Commons:Village pump

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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

Legend
In the last hour
In the last day
In the last week
In the last month
More than one month
Manual settings
When exceptions occur, please check the setting first.

It can only be speculated that, like the modern office water cooler, the village pump must have been a gathering place where dwellers discussed ideas for the improvement of their locale. [add]

Centralized discussion See also: Village pump/Proposals   ■ Archive Commons:Requests for comment/Hosting of free fonts in Commons (18 July 2024) 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

March 21

key1

(all photos with key1)

Illegal bytes in lots of pages due to file history comments being trimmed mid-byte

Has anyone noticed that a lot of pages on commons have illegal utf8 byte sequences in the file histories? I'm pretty sure this is down to the algorithm used to trim long comments in the file history using byte semantics rather than character: some 2+ byte characters have been trimmed in the middle.

There's lots of examples but here's three:

• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JoergHaider_Sep07.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chekhov_1903_ArM.jpg
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portr%C3%A4t_des_Komponisten_Pjotr_I._Tschaikowski_%281840-1893%29.jpg

On all three the first comment has been trimmed and lots pretty ugly but the main issue is that the page is no longer valid utf-8. -(unsigned)

I think there is somewhere to report bugs in mediawiki, but I can't recall where that is. Penyulap ☏ 19:58, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

It should be fixed for "new" files (files uploaded after roughly November 2011). The relavent bug is bugzilla:332. Bawolff (talk) 20:12, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Trademark discussion

Hi, apologies for posting this in English, but I wanted to alert your community to a discussion on Meta about potential changes to the Wikimedia Trademark Policy. Please translate this statement if you can. We hope that you will all participate in the discussion; we also welcome translations of the legal team’s statement into as many languages as possible and encourage you to voice your thoughts there. Please see the Trademark practices discussion (on Meta-Wiki) for more information. Thank you! --Mdennis (WMF) (talk)

Small business portraits and work-for-hire

Recently, with my en.wiki admin hat on, I've been helping a user with navigating the murky world of Commons permissions and OTRS. I am an OTRSer but am not active on Commons permissions stuff (I answer English Wikipedia questions) - the issue raised was one of portraits by small business proprietors.

I want to get Commons users' take on the copyright and good practice for a scenario like this:

User A comes to Commons and uploads a picture of himself and claims the copyright belongs either to him or to his business. It gets challenged and he is asked to send proof of copyright to OTRS. He sends a license grant from an email address that OTRS accept is coming from the business. But they do not accept he owns the copyright as he is not the photographer, he's the subject.

In a situation like this, it is very likely that the photograph was done as a work-for-hire - the photographer was hired, and his work was transferred on a work-for-hire basis. There may be no paperwork showing this work-for-hire, or the paperwork may have been lost.

My question is, in this kind of scenario - a small business getting a portrait of the proprietor of that business, usually on a work-for-hire basis - how much verification should we need? Is one person from the company verifying that it is a work for hire and releasing the photo under a free license enough? Or does an OTRSer need to go further and get, say, a scanned copy of some written proof of the copyright transfer between photographer and client? Should OTRSers have some common sense in this - there's a difference between the level of verification one might go through if Madonna or Britney Spears emailed us and said they had a photo to license out under CC than if the owner of a London pub uploads a photo of him standing outside the pub.

Thoughts on how we should deal with such scenarios are welcome. —Tom Morris (talk) 20:15, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

In these scenarios, based on my experience both on OTRS and on Commons, we sometimes (verging on often) find that when the photographer is eventually asked, they reply with a no, they did not take the photographs with the intention of them being on the basis of free commercial reuse by anyone apart from the business or individual they were taking the photographs for. When the photographer is an employee one might be more relaxed about it. The precautionary principle applies and one would expect an OTRS volunteer to ask for a confirmation email from the photographer, or someone verifiably acting as the photographer's agent or their estate. --Fæ (talk) 20:25, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

This is one of those cases where we get het up about hypothetical copyright instead of just applying a little common sense in my opinion. The answer, in the real world, is of course "nobody cares". I would suggest that OTRS should accept theses sorts of things in cases like Tom's example, although the subject in such a case could of course just get an employee to take another photo and release it under a Commons-compatible license, and if the photographer uploads it themselves it saves the need for OTRS at all. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:44, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

In the real world, professional photographers who make money off their photographs can get really hot about people listing them as public domain. We could "nobody cares" most of the photos found on the Internet and wait for DCMA notices, but we don't.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:53, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

In my real-world experience, portraits made for small businesses are not done as work-for-hire, and if they are, then the business will have a written contract explicitly stating this fact. They can scan and email the contract to you as proof. They commonly believe that they own the copyright, but they are simply mistaken most of the time. (For very large corporations, the photographer is likely to have been a regular employee, working in the business' own media studio, and it almost always is work-for-hire.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:34, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

"Error 503 Service Unavailable" when trying to access images

Few minutes ago I run into some images with no thumbnails in articles or on our File pages, so I clicked on the raw image and got

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 627211266

Then a few minutes latter images were fine. Any ideas? --Jarekt (talk) 14:38, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

confirm. Had the same error. --Isderion (talk) 14:45, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Some thumbnails selectively missing or very slow to appear on category and image pages. Dankarl (talk) 14:49, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

confirmed. Slick's bot also runs into this error quite often: 1 --McZusatz (talk) 14:51, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

This should clear up soon; engineers were "making some changes" I'm told, but I think they are done now and things should start working again.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:19, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

The problem persists; when will it be resolved? V85 (talk) 15:25, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

It's working for me now. Is anyone else still experiencing 503 errors or thumbnail problems?--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

If this still happens, a specific URL/link to an image and a notice on which continent you are located would be helful. Thanks, --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

By the way "Guru Meditation" is a geeky reference to old Commodore Amiga errormessages (if anyone was wondering)... AnonMoos (talk) 07:37, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

big filename

File:GAS STATION ATTENDANTS PEER OVER THEIR "OUT OF GAS" SIGN IN PORTLAND, ON DAY BEFORE THE STATE'S REQUESTED SATURDAY... - NARA - 555434.jpg

Hi everybody,

I found this file whose title is far too long and uppercased, could you rename it in a simpler and lowercased way ? thank you in advance 81.185.159.169 07:51, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

You can tag the file with {{Rename}}. — SMUconlaw (talk) 08:05, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

 Oppose, as it is the original title of th work and is descriptive, thereby in agreement with policy. --Túrelio (talk) 08:09, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

seems reasonable, like screaming in a library. Penyulap ☏ 09:08, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with renaming it to "File:Gas station attendants peer over their "out of gas" sign in Portland - NARA - 555434.jpg", which would eliminate the incomplete sentence, and would be slightly shorter, just as descriptive, and less jarring on the eyes. — SMUconlaw (talk) 12:03, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

True, nothing wrong with that filename either, but we only rename if the original filename is wrong. That's not the case. Multichill (talk) 12:17, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

I'd support adding exceptionally long or cumbersome filenames as a legitimate reason for renaming. In my local public library, the computers have right-click copy-paste ability disabled (for security), and anyone working there and wanting to use that file on a wiki page would have to type it out manually: not a pleasant task. - MPF (talk) 14:03, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Does drag&drop work? Disabling the clipboard is ill-considered. It only impairs accessibility. If you really want to steal copyrighted material, you will be also able without clipboard enabled. You may quote me. -- Rillke^(q?) 18:31, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

let's find the policy that says we can't do sensible stuff and mess with it. Penyulap ☏ 15:02, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Since we wind up truncating the NARA titles anyway, I do not see the harm in truncating or paraphrasing to make a logical, readable title. The important thing is to preserve information (who, what, where, occasionally when) including the NARA number. The entire original title is, or should be, in the description. The one thing we lose is the quick indication the unreadable title provides that the file was part of the "official" upload.

There is, however, also the issue of respect for the judgement and efforts of the original uploaders (who may be defending the wishes of the NARA archivists?) Dankarl (talk) 15:19, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

•  Oppose renaming: It appears to be discouraged by Commons:File renaming; it might break the Commons:National Archives and Records Administration system; it would have to be done manually to tens of thousands of files; and lack of copy-and-paste is an isolated, intentionally and artificially created problem (granted, by someone other than the user victimized by it). In detail:
  1. Commons:File renaming#Which files should not be renamed? says that, usually, "Files should NOT be renamed only because the filename is not English and/or is not correctly capitalized". "It's ugly" is not a reason to change a filename that is true and doesn't violate Commons policy.
  2. It might break/desync the NARA upload system. There are tens of thousands of NARA images on Commons with names like this, as part of a large and (as far as I know) ongoing donation project. The template for all of these images asks users to not modify anything except adding an extra description= line. If the information tag is fragile, I suspect the filename may be as well. Remember that there is a .tif and a .jpg for each image, and they don't always get uploaded at the same time; there are still lots of them that only have one and not the other uploaded; and, it's important to note, lots of NARA archives that don't have either yet on Commons. I don't know if changing the name of one of the files (or both of the files) will make the upload program think archives are missing when they're not. (Remember that wiki page names are case-sensitive, and the upload checker can be checking for exact existence of the file, not a search result.)
  3. The decision would affect tens of thousands of files, some in duplicate. NARA filenames are based on the original file descriptions, which, at least for older images, were in all upper-case. There is no good automated way to determine what the true capitalization for those words is; humans would have to go through and rename each one, with the resulting arguments about which capitalization is an error. Back to point #1: "Files should NOT be renamed only because the filename is not English and/or is not correctly capitalized".
  4. Lack of copy-and-paste is a corner case, and is the computer owner's fault anyway. What kind of "security" is disabling copy-and-paste? Sounds like a political problem to me. Copy-and-paste has been a standard system feature on every computer since before the world wide web was mainstream (mid-1990s).

  I also note that someone has submitted a rename request on this file, with a false rename reason number. It's extremely bad etiquette, and possibly against policy, to try to end-run around a discussion (like this one) already in progress, in hopes that someone will claim the issue is moot now even though it isn't. I'm striking the previous sentence, because it appears that the user was told above to use {{Rename}} and may not be experienced enough to know that we don't "just do" things while they are controversial and in the middle of a discussion. --Closeapple (talk) 23:58, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

A Problem I have no idea how to Fix.

When I first joined Wikipedia, I was unaware of Commons and uploaded pictures to Wikipedia instead. I have just discovered this picture, which I uploaded on Wikipedia during those early days. However my name is not anywhere to be seen on the file. I don't have a clue how to prove its my picture or how to approach the editor who has uploaded it onto commons. I do not want to copyright the picture, but having my name as the source of the image would be good. Wiki ian 11:35, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

The log at en.wikipedia shows that you uploaded the file before it was uploaded to nl.wikipedia. Therefore, I would presume that the uploader at nl.wikipedia wrongfully claimed authorship or that the authorship information was lost in the process of transferring the file to Commons. You could ask the deleting admin (en:User:Quadell) to compare the license, authorship and date of the deleted file and the file at Commons, which they should have done before deleting, anyhow. --rimshot^talk 12:06, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the help. Unfortunately, (en:User:Quadell) has not responded to my request. Are there any other alternatives? Wiki ian 23:22, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

You certainly can correct the information on the description page (author, date, etc., everything that should be changed). The EXIF data matches that of your other files of the same era and there's no reason why anyone who is aware of the situation should doubt your word. The problem is the messy transfer information that remains associated with this file from its upload history, which may complicate the task every time someone would want to verify the origin of the file and the validity of the informations in the future. I suppose that one way to get rid of the confusing upload history, if that's what you're asking, could be to copy the file (if you haven't kept a copy), request the speedy deletion of the file from Commons (you might link to this discussion for a rationale) and reupload the file to Commons. I don't know if the sysops would find that request acceptable or not, but you can give it a try. -- Asclepias (talk) 01:05, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

That seems quite reasonable, have it deleted by an admin who is online at the same time as ian, and then ian uploads it again immediately, fills the file page in howsoever he wishes, and copy this conversation to the file talkpage, OR refer to this conversation in an OTRS ticket so that it can be checked when necessary, and has the appropriate air of legitimacy, without the ugly history. On the file page he may wish to fill in his original upload place and date to finish it off. Penyulap ☏ 01:40, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Likely, the nl.wp user copy-pasted the PD-self tag, without care to do the necessary adaptations to fix the misleading result on nl.wp. And then a Commons uploader copied that wrong result from nl.wp to Commons. (Since then, the PD-self template has been deleted from nl.wp [4].) -- Asclepias (talk) 01:05, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

June 09

Proposal to enable Help:Gadget-HotCat for all logged users

Hi, please see COM:VPP#Enabling HotCat for all logged users ?. Jean-Fred (talk) 15:26, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Scripts broken

Hotcat, category [+] expansion and other scripts don't work for me. Firefox 21, Monobook skin.

Webconsole:

[18:57:53.057] SyntaxError: syntax error @ http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki%2CSpinner%7Cjquery.triggerQueueCallback%2CloadingSpinner%2CmwEmbedUtil%7Cmw.MwEmbedSupport&only=scripts&skin=monobook&version=20130527T163243Z:129
[18:57:54.303] ReferenceError: importScript is not defined @ http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-GalleryDetails.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&73936509:21
[18:57:54.339] ReferenceError: mw is not defined @ http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=site&only=scripts&skin=monobook&*:1
[18:57:54.370] ReferenceError: mw is not defined @ http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=user&only=scripts&skin=monobook&user=MKFI&version=20130113T094102Z&*:1
[18:57:54.401] ReferenceError: mw is not defined @ http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=user.groups&skin=monobook&user=MKFI&version=20130527T164124Z&*:1

Anyone else having problems? MKFI (talk) 16:02, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, MPF had and {{Purge client cache}} resolved the issue. -- Rillke^(q?) 18:18, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

I've got the same problem and the reaload doesn't cure it. I'm using FireFox 21 and Cologne.JIrate (talk) 21:45, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

In Firefox, you can press Ctrl+⇧ Shift+del. In the first control (the select element, on top), select all, then make sure only to check the cache checkbox in the details (remove other checkmarks!). -- Rillke^(q?) 22:11, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Done that no joy.JIrate (talk) 22:47, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Just logged on on a public machine. Not working here either IE 8. Has mediaWiki been upgrded recently? One of the devleopers has a tendency to remove features he cannot see the point of without telling anyone. JIrate (talk) 18:12, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Cache purging fixed things for me. MKFI (talk) 19:04, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

It just seems to be on Cologne Blue.JIrate (talk) 19:35, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Acually any ski other than the default and HotCat for example does not work.JIrate (talk) 19:47, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

User:Flickr upload bot

This bot often seems to fail these days, leaving a reviewed file information page with no image. I've added the ones I've found to Category:Image pages created for Flickr upload bot without files. Does anyone have a clue about what's wrong?

The files can be repaired by manually uploading them from Flickr and then requesting {{Flickrreview}}. --Stefan4 (talk) 20:22, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, I tried this with two images and upload gets interrupted by an identical duplicate message. I assume the others are similar (or the usual embedded HTML code). Bryan probable needs to optimize the Bot further so the images are checked for duplicates prior to filepage creation. --Denniss (talk) 07:29, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Did it identify the duplicate? Sometimes the image gets uploaded to a separate file with no text, in that case the simple fix is to copy the text from the imageless page to the one with the image. Dankarl (talk) 14:39, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

June 10

Error generating thumbnail

I requested to rename a file. After it is renamed to Jangmi 2008-09-27 0445Z.jpg, all thumbnails of the file are broken. I have tried to purge but became in vain. However, nobody has ever replaced the file. -- Meow 02:14, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Deleted + undeleted and it's back again. Some kind of corruption during the move. --Denniss (talk) 07:21, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Question on rules on getting hi-res images for Commons

Got a few questions on getting hi-res images for the Commons. Hopefully they can all be answered:

1. Is it troublesome if I got permission from the person responsible for the hi-res image via Flickr on Flickrmail? I e-mailed the permission and yet, I was told to forward the stuff via e-mail. My problem is most of the time, the persons responsible for the image don't have any other contact e-mail aside from the FlickrMail.

2. Is there a different procedure in getting permission from an editor of a photo, especially if it's not on Flickr? I haven't done this yet and I want to know if it's any different. Especially if I need to upload before I send the permission to the appropriate e-mail with the OTRS ticket thing.

3. If I have the chance to get permission for an image prior to upload to Commons (Using this as an example and this image as another example), do I have to upload the image even though it has watermarks on it or do I have to wait for a proper image without them?

4. There may be a point that I need to get a hi-res image from someone in a related forum as a last resort (such as a gallery or maybe a post, I don't know). Looking at this for example, does the license need to be Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0?

Ominae (talk) 03:42, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not entirely expert on this (especially your first question) but here is my attempt at an answer:

1. I presume that you could copy-paste forward the FlickrMail per OTRS. If the OTRS people have doubts, I presume they could contact the Flickr user to verify.

2. I'm not sure what you mean by "the editor of a photo" but if they are a copyright holder of any sort, then the procedure would be the same.

3. You can upload with watermarks and mark with {{Watermark}}. Obviously, if you get a cleaner copy later, you can upload the better version to the same filename.

4. As for any other photo on Commons, the license needs to be an acceptable license. Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 is certainly acceptable; is there another you'd rather use? As long as it meets the specified criteria, it could be a different license. - Jmabel ! talk 15:41, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

For 2, I may have to get a hi-res photo from a non-flickr site. When I say editor, he/she would be the copyright holder of the said photo. As for 4, I have no problem if ShareAlike 3.0 is okay. It's just finding out which licese is alright. Thanks. 121.54.44.135 16:04, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

About the text in File:Licensing tutorial en.svg

In File:Licensing tutorial en.svg the statement that a work should usually be over 150 years old to be PD is a bit exaggerated. 150 year old works from EU and US are always PD. The text in parentheses could perhaps be replaced with "usually: author died over 70 years ago". There could be also one green box more that would explain shortly that EU-works are always PD 70 years pma (well, almost always (URAA)) and pre-1923 US-works are too always PD. /á^(!) 08:57, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Not almost always; works by authors who died after 1926 from long term life+70 countries are not PD in the US unless they were published before 1923, which is important for Commons. I object to "usually: author died over 70 years ago"; by population, the largest counties in the world are China, India, the US and Indonesia which are life+50, life+60, its own mess, and life+50 respectively. Perhaps just "varies depending on the source nation, life of author and date of publication; see COM:L."--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:41, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Would "Author died over 70 years ago, and published before 1923 (not France, Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Samoa). For other cases see COM:L." be a good text? In this case the work is always PD, as far as I have understood. The text have to be short but still contain as much information as possible. In most cases the user would see already from this text that the work is PD, and at least the text is way more informing than the 150 years -text. /á^(!) 14:06, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Changed the text. Feel free to make it better. /á^(!) 16:31, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Add Spain and remove Mexico, please. Spain is 80 years p.m.a. for authors who died before 7 December 1987. Mexico is 100 years p.m.a., but because of old laws, works are in the public domain in Mexico if the author died more than 30 years before 1982, so {{PD-old-70}} currently holds in Mexico, and this will remain the case for more than half a decade. --Stefan4 (talk) 13:49, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Dating old postcards

Often there is no clue as to the date of the picture, not even a posting date. I notice that some old postcards have the warning:

Not all countries accept messages on the back side of a postcard. Or in French: Tous les Pays étrangers n'acceptent pas de la Correspondance au recto (Se renseigner a la Poste)

This message I only notice on pre World War I postcards. Is there some cut off date when such messages are no longer necessary? This would be usefull in dating.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:35, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Sounds strange to me. If, for instance, a US postcard is from 1922 according to the message, I don't understand why the message would not be accepted as a "proof" of date. Is there a court decision in some country where the message was not accepted as "proof"? /á^(!) 14:17, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

• á, I believe you've misunderstood the question. ST is saying that there was a period where this was routinely printed on postcards, and if we can know when this was commonly done, that might be a help in dating those postcards. - Jmabel ! talk 15:43, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

One thing is the date when the postcard was printed/manufactored, another is the date when the photo(s) used to illustrate the postcard was taken (obviously earlier, but could be much earlier), and finally something else is the date the postcard was written and mailed — the latter is obviously the latest date, and often easy to pinpoint via the sender’s own dating and/or the postal date stamp. That notice about «correspondance au recto» to make a postcard UPU compliant allows to date the manufactoring date of a postcard, but it is still possible that printers would keep adding it to their postcards a coupole years past the time it was not mandatory/accurate any longr, as well as, maybe, some postcards may have been manufactored without that notice, maybe those not intended for foreign correspondance, or by simple oversight. -- Tuválkin ✉ 01:33, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Dating postcards is not exact - unless you have both sides when there is almost always a postmark - or if the message has a date. But there are some pretty good rules of thumb, e.g. if you have an "undivided back" card, it is almost certainly before 1907. Note that postcards are always "published" - none were produced as a one-off to sit in somebody's personal album. They were also generally not copyrighted (need both sides) See en:Wikipedia and Tips for determining when a U.S. postcard was published. Smallbones (talk) 02:00, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

For date of creation (needed for {{PD-Australia}}, {{PD-Sweden-photo}} and similar templates), check what buildings you see, if there are buildings on the photo. Are there recent buildings missing from the postcard? Are there demolished buildings which are present on it?

Date of publication is more tricky. If you have access to the back of the postcard, and if there's a dated letter there, then it must obviously have been published before the letter was written. --Stefan4 (talk) 13:54, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Check if a page is in a supercategory

Is there a quick way to check if a particular page on commons is in a particular parent category. I have a set of WikimediaCommons URLs, pointing to images of animals. I want to check which of these are in Category:Animal_distribution_maps (i.e. are not photographs, but maps).

I'm not sure, but it's possible I need something like the "article categories" list provided by catgraph but not outputting a plot, just a plaintext list of supercategories which I can check against. Having an upper limit > 100 categories would be useful too.

HYanWong (talk) 15:39, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Amsterdam Museum CC-BY-SA 3.0

Picture from Amsterdam Museum, CC-BY-SA-3.0

Happily surprised I happened to note that the collection of Amsterdam Museum has got the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence. This applies to photographs of objects (including 3D objects, like the nice marble portret) as well as text. I uploaded one or two images today, but perhaps this could better be done by some bot! It is a great collection of the history of Amsterdam, not only paintings but lots of objects.

Link to the website: http://am.adlibhosting.com/amonline/search.aspx

Regards to you all, Elly (talk) 15:54, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Through automated translation, I tried to read the Gebruiksvoorwaarden (terms of use) section of the page Collectie van het Amsterdam Museum online, but the result of the automated translation is not good. Could you please confirm what that section says and if it applies to the images? Does it say that they have withdrawn the CC license offer until further notice? (... hebben wij als tijdelijke maatregel de Creative Commons licentie teruggetrokken. Etc.) Is that not a problem? Also, they place an icon «public domain» that links to CC-by-sa. It all seems confusing. -- Asclepias (talk) 16:25, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I didn't read that. I saw the CC-BY-SA 3.0 on every page and picture. I will translate the terms of use, as far as my English permits:

Gebruiksvoorwaarden

Terms of use

Het Amsterdam Museum streeft ernaar om zoveel mogelijk afbeeldingen onder de Creative Commons Licentie Naamsvermelding / Gelijk delen vrij te geven. Wij waren van mening dat wij voor alle door ons gepubliceerde werken goede afspraken met de rechthebbenden hadden gemaakt. We zijn onlangs benaderd door een partij die dit bestrijdt. Om te voorkomen dat wij ten onrechte rechten vrij geven, hebben wij als tijdelijke maatregel de Creative Commons licentie teruggetrokken.

The Amsterdam Museum has the intention to free as many images as possible under the CC-BY-SA licence. We were of the opinion that we have made good agreements with the "owners" (like photographers or other others, Elly) of each work. However, a little while ago we have been in contact with some party who is disagreeing on this point. In order to prevent us to give a free licence not in agreement with the "owners" we have temporarily decied to revoke the CC licence.

Om technische redenen lukt het ons niet om onderscheid te maken tussen omstreden en onomstreden werken. Wij zullen zo snel mogelijk alle werken waar wij zeker van zijn, weer vrijgeven. Tot die tijd vragen wij u, als u een werk wilt gebruiken, contact met ons op te nemen (emailadres). Wij zoeken dan voor u uit of wij dit werk vrij kunnen geven. Zonder deze toestemming kunt u de afbeelding helaas niet gebruiken. Alle tekst bij de werken kunt u vrij gebruiken.

Due to technical reasons, we are unable to distinguish between controversial and not-controversial works. We will relicence as soon as possible all works which we are sure of. Until this time, we ask, if you want to use a work, to get into touch (email adress). We will find out for you whether we can give the work free (under CC-BY-SA). Without this permission we regret to say you may not use the work. All text, however, is free for use.

Note: this is extremely friendly, you can read in between the lines that they are regretting what has happened. I hope it will be solved soon. The latest update of this page is from 20 februari 2013. If somebody thinks it is usefull I could e-mail the museum to ask for a planning. I could do that if somebody plans to make an automated upload. Elly (talk) 18:02, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it would certainly be very useful if somebody would contact the museum and and ask some news about what is going on with this situation and if they have an idea of when it might be sorted out. Because, in the present state of their website, with the weird "public-domain-CC-by-sa" tag still confusingly hanging on some pages, and considering in particular the interdiction stated in their terms of use, which is meant to contradict and trump any offer of a CC license, we cannot reasonably copy and keep images from there in good faith. To conform to the present terms of use, we should ask and obtain from them a specific clearance by OTRS for each image that we want to bring on Commons. If we are interested in a large number of images, that could soon become tiresome (for them, more than for us). For the moment you could ask them to confirm specifically at least if the images you have already uploaded have a CC license or not. -- Asclepias (talk) 13:47, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

June 11

IRS Star Trek Parody

• IRS Star Trek Parody

Would this be public domain licensed as a product of the United States federal government? -- Cirt (talk) 04:06, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this work is public domain. However, it also incorporates copyrighted and trademarked material. A public domain work can still infringe on the rights of others depending on how it is used. It may be the case that the government itself is infringing on someone's rights by distributing this, but in any case, because it incorporates copyrighted music and trademarked logos it does not meet Wikimedia Commons guidelines for sharing here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:24, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Couldn't those be seen as de minimis compared to the scope of the entire work itself? -- Cirt (talk) 03:14, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

NASA images from Voyager National Air and Space Laserdisc 5 and 6

Hello everybody.

I'd like to bulk upload a large number of NASA images (i.e. public domain) that are archived on a couple of Laserdiscs (see here) (approx 120k images). Doing this manually will probably take the rest of my natural life. The images will be limited to TV resolution (720 x 480), and I will probably upload as PNGs.

Some of content of the discs is likely replicated elsewhere online, but I believe that there are a lot of images here that aren't available on the web. For example, the early Ranger program, I think we have about 10-30 images currently uploaded. I found approx 600 here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/ranger/ but the disc has approx 1,400. I believe other programs covered, Surveyor, Lunar Orbitor, Apollo, X-15, Space Shuttle, will also include images not otherwise available online.

I have several questions:

• Any objections ?
• Does anyone have a utility or perl/python script to pull out video frames from a uncompressed AVI as PNGs ?
• Does anyone have a script for bulk uploading, adding categorization, etc ?
• Do I need bot permissions to execute such an upload ?, if so is it easier to get someone to do it (volunteers ?)

Megapixie (talk) 07:46, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

• It's 720x480, but those aren't square pixels. PNG supports non-square pixels in theory, but the standard explicitly states that viewers don't have to support them correctly. They're 4:3, so you can store them as 640x480 or 720x540.

Extracting them isn't too hard; if nothing else, mplayer can dump to PNG as video out. It's going to you the video feed, which I'm guessing offers each picture for some length of screen time (and number of frames), and someone is going to have to figure out which of several very similar but with different analog noise to upload. I don't know how bad the noise on the original Laserdisc was.

I'd recommend you upload the AVIs to the Internet Archive. That's the easiest way of making it available to everyone here to poke at, and they've got a much easier way to deal with large video files then we do.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:27, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

• You can also use en:FFmpeg to easily extract single images from a video. E.g. the command ffmpeg -i inputfile.avi -r 1 -f image2 image-%4d.png will extract one image per second (-r 1) to numbered filenames starting from image-0000.png. You can omit the -r parameter to extract every image from the video. There are a multitude of other options (start/end point of extraction, output resolution, etc.) to tune it to your needs.

Regarding noise: If the images are shown for some time, one could do some temporal noise filtering across those frames to greatly improve quality without loosing resolution.--Patrick87 (talk) 09:34, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

I believe choosing the images to upload rather than breaking videos and uploading them is a lot better. Commons accepts videos, maybe you can upload both the archive and your own selections from it. The NASA repositories of images are next-to-impossible to navigate and find what you want, A similar collection on commons wouldn't be as useful as a properly chosen and categorised collection. Penyulap ☏ 19:51, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Confirmation of PD status of these publicly-available NSA pictures

I found a collection of publicly-available pictures from the NSA in its official Photo Gallery:

• http://www.nsa.gov/about/photo_gallery/index.shtml

Is it safe to assume they were made by the agency? WhisperToMe (talk) 08:04, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'd think so. Many of them seem to be pictures of the NSA's museum. Carl Lindberg (talk) 13:48, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Upload a new version of this file

I want to upload a new version of this file because we have a special logo tomorrow.But i can't upload:"This page is currently protected from editing because it is transcluded in the following pages, which are protected with the "cascading" option enabled:".who can help me before tomorrow?--DannyChan (talk) 14:34, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

• We are UTC +8 ， 45 mins(22:45) → tomorrow (12:00 a.m) NOW!!--DannyChan (talk) 14:45, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

If no native Chinese speaker steps by, you'll have to point to a relevant discussion at zh-wiki that this change is authorized. Also, this is a request for COM:AN but if it is urgent, please ask at #wikimedia-commons ^webchat -- Rillke^(q?) 15:04, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

How to make an image file more searchable

I can't figure out how to link the image file I uploaded to a page. It would be great if files became more searchable by including words in their discription in the search engine. That way, people could find a file by Google searching a phrase relating to its description even if there are no pages that link to it. -- 21:41, 11 June 2013‎ User:Blackbombchu

That capability is the norm, I'm not sure what problem you are having; maybe just delay in getting your description into the search data. I linked the wp article you mentioned, you can look at the syntax in edit mode to see how. You could probably add a more informative description of what you have done and what it illustrates. Dankarl (talk) 22:00, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

I also added category:Mathematical diagrams. You should move it to an appropriate subcategory and check to see where else it should go. Dankarl (talk) 22:05, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

June 12

Photos on order

I want to upload a photograph of my own. But as it is mine, i have asked a cousin of mine to click the snap. In this case, the photograph is taken on my order. Won't i be able to release the photo under any license that i want? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 06:15, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

In such cases where someone else press the button to take a picture I envisioned and set up, I provided two authors and used license of my choosing after informing my coauthor. --Jarekt (talk) 12:47, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

I also have heard of this response and this works, but there is no clear answer to the ownership question in this case. It is best to mention all creators. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:23, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Usually, the person who presses the button on the camera is the photographer and holds the copyright. However, you can create a contract with your cousin that says he is assigning the copyright to you. This is very usual for businesses whose employees are hired to take pictures.

(About the "usually": if you do everything about creating the image except physically pressing the button—choosing the place, arranging the items in it, setting up the lighting, choosing the camera angles, etc.—so that the contribution of the person pressing the button is no more than you would get from a machine that pressed the button when you couldn't reach it, then you are the author and you own the copyright already.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:16, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

The second paragraph might be true in some jurisdictions for an inanimate subject with artificial -- constant -- lighting -- but for any situation where the subject could move, smile, frown, tilt his head, or whatever, then the person who pushes the button is clearly the copyright holder. The creativity lies in pushing the button at the right moment, not in the setup.

With that understood, we are generally willing to accept an image taken by a friend or relative as "own work" if it is going to be used on a User Page and not likely anywhere else..     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 21:40, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

So are you saying that if Cindy Sherman had someone else physically click the shutter, that shutter-clicker would be entitled to the copyright on the work? Because I doubt any court would agree with that. - Jmabel ! talk 23:59, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

The point is moot, because you know as well as I that anyone who pushes the button for Cindy Sherman has a work for hire agreement in place. But yes, that's exactly what I am saying. In portrait photography, pushing the button at exactly the right moment is certainly more than half of the creative effort in the photograph. At the very least, in the absence of a work for hire agreement, it would be a joint work between the person who set up the shot and the person who pushed the button. .     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 10:14, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

My point wasn't about Sherman as an individual. If I've set up a photo of myself -- costuming, positioning, etc. -- and I use someone as basically a human tripod and autotimer because I don't have a tripod with me, I absolutely will claim copyright. - Jmabel ! talk 15:21, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

And I mention two people as authors. --Jarekt (talk) 03:25, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Two images

Could someone fix these two images: File:US Army 51027 EFMP energizes exceptional education.jpg and File:US Army 51035 Leaders tackle tough issue.jpg. User:Armbrust (Local talk - en.Wikipedia talk) 09:16, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Request added at Commons:Graphic_Lab/Photography_workshop#Two_images. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 09:47, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Newbie

What easy software can i use to alter a map? I'm a complete newbie so give me somthing simple. I'm specifically talking about this one. For instance Senegal and Chad are majority Sufi. Indonesia and Kazakhstan are majority non-denominational. I don't mind if someone else fixes it. Pass a Method (talk) 16:31, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

• It's a PNG, so you could edit a copy in almost any graphics program. For something like this, even a minimal program like Microsoft Paint would do the job. The "king" of free graphics programs is GIMP, but I can't really call that simple.
• Whichever program you would use, you would download the full-res image to your computer, edit it there, and upload the altered version. - Jmabel ! talk 00:02, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
  • I'd suggest that you just use whatever you used when you assembled File:16 religionist symbols.png. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 03:53, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
    • I would suggest that he not use that program, or learn a lot more about how it works, because as previously used by him it seems to give semi-strange results... AnonMoos (talk) 07:42, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Pass a Method -- Sufi and "non-denominational" are not generally-recognized maðahib. Traditionally among Sunnis, the term maðhab as shown on the map refers more to the norms used by local legal scholars or judges, than to people's sect or denomination affiliation as such... AnonMoos (talk) 07:20, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

June 13

cutoff date (old) per country for anonymous pictures

I normaly use the EU-anonymous tag for European postcards, but perhaps there are exceptions. Is there a list? There is documentation for FoP cases. I am looking for Portugal. Smiley.toerist (talk) 08:46, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

If the photographer is anonymous and it was published more than 70 years ago, then it should be in the public domain in the entire European Union with possibly two exceptions:

• French law extends copyright if the photographer died for France in certain wars. No idea if this also applies to anonymous photos. I hope not since it would otherwise be impossible to know whether any photo is OK or not as you can't easily tell how an anonymous photographer died.
• German law might require that the anonymous photographer died more than 70 years ago if the photo is an artistic photo according to the old German copyright law, assuming that the photo was taken before 1 July 1995.
• Spanish law might require that the anonymous photographer died more than 80 years ago if the anonymous photographer died before 7 December 1987. If the anonymous photographer died on 7 December 1987 or later, then 70 years from publication is enough.

For URAA matters, the cutoff date is different in different EU countries. In Italy, Poland, Slovenia and the Nordic countries, you will find that lots of more recent postcards already are in the public domain. There must of course also not be any FOP issues with the photos. --Stefan4 (talk) 14:12, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

June 14

Americanocentric category names?

Are there any strong views for keeping Category:Hispanic? I believe the word "Hispanic" is being used in a way that is only really meaningful for Americans, living in Europe this makes far less sense to me. If we wanted a category for Spanish speaking people, or the Spanish (or those who culturally identify as Spanish, Mexican, Bolivian etc.), this would be a different and better defined grouping. If you examine the current contents of this category it appears a somewhat incoherent mish-mash and might even be construed as offensive by some of the living people arbitrarily categorized this way.

I believe this example category is part of a general bias in language use on Commons to American naming styles.

I welcome alternative views, not being American, Spanish or a Spanish speaking person myself. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 11:09, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps it could be changed to "Hispanic Americans" or "Latino Americans". Kaldari (talk) 21:18, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Commons is broken…

… volume 123456789, delivered to you by your friendly Wikipedia Signpost. (Consider this a heads–up note.) odder (talk) 11:52, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Today's lead essay by Gigs, "The Tragedy of Wikipedia's commons" is an interesting but highly critical article about Commons written very much from an English Wikipedia perspective. Comments and responses can be posted in the comments section below the article, but I'd recommend that anyone who feels annoyed should first take a deep breath, count to 10, and re-read the essay Staying Mellow before responding. Remember that it's not in the interests of the Wikimedia movement as a whole to get into public arguments, nor would it be good for Commons' reputation as a thoughtful place that tries hard to avoid drama. Ultimately, we all have the same free content aims (don't we?). Let's export mellowness to the English Wikipedia! --MichaelMaggs (talk) 13:16, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Michael, considering your long background in developing policy underpinning Commons, perhaps you could consider a mellow Op-ed piece of your own for the en.wp Signpost? We could feature it here too. It seems a sad fact of life that some Wikipedians are unlikely to express their critical views about Commons in a cooperative way on Commons any-time soon, preferring the grandstanding opportunity that Signpost and Jimmy's en.wp talk page offer. --Fæ (talk) 13:23, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi Fae, Beat you to it! I've already suggested that to the editor. Anyone is free to comment on the suggestion at en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Opinion desk#Submissions. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 13:39, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not, they still don't like people who can count past eight. Penyulap ☏ 19:45, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, I read the article and I'd like that three minutes of my life back please ;) Penyulap ☏ 20:10, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Bug report - category modification

(technical discussion ahead - sorry...)

I've modified the Template:ACClicense so that the "Ancient Chinese Characters" pictures with no decomposition be indexed under the Category:ACC needing decomposition. It works, kind of, insofar as the pictures with no decomposition are indeed categorized under the correct category - BUT - that category remains empty, though there should be ~ a thousand pictures concerned.

When I force the edit of a picture without decomposition falling in that new category (blank edit with no modification), the file itself remains as is, but the category is correctly updated and takes it into account. Honestly, I'm in no mood to make a blank edit on ~ a thousand files since that should be automated...

Apparently, there is somewhere a "modified" flag that indicates that something must be updated following an edition, that works for the files, including when files categories are modified by a template change (that may changes the categorization). But this modification flag does not reach the files categories, when file categories are modified by a template change that simply changes the categorization. The files hit by the template are obviously set by a "modified" flag, but when that modification alters the categorization, it is not taken into account : the modified file should be recategorized (modification propagation when the modified file is a template), which is obviously not the case.

1. Is this a known bug, have I missed something obvious I should have known for the change to work correctly ?
2. If this is indeed a new bug to be reported, can somebody link me to the place it should be posted (I'm lost) or (or course, preferentially) transfer this message to the relevant authority ?

Thanks in advance, Michelet-密是力 (talk) 17:45, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

When you add a category to a template that is used in a lot of pages, instead of fixing the categories for all the pages right away (which would take a long time), the template gets added to a list of things that need to have their [category] links refreshed. A different server is constantly going through the things on this list. Sometimes this list gets a little long (currently for commons there is roughly 13858 things on the list). Note that refreshlinks jobs are handled separately from HTMLCacheUpdate jobs, so adding things to a category is done separately from making the page look updated. So it may be the servers just haven't gotten to it yet. (Although you made the edit on the 11th, which is quite a while, so maybe their really is a bug). Bawolff (talk) 20:59, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Commons:We miss you

Thanks to User:Túrelio Commons has now an equivalent to en:Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians. Feel free to add appropriate usernames to the list and link to this site from the right places within the commons and help namespace. --Isderion (talk) 22:22, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Global Replace Tool

File:GlobalReplace 0.1a.png

User:Fastily/GlobalReplace

Hi everyone, I have created a new tool to assist filemovers in the field of cross-wiki renames. Please help me test it!  :) -FASTILY 23:48, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Can you make a java webstart version (like Commons:Commonist#Easiest_way)? --Isderion (talk) 00:03, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Ugh I hate playing with XML. I'll try later. -FASTILY 00:23, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

June 15

Juicy drama!

Bait and switch: could I get some advice on uploading a large number of images?

I have a CD of about 300 high quality scans of the De re metallica woodcuts. They are intrinsically artistic as well as being pretty important in the history of science (we end up using them on many mining/metallurgy articles at Wiki).

Right now, Commons has about 60 of the illustrations, so we are missing the bulk of them. Also, they are pretty disorganized (can't tell from what part of book, etc. and vary in source, quality etc. [But don't worry, I will leave them be...some have reasons for being duplicates (e.g. original editions) or cropped or the like. (possibly a few are even superior scans.)

Help needed:

1. What I want to do is set up a category for this whole set of scans, with subcategories by "book" (i.e. chapter). I have them in numerical order from the manuscript. Am I allowed to make categories and the like (e.g. one of those little article-lite pages) or do I need some admin powerz?

P.s. We can worry about merging the other images into the subcategories later (I'm indifferent).

2. I want to do the bulk uploads of the images and some boilerplate for sourcing and the like. 300 separate operations of the upload wizard would be insane. Which tool should I use (I am computer stupid!)? Or should someone help me? Also, is JPEG or Gif preferred (I have separate CDs of each, the GIF has more detail I think...)

Afterwards: I plan to go through and annotate all the images with a little extra information (e.g. page number of the book, description of the engineering aspect). It will be a really sweet project when the whole set is up.

TCO (talk) 00:16, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Set up the categories however you like. If it makes it easier for you to organize the files, then do it. Simple batch uploads? Try my tool: Commons:Up!. It supports chunked uploading and was designed with batch uploads in mind. JPG > GIF, because JPG supports some million plus colors while GIF supports only 256. Of course, it'd be nice to have both versions :] Good luck, FASTILY 00:26, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

My suggestions:

1. Add generic stuff at the moment of the upload, to save work — namely a bagging category "De re metallica illustrations from So-&-so"; others can be added later, especially those that break up the "De re metallica" material by chapter/theme.
2. Number of colors is irrelevant, as greyscale, even in JPG, goes from 0 to 255; these are monochrome illustrations (xylogravures, yes?), any color in them is an artifact (of course some artifacts can be interesting). The drawback of the JPG is that it is lossy, so I’d go for GIF — ideally converted to TIFF or PNG before uploading, as Commons wants GIFs restricted to animated ones. (Your CD’s GIFs may be however derived from the JPGs, a common mistake; pls look out for any compression artifacts, even in the GIFs.)

This seems to be an interesting project indeed! -- Tuválkin ✉ 00:57, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Not many people know about high quality GIF's, which don't have limitations to the number of colours the way most gif's we come across seem to. They have lots of colours. Penyulap ☏ 01:12, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

After reading en:GIF, I learned that I already knew most of what’s to be known about this file format. Your «high quality GIF's» seem to be, although not exactly non-existent, too unusual to be considered here. Either way, monochrome originals can (and should) be scanned and stored as monochrome images, which in turn are perfectly suited to be saved as «most gif's we come across». -- Tuválkin ✉ 17:53, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

I want to try uploading the stuff, but it seems like the instructions for categories say you have to already have an image up to create a category? Is that right or can I make them before?

I think I figured it out. Did a sort of workaround with another image temporarily.TCO (talk) 04:36, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Maybe you could upload a sample: One of the GIFs and the corresponding JPEG so the graphics experts can have a look. --McZusatz (talk) 08:08, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

If you want to create a category, the simplest way is to add it (rather its name) to a file or another category (which will be a subcat of the new cat), let it show up in red, and then click the red link and fill it out with the new cat’s content (which should be at least one parent category). -- Tuválkin ✉ 17:53, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

UploadWizard should work better in Opera and Chrome since today

Bugs 48091 and 49550 have been fixed and the fixes are deployed to Commons. This means Opera and Chrome users should be seeing the same interface as the rest of us. Please continue to diligently report bugs here and at Bugzilla, and thanks for flying Wikimedia Air. --MarkTraceur (talk) 01:58, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

The project can't be a tool for tools, or can it?

If an image which perfectly meets the requirements of scope is uploaded, but the subject of the image turns out to feel bullied by that image, shouldn't one policy over-ride the other, so that as a precaution we remove the image while respecting it would otherwise be acceptable, or at least do that in cases where there is a clear consensus that the image can fall into both categories, that it is notable, but there is also a consensus that it is unacceptable because it could be considered an attack ? Penyulap ☏ 11:31, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a very theoretical issue. Let’s wait for an actual case to come up, shall we? Jean-Fred (talk) 14:03, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, it's a simple current case. The only person that commons won't 'attack' is Jimmy, why the f*** can't we make it scope that we don't attack _anyone_ or at the very least, not attack a few more people, groups, how about a few minorities ? can we manage one minority out of this ? Commons:Deletion requests/File:Jimmy Wales by Pricasso.jpg why does Jimmy get the special treatment that everyone should get ? Penyulap ☏ 17:41, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree. If something applies to Jimbo, it should apply to everyone. As I said in the discussion there, I don't see any sign of that as yet. These e.g. are clearly more gratuitous attack images than Pricasso's penis-painted portrait of Jimbo, with considerably less artistic and educational merit. Deleting Pricasso's work of Jimbo while being happy to host those files strikes me as the height of hypocrisy. I suspect the general public might share that impression. Andreas JN466 20:39, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Awesome, then let's delete the gratuitous attack images that aren't artistic or educational. Problem solved! :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:30, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

well, if you're serious, then help us draft a policy rather than say it in a manner that may imply it's a joke. Penyulap ☏ 21:41, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your offer of help. You could start with this one: File:Santorum_spelled_with_santorum.jpg and most other images in that category. Unlike Pricasso, the "artist" in this case is not notable in any way, and the artistic merit is zero. Let's see if there is the will to apply this idea to other people than Jimbo. Andreas JN466 22:00, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

That is absolutely disgusting and I wish I hadn't looked. There are things you can't un-see.

Policy should start with a suggestion, like, for example, if 25% of people believe an image is an attack image, then it should be deleted. Add a three person minimum, point out the discussion should be the file talkpage or a DR, and that's the basis for a policy.

25% may be a little low, but if the grounds upon which they object are clearly articulated, and an appropriate minimum number of objections is defined, that should be an acceptable policy for the community. Penyulap ☏ 22:13, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a job for... the Commons

"Giving away an archive of modern art" (International Herald Tribune, 6 June 2013, p. 10): "Help yourself to D. James Dee's luscious, sprawling photographic archive of the modern New York art scene. He has about 250,000 color transparencies and slides, ranging in size from 35 milimeter to 8 by 10 inches, documenting the work of almost every important artist of the past 40 years and installations at some of the most influential galleries. And, yes, he's giving them away. All you'll need is a truck large enough to hold 65 cardboard file boxes. It would help if you represent a nonprofit organization, because Mr. Dee hopes to receive a tax deduction for donating his life's work. But that's not a deal breaker. You should, however, be conversant with modern American art history. Really conversant. Almost none of the transparencies and slides are labeled. ... The National Gallery of Art, Getty Images, and the Fales Library and Special Collections of New York University have declined his offer, Mr. Dee said. ... 'At some point,' Mr. Dee said, 'I've got to get a Dumpster to put them in.' He sounded very sad. And quite serious."

Sounds like a job for the Commons! (Though I realize that photographs of the artworks themselves would not be suitable for the Commons until their copyright has expired.) — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 11:38, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Could be a nice project for someone/an organization with a bit of handy cool storage space and a few volunteers to categorize and scan the material with the highest public benefit. Maybe a couple of local enthusiasts could work with Mr. Dee to put in a bid for a small grant from m:Grants:Start to ensure these are stored, and at least the risk of having them dumped is removed? A few hundred dollars might make a big difference here to cover a bit of travel and the cost of a reasonable scanner. --Fæ (talk) 12:40, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't sound like a job for Wikimedia Commons to me, for the reason you put in parentheses: it is a "photographic archive of the modern New York art scene". So, Commons has not a lot to gain from this, as probably most of these photos can't be used here due to still being protected by copyright. And why should we laboriously identify the artists and works of unlabeled pictures if they can't be published? I'm not surprised that Getty et al. have declined Mr. Dee's offer, as they of course are very aware of rights isssues. Gestumblindi (talk) 14:24, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

• It does seem an ugly shame just for the sake of storage. Hopefully someone in NYC will fund transport and storage for them in the next couple of weeks. WMF grants would probably be too slow and the copyrights won't do here for decades. Ebay, photography schools, and art museums may be a good solution if they have temporary storage. Cataloguing will be a mess. He will be in FLA but most of those that can ID the shots may be in NYC area.--Canoe1967 (talk) 18:15, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Accessibility Project Ideas - Looking for Contributors

Hi Commons Community,

The nonprofit organization I work with, Benetech has been developing software for over 20 years to make books accessible to all with particular focus on students with print disabilities. Today our most prominent projects are [[5]Bookshare], the world's largest library of accessible eBooks, and the DIAGRAM Center, which is developing open source tools, best practices and standards to solve the accessibility challenges presented by images, diagrams and mathematics across all digital media. Our vision is that when content is born digital, it is born accessible. We are very interested in engaging the Commons community to help us with the following projects:

Accessibility Metadata: We have proposed an extension to Schema.org that will enable users to search for accessible content and quickly assess the accessibility of a web resource. Adoption via MediaWiki and by Commons will encourage formal Schema.org adoption. An example use case is a student or a content creator, such as a teacher creating accessible supplementary materials, may want to find images that have alternative descriptions or videos that are closed-captioned or subtitled. A good way to demonstrate the downside of the lack of this type of accessibility metadata is to compare the below two Google searches for closed-captioned videos about the moon landing filtered by site:

• Limit search to YouTube -> yields numerous results

Example video search filtered by whether it's closed-captioned

• Limit search to Wikimedia Commons -> no results

Open Source Tools for Cross-Platform, Accessible and Performant MathML: At a recent Accessible OER Sprint we identified that the accessibility of math in web pages is a significant issue. MathML is the recommended accessible format for math and Wikipedia is supporting MathML through the use of MathJax, which can be enabled in MediaWiki. Unfortunately, for blind and dyslexic students to listen to MathML they need to use either the proprietary and platform limited MathPlayer plugin or Google Chrome's ChromeVox screenreader, which has limited adoption by blind users. MathJax itself has presented issues due to poor rendering performance, particularly in IE. We would to continue work on the productization of a prototype we built at the recent sprint, which pre-generated accessible SVG images of MathML via server-side application that enabled the server-side execution of MathJax for SVG rendering and ChromeVox for aural rendering. In addition to having images that could be described via a screen reader for blind and dyslexic users, all users of Wikipedia would greatly benefit from higher quality SVG graphics versus the current PNG images.

Wikimedia Commons as a Repository of Accessible Educational Resources: Through the DIAGRAM Center Benetech has been doing a lot of work on accessibility of images and exploring crowdsourcing methods. One of the projects we want to undertake is to create a CC licensed repository of accessible images, with a focus on STEM education, that can be remixed/reused, thus freeing up teachers and disability services specialists from having to recreate these resources themselves. Wikimedia Commons can be this repository. These images could then be tagged with Accessibility Metadata and LRMI metadata to make it easier for educators and publishers to discover them. We would like to apply the methodologies and technologies developed out of the DIAGRAM Center to Wikimedia Commons. For example, we could include a wizard tool to help Commons contributors more effectively describe images. We could also include tools for more easily creating and incorporating SVG graphics that can be printed on tactile and 3D printers. Once media resources were enhanced with accessibility features, we could enable discovery of those media resources via the search features on Commons. We could also partner with Gooru Learning and the Learning RegistryInBloom who have been working with us on indexing Accessibility Metadata in educational resources to index these resources.

Please let us know if you're interested in working with us on this project.

Thank You,

Gerardo Capiel

VP of Engineering, Benetech

-end of comment by (Gerardo Capiel)

• Hi Gerardo, I can make images suitable for use in guides for sighted people to outline what they can do to help. I'm not good with svg, but I am an ok graphics artist. I'd like to help with the images you want on guideline pages. If you click on the green telephone next to my name and write any request on my talkpage I'll be happy to help. Penyulap ☏ 19:07, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

On the subject of math rendering, try sending an email to wikitech-l, you're probably get a better response on that topic there. On the subject of accessible metadata: Are there actually currently existing applications that would use this metadata (I only ask because its not uncommon for people to come out with X new metadata standard which nobody ever uses and then is forgotten about after a couple months)? Currently commons does not support microdata, but that could probably be changed if the people here wanted to use such markup Bawolff (talk) 22:01, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Request for Checkuser rights

This is to inform the community that there is a nomination for Checkuser rights here. It was agreed a couple of years ago that such requests and for Oversight (which are quite rare) should be publicised due to the high level of trust required in users with these rights. Trijnstel_talk 20:38, 15 June 2013 (UTC)