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COMMONS DISCUSSION PAGES (index) Commons Help desk Village pump (general discussion) Copyright Proposals Technical Graphics and photography discussion Photography critiques Image improvement Illustration workshop Map workshop Photography workshop Video and sound workshop Categories for discussion Undeletion requests Deletion requests Volunteer Response Team/Noticeboard Translators' noticeboard Work requests for bots Contact administrators Vandalism User problems (Dispute resolution) Blocks and protections Bureaucrats' noticeboard CheckUser requests Oversight requests Telegram IRC webchat Commons mailing list (archive) Commons' bugs on Phabricator Welcome to the Village pump This page is used for discussions of the operations, technical issues, and policies of Wikimedia Commons. Recent sections with no replies for 7 days and sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=--~~~~}} may be archived; for old discussions, see the archives; the latest archive is Commons:Village pump/Archive/2024/07. Please note: If you want to ask why unfree/non-commercial material is not allowed at Wikimedia Commons or if you want to suggest that allowing it would be a good thing, please do not comment here. It is probably pointless. One of Wikimedia Commons’ core principles is: "Only free content is allowed." This is a basic rule of the place, as inherent as the NPOV requirement on all Wikipedias. Have you read our FAQ? For changing the name of a file, see Commons:File renaming. Any answers you receive here are not legal advice and the responder cannot be held liable for them. If you have legal questions, we can try to help but our answers cannot replace those of a qualified professional (i.e. a lawyer). Your question will be answered here; please check back regularly. Please do not leave your email address or other contact information, as this page is widely visible across the internet and you are liable to receive spam. Purposes which do not meet the scope of this page: Please do not make deletion requests here: use the relevant process for it instead. For technical support and graphics talks (PNG, SVG, GIF, etc.), please post on the Graphics village pump. To ask for image improvement, see: Graphic Lab/Photography workshop for photographs. Graphic Lab/Map workshop for maps. Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop for other illustrations. To ask for video or audio improvement, see Commons:Graphic Lab/Video and sound workshop. For translation requests, please post at Commons:Requests for translation. For media requests, please post at Commons:File requests. Search archives:     Start a new discussion

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Water pump next to the church in the town center of Doel. Doel, Beveren, East Flanders, Belgium. [add]

Centralized discussion See also: Village pump/Proposals   ■ Archive How do we organize categories by date (14 May 2024) Should PD-CQ Roll Call be used for recent images? (5 January 2024) Technical needs survey (17 December 2023) When does PDART apply to textile works? (15 November 2023) Does this image contain "love hearts"? (17 August 2023) Overhaul of categories by period (5 December 2022) Version of Saudi flag to use (11 July 2022) Concern regarding revocability of KOGL licenses (22 December 2021) Should deleting content from your own talk page be forbidden? (11 November 2021) Revise the COM:FOP Sweden section (1 February 2021) Change technical name of LRs to license-reviewer from image-reviewer(2 November 2023) Template: View   ■ Discuss    ■ Edit   ■ Watch

June 5

Wrong picture in article

I am new to Wikipedia and need help. Someone put up a page about me (Diane Stanley) which is mostly accurate, but the picture is of somebody else. I have uploaded a correct picture to Wikimedia but don't know how to delete the current picture and its caption and put a correct picture in. Can someone help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dsvennema (talk • contribs) 18:14, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I've added the new picture you uploaded to the Diane Stanley article on Wikipedia. As for the old picture, you could tag it with {{Fact disputed}} or nominate it for deletion (since, after all, it's not much use if we don't know whom it really shows). —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:24, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, as User:Dsvennema claims the image is about herself, we'll have to believe it. Otherwise I wouldn't be so sure about that, as the "original" image is said to be shot 19 years ago. --Túrelio (talk) 12:49, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

June 6

Change delisted template

The current {{Delisted picture}} template doesn't link to why the picture was delisted, nor has a proper icon. Is there a way we could make this look better? --Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 12:42, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

This was formerly a featured picture on Wikimedia Commons.

• I'll have a go at it. Sarcastic ShockwaveLover (talk) 03:56, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

• • Here you go, [1], or {{DelistedPicture}}. Is that sort of what you were after? I borrowed the icon from the 'formerly featured articles'. Same thing, really. No autolanguage, as I didn't understand how that works, and I'm not game to try integrating it. Sarcastic ShockwaveLover (talk) 04:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

• • Here is the new template, is anyone against it?--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 14:36, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

This was formerly a featured picture on Wikimedia Commons. It was delisted because {{{1}}}. The delisting nomination can be found at Commons:Featured picture candidates/removal/File:Village pump.

•  Comment If there are any, more accomplished, coders present, they may wish to add the autolanguage feature, make the reason italicised and automatically add any pages with this template added to the 'Former featured pictures' category. Sarcastic ShockwaveLover (talk) 14:55, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

GFDL 1.3 relicensing notice (and translation request)

As the date set by the Wikimedia Foundation for the GFDL 1.3 -> CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensing update approaches, I've added a notice about the impending relicensing to {{GFDL}}. I'd now like to request the community's help in

• translating the eligibility criteria at Commons:GFDL 1.3 relicensing criteria to as many languages as possible, and
• translating the notice on {{GFDL}} and adding it to all the translated versions of the template.

Please also feel welcome spread this notice to village pumps in other languages. I'm planning to spam it across all of them (that haven't been notified yet) in a day or two, in order to reach as many potential translators as possible, but I'll start with this announcement here for now.

Also, the general coordination page for the license migration on Commons is at Commons:License Migration Task Force. Please join us there to help plan and implement further stages of the migration process. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:49, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

June 11

I uploaded a picture, but its orientation was wrong, so I rotated it using

jpegtran -rotate 270 -copy all -perfect

and uploaded again. Now the picture seems to be OK, but the thumbnail in file history appears wrong. What should I do to fix this? I have several other images and I am afraid to run into the same problem again. --Marozols (talk) 12:09, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I managed to fix the problem using

jhead -autorot

Thanks. --Marozols (talk) 12:47, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

The thumbnail appearance problem was just cache persistence, and would have gone away on its own after a while (or you could have tried "purging" thumbnails, etc.). By the way, jpegtran rotates "losslesly" (within limitations), while general image editing applications don't (which can be important in some contexts). AnonMoos (talk) 16:31, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Library of Congress mass upload?

Hi everyone, did anyone ever do a mass upload of Library of Congress images? Did anyone ever try to contacting them? The have a huge collection of free images, would be nice to do a batch upload like we're doing with the Bundesarchiv and Deutsche Fotothek. Multichill (talk) 12:48, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

There was a discussion about it here. We already have set of PD licenses for LOC here. In the past I have seen a discussion saying that Commons is/was talking to LOC about mass upload and then I heard about mass transfer of images from LOC to flicker under "LOC is not aware of any copyright issues" license. I can not find those discussions now. I agree that a coordinated mass transfer, with or without help of LOC would be great. One challenge would be not duplicating about 20k images we already have from them. --Jarekt (talk) 13:59, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers. I would like to get the images from LOC directly, the MARC records are very useful for metadata (example). I already wrote a tool to calculate the number of exact dupes (same hash) in a image set before upload. This can be used to prevent dupes or at least mark them. Multichill (talk) 15:22, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

AFaIR the LOC hosts images that are PD only in the US, not in their country of origin. If there is a mass upload, those images should be excluded. We also need a more detailed statement than "No known restrictions" or such, so we can tag the images with the correct licensing tags (PD-US, PD-USGov, PD-old etc.). Regards, -- ChrisiPK (Talk|Contribs) 15:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes. We have to be careful. We should probably just start with the really old works in the collection to be on the safe side. Multichill (talk) 13:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Do we need to focus on quantity ? Isn't this (and bundesarchiv, and pikiwiki etc...) sounding like a {{NUMBEROFFILES}}-worship ? Let's upload files little by little, when someone needs them, or feels they can be useful. Batch uploads are not nice. Mass uploads are useful only in one instance : when we know that the source website is going to collapse. But I don't think the Library of Congress is going to collapse soon. There is no emergency. Teofilo (talk) 10:54, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

It's not number of files worship. It's about improving the content of Commons. With a batch upload you can get a lot of nice images at once without too much effort. Multichill (talk) 13:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Multichill. I am big fan of mass uploads, since they can provide really great images. For example bundesarchiv collection of WWII images from Poland is very good and in Commons we can access them much more easily than from the original database( and without the annoying watermark). Many wikipedia contributors are not going to search through dozen of databases (which are often not cataloged by Google) and than evaluate copyrights for each image they need. Also if one measures ratio of number of images gained to number of copyvos that will have to be dealt with by admins, than mass uploads are likely much better than regular ones. --Jarekt (talk) 19:38, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I totally agree with Jarekt here. If we can do a mass upload of LOC images, we should do it. Yann (talk) 20:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Money-EU template change

I'd like to have some input on clarifying the {{money-EU}} template, and also the deletion of many files on Commons that use it. The issue is the presence on Commons of images bearing the national faces of Euro coins. The Money-EU template is not clear that the EU document setting out the copyright restrictions for images of Euro coins (CftC 2001/C 318/03, referenced by the template and viewable here) only refers to the European side, the "common face design", and not the national sides of the coins. Quoting from the document: "Reproduction of all or part of the common face design of the euro coins is authorised without recourse to a specific procedure in the following cases..." [emphasis mine]. For the national sides, see for example Template:Non-free currency-EU coin national on English Wikipedia. It seems that every national face of Euro coins is represented on Commons (see Euro), so either I'm somehow wrong or there's a lot of deleting to do. Thoughts? - Gump Stump (talk) 17:38, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm highly worried about this fact (national side). Additionally, I am worried about the common side as well (the relevant communication from the Commision explicitly require "faithful likeness" - which is conflicting our requirement of possibility of making derivate works). See (now dead) discussion at Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2009May#Common_side_of_euro_coin_and_faithful_likeness. I indeed think there is a lot of deletion to be done. Nillerdk (talk) 13:56, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to keep the "common side" issue separate from this; previous discussions have obviously been spirited but not conclusive. The national sides being a violation of Commons policy is far less controversial, I think. - Gump Stump (talk) 17:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Sure, let us discuss the issues separately. How do you suggest we proceed? The {{Money-EU}} is obviously invalid as a license template for the national side of the Euro coin. Probably it would be a good idea to deprecate this template and replace it by {{Euro coin common side}}, {{Euro coin national side}} and {{Euro bank note}}. But before doing that we might discuss if any of those templates can be used a free license templates? I'm open for suggestions. Nillerdk (talk) 19:14, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I think the {{Money-EU}} template could be modified to specify that only the common, European sides of the coins are applicable to that license template. But I do like your idea of splitting the templates, so that there is no ambiguity (and the "national coin" template could redirect to speedy deletion). The "common side" and "bank note" templates could be applied as the money-EU template is used now (if I may dodge the contentious free/non-free question raised about that template!). However, I don't have any experience with template creation/deletion, so splitting the templates may be a huge task. How would I proceed if I were to propose that? - Gump Stump (talk) 00:10, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 12

Need help

I have uploaded an image It is an image file of a political party logo I have received a request from Wiki to add categories to it I cannot, for the life of me, work out how to do it despite Wiki telling me how easy it is. All I see are a never ending circle of interlinked pages, none of which give me a simple answer but instead refer to yet another round of interlinked pages I can't even find a list of categories

All I want to know is 1) how do I categorise this picture as a political party logo 2) how to I upload it to appear next to an article I uploaded about this political party?

Thank you

Chris Kelly

Edit the image page. Down the bottom, you'll find a selection of editing buttons in the toolbox. Click on [[Category:]] to insert the code and add in the title of the category you want - e.g. [[Category:Top hats]]. Then save. Man vyi (talk) 11:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Crediting authors of OpenStreetMap maps

I don' think "Author:OpenStreetMap contributors" on {{OpenStreetMap}} (for example on File:Glasgow.png) is complying with the Creative Commons license requirement to credit authors. Crediting an author means providing this author's name. Writing "some unnamed author somewhere" is the same as giving no credit at all.

• Is there an author list or history page on the source website ? If so, is it not possible to add the URL of the author list or history page ?

• My understanding of that project is that internet users add names on a blank map provided by the website owner. Do we know the source of the original blank map ? This information should be written on the template.
  • Because the Creative Commons License requires us to credit all authors
  • Because we need to know when the blank map was created (the outline of coasts and river banks changes little by little over the years, or when a volcanic eruption occurs, or when a dam creates an artificial lake, when a marsh is dried, a port is built, etc...)

• Are we sure that the original blank map is free ? Is not the original blank map copyrighted, while only the layer provided by internet users is free ?

• Openstreetmap is a wiki. Is it reliable-enough ? Do they have a copyvio-deletion team ? Requests for deletion pages ? Wikipedia article en:OpenStreetMap says : "Use of unfree data is an especially severe problem for a map", which is quite enigmatic.

(I can't surf too much on OpenStreetmap myself, at this seems to freeze my computer)

Teofilo (talk) 10:29, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The perils of attributing such a map are comparable to those of attributing a Wikipedia article - Creative Commons may technically require attribution by name, but it may suffice to provide access to a list of names, such as via a URL. As for the original blank maps, I think they're okay, but I need someone who knows more to confirm this. My hope is that the blank maps are derived from US federal government data. Dcoetzee (talk) 11:20, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The users do not only add names, but also draw the map using GPS devices. Some of the data comes from other sources under compatible licenses. --AVRS (talk) 18:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I think Wikimedia Commons' uploaders should give the details on the original source, and not merely credit "opensteetmap" as a source. Teofilo (talk) 21:10, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I participate in OpenStreetMap and asked the OSM developers (I think User:Firefishy) some time ago to create such a page with the list of all contributors. This attempt was then abandoned. The problem is that the creator of OSM (Steve Coast) had initially only a very superficial understanding of CC-BY-SA when he created the product (OSM map). He should have chosen that attribution to the project is enough (Copyright Openstreetmap under CC-BY-SA 2.0). He did not. So attribution to "OpenStreetMap contributors" is the only sensible choice at the moment. It could be possible to retrieve a list of all contributors from the database. But this until now was not a priority for OSM. Longbow4u (talk) 10:32, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me that the easiest way is to provide the permanent link to the map, or the history page of that map directly. For example, the map of London has all its contributors listed on its history page. –Tryphon^☂ 12:03, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, this is essentially what Wikipedia recommends for article attribution - so it should suffice here too. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:27, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Is the following license text compatible with Commons?

Hi all. A user of the Basque Wikipedia has asked me to help with an image that he wants to upload to Commons. It is this one. He has talked to the publishing house and got the authorization to use it. However, I doubt that the permission give by the publihers is compatible with Commons. He received the authorization by email, this is the text (translated using Google Translate):

Editorial XXX grants WIKIPEDIA the right to use the image with the sole purpose of illustrating the articles on their websites, while retaining full copyright of the image and the right to be recognized as an author under the terms of the license chosen for this work. Editorial XXX reserves the right to take legal action against anyone who uses this site to violate any other law, such as trademarks restrictions, libel or specific geographic restrictions. Editorial XXX recognizes that it can not withdraw this agreement, except by a three months' notice and that the picture may or may not be stored permanently on a Wikimedia Foundation project, if the purpose of the importation is authorized.

I don't want to use COM:OTRS, because I am almost sure that it is not compatible, but I wanted to have some advice before talking to the user. --Assar (talk) 14:28, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest that it gets uploaded to the Basque Wikipedia. A condition of WC is that an image has one of the 'free' copyright licences unless it is PD. This image clearly does not satisfy this basic condition. However, that should not stop it going on the Wikipedia but still send the OTRS to the Foundation. Wait till somebody confirms this. --P.g.champion (talk) 15:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't think that it is okay to upload it to Basque Wikipedia. Images on local projects also must be free to re-use. We allow fair use on some projects although fair use is not really free, but fair use at least allows re-use. Wikipedia-only doesn't. --Slomox (talk) 16:31, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The Basque Wikipedia decided to not store any image and upload all of them to Commons, both to save space and to give other people facilities to use them in other Wikipedias, so that's not an option for us. Anyway, thank you both.--Assar (talk) 20:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Some reflections about the governance of Commons

Hello Commons community:

As all of you know Commons is a very unique and very important project within all of our projects. Commons has virtually contact with all other projects because all other projects use materials that are collected on Commons. Users from all other projects would come to Commons in search of materials they can use for their project, or would upload materials onto Commons. From all Wikipedia language versions there is an upload link to Commons. Some user from other communities would visite Commons once or twice in their entire Wikimedia-project-life, others would do it once or twice a year. So Commons has the most versatile community of all our communities. Not only our users are using Commons, as many of you know, the Foundation and the chapters of the Foundation are actively propagating free content and persuading other institutions to give their content free and put them on Commons. So, the well being of Commons not only influences our other projects, but also the Foundation, its chapters and our mission. In this post I will raise a few issues about Commons. My intention here is not to critisize Commons or its community, but to show possible problems, or to dissolve my own misunderstanding, and to search for solutions for these problems, to make Commons better. I will also post a link to this post on foundation-l, commons-l and maybe ask SignPost and other community forums to post a link to this to get a most possibly broad coverage. I do this not to get "outsiders" in to disturb the Commons, but as I said before, because Commons has such an important and central role in our projects landscape. I will use some examples. By using these examples I want to plastiquely describe the problems I see, not to finger pointing at individual community members. I am myself a long year administrator in one of the more complicated community and I make failures myself (I am quite sure at least one in a week in average). Please keep in mind the examples are meant to point at certain processes or phenomenon, not to single community member. I would appreciate if during the discussion we keep this in mind. I will refer to a few different problems I see. They are all interlinked, but I am ok if the community think it is better to split them into individual discussions. Last but not least, this post is from a normal community member, and not from a board member. What I say or suggest here are my personal opinions. I am nothing special in any way from any other community member.

Commons is meant to be a commonly used repository of free media files for all other projects. So ideally ALL free media files should be uploaded on Commons, while the projects would only keep those media files that the individual community had agreed to keep. This is also the reason why on all our Wikipedia projects we have a link for upload to Commons. In the reality though we still have a lot of free media files on our individual projects. A lot of community members are reluctant to upload their files to Commons. Asked why they don't upload their images on Commons most these user answer because Commons are harsh and unfriendly, and because they have language problems with the administrators here. I want to use an example here to illustrate this problem. As I said before. It is not meant as a finger point to an administrator on Commons, but as an example for a phenomenon. I use this example because I made a failure here and take part of the blame, and because I think it illustrates what I said before: harshness, unfriendliness and language problem. A few days ago I found the following remark on my talk page: {{Speedywhat|File:Columbia 5pts aerial.jpg}} GFDL licensed images copied without the required attribution are copyright violations. (name omitted). The following exchange took place (TC is me, CA is a Commons Administrator):

TC: Hello, I have several questions about this deletion. The first question is that the reason named "GFDL licensed images copied without the required attribution are copyright violations." is not clear for me. What do you mean in this case, which attribution do you mean? I am one of the administrators on zh-wp who patrol through the files uploaded there from the users. Images that are released from the user as GFDL and which has certain quality are uploaded from me to Commons and then deleted on the local project. This is to my understand what Commons for. It is important for me to understand where here is the problem to avoid future problems because I totally agree with you that copyright issue is very important for Commons and at the same time it doesn't make sense to keep free images on several local projects. So a clarification would be appreciated.

CA: The GNU Free Documentation License is not the same as being PD. Preserving authorship credit is required. Copying a GFDL file without attribution breaks the license. In this case you neglected to give any credit to the creator of the file.

TC: I am not quite sure what you mean. I thought in the upload formular I had wrote the username of the original author? (Maybe I am wrong, it is some time back, I cannot remember every detail). Or do you mean I should keep the original image on zh-wp so that the authorship and history is granted? Again I need to understand this so that I would not make such a failure again. Thanks for the explaination.

CA: That particular image you transfered 2 years ago, and didn't give any attribution-- no mention of the photographer/original uploader at en:Wikipedia at all. When transfering images to Commons be sure to include the information from the description page; these are often deleted from the local Wiki after the image is availible on Commons. I restored the local copy on en:Wikipedia for this one. I see more recent transfers you've done that have given proper credit. Maybe you just forgot to add the info with that one. I wanted to alert you about it in case you didn't know GFDL licensed files needed to be attributed. Cheers,

There are two issues in this whole incident that I consider characteristic. The first is that in my opinion the explanation should be put in the delete notice, or at least after I had asked once. Actually I must ask twice and give by myself a longer explanation to get the answer. I know that a lot of users are not so patient as I was and they would probably break up and rather upload their files on their home project, and tell other people Commons is harsh and unfriendly. And if he happens doesn't speak enough good English he would even be lost with that explanation. If someone ask me what is a Wikimedia project, the first thing that I would answer is that it is a massive multilingual collaborative contribution system. I would especially emphasize the collaborative character of our projects. I am doing image file patrols on zh-wp myself. If I see that a user has made an obviouse technical failure (as is this case. The image itself is fully ok, I made a quite obvious error by uploading), I would very probably just fix the error by myself, like put the correct copyright mark on the image or link to the original image. I would not expect every administrator go such far, but I would at least expect that they give a hint of the problem that would be helpful for the user. On many other projects I know that there is such a rule: w:Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers. I don't know if there is such a rule on Commons too because there is no interwiki link for Commons. Personally I think a Commons administrator should be especially aware of this rule and always keep it in mind, because it is such an important project, because it's community is so versatile. Another project that is active on en-wp and de-wp is w:Wikipedia:Mentorship, I think it would also be very helpful to be implemented on Commons.

The second issue I see in this incident is the speed delete. On zh-wp such cases would be kept for seven days so that the user can get the chance to explain or to fix the failure. I take the speed delete is in accordance with the rules of Commons. But with such a speed delete the user is no more able to fix his error. In my case because it is a case of more than two years ago I even cannot remember what image it is. I thought it was an image I uploaded from zh-wp and felt really sick because I was not able to find it there. So I was not only not able to fix my error, I was even not able to know what I did. Personally I find a such a speed delete that doesn't give the user the chance to explain or fix his failure problematic and is another source for the image of Commons to be especially harsh and unfriendly.

Now I want to come to the next thing that I want to talk about. I was told that administrators on Commons are especially mighty. Also here I want to use an example. Again I want to remind that my intention is not to finger point at certain community member(s) but a systematic failure. I take that the community members did what is fully in accordance to the rules. The rules allow them do these things so if there is a problem, it is not that the community members handled wrong, but the rules are flawed.

The example I want to use is the reopening of the deletion request of an image. You can read the entire discussion here. I reopened the deletion request because I think through the board BLP resolution we should recheck the situation. After four days of discussion it was obvious for me that the majority of the community think that my concern is not correct. I summarized the discussion in this sense and said I accept the community decision and am ok with the close of the deletion request. The next morning I found with supprise that the file was deleted by an administrator. Now maybe you may think I should be happy with such an unexpected turn of event. Actually I am very shocked. I found it very disturbing that a single administrator can simply overturn the whole discussion and thus (for me a quite clear) community consensus. Normally when asked I always explain to other people that administrators are also only community members, their opinion have no more or less weight than any other community member. They have more power than users that are no administrators, but they are only allowed to use their power in accordance with the community consensus, with the rules and only if it is necessary and do things that simply must be done. I had always believed in this. The incident is especially disturbing for me because it reminds me of my presentation on the Alexandria Wikimania. I said there "There are Cabals". I said this to remind the experienced user to be careful with their power and their knowledge. I am very unhappy to find this to be true here. Two hours later two other administrators reversed the deletion. But what worries me is that if none of the administrators wanted to reverse the deletion the community can get what ever consensus they can simply be ignored. I find this really shocking. I find it is against almost the most fundamental of what I understand under a wikimedia project.

The third and last issue I want to raise is as I had already said at the beginning of my post. The Foundation and our chapters are encouraging other organizations to contribute free content and use Commons as a repository. We had the Bundesarchiv at the beginning of this process. There is a collaboration initiated from the chapter of netherlands and we have Pikiwiki from the israel chapter. The australian chapter is very active in persuading other organizations. The Pikiwiki project showed quite dramatically that such projects are not without risks. Personally I think the risk is even quite big, failed projects can even harm the reputation of the Foundation, of its chapters and even our mission. Just suppose a national museum of a land gives its content free (there is no such project that I am aware of, I take this just as an example), the project failed because of what ever reason. By the next time the director of the museum meets his colleagues on conferences, meetings or what ever occasions he would complain about how arrogant and mistrustful and unfriendly and harsh Wikimedia Foundation is. It could really set us back. That's the reason why I think we should be more careful and better prepared for any further such collaborations. I am sure this is not only an issue of Commons, but also of the Foundation and its chapters, who plan such projects. Especially we cannot handle people from a third party organization in the ways I discribed above. Let's take the example Pikiwiki. I think there are three major issues that caused the difficulties: The mistrust of the Commons community about the israeli copyright law and how it is handled by the Pikiwiki project; the copyrighted logo of the project and the technical failure of the bot. I think it is important for us to learn from the problems so that we can avoid them in the future. The solution I would suggest for these problems is: Whenever such a project is planned the Commons should build up a steering committee from the community member with the chapter who is in lead of the project. They should work through a checklist so that as much of the potential issues can be solved before the project actually starts. When the project is approved by the committee and bots or other technical utilities are involved in the project there should be a pilot phase where the utilities are tested and possible failures found and fixed. After that pilot phase the project can get the Go. And even after the project is started as long as the project is running the committee should be kept alife. If there are problems the committee should be called at first before any action be taken. The committee can then consult with the chapter and the third party organization to solve the problem. The committee should also record the problems that the project encountered and work them into the checklist for future projects.

I apology for this very long post. But I think the issues are important and thank you very much.--Wing (talk) 14:59, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Suppose we should answer these (in a friendly voice) in the order that they are asked :

• Attribution. Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary. Noun. Singular 'attribution'; Plural 'attributions' 1. Gerund form of attribute; an explicit or formal acknowledgment of ownership or authorship. [2]. Therefore, this probably means in this case that the up-loader onto Commons needs to say who the original owner/creator (and source) of the image is (or was, if they are now dead). Is this bit clear so far ? How could we say it to make it clearer? Would a multi-linguale template message help? --P.g.champion (talk) 15:35, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

(ec) Issues #1 and #2 look like clear and unfortunate mistakes on behalf of administrators here. In #1, you put that the source of the image was en.wp and the image had been deleted there so the chain was indeed broken, but the deleting administrator here is also an administrator at en.wp and could have looked at the deleted content there to fix the chain. Perhaps a case of laziness? Regardless, you are also correct that speedy deletion was an overreaction. Speedy deleting any two-year-old upload is often a bad idea in my opinion. We do have {{Nsd}} and {{Npd}}, etc. here and those would have been better alternatives. The image was here for two years, how would another month or so cause any harm? For #2, the COM:DR closure was clearly premature and was reversed as such. For #3, the issue is less clear and is also playing out off-wiki, so I cannot offer much insight. The Pikiwiki situation seems to be fraught with overreaction on both sides and needs some cool heads to intervene - I have yet to see any cool heads on the Commons side, the Foundation side, or the Pikiwiki side in any of the correspondences I have seen.

My question is that you have done a good job summarizing some problems here and give good examples - do you have a suggestion on how to fix the problems? A better process perhaps? Some sort of governing committee or noticeboard? (You suggest a committee for Pikiwiki-type situations, but how about your #1 and #2?) Issues #1 and #2 especially highlight a problem that has existed at en.wp for a long time and apparently exists here as well - a lack of patience on the part of administrators. I get the feeling that many administrators feel the need to be the first to do something so they get some sort of credit or notice. Someone closing an important deletion request is likely to get into en:Wikipedia:News, so maybe they want to become quasi-famous? I don't really know. But you are right that lack of patience poisons both projects (and surely other projects that I am not involved in). Wknight94 ^talk 15:46, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion: Sort out the obvious problem first: People keep complaining on Village Pump that publications keep using WC images without giving any credits. The real problem is this: when a Picture Desk gets someone to quickly skim through WC, they do not see or recognise any ‘credit line’ or other terms they are expecting to see. I have had people argue with me that the summery box ‘stuff’ is to do with the article that the ‘Author’ has written on Wikipedia. Were it to refer to the ‘photo’ (they go onto explain) the information would be completed differently and state who was the photographer or artist or what ever ect., ect., ect. If we got the layout and terminology right then maybe non English speaking users would also be able to understand. After all, if native speaker of English don’t understand it - how can we expect anybody else too!--P.g.champion (talk) 16:16, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

#1 was an obvious error. It's not okay to speedy delete an image for missing attribution. A normal deletion request would have been the right thing.

#2 is a question of judgement. I would call it an error, but still it's judgement. Both #1 and #2 cannot be avoided, cause we are humans and we make errors. We can try to increase awareness and carefulness, but we cannot "solve" the problem.

@#3: I don't know the case Pikiwiki, but I have made some experiences with similar projects. The problem usually is a lack of communication. The Commons community often becomes aware of the project only when the uploading starts. And very often I think "Why didn't they talk with us Commons people? If they had, we would have helped them improve it." (I am especially interested in templates and often the templates created for such mass uploads have issues, that could have easily been fixed, if only it had been done _before_ the upload started). A checklist or a project assisting such projects would indeed help much. I'd say: Have a start. --Slomox (talk) 16:26, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I've no experience about admin jobs here, just an interesting experience as a user. I presently work into it.source, a "small" project where any active member is well known by other active users. Links among users are friendly, and highly cohoperative. I did some month ago the terrible mistake to invite a non-wiki friend into it.wiki, that is a large, busy, fast developing project. Her first contribution has been criticized with some warning templates (obviously the contribution was far from perfect, it was only a bold try!), that she misinterpreted as offensive. In a few minutes, while I was furiosly fixing the contribution of my friend, a terrible fight arose into the village pump. She made some more mistakes into thet hot discussion and she had been banned - I could not avoid it because while I was fixing into one page, something horrible was happening into another page... In conclusion: I - a moderately expert user - extremely frustrated, a new user banned, lost and very hungry against wiki in general, and the end of my will to invite any other friend into wiki.

I tried to discuss this serious and unhappy outcome just to find solutions... nothing to do, fight had been so furious that I too got some unpleasant comments and attacks... and I went back to my quiet it.source.

My suggestione had been to suggest to any new user to find a "tutor", an experienced user of the project (i.e., the user that posts the welcome message to new members), and to invite any admin and any user to address to the tutor, and not to the new user, any comment about new user work, so that the tutor can explain quietly and friendly to his "pupil" what has gone wrong, and why, and how fix the trouble. Wiki is a really complex application, and a number of severe mistakes are perfectly normal from a new (and from en expert one too) user, nor can be avoided with the best system of help pages and manuals. I observed that any experienced user forgot at all from a long time how wiki is difficult and exoteric, and when it forgets this, it's terribly easy to be offensive in his remarks - to say something that, for a new user, sounds like "You stupid, how you can't understand a so simple rule!!!???" --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 20:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

"Exoteric" is actually the opposite of "esoteric"! -- AnonMoos (talk) 09:00, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

For the record - the Pikiwiki project was introduced through the Meta. It seemed relevant to the entire Wikimedia community, and not only the Commons, so I placed the explanations there (I was in charge of informing the WM community). I also informed people who are involved in the Commons (I won't mentioned name, because I wouldn't like it to seem as pointing fingers). The project was also introduced in Wikimania and chapter meetings. It would have been best to get the Commons community involved from the first steps, but it is not a good thing that the Commons' regular users don't read messages on Meta, and are not in close contact with the chapters. The chapters have valuable information about local copyright statutes, about possible large contributions etc. The Commons' users should not wait until the chapters turn to them, but rather send questions and ask for updates from the chapters on a regular basis. Drork (talk) 07:15, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I have some additional remarks, if I may:

1. In the pursuit to verify the legality of every upload, the Commons often act against the free content movement interests. In case the law is not 100% clear, we have every interest to create a status quo in favor of free content. This is perfectly legitimate. If someone appeals to a court of law asking to clarify an ambiguous legal term, I want the judge to say: "there is no use to rule against the status quo on the Wikimedia project", rather than: "even Wikimedia won't publish these images, why should I allow it?".
2. Copyright statutes vary quite a bit among countries. It is very unwise to have long legal discussions about the legal situation in different countries, and try to interpret their laws. First of all, it is often impossible due to language and cultural barriers. Secondly, it puts the Commons in an unfavorable position should a lawsuit be filed somewhere. The best way in case of doubt is to ask a trusted person in the larger Wikimedia community, who can provide the relevant information. There is no use to initiate special inquiries - the Commons is not a court of law. Drork (talk) 07:28, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

@Drork: it is not a good thing that the Commons' regular users don't read messages on Meta Meta is a big heap of about 15,000 pages about all possible topics (and about 80% of them very outdated). Which pages do you recommend to the Commons users to get notice of?

The Commons' users should not wait until the chapters turn to them, but rather send questions and ask for updates from the chapters on a regular basis What kind of updates do you think about? About local copyright statutes? Then the chapters should notice Commons if they become aware of any changes. Or news about upcoming image upload projects? Then the chapters should notice Commons too. I don't think that asking "Any news on your side?" and getting the answer "No." on a monthly base is very meaningful. If the chapters have information relevant to Commons, they should speak to Commons.

About your additional remarks: That's not how Commons or Wikimedia work. We collect free content, but we don't try to create facts. --Slomox (talk) 13:14, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I am talking about pages like this meta:Israeli new copyright law, like this meta:Elef Millim project, like this meta:Wikimedia Israel free image collection project, and I suppose there are other pages from other chapters or Wikimedia communities. These pages are written for people to read them. I know it is hard to keep updated, but the least that can be expected is that people read this kind of pages once they learn there is a new project or once a problem arises, before taking any further steps. The Commons is part of the Wikimedia movement. It has an obligation, which is beyond any written rule, to cooperate with the interest of the entire movement. Saying "it's not how we work" is not really an answer to my concern. I know how the Commons works, and it should work differently. By collecting free content we create facts - we are not passive here, and we must not be passive. Drork (talk) 15:05, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Although some uploads from the Bundesarchiv have been deleted, I would believe that the Bundesarchiv is quite happy about the collaboration. In the same way, some Pikiwiki uploads have obvious problems with copyright, but the project's representatives have reacted with a "not an inch" attitude. Now Drork even wants to limit discussion of his interpretation of Israeli copyright, which indicates that he is not very confident that his interpretation is correct. I agree with him that commons does not always further the free-content movement, especially in many deletions where the precautionary principle is invoked overly cautiously, but commons does not influence the legal situation. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 09:12, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Commons *has* a community, though a small and vulnerable one, and regretfully declining community over the last years. Currently some twenty people contribute 100 edits or more a month, and some four hundred people contribute 5 edits or more a month, which is comparable to a "small" language Wikipedia. I thank Pieter Kuiper fully for admitting Commons isn't without it's own problems. I thank Ting Cheng, a community elected board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, for his lengthy elaboration recognizing an issue. I thank Dror for standing up. This Spring the WMF has initiated a year long strategy formation process asking input from all sides and parties involved around a series of questions concerning participation, reach and quality. (Strict) compliance with license(s) is considered a [[[quality]] issue by more than one regular contributor to Commons. Several image gathering projects do have several goals, most notably informing the public about free repositories of (for example) images which I will dub reach and hooking newcomers to become contributors of content, which I will dub participation. Initially dubbed governance of Commmons I would like to invite all participants in this discussion, and all participants in the massive upload conflicts to participate this year, just started, and ending summer 2010, in the overall Wikimedia Foundation strategy formation process. Help us all finding answers to all of "What should we do" and "How should we do" questions. In my belief all active participants to Commons should be give the time to reflect on the current issue, and give their opinion, if they want to, which can take a longer time than the wikibreak of Dror. Maybe it might be possible to generate a rough guideline in a year time about I started a project to have the public take images and upload them ultimately to Commons. How and when should I inform the community at commons about my project and under which conditions won't the community at Commons block all uploads from my project. After all, the Commons is a very special project. It has many more sysops than active contributors. And, as far as I know, a sysop is just a technical function, with the ability (some buttons) and not the authority to push them without 'community consent'. Governance at he commons and discussing about sysops might blur this a little bit. That might presuppose sysops having an organizational role or function they wouldn't have. And one last thing: Commons, like all projects, are independent of the WMF, the Board of the WMF can't impose anything on the project. So Ting showed a lot of courage by stepping into this discussion, and I thank him for that, again. Dedalus (talk) 16:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I wonder whether those counts are based on "gallery" edits only (i.e. what would be article edits on a Wikipedia)? Tabulating only article edits makes sense on the wikipedias, but tabulating only gallery edits wouldn't have much meaning for Commons... AnonMoos (talk) 08:56, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Adminship on Commons, and how it might be seen from the other projects

I hope I am not too much off-topic here, but I'd like to react to something Wing has pointed out and which I think should be given more attention. It is more about adminship on Commons, feel free to raise the title level, should you want to totally separate the section from the existing debate (feel free to remove the title should you feel that the section belongs to the mainstream debate). Disclaimer: I'm a quite young Commons admin, with little experience. For users coming from the Wikipedias (for instance), admins have mostly technical duties and "cannot overturn community consensus". Regular Commoners know that it is quite different here when it comes to content deletion. Deletions on Commons are, in their majority, not based on consensus but on the understanding of the applicable copyright law (in the case of copyvio-based deletion requests). In those cases, no matter how many people "vote" in favour of an image, if the closing admin, on the basis of the given information, thinks that the image must be deleted, he has the right to do so (according to the rules). I think it is something not well taken by visiting users (I am not even talking of mistakes made by the closing admins). However, this kind of rule is necessary because of the subtleties handled on a daily basis on Commons and generally ignored by most users, and quite often also by non-Commons admins. For instance, I am a Frenchman and yet, it was only when I became interested in adminship on Commons that I understood the exact terms and implications of the quasi-absence of "freedom of panorama" in my own country. I remember a few deletion requests in which there was only one user requesting the deletion, with several users and sometimes admins against him, and yet these requests had to lead to deletion and did so, by the decision of the closing admin, based on facts (and interpretation), not on consensus. Of course, the issues here are so complex that a single person can only have thorough knowledge about few legal systems or circumstances. For the others, we must rely on the translations, interpretations and other digests provided on the wiki, and of course be very careful about it. The "careful" part is one of the weaknesses of the Commons admin community. We tend to become full of ourselves and of our "knowledge" and "experience", that other users don't have but must accept. This, added to the workload, can make admins harsh.

The quantity of work that the admins have to do is terrifying. There are hundreds of thousands of spotted problematic images, needing individual review (for various reasons: copyright/permission, categories, sourcing, scope inclusion, various requests and technical issues...), and probably much more unspotted ones. We are expected to address this huge backlog, this is presented as our primary task. If you want to be a "good" admin (or to do your job on the project), you have to take your share of pictures out of the backlog and either delete them or "clean" them. The fact that only deletion can be spotted, logged and counted (and that deleting is easier than cleaning) is a huge bias, and if you're not careful enough it can make you become more and more severe in your evaluations. In one's imagination, you would become more useful as an admin, and maybe a saviour for the project. When you spend time finding a reliable source for an apparently doomed image, when you find the alinea in the law that allows an image to stay, when you correct the deprecated license tag by finding out the actual status of an image instead of deleting it as requested by the tag itself, it doesn't count as an "admin action", and yet adminship experience does help a lot. I think admins need to take, from time to time, short breaks from the sysop tools (which is not incompatible with regular contributions), and maybe they should be told (nicely) when they need such breaks. I've tried those breaks, they're great. They give you back your old perspective about what Commons is and should be, what is valuable and what is not.

As I said, for these reasons admins can become harsh because they're "trained" to deal with content more than with users. You give a well-deserved warning template to this stupid contributor who doesn't know about copyright renewal rules in the US, but you've already forgotten that you didn't know much about them a few months/years ago. Another thing that doesn't help: Commons is a multi-language project, probably more than any other WMF project. Quite often, the user you're "dealing with" doesn't have a good English, or you don't even have a common language. Therefore, when you apply a "no source" tag about 50 or 100 times a day (I don't, but if you want, it's easy, the files are just out there...), you just rely on the auto-translated templates. It makes the process even colder and unfriendly for the newcomers (and indeed very few of them answer to the templates, although when they do it usually proves easy to solve the issue or to make the user improve its behaviour).

The thing that we need most on this project (in my opinion), and that has been suggested already in this conversation, is tutorship. When I came to Commons, I looked for such a procedure (as I knew it existed on my then home Wikipedia) and didn't find it. Later, as an admin, I have been asked once to become a tutor for somebody. There was no "official" tutorship project, but I accepted to review any single upload of a user and explain how and why it would be ok or not. Admins, if you want to feel useful, DO THAT. It's just great. Plus, it is something that could help us address our communication problem ("Commons is an unfriendly project, so I won't upload there"), for instance by systematically proposing tutorship in the welcome templates and in some chosen user message templates. However, it is more adapted to a Wikipedia than to Commons, because here users come with a few pictures, dump them and leave. There are exceptions of course (newcomers that become steady contributors), but usually, even when they show interest in what we do, they leave when they have done what they had to do. As it has been said, Commons is a home (or second home) project for a few users only. Anyway, I am much motivated by this idea of tutorship. I don't have the resources to launch such a subproject on my own right now (plus, it would benefit from the experience of the tutorship initiatives on other projects, and I'm only a Commoner), but if someone wants to do it as soon as someone wants to do it, I beg him to ping me so that I can help. That's the shameless non-proposal I've ever made...

Please accept my apologies for the length of this message. --Eusebius (talk) 22:41, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

• I'm definitely  for it! I used to helping Matthieu Weber, but it regretfully didn't last long, and I'm eager to help! →Diti the penguin — 23:17, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. The problem are not complicate copyright discussions or newby questions on copyright, they are very rare and noone is unfriendly. The problem here are simple copyvios: Pics from the internet under wrong self-made claims - claims I often refer to as lies. And there is no difference to Wikipedia except three:

1) On (most) Wikipedias the red warning "do not copy from other websites" is present - not on Commons.

2) If you copy&paste text from a website to Wikipedia and its clear that you are not the copyright holder you will get blocked if you repeat one time - on Commons it takes much more cases to reveive a final block.

3) The following is not intended to atack a project or their valuable administrators and volunteers. Experienced 50% of copyright violations are from es. Wikipedians, the most blatant copyvios and the ugliest "own work" claims are from spanish users. The number of their admins here is small (19x es-n) but the upload button on es.wikipedia directly leeds to the Commons upload form - without any instructions compared to pt.wiki which first shows a (too long) instruction page. de.Wikipedians can not upload the first 4 days localy and they probably dont find Commons in this time - the number of copyvios from de.wp is extremly small even the project is larger. The few copyvio uploaders from germany will get personal advice from one of the 54 de-n admins if someone noticed the problem or help is requested. Commons is not a home project, it depends on other projects and on good users who find their way to Commons at least understanding what "free" means and interested in the special scope. Some projects use Commons like one-click hosting, thats disadvantageous for Commons, dissapointing for the user from this Wiki project and thats bad for the wikis. Especially the Wikipedias without local upload must consider Commons more a part of their project and giving instructions on copyright basics a part of their local duties. --Martin H. (talk) 23:50, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I basically second what Eusebius said, disagree with MartinH, and would like to add a few more points. The main problem I observe is that the contributors do not know, whether the admin made a mistake because he intended to do so (like putting a pic on speedy delete because s/he knows something s/he didn't had the time to share), or just because s/he doesn't have enough time to check the facts (which results baseless nominations), or for some other reasons. Basically users only get a template telling something, and I guess most of the time it is relevant, enough and proper. In many cases, however, I have observed templates applied without care, with lack of reasons. And I have observed many times that the deletions were in fact speedy, so speedy that the submitter did not even have the change to react. Often the deletions do not have discussion. Some may think: "Yeah, submitter is ignorant and careless, why should we care then?" And I'd say: "Hey, maybe the submitted isn't even aware of what happening, let alone being able to discuss the problem."

What barriers do we have around?

• Language barrier. While the templates are translated and work quite well, discussions aren't. There should be a globalised way to help non-English submitters to easily find people who can help them in discussions in English. I can imagine a link form every template, or from the discussion pages of the deletes, to point to the "You may try to ask these fellows to help you" page in their (or any) language.
• Non-local editors. Since people from all over wikimedia projects use Commons, they do not come here regularly, and do not check their talk pages. (Which makes me note that it is completely unacceptable to submit anything to any kind of deletion without notifying the uploader!) As far as I know it's now default that the discussion page emails the owner, but only if they provided email address, and it may not be obvious for average contributors that they have to provide an email address to get notifications. I would be pretty interested in a stat about how many percent of Commons users do have a working email, and of those how many have talk page notification active. I'd guess a low percent, and this is an educational/informational problem (eg. users should be warned to provide email address if they want to get notifications).
• Speedy admins. Sometimes admins do speedy deletions speedy in cases where the speedy criteria wasn't met. Even normal delete is pretty speedy considering the problems above, so care should be taken not to speedy delete anythnig with the slightest doubt.
• Education. As it was mentioned, copyright laws are a large sad pool of fæces, and admins have knowledge average people may not. It is easier to accept a deletion if it is based on well defined explanations. Additionally, many people don't lie about licenses but misunderstand them. I had many cases of these (in Commons and well as through OTRS), and most of them was able to "fix" the problem by re-requesting the permission or choose the poper license. In these cases patience helps a lot.

Sidenote ends here. :-) --grin ✎ 09:43, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

These barriers are indeed problematic. I'm an admin at a small Wikipedia who encourages all our users to upload to Commons, rather than locally, but realise that a lot of them are new when it comes to copyright issues (and thus completely ignorant of copyright violation). Many of them are also quite new to Wiki-markup and it can be quite daunting to find the correct template for your licensing and know how to use it.

The email function for edited talk pages often doesn't work properly. I've had emails arrive more than a month after my talk page has been edited. Anrie (talk) 11:30, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

The workload of the admins is so heavy because they often take upon themselves work they should not do. Apparently quite a few admins try to understand the details of copyright statutes, rather then simply ask relevant people and trust their answers. I saw admins who get involved in endless discussions instead of assuming good faith and pass on to much more needed work. As long as some admins think they should act as inspectors and policemen and interrogate people in any case of doubt, the workload won't decrease. Drork (talk) 13:01, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Providing freely licensed content is the very core of Commons. Ensuring that a given status is ok, that we have enough info to convince reusers that the status is ok (because reusers are responsible for their actions and must be given the relevant info) is NOT something we "should not do". It is something absolutely necessary, and on Commons, admin candidateships are evaluated partly on this basis. If the current general debate leads to the conclusion that understanding copyright law (or trying to) and making related decisions is not the job of a Commons admin anymore (why not, after all), then we will have to find a new role to do this job. Trusting and assuming good faith from users is of course ok and necessary but, just like on OTRS, we need to trust only the party which is entitled to make the release and declarations. About trusting other people's analysis and interpretation of the laws, it is what we do everyday when referring to COM:L or improving it. It appears that sometimes the process becomes more difficult, though... --Eusebius (talk) 13:34, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

First of all, some admins on the Commons (and I won't mention names for the time being) see as part of their job promoting political ideas. They sometime use their adminship privileges to do that. If the administrator's job is to monitor copyvio, then these admins should be advised to give up political campaigns. Secondly, there is absolutely no way in which an admin from western Europe can read and understand all the details of a copyright statute from eastern Asia. If the admins try to do that, no wonder they feel frustrated. They are usually not lawyers, and even if they are, they cannot read east-Asian languages and the cannot understand all the authorized legal interpretations and regulations. The job of the administrator is to check if the upload seems "kosher" and if not, to ask for clarifications. That's about it. If you want all material on the Commons to be "kosher" with no single shred of doubt, you cannot allow users to upload images. You have to create a repository without the participation of outside users. Drork (talk) 15:09, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Translations of copyrights laws on other languages (including English) are existing. Sorry, but Piwiki can't usurp right to interpret Israel copyrights law. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:32, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

With SUL accounts, it should be possible to leave a notice also on a contributors home project. It might be a good idea to leave a bot note on talk pages of articles where an image is in use when it is tagged for something here. This would reach every who had the article on his/her watchlist. Unless there is an urgent reason like personal attacks or obvious copyright violations involving a litigious company, deletion requests should be left open for a week - not all obvious cases are all that obvious (recent case of incredibly fast deletion: the audio files of the recitation of the complete quran). /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 16:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Drork that some admins (and another users) at Commons defend their political, religious and ethnical interests in deletion request. I don't mention names but it was significant that many people from Hebrew Wikipedia wanted to delete Lautuff's images.

The way of making decisions at Commons is quite unfriendly for ordinary users. I think that it the reason why usually few people solve deletion requests, vote and comment the proposals. At Czech Wikipedia usually about 35 people solve deletion request. At Commons they know that their voice has not such value. It is understandable in cases of proven copyvios or wrong licences, but I saw also many problems in requests like "out of scope" where admins made queer decisions. Anoter controversial decisions were in request like "I think it is copyvio but a can't prove it".

Maybe it is time to discriminate reasons for deletion in deletion requests and increase position of community in some of them. --Dezidor (talk) 10:34, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

I have a feeling that this discussion leads nowhere. I don't see a point in continuing it. I think the Commons failed to function as a service to other projects, and as an international/inter-project forum, and it is better not to regard it as such anymore. Users should be advised that this project is intended for adults only and unlike other projects, it reflects the opinions of its administrators, and is not subject to the NPOV rules. I think other projects' users and contributers should be advised to upload images onto their respective projects rather than the Commons. The Commons' users could pick up picture they find in other projects and arrange them in categories and galleries to form a kind of gallery which will reflect their point of view. This will also solve the copyright issue. Drork (talk) 13:14, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Commons failed to function as a service to other projects mainly because FOP restrictions. People mainly from counteries of former Soviet Union or coutries like France, Italy... can't upload normal photos of houses or monuments. They can for example at Franch Wikipedia under special licence but it disrupts the function of Commons as service to these local projects.

Luckily I live in country, where is no problem with FOP, but if I were from Ukraine or France, i will run from Commons in few weeks because it would have no sence to find who is the architect of every ordinary house, small chapel or WW1 monument in every village, when it was built and when the architect died. --Dezidor (talk) 13:33, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

People should stop complaining when they are at fault when it comes to have their image upload being deleted by admins. Commons admins (and users) are not necessarily here to feed the essential missing information and are also not here to accept unverified or breaking copyright content. If you think commons boys are here to solve the project mistakes and to change the copyright laws of all the country of the world, then you were obviously in the wrong place to begin with... Nothing more to add on the subject. Nothing is perfect, sometimes there are errors, misunderstanding, etc. Anyway, you should stop mixing problems and issues. Esby (talk) 13:38, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

E-mail preference default setting

Hi all! Commons is one of the project that allows e-mail notifications to be sent out if one's talk page changes, and, as Wing points out in the section above, there are lot of users who are on Commons only while uploading their pictures and thus usually they get the different notices on their talk pages too late. I believe, if the e-mail notification was turned on as a default, it would be an improvement (with the unfortunate side effect that users would get an unnecessary e-mail about the automatic welcome bot on their talk page). What do you think? --Dami (talk) 15:19, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

AFAIR the "send email on watchlist change" feature has been disabled on most larger wikis (including dewiki, enwiki and probably some more) because it generates too much mail traffic. I think activating it by default might also generate a considerable amount of traffic. However, I generally like the idea, but we should ask the sysadmins whether this is feasible. Regards, -- ChrisiPK (Talk|Contribs) 18:35, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I think the suggestion is to send e-mails when the user's talk page is edited, not when any watched page is edited (the second tick box in the E-mail preferences, not the first one). If this isn't already the default, it should be, as it would help warn people that one of their images is up for deletion or is missing essential information. Pruneau^talk 09:25, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I just checked: this is already the default. Pruneau (talk) 09:29, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

For new users maybe. Does anyone recall when this was enabled? We could also have this turned on for all current users. Multichill (talk) 12:34, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Some statistics:

• Total users : 714,489
• Users with talk-notify enabled : 620,715
• Users with an authenticated emailaddress : 304,480
• Users with talk-notify and an authenticated emailaddress : 256,991

So it looks like most users just have to authenticate their emailaddress to get it working. Multichill (talk) 13:06, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I only recall it was a long time ago, but commons memory is better than mine: 11 November 2006 :)

The problem with mass turning on is that there's no difference between no changing the default you were given (ok to change) and explicitely setting it (shouldn't be changed).

OTOH someone which authenticated its email address in the last three years probably doesn't mind having it enabled for him. Platonides (talk) 20:58, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

The email notification function for edited talk pages often doesn't work properly. I've had emails arrive more than a month after my talk page has been edited. When an image is deleted a week after tagging and you receive an email about it a month after tagging, you'd obviously be confused and displeased. Anrie (talk) 10:35, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 13

Wrong information maps

See File talk:H1N1 Argentina Map .png ; If it is not deleted, shouldn't it be categorized? There's already a disclaimer on the image.70.29.212.226 10:16, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Of course it should be categorized. Every image should be categorized. Multichill (talk) 12:26, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

User:Dexxter says they should not be categorized, per the talk page, and removal of the categories that were added to the image... So, is there a document I can point to, to point this out to Dexxter? 70.29.212.226 13:04, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

If the information on the map is unanimous wrong, it should be deleted. Yann (talk) 17:18, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

There is one error on the map, an unconfirmed death is marked in black, otherwise the image is the same as the other Argentine map for that date. It should be confirmed deaths that are marked in black. 70.29.212.226 07:04, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

the strange case of the missing image

Hi all, anyone know why this image doesn't appear except as a direct link? - File:Australian Magpie - distribution.svg

The SVG validator gives warnings (but no errors). Try fixing that. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 21:14, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Erm, how do I do that? (I didn't make the image) Casliber (talk) 21:16, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I fixed it. The file linked to two other files. That is not allowed in SVGs on Commons. /Ö 21:48, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! much appreciated. Casliber (talk) 21:51, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Copyright problem

File:Giuseppe gariballsi!.jpg Obviously false copyright claim. TreasuryTag (talk) 20:53, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

The copyright might be ok, depending on the age of the pictures. Deleted as out of scope. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:16, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

June 14

Images used, violating the license

I found one of my images that I published here under GFDL/CC-BY-SA is used on this web site. The site neither credits the image author, nor wikimedia, and there is no mention of the license, not to talk about a link to the license terms. I sent them a message, kindly asking them to use the image according to the license, but did not get any reply. What can I do? --Vesta (talk) 13:23, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

DMCA them, that'll stop it. IANAL ViperSnake151 (talk) 13:53, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

You can use the {{Published}} template with the "legal=no" parameter to indicate on the image description page that the image has been used in a noncompliant fashion, which helps to shame them. You also have the option of sending them a DMCA takedown notice - we don't currently have a page describing how to do this, but there's lots of related info out there if you just search on that. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:26, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Categories/Keywords?

I'm absolutely in love with Wikimedia Commons. This is truly an internet tool that I've been looking for for years. Gush gush gush!

The problem is that I can't find what I really need. If you take any individual picture, it might have one or two categories assigned to it. But it is possible that 10, 25, or 50 would be more appropriate. How much leeway does one have in categorizing pictures? Can I add new categories and move others around at will? May I move Category: Smile underneath Category:Facial_expression? May I add Category: Smile to every such picture that I come across?

And then there's consistency issues:
The first image in Category:Facial_expression depicts a woman with "Décolleté". Why is this a separate category from Category:Cleavage_(breasts)? (No, I'm not breast obsessed; I was looking for facial expressions.) Should the categories relate to those used on Wikipedia for consistency? After all, Décolleté is defined at the top of the page as cleavage at Wikipedia.

The second image ironically enough depicts a man with a checked shirt; the first image is categorized under Category:Checkered clothing, but this second image is not. Go ahead and add this category to the second image? Should one add mustache, male, smile, etc. as categories?

Sorry if any of these seem obvious; from the stand point of "Stock" images, these things are easier to find later if there's greater consistency...so what limits do I have and is there a "central" authority to prevent this from all becoming unglued? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rustbelt Maps (talk • contribs) 17:06, 14. Jun. 2009 (UTC)

Rustbelt Maps (talk) 15:06, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

For an explaination of the categorization, see: Commons:Categories. --Túrelio (talk) 15:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I would say: go and organize. We always need more people straightening up the categories. If you are unsure or think that some moves can be controversial than ask first on talk pages of given category (or here), but most of the time you will not hear back. Make sure you use cat-a-lot and hot cat tools (see my preferences / gadgets / Tools for categories) to be more efficient. --Jarekt (talk) 14:03, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Deletion of picture of modern artwork

I uploaded this picture recently. I wasn't sure what it was, but an answer at en-Wikipedia's reference desk here, told me that it is a modern artwork created using old stone (in public view in the UK, unveiled 1997). I think it therefore needs to be deleted, for copyright reasons. Can I just request that here? I'll try not to upload unidentified stuff in future... Carcharoth (Commons) (talk) 16:45, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Its ok from UK, see COM:FOP#United Kingdom. "Freedom of Panorama" allow photograhic works based on someone elses, still copyright protected artwork. --Martin H. (talk) 16:52, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Oh, OK. Thanks. Now I need to work out if there are any articles that it can be used in. Carcharoth (Commons) (talk) 16:55, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

First of all you should add [[Category:Durham]] or [[Category:Prebends Bridge]] to the filepage to give the image a categorie. Maybe some subcategory of Category:Art of the United Kingdom would also be a good idea. --Martin H. (talk) 16:59, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

June 15

Copyright question

I do not know much about copyrights, but I have a concern about a couple of pictures and do not know how to proceed. File:Big Red B-17 Photo.jpg and File:Big Red Crew.jpg were uploaded by User:CrayZatseA stating that the pictures are the work of the uploader. On his talk page on the english wikipedia he states that he is not the original creator. He says he was given copies by the original creator, is this a problem? A new name 2008 (talk) 01:51, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I think a permission is needed. You can open a deletion request. Yann (talk) 10:11, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, I have opened deletion requests on them both. A new name 2008 (talk) 21:33, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Typo in GFDL/de template

There is a minor typo in the German version of the GFDL template. It links to "Kriterien zur Neulizensierung", but "Neulizenzierung" is written with two z and without s. I have already moved the page to Commons:GFDL 1.3 Kriterien zur Neulizenzierung, but I cannot change the template because it is locked. --Head (talk) 12:54, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Done. --Martin H. (talk) 13:06, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

New licensing messages for text

We seem to have new cc-by-sa & GFDL double license for text with another long this is not wikipedia notice below every edit box. Both messages take about 8 lines of text on my screen and force me to scroll each time I use one of the buttons on the bottom. I have read the messages and agree with them - now is there any way to acknowledge that and skip those messages in the future edits, or collapse them into a single line somehow? May be we can add an preference box (false by default) to allow one line version of those boxes. --Jarekt (talk) 14:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd also be interested in any opt-out mechanism... Can it be deactivated through JS or CSS, for instance? It's obviously a good thing that the messages are there, though. --Eusebius (talk) 16:06, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

This will suppress it entirely in personal CSS:

div#editpage-copywarn {
  display: none;
}

If there is going to be a gadget I would prefer it be one that creates a show/hide box so that the information is not so far gone that people forget about it. Dragons flight (talk) 16:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. I'm not convinced it should be a gadget (I'm not convinced it should be TOO easy to hide). --Eusebius (talk) 16:32, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

that worked thanks --Jarekt (talk) 18:19, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Terms of use

Please see Commons:Terms of use, as adapted from m:Licensing update/Implementation. Although this is based more off the reference drafts, since as of right now we're saying that all edits as of today are CC-BY-SA/GFDL, it would be good to make sure this is implemented. We may also want to think about being able to merge Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia into it too. ViperSnake151 (talk) 19:08, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

June 16

Ripping and uploading a DVD of short videos

w:Nina Paley is releasing most of her historical art and video work under CC-SA. This includes a body of shorts which are currently on an out-of-production DVD. Is there a good place to post a link to source for ripping and uploading? Are there examples of commons projects that have done this before? Thanks, +sj + 03:16, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Pretty much anyone with access to the DVDs should be able to do this. Commons probably is not the best place to locate such a person. However, if someone else rips it and wants a Commoner to encode and upload it, that's another matter. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:21, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

My thought is we could use a place to post this sort of request (pointer to raw content, indication of size of task and # of pieces). Another example is the collection of ~1100 items in the new world digital library at wdl.org. Assuming that they post a metadata file to make writing a bulk import script easier, listing this as a distributable or claimable task and having a page listing ungathered free content would be handy. +sj + 07:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for submerged bridge?

Hi, I am looking for some pics of the ancient en:Karamagara Bridge. Unfortunately, the bridge is sumberged since the 1970s and the image requests for the only two pics I found online (Panoramio I and Panoramio II) remained unanswered. There are some more pics in a scholarly work from the 1960s on the ancient road system in the region which show the bridge then. My question: Can I use the pics despite the lack of admission of the Panoramio users/scholars on the grounds that the briddge is today invisible (or perhaps even destroyed) and very likely to remain so for a long time? Does fair rationale use apply for this specific instance? Regards Gun Powder Ma (talk) 08:25, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

No, on Commons fair-use rationale is never applicable. However, if using the image for a specific purpose/article on :en, fair-use rationale may well be applicable. But that would require uploading the image locally. --Túrelio (talk) 08:49, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Is this derivative enough to have no new copyrights?

Georges Cuvier drew File:Cuvier elephant jaw.jpg in 1798–99. Eric Buffetaut gave this image by courtesy to Michael Benton for publishing in Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record, 1st Edition.[3] The way I look at it, Buffetaut either scanned Cuvier's drawing or traced it, so he should have no copyright to the image, right? Can I upload Buffetaut's derivative work under {{PD-Old}} (and if so, should Buffetaut be mentioned as one of the authors, or just Cuvier alone)? Is there something I have overlooked? Jappalang (talk) 12:52, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I haven't looked at the external site, but the basic question is whether the newer image shows scope for individual creativity with respect to the older PD image... AnonMoos (talk) 15:28, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

A simple tracing that closely resembles the original would generally be considered a slavish reproduction. However, sometimes copiers introduce original variations, such as noticable changes in the background or shading, which would make it an original work. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:19, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, the outlines of the two diagrams are the same, even the lines of the shading. The reason I suspect it could be a scan, is because Huffetaut's version has eliminated some of the lighter shading. Is that enough to constitute originality for copyright? Jappalang (talk) 02:41, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Category:国 is for what?

This category Category:国 is for what? Who can explain the purpose?--百楽兎 (talk) 13:08, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Check its parent category. I'd guess for . Not sure why the other images end up in there. -- User:Docu

It seems User:BotMultichill's mistakes.--百楽兎 (talk) 15:16, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Only 4 images should belong to this category. Others are just off by a mile (or even more than that) OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:20, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

This seems to be a very limited category... just for the Chinese character, which means "country". Jappalang (talk) 08:53, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Botmultichill seems to be working on the assumption that any file which is used in any article which has the character 国 in the title belongs in this category.KTo288 (talk) 22:15, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Carlos Latuff cartoons arbitration

Please see Commons:Categories for discussion/Current requests/2009/06/Carlos Latuff for a proposal as to how we might settle the long-running argument about the proper categorization of the Carlos Latuff images. It has wider implications for the categorization of files that disparage a living public figure. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 13:18, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi resolution portraits

By coincidence I laid my eyes on the picture File:C_Lundberg_Markow_1.JPG. I saw an attractive middle aged woman and I followed the link to the article referencing the photo to find out who she was, then I took a look at the photo in full detail.

The picture resolution is very high, 12.1 mega pixel (2912x4368 pixel). Although the woman has a pleasant look and a good makeup, it made me realize how unforgiving modern digital cameras are. Every little wrinkle, every pore, all thin down, every little imperfection can be studied in great detail in this photo.

This made me think about limiting image resolution for portraits on Wikipedia, just as a courtesy to the person being portraited. In this case I believe reducing picture resolution to 50% would suffice.

What do you Wikipedians think? Is my thoughtfulness just misguided?

/Klebom (talk) 17:18, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

In real life we can view our fellow humans in even higher resolution. If there is something shameful about the physical nature of human skin, perhaps we should wear masks. In my opinion, honesty is healthier than all the photo retouching, heavy makeup, careful lighting, etc., which the media use to brainwash people into thinking humans can and should be free of "flaws". Just my opinion. --Teratornis (talk) 18:54, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Largely agree with Teratornis. Images at Commons are intended for educational and informational use, to portray the subject as they are and not as they wish to be seen. Moreover, even though some people may find their appearance at full resolution objectionable, this is not a universal truth. Some people prefer to be portrayed in a more natural way. Also, any third party who wishes to reuse the image, including the subject, can modify it as they like - operations like blurring, downscaling, and "blemish removal" are generally straightforward but irreversible. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:16, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

'Details'

I am just questioning my own work. Does it make sense to upload slightly cut picture - basically without the maniscript text - as I did at Bellifortis? Gun Powder Ma (talk) 23:03, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's fine - the text doesn't add much at thumbnail size, so it's good to have a version without it. In some cases it'd be better to clone out the text, so that you can maintain a good composition. Dcoetzee (talk) 00:17, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 17

Pseudo namespaces

	redirects to
COM:	Commons:

Commons has amount of shortcut redirect. "COM:" and "CAT:" is the most used prefix. Now I propose to make psuedo-namespaces. We tend to use more shortened-redirects as Commons grows. I think psuedo-namespace would be useful and would make us convenient. Please comment about that. Thank you. Kwj2772 (msg) 11:52, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

If I remember well, COM is an ISO code the Commanche language. I don't know it that would be possible, in case a Commanche-speaking Wikipedia is created. →Diti the penguin — 13:36, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't there be a clash anyway with the existing shortcuts? --Eusebius (talk) 13:42, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

If Connanche language wikipedia created, we cannot use even "COM:" prefix-redirecting method. When we enter "COM:L" in search box, software may redirect to http://com.wikipedia.org/wiki/L --Kwj2772 (msg) 14:31, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

For local pseudo name spaces and avoiding conflicts with global (wikiwide) name spaces, I would suggest special signs or lower case followed by a minimum of characters. This would be handy for searching things. Examples for category and galleries: "<c:" "<G:", "=c:" "=g", "cat:" "gal:", "µc:", "µg:" ...--Foroa (talk) 15:50, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

COM was formally rejected as a cross-wiki redirect to Commons on grounds of possible conflict with a Comanche wikipedia (if there ever is such a thing, which seems doubtful, but never mind). However CM is actually available, because there's no CM ISO639-1 code, and ISO639-1 is not supposed to be expanded. There was some brief flurry of interest in "CM" a year or two back, but I'm not sure anything ever came of it... AnonMoos (talk) 15:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Protection of templates

Commons uses a lot of templates. Some of these templates are used a lot and should be protected. But which templates should be protected? And should these templates be full- or semi-protected? We don't want to leave heavy usage templates unprotected and on the other side we don't want it too hard for users to edit templates. The Template i18n added a lot of templates which were left unprotected. This is a proposal for protecting heavy usage templates.

Proposal

Main templates

Main templates are templates not containing a "/". Main templates used on more than 1000 pages should be semi-protected (semi threshold). Main templates used on more than 10.000 pages should be fully protected (full threshold). Of course the semi threshold and the full threshold could be raised or lowered. I just picked these numbers because the seem reasonable to me.

/layout templates

<main template>/layout templates are used a lot in autotranslated templates. These templates should have the same protection as the main template (for example {{GFDL}} and {{GFDL/layout}})

/lang templates

<main template>/lang templates are templates to move between the different language versions of a template. These should have the same protection as the main template if it's in use at the main template (that's not always the case, see for example ({{Information}}).

Language versions of templates

Once a template is autotranslated, templates are shown in different languages to different users. <main template>/en templates are the English language versions of templates and are shown to anonymous users, users from enwp and most logged in users. These templates should have the same protection as the main template. But what to do with the other language versions like <main template>/de or <main template>/nl? These versions are used by logged in users and Wikipedia's. I tried doing something based on a score per language, but that didn't seem to work very well so i'll keep it simple. <main template>/es, <main template>/fr, <main template>/de, <main template>/pt & <main template>/ja should be semi-protected if the main template is fully protected.

Tag these templates

All templates protected as heavily used should be tagged with {{Heavily used template}}. It would probably be nice to have two versions: One for semi-protected templates and one for fully protected templates (including how to use {{Editprotected}}).

Comments

Comments here please. Multichill (talk) 14:21, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, but we need to internationalize {{Heavily used template}} before applying it to so many places! Pruneau^talk 16:23, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that has to be done. I'm thinking about adding an option like protection=semi and protection=full to have some specific text show up so we only have to use one template. Multichill (talk) 18:19, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

• I agree with the need to standardize protection of templates and system based on number of uses seems just fine. Is there an easy way to measure number of uses of each template?
  • Sure, query at the toolserver.
    • I will have to learn how to do it one day. May be we can have a system that automatically adjust this. I have seen in the past fully-protected unused templates where I needed to use {{Editprotected}} to nominate for deletion.
• I do not like current protection levels used for templates: User requirements needed for editing semi-protected pages are very minimal. And the requirement that only admins can edit fully protected pages seems too high for most pages. As a non-admin frequently localizing and improving (hopefully) templates I do not like fully-protected pages or templates using Mediawiki namespace, since they are so hard to edit.
  • I assume good faith to a certain level. Only the most important templates are fully protected. Any edits to these templates should be discussed first anyway. Autoconfirmed users can vandalize a lot of templates, but not the most important ones. Which heavy usage templates (besides int:lang) use mediawiki namespace by the way?
    • Comment about mediawiki resulted from some fixes needed for {{Other date}} which required changes to {{Date}}, {{I18n month}} and many Mediawiki namespace pages . I worked with user:Slomox, who is always great to work with, but I would still prefer to do my own edits.
• I would like to propose to create another group of users privileged to edit most of the templates (may be except for {{Information}} and few others). Kind of like the users trusted to rename files or Flicker reviewers. That would create 4 levels of protection: fully protected, trusted users only, semi-protected and unprotected.
  • I don't think an extra level will make all of this better. Implementing tages ages anyway (if it's ever going to be implemented)
• There should be a minimal protection roadblocks for creating new translations of templates. That would mean minimal protection for /lang pages. I would propose one level lower than the main page. We can always change it if some crafty vandal discovers the weakness.
  • I already have a bot working on keep /lang templates up to date. I'll just have to finish it. Once it's done i'll tag all the protected /lang templates with a nice message explaining this.
    • That sounds great
• I would also use one-level-lower protection for the translations of protected pages.
  • Why? Which language versions? All? Only /en or also the other once i mentioned?
    • I was imagining all non en versions. This was attempt to have a simple rule used for most of the templates.

--Jarekt (talk) 20:26, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Multichill (talk) 21:09, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

--Jarekt (talk) 16:40, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

• For license tags, full protection should probably be used. To simplify translations, maybe protected revisions could be activated for template namespace. -- User:Docu/ - June 18, 2009

Template editing

I want to tweak and update the text of Template:Animated SVG but I am not familiar with these newfangled auto thingies. What do I do, please? Globbet (talk) 15:22, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I guess you want to update the English version. You can find it here. Multichill (talk) 15:28, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

delete of file

I want to delete two of my files from wikipedia commons. How to do this? --Blueye (talk) 19:02, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

If one of the reasons for speedy deletion is given, add the appropriate template. Otherwise start a regular deletion request. If you are unsure what to do, just ask here again, stating why you want the images deleted. --rimshot^talk 19:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

June 18

Submit your (good) images to the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

Ubuntu Linux distributes a few images and audio/video files with each release to highlight the things the Free Culture movement can produce:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase

The submissions page has always been a bit barren, and it would be really great if some content creators from Commons submitted their quality photos/diagrams/video/audio to the Ubuntu contest for consideration there.

If you win, your work will be installed by default on millions of computers in the Examples folder, which is clearly visible on each user's Desktop.  ;)

Make sure you read the terms at the bottom of the page (they're more restrictive of content and license than Commons), and submit your work by July 16th (one month!)

(Also, remember that they do this every six months, so you don't need to inundate them.)

German photos free for use on attribution?

Centralize on: Commons talk:Licensing#German photos free for use on attribution?

Does "Fotos honorarfrei bei Namensnennung" (Google translate: "Photos free of charge for Attribution") mean the photos can be uploaded per {{Attribution}}? Website in question: Jappalang (talk) 06:31, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

I strongly doubt it. And if you look at the subdirectory on the source server where these photos are found, it contains the string "presse" (http://www.operklosterneuburg.at/2004/presse/fotoh.htm) suggesting these are free only for press and PR purposes. --Túrelio (talk) 10:37, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Unattributed schematic

The electronic schematic File:VCO.jpg was clearly taken from a source, but it is not identified. It is possibly taken from this book. I have tagged it with {{Source file please}} but I am not sure if that's all that needs doing, particularly GFDL concerns. Can someone take a look. Also there are errors in the schematic. SpinningSpark 11:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Why doesn't Commons accept FLASH files?

Why doesn't Commons accept FLASH files, such as *.swf and *.flv?--百楽兎 (talk) 13:49, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

I will venture a guess that the reason is that Flash is not free technology. Same reason we do not host .mpg files, etc. Wknight94 ^talk 14:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Flash is non-free software. Any file created in it is non-free and cannot be hosted here. ViperSnake151 (talk) 14:47, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

See Commons:Project_scope#Must_be_an_allowable_free_file_format. The long explanation is that unfree file types place us at the whim and mercy of the producer of the proprietary viewer software, who may choose to not support certain platforms or to discontinue the format in favour of another one in the future. Dcoetzee (talk) 15:04, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

User contributions: User:Monarchians

Hi. I'm not sure if this is the right place for my question. If not, please show me the right direction.

I'm not sure what to do with contributions of User:Monarchians. He uploaded lots of old pictures of the Thai Royal Family. He claimes with the most recent ones to be the author of those works - which I doubt. While on older uploads he says about the author: "Unknown (It is assumed the author died more than 70 years ago.)", though some photos cannot be older than 60 years (e.g. this one).

On his talk page he was already warned: "Please do not remove problem tags" and has been blocked for 2 hours - so he's not so innocent?

What to do? Ignore? --hdamm (talk) 16:22, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Addendum: some of "his" photos even seem to be scans from books or magazines (File:Mom Sangwal with M.C. Galyani Vadhana.JPG) --hdamm (talk) 16:56, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Will Commons consider supporting XAML format?

Will Commons consider supporting XAML format? I think XAML seems to be an acceptable file format in Commons.--百楽兎 (talk) 23:14, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

June 19

Somebody with knowledge of Chinese

Could somebody with knowledge of Chinese language and culture check the description of File:孙文广.袭击.JPG and File:孙文广.袭击.3.JPG. They don't make sense to me. --Túrelio (talk) 09:11, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Related New York Times article. Teofilo (talk) 13:27, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. See: Category:Sun Wenguang. --Túrelio (talk) 13:42, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Make the licence info button clearer on the upload form

On the English Wikipedia upload form when you select a licence the template pops up so you can view the licence and click on links etc. This is very handy. At Commons there is an "info" button that does the same thing, but I did not notice it, it should be clearer. There are a couple of options:

• Option 1: change the current button () to something else (eg ) and have an admin update the relevant pages. I think a yellow button will stand out from all of the blue help buttons.
• Option 2: change the info icon to a "Licence preview" button (see a mockup). This would require localisation for different languages.
• Option 3: make no change, or an alternate suggestion?

I think option 1 would be good. Is there consensus for a change?--Commander Keane (talk) 09:40, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe just lose the button all together and show the license. Rocket000 (talk) 22:29, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

That's horrid. Slap a full GFDL tag in the midst of this form, pushing the submit buttons and the rest all the way down. No thanks, that was the reason why I disabled it and came up with that button in the first place. I have seen no complaints about this change since the upload form script was enabled more than a year ago. It's all OK with me to make that button more prominent (by whatever means); it's just a minor configuration thing. But going back to the old ways would be a mistake in my opinion. Lupo 23:12, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Meh, I don't use that form anyway so don't listen to me. :-) Rocket000 (talk) 00:16, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Asking community permission for a categorization test (field: Pathology)

I tested into it.source an implementation of atomic keyword-like, multi-axis categorization; a brief description of that test into a personal sandbox page: User:Alex brollo/O_Categories.

Here am I to ask the community for its permission to do some tests into Pathology-related images; some years ago I worked into it (I am a pathologist and I posted some from the first microscopic images here), and I'll be happy to test my idea here, but I'd have to create new categories with new rules and some special code.

The goal is, to introduce a little of automation and to produce a set of categories, designed to be used with +incategory, t.i. category intersection.

For my tests, I presume that a dozen of categories, applied to perhaps 100 images, will be sufficient to give you a running idea of the trick. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 21:03, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

No thanks, this would pollute the category tree. http://test.wikipedia.org might be a more suitable place for testing things. Multichill (talk) 21:41, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

OK. I'll go on into it.source where a preliminary test is running. The aim was not to test the code, it was to let you see how it runs. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 22:05, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

That would be a lot of over-categorization. See COM:OVERCAT. The key is create a good category tree and only categorize the media in the most specific one. Things like "normal" and "microscopic" are terrible category names. Putting something in "benign epithelial tumor", "benign tumor", and "tumor" is completely ruining the purpose of subcategories.. Rocket000 (talk) 22:25, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

I already said that I'll NOT go on to implement this system. Nevertheless tell me please how you can have a list of all microscopic images of tumors of digestive system, all the images matching this three features, and no one other. Category intersection needs "over-categorization", or simply it doen't run, as it doesn't run presently. I know that this system breaks the principle "only categorize the media in the most specific one": this is why I was asking your permission to implement it, into a field that I know professionally and that is presently not so well categorized!

But - I don't want to waste your (and mine) time any more. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 22:59, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Um, why not just create a category called "microscopic images of tumors of digestive system"? Rocket000 (talk)

It was only an example.... if you want to create one specific category for any intersection of a 3-axial, 100x100x20 category and subcategory system, as I told in my sandbox page, you need 200.000 categories. If you use the +incategory tool and you use atomic, +incategory-oriented categorization, you need only 220. It's a long-lasting debate, but believe me, my suggestion is not so stupid as you could presume at a first glance. ;-) . But really, I see that Commons is too a busy and complex community to do this kind of tests. Much better to develop it and to test it deeply into a small, quiet community. --Alex_brollo Talk|Contrib 07:57, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

tools:~escaladix/catcroiseur/ might work for this, but I keep getting a screen that seems to say 21 users are overloading it. -- User:Docu (talk) / en:User:Docu (talk) 09:36, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Renaming a file

I have given a file a wrong name. File:Thormod Thorlæus.jpg should have been named File:Thormod Thorfæus.jpg. Where do I go to correct this? --Saddhiyama (talk) 21:34, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Just follow the instructions in Commons:File renaming. Another page, Commons:Help desk is the right place to ask if you have further questions. Cheers, --Slaunger (talk) 21:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

If its your own file all you have to do is upload the file again with the proper name, so that there are now two versions of the file, then tag the version with the wrong name with {{badname|File:Thormod Thorfæus.jpg}} or if its not your own file add the tag {{rename|Thormod Thorfæus.jpg|This file has been given the wrong name}}.KTo288 (talk) 22:05, 19 June 2009 (UTC)