File talk:Yunus Nawandish, mayor of Kabul.jpg

explanation

ISAF publishes or republishes photos taken by soldiers in the Armed Forces of various member nations. Something like 60 to 80 percent of the images are taken by American soldiers. So those photos are really in the public domain, and can bear some kind of {{PD-USGov}} liscense.

Lots of times I come across an image published multiple times -- by the ISAF-media flickr-id, by DVIDS, and in other DoD publications.

Why use the flickr version at all?

1. Because the flickr is the first version to be found;
2. Because flinfo automates some of the steps of uploading;
3. Because flickrreview will take care of uploading the highest resolution version;
4. Because flickrreview will take care of verifying the image is under a free liscense;

Another contributor excised a populated {{ID-USMil}} template from the description of this image -- because ISAF published this image. As above this does not mean it is not an image from the DoD.

The {{ID-USMil}} template is valuable if we come across a similar image from a DoD site. If the two images have the same military serial number they are obviously be the same image, and one can be deleted. If the serial numbers differ, the two images are probably closely related images from the same photoset.

So I reverted the excision of the template.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:24, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

The author of the image is MCC Jason Carter, can we verify that he is a member of the U.S. armed forces? Jason Carter is likely an American name but suppose he is a citizen of Canada, Europe or Australia, and for us to tag his work with ID-USmil would be misleading and I think it will make him feel sad.--Officer (talk) 18:00, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

• http://www.navy.mil/photo_submit.asp and http://www.defenseimagery.mil/learning/howto/virin.html explain the fields in one of these DoD serial numbers. The "N" in this serial number indicates that MCC Jason Carter is a US Navy employee. I don't remember seeing an image using "O" for other. I don't know if they are supposed to apply one of these official serial numbers for images that are not {{PD-USGov}} images. Geo Swan (talk) 19:28, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

A — Army

N — Navy

F — Air Force

M — Marine Corps

G — Coast Guard

Z — National Guard

D — Department of Defense

S — Department of State

H — Department of Homeland Security

O — Other

• Thanks for explaining this but I knew this a long time ago. We still need to verify it because someone who is uploading these images to Flickr could make an error with these serial numbers. To me this is not a big deal but I just felt that we be accurate, especially when so many soldiers from so many countries have cameras capturing images in Afghanistan.--Officer (talk) 23:20, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

  • Human error can happen at any time. Any element of the descriptions can be scrambled by human error... So why would we suspect the MilID is in error, and not suspect any other part of the description? Geo Swan (talk) 12:04, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

    Asking me these questions is pointless. Instead, you could go search the Navy site to find this image and add the link to the MilID tag or remove the MilID tag because it will create a problem when another user comes across this same image.--Officer (talk) 15:23, 23 May 2011 (UTC)