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#	💭 Title	💬	👥	🙋 Last editor	🕒 (UTC)
1	Special:UncategorizedCategories	11	5	Jmabel	2023-12-07 21:58
2	Role accounts	7	5	RZuo	2023-12-01 19:33
3	How to find images added since a given date in a category with multiple sub categories	7	4	RZuo	2023-12-08 09:19
4	Subcategories Rail vehicle doors	9	4	PantheraLeo1359531	2023-12-05 15:23
5	Movement Charter	52	12	Bawolff	2023-12-05 15:58
6	Commons Gazette 2023-12	1	1	RZuo	2023-12-01 12:05
7	Bot to remind uploaders of corrupted files	1	1	RZuo	2023-12-02 14:31
8	CropTool will soon be broken	1	1	Jmabel	2023-12-02 18:01
9	Avoid using video2commons for youtube temporarily	3	3	Draceane	2023-12-05 21:20
10	Importer for Yug	4	2	Yug	2023-12-04 09:04
11	Random deletion of perfectly good files from Gallica	27	6	Jmabel	2023-12-05 18:53
12	Search for filetype among user uploads?	14	5	FunkMonk	2023-12-06 12:49
13	Category:Poland photographs taken on XXXX-XX-XX	7	2	Ymblanter	2023-12-05 10:39
14	The Afrikaans Wikipedia	3	3	Jmabel	2023-12-05 18:57
15	Please, rev del the original photo.	3	2	Ooligan	2023-12-06 01:32
16	Error with SVG translation	2	2	Glrx	2023-12-06 04:34
17	AI images	63	14	FunkMonk	2023-12-08 11:02
18	File:Forms of government 2021.svg dilemma	2	2	Jmabel	2023-12-07 21:40
19	Non-AI generated images with template PD-algorithm	1	1	Polarlys	2023-12-07 17:25
20	Request for conversation / Talking: 2024	1	1	Udehb-WMF	2023-12-07 18:19
21	Request for one file version to be removed	3	2	RobbieIanMorrison	2023-12-07 22:06

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November 26[edit]

Special:UncategorizedCategories[edit]

We now have 2,544 uncategorized (parentless) categories, down from about 8,000 in the beginning of September. At this point, most of the "low-hanging fruit" is taken care of. User:Billinghurst and I have done the bulk of the cleanup, although a few others have also helped in various degrees. We could definintely use more help, most of which does not require an admin as such.

Most of the remaining listings are legitimate categories, with content, but lacking parent categories. They need parent categories and they need incoming interwiki links from any relevant Wikidata item.
- A disproportionate number of these would best be handled by someone who knows Hungarian or Estonian.
Some categories just need to be turned into cat redirects ({{Cat redirect}} and have their content moved accordingly.
A few categories listed here will prove to be fine as they stand; the tool messed up and put them in the list because it didn't correctly understand that a template had correctly given them parent categories. Many of these are right near the front of the (alphabetical) list, and involve dates.
Some categories probably either call for obvious renaming or should be nominated for COM:CFD discussions.
Some empty categories (not a lot of those left, but new ones happen all the time) need to be deleted.
At the end of the alphabetical listing (5th and 6th page) are about 75 categories that have names in non-Latin alphabets. It would be great if people who read the relevant writing systems could help with these. Probably most of these are candidates for renaming.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give. - Jmabel ! talk 03:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm a bit confused about something @Jmabel: I checked the page and some of the categories on there are for example Category:April 2016 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (through 2023), but these were created years ago in some instances and already had parent categories from the start. How do categories like that end up there? ReneeWrites (talk) 02:09, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@ReneeWrites: Insufficient follow-through and patrolling, combined with out of control back end processes. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 02:48, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@ReneeWrites: Actually, in this case this appears to be some sort of flaw in the software that creates the Special page. As I wrote a couple of days ago, "A few categories listed here will prove to be fine as they stand; the tool messed up and put them in the list because it didn't correctly understand that a template had correctly given them parent categories. Many of these are right near the front of the (alphabetical) list, and involve dates." It looks like today's run added a bunch of these false positives and that (unlike the previous bunch) they are more scattered through the list. I believe all of the 100+ files that use Template:Month by year in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté are on today's list; none of these were there three days earlier. That probably has something to do with User:Birdie's edits to yesterday to Template:Month by year in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté; those are complicated enough that I have no idea what in particular might have confused the software. The categories still look fine from a normal user point of view, but the software that creates Special:UncategorizedCategoriesn is somehow confused.

Other than that: we're a couple of hundred fixed or deleted categories closer to where we'd want to be, compared to a couple of days ago. - Jmabel ! talk 04:23, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Server-purges should fix this but apparently it doesn't. Some categories that didn't appear last time after purging the cache have disappeared now so I'm more confused as to what the problem could be since the iirc the refresh time was after some pages were updated (it has problems when pages get all their categories from a template). There should probably be a phrabricator issue about this, albeit it's possible things work fine once there are always just a small number of cats there which seems increasingly feasible. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:35, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jeff G., could you explain what "... out of control back end processes" means, so I can understand your comment? --Ooligan (talk) 16:54, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ooligan: As I understand it, there are processes that run on WMF servers that run too long or get caught up in race conditions or whatever, and that get terminated after running too long. I think updating this special page may be one such process, sometimes. Certainly, updating the read / not read status of stuff on my watchlist seems that way, especially when using this new reply tool. Turning off the big orange bar before displaying my user talk page would be helpful, too. <end rant> — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 19:26, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jeff G., thank you. --Ooligan (talk) 19:44, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ooligan: You're welcome. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 20:11, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Even with those 100 or so "Bourgogne-Franche-Comté" false positives, we are now down to 2079. Again, we could really use help from people who know languages with non-Latin scripts, all of which are grouped toward the end of the list. Also, Hungarian and Estonian, scattered throughout. - Jmabel ! talk 23:08, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Now down to 1905, again including 100+ false positives. Still really need help from people who read Estonian, Hungarian, or languages with non-Latin scripts. - Jmabel ! talk 21:58, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Role accounts[edit]

Have the unresolved policy issues raised by User:Bluerasberry in Commons:Role account ever been resolved? If so, what has been the resolution? - Jmabel ! talk 05:01, 26 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I developed that policy in the mid 2010s. There is still ambiguity about how organizations can have role accounts. Here are some developments that come to my mind -

The advent of Wikidata has probably recruited more organizational staff to contribute to Wikimedia projects on behalf of their organizations than any other effort. One example of a major successful outreach effort was d:Wikidata:WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot/Participants, which recruited a lot of university staff and librarians to contribute ot d:Wikidata:WikiCite. In all cases so far as I know, the account pattern has been personal accounts, to individuals, who never share them, and who are under no obligation to design the account to indicate their institutional connection, and whose activity is not anything which has ever triggered a conflict of interest concern. If anyone else from the same institution wanted to pick up a project, they would make their own account. No account sharing here, and no account interlinking.
The state of United States GLAM partnerships is in existential crisis as the Met Museum in New York and the Smithsonian ceased renewal of their Wikimedian in Residence programs and consequently, much of their relationships with Wikimedia NYC and Wikimedia DC. While these relationships were not fundamentally critical, it was very helpful in outreach to be able to point to existing, ongoing, long-term, journalist-documented Wikimedia cultural partnerships with high-profile institutions. My own view of what these organizations would have wanted is communication metrics reports of the impact of their Wikimedia engagement, which they cannot get due to lack of software maintenance. I think these relationships could have been saved if there was continuous funding for 0.5 FTE software development for the GLAM space, but there is no Wikimedia community connection to any such development support.
Rumor is that outcomes of meta:GLAM Wiki 2023/Program may include conversation notes about potential crisis of institutional partner outreach. I am unsure who might or will post notes. If anyone has anything to say, English Wikipedia's Signpost is a possible channel.
Advancement of policy discussion is generally bleak in the Wikimedia Movement. At the last https://wikiconference.org/ in Toronto in November 2023, the organizers got a WMF grant, an additional grant from another sponsor called Credibility Coalition, and the conference was hosted in the city's public library. Despite all this support, there was no money available for video recording most talks, there was little money available for English/Spanish translation to include Spanish speakers in American/Canadian conversations, and the conference lacked money for the normal amount of conference catering. WMF is simply not adequately funding community conversation as a strategic priority through conferences or otherwise.

These are big issues! I wish that we could set in-kind donation of institutional staff time as a strategic priority for Wikimedia outreach. I think the community wants this, but I am unaware of WMF efforts to recognize, measure, track, encourage, and sponsor this activity. Bluerasberry (talk) 13:14, 26 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Bluerasberry,

You wrote, "My own view of what these organizations would have wanted is communication metrics reports of the impact of their Wikimedia engagement, which they cannot get due to lack of software maintenance." (emphasis added)

Could you link to an example of a "communication metrics report?"

If these reports are not available, what "metrics" should they typically contain?

Specifically, how can "the impact of their Wikimedia engagement" be differentiated from other the "impacts" of other (non-Wikimedia) engagements? --Ooligan (talk) 21:37, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ooligan: meta:BaGLAMa is not maintained. Suppose that a museum uploads 10,000 images. They would want to know how many times those images are viewed for a given year.

Compare this to for example, any twitter dashboard, which would report how many times people viewed all the tweets from an organization, or tweets containing images.

Social media professionals routinely operate social media accounts and their deliverable product is "impact metrics", which is a report from that platform of how much audience engagement the posted media generated. Wikimedia is different because we do not convert people to do sales, and hardly have equivalents to "like" buttons or "share" buttons, but such as is our nature, we do have some metrics. Social media professionals provide metrics, and if the wiki platform cannot generate metrics, then we block the possibility of professional communication service development.

I presume that we have nearly universal consensus that professional communication engagement in some form is highly desireable for Wikimedia Commons and all Wikimedia projects. If we had tools in place, then we could scale outreach of institutional partnerships, and get professional engagement from major institutions spontaneously without investing in outreach for every single institution, which is the current institutional engagement model. Bluerasberry (talk) 22:15, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I know for me even as a non-institutional contributor that not knowing how many people, if any, have viewed my uploads can be discouraging. I've actually been thinking about mainly uploading images to Flickr where they provide basic metrics due to it. So metrics would really be net a positive to the project all around. I guess there is the "page views for this category" template. But it's less then optimal, seems to be broken a lot, and doesn't provide per file or per user statistics anyway. So it's not super helpful in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, I could see why institutions wouldn't want to contribute to Commons if there's no way for them to know even on a basic level what kind of engagement their contributions are having. So hopefully that's something can be remedied at some point. Otherwise there's no reason they wouldn't just upload files to somewhere like Flickr or a media website instead of Commons. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:14, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I get this, but I have to say that I personally greatly prefer that Commons does not focus on this sort of metric. It's a commons, not a market. - Jmabel ! talk 23:53, 29 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

there're some tools that can show usage or calculate views. i integrated some in {{Category helper}}. for example, Category:Images from the Nationalmuseum Stockholm, two links let you use http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php and https://glamtools.toolforge.org/glamorgan.html .

in addition, User:DPLA bot created pages like Category talk:Images from the Nationalmuseum Stockholm/Views. i guess the same can be done for any category if needed. RZuo (talk) 19:33, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

November 30[edit]

How to find images added since a given date in a category with multiple sub categories[edit]

Hello,

How could i dectect in a simple way images uploaded since a given date in a category containing many subcategories ? --Pline (talk) 07:22, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Pline: try Petscan with Page properties options "Last edit"->After and "Only pages created during the above time window": example. MKFI (talk) 07:58, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@MKFI: Thanks ! --Pline (talk) 11:10, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think WMC is missing ways to have pages display images, if toggled also of some/all subcats, sortable by things like upload date (or other things, maybe also 'number of Wikipedia inclusions'). Despite of the neglection of MediaWiki and WMC code development, I'm a bit surprised something like that has not yet been built in:

in many categories there are tons of outdated images where sorting by upload date would be very useful (example).

Let me know if there are plans or a phabricator code issue about this. Sorting by upload date and ways to have images of subcats displayed on a page sorted by proxies for 'most useful/quality/relevant' would be a common use-case and extremely useful (and I know about PetScan). Prototyperspective (talk) 11:11, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

i made a gadget Help:Gadget-DeepcatSearch that you can enable at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets.

the gadget works if the categories that would be searched are less than 256 due to mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Deepcategory.

currently it only has two links, but i've thought about making more links like filtering by filetype, sorting by upload date, etc. RZuo (talk) 19:08, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Very useful, thanks for coding that! I already had it enabled but never really used it. I'm not sure if your reply is meant for OP or me – anyway the problem with that is that a) it's not available for people not registered and logged in b) even when you are a user you need to be an advanced user, know of that tool, and find it c) it's not really what I meant but may be useful for that (I'll get to that below) d) it doesn't work (if a cat has more than 256 subcats it should just limit it to e.g. the top 256 cats closest to the top-level and not show no images at all).

Regarding c): the "Deepcat🖼️" brings up a wall of images which is great – that is currently limited to the search. My proposal is basically to have a wall of images view sorted by most relevant / highest-quality (e.g. via number of Wikipedia usages).

I think all other image/photography websites have that, just not WMC. When looking for good-quality images for rivers from above I don't want to go through all the subcats of this; same for this...there's nothing but relevance (e.g. up-to-date charts) or quality I'm looking for, not any specific river. This is especially useful in overflowing cats (e.g. mostly outdated stats) or cats with very long branches of subcats one can't all browse through. This may get too tangential here and I'll propose this elsewhere. Maybe I'll put it into your Idea Lab or elsewhere(?) here. Currently WMC is not that useful and popular – I think implementing sth like that would be one of the top effective ways to change that.

Via cats like 2019 maps of the world and updating relevance/quality via file-uses & nominations, it could show results for all subcategories, not via serverload-heavy queries but like the current search engine does. Maybe your tool could be developed further and then become a Beta feature for a well-visible toggle button. To make it short, even if your tool would enable that which it currently doesn't, it should be part of WMC. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:05, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

thx. your insights gave me some ideas. for example, we could actually utilise google to do the search, which doesnt have the 256 limit. :D

feel free to write down more ideas at idea lab, MediaWiki talk:Gadget-DeepcatSearch.js or anywhere. i will also think about ways to expand the tool's capability. i'm a noobish coder though. RZuo (talk) 09:19, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Subcategories Rail vehicle doors[edit]

I created a new Category:Rail vehicles sliding doors. There are other types of doors: Folding doors (Category:Rail vehicle folding doors), the 'swerve-swing door' (Category:Rail vehicles swerve-swing doors) and the 'sliding-plug door' (www.schaltbau-bode.com) The 'sliding-plug door' and 'swerve-swing door' are in in most cases imposible to visualy determine, because closed doors are flush with the outside vehicle surface and only the study of the door mechanisme can determine the difference. The difference is movement: one slides along until it is pulled in at the last moment (plug), while the other door swings and moves further outward. I propose to put both in the same category: Rail vehicles with sliding-plug doors or swerve-swing doors.

Another usefull subcategory could be: Rail vehicle doors with stairs. Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:30, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It's not really the doors that have the stairs is it? --Adamant1 (talk) 12:49, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No but the stairs are an integral part of the dooropening and passage, necessary to negociate the high differences. Sometimes there are folding steps that move simultaniously with the door.Smiley.toerist (talk) 13:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

A better name would be: Rail vehicle with doors and stairs combinations.Smiley.toerist (talk) 21:22, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

If there is 4 separate things to categorise then I'd prefer 4 separate Categories, But I'd only categorise files which display relevant content such as the opening/closing mechanism, rather then here's a distance view of a train in which you can barely see the doors let alone discern the type of doors. If you do not know the type of doors then just don't categorise it. Rather then just guess or use an imprecise and therefore ultimately pointless category. Oxyman (talk) 17:35, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Oxyman: +2. Although I'm at a lose as to how the categories should be named or organized. Like you say, it's hard to do in the first place when the are barely disernable to begin with. Let alone what type of opening mechanisms they have. Really, images should probably just go in a single category for rail vehicle doors. Instead of micromanaging images of them at such unverifiably minor level. --Adamant1 (talk) 13:22, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

There special type of folding doors, that are frequently in international and long distance coaches. d:Q1256461 What is the name in English? If I try to translate Drehfalttuer, I get Hinged folding door. Is this correct? Smiley.toerist (talk) 21:45, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

DeepL says yes :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:23, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Update[edit]

I created 4 type train doors categories:

I have added the Czech Republic, Belgium and Russia to the country category trees. By the swerve-swing and sliding-plug I selected some good 'open door' examples. Of course, once it is determined that a particular type of of train has X type of doors, closed door viewed from outside can be selected. (Outside there is no visual difference). I would prefer that in this fase of classifying, no subdivision by country is applied. The next train door type to classify is the classic slam door, hinged door, but I first wil take a holiday break.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:16, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 01[edit]

Movement Charter[edit]

There has been little or no discussion on Commons of the pending Movement Charter (see especially meta:Movement Charter/Content and meta:Movement Charter/Content/Global Council) and whether the Commons community may have any particular concerns about how it is shaping up. The Movement Charter document is still an incomplete draft as of November 2023.

A few comments/questions:

One portion of this seems relatively uncontroversial in its overview, with only relative details to be worked out (though, please, if you disagree, speak up!): meta:Movement Charter/Content/Hubs (draft) describes the formation of geographically- and thematically-based "Hubs" that will fill a space between affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). There are now nearly 200 affiliates, and that number presumably will only grow. Some of them are pretty tiny. It's become nearly impossible for each of these, especially the smaller ones, to maintain any meaningful relationship with the WMF. This has made it particularly difficult for smaller affiliates to seek grants from WMF, or even learn what other groups are doing successfully in their own fundraising, collaborations, etc. The hope is that the Hubs will be of a scale to be more tractable from both "above" and "below." (E.g., on the budgeting front, WMF can give a chunk of money to a Hub, which can make allocations "closer to the ground.")
As far as I can tell, the main other goal of this process is to form a Global Council that (1) can remain reasonably light on its feet while at the same time (2) can, in some respects, provide a better representation of the broad Wikimedia movement than is provided by the WMF, which appears to be willing to offload/devolve some significant responsibilities to this Council. The best summary I've seen of this proposed delegation is at meta:Movement Charter/Content/Global Council.
This will almost certainly be the largest change in Wikimedia movement governance in well over a decade. Because representatives to the Wikimedia Summit that will take place April 2024 in Berlin were selected through a process centered on affiliates, not sister projects, there is no formal representation of Commons as such, nor of people whose participation in Wikimedia projects is entirely online. Instead, representation consists of WMF itself and of the geographically or topically based affiliates.
I believe we should have some forum to discuss whether the Commons community as such has any particular concerns about the Charter. I don't think just a section like this on the Village pump (or several such sections) is the greatest way to do it, but I suspect we should have some high-level discussion here first and then start a more dedicated page.
After some back-and-forth on the part of the organizers, I will now definitely be attending the Summit, and intend to try to represent any concerns that the Commons community may have, both in the next several months and at the Summit itself. I suspect that the next several months will be more crucial than the face-to-face meeting: as with most "summits", the meeting itself is likely to be more of a pro forma ratification than a place where anything is hashed out.
I'd be very interested to know if there are others who are significantly active in Commons and who will be there in Berlin or are otherwise actively engaged in this process, especially if you are also willing to commit to helping represent any concerns that the Commons community may have.
My own two largest concerns, just for the record:
1. I don't think enough attention is being paid to the type of contributors I see as the backbone of Commons and virtually all other Wikimedia projects: people who contribute entirely (or almost entirely) through on-wiki activities, and who never attend face-to-face meetings even locally, let alone ones that require travel. Unsurprisingly (but I hope not inevitably), the bulk of "movement" level decisions are made by a group of perhaps a thousand or so people who travel to meetings and have come to largely know each other; I'd consider myself to be roughly on the fringes of that group. In a potentially vicious cycle, the very people liable to be under-represented are also under-represented in the process of determining how the community is to be represented.
2. I am concerned that the Global Council could become a "talking shop", the sort of thing that in my view has happened to the General Assembly of the UN: lots of speeches, some resolutions, no power or authority. I'm not sure how much that is a matter of what we say in a charter vs. what will happen over time once it is established, but I think that if this Council is going to create meaningful and beneficial change, it can't hurt to keep that in mind in drafting a charter.
And one last remark: something like the Council should have happened ages ago, but let's face it: as WMF went from a handful of people in the 2000s to something much larger in the 2010s. Most of us with an on-wiki focus took years to even notice this change, and when we did notice it was because several things went wrong (I don't think I need to enumerate those here, but certainly the disastrous first release of the WYSIWIG editor for Wikipedia was a wake-up call for a lot of us). The relationship between the WMF and a lot of on-wiki participants was pretty awful in the mid-2010s. I think that has improved a lot, but not enough. I think a council like this is almost certainly a step in the right direction, but I also think it could be botched, and that we should be paying attention. I realize that "movement governance" isn't everyone's thing, and that's OK, but I think we need more than a handful of us to pay attention, and we need to recognize that if we are concerned with the shape this takes, we have way more chance to influence this the next few months than we will in many years after that.

Jmabel ! talk 02:55, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

thanks for making the effort to represent commons despite wmf's restrictions etc.

i dont intend to derail your discussion, but i just want to say this observation of mine in short -- no matter how hard people try to provide equal opportunities and rights universally, the majority of people often end up not reached and remain neglected, but power and control fall into only the hands of the power-hungry, unrestrained few. RZuo (talk) 12:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It mostly looks like a long-winded thesis consisting of either vague wordiness or explanations of the way things already work. I expect it will be much like the UCOC: quietly stored somewhere on Meta, 90% of contributors wont even know it exits at all, most of the rest wont read it, and most of the rest will immediately forget it. GMG ^talk 13:12, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I am afraid the only way to be heard is to form a Commons User group. It will not solve the issues - in any case users who did not become (for one of thousands reasons) the members of the group will net feel represented, but at least there would be someone invited to these meetings. I believe that we have a Photographers user group or smth similar though. Ymblanter (talk) 16:09, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ymblanter: we do have a photographers' user group (Commons:Commons Photographers User Group) but its focus is rather specific. Typical topics for the mostly Zoom-based meetings are things like " Underwater photography" or a "Post Photograph Processing Workshop" or "Wildlife photography and citizen science". That is to say, it is very much a photographers' group. It has zero concern with the roughly 50% of Commons' content that comes from GLAMs or other third-party sources such as Flickr; it is very little concerned with curation, not at all concerned with governance, and any concern with online tools is precisely about those that are useful to serious photographers.

At WikiConference North America I brought up the possibility that Commons as such could form a user group that could become a WMF affiliate. In general, this was not warmly received. There seemed to be a fear that each of the several hundred wikis in the WMF cosmos would form a user group, and that there would be an awful lot of separate, possibly redundant, entities. (On the other hand, a user group related to GLAM content would probably be welcomed, and there should be other appropriate themes for thematic user groups that would at least intersect Commons' work.) - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@RZuo: I agree that is likely, and is a danger. What I'm saying is that I think there is more leverage than usual right now to do something about that, and it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@GreenMeansGo: yes, these documents are tedious, and unfortunately blowhards are heavily drawn to working on these. But the Hubs are already starting to form, and the General Council will almost certainly happen. We need to identify our needs and work out how to get them met. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Aside: my biggest beef with documents like this in not so much the vacuous, ornamental declarations, as the parts that say something will happen without laying out mechanisms and responsibilities. I really do urge people to slog through at least some of the document, look for places where it could be improved—including where it could be improved by cutting something outright—and bringing that up on the appropriate talk page. The recently adopted Universal Code of Conduct also started out as a lot of vacuous blather, but it actually ended up being workable. Not necessarily pretty, but workable. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

this seems to have stalled out, so let me re-raise the two key points:

Will anyone else significantly active on Commons be attending the Summit?
Does anyone other than me have issues/concerns on Commons behalf about the shape that the Charter is taking?

Jmabel ! talk 20:46, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Prioritizing our technical needs[edit]

A largely separate issue that has come up in the course of this process. I've had several very good discussions with Selena Deckelmann, CPTO of the WMF. I have no doubt of her good will, and that if the Commons community can get reasonable consensus on a priority-ordered list of our largest technical concerns, that would influence where at least some technical resources were allocated, certainly in terms of projects taken on by WMF technical staff and possibly by WMF grants to build particular tools that are better built by someone other than WMF technical staff. As it is, descriptions of those technical needs are floating around as a bunch of phabricator bugs, and we have really given WMF little or no guidance as to how those might be prioritized. There is no guarantee we'd be listened to?, but as long as we don't have such a list, it is a certainty that we have almost no influence on how money is spent. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

May be we can get here at least some of these Phabricator tags and then try to prioritize? I do not think there is a single person knowing all the issues, but collectively we might be able to find many of them. Ymblanter (talk) 21:13, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think we often said that bugs in the file handling resulting in failed or corrupted uploads and bugs in the UploadWizard are our priority number one followed by batch upload desktop software and mobile upload apps. GPSLeo (talk) 21:42, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

i think many functionalities currently fulfilled by user scripts should be taken over by the software or at least maintained by wmf staff instead of volunteers.

i think we can divide commons into these different parts and list "feature requests" respectively.

file upload: better video/audio upload tool; batch upload tool (wizard often breaks for me when files exceed several dozen, and to batch edit description fields is hard and annoying); https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350917 ...
search and use media: better deepcategory search; sorting options (instead of only alphabetical); better video player (now cannot even jump forward or backward 5s by pressing left or right arrows); better document reader interface; super high resolution image viewer.
maintenance: category description that's more like wikidata items (meaning instead of a single title we can have multilingual titles. instead of constructing relations into the english title like "cat:2023 in France" we can have "this category combines topics '2023' and 'france'". etc.); licence review tool...

i also made Commons:Idea Lab where everyone can write ideas. i wrote quite a lot...--RZuo (talk) 22:56, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Fixing the issue where thumbails for other image file formats besides JPEG are fuzzy would be huge. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I would encourage folks to go into more detail than just "better X". The more explicitly needs are documented the more likely you get a good solution. Bawolff (talk) 02:50, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

In 3. I would definitely add improving VFC, notably adding "source" in the preview summary. Yann (talk) 11:40, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

my list is by no means complete. it's for everyone to add on.

this now sounds like perennial m:Community Wishlist Survey (CWS). maybe we can already start with Community Wishlist Survey 2024? which should happen pretty soon in jan 2024?

interested users can sieve thru past years' surveys for proposals that were already written and recommended but not implemented?

but unlike CWS, this time once we get a list of many detailed proposals, we can group them by urgency, keep them on a dedicated page and submit them to wmf as a list of "much needed technological developments" or something like that, so that wmf keeps working on this list and we dont have to write the same things for CWS every year. RZuo (talk) 11:52, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I also would propose that we make our own wishlist and than we can show it to the WMF and we could also coordinate our votings for the official wishlist where we if we do not coordinate our votings do not have a chance against the Wikipedia related proposals. Unlike in the official wishlist we should also include the fixing of bugs and not only new features in this list. GPSLeo (talk) 14:37, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I keep a list of wishlist items for myself. Anyone is welcome to take items from them. And use them as inspiration. And yes, please avoid “better X”. For instance “better file upload” is probably more accurately described as “more resilient against connection problems” or “resumeable uploads” or “make storage layer throw fewer exceptions during upload” or “better memory mangemant when uploading dozens of images at once with the uploadwizard” etc. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Additionally, I think this is EXACTLY what is wrong right now with the foundation development model. It should not be UP TO US to be our own product owner, who is able to analyze problems, describe them and turn it into an actionable roadmap to be pitched to the foundation management etc. This is EXACTLY what the foundation should be doing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:11, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

i dont know what the structure of wmf is, how the whole wmf is divided into departments and managed, etc.

it seems to me they are mixing different roles all in one. imo, there're 3 rather unrelated roles:

tech. to develop the mediawiki software, the software implemented for wiki projects, hosting of wiki projects' data.
outreach. to encourage participation in minority ethnolinguistic groups, countries... to coordinate between wmf and users.
money. raising/earning money and spending it on themselves and tech and outreach.

like whenever some new software comes out and we report problems, we often cant get the feedback directly back to the "tech" people but only the "outreach" people, then messages are lost in the middle. how about spinning off the tech part as a separate entity that focuses on tech like the Mozilla Corporation or Open Technology Fund?

most of the outreach part is basically the same as any NGO that aims to promote and preserve threatened minority cultures. it's not something that must be done by wmf with all that money raised from donations.

in https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2022-annual-report/financials/ it says it paid 88 mil usd as salaries. that's like hiring 400 people with 200k usd per annum (which is not small at all for any internet company). i wonder how many of the employees are actually involved with "tech". on the other hand, how much percentage of development and maintenance are done by unpaid volunteers? RZuo (talk) 13:16, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The truly outreachy people rarely handle tech related things. Perhaps you mean community liasons, who often act as intermediaries? They would fall in tech side of any organization. In any case its not like the actual programmers are in charge of the strategic direction of WMF either. They have input of course, but really its management who makes the big direction decisions. Bawolff (talk) 17:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don't have a number, and sometimes it is hard to say who is "tech", but from what I can gather the WMF is about 50% technical. - Jmabel ! talk 18:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@TheDJ: as someone who worked 40 years in the software industry, I strongly disagree. We are the client and (collectively) the subject-matter experts. We should know and define our needs. The Foundation is, above all, an engine for raising money and providing resources. They have some goals of their own, but as far as the online projects are concerned their goal, at best, is "try to get them what they need". Relatively few people at the Foundation, even on the technical side, have any significant experience using Commons in any non-trivial way. Some of them are very good project managers or software engineers, but at best that means an ability to gather requirements translate those into functional and technical terms, and efficiently implement software that meets those requirements.

In WMF terms, Commons is a weird case. Among the hundreds of wikis they are responsible for, we are probably the only one that is focused mainly on file content; the only one other than Wikidata itself that makes such heavy use of its own Wikibase instance; the most multilingual. There is almost no chance that a team that is responsible for the support of hundreds of wikis, including well over 100 that are significantly active, is going to have a deep understanding of one that is so unique. It would be nice if there was a program manager for Commons, but from what I can tell they aren't organized that way; I don't think there is even a program manager for en-wiki, and (with all due respect to ourselves) that is an even more important project than Commons. There is perhaps a little too strong an assumption that a common set of tools will serve everyone, and we are probably the wiki where that is least true, so we need to advocate for ourselves and make it easier for someone to give us what we need. Perhaps what we need is a program manager, and if that's the case we should try to build a consensus toward that, but there is no way that anyone is going to come from outside, or on high, and be better able to analyze our needs than we are. - Jmabel ! talk 18:17, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Sure all that is true, and while I too have 30 25 years of software experience, we as a group are here for images. If people here are going to be defining software products, you wont get to do much of images any longer. I spend about 3 hours every week, just keeping up with MediaWiki software changes. I spend about 6 hours a week providing the community with support on technical issues. That leaves me about 2 hours a week doing some volunteer development. Yes we should be providing input, but the foundation should be facilitating PROCESS, so that we create a consistent, predictive and readable results that can create actionable results. And they are delegating even THAT to us. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:51, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@TheDJ: (1) "the foundation should": Railing against the first-born of Egypt will have about the same result it has had in the past: nothing.

(2) "I spend…": If you personally don't have time for this, that's fine. No one individual is particularly responsible to take this on.

(3) Glad to hear you also have that level of experience. Insofar as you choose to participate in this, I imagine your contributions will be useful.

(4) "we as a group are here for images": up to a point. I can think of a lot else we do than warehouse images and other media. I could probably give 100 examples, but here's two from my own recent work: the edits at this or this are at least as useful as having uploaded copies of postcards that were already online on a library site and replicating the library's inaccurate description. Without descriptions, categories, generally accurate licensing, structured data, etc., Commons would not produce nearly the value that it does. There's a reason why, despite hosting 1/60 as many images as Flickr, at least as many Commons images as Flickr images get picked up to be used in newspapers and other traditional media.

Jmabel ! talk 19:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

My concern (which I think is similar to TheDJ's) is that these sorts of things often devolve into band-aid solution. The community wishlist is a good example of this - the top proposals are what sounds cool to a large number of people, but maintenance and any sort of long term strategy is left by the wayside. That doesn't mean good things don't come out of those processes, they do, but the processes rarely lead to the work being more than the sum of its parts. At best they are one-off solutions - rarely any sort of holistic solution to underlying problems. There is a reason why product managers are generally considered full time jobs involving specialized skills, not replaceable by a simple popular vote. Ultimately you're right though - The situation, for better or worse, is what it is, and commons should make the most of the opportunities that it has. Bawolff (talk) 15:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@RZuo: it's interesting that you invoke Mozilla. I don't know whether you know that the aforementioned Selena Deckelmann, who became CPTO a little over a year ago, was about eight years at Mozilla/Firefox and worked her way up from Data Architect to Sr. Vice President there. I personally think she's in a position to change a lot for the better. - Jmabel ! talk 18:32, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

i didnt know. i'm a noob about all these things. just giving my uneducated opinion and hoping others forgive my ignorance.

1 thing about where feedback should come from though. is it like, no one from the whole tech team at wmf is a commons or wikidata user?

for example, the "add statement" button on wikidata is totally anti-user, because it appears in the middle of the page. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142082 is 7 years old! they cant put in any basic solution to this anti-user design that's the core to editing wikidata. any new user of wikidata will realise this is a problem after trying to find the button a few times.

an obvious problem on commons is the timedtext of audios/videos. take a look at File:10 Signs Your Mental Health is Getting Worse.webm, the only built-in way to check what subtitles exist is clicking on the CC button in the popup video player. there isnt a simple list somewhere. because this functionality is so badly needed, users had to create Template:Closed captions/layout by themselves! yet 10 years after users having DIY-ed this template, wmf still doesnt have a built-in solution for this need! (i wish i have 88 mil usd every year, then i will spend half of it hiring 4000 indian programmers and pocket the other half.)

we can see how our opinions on what needs improvement converge rather quickly, because we've all been active and know which problems exist. if the tech team has anyone who's an occasional, hobbyist commons user, maybe s/he would've shared some obvious things with colleagues already.

and even though there are hundreds of wiki projects, the real difference is probably only about 20, because most are just different language versions of the same thing that's supported by the same piece of software. RZuo (talk) 19:56, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

As far as I know there are multiple Commoners, Wikipedians and Wikidatans amongst staff. This does not mean they have the 'power' to prioritize technical tasks, or can speak on behalf of the community what needs to be prioritized. They have to work on tasks assigned to them by lead staff - like Selena. Ciell (talk) 20:12, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I would guess (a guess, but from experience) that in any organization the size of WMF, several people in the middle of a hierarchy is making the decisions what work gets prioritized. At the top, they are managing managers, and probably setting policies for how work is prioritized, but except for very major projects no one at the top is deciding "this particular feature will get done."

If you think about it from a broad, organizational perspective, they are mainly maintaining mediawiki and (now that WMDE has handed it over to WMF) wikibase. Laying wikibase aside for the moment: we on Commons use mediawiki very differently from its hundreds of other uses by sister projects. We are probably the only wiki in the WMF world where categories are more important than mainspace (galleries for us, articles for almost everyone else) and media more important than either. It's not surprising that Commons' needs can get lost in the shuffle for a team that works on mediawiki. So, again: if we define our (probably unique) priorities, there is a fair chance that they will be attended to. If we do not, it should not be surprising that we remain the red-headed stepchild. - Jmabel ! talk 22:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

that makes me think of Mr Magnus Manske, the creator of mediawiki. he knows well commons' needs and has created so many tools that are essential and cater so well to commons: cat-a-lot, flickr2c, url2c, User:Magnus Manske/sdc_tool.js, GLAMorous, BaGLAMa... look at this list https://magnustools.toolforge.org/ . Orz. RZuo (talk) 06:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

“no one from the whole tech team at wmf is a commons or wikidata user” i dont see where you get that idea. At least half of the foundation tech team is sourced from the community. Visit any event and you would quickly learn this. No, the problem is that we have people doing 10000 different things. Dozens of workflows that are important to like 10 people each. There is no amount of employees that scales to our diversity, but don’t mistake that for the personal drive and commitment that people have to the projects. They just dont always want to edit any longer after a 40 hour workweek, because having the same work and hobby is not always a healthy mix.. This is a more a scale problem than anything else. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:04, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

the problem is that we have people doing 10000 different things. That shouldn't be an issue if they have a clear direction and goal to work around. There's naturally going to be 10000 different things being worked on at any given time if we aren't clear about what we want from them as a user base though. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:19, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

the feeling comes from the wikidata "add statement" button. adding every single statement (unless you're using some other tools) is done by clicking that button first, but that button has no fixed position.

cant imagine if a commercial company has UX like this in its products.

and users have reported this is a problem for 7 years now. yet developers do nothing about it. cant imagine if a company ignores customers like that. RZuo (talk) 14:21, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

You should ping Lea_Lacroix_WMDE in the Phabricator issue and see where it's at since she said they were going to deal with. Otherwise it does look kind of negligent on their part. Sometimes a little prodding can get things going again though. I doubt it's anything other then an oversight in this case since it seems like they were willing to fix it and in the process of doing so. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

an example for commons would be the uploadwizard. if you went on a trip and took 5 photos each of 4 buildings, how are you gonna upload the 20 photos? if you do it in 1 batch, then you have to scroll and copypaste the filename, the description, the categories separately for the 4 things. or you upload in 4 batches.

compare that to flickr's uploader. 1. you dont need to scroll. 2. you can select photos for batch edits.

this is the most fundamental part of a file hosting platform, yet it's so hard to use. even new users would feel the difficulty. why are devs oblivious? RZuo (talk) 14:37, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Its actually pretty common for commercial software to ignore user bug reports when they are not critical. Bawolff (talk) 18:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hey there! Thanks Joe, for starting up this discussion. I'm following with interest.

A suggestion I have to help with clarity -- identify the priorities around which problems you'd like solved, and the audience the problem is being solved for. For example, @Fuzheado just held an unconference session at Wikicon NA to ask about tools and workflows folks in GLAMs are interested in, which likely intersects with some of the tooling issues flagged here. Getting clear about who benefits from certain changes the most, which usually is very related to who a change is being designed for, may help us identify areas to focus and also get clear about why. Ideally that will help support better prioritization decisions that must be made, even when everyone doesn't agree.

In addition, something helpful to think about are the ways in which we are evaluating the success of work. One of the ways is by coming up with measurement criteria that provides both leading indicators that the work is having the intended effect (these tend to be specific to individual changes), and also lagging indicators that help us understand more holistically impact as systems change (these tend to be more like "foundation-wide metrics" or lodestar metrics for departments and organizations). Happy to talk about this more with anyone interested. Finding good metrics is something I hope that we become really good together.

I have heard (in this thread and from others) requests for more support from the Foundation for Commons. Partly in response to the open letter, I asked the whole Structured Content team (who formerly worked on structured data related projects) to dive into an area that acutely needed support so that they could refamiliarize themselves with some aspects of Commons and the state of our infrastructure. After some research was done to identify acute issues, they decided to tackle improvements to the Commons Upload Wizard. After that's done, my plan is to reflect on the work, our understanding of volunteer needs and the needs of the many types of users of Commons, and find a path forward. Input from you all on priorities, and a willingness to engage in further conversations about purpose, metrics and outcomes, would all be really be helpful. SDeckelmann-WMF (talk) 23:06, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Again: if the head of the tech side of the Foundation says that the most effective thing the Commons community could do to make it more likely to get what we need from the Foundation is to create our own prioritized list, I see absolutely no reason to doubt her. There may be other things that might help us even more, but those other things are not in our own hands. - Jmabel ! talk 18:32, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No offense to RZuo or anyone else, but Its not on the WMF to sort through random, years old discussions to suss out what our priorties and needs as a project are. Instead there really needs to be a list of issues, needs, wants, or whatever on our end sorted by priorty with the top 4 or 5 being the most urgent. We can't expect them to just somehow magically know what the community wants them to work on or fix though.Random, ambigious complaints about "issues" aren't a cohesive, actionable plan either. Nor are they going to spend the time and resources fixing things that might actually end up being low on the priority list just because a few users mentioned them in passing somewhere. That's not how organizations work. There should be a list of the top things Commons' users want them to deal with. Otherwise don't supprised if nothing gets fixed on their end. Something like Commons:Strategic plan perhaps? --Adamant1 (talk) 23:39, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm guessing that something we could call a "strategic plan" is more than we can hope for. But I think we should be able to identify (1) our biggest pain points and what we think could be done about them, (2) some "low-hanging fruit" (e.g. small UI changes that would have high return) and (maybe overlapping the other two) (3) things done by fragile bots that deserve a lot stronger technical backing. - Jmabel ! talk 00:53, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jmabel: I agree a "strategic plan" is probably to lofty. It's mainly that there needs to be a more centralized, formal place for all of this outside of the village pump or the "Wishlist" pages that users have created so far. What the page is called doesn't really matter though. But so far there's a couple of pages that were created by RZuo and TheDJ, this discussion, and I'm sure others. The whole thing really needs to be more centralized and consensus based then it is currently. Your idea of what we need to identify sounds like a good starting point for whatever it ends up being though. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:50, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

for #3, i grouped some "tools" (user contributed) by their importance: Commons:Tools/Directory (not a complete list, feel free to keep cataloguing). all these are maintained by users. RZuo (talk) 06:21, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

One thing to keep in mind is that MediaWiki is sort of a hybrid project. There is the WMF, who acts very similarly to mid-sized commercial software company developing MediaWiki - with managers, product managers, scrum, agile, KPIs, etc. There is also MediaWiki the open source project, where random people contribute. Prioritized lists can often be quite compelling for the second group of people. People who contribute to MediaWiki in an open-source fashion are usually motivated by solving a problem that bothers them. However sometimes they like to do other things. Generally though (and this is a very rough generalization) they don't like the messy work of talking to 50 different people to try and figure out what people actually want. Well defined lists of desired improvements gives them something to work on. Bawolff (talk) 18:43, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I created a RfC page to make such a survey Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey. If everyone agrees that this method is what we need to get our priority list we could immediately start collecting the proposals. GPSLeo (talk) 09:01, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Looks like a good idea but probably needs to (i) be advertised project-wide, or may be even cross-project-wide (ii) have a closed or even a team of closers who would summarize the results in terms of the priorities. Ymblanter (talk) 18:23, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Strategic issues[edit]

Before anyone can come up with the specific proposals (see above) I think we need to discuss the big picture. From my perspective, I see four big things which we should have understanding of before writing any proposals. I am sure some of these are non-issues, and that there are some serious things I just do not see, but we need to start somewhere and discuss. (This may become sections of the wishlist discussed above, or not):

Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to become a major audio and video repository? If yes, how do we make sure we are not a poor version of Youtube, vimeo etc.?
Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to have a fully functioning mobile version and a mobile app, say for uploads?
Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to fully replace categories by some more modern structure such as Structured Commons? (Multilingual categories go here as well).
(Just to repeat the question which I asked at the top of the page, but more broadly): Do we expect any total-size-related limitations on uploads in the future and, if yes, are we going to restrict uploads or perform some form of cleanup of existing approach?--Ymblanter (talk) 18:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think most of this was already discussed at Commons talk:Think big - open letter about Wikimedia Commons and there we also had the conclusion that we need a priority list but we never made the list. Of course we need a long term plan for what we want to be. The current idea of the priority list is more about what tools do we need fixed to keep the current state of Commons running. Both is needed but I think more or less independent of each other. GPSLeo (talk) 18:41, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think that being audio repository then yes. Audio file size is pretty much trivial. About video, then question is that do we even want to be major videorepository? Handling video would mean that it would require much more server and bandwidth capacity in every level. Handling video in crowdsourced way (annotating, referencing, ... ) is much complicated than images and it is totally possible that world is outpacing the video with AI(or other automatic systems) which generates output dynamically from data. -- Zache (talk) 19:52, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

At least, we should a copy of a film if it is notable enough to have a WP article in any language (and in the public domain of course). Many old movies are being released again on DVD/Blu-ray, and we should have a copy of these. Yann (talk) 20:42, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Turning Commons into a full on video host sounds like a bad idea, if it's even doable to begin with. Although allowing for copies of older films that are notable enough to have a WP article seems like a reasonable standard. Just as long as it doesn't lead to Commons being a glorified PD version of PornHub. Audio files on the other hand seem like a mixed bag, but one that's at least doable. Although allowing for either one shouldn't come at the cost of other things or make it harder to get core issues dealt with. The time and effort it would take to make hosting videos somewhat viable would invariably mean less of both going into say fixing the UploadWizard or improving other neglected areas of the platform. Plus it's better to focus on the platforms core strengths and purpose instead of trying to turn it into the Swiss Army Knife of media hosting platforms anyway. It's always better to focus on a project's core strengths instead of making it into a multi-purpose tool for everything and everyone. I just don't think that's in hosting video or audio files. Although more so with the former then the later. --Adamant1 (talk) 03:41, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Commons Gazette 2023-12[edit]

The total number of files on Wikimedia Commons exceeded 100 million on 16 November 2023.^[1] This has taken 7 009 days since the founding of Wikimedia Commons on 7 September 2004.

Some files on Wikimedia Commons

Zimbabwe $100 000 000 (2008)

The 100 millionth file

Galaxy NGC 7479, approximately 100 million light-years from Earth.

Galaxy M82's burst of star formation is thought to have been initiated by a close encounter with M81 about 100 million years ago.

Currently, there are 186 sysops.

References

↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20231116195221/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Edited by RZuo (talk).

Commons Gazette is a monthly newsletter of the latest important news about Wikimedia Commons, edited by volunteers. You can also help with editing! --RZuo (talk) 12:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 02[edit]

Bot to remind uploaders of corrupted files[edit]

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T350917

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=filesize%3A10239%2C10241&sort=create_timestamp_desc

i think, a bot, which detects these files and sends a notice to their uploaders asap, would be necessary. can someone code up something? or do a manual vfc once a few days before a bot takes over? RZuo (talk) 14:31, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

CropTool will soon be broken[edit]

Commons talk:CropTool#Grid engine will shut down on December 14th, tool will stop working. Discussion should probably take place there, not here. - Jmabel ! talk 18:01, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 03[edit]

Avoid using video2commons for youtube temporarily[edit]

v2c has been uploading youtube videos in low resolution, because of a flaw in its code.

so far, i have found that this problem affects some recently uploaded youtube videos, but i am not sure if it affects other video websites or how long it has existed.

you can still use v2c but only with extra caution, as explained at Commons_talk:Video2commons#Summary.

if you know these users https://github.com/orgs/toolforge/people , please ask them to help with https://github.com/toolforge/video2commons/issues/173 . RZuo (talk) 13:15, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I had this issue some weeks ago. It uploads the 144p version, which is the smallest one. I used an online downloader to overwrite with the HD version --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:41, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Yup, I noticed probably the same problem while uploading File:Klášter Vyšší Brod, 2020.webm (now merged & deleted as File:Klášter Vyšší Brod, 2020 duplicate.webm). — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 21:20, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Importer for Yug[edit]

Yug (talk · contributions · Statistics · Recent activity · block log · User rights log · uploads · Global account information) (assign permissions)

Lingualibre.org which is a Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Foundation supported web app, project, community and wiki plans to migrate its documentation to Commons. I would like to have the (Transwiki) importer right, so the wikipage could be migrated with proper credit history. Lingualibre uses Wikimedia oath connection to create accounts so usernames are similar to wikimedia's wikis. I'm administrator there, and there are about 30 pages and 120 translations to import. I'm familiar with lingualibre:Special:Export and Special:Import. It seems possible to import all our help pages at once, but I will need to try it. Yug (talk) 18:17, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Yug: At least one technical issue: Lingualibre is not in the list of supported wikis to import from, that will need to be changed (I can file the phab task if you need once we agree that this should be done). And I'm not sure how to import translations, but you might need translationadmin rights for that in addition to transwiki importer; do you know how this works? Before we move forward, however, where on Commons do you plan to import these to? —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 19:31, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hello Mdaniels5757, I anticipated some technical roadblocks as the one above so I'm coming early to solve them.

Timeline: Migration for the wiki pages is wished for Spring 2024.

Place and move rights: Commons:Lingua Libre has been discussed as the main page. I have a few ideas for the documentations, be it Commons:Lingua Libre/* or Help:Lingua Libre/*. If necessary, I and several other members have move rights.
Supported import Wikis: Yes, if possible to get Lingualibre on the import list you cited, I guess it would help to make cleaner, more automatized imports, so this is interesting as well.
Technical connection level between Lingualibre ⇔ Wikimedia Commons: Not sure if this is relevant, but I will clarify the level of technical connexion. Users of Lingua Libre log in via Wikimedia oath system, so Lingua Libre accounts id and names and Wikimédia Commons accounts ids and names are identical. Lingua Libre is not completely connected : notifications systems are autonomous.
Administrative connextion level: LinguaLibre.org is financially supported by Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimédia France, about 100k€ so far. See meta:Lingua Libre/Supports for a non-exhaustive review.

The most important for me is to get the Transwiki importer and translationadmin userrights. From what I understand of Special:Export and Special:Import, this alone allows me to work on batch of files from a same category on the origine wiki, then import them in one shoot to the target wiki. Since we only have about 100 pages to import, this can do the job. Yug (talk) 08:37, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

cc User:WikiLucas00. Yug (talk) 09:04, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 04[edit]

Random deletion of perfectly good files from Gallica[edit]

There are literally tens to hundreds of thousands of books and files that overzealous editors will start in on deleting thanks to this apparently random edit of PD-GallicaScan by User:Rosenzweig.

A) I'd revert/undo it myself except I apparently lack the permissions to do so (?). Anyone know what's involved or where I sign up for those?

B) Can one of y'all undo it in the meantime?

Even if we are officially depreciating this template, 1st the phrasing should reflect that almost all of the affected files are old and in the public domain and simply request that the license be changed and 2nd whoever decided on this should be the one shunting over 1.4+ million pages to whatever they think the appropriate license is, not purging that many files from the service for no particularly good reason. Is there any evidence we even have files from Gallica that are so recent that PD is an issue? Gallica shouldn't be hosting most of those online itself. Are there any?

C) There should've been more discussion somewhere to link to before this change went through. That should be somewhere on the template's page or its talk page.

D) If the general response here is to pound sand and that it's great that we're deleting all these perfectly good files... well, for the several thousand of those files that I've been working with—from the 18th century for what it's worth—is there any product like HotCat where I can mass replace their PDs? Someone needs to be doing that with the new change and it can't be by going through 1.4 million files by hand.

— LlywelynII 00:10, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@LlywelynII: Please see COM:VPC#Deprecate Template:PD-BNF and Template:PD-GallicaScan. You may also use {{Editrequest}} at Template talk:PD-GallicaScan. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 00:16, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jeff G.: Thanks for the links but, if you're already that knowledgeable, do you know where I need to go to just get the permission added to my account to fix things like this on my own? (Obv not going to remove the change if there has been more discussion that Rz just forgot to link back to, but the wording could be much better and much better formatted and a link provided to that discussion. See also my long edit history and general trustworthiness.) — LlywelynII 04:47, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@LlywelynII: You can post on COM:RFR, and if that lacks any section for the right you want, COM:AN or Commons:Administrators/Requests. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 12:32, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Similarly, there are multiple thousands of images I've probably edited from Gallica that now need to preemptively get this fixed to avoid 'helpful' deletion. Are there any mass PD template-shifting add-ons or programs to make this reasonable work? — LlywelynII 04:52, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Rosenzweig: FYI. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 00:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@LlywelynII: "Is there any evidence we even have files from Gallica that are so recent that PD is an issue?": Yes, there is. Gallica is hosting newspapers and magazines up to ca. the 1950s, where the BNF itself says they are "consultable en ligne" (viewable online), not 'in the public domain". These contain texts and images by authors who died less than 70 years ago. Compare Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Robert Fuzier, Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Paul Poncet, and others from the same date. The wording says might be deleted, not will. If you think the specific wording of the deprecation needs to be changed, feel free to chip in at COM:VPC#Deprecate Template:PD-BNF and Template:PD-GallicaScan (as already mentioned by JeffG, thanks). Regards --Rosenzweig τ 00:40, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

My experience is planting enormous THIS FILE MIGHT NOT BE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND MIGHT BE DELETED AT ANY MOMENT headers is just begging "helpful" "editors" to go around deleting absolutely everything they can, frequently with bots and without any care. If you've found a few newspapers, put the header on those items. At minimum, the template replacement should be rephrased to This template has been depreciated and should be replaced with ... like normal, instead of begging for people to go around destroying things for no particularly good reason.

If there's a separate location for feedback, remember to put it in your template edits or edit summaries to help fix problems like this. — LlywelynII 04:42, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

You're over-dramatizing this. Nowhere does it say that files might be deleted "at any moment". And I fail to see how you come to the conclusion that users might be deleting "absolutely everything they can" with bots (!) --Rosenzweig τ 05:46, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I agree with Rosenzweig here. When over-broad mass-deletions come in as DRs, there is usually a quick "this is too many files with different issues for one DR", and it gets closed with no action.

There were similar issues with some of Fæ's massive batch uploads. I continue to track his user talk page for what is DR'd. So far, I can't recall seeing any "obvious keeps" get DR'd, and most have been such obvious copyvios that in other circumstances they would likely have been speedied.

We should think about categories that will be useful in sorting this out. Besides any possible maintenance categories on the files themselves, we should probably put a new subcat Category:Gallica-related deletion requests somewhere under Category:Sorted deletion requests; I'm not sure where, but we'd want to make it easy for someone to track these.

By the way, is there any evidence that there have been bad deletions on this basis? - Jmabel ! talk 06:24, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jmabel: See Category:Gallica-related deletion requests. --Rosenzweig τ 07:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

According to https://templatecount.toolforge.org/?lang=commons&name=PD-GallicaScan&namespace=10#bottom there are 1,403,251 transclusions. That's an impractical amount of work without bot help, and I'd suggest undoing the depreciation until a bot can, in the first instance, spot every extant use where other copyright explanations exist, and replace it with a suitable note explaining, briefly, what the template said outside of the PD declaration. In many cases, I believe this was just a specific variant of PD-scan. Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:12, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Simply undoing the change "until a bot" can replace something (when will that be?) won't discourage people from uploading still protected Gallica scans like they are doing now, which will only make the problem worse. I don't think that's a good idea. And yes, bots will almost certainly be needed to help here. --Rosenzweig τ 07:18, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think a literal over a million files losing a PD tag is a bigger problem. Files without a PD tag get put up for deletion. Prolific uploaders could be looking at thousands of files to review at once. Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:23, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Why would prolific uploaders be looking at thousands of files to review at once? No one is requiring uploaders to do that and nothing in the template says anything even slightly along those lines either. Really, they can just ignore the change completely if they want to and literally nothing will happen. Except clear COPYVIO will be deleted going forward, but that's probably about it and doesn't involve anyone reviewing thousands of files. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:30, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

At this point, not a single one of those files has actually "lost a PD tag". The tag is still there. It's just deprecated. --Rosenzweig τ 07:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I've changed the template a bit so that the collapsed section with the deprecated tag is now expanded by default. --Rosenzweig τ 07:59, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Are you aware of User:AntiCompositeBot? If the tag isn't listed in a way that categorises an image as public domain, I'm pretty sure it will be automatically listed for deletion. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

If that bot didn't ~~list~~ files (or rather mark them as missing a valid license tag) tagged with PD-GallicaScan before, it won't ~~list~~ mark them now. Why should it? Nothing in the actual file pages has changed. --Rosenzweig τ 08:31, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Missed a closing > there, but no matter. I believe it's down to PD-GallicaScan's inclusion on lists of valid PD tags, things that it could readily be removed from now. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:39, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Commons:Bots/Requests/AntiCompositeBot 4: “The bot uses a query [...] to find potentially eligible files that are in Category:Files_with_no_machine-readable_license, were uploaded in the last 1 month, and are not currently tagged for deletion. The restriction on upload time is to prevent the bot from tagging files that may have previously had a license or otherwise need human review.” --Rosenzweig τ 08:42, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Rosenzweig: thank you for creating Category:Gallica-related deletion requests. All six of those I see at this time look valid, or at least plausible, to me. Yes, it is too bad that we have been trusting that mere inclusion on this site meant things were in the public domain, but clearly it does not.

One further suggestion: when URAA is the basis for proposed deletion, probably they should be marked with {{deletionsort|URAA}} as well. Note that per Commons:Licensing, "A mere allegation that the URAA applies to a file cannot be the sole reason for deletion" (italics in the original). - Jmabel ! talk 20:10, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Apparently you need to "subst" {{Deletionsort}} when adding. - Jmabel ! talk 20:14, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jmabel: Try {{subst:deletionsort|URAA}}. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 06:46, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Sorry if it was not clear that what Jeff G. says here was exactly the meaning of my last comment. - Jmabel ! talk 18:52, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jmabel: I know about the whole URAA thing (and I'm not making "mere allegations" when URAA is concerned, I check the country list at en:WP:Non-U.S. copyrights if I'm not sure). But frankly I wonder if the URAA tracking category for deletion requests (and several other DR tracking categories) still make sense or make sense at all. The FOP categories, yes, whenever South Africa actually does introduce FOP we can use the South Africa FOP category to restore files. But what's the point of the URAA tracking categories these days? The Supreme Court case (Golan v. Holder) was over a decade ago, the URAA was upheld. Does anyone still think this will change? --Rosenzweig τ 07:37, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Rosenzweig: I don't honestly know. I just know there has never been any overt decision to stop tracking them; feel free to push for such a decision. - Jmabel ! talk 18:53, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Search for filetype among user uploads?[edit]

I wanted to find out how many videos I had uploaded, but realised there was no way of searching for that specifically in my upload list[1], or among the uploads of others, for that matter. Am I overlooking something, or could that actually be a nice, probably easily implementable feature? Seems you can already sort uploads by date by clicking the black arrow, why not by filetype or name, or even size? FunkMonk (talk) 20:38, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@FunkMonk: Help:Searching: "filemime" to specify MIME type. - Jmabel ! talk 21:49, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

But can I use that to only search for files that I (or any other specific user) have uploaded? Doesn't seem so from that page? FunkMonk (talk) 22:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Assuming you consistently use your username somewhere in the wikitext, "insource:FunkMonk" should have very few false positives. - Jmabel ! talk 23:53, 4 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I only include username for selfmade files, not when i transfer files from free sources, which is mainly what I'm looking for here. FunkMonk (talk) 09:14, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@FunkMonk and Jmabel: Mine are easy, Category:Videos transferred by User:Jeff G. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 07:21, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

But I guess you manually added them to those categories? My problem is that we're talking a backlog of years of uploads I can't parse today. FunkMonk (talk) 09:14, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Do not know if this helps but one can (relatively) painlessly add these categories by going to the upload list and using cat-a-lot. It still requires manual work but I was able to categize my several thousands uploads by country in a few days. Ymblanter (talk) 09:18, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

yes it's a good feature to have.

for your personal request, without a way to batch filter upload logs, what i would do is to take the lists from https://xtools.wmcloud.org/pages/commons.wikimedia.org/FunkMonk/6 and use regex to filter videos or filter out non-videos. RZuo (talk) 07:36, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

So a text file is downloaded to search through, or? FunkMonk (talk) 09:14, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@FunkMonk here's my silly way, because i'm pretty noobish with coding:

open https://xtools.wmcloud.org/pages/commons.wikimedia.org/FunkMonk/6
(alternatively and a little faster but CAUTION page might be slow to load because it's large https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/upload&user=FunkMonk&type=upload&offset=&limit=5000 )
ctrl+a
ctrl+c
open https://regexr.com/
left click the part "RegExr was created by gskinner.com..." once
ctrl+a
ctrl+v (this means, i copied the whole text to the input field on regexr.com)
replace the expression field (website default ([A-Z])\w+ ) with File:.+\.(webm|ogv|ogg)
click "List" in the "Tools" below
replace the default $&\n with *[[:$&]]\n
then you can copy paste the list to a wiki page. (double click anywhere in the list so your cursor selects a word, then ctrl+a, then ctrl+c).

add more extensions to #8 as you like.

repeat this 6 times (because xtools shows 1000 files on 1 page and you have 5000+ logs), or 3 times for Special:Log. RZuo (talk) 11:04, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks, already a little over my head, but I'll try it out. Do people think it makes sense if I made a proposal for stuff like this to be implemented directly in the uploads list so we don't have to do it in all sorts of ways? Doesn't sound like it would be a huge change, but many people seem to need such a feature, but are forced to work it out themselves. FunkMonk (talk) 13:09, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

yes i think advanced ways to sort and search files in a category or uploaded by a user are something many users want.

could be an item in the wishlist survey discussed in sections above.--RZuo (talk) 17:05, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I've made a proposal here:[2] FunkMonk (talk) 12:49, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 05[edit]

Category:Poland photographs taken on XXXX-XX-XX[edit]

Something has gone wrong with the categories in Category:Photographs of Poland by date, e.g. see Category:Poland photographs taken on 2023-11-11. You can see there are several thousand of these categories in Category:Non-empty category redirects. I have checked the templates {{Poland photographs taken on navbox}} and {{World photos}}, also Module:Countries/Europe (talk | +/− | links | doc | subpages | tests – results), but can't see any recent changes that should be causing this issue. The categories were all working fine last time I looked about a week ago. Can anyone shed some light on this? BigDom (talk) 08:56, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I added {{Poland photographs taken on navbox}} but it did not fully solve the problem. Ymblanter (talk) 09:23, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Yes, the problem happens whether you use the specific Poland template, or World photos. It seems to be limited to Poland though, see Category:Non-empty category redirects from page 2 onwards. There are thousands of Polish categories, but none from any other country. BigDom (talk) 09:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It must be something in one of the templates upstream, but I can not really check this now, just too busy at my work. Ymblanter (talk) 09:52, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No problem, I'll keep looking for now. BigDom (talk) 10:11, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ymblanter: - found and fixed the issue. The cat= parameter had been removed at Template:Country label/N which was breaking the categorisation for Poland (turned out it was also affecting Portugal). I have pinged the user who made the edits in my edit summary to see why they did it. Cheers, BigDom (talk) 10:26, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Great, thanks. Ymblanter (talk) 10:39, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The Afrikaans Wikipedia[edit]

Hi Guys! I am the Director for Afrikaans on WikimediaZA. I want to load a bunch of picture re out 22n Birthday bash, High School Writing Competition and our Campaigners for the Afrikaans Wikipedia program onto Commons. Am I allowed to create a category Afrikaans Wikipedia or something similar? If not, where can I store the pictures? Regards. Oesjaar (talk) 11:41, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Oesjaar: there's Category:Afrikaans Wikimedia. you can also upload some photos first so that we can see what kind of photos you're uploading, whether they meet com:scope etc., and what categories are suitable?--RZuo (talk) 17:05, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

And you'll probably want to create a subcat for the specific event. - Jmabel ! talk 18:57, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Please, rev del the original photo.[edit]

I cropped out the building. File:Ashrarq_Interview_(cop28_0893).jpg Thanks, --Ooligan (talk) 21:59, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ooligan: Done. Please use internal wiki links when possible: they work correctly on both PCs and mobile devices. - Jmabel ! talk 23:17, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Ok, I will. --Ooligan (talk) 01:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 06[edit]

Error with SVG translation[edit]

I have found a bug with the SVG translator tool. It only lets me translate files that I upload. When I try and translate another one, when I click the "Upload to Commons" button it doesn't upload. All it says is "500: Internal Server Error" at the top and then below that it says "⧼abusefilter-warning-file-overwriting⧽". This is despite the fact that I can indeed overwrite files. Please fix this. PoliticsMaps (talk) 03:48, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@PoliticsMaps: Commons has recently added a filter that restricts overwriting files. See COM:Overwriting existing files. You need to have the autopatrol right or request that the files you want to change are marked to allow overwriting at COM:Overwriting existing files/requests. Glrx (talk) 04:34, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

AI images[edit]

Category:Giovanna IV di Napoli is being overwhelmed with AI images that look to me like mediocre illustrations from children's books. I personally think that adding more than a couple of images (at most) like this to a category becomes a sheer liability, and I'd have no problem with saying "none at all, unless they are either in use on a sister project or about to be," but I don't know if we have consensus on that. I know there has been a bunch of back-and-forth on what is and is not acceptable by way of AI images, but I don't think I've seen a clear consensus on anything other than that we don't want a bunch of AI-generated quasi-porn.

I'm inclined to start a deletion request, but I thought it might be more useful to bring the discussion here where it would be seen by more people and we might get a more meaningful survey than a DR would draw. Pinging @Beaest as a courtesy; they uploaded these images and claim them as copyrighted "own work" for which they have given a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. (Another question: is there any basis under either the law of Italy, where I presume from their talk page Beaest lives, or the U.S., where Commons is hosted, for a human to claim copyright on a work generated by Microsoft Bing? To the best of my knowledge, both countries have traditionally considered computer-generated art to be in the public domain, unless there is a great deal of control of the output by the person claiming copyright, far more than giving a prompt to Bing. Also, with no indication even of what prompt was given, these seem to me to be particularly lacking in any claim to being in Commons' "educational" scope.) - Jmabel ! talk 06:03, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Within our current guideline they are definitely public domain. On the number of photos: They should at least become moved to a subcat also to avoid accidental use as real painting. GPSLeo (talk) 06:45, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The images are interesting, but I kind of wonder what eductional purpose they serve when their likely to be historically inaccurate and that's probably not what Joanna of Naples looked like either. Although the images clearly present themselves as both. But what exactly are being educated 1about here, that AI can roughly recreate 15th century art? Anyway, I'd put images like these along the same lines as "fake" flags and the like. Although more good faithed, but still something that we probably shouldn't be screwing with because of the high chance of disinformation (intentional or not) and lack of verifiability. Otherwise its pure fan art, but being passed off as more legitimate (again, intentional or not). But if someone searches for on Google and these images come up it probably won't be clear they were AI generated. Regardless, why not just upload actual, original artwork of her at that point? I'm sure it would be PD. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:16, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

These are high-quality and they mainly portray Ferdinand II of Naples where they seem to be quite realistic. Adamant1 already named one educational purposes, but there also are more. In contrast to that, I've yet to hear why hundreds of humorous professional-grade porn by the same photographer adding to an already vast collection would be "realistically" educational – I'm okay with these, just not that they are categorized in cats about children's games, foods or directly into "Pickachu" and so on. Please stop marginalizing AI art and maybe start worrying about things that are actually problematic on WMC. Concerning the license of these images, that should indeed probably be changed and including the prompts would be much better but isn't and shouldn't be required. A clearly visible prominent note about it being an AI artwork is something I think is necessary too but is currently not required. However, these images also make it quite clear that these are AI-generated images via the file description. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:14, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

These are high-quality and they mainly portray Ferdinand II of Naples where they seem to be quite realistic. Maybe the images look realistic, but it's not a realistic portray of Ferdinand II of Naples by any means. The person this image looks nothing like the one in this one. I don't really care if the art style looks real, but the people depicted in the images should at least be close to actual historical figures. And there's nothing educational at all about an image that looks nothing at all like what it's suppose to be about. In no way I'm I trying to margalize AI art by saying so either. I'm simply saying that we shouldn't allow for AI generated of images of real people that look nothing like them. Since there's nothing educational about an image of Ferdinand II of Naples that looks absolutely nothing like him. I could really care less if someone wants to upload an AI generated image of a dragon or whatever though. I'd also probably be fine with these images being hosted on Commons if they were just uploaded as fantasy images of random people from the 15th century. Since that's essentially what they are. --Adamant1 (talk) 15:09, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Good points and agree; I guess where we differ there is that a) I think they do look similar albeit it could be better (quite good already for current AI generators with so few pics to train on though) and b) that's not necessarily a reason for deletion or objecting to these images entirely; it may be relevant to portraits but when the focus of an image is a historical scene/event rather than the person it matters much less how the person looks like.

(Moreover, prior artworks aren't photographs and are known to differ significantly from how the people actually looked like.) Prototyperspective (talk) 15:20, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Rispondo nella mia lingua madre presumendo che userete il traduttore, né io farei diversamente (e non sono riuscita a capire tutto del vostro discorso, ma provo comunque a rispondere). Le immagini che ho creato con l'intelligenza artificiale non sono limitate solo a Ferdinando II di Napoli e a Giovanna IV d'Aragona, ma visto che parliamo di loro incomincio col dire che ho ricavato l'aspetto fisico dai loro ritratti reali, che sono pochissimi: un giovane uomo con mascella pronunciata, labbra carnose, naso dritto, fronte corta, testa sollevata (e la bocca storta non me l'ha fatta, mi dispiace), chioma di capelli fluenti (sua caratteristica peculiare) per Ferdinando II d'Aragona, come appare da questa medaglia. Di Giovanna IV invece sappiamo che era bionda e aveva forse anche gli occhi azzurri. Lo scenario è quello della Napoli medievale, mi pare che alcuni dei monumenti richiesti (Maschio angioino e il porto medievale) siano venuti anche piuttosto somiglianti. Se le immagini sono di pubblico, non credo ci siamo motivo di cancellarle anche perché non ne creerò più su questi soggetti. Ne ho caricata più di una in modo tale che la gente possa liberamente scegliere quale usare. Beaest (talk) 12:47, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The AI images look nothing like Ferdinand II of Naples or Joanna IV of Aragon what-so-ever. Do you not see why that might be a problem when the claim being made here is that they are high-quality, quite realistic images of the historical figures? --Adamant1 (talk) 15:09, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

the images generated by Beadest are inaccurate and inexact: these images contain many errors in history and anatomy (for example, in one image of Naples there is a monument that did not yet exist and some people have 6 fingers in one hand). In my opinion these images should be deleted Fresh Blood (talk) 15:16, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Create a DR for that specific image then or modify the image to remove that part or add Template:Factual accuracy to point that out just like it's commonly done for paleoart.

Things like extra fingers or an object that shouldn't be there can often easily be fixed and it would be good if the uploader did that before uploading – one could also ask the uploader to do so. See here for how this usually can be fixed in a minute or so. @Beaest it would be nice if you could do that for the image(s) referred to by this user. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:24, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Prototyperspective I don't mind doing it but this is not good Fresh Blood (talk) 16:04, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm inclined to agree. These images aren't actually of the subject, and so don't necessarily have any intrinsic historical or educational significance. It is as authentic and useful as if I grabbed a pencil and drew a picture of Paris. GMG ^talk 15:41, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Paris, 500 years ago, yes. And there are tons of drawings of cities. I value these images not for the people depicted in it but the ancient settings, the artistic aspects, and the way they were made. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:49, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm not a very good artist. Always been on the more music side of things, and so I may be liable to do something silly like draw someone with six fingers as per above.

At the end of the day AI generated images are little more than fan fiction. Don't get me wrong, my novella about James T Kirk waking up as a woman should absolutely be published and people should love me for it. But it doesn't necessarily have a lasting historical and educational significance in terms of Commons. GMG ^talk 16:18, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Adamant1 non capisco come tu faccia ad affermare che quelle immagini non assomigliano per niente a Giovanna IV, quando l'unico ritratto esistente (su Wikimedia) di questa regina è uno scarabocchio privo di qualunque connotazione fisiognomica. Non credi di essere leggermente condizionato nel tuo giudizio? O forse hai scambiato i ritratti postumi di duecento anni dopo e le attribuzioni con i ritratti autentici? Quanto a Ferdinando II, che è il re di Napoli e non il re di Spagna, ho già detto che mi sono affidata alla medaglia allegata in discussione, che non è pubblica su Wikimedia. La somiglianza c'è eccome.

@Fresh Blood abbiamo già osservato su Wikipedia italiana che l'intelligenza artificiale è imprecisa e che lo stesso metro di giudizio che tu stai usando con lei non lo usi però coi dipinti dell'epoca moderna che raffigurano eventi storici dei secoli passati, i quali sono pieni di anacronismi a partire dal vestiario e dai monumenti. Quelli vanno bene e l'intelligenza artificiale no? Wikimedia ha regole di funzionamento diverse da Wikipedia.

@Prototyperspective posso farlo a partire da domani, per adesso sono impegnata. Studierò bene la cosa. Beaest (talk) 15:44, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

how you can claim that those images look nothing like Joan IV, when the only existing portrait (on Wikimedia) of this queen is a doodle devoid of any physiognomic connotation. By that logic I could upload an image of a potato with a face drawn on it, say it's Jesus Christ, put the image in Category:Jesus Christ, And you would be totally fine with that because it's not like historical paintings of Jesus Christ are accurate anyway. Right. I have to agree with Fresh Blood and GreenMeansGo here. The images should just be deleted. The suggestion that there's nothing wrong with the images because paintings of them at the time weren't 100% accurate either is totally ridiculous. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:00, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Non girare attorno alla questione: hai affermato qualcosa che nessuno è in grado di affermare, data l'assoluta scarsezza di ritratti di Giovanna IV, e la pessima qualità di quelli esistenti. Hai negato la somiglianza forse senza neppure verificare i ritratti, solo per la tua ostilità verso l'intelligenza artificiale. Inoltre la tua logica non regge: di Giovanna sappiamo che era bionda, che aveva (pare) gli occhi azzurri, e che portava la treccia catalana (coazzone). Questi elementi sono stati combinati e si è cercato di recuperarli nella maniera più verosimile possibile. Se avessi preso l'immagine di un uomo vestito da donna allora il tuo discorso avrebbe senso. Beaest (talk) 16:16, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

just because of your hostility towards artificial intelligence. Not that your doing anything other then deflecting from addressing what I said, but I actually have a Flickr account where I upload AI images to instead of trying to upload my made up fan art to Commons when that's not what the site is for. This isn't a personal file host. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:38, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Mi risulta che Wikimedia accetti qualsiasi tipo di immagine (con licenza adatta) che abbia una qualche finalità istruttiva o rappresentativa. Se c'è gente che carica le foto dei propri genitali con la scusa di mostrare com'è fatto il corpo umano, mi domando perché io non possa caricare immagini generate da intelligenza artificiale per mostrare come funziona l'intelligenza e come risponde alle richieste di rappresentazione di determinati personaggi storici, tanto più che leggo nella guida di Wikimedia che questo è accettato. Nessuno qui vuole spacciarle per dipinti reali, nessuno ha mai negato la loro imprecisione, fatto sta che è così che l'intelligenza artificiale lavora in questo momento e quelle immagini hanno comunque un fine istruttivo. Beaest (talk) 16:44, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Template:Qt Images of peoples genitals are deleted as out of scope all the time. So that's not counter arguement you seem to think it is.

Nobody here wants to pass them off as real paintings, nobody has ever denied their imprecision the fact is that this is how artificial intelligence works at the moment and those images still have an instructive purpose. Re-up or rename/categorize them as images of random people from the 15th century instead of acting like they are of real people then. I don't think anyone would care. I know I wouldn't. And I don't see why you would either if this is purely about "how artificial intelligence works at the moment" or whatever and not just you trying to pass them off as images of historical figures when that's not they are. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:55, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Io non cerco di spacciare proprio nulla, ho impegnato giornate intere a ripulire Wikimedia dai finti ritratti di personaggi storici che erano in verità ritratti di ignoti e le cui attribuzioni erano state fatte totalmente a caso. I titoli che ho messo sono puramente riassuntivi e significano lo scopo per cui quelle immagini sono state generate. Se io ho chiesto Ferrandino d'Aragona alla battaglia di Seminara, così si deve chiamare. Poi si può anche rinominare mettendo "intelligenza artificiale" nel titolo, ma non mi metto a rinominare tutte le immagini a una a una. Inoltre le immagini oscene io continuo a vederle, e sono pure categorizzate, quindi non sono state cancellate tutte. Beaest (talk) 17:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Just because there's obscene material on Commons doesn't mean it's not being deleted. They aren't mutually exclusive. Regardless, you can say you aren't trying to pass off anything but then you also named the files after historical figures, put them in categories for those historical figures, and tried to argue they were perfectly fine because images of them at the time weren't 100% accurate either. Those no reason you would have done any of those things, especially the last one, if you weren't trying to pass the images off as representing real historical figures. Anyway, I nominated the images for deletion. So I guess it's up to the community to decide if we should allow for these types of images or not. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:13, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Se sapessi chi sono io e il lavoro di ricerca storica che ho fatto su Wikipedia, neanche ti sogneresti di formulare una simile accusa. Ma non perdo tempo neppure a risponderti. La mia buona fede risulta EVIDENTE già soltanto dalla creazione di categorie come "Ferrandino d'Aragona in immagini generate da intelligenza artificiale" che tutto vogliono fare meno che nascondere. Beaest (talk) 18:39, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

E si dice wikipedia in italiano @Beaest, sto sul pezzo Fresh Blood (talk) 16:01, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The CC-BY-SA 4.0 license is pretty much copyright fraud Trade (talk) 18:10, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Comment I nominated the images for deletion at Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Giovanna IV di Napoli by Bing Image Creator. Trade makes a good point against hosting the images to on top of everything else. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:15, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Commons:Free media resources/fi "(...) Please always double check if the media is really freely licensed and if it is useful for Wikimedia Commons projects." Since much of the AI stuff on commons seems to fail the "useful" part, I would suggest to delete it. Regardless if it´s PD or not. Otherwise we drown in that stuff and contribute to the planet exploding - courtesy of carbon emissions from data centers. Alexpl (talk) 22:01, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I explained, with very specific examples, how these images are useful. I also noted that these >600 images are not useful but they are kept anyway which is fine. Nobody is arguing that we don't delete any AI art, just not the highest-quality actually useful ones please. Now even carbon emissions of data centers seems to be valid rationale for censorship here. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:13, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Prototyperspective: From what it sounds like Beaest has already had problems with uploading these or similar images to Italian Wikipedia already and there's clearly opposition to them here. Plus Its not like people can't have Microsoft Image Creator or any other AI generator create the same exact images instsntly and in mass if they want to. if they want to either. So what useful purpose do they serve if they can't be used in a Wikipedia article and anyone can instantly create thousands of versions of the same exact images in a matter of minutes if they wanted to? The images don't even illustrate a novel usage of the technology either. Its just generic, lower quality versions of already exiting paintings. Really Beaest could have skipped all this by just uploading the originals. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:42, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Adamant1 rispondo solo per smentire un'idea fallace: l'intelligenza artificiale non è in grado di ricreare la stessa immagine neppure se a chiederla è la stessa persona con la stessa identica trama. Le immagini sono uniche, se non vengono salvate sono perdute, per cui nessuna persona esterna potrà mai ottenere lo stesso risultato semplicemente chiedendo.

Adesso vorrei proprio sapere di che originali tu stia parlando, mostrameli. Non esistono. L'intelligenza dichiara apertamente di non ispirarsi a nessun dipinto esistente, a meno che non sia tu a chiedergli, per esempio, il David. Beaest (talk) 05:12, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The word "unique" there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I look at this the same as "limited edition" art prints or NFTs. In both those cases every image is supposedly "unique" but only contain minor iterations of a general base image. I don't think every image is "unique" just because their slightly different though. In fact I can get pretty similar results to you just by putting "15th century oil painting of young King Ferrandino of Aragon and Queen Giovannella greeting cheering people in front of a castle close up portrait" into Image Creator. So no offense, but the images you uploaded are extremely generic. That's kind of baked into AI artwork. All it does is paint by numbers based on preexisting artwork. And to what artwork I'm refering to, there's plenty of images out there of knights riding horses in battle or kings and queens standing in a court yard. But I'm sure you'll claim yours are different and more unique then those because you put "Ferrandino d'Aragona" in the file names. Anyway, I'd still like Prototyperspective to answer the question I asked them about how the images are useful. So I'd appreciate it if we left at that so they can. --Adamant1 (talk) 05:38, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

"Ci sono un sacco di immagini di re, regine e cavalieri". Grazie. Stai parlando con una che ha passato anni a setacciare la rete cercando immagini che fossero simiglianti a questi personaggi storici, e non ne ho trovato praticamente nessuna. Quindi no, non faccio prima a caricare gli originali perché non esistono. E se anche trovassi il ritratto di una persona somigliante, non lo troveresti mai nella scena richiesta, mai coi vestiti richiesti, mai in compagnia delle persone richieste. Fai tutto facile perché non ti interessi di ricostruzione storica, evidentemente.

E non hai nemmeno capito il significato di unico. Le immagini sono uniche perché l'intelligenza non è in grado di ricrearle neppure se glielo chiedi. Avrai sempre un risultato diverso. Non c'entra nulla con l'edizione limitata che sono 500 copie uguali di uno stesso disegno. Qui ti dà una immagine soltanto e basta. L'unico modo per copiarla è condividerla.

E a ben vedere non mi ci porta nessuno a mettere il frutto di ora di lavoro, selezione e ritocchi a disposizione di tutti anonimamente. Meglio che il merito rimanga a me. Beaest (talk) 07:13, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think I was pretty clear about it, but since you didn't seem to get my point the first time I wasn't talking about limited edition prints where it's 500 copies of the same image, but limited edition prints where "new" editions are just variations on the same base image or theme with only minor differences. Anyway, I'd appreciate if you dropped it like I asked you to so Prototyperspective can have a chance to answer my question about how these images are useful. The endless side tangents about things no one disagrees with and have nothing to do with this aren't really helpful. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:46, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

anyone can instantly create thousands of versions of the same exact images in a matter of minutes if they wanted to Unsubstantiated false claim. People claim all the time how easy it is to create AI art. Go ahead and create the same quality of images if that's so easy. Furthermore one needs to know which things work. The images don't even illustrate a novel usage of the technology either. They do, as I already explained. lower quality versions of already exiting paintings As far as I know that is not the case. The images used are on WMC which aren't higher quality paintings of these. how the images are useful. I.explained.that.already. Unlike in other DRs where images are kept for no apparent reason other than being allowed by current policy, I made three or more very specific examples of how they could be used in educational ways. I explained it multiple times already but you always ignored it. This is more than enough: "I…use the image for my blog that talks about life in the middle ages or whatever or a Wikipedia article about AI art depicting historical figures and how current generators currently fail" Prototyperspective (talk) 09:06, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Go ahead and create the same quality of images if that's so easy. As I've pointed out once already I pretty easily created images that were similar to the ones uploaded by Beaest in Microsoft Image Creator by using the prompt "15th century oil painting of young King Ferrandino of Aragon and Queen Giovannella greeting cheering people in front of a castle close up portrait." The guy in the image picture in particular looks almost the same. So yes it is easy to create the same quality of images. They aren't at all unique or hard to reproduce like both of you are acting.

use the image for my blog Any image can be used for a blog post about anything. I was hoping for something more specific and geared towards a general audience then vague assertions about how you think the image would be useful for your personal blog. Commons isn't a personal file host. Maybe the images could be used in a Wikipedia article about AI art, but it sounds like Beaest has already had trouble adding the images to the Italian language Wikipedia. So sure AI generated images can be included in a Wikipedia article about AI artwork, but these specific images apparently aren't going to be used in any articles. --Adamant1 (talk) 09:23, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Adamant1 tu sei lo stesso che ha affermato che le immagini di Giovanna IV non fossero somiglianti ai ritratti, quando non sapevi nemmeno quali fossero i ritratti esistenti. Non sei affidabile per giudicare la qualità dell'immagine. Dice il proverbio: per un astemio tutti i vini sono uguali. Se non conosci il periodo storico, i protagonisti e i dettagli, è inutile che ti metti a valutare. Ti sembreranno tutti egualmente validi, ma non lo sono. Non riconosci nemmeno i lineamenti del volto. Beaest (talk) 09:44, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It does not matter. It's still nothing but an unsubstantiated claim. If that specific prompt works well that is a nice find and there were hardly any images of that kind here before. The ease of creation is not or not necessarily a factor. I explained a specific educational use-case and you did nothing to address it but misquoted one of multiple to derided it. Stop marginalizing AI art and start adhering to Wikimedia Commons policies please. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:19, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

So we can assert: There are no real AI related policies. Based on current rules, Commons will become a massive dump for AI stuff. Images + Audio and Video (in the near future). Until the foundation runs out of money for hosting, that is. Bye Bye. Alexpl (talk) 10:34, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

All of that is not true.

Moreover, my concerns about ~~hosting~~ unexpected inclusions in pages of nonamateur porn were dismissed – why does it suddenly matter in this case when AI art is finally enabling us to have CCBY images for subjects for which there are nearly none in the public domain. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:17, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Why delete porn? At least those guys usually don´t pretend to be "old" or "original". Just keeping the stuff that scammers try to upload to Alamy and the like is kind of boring. Jokes aside: There have to be easily understandable rules for all AI stuff, other than PD or, worse, CC-by. But that will become pretty obvious soon enough. Alexpl (talk) 13:50, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It's still nothing but an unsubstantiated claim. Try the prompt yourself. Or I can always upload the image to Commons so we can compare them. I can guarantee that King Ferrandino has essentially the same look as he does in Beaest images though. This isn't magic. Bing Image Creator uses a base template that essentially every image of the same person and setting is based on with minor variations depending on what prompts you to add it. That doesn't inherently change that images of King Ferrandino will probably look the same or extremely similar even if people add things to the prompt. More then likely Beaest's images turned out how they did despite the extra descriptors, not because of them. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:06, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Adamant1 non c'è bisogno di garantire, se condividi le immagini qui tramite i

indizamento possiamo verificare tutti la loro qualità zo Beaest (talk) 18:18, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don't know what you mean by "verify their quality" since that's not what I was talking about, but I rather not give you and Prototyperspective more fodder to argue about. So I think I'm good for now. Maybe I'll upload the image after things calm down a little and other people have a chance to give their opinion on the subsection though. But I don't really have anything else to say about it at this point. Especially considering the way you and Prototyperspective have been treating me over the whole thing. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:30, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Adamant1 uno che non ha niente da nascondere non esisterebbe a condividere queste immagini anche solo per dimostrare le proprie affermazioni.

P.S. io non ho trattato male nessuno e soprattutto non ho vilipeso il lavoro altrui né fatto commenti sprezzanti sulle immagini caricate da altri utenti definendole disegni per bambini Beaest (talk) 18:44, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Whatever you say, Beaest. Why not drop it? --Adamant1 (talk) 18:55, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Adamant1 Se ritieni che non siano utili allora potresti evitare di fare commenti sulla mancata somiglianza o su altri dettagli artistici che sono tue opinioni personali. "Solo piccole differenze" può dirlo uno che non abbia mai usato l'intelligenza artificiale e non si preoccupi di raggiungere la perfezione. Talvolta servono anche centinaia di tentativi, di modifiche di parole, talvolta serve tanta tanta fortuna, prima di ottenere un risultato soddisfacente. Qui lo scenario è perfetto, ma il personaggio poco somigliante. Qua è molto somigliante, ma è vestito male. Qui invece è tutto adatto, ma gli sono venute sei dita, o gli manca la spada. Talvolta riesci a ottenere l'assoluta perfezione dell'immagine richiesta, e figuriamoci se potrà mai rigenerarla, non dico uguale, ma anche solo simile! Altro che piccole differenze! Beaest (talk) 09:07, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

General discussion about AI on Commons[edit]

Let's move this discussion to the initial question: try to get a clear consensus on AI images on Commons, what is acceptable and what is not. My thoughts:

About copyrights:
1. Fact: Computer-generated art is in the public domain, but there may be exceptions.
2. But there might be a problem: what was the source of the AI tool to make an image? Did it just copy it from another image (copyrighted or PD), combine copyrighted images and those that are in the Public Domain, or did it totally created it himself? Question Has this been discussed before?
Are AI images educational? My opinion:
1. AI illustrations about historical persons, situations, locations and so on: only as illustrations in novels and at other stories where imagination and fantasy are more important than facts and truthful details. Is this part of the "educational purpose" of Commons? I doubt it.
2. We do not accept images/photographs of every contemporary artwork on Commons as well, only of artworks of established artists and there are perhaps other criteria, am I right? So why should we accept all AI images that look like art? Who can judge the quality of AI images?
3. AI illustrations for other purposes, can be useful. I think of diagrams, theoretical models, explanations of how things work or how to make something (like in manuals, guides and handbooks), abstracted drawings of for instance tools and architectural elements, perhaps icons. (Note: this is not an exhaustive overview.)
Recognizability: All AI illustrations should be clearly recognizable as such.
1. I plea for a message in every file with an AI illustration, preferably by a template. I saw that nowadays in the Upload Wizzard you have to tick a box to indicate that you upload an AI image. Perhaps a template can be linked to such a check mark.
2. They should be all in a (sub) category of Category:AI-generated images.

--JopkeB (talk) 11:52, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

On point one, at least with Dall-E they trained it on a mix of public domain and licensed works. Which is probably why its really good at creating images that look copyrighted characters. Regardless, its probably not to allow images created with Dall-E since there's no way to confirm if the original images were PD or not (I assume it would violate copyright to re-use images that are similar to pre-exiting artwork or characters even if the AI generated image itself isn't copyrightable). --Adamant1 (talk) 12:21, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

1.2 In general AI generators create artwork based on training on the image output of all of humanity, and that is the case also if the image looks similar to some existing one, it wouldn't work any other way. And yes it has been discussed before if you consider discussing me bringing that img2img issue up twice but being ignored; don't know if there's a further discussion about it elsewhere.
2.1 WMC hosts a lot of art and it can be educational in a myriad of ways such as information about art styles, art movements, subjects depicted in the image, and so on. Is the educational purpose of Commons humorous/artistic nonamateur porn? I doubt it but nevertheless these images have been kept over and over. There are many more ways they can be educationally useful and I already described many specific of these albeit we probably don't know all the potential educational use-cases. For example an AI-generated hamburger may look useless but since there's no other CCBY image of how advertisements depict fast food burgers, it can be used to illustrate how ads portray them. Don't assume we can easily anticipate all the many use-cases; the specific ones I mentioned should be more than enough.
2.2 Nobody is arguing we should accept all. Source for that not all photographs of contemporary artwork is allowed? I thought none was allowed if the artwork is not CCBY and the image taken in a way where you get a good view of the artwork.
2.3 Please stop marginalizing AI art and treating it in a special way where suddenly our existing practices and policies don't matter anymore.
3.1 Very much agree and suggested exactly this at the Upload Wizard improvements talk page.
3.2 Very much agree. I worked a lot to implement this in contrast to the people complaining about it. I also asked that porn and nude people must be categorized into a subcat of Nude people but apparently only AI art is considered to require such maintenance.

Prototyperspective (talk) 12:27, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Please stop marginalizing AI art and treating it in a special way I mean...it kindof is special. The copyright issues alone are almost completely unlitigated. You can't very well expect people to plug their nose and treat it like a human with a camera, backed by a century of precedent regarding ownership of the work. GMG ^talk 15:48, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I agree with JopkeB, with his concern about the usefulness and accuracy of AI generated content. AI are tools, and as any tool, they can be well used or not. Imho, inaccurate pictures should be deleted without any blame on the use of AI, but even without the fear of losing a masterpiece, adopting the same approach used for the several hundred pictures crowding the categories about 'actors' and 'actresses'. --Harlock81 (talk) 22:14, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Yes Photoshop can also be used in problematic ways. Art is characteristically not accurate. Welcome to the 15th century where nearly all art was portraying realistic scenes and the upcoming theocratic totalitarian/oligarchic enforcement of w:Realism (arts). Concerning categorization, I agree that they should not be categorized in misleading ways. For the same reason I don't consider it okay to categorize porn in children's games or foods cats just because the name of it is written on the body which is currently being done. And several hundred pictures crowding the categories about 'actors' is also provably false. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:19, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don't understand the reason of such a note when you can go and give a look: 1966 files in Category:Actors, 2400 file in Category:Actresses, most of them unused because uploaded just for promotional articles that have been deleted time ago. --Harlock81 (talk) 23:06, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

How is that relevant to AI art – those are not AI generated I thought you were talking about AI images. That low-quality images crowd out more relevant and higher-quality images is exactly what I pointed out here earlier and suggested to be one of the top priorities to fix. I'm currently thinking about how to describe my suggested changes in a better way. Deleting AI art as useful as the above does not help that cause, it's just an additional problem. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:21, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Except that it's a tool where not even the people who created it know what it's doing or how it's doing it. We just need one jurisdiction in the entire world to say that AI art is derivative, and it nukes everything, because we have no way of knowing what work it's drawing from. Saying, as a number of people have said, that there is simply a bias against AI isn't really a response that addresses the underlying issues of what it is and how it work and how it's fundamentally different. GMG ^talk 13:58, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@GreenMeansGo:

Done, please see [[oOM:VPC#Curt in Beijing China ruled AI pic copyrightable

].] — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ_{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 14:08, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

There are three fundamental issues with AI-created images, some of which JopkeB touched on above:

Accuracy: AI creations are not based on knowledge as human creations are; they cannot incorporate specific sources or discuss artistic decisions. There is zero guarantee that the output will be accurate, merely that it will superficially resemble the intended output. Yes, human illustrators are also fallible, but they are capable of sourcing, discussing, and editing their work. That allows for provenance of information to be tracked, like an error being the result of a similar error in a reference image. AI art programs can't tell you which of thousands of images that error came from. The result of this is that every AI image is a potential undetected hoax, with no ability to extend good faith as with human creators. Worse, as soon as the image is used anywhere that doesn't link back to the Commons file page, the AI origin of its creation will often be forgotten. Users and search engines treat Wikimedia projects as trustworthy, and will assume that these images are factual.
Scope: We only allow artworks when they have a specific historical or educational value - whether that is due to the artwork or creator being notable, being a good example of a particular style or technique, or so on. We do not allow personal artworks by non-notable creators that are out of scope; they are regularly deleted as F10 or at DR. Because AI works are not useful as educational or historical illustrations due to accuracy issues, they are no different than any other personal artworks.
Rights: While emerging law seems to treat AI works as PD, there are still rights issues:
- It is possible (and common) for AI works to contain fragments of source images, including of the many nonfree images in their dataset. Unlike typical copyvios, these are almost impossible to trace: the copied work could be any of the images in the AI dataset, rather than an image of the same subject as copyvios generally are. (For example, a face in an AI image could be copied from any face in any image in its dataset.) Additionally, the copied portion may be only a portion of either original or AI work, making it more difficult to detect with automated methods.
- Similarly, the AI may replicate images of copyrighted subjects, such as buildings in non-FOP countries or advertisements in the background of a photograph. The same concerns about detectability apply.
- Most of these datasets include stolen images (including from Commons) that were used in violation of their copyright or licensing terms. We should not be encouraging the production of unethically produced AI images by hosting them.

The combination of these means that hosting of AI-produced images is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of Commons, and we should not accept most AI-produced works. (There are of course exceptions – images to illustrated facets of AI art production, use of ethically-sourced AI to produce works like heralds that inherently involve artistic interpretation of specifications – but these are specific exceptions to the general rule.) Pi.1415926535 (talk) 06:49, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The issue with stolen source material is debatable as least in US court has been stated that least in cases where generated material doesn't compete with original. Another point is that it is likely that newer models will have addressed the problems with shady source data (by using PD material, by using licenced materials, by using self-generated materials ) so this issue is something which will solve itself sooner than later also because of this. --Zache (talk) 07:01, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I tend to agree with Pi.1415926535: Hosting of AI-produced images is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of Commons, unless there is a clear statement which sources has been used, as Zache wrote there will be in future. In that case AI images on Commons still have to comply with rules about scope and accuracy, and I hope with recognizability as pointed out above. JopkeB (talk) 07:59, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think that there should not be differentation between AI generated and human manipulated images in cases where there should be historical accuracy and images could be considered rather straightforwardly as fakes. This includes how images are categorized etc. (ie. categories containing images about real places and persons should not be flooded with fake images) and differentation between real and generated images should be done in category level also. --Zache (talk) 08:41, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Zache: Do you mean "composite" images, were a human has combined elements of real photos, should be allowed? Alamy offers those, but it doesn´t seem quite right. Alexpl (talk) 09:26, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I mean that in last year i found badly photoshopped 60s look like advertisements which were added to wikipedia articles. Some with changed images and some with modified texts. When I saw them I feeled that they should be deleted as fakes and it was bad thing that they were in same categories than real scanned adds. In this context I dont think that I would like the AI generated works which tries to be genuine either when i didn't like the human manually created fakes. No matter how good they are. --Zache (talk) 09:37, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hosting of AI-produced images is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of Commons ---- +1 sounds like a reasonable policy. Alexpl (talk) 09:26, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I would say that there are useful usecases for AI generated images. Icons, placeholder and decoration images are good examples for useful usecases (ie. cases where we do not need historical accuracy). Also one gray area is the AI enhanced / retouched images where AI is used for improving resolution and source image quality. However, by definition GAN's for example generate content from thin air and even if it looks credible it may not be accurate (and they hallucinate also). Should in these cases the guideline be that if one edits the image then new image should be uploaded with different filename and there should be link to the original image in the image description? (in addition that how new image was edited compared to original) --Zache (talk) 09:44, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

As I stated in a current DR[3], I think that, well-intentioned or not, it is basically all Commons:out of scope; unverifiable, and in the worst cases, misleading and harmful, not to mention potential copyright infringement issues. Using AI to upscale existing images or similar is one thing, creating fake "historical" or nature images from scratch is another. This practice should be entirely banned, in my opinion, unless maybe for limited use as joke images on user and talk pages, while clearly labelled as such. FunkMonk (talk) 11:02, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

What steps are necessary to make an AI-ban a rule/policy on Commons? Alexpl (talk) 13:53, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 07[edit]

File:Forms of government 2021.svg dilemma[edit]

The File:Forms of government 2021.svg was, as the name states, supposed to show the forms of government for the year 2021. But this fact that the file should show the status seems to be never was respected in the past. In the mean time this became on the most viewed files in all Wikipedias where it is also used to show the current status of the form of government. Should we move the file and all uses to File:Forms of government.svg and restore the 2021 version under File:Forms of government 2021.svg? GPSLeo (talk) 16:39, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Sounds reasonable to me. - Jmabel ! talk 21:40, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Non-AI generated images with template PD-algorithm[edit]

Over the recent days, I deleted several random internet images (not AI generated), that were uploaded with the following templates: {{cc-by-sa-4.0}} {{PD-algorithm}}. Is there anything new in the upload process that lets users choose this combination of license templates? Thanks, --Polarlys (talk) 17:25, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Request for conversation / Talking: 2024[edit]

Hi folks,

Recently, Maryana Iskander, Foundation CEO, announced a virtual learning and sharing tour, Talking: 2024. This is two years after the initial listening tour that Maryana launched before assuming her role. The aim is to talk directly with Wikimedia contributors around the world about some of the big questions facing the future of our movement. I'm writing here to warmly invite those of you interested to participate – on-wiki or by signing up for a conversation. The priorities that contributors identify in these conversations will become the driving force in the Foundation’s annual planning process, especially as our senior leadership and Trustees develop multi-year goals in 2024. Thanks for your time and attention. Looking forward to talking together. -Udehb-WMF (talk) 18:19, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Request for one file version to be removed[edit]

Regarding the file indicated on the right. The original upload at 17:30 is fine. The next version at 17:32 has has some clumsy image edits on a person. And the third version is a revert. So for tidiness, the second upload should be removed and the first version alone should remain. Can someone manage this? If not possible, the current status is okay. Sorry for the workload and TIA. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 18:49, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Done, deleted as a "courtesy deletion". - Jmabel ! talk 21:47, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jmabel: Many thanks! And again, my apologies for the additional workload. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 22:06, 7 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

December 08[edit]

Corte-Real[edit]

These two images are described as João Vaz Corte-Real and Gaspar Corte-Real respectively. At least one description would be probably incorrect, but which? — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 11:58, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

João Vaz Corte-Real
Gaspar Corte-Real

[1] ttp://web.archive.org/web/20231116195221/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

[1]

Commons:Village pump

Contents