Examples include

I can map any area on the globe. David.Monniaux 06:51, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

WOW :) cool. notafish }<';> 12:31, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
de:Benutzer:Captain Blood has published an example script at de:Bild:Brasilien topo.png you might want to look at. -guety 12:33, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
You may be interested in the en:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maps project too. -- Joolz 15:22, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

(I'm doing maps of France because I know what they're supposed to look like...) David.Monniaux 08:00, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Vote on language signs on gallery and other pages

People still produce flag templates although they were declared deprecated in a recent vote and ISO-Code were prefereded. As this is denied by some people here a vote that want's to clarify if we use plain ISO-Codes and/or plain language names only. And of course it is no good IMHO if I need to change my CSS in order not to get rid of the the flags (it must be the other way round: Code as standard and flags only for the people that want them). I hope we can avoid this silly voting in future and people don't insist on fain grained distinctions (e.g.: against flags is not in favor of ISO-Codes). Please give only the option you like an approval and no dislike vote. The one with the most approval votes has won. Arnomane 10:11, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

P.S.: The vote lasts till Saturday 28. May. 12 a.m. UTC. This should be enough time. Arnomane 10:19, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Aren't the CSS things and the flags seperate issues? Also doesn't this poll overlap the aims of the poll listed higher on this page, that is currently collecting alternatives to flags?Peregrine981 11:38, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
The terms of this vote are flawed. The "complicated CSS-stuff" doesn't effect whether flags or ISO-codes are used. The previous poll didn't decide on whether to use flags or anything else, it was about whether animated-flags should be used or not. -- Joolz 12:24, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
PS: The options on the poll are biased - refering to one option as "complicated CSS-stuff" doesn't appear to me to be neutral. -- Joolz 12:26, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
I knew that this would come... Well it's changed. Beside that: If we simply vote about everything we will have soon problems as en.wikipedia. You can clearly see out of the comments that a lot of people are in favour of ISO-Codes. And of course this project is about creating a media database not about making nice pages as in Wikipedia. Indeed the CSS-thing looks nice (I have no knowledge about CSS and couldn't do it) but it's not easy to handle. So an easy approach for language markup is enough. We should concentrate on high quality media content and a good navigation and description of this content and not on fancy side features. But well let the votes speak... Arnomane 14:11, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

I really do not agree with this kind of votes which take place on a local village pump without any notification on the project. Is it too complicated to make a Commons: page for the vote and put a notification on the main page of the main languages? I had believed it was an international project... WεFt 15:04, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Arnomane, what you denigrate as a "complicated CSS-stuff" is not a proposal about but how to render language indication (flags, ISO-Codes, etc.) but how to encapsulate language specific text to help site maintenance (and, optionally, allow customization). I really don't understand why you think *'''en:''' This is an English gallery page text. is so pretty and {{en|This is an English gallery page text.}} is so "complicated". Don't mix up what we have to do (use a template) and what we are allowed to do (filter & customize via CSS). I recommend you to read #Language_Templates upper in this page then I hope you will understand the issue of language indicator is not the issue of the template proposal. At last, as WεFt told you, Commons is an international project and vote concerning the whole community mustn't take place under the counter of the English Village pump. Aoineko 15:35, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Perhapes both of you could have checked that I'm no native English speaker. I'm German. So I'm aware of "other" languages and find them equally important to English. If you have a problem with this vote here in this special village pump, why don't you fix it by yourself as proposed by you? Instead there is a large debate ongoing what I did wrong. Come on this is a wiki, why should this be in a vote different? In the end by collective authorship the result is better than in the beginning. But now to the CSS: One of your motivations building this template is that you don't need to scroll through 100 languages in a gallery page. Fine. But this "hiding" idea according to your language interface settings doesn't work. What if there is only a German and French description but no English one but you have set your interface to show the English one? And of course these 100 languages are seriously no problem. Most of the gallery descriptions in a language are one line long. So no serious problem with site maintainance ever, even in future (for deeper descriptions to a gallery exist the interwiki-links to the relevant Wikipedia articles). And beside that your template can't be used on image description pages that use a template for image description. There is a inability in MediaWiki software that way that you cannot embedd a template in a variable of another template and exactly this feature would be needed. I have tried exactly this by myself and in the end I said to myself: Well don't make things more complicated as necessary care about your pics and that they have a good description and don't care about nice layout, put an ISO-Code at the beginning of a descriptive text and everyone knows what it is. I don't want to make your work bad it looks really nice but it simply doesn't work as wanted. Arnomane 18:21, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
See my answer below... Aoineko 02:44, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Please stop this voting! I was preparing a similar voting by asking for alternatives first and this is ending tonight at midnight. I planned on starting a voting about which language representation to use shortly after that. Apart from that this voting is not fair because of several reasons:
  • It sabotages my preparations for a similar poll.
  • It's 2 votings in 1: Templates: Yes or No; Flags or ISO?
  • What about the other alternatives?
  • It's running for only 3 days.
Please stop it. — Richie 19:18, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
I talked to Arnomane and we agreed upon the following: He will stop this voting and together we will start the voting I planned tonight, which will be announced here. — Richie 20:51, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

As already said by Richie we have agreed on a more accurate voting. I apologize that I didn't recognize his effort. So I added some of the ideas into his already well prepared proposal and this vote here is thatfor closed. Arnomane 21:02, 25 May 2005 (UTC)


I hided the informal vote (still present in page source). Aoineko 02:44, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Some explanation about template proposal

The first point is that the only thing authors have to do is to use, for example, {{de|Dies ist ein Satz in Deutsch.}} when they want to write a German language specific information (de is just an example of template name and may be something else). Not so complicated I think.
The second point is maintenance. The proposal is about embedded the contents into a common/main container. This is useful when you want to make change that will automatically apply to all data. For example:

  • Change the language sign (if community decides it);
  • Add a category to list pages in a specific language;
  • Change template to wikisyntax (one day, language feature will have to be managed by the software).

All those tasks can be made simply by changing only the main template. Without template, we will have to use a bot to change manually all pages.
The last point is about optional customization. The use of template allow people who want to do what ever they want regarding the language specific information layout. I think is a pretty good solution to avoid interminable discussions about "which is the best layout". I agree that hide language like English may seem senseless, but hide language you definitively can't read (ie. العربية, ગુજરાતી, עברית, हिन्दी, 한국어, etc.) make sense for me. Moreover, the CSS filter is a manual process and has no link with language interface settings. If you don't add any code into your personal CSS, you will have no filter. One more time: All the CSS stuffs are OPTIONAL.
Finally, as embed or not language specific texts into template is an other problem than choose what we want as a default layout, we will have to vote on two separate questions:

  • Language layout: Flags, ISO-codes text, ISO-codes icons, Full text (in native language), etc.
  • Embed texts into template: yes, no.

If some people use template to write description, the use of subst: prefix may solve the problem. As image texts don't need to be dynamic, I don't see any good reason to put them into dynamic template.
Aoineko 02:44, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Voting about language representation

I already announced that I was preparing a voting about the language representation to use in the language templates like {{English}} and {{Deutsch}}. Arnomane and I started it on Commons talk:Templates for galleries. Deadline is 2005-06-05 12:00:00 UTC, please vote. — Richie 07:58, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I translated the news on French and Japanese village pump. Why don't vote in the same time to chose to embedded text into template or not (just need to add a yes-no question). Aoineko 09:40, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for translating the news. This voting is about language representation and should be kept as simple as possible. It's not about which templates to use for language tagging. — Richie 12:34, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Have you read: Using Ultimate Wiktionary for Commons ?? This is about localising the pictures themselves. This would create some genuine localisation and, that is really helpfull. GerardM 12:05, 27 May 2005 (UTC)


Why adminship should be a big deal

Jimbo has famously said that adminship should be no big deal.

There are two things admins can do that are not easily undone: page history merges, and image deletion. History merges can be undone with care and effort. Images, on the other hand, cannot be undeleted.

I'm worried about this. It's only a matter of time until some disgruntled admin (or some compromised admin account) starts a deletion rampage through Special:Newimages. Note that admins can unblock themselves, so the only way to stop such an attack would be for one of our three bureaucrats / stewards to de-sysop the person, or for a developer to do something.

The more admins we have, the sooner this will happen.

Especially since the Commons is all about images, I think we should be a bit cautious in promoting admins until we get an image undelete feature. (Full disclosure: I am admin number 52 out of 62 currently.)

By the way, does anyone know how long an image has to be here until it is "safe", i.e., it's been mirrored or backed up somewhere that it can be restored if it gets deleted?

Dbenbenn 00:47, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

A big deal I don't know. You're right, pictures can't be undeleted. On the other hand, who would be mad enough to delete a picture local copy on the basis that an upload to Commons has been made ? Even in case of deletion, you can re-upload the stuff, so ... Anyway this provides me a good opportunity to announce once more the current poll about admins criterions at Commons talk:Administrators#Poll about minimal criterions for admin requests until June 10. villy ♦ ✎ 10:13, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
This problem weren't so big if the picture-dump download on download.wikimedia.org will be reactivated - someone should ask Brion about this. --Avatar 22:12, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
Adminship should be a huge deal -- all it takes is one rogue admin, after all. --Zantastik 19:42, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

image on wikimedia commons, explicitly labeled as copyrighted?

There's an image at Image:Albert_Einstein.jpg that is explicitly labeled as being copyrighted. Am I not understanding something? Shouldn't it be removed?

Please always sign (using ~~~~) when you write something. Some anonymous user modified the description page, I reverted it. — Richie 17:37, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
(Note to myself: Always preview. — Richie 17:39, 28 May 2005 (UTC))

hmm... the description page states that "The copyright on this image has expired". But it also sais the image was taken in 1948 by Yousuf Karsh who died 13 July 2002 - so the image is indeed copyrighted until 2072! Or has it been released into the public domain by Karsh? I fear this very good picture is indeed a copyright violation. -- Duesentrieb 17:48, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I have restored the image description as created by the anon IP - I belive it was probably the copyright holders themseves who wrote this. I also marked the image as a copyright violation. I'll also notify the uploader. -- Duesentrieb 17:50, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

It was indeed camera press themsef who wrote this. From the whois for 195.157.153.13:

inetnum:      195.157.153.0 - 195.157.153.15
netname:      NSUK-CAMERAPRESS-LL
descr:        Camera Press
country:      GB

so, the image will have to be deleted. -- Duesentrieb 17:52, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

This is a photo from the Yousuf Karsh collection at the Library and Archives Canada who claim that there are no restrictions for this photo [5] WikiCommons has more images from the Karsh collection, e.g. Image:Winston Churchill 1941 photo by Yousuf Karsh.jpg. Thuresson 18:36, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
This is utter rubbish. If the Library and Archives of Canada, who have acquired the Yousuf Karsh Collection, state that the copyright was expired, then that's good enough for me and for Wikipedia.
See [6] Lupo 19:01, 28 May 2005 (UTC) copyied here by Duesentrieb 19:12, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
See also [7], where LAC states that they acquired the Karsh collection. Camera Press shall sue LAC, if they dare, or send an official DMCA takedown notice. I'd ignore spurious copyvio claims by anons. Lupo 19:11, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
Well, archives have been known for putting incorrect labels on images. The claim that the copyright is expired seems false to me, I don't know of any law that could cause the copyright of an image taken in 1948 to be expired today. The image may be PD for other reasons, though. It would probably be best to ask both, LAC and Camera Press, for clarification, so they can duke it out... -- Duesentrieb 19:02, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
I would think it highly unlikely that the LAC labelled all their images of Karsh wrongly (c.f. the Winston Churchill image). If you insist on asking for confirmation, I'd just ask LAC. A commercial company like Camera Press that makes money by providing images will of course tell you that they hold the copyright and Wikipedia should either pay them or take down the image. But verifying their claims might be hard. Ask LAC, and if they admit having made an error, then think about taking it down. If they confirm the PD nature of the image, just ignore Camera Press. I really think that Camera Press would have sent a formal DMCA notice to the Wikimedia Foundation if their claim really held up. Lupo 07:11, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
Hint: CANADA. Upon what country's law did you base that 2072 year? I'll guess the copyright expired in 1998. AlbertCahalan 02:07, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Ok, I checked again, and we seem to both be wrong: in Canada, copyright expires 50 year after the death of the author as by the Berne Convention, which means in this case 2052, because Yousuf Karsh died in 2002. -- Duesentrieb 02:46, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Might it make a difference that the archives are owned by the government? In any case, I'm inclined to accept the statement made by the archives. Canadian law probably has an equivalent to the US "estoppel" concept. Also, it would seem completely contrary to the goals of the Canadian archives to even be bothered by use of the photos. So accept this one as stated until told otherwise. AlbertCahalan 03:19, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The interresting question here is wether the Canadian Government just bought the physical collection or the copyright to it, or both. As far as I know it would not make a difference if the work is owned by the governemnt (it would not make a difference in the US either), because only works created by the government are PD automatically (at least in the US). If the government actually bought the copyright, they may have released to contents into the public domain, or they may not. In any case, the statement that the copyright expired seems false to me. I don't see what estoppel (see here for a more understandable definition) should have to with this, btw...
Please understand that I'm not pushing for the deletion of this image - I'm just saying that the situation should be clarified. It would IMHO be a good idea to ask the LAC for a statement, so we have something to point to in case Camera Press gets nasty... -- Duesentrieb 10:34, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
All right, did anyone contact the LAC? Lupo 11:40, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

when inactive, this discussion should be archived at Image talk:Albert_Einstein.jpg for future reference -- Duesentrieb 10:34, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Geotagging

I'm interested in what provisions have been made for geotagging? I've searched the site and as yet not found any evidence of geotagging images. Is there a Wikiworld map for tagging images to the planet? Maybe use worldkit? http://brainoff.com/worldkit/index.php

Maybe a utility to help people tag the locations of the image? For example: lat/lon 25.2522222,55.28 geotags geo:lat=25.2522222 geo:long=55.28 geourl <meta name="ICBM" content="25.2522222,55.28">

This would be for images in in the UAE, Dubai. --Dgd 17:58, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

This is already realised in wikipedia but up to now not in coomons. Thus I have created Template:Coor in Commons and used it for demonstration purpose on Image:Hannover - Altstadt Altes Rathaus.jpg. I think it is a good idea to tag images with Geo information. --Heidas 20:12, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Cool! I like it! I'll give it a shot with some of my photos. Question though. Which of the myriad of map servvers is most friendly to displaying the link to the image in the map so that user will see that there are images there?--Dgd 20:20, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
It´s a good idea and it works. Now you need only a Digicam with GPS and EXIF. :-) Kolossos 09:37, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Web based Check-Usage

At the moment there is no (easy) possibility to check if media on commons is used throughout the wikipedia projects included into mediawiki.

Wikipedia Check-Usage is a web based tool which can be used to check where commons media is used throughout the wikimedia universe. Also it is able to find "local" duplicates to commons media.

Check-Usage is strongly inspired by Arnomane's check-usage.sh - a unix shell script doing mostly the same job. Because this script has several preconditions to run, like shell access to a unix/linux system and several programs installed on this machine, I though of writing a small web based interface. After short consideration I decided not to write only an interface calling Arnomane's script, but to re-code it completly. Check-Usage is written in PHP using libcurl.

So if you are interested where 'your' pictures are used - give it a try.

And commons sysops can use it before deleting files which are more than a few days old. In the past it was often problematic deleting/moving a file on commons, because doing this the included pictures in other wikimedia-projects were broken.

Regarding the traffic load: only the text of the chosen image-page gets transfered. --Avatar 00:53, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

This is a really good tool, much easier than checking things manually :) One suggestion though, when running a usage check it would be good if it would say if there's a local copy which is being used. Also, I've just noticed that if you search for 'Euflag.png' on a 'check for local duplicates' search, it doesn't say that the one on en.wikipedia.org is a local copy of the same file, even though it is. Other than that, this is gunna be really useful -- Joolz 14:03, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
I will copy this to User talk:Avatar/Check-Usage to have all talk about this at one place. At the moment you can only choose between check usage and check for local duplicates, but there shouldn't be a problem to merge this two functions. The local Euflag.png on wp-en is ignored because it already has a NowCommons-Template. Because the check for local duplicates is meant to find "accidental" duplicates, all duplicates which have the NowCommons-Template will be ignored. --Avatar 22:17, 29 May 2005 (UTC)


Are morguefile images OK here?

An image I uploaded from http://www.morguefile.com/ was tagged as follows:

Terms of use: [8]:

All materials within this site are property of the morguefile and its contributors. By using this site you agree to comply with and be bound by the following terms of use. This license is issued only to the person or organization that downloads these images. This agreement may not be resold or reassigned, distribution and or resale of the archived compilation in part or whole is prohibited. These images may be used for any other commercial or personal use. Credit for this use is appreciated but is not necessary.

Are images from this website allowed here or not? If not, then there are quite a few images that should be removed. Lupin 19:43, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

No, those images are not allowed, as Commons has to allow commercial use. Korrigan bla 19:53, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
Read carefully. Commercial use is allowed. Other of the site's terms may cause problems, but that is not one of them. Morven 20:58, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
Woops, sorry for that ! I'm used to read "not for commercial use", I should be more careful... Korrigan bla 21:20, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
The site does, however, seem to prohibit redistribution, which might be problematic. Morven 21:03, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
It isn't clear whether the Commons counts as distribution of the "archived compilation in part". Perhaps someone could just ask the site's administrators? Dbenbenn 00:40, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/13"