Commons:Village pump/Archive/2006/12

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Village Pump archives
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2004 Not available 09 10 11 12
2005 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2006 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2007 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2008 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2009 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2010 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2011 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2012 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2013 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2014 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
2015 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12

Contents

Flags

Are national flags in the public domain? What about city flags or other flags? I have read the discussion at Template talk:PD-Flag and Commons talk:Licensing and am wondering how the discussion proceeded. Are they ineligible for copyright due to lack of originality as someone proposed? The answer would be very helpful for Slovenian Wikipedia as we see different information here and in the English Wikipedia (e.g. en:template:PD-flag) --Eleassar (t/p) 15:34, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

I think it's depend on particular country copyrights law. For example, in Belarus only state flag is not protected by copyrights ({{PD-BY-exempt}}). Flag images from pre-20 century should be in PD. --EugeneZelenko 15:51, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Are they ineligible for copyright due to lack of originality as someone proposed? Do you mean a lack of creativity? In general this cannot be applied. Flags are a PITA and there is no rule that applies to all of them, seemingly. We can try and organise to have the same information as en.wp but we can't promise to find a simple rule, sorry. :) --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 16:20, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, this would be appreciated. Thanks for your replies. --Eleassar (t/p) 15:23, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Inscape guru needed

Hello,

If someone could complete the collection of ISO 639-1 icons (see Category:Icons_ISO_639-1) or at least those which are in red in the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Translation/_%2A%2A/All_languages , he would be my hero.

Jmfayard 21:42, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Try Commons:Picture requests, we have quite a few SVG gurus and one of them should be able to help you out. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 04:33, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
3247 done similar batch jobs in the past. --EugeneZelenko 16:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm working on it. --  (talk) 19:34, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Oops, some of these icons did already exist but were in Category:Icons_ISO_639 (and had different file names). This category should be cleaned up first. (Then I can create the missing images using this script.) The discussion page already contains an entry that suggests a flat hierarchy without separate cats for ISO 639-1 and 639-2. As the only differece is the length of the language code, I think this is a good idea. Of course, the file names should be like ISO_639_Icon_code.svg then. What are others thinking? --  (talk) 08:22, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Since you are the one working on it, I say do whatever makes sense to you, just document it as well so other people can know. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 00:46, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, the category should be named Category:ISO 639 icons anyway (different word order). I'm going to put all of these images there. --  (talk) 13:30, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

It will be nice to rename all file name, removing -1 -2 -3... Exemple Image:ISO 639-1 Icon en.svg -> Image:ISO 639 Icon en.svg (some of them already exists, like this one). This -1 -2 -3... is not need and cause problems with some templates in Wikipedia. What do you think about this ? ~ bayo or talk 00:01, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Propposal: {{PD-Anarchist}} tag?

I have been having trouble to license some work produced by unknown militants, or anarchist organisations, under the present copyright tags. Most of those tags expect that there would be an owner at some point who lost its right to property, either by renouncing to it, or for its right had expired. The problem arises when we have to deal with work upon which nobody ever claimed property. I understand this should probably be not be a problem that arises solely with dealing with Anarchist material, but it clearly does under these circumstances.

An example are the famous Spanish revolution posters, who were created during a time where no one was supposed to own anything, between july 1936 and early 1939, in parts of Spain controlled by anarchist organisations. There was never an owner, and hence no one could renounce its rights!

Another example would be the Anarchist flag:Anarchist flag.svg. Someone registered it as being his creation. He surely did create the file, but the idea behind it, the red and black flag divided diagonally, was created in the XIX century, no one knows who, and it has since been used freely. Claiming property, so one could release it again to the public domain, is, at the least, innapropriate. It doesn't reflect the truth.

I do understand that some of their publications bring revenue to their organisations, and that for such reason some of them might seek copyright protection. But there is a whole body of work that is not formally owned by no one, or that no one ever knew who was the author. A good example are the spanish revolution pictures which were collected by Abel Paz and the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation from comrades who donated it with the sole purpose of making their history known. Preventing the publication of their material, in this sense, comes against the wishes of the ones who made those images public. Adding to that, they did publish some of those pictures recently, in english language, and none of their material refers to copyright, probably because it doesn't apply anyway.

Copyright should protect the use of images, not prevent it.

I wish to express here that I am not a supporter of "Fair Use". My point is: there is no sense in postulating property in its absence. Mr.Rocks 11:52, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Read the text on Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. It clearly states that "In the case of anonymous or pseudonymous works, the term of protection granted by this Convention shall expire fifty years after the work has been lawfully made available to the public.". To know more about the Convention read Berne_Convention_on_Copyright. --OsvaldoGago 14:25, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Is there a tag for anonymous work more than 50 years old? Mr.Rocks 01:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Template:Anonymous work say 70 years :) ~ bayo or talk 00:10, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Permission of images in category:Lothar Wolleh

Can anybody with access to permissions@wikimedia.org check if the mails containing the permissions have been received? Please mark the image descriptions. It's great to have these photographs for free use, but I would like to have this confirmed. --Lyzzy 16:17, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Problem with Category:Histopathology

I have been trying to clean up several categories, but I may have hit a will with this one. I would like to rename the subcategories in this category to make them broader so that they can include gross pathology, diagrams and whatnot. (For example change Category:Ductal carcinoma Histopathology to Category:Ductal carcinoma and include the gross pathology, anatomy images. As it stands there are generally only one or two images per category, making them broader would really help organization in other categories such as Category:Organ systems and Category:Cancer which are quite underpopulated. But I do not appear to be able to change the name. Does anyone have any ideas? Cheers--DO11.10 17:52, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Just replace the old category name with the new one at the bottom of each image: since they are just 7 in the category, it is feasible. Then create the new category page by adding mother category and explanation, if any, and eventually make a redirect from the old one to the new one. [if any pages are linking to the old category] (it lokks like none do) and in case update them. Provided that everybody agrees with your changes, that is... Love. --G.dallorto 19:26, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Images not showing up

Since one month ago or so, some of the pictures I upload do not show up afterwards. But if I clic on their name, then they show. Can anybody tell me how to solve the problem? The phenomenon seems to happen randomly, and may strike just two in twenty pictures. See for an example: this one. Thank you --G.dallorto 19:22, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Seems to load fine for me. It could be that a thumbnail has not been generated yet or that your browser is having issues. --tomf688 (talk - email) 22:10, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

image disappeared

Why did the image "1santims_2005.png" disappear from Category:Coins of Latvia? The link to the image is still there and the image itself does exist, but it is not displayed anymore. Cocoloi 21:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

It's still there! Try ctrl+F5 --Tarawneh 21:40, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, it's still not there. Cocoloi 22:03, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Ok, IE no problem. Opera no problem, but.. yes I can't see it using Firefox --Tarawneh 23:10, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I get different display problems every time I refresh using FireFox. It is not only Image:1santims_2005.png. With every refresh, some come back and other images just disappear. Interesting --Tarawneh 23:44, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Now I see that the image has reappeared. Jawohl Tarawne, ich benutze Firefox. Danke! Cocoloi 19:41, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

See my previous post on the same date than this post. I use Firefox too. So it seems there is a bug in it preventing display of SOME pix. Who can we ask about it to? --G.dallorto 21:41, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Now the image 2santimi_2006.png disappeared!!! 23:54, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Photographs of books

Hi. I've recently seen some "tridimensional" photos of books (I mean, photos of real books, not just a bidimensional reproduction of their covers), like this and this one. I think these are just derivative works and the should be treated as {{copyvio}}s unless the cover art/design itself has been published under a free license, and of course the uploader is able to prove it. Am I wrong? Are there any exceptions to this? Thanks. --Dodo 08:33, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

You are right - pictures like this are only ok if the cover itself has been published under a free license, or is PD. It may be PD because of age (like Image:Leviathan gr.jpg), or because the design is trivial (if this is the case for the Duden covers may be debatable - I'd suggest to err on the side of safety and say no). Another possible exception is when the book cover is not the main subject of the image and not clearly recognizable - for example if you take a picture of a store that has some books on display.
I would suggest to notify the uploader and file a regular deletion request for these images, so they can be deleted or kept after a debate about wether the covers are trivial enough to be PD. In this case, however, it'S doubtful if the (derivative) pictures can be licensed as GFDL - since they are reproductive (i.e. no originality), they would have to be PD to, IMHO. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 19:46, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Bukovniško jezero.jpg

Is the copyright license of Image:Bukovniško jezero.jpg valid? It is a depiction of a copyrighted two-dimensional work so I'm not sure about this. --Eleassar (t/p) 15:21, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I seriously doubt this is a valid tag, unless the work that was photographed can be proven to be PD. --tomf688 (talk - email) 18:28, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Copyright doubt

I just uploaded here http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:G.dallorto/Perugia#Museo_di_Palazzo_della_Penna some pictures of a very beautiful contemporary piece of architecture, a stair by Franco Minissi. I was caught by the doubt about the fact that, the author not having been dead for at least 70 years, copyright may apply to the stairs itself. Who can help me? (PS if the pix are to be deleted, please give me the time - i.e. 24 hours - to move them to Flickr before deleting. Thx). --G.dallorto 21:45, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Ps2: same doubt here.

Gas rations from 1945

I have some gas rations from 1945, i would like to know there value The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.35.33.160 (talk • contribs) at 03:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Try asking at the Wikipedia Reference Desk. Alphax (talk) 05:48, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm fairly certain that Wikimedia's goals don't include appraisals. You may have more luck finding it on another website. --tomf688 (talk - email) 13:15, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

System messages needing translation

There are quite a few systems messages which haven't been translated from English yet, as visible at Special:Allmessages (if you set your preferences to a language other than English, or append ?uselang=... to the URL). If there are any that you know a correct translation for, can you post the name of the message, the language, and the correct translation at COM:AN? Thanks, Alphax (talk) 05:48, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Flickr images

There are many flickr images on commons. I think which are not free images according to their terms of use.

They mention teir terms of use: 'Flickr.com Terms of Use'

By using the Flickr.com web site, a service of Ludicorp Research and Development, Ltd. ("Ludicorp"), you are agreeing to be bound by the following terms and conditions (“Terms of Use”). Basic Terms

  1. You must be 13 years and older to use this site.
  2. You are responsible for any activity that occurs under your screen name.
  3. You are responsible for keeping your password secure.
  4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Flickr users.
  5. You may not use the Flickr.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
  6. You are solely responsible for your conduct and any data, text, information, screen names, graphics, photos, profiles, audio and video clips, links (“Content”)that you submit, post, and display on the Flickr.com service.
  7. Flickr is intended for personal use and is not a generic image hosting service. Professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited.
  8. You must not modify, adapt or hack Flickr.com or modify another website so as to falsely imply that it is associated with Flickr.com.
  9. You must not create or submit unwanted email to any Flickr members (“Spam”).
  10. You must not transmit any worms or viruses or any code of a destructive nature.
  11. You must not, in the use of Flickr, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws).

Violation of any of these agreements will result in the termination of your Flickr.com account. While Flickr.com prohibits such conduct and content on its site, you understand and agree that Flickr cannot be responsible for the Content posted on its web site and you nonetheless may be exposed to such materials and that you use the Flickr.com service at your own risk. General Conditions

  • We reserve the right to modify or terminate the Flickr.com service for any reason, without notice at any time.
  • We reserve the right to alter these Terms of Use at any time. If the alterations constitute a material change to the Terms of Use, we will notify you via Flickr's internal messaging service ('FlickrMail') or via internet mail according to the preference expressed on your account. What constitutes a "material change" will be determined at our sole discretion, in good faith and using common sense and reasonable judgement.
  • We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.
  • We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Use.
  • The Flickr service makes it possible to post images hosted on Flickr to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link back to Flickr from each photo to its photo page on Flickr.
  • Your account will also be terminated if it is used for hosting graphic elements of web page designs, icons, smilies, buddy icons, forum avatars, badges and other non-photographic elements on external websites.

Copyright (What's Yours is Yours)

NOTICE AND PROCEDURE FOR MAKING CLAIMS OF COPYRIGHT OR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY INFRINGEMENT

Yahoo! respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same. Yahoo! may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, disable and/or terminate the accounts of users who may be repeat infringers. If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, or your intellectual property rights have been otherwise violated, please provide Yahoo!'s Copyright Agent the following information:

  • an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright or other intellectual property interest;
  • a description of the copyrighted work or other intellectual property that you claim has been infringed;
  • a description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the site;
  • your address, telephone number, and email address;
  • a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
  • a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your Notice is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual property owner or authorized to act on the copyright or intellectual property owner's behalf.

Shyam (T/C) 11:28, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

What exactly do you think is unfree? It looks fine to me. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 12:30, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Mostly Flickr is intended for personal use and is not a generic image hosting service. Professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited. Shyam (T/C) 12:33, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
If I'm not mistaken, these words limit users, who could host images on flickr.com, not users who could use (download, view, etc.) content hosted there. --EugeneZelenko 15:48, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
What I think according to above statements is flickr.com atrictly prohibits the images on wikimedia commons atleast. They are not free images and sometimes acceptable as fair use image. Shyam (T/C) 18:51, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
"flickr.com atrictly prohibits the images on wikimedia commons atleast" - If they do then they (aka Yahoo) are most welcome to contact wikimedia and request we take them down. Somehow I don't think Yahoo are going to do that, given they are actively donating servers to wikimedia. Everything on the web is under one licence or another (in the vast majority of cases it is all rights reserved) - we are simply using some content that is licensed under suitable commons licences. SFC9394 19:12, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
No insult intended Shyam, but you are not making a coherent argument here. Commons/Wikimedia has never made any agreement with Yahoo related to flickr, and nothing about the Flikr agreement would prohibit people from downloading and redistributing the works on Flickr. Furthermore, since many of the images we take from Flickr are under share-alike licenses it would actually be a violation of the license for Yahoo to attempt to limit redistribution. --Gmaxwell 19:29, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
I do not have any knowledge about the agreement between Wikimedia/Commons and Yahoo, would you please post the link of e-mail regarding the agreement. I do not have good knowledge about the licenses but I suppose, the personal use images could not be free use images. Correct me if I am wrong. Gmaxwell, could you please explain images we take from Flickr are under share-alike licenses it would actually be a violation of the license for Yahoo to attempt to limit redistribution. I am unable to understand what do you mean by this, should we change the license from share-alike or something else? Shyam (T/C) 21:15, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Shayam, you are confusing Flickr's user ToS with the license status of individual files posted by those users who agree to abide by that ToS. There's really no issue here. If you're curious about Creative Commons licenses, you can find full descriptions at http://www.creativecommons.org Jkelly 21:33, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Here for the piece on the links between the two organisations - not that that makes any difference to the legality of the licences. The files on flickr licensed under suitable CC terms can be uploaded here (or to any other server in the world) - that point is, I'm afraid, indisputable. SFC9394 21:36, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure but does it mean wherever Yahoo! Inc. claims for its copyright could the images be used as free use and simply tag with share-alike licenses or should we require further procedure to contact Yahoo! or website owner? Shyam (T/C) 21:52, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
The images on flickr are not copyrighted by Yahoo, but by the photographers. By uploading pictures to flickr, they grant Yahoo to redistribute the images, but nothing else. Some do as well release them under a CC license, which makes it suitable for the commons. So Yahoo has nothing to do with this matter, only the photographers themself. -- Bryan (talk to me) 22:50, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

The "professional use" ToS is poorly phrased, I suspect. I think what they're trying to say is that they don't want commercial photographers setting up shop on Flickr instead of paying for their own bandwidth. Big websites are always dealing with people coming up with new ways to sponge off their fat pipes, witness linkspamming in WP articles. Stan Shebs 18:12, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. Flickr/Yahoo makes no copyright claims to the images uploaded by users. Their terms of service apply to your use of the flickr website, not to the use of the images you obtain from there. Morven 00:24, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I've been reviewing some Flickr images, and wrote the users a comment like:
Thanks for licensing this lovely picture as CC-BY. Your choice of a free license has allowed us to use your image in Wikimedia Commons - (the link)
Best regards, Yuval

The users that HAVE replyed me, were fluttered. Yuval YChat • 17:54, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Wik Bullies, Thugs and Ferals

Howcome the Australian editors with the help of some offshore admins are being totally rude and ignorant to new editors and claiming they are using 'sockpuppets' when I had to look up what that was, and am not etc?

Registered user 'Gretaw' has been blocked along with my block when Gretaw is totally absolutely nil to do with me. The admins who did this are either Gretaw or they have attacked a totally not involved reg wik user.

Whatever, the go at me on wikipedia has been pretty disgusting and bad form wik that you allow this bully stuff to happen on your site. Check out that Gretaw stuff and what Thatcher131, Golden Wattle, Longhair/Durova, and any other whinney ones - oh I forgot the pompous Sarah Uhart. There was the spree slope Grahame something also.

Bad show wik. Poor form and disgusting org. The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.54.9.127 (talk • contribs) at 14:34, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Wrong wiki mate. Don't bring your gripes here or you'll be blocked quick smart. Alphax (talk) 04:35, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Pig

Alpha you sound like a totally unplesant turnout also

what

what do i do on this website The preceding unsigned comment was added by Orangegirl (talk • contribs) at 03:25, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

See Commons:Welcome. Alphax (talk) 04:43, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Undeletion possible? because of Panoramafreiheit

Hi, i'm missing some images in Truppenübungsplatz Vogelsang. They were all deleted, possibly because no one knows that they were shot under Freedom of Panorama (the location, an ex- military area/"castle", is owned by the state of Germany and the state of NRW, and publically opened. It is owned by the people of Germany therefore, literally, not by any private person or company.) I remember a discussion about another photo of one of Willy Meller's sculptures and it was kept. But i don't find it at the moment :-/ Is it possible that a - maybe german - administrator looks again at the deleted images on that page and decides, if they can be restored? Thank you. --217.237.149.206 10:53, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Looking at the deletion log entries, they were mostly deleted in late September due to lack of source information. No idea if they can still be undeleted, but I assume the source information would have to be filled in for them to be kept. Carl Lindberg 15:51, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
The five photos (Image:Vogelsang 9 DB.jpg,Image:Vogelsang 8 DB.jpg,Image:Vogelsang 6 DB.jpg,Image:Vogelsang 7 DB.jpg,Image:Vogelsang 7 DB-Ausschnitt.jpg) were all tagged as {{nsd}} or {{nld}} on 21 July by Wikipeder (talk · contribs) and subsequently deleted by the admins Nilfanion (talk · contribs) and Samulili (talk · contribs). These people should be your first point of contact to request undeletion. Alternatively you can request undeletion at Commons:Undeletion requests. Four of the five deleted photos are photographs of old photographs. I'm not sure whether Panoramafreiheit applies to these, as they are essentially direct copies of someone else's copyrighted work rather than derivative works. However Image:Vogelsang 6 DB.jpg is a photo of an outdoor sculpture, so Panoramafreiheit may apply to this one. —JeremyA 16:21, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I have restored #6, but for reasons stated by JeremyA, I don't feel comfortable/convinced restoring the other images. -Samulili 19:13, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

New Wikimedia User --- Questions re Use of Email

Hello --- Recently while browsing the Web, I came upon some pictures on Wikimedia that were taken by another member named Rami Tarawneh. These pictures were of particular significance to me and my family as they were of my mother's hometown of Bremen, Germany. I would like to send an email to Rami Tarawneh, but am not sure how to go about this using Wikimedia as the email medium. I would appreciate any help that you can offer. My name is Peter Klemans and my email address is peter_klemans [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Thank You ........ Peter The preceding unsigned comment was added by Peter Klemans (talk • contribs) at 16:58, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

You can contact User:Tarawneh on his talk page. Click this link: User talk:Tarawneh, and then click the plus sign next to "edit" at the top of that page to type your message. --tomf688 (talk - email) 19:27, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Videos of desktop running Ubuntu

Hi.

Ubuntu is a Free operating system licensed under the GPL license.

I've uploaded an ogg theora video showing the menu system of Gnome.

I think I haven't tagged and licensed this video properly.

Can anyone help me?

--OsvaldoGago 01:31, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I've just found out how. --OsvaldoGago 10:03, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Where to ask about licensing problems with an existing image

I cannot work out at all where to ask about possible licensing problems with an existing image. I would think that this should be prominently posted on the Community Portal. It is not. Commons:Help desk and Commons talk:Licensing each suggest that the other would be an appropriate place to report. So I am putting this here and asking someone more familiar with the community pages on Commons to copy it to the appropriate place, and also to add the relevant information to the Community Portal: I imagine that an enormous number of images are mis-tagged initially, and we ought to be making it easy for someone to point out the problems.

The specific issue: Image:Gernika3.jpg is marked with {{PD-Art}}. "Art" seems a stretch, but in any case the text of the template says that it was either published pre-1923 in the U.S. (impossible: it depicts a 1937 event) or that the author has been dead over 70 years (impossible, at least for the next several months, even if the photographer died in the act of snapping the photo). It may be PD on some other basis, but clearly not on this basis. - en:Jmabel | talk 01:58, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

It may be best to just tag the image as having no source. In fact, I'll go ahead and do so myself. --tomf688 (talk - email) 05:30, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Chinese characters: Massiv PNG upload for Clerical and Kaishu style

Hello, I can make quickly image.png (using a font and a script) of the 1.000 commonest Chinese characters, in Clerical and in Kaishu style. I even can make the 2.000 commonests, allways in .png. The need can be because many European computer don t have extrem oriental fonts.
3 questions :

  1. This is a wide copy of an existent font, which USA laws apply on this kind of work ?
  2. How upload quickly 2 thousand files ? Scripts are welcome, who can do this ?
  3. PNG or SVG : We can do this 2.000 x 2 = 4.000 files in SVG, but that will need 30 seconde by file [Open in Inkscape-vectorisation-save-close], I think it's not convenient to do it. Scripts are welcome but I'm unable to do this.

What do you think about that ? Yug (talk) 15:22, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Freeship files, boat and ship 3D models.

I am unclear whether it would be acceptable for me to place in the commons Freeship files which I create of ships and boats. I use this program to create 3D models of ships and boats, both that I see in the world, but also of known boat designs. Considering that the ships and boats are utilitarian, is this, or is this not considered to be a 'fair use' representation? (and therefore disallowed because it is 'fair use'?) BruceHallman 20:19, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

If you're creating original designs, you're the copyright holder; if you're copying the designs of someone else, you're infringing the copyright of the ship architect or shipwright who designed the boat, unless they've been dead long enough that the copyright on the original design has expired. Also, what file format would they be in? Alphax (talk) 03:45, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Wrong - industrial design and engineering is not copyrightable (in any jurisdiction i know of, anyway). Otherwise, we couldn't have any pictures of recent buildings, cars, clothing, toasters, etc. So, unless the boat is considered a piece of art, publishing self-made models of them should be perfectly ok; If making the model itself does not involve creative originality, it would be PD, btw: the model's creator wouldn't own any rights.
There are always borderline cases - architecture may be simple engineering, or art. The same may be true for some very special cars, boats, etc. en:Colani comes to mind as one who makes it hard to draw a line between (non-copyrightable) industrial design and (copyrightable) applied art. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 20:48, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't know the status in other countries, but I'm afraid that in the U.S., boat hulls are copyrightable. They were specifically written into the copyright code - 17 U.S.C. chapter 13. --Davepape 00:00, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Wow, that's interresting - so cars and planes aren't copyrighted, but boats are? The boat industry must have excellent lobbyists... But wait: is chapter 13 realy about "normal copyright"? This sounds like "design patent" to me - the term of protection given in § 1305 is only 10 years and § 1306 talks about an explicit "protected design" notice and registration. Does such a "protected design" extend to digital models? To photographs? How exactly does it relate to copyright? The protection seems limited (§ 1308): The owner of a design protected under this chapter has the exclusive right to— (1) make, have made, or import, for sale or for use in trade, any useful article embodying that design; and (2) sell or distribute for sale or for use in trade any useful article embodying that design. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 01:32, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
I was hoping for a yes or a no answer.  :-) BruceHallman 05:15, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Ah but, copyright is true Zen - yes and no are both illusory... ;-) Man vyi 16:37, 25 November 2006 (UTC)}
The answer to your question is the same as the answer to this question: Have you stopped beating your wife? Alphax (talk) 17:02, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Chapter 13 isn't 'Copyright', it is 'Protected Designs'. Also, there is a requirement that the designs be marked Circle D, section §1306 and that application for protection be made per §1310 In short, after reading Chapter 13, I think that my posting into the commons of 3D models of existing designs 10 years or older, and 3D modeling of designs not registred per §1310 is not Copyright 'fair use' or Protected Design 'fair use' and therefore allowed to put into the Commons. I still am interested to learn if anyone around here questions my judgement in this regard. BruceHallman 16:19, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm.

What I should do when I come across things like Image:Winterberries.jpg, where the source copyright is different from the templated copyright? --SB_Johnny|talk|books 18:22, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

What do you mean with 'source copyright' ? -- Bryan (talk to me) 20:32, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Generally, if the image's source states a different license than the one given on the image page, ask the uploader to clarify. The description page has to relect the exact license given by the creator of the work - that may however be different from the general copyright statement given on the source website. In the above case, en:Wikipedia:Successful_requests_for_permission#In_My_Garden seems pretty clear, although it would be good to have somethine at least a little verifiable, like an email from the creator sent to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 21:07, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
By "source copyright I mean that the image description includes mention of "copyright but may be used...", while the uploader listed it under GFDL.
As far as the request for permission goes (how did you find that, BTW???), "I asked Susan Sweeney (the copyright owner) if we could use the photos on In My Garden on Wikipedia. She said we could use all we want, so long as we don't give permission for anyone else to use them. I explained to her that we couldn't use the photos unless they were licensed under the GFDL, and I explained to her what that meant. She said "GFDL is not quite what I want but I want to support Wikipedia, so I'll live with it." " isn't particularly comforting to me... the GFDL doesn't mean "OK for wikipedia". I agree... something traceable to the image creator or copyright holder would be much better.
Just some background: I came across that image because I wasn't completely satisfied with the quality of Image:Ilex verticillata fruits 01.JPG, which is a photo I took. I decided to just go ahead and download my photo because I felt uncomfortable using a photo of questionable copyright status in the content page I want to use it in. --SB_Johnny|talk|books 22:21, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
How I found it? The description page says "see this page for further copyright information"... it seems to me that the author originally wanted to give permission for Wikipedia only, but was persuaded to agree to the GFDL.
Anyway: "copyrighted" is not a contradiction to GFDL, quite the contrary: licenses are only possible for copyrighted material, copyleft licenses rely on copyright to enforce license terms; all works that are not PD are, per definition, copyrighted. The standard header for works under the GFDL [1] (and GPL, and other licenses) starts with Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of... -- Duesentrieb(?!) 11:50, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

November 10

==> Fine. I insist, if there is something not clear, it is right to ask to the uploader to make it clear. Having the authorization of the University, there is not a problem to ask any other letter in that matter. They would provide it very soon as I know them very well. But you have taken a drastic decision that caused a bad mood. In that case you were irresponsabile. The contributions of user come from a volunteer work and it is good to be carefull. About me I have expended much hours in this and, as I am a very busy man, I think it is time to get away and dedicate the free time to other projects, I have many. I will delete all my contributions, it would be my last work this week. Thank you to all the gentlemen here and Shalom to everybody. User:Albeiror24

November 23

Munich

On October, 23, User:Mac9 created the [new category] Category:Munich, Germany in order to move Category:München, Germany. I supported him for this action, since Commons rules say that categories are in English, and other big city categories have already been moved, like Category:Rome, Category:Vienna.

User:Rüdiger Wölk recently reverted our edits to recover the category München, Germany; then, I restored the English category Category:Munich, because the English article is w:Munich, and not Munich, Germany, and to make easier the creation of standard subcategories in the form “OBJECT in/of Munich” (I am working to rename the previous forms “OBJECT in/of LOCATION” when LOCATION is “München, Germany”, “München”, or “Munich, Germany”).

Now, User:Rüdiger Wölk told to me that he prefer Munich, Germany, rather than Munich. So, I ask for other opinions: what is your prefered choice for the name of this category? (de:München en:Munich). --Juiced lemon 11:31, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

where is this commons rule that categories have to be in english? i thought its an international project an not an english one .oO ...Sicherlich Post 13:59, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
You'll find these rules in the following pages: Commons:Language policy and Commons:By location category scheme.
Since we are an international project and near nobody speaks all the languages used in wikipedia projects, we use a single and international language to name categories. So, anybody who speaks this only language can easily browse through the whole Commons database. This is an obvious convenience, otherwise I am not a fierce partisan of the English language. --Juiced lemon 14:16, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
In catgerory Cities of Germany we have categorized the most of the German cities. Wy should there a special rule for 3 of the German cities? And why Munich or München without the ending germany -- Rüdiger Wölk 16:22, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Why is the Berlin category without , Germany? Because it's the capital of Germany? But Hamburg is very important, too, more important than Berlin in economic affairs.--Wappen-stadt-bonn.svgBo-rhein-sieg 16:33, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

The question if it's a big city isn't important. When nearly all subcategories from cities in Germany with , Germany ends, that should be also for Munich and Berlin. -- Rüdiger Wölk 16:50, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I would like the Solution, that the Cat. will be named "München, Germany" the other ones could be used as

redirects, so everybody can find it. I like this cat. because nearly all german cities use the germany ending. And "München" is the local name, so it could be prefered, because many cities in germany don't have an english name... --Stefan-Xp 19:18, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Da hier fast nur deutsche Benutzer mitreden, möchte ich nicht stundenlang unnötig über dem Langenscheidt sitzen. @Rüdiger Wölk: Ich sehe das genauso, es ist eigentlich unwichtig, wie groß eine Stadt ist und daher kann das „, Germany“ ruhig auch dort rein. Die Erläuterung mit Hamburg meinte ich nur, weil die Sonderstellung von Berlin als Hauptstadt quatsch wäre. Aber wenn Du das mit Berlin ändern willst, kannst Du dich sicherlich auf einigen Widerstand von dort gefasst machen ;-). Was mir bisher auch unklar blieb: Sollen alle Unterkategorien (also z.B. „Buildings in Munich“) auch den Zusatz „, Germany“ enthalten? Da gibt es auf Commons auch ein großes Wirrwar.

@Stefan-Xp: Das könnte man schon machen. Im Prinzip ist das aber schon eine Art Mischmach, für mich hört sich z. B. Köln (Deutsch), Germany (Englisch) etwas komisch an, da mir „Cologne“ schon ein sehr, sehr fester Begriff ist, Munich und Nuremberg kannte ich auch.--Wappen-stadt-bonn.svgBo-rhein-sieg 19:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC) P. S.: Man kann das auch anders sehen: Alle Städte haben einen englischen Namen, der nur in sehr wenigen Fällen nicht mit dem deutschen übereinstimmt. In Wörterbüchern werden auch solche Städtenamen übersetzt.--Wappen-stadt-bonn.svgBo-rhein-sieg 19:45, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I insist on putting cities to their real name. But there must always be a redirect at least from the english language. If this is an international project or not is irrelevant because you will be redirected. The name is München and not Munich or else. If a city is important is POV. I do not know who enforced this "new policy". But the possibility to redirect categories has only been implemented to fullfill the redirect to the propper name. --Paddy 08:36, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

There is not any “new policy”. Category:CommonsRoot was created on 10:06, 19 November 2004, and language policy for categories was initiated on Revision as of 00:57, 21 December 2004 (Commons:Language policy).
A Munich page was created on 21:14, 19 November 2004. It was moved to München on 10:55, 9 July 2005. Category:München, Germany was created 03:08, 15 December 2004 during the talks about language policy. Now, we have no reasons to continue to use it, as long as we keep the same policy. More, “München, Germany” is incoherent, like “Munich, Deutschland”, and such title cannot logically be expected.
Place names are conventional names, that's the reality. For example, en:Easter Island (de:Osterinsel), en:Kaliningrad (de:Kaliningrad) are names we use at present time. So, we have no special reason to use de:München, and not ru:Москва, ar:طرابلس (ليبيا) or zh:北京市. --Juiced lemon 15:40, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
let us use Munich, Germany -- Rüdiger Wölk 02:03, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
And why not München, Germany ? --Stefan-Xp 03:04, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
This is the result, when you search München, Germany on the Deutsch Wikipedia. Category titles are also useful to identify matching articles in the Wikipedia projects. So, I should advise against to mix a German (and non-English) place name with a English suffix.
More generally, I am reluctant to add superfluous suffixes to category names. Suffixes are even annoying when they are necessary for disambiguation: Category:Georgia (U.S. state) is a good example (disambiguation with the country Category:Georgia. Look at the subcategories for this U.S. state:
  1. some categories I created recently have the suffix “(U.S. state)”
  2. 3 categories Category:Age pyramids for counties in Georgia, Category:Counties in Georgia, and Category:Universities and colleges in Georgia, have no suffix (I created the second one because it was a wanted category)
  3. the category Category:Maps of Georgia (USA) has an eccentric suffix (I have planned to move it, but the new name is still undecided)
  4. city categories, which names fit with English Wikipedia articles (so, without “U.S. state”)
It demonstrates that suffixes bring extra difficulties, when they are used for the name of a subdivided category. On the other hand, you didn't explain yet why the suffix “, Germany” is so useful for you. So, I have no chance to concur with you on this subject for the moment. --Juiced lemon 16:24, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

I think the suffix is usefull to have all the german cities with one suffix. There are many german cities with the same name than the original German cities (Berlin - 32 other cities with the same name. or Frankfurt - 2 cities with the same name alone in Germany). And it is much easier to give all the normal (German) users the advice to add the suffix Germany. We have now all the German categories with the same suffix und I think it is much better to have no exeptions. In this way it is much easier to understand the system for normal users. -- Rüdiger Wölk 06:36, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand your demonstration: when you consider 32 german cities with the same name, the suffix “Germany” is obviously unable to disambiguate them. “Germany” would suit only in extremely rare cases, when a single german city has the same name than cities outside of Germany. You could say directly that the suffix “Germany” was useless.
Lastly, it is much easier for all users to apply the same rule for german cities than for all other cities in the world, and to look for the city name in the English Wikipedia. --Juiced lemon 19:25, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
NO - there are not 32 german Cities with the same name. These cities are outside Germany: Städte und Orte in Nordamerika are listed on the German Berlin article. many people from Germany moved to America and they used the old names: * Berlin (Cullman County), Alabama,
   * Berlin (Dallas County), Alabama
   * Berlin (Arkansas)
   * Berlin (Connecticut)
   * Berlin (Georgia)
   * Berlin (Illinois), Sangamon County
   * Berlin (Iowa)
   * Berlin (Kansas)
   * Berlin (Kentucky)
   * Berlin (Maryland)
   * Berlin (Massachusetts)
   * Berlin (Missouri)
   * Berlin (Nevada)
   * Berlin (New Hampshire)
   * Berlin (New Jersey)
   * Berlin (New York)
   * Berlin (North Dakota)
   * Berlin (Holmes County), Ohio
   * Berlin (Williams County), Ohio
   * Berlin (Oklahoma)
   * Berlin (Oregon)
   * Berlin (Somerset County), Pennsylvania
   * Berlin (South Carolina)
   * Berlin (Tennessee)
   * Berlin (Texas)
   * Berlin (Vermont)
   * Berlin (Virginia)
   * Berlin (Washington)
   * Berlin (West Virginia)
   * Berlin (Green Lake County), Wisconsin
   * Berlin, heute Kitchener (Ontario)
   * außerdem noch: Berlin Township, Ohio

the same with Frankfurt. So it isn't a good idea only to look for the english Wikipedia. -- Rüdiger Wölk 16:34, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


Youre right i don't know longer what is better :( i reject. --Stefan-Xp 16:34, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

The special thing about Berlin is, that it isn't only a city, but a state, too. --Flominator 20:38, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

My suggestion: let us use Munich, Germany. It is a lot to do and we can start to clean up the categories. OK? -- Rüdiger Wölk 20:45, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Symbol support vote.svg Support--Wappen-stadt-bonn.svgBo-rhein-sieg 20:47, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
I sum up my stance:
  1. I disapprove the systematic addition of the suffix ,Germany to German city names in Commons because:
    1. It's an unjustified except to the Commons rules or uses (English Wikipedia as the reference for place names)
    2. The suffix “,Germany” don't disambiguate between 2 German cities with the same name
    3. A suffix is often the source of mistakes when you create subcategories
    4. With a suffix, you'll have longer subcategory names, and sometimes a bad layout (as Category:Coats of arms of municipalities of Switzerland).
  2. However, I'll respect the most people's opinion. So, if this opinion is favourable to the suffix, I'll not initiate an edit war to keep Category:Munich (without the suffix), even if I think it is the correct category name, and the best one for maintenance. --Juiced lemon 10:42, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

November 24

New block

Hi all. NEWS: We are now blocked in Tunisia. (not just commons, all the other projects) Why? Don't ask me :) At least the block was lifted in China--Tarawneh 04:26, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Isn't it obvious? Wikimedia is a dangerous information-spreading plague upon the dictatorships of the world. --tomf688 (talk - email) 05:28, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
It is also addictive so can we coin a new phrase: Wikiholic ?? All we need is the 12 step program. WayneRay 19:21, 29 November 2006 (UTC)WayneRay

Addition of file type 'fbm' for three dimensional surface renderings.

The opensource Sourceforge project Freeship[2] allows creation of media to represent three dimensional surfaces. These media files, of the file type 'fbm', are presently not allowed in the Commons. This form of rendering three dimensional surfaces is especially valuable for visualization of the forms, because they can be rotated through 360 degrees. I am interested in contributing 'fbm' files to the commons, and would like to know how to get permission to do this. Here is an example[3] of a 'fbm' file, and a screenshot two dimensional PNG image of the 'fbm' file. BruceHallman 23:16, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm, I guess you would also like to see it in 3D within Commons, right ? Because otherwise you could export a screen copy as a PNG and import it here. Well, 3D support is a bit weak in MediaWiki, as there is none :-), so you have the following options :
  • Get the Freeship people to code an extension to MediaWiki to make it able to read FBM files. Good luck. An extension for Firefox would be a good starting point, as I can't read these files.
  • Get a MediaWiki developer to code this. I wish you a hell lot of good luck :-)
  • Give your fortune to WMFoundation so that they can hire more developers, and hopefully one who understands your suggestion. Good luck for getting rich.
Now, if we suppose that some day MediaWiki will be able to display 3D models (how cool would this be, with loads of details and pan and rotate and... ok I stop dreaming), I guess it would be more sensible to accept more "standard" 3D files, like those from Blender or some other widespread free 3D software. le Korrigan bla 14:54, 28 November 2006 (UTC)


le Korrigan wrote: "Hmmm, I guess you would also like to see it in 3D within Commons, right ? ...ok I stop dreaming..."
That too, I suppose. (but not the stop dreaming part)
What I really want is to contribute 3D 'fbm' files into the Commons, as 'a planted seed' or 'priming the pump' so to speak, with the hope and expectation that other people will also contribute 3D files. My dream of the future includes the Commons becoming the central repository of free 3D 'fbm' files. There is already interest in this, but I would prefer to instigate a 'free' repository for this body of work, and the Commons seems well suited. Why not? BruceHallman 16:01, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, if those files can't be displayed within Commons and can't be embedded within Wikimedia projects, there are not much useful. As a student in naval architecture, I would dream of accessing such files easily, but have a read at Commons:Welcome which states "[Commons] provides a central repository for freely licensed [...] media of all sorts that are useful for any Wikimedia project. So far these files aren't useful for any Wikimedia project, so I see no point in accepting them. That's why I say "first develop an extension for the software to be able to read these files, then allow uploading them". Same stuff as for SVG : they're extremely useful, but we had to wait for its implementation in the software before using them here. le Korrigan bla 17:36, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Oh, and Commons is not a file repository : it is as media repository, for Wikimedia projects (see Commons:Project scope) : so stuff which is not multimedia (images / sound / video) and / or which is not encyclopedic does not belong to here. 3D models, and 3D models of ships, can be considered encyclopedic, if they are to illustrate articles on projects. For the sole purpose of storing a lot of them, you should have a look at "real" file repositories. le Korrigan bla 17:42, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
le Korrigan wrote: "it would be more sensible to accept more "standard" 3D files, like those from Blender "
I see no reason this should be 'either:or'. If Blender is open source, I vote to allow it in the Commons. Perhaps I am not understanding the sense of community here. What criteria is used to exclude 'free' opensource media from the Commons? BruceHallman 16:09, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
No indeed, it could be both. But then, it is quite probable that the first 3D extension to be built into MediaWiki will be for a specific filetype only, and it makes sense to develop it for the most widespread filetype. Again, if you (or anybody) can provide an extension to MediaWiki which reads fbm files, then yeah let's have loads of them ! FYI, you should go to Bugzilla to make such requests to developers (such as "allow fbm files on Commons"), but you may face the same answer as here. le Korrigan bla 17:36, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
This seems to hinge on usefulness to a Wikimedia project. If there was a Freeship textbook in Wikibooks, a user manual for the Freeship software, that would meet the usefulness test, no? BruceHallman 17:54, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, of course. Then again it would be to illustrate the topic (and maybe provide tutorials & examples), not to serve as a file repository. le Korrigan bla 18:17, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I get the idea, thanks. BruceHallman 20:27, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

3D is one of the media types that can be improved by a community, there's a lot of room for team work in 3D graphics. I'm not a 3D or computing expert, but I think 3D media is usefull in education... I think a 3D graphic format can be as important for 3d as SVG is for 2D. Wikipedia articles on VRML and X3D may help understanding this issue.

I'm not sure MediaWiki needs to render 3D. That would push the servers a lot. Maybe 3D can be viewed with a client side pluggin, so the user could rotate and zoom 3d artwork. Firefox and Opera can render SVG, maybe they can render 3d with a pluggin (like they do now with flash).

By the way the Commons is not a repository only for Wikipedia, there's also Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiversity and others. --OsvaldoGago 20:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

November 27

TIFF files?

Over at Wikisource there has been a bit of discussion on where to put TIFF files. Why not here? They are a type of media, thus fitting into the "free media repository" goal. Makes more sense to me to put them here rather than on individual projects. --Spangineeren ws (háblame) 03:07, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not certain how capable the Wikimedia servers would be hosting TIFF files, which are typically very large and require a great deal of space and bandwidth. --tomf688 (talk - email) 03:40, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Does Wikisource currently accept TIFF files? If so, I'm sure we can simply request to have them be allowed here, too. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 05:01, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
But TIFF files may be used by more than one Wikisource language. Uploading the exactly same file for two or three wikis is (IMHO) grotesque. Lugusto҉ 17:02, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
iirc, TIFF files were disabled here because of the concern about file size. I know that Commons:File types has listed TIFF as not allowed ever since that page was created last year[4]. Zzyzx11 05:52, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I wonder how that decision was made. I'm rather surprised, given all the talk from the developers about how it's virtually impossible that we'll ever run out of space. I suppose contacting Brion or someone like that would be a good way to go. --Spangineeren ws (háblame) 01:40, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Space has never been the issue as far as I know, but bandwidth has been. There may also be a problem with generating thumbnails for TIFF images. --tomf688 (talk - email) 01:50, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Regarding size, the examples we're talking about are much bigger as jpegs than tiffs (see the linked discussion). However, I have no idea about thumbnail generation. --Spangineeren ws (háblame) 04:10, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
We don't really care about thumbnail generation. --Benn Newman 16:11, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
I noticed that recent versions of MediaWiki now support w:DjVu files, which seem to be specifically geared towards scanned text. Would those work for Wikisource? Commons even seems to have a handful of them already uploaded (and more that are not in that category -- search on "DjVu"), so I assume they are supported file types here. Thumbnail generation did not seem to work at en — maybe MediaWiki has not been upgraded there yet — but it does here on commons. Carl Lindberg 16:44, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
That is one big page which doesn't work with what we want to do. Also, none of us have software to use with it! --Benn Newman 14:01, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Mozart, page 81
I'm probably missing something, but djvu contains multiple images -- it's designed for putting entire scanned books into one file. MediaWiki now supports a "page=81" parameter to the standard Image: links to pick the individual embedded image out (example to the right). What exactly do you want to do with it? I guess I don't see what TIFF gives you that DjVu doesn't. The software I agree could be an issue... I've never worked with any myself, but just going by the examples I see, there does seem to be a certain amount out there (no idea about how good). djvuzone.org seems to list some. Maybe there is a tool to turn a multi-image TIFF file into a DjVu file... that way, you would create files the way you were intending but create the one additional file for upload. Which OS do folks generally work with... Windows, Mac, Linux, or other? Carl Lindberg 02:51, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


Arabic SVG?

As an FYI, I continue to have problems with some SVG files I upload, perhaps 1 out of 8 and so in those cases I revert to PNG. I recently uploaded an Arabic file, but it did not render correctly and I was told informally that AVG cannot handle right-to-left scripts like Arabic or Hebrew. Is this true?? MapMaster 15:07, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Another problem

I have a similar problem with Image:Hybridpar.svg, the image is not rendered but the file is correctly uploaded and can be seen by clicking on the link http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Hybridpar.svg . What is the problem? LHOON 10:52, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

November 28

image history

Image:Ares and Aphrodite.jpg history not can restored, Plase help! --Shizhao 08:22, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

It was deleted in March 2006, wasn't it? Deleted images are only stored sine 16 June 2006 (the date when this feature was introduced). You can undelete no image which was deleted before that. – rotemlissTalk 15:23, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

would someone competent please check

Category:Castelli Werke (1844) Band 3 : is this the right place for this kind of document ? Shouldn't it be a Wikibook ? --Anne97432 14:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

This is quite OK: scans of PD works are usefull to some wikimedia projects (mainly wikisource - not wikibooks), and are thus well within the scope of commons. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 10:21, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

SVG not rendering

Why is my newly uploaded Image:Film reel.svg not rendering? —Bromskloss 17:28, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Might query http://validator.w3.org/. ¦ Reisio 20:44, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

It contains, no, it contained an <image> element referencing a local file:

   <pattern
      id="pattern5144"
      height="50"
      width="50"
      patternUnits="userSpaceOnUse"
      inkscape:collect="always">
     <image
        id="image5146"
        height="50"
        width="50"
        sodipodi:absref="C:\Documents and Settings\Jonas\Skrivbord\FilmRoll-small.png"
        xlink:href="FilmRoll-small.png" />
   </pattern>

rsvg does not like that. The whole definition was unnecessary as the pattern defined was not used in the image, so I just removed it. --  (talk) 01:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Template:Move

I made the following changes to the template Template:Move:

  1. I added an optional parameter to specify the reason. Without this second parameter, the words “below” and “Reason:” are not displayed.
  2. I added a link to the talk page.

Examples:

A user's guide would be useful, but I don't specifically know how to use the template. --Juiced lemon 19:55, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

November 29

Help

35 MB Maps. date back to 1662 and 1629. Suggestions, other than resize them :P . --Tarawneh 04:01, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Is there an upload size maximum that I don't know about? --Spangineeren ws (háblame) 04:08, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Upper limit for file sizes is 20 MB, and MediaWiki software can’t handle PNGs larger than 12.5 megapixels. The maps are in JPG format. --Tarawneh 06:49, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
The upload limit can be bypassed: See here. --Matt314 07:50, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
JPEG isn't really good for maps, since they are usually high contrast, high detail... As to the size: perhaps it would be best to upload a scaled version of the entire map, and cut the full scale image into (four?) parts. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 10:24, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Mat314. OK, Maps back on 16XX and 15XX where hand painted, so I guess you will need JPG. I will mail them to the foundation. Thanks all. --Tarawneh 14:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
If parts of the maps are useful, perhaps they could be split up into sections and as Duesentrieb suggests, then when needed, stitched together? Properly displayed in a table, no seams will be visible (the mosaic is done this way). It's awkward so maybe not such a good idea. ++Lar: t/c 16:03, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
The best format for these is probably w:DjVu. Alphax (talk) 05:18, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

IRIN

Could someone who is more meticulous than myself look at this. And let me know if these terms qualify as "Copyright free use" ? If so, could an IRIN template be created? They have some quite nice images of CSB subjects. I uploaded one photograph here, if it needs to be deleted, sobeit. - FrancisTyers 18:43, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

The copyright notice says "IRIN materials ... may be reposted ... provided there is no financial gain". Licenses that restrict commercial use are against Commons policy. --Davepape 19:30, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
That refers to ARTICLE REPRINTS / REPOSTINGS: scroll down for PHOTOGRAPHS & PHOTO SLIDE SHOWS: - FrancisTyers 19:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
It looks to me that photographs credited to IRIN alone are {{attribution}}. However, the photograph that you uploaded is credited to Nicholas Reader/IRIN. I would suggest that this one falls under the "All others photographs require copyright permission from the original photographer or agency" part. —JeremyA 01:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I was quoting the second paragraph on the page, not Article Reprints. In the first bit I ellipsised, it says the non-commercial restrictions apply to photos as well as articles. So at best their rules are self-contradictory, but to me it reads like they meant the Photographs section to spell out additional requirements, beyond "no financial gain". --Davepape 03:17, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
In addition to the text that Davepape saw (and I missed), on their gallery page they also make it clear that derivative works are not allowed without written consent from IRIN. So they cannot be uploaded here. —JeremyA 03:27, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok cool thanks. Always pays to check :) I've marked the one I uploaded for deletion. - FrancisTyers 08:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

November 30

One million files on Commons!

Don't won't to alarm anybody but it will probably happen today! As I speak there are 999,277 (current: 27,550,520). I believe we are not fully ready for this. Starting TODO list below --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 02:40, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Things to do?

  • Commons:Press releases/1M - needs clean-up (contact info, animation, audio files?)
  • Wikimedia_logo_mosaic - anyone willing to check licensing of all those images would gain fame and glory ;).
  • more?
    • And we're there! Congratulations to all contributors. Now let's take care of some deletion request backlog and we'll be able to celebrate again tomorrow ;) Siebrand 09:58, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
    • Congratulations. --Emijrp 10:31, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
the millionth picture?

If my calculations are correct the millionth picture was the one you see on the right (what luck - it's a cake :)). I'm not sure if it's really the one, because I used Special:Newimages and value of NUMBEROFFILES. If anyone knows some more accurate method, please use it :). --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 12:38, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Some say that the millionth picture is this photo of the Singapore Zoo? See User_talk:Terence_Ong#1.2C000.2C000th_file also. --mh 12:51, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Let's run with the Singapore Zoo photo, shall we? It would be nice if our 1M file wasn't deleted in two weeks as a copyvio. :/ --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 14:09, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I cake would be great, but I must agree that licensing there might still be unclear. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 14:27, 30 November 2006 (UTC)


Commons reaching the 1M
Correct. The real 1M file was Image:Singapore Zoo 37.JPG. You can check my references at the right :-) There were (luckily) no deletions between 9:42 and 9:44
  • 09:52, 30 November 2006 MesserWoland deleted "Image:Picture.jpg" (duplicate of Image:Schaldemose.jpg)
  • 09:16, 30 November 2006 Matt314 deleted "Image:220px-Ghostfacepic.jpg" (Copyvio)
Image:Orasnice.jpg was uploaded at 9:45. As you can see on the image, the million was reached before 9:44.
Platonides 22:18, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Just to say that copyright situation is clear on these images. Yes, they're from a website, but we do have really clear permission. And to repeat what I said on IRC that it is fair that Singapore Zoo is the millionth picture, as it was uploaded by hand, rather than by Commonist. Nikola Smolenski 16:29, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of Image:Abstatt Burg Wildeck 04 20061126.jpg

User:Zirland has deleted this image as "dupe" [5]. This image was NOT a duplicate of any other image, and I did not request its deletion. Furthermore, the image was used in the German wikipedia. Please restore it immediately. --Rosenzweig 08:59, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Done. You are right, this is not the exact duplicate. --Panther 10:48, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Thank you. Some users here seem to have a strange concept of what is a duplicate. --Rosenzweig 11:20, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
They are not the exact duplicates, but what is your reason to keep both of them? They are too similar. --Panther 11:35, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't think they are too similar. They are just different enough to have some variety. --Rosenzweig 12:17, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I do think they are too similar. --AtonX 12:45, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I personally prefer "04" because it has a bit more color and is higher in resolution. The other one might be a candidate for deletion (just not speedily), but as long as they are both freely licensed I don't feel it is that big of an issue. --tomf688 (talk - email) 13:27, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Lets not be too corny people. People make mistakes, there is absolutely no acceptable reason to mock them. --Cat out 14:42, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Internationalisation of images

I'd like to make an SVG version of this tagged jpeg. But there is another tag that says that image should become language neutral, too. How do I do that? Cutting all the text from the picture, putting numbers instead and creating a table for the different translations? Or is there a way to store the labels in the XML code and if so, is this preferred? Other ways? --Enricopedia 17:10, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

The best way is to do something like Image:PlaneWing.png, Image:Trombone.svg and others: Cut all of the text, put numbers, and create tables of the different translations on the image description page. Zzyzx11 18:43, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes I was thinking about that, too. But because this image contains a lot of proper names that can't be translated, I might also include them directly and ignore the language neutral tag.  :) --Enricopedia 23:43, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
But they still might need transliterating for other writing systems (especially where they've been transliterated from Cyrillic in the first place, e.g. Zvezda, Zarya) Man vyi 16:07, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, I think there should be a general decision about this. Since SVG is nothing more than XML code and the text gets stored as plain text in the code, I think it would be best to provide an English version of the file and everyone can translate the code directly and upload his language version as a new file, like ISS_image.svg, ISS_image_DE.svg, ISS_image_FR.svg. Or in subpages of the main file, if that is possible and preferred. There is not even an SVG editor needed to do this. A text editor is enough and every piece of text in the XML code can simply be found by searching for the „<text“ tags. --Enricopedia 17:35, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Defaulting to English is sort of...not multilingual. The best way would be to have one file that takes variables like a template. ¦ Reisio 18:45, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it would be nice if we had just one image file and a language file with the translations but I guess it's not possible with the current software. IMO the SVG renderer has to be changed for that. --Enricopedia 21:38, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

My solution for this

I now made new versions of the image (and of its related versions):

New language versions can now easily be added, by downloading a version and translating the labels on the file.

I suggest using Inkscape for this work, because I tried to translate with a text editor and it had two disadvantages:

  • Using letters other than Unicode will cause the image not to render anymore. (When using Inkscape, it will use the correct XML code instead.)
  • Due to the different length of some words in different languages, the layout can be really messed up. (When using Inkscape, you'll see that and can move the positions of the labels.)

Note that all the ISS configuration grafics can be found here. If you add a new language version, please post it there.

I think this solution can be used for more pictures with a lot of labels. Although images with few labels should rather get rid of them and use referencing numbers instead.

--Enricopedia 01:45, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I like your proposal, Enrico P., in part because that has been my approach to maps. While I have made "locator maps" without any text, these feature a single subject (see User:MapMaster#locator maps). Most maps require many text labels -- numbers just don't work.
Here's my problem: it's hard for me to keep track of the different versions of the same map. For example:
  • On each image page, I would like to link to the other language versions. That way someone who runs across an English map can easily find out if there is a German version. I have to do this manually right now, and the more language versions I have of a map, the more difficult it is.
  • It would be nice if categories could be established for all versions in once place (i.e. for the group), instead of image-by-image.
  • To reduce clutter, it would be best if only one of the maps appeared on the category page.
However, to realize these improvements, methinks some sort of hook/box/functionality would need to be built into the wiki software. Any insight would be appreciated, MapMaster 16:01, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

sostenimiento de las universidades públicas en los Estados Unidos Mexicanos

Tengo interes en un comparativo de la estructura de financiamiento del subsidio público de la Universidades Públicas Estatales en México. Atte. Líc.León Ignacio Ruiz Ponce editor del_habitante@yahoo.com.mx

December 1

Purge Mediawiki image cache

I've recently slightly changed colour to a series of infographics you can look at here. The problem is, you can notice some of them still keep the old colour, which is not nice at all. Even worse, some other pictures with major changes suffer from the same caching problem due to "/blah/blah/XXXpx-image_name.ext" not being updated upon upload of the new image. The problem only randomly shows up with images already viewed in a given size; if I change size (even 1 pixel) the filename changes and Mediawiki has to generate another image, this time using the new picture.

I don't think it's a browser-related issue, as I've tried emptying my browser's cache several times, and the picture was still there.

The only workaround I've found to be working is:

  • copy the URL of the "wrong" picture cache
  • paste into the address bar, and change one letter in the filename (but leaving the path unchanged)
  • hit Enter, forcing Wikimedia to generate a different cache of same size for the same image (which seems to be told by the path of the cache, not by the file name)
  • refresh the page containing the "wrong" image, et voilà: the image (finally) actually refreshes!

Any faster workarounds? --ColdShine 14:47, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Have you tried http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/thumb.php?f=filename.jpg&w=width ? (From COM:FAQ: Why is the old picture and not the new uploaded picture on my screen? (Or-- my thumbnail is wrong.)). Some days ago when I had the same problem I copyied the image URL and added a &action=purge which worked fine for me in this situation. --Matt314 17:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
It indeed works, but still I can't get to update this image. Some more help? --ColdShine 11:16, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
This worked. It's updated now. --Matt314 16:42, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Oh, thank you. I didn't get it was just all about appending "&action=purge". --ColdShine 12:03, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Commons policies as in Commons:Protected page

I thought policies apply to admins too. Admins should follow commons polices (like others do), not break it the moment they become admins. [6] --Tarawneh 16:00, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

It's probably a test as stated in the summary. I think he just wants to play around with his new toys :). -- Bryan (talk to me) 16:14, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
OK, I posted him a note on his userpage :).--Tarawneh 16:59, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

December 2

Inconsistent behaviour of i18n templates

Can anyone explain why this:

{{ja|
# first
# second
# third
}}
{{en|
# first
# second
# third
}}

is rendering like this:

日本語:
  1. first
  2. second
  3. third
English:
  1. first
  2. second
  3. third

I've looked at the {{ja}} and {{en}} templates, but frankly I can't make head or tail of them. Can someone fix this for me? Or is there a workaround? I tried inserting extra line breaks after the opening {{en|, but it made no difference. -- Sakurambo 00:10, 2 December 2006 (UTC)


Done. Just use:

{{ja|<nowiki/>
# first
# second
# third
}}
日本語:
  1. first
  2. second
  3. third

Nux (talk··dyskusja).

Great, thanks for that. -- Sakurambo 09:42, 2 December 2006 (UTC)


Category:Personalities

Does anyone know the purpose of this category and the distinction between it and Category:People? --Flominator 10:39, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

In the description of the category it says “People who are widely recognised.” Isn't that even POV? --Flominator 15:41, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I think so, since I have never heared of any of these “famous” personalities. I suggest to move the contents to our classic categories. --Juiced lemon 23:15, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Done! --Flominator 12:41, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

December 3

Flags of Poland

Can someone please lock all images about flags of poland (2 originals (one bordered)) because someone is reverting it every day to some gray, instead of white version. This is very bad because commons ticker on every wiki that have this option is flooded with those reverts. Please, first lock those images, and after investigate what is the true color for this flags. Thanks. --SasaStefanovic 02:59, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Protected because the upload war in that file. Lugusto҉ 03:18, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Dear Sasa and Lugusto: The "some gray" version is the correct version of the flag as explained on Polish Wikipedia in the article w:pl:Flaga Polski and on English Wikipedia in the article w:en:Flag of Poland. Also check w:pl:Polska.
Accordingly, Wikimedia Commons flags Image:Flag of Poland.svg has been replaced by Image:Flag of Poland corrected.svg and Image:Flag of Poland (bordered).svg has been replaced by Image:Flag of Poland corrected (bordered).svg; that is, until you two reverted these updates and protected the files.
The correct value of Polish white color as specified by the Polish law has been calculated on 29 November 2006 on the talk page w:pl:Dyskusja:Flaga Polski as #e9e8e7. Similarly, the correct value of the Polish red color has been calculated as #d4213d. These values have been documented in those Wikipedia articles about the Polish flag.
Please inquire on the Polish Wikipedia, if you are in doubt after reading the articles referenced by me here. Thank you. Best Wishes, --Mareklug talk 07:59, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
I think this issue is in the field of Commons Wikipedia. We can let an other project collect the specifications, but possible calculations about colors are in our domain.
Therefore, we would not recognize the changes about the flag of Poland as long as we cannot discuss or check them, here, in the Commons project. The “new” colors (as referenced above) of the Poland flag appear to me to be wrong. --Juiced lemon 10:28, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Excuse me, but on what basis do the "new" colors of the Poland flag appear wrong to you? You are free to perform the calculation Polish Wikipedians already performed, as well as to follow the supplied links to the sources (Polish law stipulating the flag), and certainly you have access to the Wikipedia articles in Polish and English describing the flag and its evolution over the years in Poland. I invite you to perform the calculations and examine the numbers and the methodology used.
The trouble with the "old" colors is that no one did any calculations at all -- people just pasted in "#FFFFFF"/"WHITE" and "#FF0000/"RED" for the flag colors, without any regard for the content of the Polish law regulating these values in xyY color space and CIE LUV permissible deviation specification. And, on top of it all, the Polish law dates from 1980/revised in 1990, and does not say anything about the display of the flag on a computer or television screen. Please assume good faith, but don't assume anything beyond it. :) --Mareklug talk 10:58, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok, the explanation of change is mentioned here. Unfortunately my computer show gray instead of white. IMHO the image page need to have a note explaining it instead of pointing to read a article in another project in a single upload summary or a single phrase "The flag of Poland with corrected colors [...]" (correct by and why?); the image is hosted at the Commons, nor at the en.wp or pl.wp. And, if possible, research for a "white" color correctly displayed in all computers can be a good option. Lugusto҉ 15:34, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Done! Thank you all for help, and sorry for the trouble. --Mareklug talk 18:46, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Although Mareklug seems to imply that Polish Wikipedians agree that the gray-red version is the correct interpretation of the law, I would just like to point out that it's not the case. In fact this version is supported by minority of Wikipedians as shown in the discussion, but this very minority is active in voicing their opinions as the "official" PL Wiki statement. Just my two cents. --Wanted 01:52, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
We are currently waiting for official interpretation of those colors for screen displays. Please do not do anything more with those flags until then. Leaving them locked is probably a good idea. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 02:09, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Please delete all "grey" flags made by Mareklug, they are his original research, contradicting official presentations by state of Poland.


Upload of a large ogg theora movie.

Hi.

I'm making a movie to illustrate a Wikipedia article.

The file size of the ogg theora may be very large, but the type of film requires an 800x600 resolution, so the contents may be understood. The movie may have about 25min to 30min.

I think file size may be between 20Mb and 40Mb. Reducing quality may turn the movie useless.

How can I upload it to the Commons? Can it be done trough the browser ?

Best regards,

Osvaldo

See here. -- Bryan (talk to me) 16:01, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks --OsvaldoGago 19:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

How do I rename a page here?

I am placing scanned pages of books on the Volapük language here. I have made a mistake in the name I gave to one file Image:VolapükGrammaticaELessicologiaPagina005.gif: it should be "Pagina007", not "Pagina005". But I couldn't see any tabs for 'moving' or 'renaming' files. How is this done in this wiki?

Thanks, --Smeira 15:59, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

That is currently not possible. The solution is to reupload the image under the correct name and tag the incorrect one with {{badname}}. It will then be speedy deleted. -- Bryan (talk to me) 16:03, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Image:AlbertSleumer.png

The above picture, which I have uploaded, has been marked for deletion. I asked why in the deletions page here), but nobody has reacted. What should I do now? --Smeira 17:03, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

It is tagged as "public domain (author died more than 70 years ago)" while dated as "1949", which is clearly contradictary as 1949 is less than 70 years ago. If you have reason to know that the image is public domain, please explain why. Hope this helps, -- Infrogmation 21:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Here is the thing. The person depicted died about twenty years before publication date (1949): the picture was published posthumously. What I don't know is who the photographer is, and if he also died more than 70 years ago. It was published in a small propaganda newsletter (a newsletter for the Volapük-speaking community of the time); no information was given about who the photographer was, and who holds the copyright. How are such cases treated? Please advise. (I note that a number of the photos I placed in Category:Volapük came from the same source newsletter, and may have similar problems -- author unknown, perhaps but not surely dead long ago; you may want to have a look at them. I'd like to know your opinion.) --Smeira 02:11, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Such cases are treated as described at COM:L. If you do not know the creator you have to wait from the date of the picture d a lot of mine to be sure. d-10+110+70 (10: a photographer was not younger than 10, 110: most people are dying earlier than 110, 70 pma copyright term in the EU). Is the picture younger than 1835? Forget it here (you can upload it at the de Wikipedia using the d-100 rule who isn't accepted by the fanatic commonists here ...) --Historiograf 21:07, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

meta:Ku.wikipedia inquiry

There is an ongoing debate on meta about problems in ku.wiki. I hereby invite all experienced wikipedians to comment there. --Cat out 17:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

December 14 POTD

Because the original image for December 14 Image:Antibiogramme.jpg remains unsourced for longer than 2 weeks and will be deleted, I changed the image to Image:2006-10-18Cucurbita pepo02.jpg, a Quality image featuring gourds. Unfortunately, I had to also delete certain translations, such as Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese (hans) and Polish, because the captions no longer applied. Therefore, if you care about these languages maintaining captions for POTD, please feel free to remake them. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 17:37, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Tabs

Whats happend to the check usage tab on the image pages? Also some of the tabs that used to be on the User pages are gone. /Lokal_Profil 18:05, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Never mind, purging my monobook.js brought them all back. Wonder why they dissapeared to start with though. /Lokal_Profil 18:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

December 4

Ytreua uploading vandalism

He uploaded this just to use it on a vanalism-page on wiki-pt (here). Uniemelk 05:05, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Deleted by User:WarX. --EugeneZelenko 15:43, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

December 9 POTD

I've replaced Image:Jokulsarlon lake, Iceland.jpg, which is listed as Copyrighted on Flickr; although the page has been listed as "Flickr change of license";, I'm doubtful. The uploader has mistaken Flickr license before. There are quite a number of language translations that need replacing. The image I've replaced was Image:Leadenhall Market In London - Feb 2006.jpg, with english caption "Leadenhall Market in London.". Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 15:46, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

December 5

Search engine access to commons

I don't see any images from Commons showing up on Google or Yahoo images search. Does anyone know why? Is this intentional? -- Beland 02:42, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

It's a known problem, but not exactly intentional. Search engines fail to index our pages properly, because the URLs end in things like "jpg", which they tend to think are images rather than image pages in our case. Sorry, we share your disappointment here though. :( --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 03:32, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Bansky

Sorry, pals, shouldn't we consider the ARTIST copyright for these images, and not only the photographer's one? --Jollyroger 12:57, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

It's graffiti - albeit graffiti with pretensions. In what way would it differ from any other graffiti for copyright purposes? As for moral rights, the paternity right is unasserted in the case of the defacement of private or public property. And surely it would anyway, in the UK, fall under the definition of public art in a public place? Man vyi 13:45, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
The difference is that the author is known, and they are not just "defacements" but mostly are equivalent art installations. I don't know how the "public art" rule is in england, there is no equivalent in italian law. Please, can you explain the terms of this law? --Jollyroger 12:10, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
From COM:L Exceptions to Copyright As with many other countries the UK defines an exception to copyright infringement for artistic works on public display. Section 62 of the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988 states that it is not an infringement of copyright to film, photograph, broadcast or make a graphic image of a building, sculpture, models for buildings or work of artistic craftsmanship if that work is permanently situated in a public place or in premises open to the public. from this the images uploaded here are fine Gnangarra 12:52, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok, thanks. That applies only to photos taken in England or photos of english subjects? --Jollyroger 08:31, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
These photo are taken in UK / the artwork is on public display in the UK so UK law would apply, photos taken in Italy would have to be released as per Italian laws. Gnangarra 10:59, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok, perfect. So photo taken in Italy follow italian law. Why PD-Italy was deleted, then? --Jollyroger 09:54, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Amedeo Modigliani

Hello there, something wrong here : Amedeo Modigliani Same painting but wrong date of creation (1919) on the second one, beside the poor quality. Hope an admin will do the right thing ;-) -- Perky 13:33, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Some more details maybe :-) : there's Image:Amadeo Modigliani 008.jpg and Image:Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) - Reclining Nude (1919).jpg. Now there's wrong colors on one of them, but which ? le Korrigan bla 17:06, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Korrigan, the right one is : Image:Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) - Reclining Nude (1919).jpg right with the date and the colors. Some more infos : Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. est la référence d'un procès entre Bridgeman Art Library et Corel Corp., où les premiers ont accusé les seconds de violation de copyright. Bridgeman avait photographié des tableaux anciens avec grand soin, et disait donc détenir un droit d'auteur sur les photos. Cependant, le juge a rejeté leur demande, car ces photos, visant à une reproduction la plus fidèle possible du sujet, manquaient de l'inventivité nécessaire à l'établissement d'un copyright. from David.Monniaux 3 décembre 2006 à 17:05 (CET). All that means, please, delete Image:Amadeo Modigliani 008.jpg because artificiel colors and bad dating. And keep Bridgeman photo, now in public domain. -- Perky 18:05, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

New permissions

From www.met.no:

All material on our site is available for public domain, including figures and photos
without byline. We only require that you state met.no as the source. Photos where the
photographer is stated are sent to us from private persons, and we cannot allow the
use of these photos. Then you have to get permission from the photographer yourself.

Hei,

Alt skrevet materiale på våre sider kan du uten videre benytte, og også alle figurer
og fotos som ikke har noen byline. Det eneste kravet er at du oppgir met.no som
kilde. Der hvor fotografens navn er oppgitt, betyr det at "noen" har sendt oss
bilder. I slike tilfeller kan ikke vi gi deg lov til å benytte bildet - fotografen
selv må gi sin tillatelse. Ofte har vi imidlertid adressen til vedkommende, slik at
jeg evt. kan hjelpe deg å spore opp fotografen.

This information is verifiable as follows:

OTRS Wikimedia

This work is free and may be used by anyone for any purpose. If you wish to use this content, you do not need to request permission as long as you follow any licensing requirements mentioned on this page.

Wikimedia has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright holder has approved publication under the terms mentioned on this page. This correspondence has been reviewed by an OTRS member and stored in our permission archive. The correspondence is available to trusted volunteers here.

If you have questions about the archived correspondence, please use the OTRS noticeboard. Ticket link: https://secure.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=551272

Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 14:35, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Should a template be made for these images? Cnyborg 16:38, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
I think something that transcludes {{pd-because}} would be nice. Probably adding a new category to it. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 17:02, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Surely their intent is {{attribution}}, in spite of their wording. Jkelly 19:34, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
I think so too. There is no equivalent of public domain in Norwegian copyright law, and they do explicitly ask for attribution. Cnyborg 19:53, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Image:Arbcom elections.OGG

Is there a way to cheak if this video is Theora or rewarpped WMV?Geni 15:38, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I handled this for you on IRC the other day.. I just wanted to comment here so no one would waste anytime helping the already helped. --Gmaxwell 21:40, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Category:Naked baby

Does it make any sense whether a picture illustrates a baby or a naked baby to put that in different categories? -- Bryan (talk to me) 19:31, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

This category is also a subcat from Category:Cute. Now cute sounds really POV to me. -- Bryan (talk to me) 20:04, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Delete both. Category:Naked babies would be OK, but Category:Naked baby is not. However, it must be specified: “no clothes, but partial covering, jewellery (like plastic bracelets) are allowed”. So, this UC and her minutes-old baby.jpg one is naked. --Juiced lemon 22:20, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Category:Cute, like Category:Spooky, and Category:Joy and others in Category:Emotions are inherently subjective. But without a certain amount of subjective categorisation, such topics would be systematically unfindable by searching. Is cuteness an emotion? Man vyi 07:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
We have Category:Nude men and Category:Nude women in Category:Nudity along with the babies. It seems a case of correct categorisation (once the plural is fixed). Whether it's a case of appropriate categorisation is another matter. Man vyi 07:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

A place where WikiGraphist help Wikipedia : need fr => en translation

Please, some user could translate this Commons:Graphic Lab from french into english. Because of various raisons (visibility, number of users, etc.), the page will be move to the english wikipedia after the translation. See also little talk with Para --Yug (talk) 08:11, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello Yug. There is already Commons:Atelier graphique which could maybe be reactivated, and I don't see the need for a new translation. If you want to suggest something new for en.wikipedia, then go on their willage pump and suggest pump. Here you are within the Commons community (which does exist, contrary to what you believe, people spend some time here), so please suggest things for Commons. le Korrigan bla 08:11, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I think English Wikipedia deals with English encyclopedia content. The Commons deals with free media and it's almost completely language-independent. It also deals with media that is useful for Wikibooks and other Wikimedia projects. Where do you think the project belongs ? --OsvaldoGago 08:21, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I think the point Yug is making is that the "Atelier graphique" on fr.wikipedia is very active due to a big community and a lot of "encyclopedic" requests. There wouldn't be as many requests if it was only on Commons.
Yet nothing prevents having one on fr, one here (see link above, it exists already, it only needs more advertisement) and one on en.wikipedia. le Korrigan bla 08:41, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
“the "Atelier graphique" on fr.wikipedia is very active due to a big community and a lot of "encyclopedic" requests. There wouldn't be as many requests if it was only on Commons.” Yes, this is one of the main issues. :] --Yug (talk) 08:46, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
So why not create an outpost/front for "Atelier graphique" on en.wiki (and other wikis for that matter) whilst keeping the center of activity here (at Commons:Atelier graphique for instance)? That way people get to know about it at wikipedia level and so can make "encyclopedic" requests (and who knows some of them may even join). On the same time keeping the benifits of being on Commons. /Lokal_Profil 12:24, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Symbol support vote.svg Support!! This is the best idea yet. Yug's proposition has a doormat page anyway, so that page could be placed outside Commons in multiple languages and the activity here. With lots of active users interested in images, Commons is the perfect place for this. --Para 16:38, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Symbol oppose vote.svg Oppose - I have a 2 year experience about this project, your one day opinion is not the best way and will open several problems. You are right in one point : an common place to talk about the several Graphic workshop is need. That s an other question. --Yug (talk) 16:52, 6 December 2006 (UTC) PS: Please vote for names (see below).

Vote a name

I Also need some advice, the french name is "Atelier Graphique". Which english name is the best for "a place where graphists work, for fun, helping others" Yug (talk) 20:13, 5 December 2006 (UTC) Name :

  • French : Atelier Graphique

Proposed English names :

  • Graphics Workshop : [add your signature here to vote]
  • Graphics Lab : Yug
  • Graphics Desktop :
  • Graphics Studio : Man vyi, Bastiq▼e
If your proposal is for en.wikipedia, why not ask on their village pump instead of here ? You will have more chances to meet graphists from en.wikipedia, who could have better suggestions for the name. le Korrigan bla 13:46, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Frankly, I consider this a great place to have a Graphics Studio. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 14:17, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree. one place where all of us could share ideas would be great! I seem to have inkscape questions a fair bit. ++Lar: t/c 15:15, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Personal upload gallery access problem

Hi, Have been trying to access my up load gallery from my user page. But have been getting error messages for the past two days now. I've tried from two different computers, and the same problem occurs. Is this function down or am I the only one experiencing this problem? Jnpet 06:30, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

  • P.S. The following is the message I get.
    • Database Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query (zedler.ts-local)

- failed to connect to log database - failed to log script start! Database Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query (zedler.ts-local)

- failed to connect to WikiList database

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'MWException' with message 'failed to connect to WikiList database ' in /home/daniel/MediaWiki-live/phase3/includes/GlobalFunctions.php:668 Stack trace: #0 /home/daniel/public_html/WikiSense-live/common/WikiSense.php(158): wfDebugDieBacktrace('failed to conne...') #1 /home/daniel/public_html/WikiSense-live/common/WikiSense.php(168): getWikiListDB() #2 /home/daniel/public_html/WikiSense-live/common/WikiSense.php(290): getWikiInfo(Array, 1) #3 /home/daniel/public_html/WikiSense-live/web/common/WikiSelector.php(107): getWikiInfoFromDomain('commons.wikimed...') #4 /home/daniel/public_html/WikiSense-live/web/common/WikiQuery.php(103): WikiSelector->WikiSelector() #5 /home/daniel/public_html/WikiSense-live/web/Gallery.php(310): WikiQuery->WikiQuery('Gallery', 'SELECT image.*,...') #6 {main} thrown in /home/daniel/MediaWiki-live/phase3/includes/GlobalFunctions.php on line 668

- script start not logged! logging end anyway.

Unfortunately, MySQL at the toolserver is down now, and majority of it's services are unavailable. --Panther 07:09, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone know when it will be back online? Without CheckUsage it's difficult to deal with some deletions, especially badname and superseded. Cnyborg 15:32, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiCast

On behalf of WikiCast, Anyone got any ideas on what materil on commons could be used? - ShakespeareFan00 62.56.78.127 12:56, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Could you describe a bit more about WikiCast or give a link? Maybe give examples of what material you were thinking of using? Almost everything on Commons (save things we need to clean up!) is freely usable, perhaps with attribution. So maybe I'm not understanding your question. Is it about legality or about what would be GOOD to use with WikiCast. Thanks! ++Lar: t/c 15:17, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Is this a copyright violation? (Volapük language materials)

I have recently received some old postcards, originally sent by the most important Volapükist of the Netherlands, Arie de Jong. These postcards were sent to a Swedish Volapükist in the beginning of the 50's, a couple of years before Arie de Jong's death in 1952. As I understand it, the Swedish Volapükist in question also died ca. ten years thereafter. His wife donated his Volapük materials, among which also the postcards, to the Interlingua association of Sweden (in Stockholm, I think), who promptly put them for sale on their Interlingua web site. Because these postcards are historical material (they contain some new texts in Volapük that have never been published, and also some informations on their author's life and thoughts), I would like to scan them and place them here. The question is, is that possible, or would I be somehow violating copyright laws? (I note these were not published materials, but personal correspondence, and that it was donated by the original receiver's wife to an institution that sold them, after the death of the receiver in the late 1960's.) --Smeira 16:22, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Is the creator dead 70 years or more or have his heirs agreed? No? Forget it --Historiograf 21:01, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Jacopo Tintoretto

Hello, after Modigliani, now The Tintoretto, It is not before or after restauration but just seems poor quality for one of them. Public domain/see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. and Public domain/Yorck Project One of them has to go, no ? -- Perky 16:53, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

One of them has to go - as soon as you provide an image with a color scale which is true to the original colors....
How many times do we have to discuss this? It is impossible to tell which reproduction is "better", if you don't have the original in front of you. Any decision would be highly subjective, that's why we HAVE to keep both. --Fb78 16:12, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
I am new here, Sunshine, so I missed previous discutions. Never the less, here is an old discution, which does not seems subjective, but technical: using a JPG quality setting of about 40%.[[7]]. But if nobody care, why would I ? Tchao. -- Perky 08:10, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Commons:Graphic Village Pump/December 2006


December 7

Reorganization of Christianity related categories

Recently I tried to seek some images for Christianity related articles, and have some difficulties. Those images are categorized, but in my opinion there are still things we may be happy to improve. As a first step, I would like to invite you to reorganize Apostles related categories (we know at minimum 13 individual figures, so it could be one of most manageable part expectedly). If I receive your feedback to my proposal on Category talk:Apostles, I'll be more than happy. --Aphaia 03:30, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Toolserv's status

I really love the toolserv. But I always see it as an optional tool. Is it not so? --Cat out 05:34, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

What on earth are you trying to ask? :) --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 13:50, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
A guess.. can we count on toolserver being there almost always except for minimal downtime, or is it just a nice to have that we should not build core processes around... I hope the former but there are reasons to wonder. This isn't the place to discuss them, though, there is a toolserv-i mailing list: [8] that probably is the place. Hope that helps. ++Lar: t/c 15:53, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't know what you are talking about  :)) but I just found this nice usage check tool on Bricktop's user page and I wanted to tell you. It replaces the toolservers usage check for me. --Enricopedia 00:35, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Also notice that CommonsTicker seems to be down for the same reason. /Lokal_Profil 18:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
To Enricopedia: Avatar's Check-Usage is incomplete -- it only checks those wikis listed. It is nice for casual use but we admins can't rely on it sadly. :( --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 07:24, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Sixty-one...

...and counting. ¦ Reisio 17:08, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Huh? Are you concerned about a lack of usertalk archiving? Jkelly 18:02, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

No, with the reason each section exists. ¦ Reisio 23:51, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I see, you're just trying to pick a fight here. Please don't do that. Jkelly 00:15, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Raise awareness, anyways. ¦ Reisio 10:17, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Isao Tomita

I have a free use question. My copy of Isao Tomita's "Snowflakes are Dancing" CD has a smallish picture of Isao Tomita in an audio studio. Is it reasonable under the free use guidelines to make a lower-quality scan of this image for use in the wikipedia article? Thanks. — RJHall 23:01, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

You're obviously talking about en:Wikipedia:Fair use, not "free use". You'll have to check with the guidelines of whichever project you want to use the image with, it is certainly not okay to upload such an image here. Jkelly 23:16, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. — RJHall 15:24, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

December 8

Music

I recently attempted to play some music on the Beta player, which was aqpparently inaccessible. Why? 75.34.8.146 03:43, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

What is "The Beta Player".? Have you tried this Commons:Media help ? --OsvaldoGago 10:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
The "beta player" is Gmaxwell's Java media player, hosted on the toolserver, which sortof died (it's back but very flaky) recently. Alphax (talk) 15:07, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Would it be possible to fix it soon?

75.34.8.146 02:40, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Image with better resolution

Image:Kjerkgata sett nedenfra 1869 Foto Elen Schomragh.jpg is very small. On the website where it comes from is the same picture much bigger [9]. Is there any reason why the small image was used instead of the big one? --88.76.200.73 09:55, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

As the image is in the public domain because of age, you can download the higher resolution from a source and upload it over the existing image. Please do mention your source (again) in your upload message. Cheers! Siebrand 15:03, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Can you please, explain clearly, how to do that : download the higher resolution from a source and upload it over the existing image. Lots of thanks :-) -- Perky 17:51, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
It appears to have been updated now, but here is how you do it: Save the largest version of the image available, to your computer. Go to the image page. Under "File history", there is a link that says "Upload a new version of this file". Click on that link and then browse and find the image you just saved. For the summary, you should put something like "hi-res version" - just one line is enough to say what changes you are making. Then click "Upload file". You will get the warning that you are replacing an existing image, but since that is what you want to do, you should continue. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 07:17, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Free Music ?

Hi.

I'm developing a free licensed movie, and I was looking for compatible licensed music. It's very hard to find music with a license that allows commercial use and derivate works. The page Commons:Free media resources/Sound lists only one website!.

By the way. Most of the musics in Media of the day have as source http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/, a site that doesn't exist anymore 404 Not Found.

Can anyone help here ?

--OsvaldoGago 10:35, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

The latest archive.org version says that everything is CC-BY-NC-SA, which isn't good. However, since Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable, you can use an older version (eg. this); a full list of archived versions is available here. Alphax (talk) 15:10, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Alphax, please be careful when claiming "non-revocable". It's quite possible that the person who placed these files online is not the copyright holder and they simply made an error when selecting the license. The diversity of creative commons of licenses is somewhat confusing, and I can promise you that no court would upload a release made in error. If you were fairly unaware of the error, it's unlikely that damages would be awarded... but if you are aware of the change and choose to ignore it and not clarify the situation, you probably deserve what you have coming. --Gmaxwell 20:30, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Now I'm really unsure what's going on; they make the blanket claim The audio recordings herein, even those which do not currently have an ID3, Vorbis, or other tag, are copyrighted by their creators, and are distributed under the terms of the "Attribution-ShareAlike" Creative Commons License. You must not modify or delete any fields in the Vorbis comment or id3. So the legal status of all of these recordings is probably in question... Alphax (talk) 02:19, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
I also believe the by-sa license does not have anything such as invariant sections?

Having outsiders release as PD

I've got a Canadian comedian to agree to release their image as PD. What should they say in their email? (I'll of course be forwarding the email to permissions. -- Zanimum 14:45, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

See Commons:Email templates; hopefully there's something suitable. Basically, we need to ensure that yes, they're the copyright holder of the image, and that yes, they're willing to release all rights to it - so anybody can do whatever they want with it (derivatives, commercial use). Alphax (talk) 15:06, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

New templates

I lately created two new templates. Since I didn't create them for myself only, I wanted to inform you about them and maybe get some feedback.

  • Template:Translation possible: Information about this template can be found on the template page or on the page that is linked from the template. If you like it, more translations could be useful.

--Enricopedia 19:59, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

50 famous art works

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/56809 Do we have those which are 2-D? --Historiograf 20:56, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I hope not, given that some of them are still protected by copyrighted... :-) Jastrow (Λέγετε)

A Graphic Lab to improve Images On Wikipedi En

A Graphic Lab have Started on Wikipedia-en. You can help by reading its Main page, and helping to its improvement.
The Graphic Lab need some active users and graphists to start and improve it, raise graphic request,and make images improvement.
To request graphic improvement, please see the newly open Graphic Lab/Images to improve (copied from Deutsch and Français).
Please, talk about this to other users who can be interesting by graphism, requesting images improvement or creation, and people interesting by photographs. Yug (talk) 10:53, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

December 9

Village Pump for graphic discussion

Hello, a Commons:Graphic_Village_Pump have opened, link to the projects of the several Graphic Labs (English - Deutsch) and Users' Graphic abilities page. One day, all discussions about graphism will have to be done in these page. An other solution may be to have this page (the Village pump) divide in two section :

  1. General
  2. Graphism support forum.

I just put these ideas here, we will have to talk again about that in 6 month or one year. Yug (talk) 18:41, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I think this has been done all inversed. It's very good to have the collective expertise on image modification located in the same place, but with people coming from many countries, actual discussion may be hard. With language independent images however, and mostly simple improvement requests, people could contribute, maybe helped with online translators if necessary. It seems as though this project idea isn't very popular or not very visible? Wonder how we could find the people on Commons who have removed something from Category:Images for cleanup lately? --Para 19:17, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Categories

hi from France; i just put one of my Benedict XVI portraits image on the site but i ddint choose the category! how can i do now? thanks Tommy2 08:02, 9 December 2006

Salut Tommy, il te suffit d'ajouter la catégorie après coup, en éditant la page de ton image comme tu le ferais d'une page normale de Wikipédia. Jastrow (Λέγετε) 09:36, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Archive of Flickr Copyright Screens.

Hi.

As you all know, one of our problems with Flickr is the fact that some users change the license on their images. Well legally those changes may not remove rights to users that already used the image, but the problem is that it may be difficult for a user to prove that copyright was under a free license, because the image may be deleted from Flickr or the image changed.

I would like to suggest that screenshoot like this:

File:ProveCopyLeft.jpg
Example of a screenshot of an image under a free license in Flickr

The Would be archived somewhere in The Commons, linked to the image itself.

What do you think ?

Best regards

Osvaldo

This image is copyvio! --WarX 08:47, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Exactly, it's a screenshot of a copyrighted website. -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:59, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
This was discussed a while ago and as with running our own bots for similar purposes, the problem is that we might be prejudiced in favour of keeping images here. I did a test run for the 21500 Flickr ids recognized anyway, and came up with 1700 MB of files, with the preview size as "Small". I suppose it wouldn't be too complicated to change the symbols at the bottom in batch if someone really wanted to, so it's not a solution really.
I proposed another solution for the problem, that Flickr could start signing each image file with the license information, but haven't had any feedback on that.
The MediaWiki ImportFreeImages extension also sounds interesting, we could implement the needed functionality there. Perhaps an open source module of MediaWiki could be trustworthy enough? --Para 12:58, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

In this particular case, the image is used as fair use for this thread only. My mistake. Of course fair use isn't allowed in the Commons. It's the law and it's our policy, and I think it should continue that way. However we should work on legal way to be able to prove that a certain image had a free irrevocable license. Imagine that tomorow Flickr stops the CC licensing feature or any other event. Perhaps the screenshots may be kept in a separate place outside the Commons, with Flickr authorization or under the argument of fair use.

I wouldn't try to hard negotiations with flickr. Their purpose is to please their costumers, nothing else.

Another way to prove that a certain image was indeed under a free license, is to add a witness list to it. In my country, as maybe anywhere in the world, witnesses have legal value. Two witnesses could testify the image was under a free license in case of a legal issue anyone could point to those witnesses... A major problem is that in the Commons the identity of the users is hard to check. In a few (10?) years it will be almost impossible to find most of them. Dont you agree ?

Personally I think that: if capturing screenshoots can be done legally, and I trust only in attorneys opinions about this, and if it becomes the best solution, we should go for it.

By the way. How can I be 100% sure that the musics and in Commons:Media of the day are really under a free license ? It seems most of them were downloaded from http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/ and the website doesn't exist anymore? I would like to use some of those musics in a movie I'm doing, but I need to be sure that they are really under a free license. --OsvaldoGago 22:18, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

It would be in Flickr users' best interests if photos downloaded from the site included credit to them and license info. That would be pleasing customers at its finest.
For the witness idea, there is an ongoing review process and its rounds on a single image could be done as many times as necessary. The problem with it is that it's not reliable. It can be hard to copy the correct data from the Flickr page when reviewing in big batches. It's different from witnessing a simple signing for example. I did a comparison of the reviewed images with my own weekly results, and found that 3% of all Flickr reviews had been done incorrectly. It's just not feasible to have people compare ones and zeros and record the information correctly for thousands of items.
If the simple representation of data in the above screenshot really is copyrightable, then perhaps the image could be cropped just above the photo, to leave only the photo and the license symbols? But that's going into the dangerous territory of editing the original view anyone could see on the site at any moment, and would diminish its value as proof.
In an earlier discussion it was pointed out that perhaps the screenshots should be done by an unaffiliated third party. I can't think of any type of organisation that would be both unaffiliated on usage of free images and do it without payment. If we start thinking of paying for using images, there are probably many other places where that money would get better quality images than on Flickr. This problem isn't with just Flickr either, it's pretty much all copyrighted images we have here that aren't uploaded by the photographer directly.
And finally there's of course the point Gmaxwell likes to bring up that Flickr users can make mistakes and when they choose a free license, they may not really mean it, and whatever we try to do is pointless anyway. Gah. --Para 03:38, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
If a flickr user made a mistake and choose a free license, when he/she didn't want to, well my opinion is that he has to live with his mistake. Of course I'm in favor of removing the image from wikimedia online projects, but that user can't sue, ask for money or ask an image to be removed from print materials. The question here is how reliable are Commons licenses for permanent uses.
Suppose I'm making a book and I use some images in the Commons, after verifying flickr user pages I check that those images are correctly licensed. Then some use decides to change his license to Non Comercial and demands me to remove his images from the book or to pay. Legally I have right to use the images in my book, as long as I respect the license that was on that image on the moment I downloaded it. But if the user sues me I have to prove that the image was under a free license. This is the real problem wich screenshoots could solve.
By the way I disagree that only administrators can validate images with review process, but that's another story. --OsvaldoGago 08:26, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
...sigh... By default you are not permitted to execute the actions reserved by copyright. You are only permitted to do so when the copyright holder grants you a license to execute those actions. Since it is *well* established in law that someone can't make such a grant unintentionally, an accidental release is simply not binding. No court would uphold it. There is no dispute about this issue among people with any insight on this matter.
Even in a case where we could prove that copyright holder actually intended to freely release the work but later changed their mind, they've received no compensation or other interest from us... so no binding contract could have been formed. I would doubt any US court would consider the disputed license valid. ... and these cases are rare, usually we can't tell a pure accident from a change in mind.
Furthermore, telling the authors of a work that we're just going to ignore their wishes puts us in an ugly position ethically. We depend on the creators of content being kind enough to release their works. If we get a public image of a bunch of greedy information pirates it will impact people's willingness to contribute to us. --Gmaxwell 19:26, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

My 2 cents (@WarX, Bryan): The screenshot itself is not a copyvio. There are no copyrightable elements on the page except the photograph itself. --Fb78 10:37, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

The flickrlogo, the author's avatar, and possibly the design, I don't know however whether that is copyrighted. -- Bryan (talk to me) 11:50, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, there are copyrighted elements in the image.. You could argue that they are only incidentally included .. which would be permitted by US law.. but it is pointless: Someone could fake a screenshot as equally as they could fake a piece of copied text. The screenshot is not proof. --Gmaxwell 19:26, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


Well should I start to believe that the Creative Commons Licenses are not reliable at all, and start getting signed contracts from every author? How can we produce a work based on other's works safely ? How does the free software industry deals with this, when producing GPL code? Does a response from the authors trough e-mail has legal value ? --OsvaldoGago 20:10, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Software doesn't get a copyright statement in every source file and a copy of the GPL included in the package when someone accidentally forgets to change a dropdown on a webpage. Because of the way software is distributed and, to an extent, the skillset of the people involved this issue is just a lot less significant for software. This isn't something thats unique to the Creative Commons licenses, but rather a result of trying to get licenses releases via dropdown or checkbox. The statements and actions of the copyright holders do have value, and the more that we can interact from them the better. We should try to do our best, and deal with it when we run into problems.--Gmaxwell 20:59, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

"The statements and actions of the copyright holders do have value, and the more that we can interact from them the better." I agree. Any ideias ? --OsvaldoGago 23:32, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Image Processing for Administration

Is there any plan to use image processing software to help with administration? There are various techniques that can be used to fingerprint images to detect duplicates (even where scaled, differently encoded or in the presence of noise). Such software could be used for example to automatically detect the re-uploading of a previously deleted image by keeping a database of image fingerprints. There is also software available in academia that can automatically detect porn with reasonable success. Such software could be used to place images in the speedy delete category without manual intervention.

--ksfan 16:58, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, ... I've done work with this. The available algorithms that I've used have been... mostly unimpressive. If you have any good references, please send them to me. There are very few implementations that I've found for approaches more sophisticated than color histograms, and much of it requires K-d trees for lookup, which are fairly expensive when considering that we have over a million images. --Gmaxwell 18:25, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
Was that refs for porn detection or image fingerprinting sorry? There's better approaches than just colour histograms for porn detection e.g. looking at shapes. Here's a quick Google result for example for a commercial product that looks at shapes - PicSeer. I've heard of similar sorts of ideas in academic research before but can't remember a specific source. I don't think a million images is necessarily such a huge problem. CPU cycles tend to be free flowing for philantropic projects. You can solve the problem through spare processing time donations/distributed computing etc.
For fingerprinting I would be surprised if there was not a scalabale approach for looking up an image fingerprint in a database out there somewhere. It's been done on a large scale in the audio domain for example which is a similar problem. There are commercial services you can send a clip of audio of a song to and they will tag it for you in the presence of significant noise from a large database of audio fingerprints. There are also services that detect audio similarity in relatively large databases. --ksfan 16:58, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
Please feel free to implement a free software system for distributed image indexing using non-patented algorithms. We'll enjoy using it. Proposing it is the easy part. I'm especially excited to see how you'll solve problems caused the very limited bandwidths available in SETI-at-home style distributed computing. --Gmaxwell 19:33, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Indeed proposing ideas is the easy part. I was interested if anyone was looking at image processing for commons, didn't say I was going to do it :-) I fully expect and quite agree there probably are many practical difficulties.

By limited bandwidth problem, do you mean availability of outgoing bandwidth at commons for sending images to clients? What's the mean size of a still image? Let's say it's 500k which makes the million images 500Gb in size. So if you intend to distribute the million images over a month to the clients to do some processing then you need a minimum approx 2Mbit dedicated outgoing (if I've worked that out about right - please correct if I'm wrong). Although I guess practically you need more because of the probably uneven distribution of client availability. I don't see there's any bandwidth problem at the client particuarly assuming you imagine a reasonable number of keen clients with DSL connections are available to do the job e.g. a few hundred.

Alternatively if you did the job locally and you expended say 20 seconds per image, then you need 8 dedicated CPUs to get the job done in a month. I expect there's quite a lot of useful work you could do say in 20 seconds per image.

I don't think a million images is really so impractical to attack from a computational point of view if there are some useful and reliable algorithms.

--ksfan 20:45, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Ha, I never noticed this response until now… but I figure I'll follow up here just so that other searchers don't miss this point. Your notion of "20 seconds per image" is unreasonable: Fine details in images are not perceptually important, a human can reliably tell if two images are probably the same with a little 320x240 (0.07 mpixel) thumbnail. The even the most sophisticated fingerprinting should be deeply sub-second per image. With the multiple gigaflops available on modern CPUs and the small sizes needed for perceptual processing most resources would be spent on transferring. A single system of mine manages to download every image uploaded to commons, SHA1 it, then look up the SHA1 in an database without using a noticeable amount of CPU. More extensive fingerprinting would not be much of a computational burden.
If you want to do something distributed, consider indexing all the images available on the web. :) --Gmaxwell (talk) 21:34, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

{{GFDL-no-disclaimers}}

I cant find a commons police to use this template. In which case should it used insteat of {{GFDL}}? Also, it use a different category: Category:GFDL images. I think this isnt usefull. --GeorgHH 23:21, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

It's because English Wikipedia stupidly included the line "subject to disclaimers" in their GFDL template, so images moved here that had that version of the template should have it here too. In general it shouldn't concern Commons users who are no transferring images from en.wp. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 06:53, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

December 10

Transvestitenschwein (talk · contribs)

Can somebody please take a look at pictures that this person is uploading? They seem highly offensive to me, and serve no useful purpose. MartinD 09:36, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Images deleted (hate campaign against transvestites) and user blocked for one week. --GeorgHH 10:38, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Is a username like that not part of the hate campaign in itself? I would suggest permanent block due to unsuitable username. /Lokal_Profil 17:02, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree, I think the username is offensive. Cnyborg 18:09, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, an indef block is appropriate. -- Bryan (talk to me) 18:20, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for taking action! MartinD 18:46, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

December 11

Image:Klaviatura.png

Is this image free? It uses the Petrucci fonts from http://www.music-theory.com/fonts.html. --Eleassar (t/p) 16:51, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know are text displayed in a copyrighted font free. -- Bryan (talk to me) 19:16, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I meant of course, if the image itself is free, and the font not, the image is free. If the image is not free, but the font is not, the image is not free. -- Bryan (talk to me) 11:57, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Stale dispute over Norwegian licence

It would be nice if some people would attempt to break the stalemate with regards to the validity of Template:Norwegian coat of arms. __meco 23:13, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

December 12

Fan art

Ok, I may be shooting myself (and everyone else) in the foot, but I've had it with the ambiguity and inconsistency.

The Commons:Derivative works policy indicates that any drawing, costume, photographic reproduction, et cetera representing elements of a copyrighted work (in short, 'fan art') is subject to that copyright... and thus that it is essentially impossible to have non-copyrighted images of 'Star Wars' for example.

And yet, in direct contradiction of the example cited in the policy, we have Category:Star Wars... containing dozens of images which would seem to fit the criteria.

This causes frequent problems with some users on various projects claiming that such images are 'free use' (they are on Commons after all) and others deleting them because they are 'fair use'. Complaints that 'free use only' prevents display of ANY images related to fiction whose creators lived past 1936 get met with replies that, 'you can just buy a costume, photograph it, and have a free image'... while others then cite that same procedure as creating a 'copy' which is 'fair use' only and thus not allowed. The German Wikipedia ostensibly allows only 'free' images, but makes extensive use of this sort of 'fan art' for things like w:de:Völker im Star-Trek-Universum - every image in that article technically being a fan reproduction of copyrighted material.

This issue was previously discussed at the administrator's noticeboard here with various admins arguing that fan art was not 'free', but should be allowed anyway... and the apparent conclusion that a specific policy regarding fan art was needed. That seems like a good idea.

In short, is fan art allowed on Commons or not? Do we rely on the fact that lawsuits are (almost) never lodged in relation to such artwork? Is there some sort of dividing line where the image is 'generic enough' (i.e. plain gold ring meant to be Tolkien's 'One Ring' is ok because a gold ring is a commonplace item - and does adding the inscription then make it 'fair use' only?) or 'unique enough' (i.e. drawing of Harry Potter book character who has never appeared in illustrations or movies is an 'original artwork' based on a written description) that some fan artworks are 'free' while others are not?

Currently, here and in other Wikimedia projects, some of these images get kept while others get deleted... with no apparent rhyme or reason save the understanding of copyright, accurate or not, held by the respondents. It's chaotic and confusing and some sort of 'official word' would at least allow us all to make decisions regarding images from the same basis. --CBDunkerson 11:43, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Fan art is NOT ALLOWED and has to be DELETED. Fan art is always Fair Use, and Fair Use is NOT ALLOWED on Commons by principle. Delete it speedily, if you like. Feel free to spread the news and deletion requests. The scope of this project is to create a FREE database, and Fan art that imitates the original as closely as possible is not free by definition. --Fb78 13:43, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
There could be some fan art that borrows absolutely no design elements from the copyrighted works - for instance, a novel design of spacecraft. But it would have to be so generic that it could just as easily fit in the Star Trek or Stargate universes, and perhaps it's no longer "fan art" at that point. I've always thought the de: folks were trying to pull a fast one in this area; if they started showing a full-length movie using only fan art, did they think that the movie studio wasn't going to pay them a visit demanding royalties? Stan Shebs 14:56, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
It looks to me that at least the majority of the images in Category:Star Wars is inappropriate for this project and should be deleted. -- Infrogmation 19:50, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Category names for locating maps

We have a lot of locating maps which often clutter up the root categories for maps (like Category:Maps of the United States). So, we'll have to move these maps to specific categories.

However, we need a rule to determine category names for locating maps; here, are some various examples of current categories for such maps:

I suggest the following form to standardize all these categories:

Category:<Object name> <preposition 1> <location> <preposition 2> <territory>
  • <territory> is the name of the area the maps show
  • <preposition 2> = in when <location> is a type of settlement (like a city), of in the other cases (like a municipality)
  • <location> is the type of places the maps locate

(you can create new sections, if you don't agree with the definitions above) --Juiced lemon 14:39, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Preposition 1

Of or for or ?; I prefer of. --Juiced lemon 14:39, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

  • Symbol support vote.svg Support Of.--Wappen-stadt-bonn.svgBo-rhein-sieg 18:51, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • of -- Bryan (talk to me) 19:26, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support Of but not if the second preposition is also of. Can that be in for every case? not a native English speaker --Enricopedia 19:34, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support Of Siebrand 12:29, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support for, since they are maps for locating the subjects, not locator maps belonging to the subjects. LX (talk, contribs) 13:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support of – after thinking some more, maps of X sounds fine, so why shouldn't locator maps of X be fine as well, and it's more consistent. LX (talk, contribs) 13:37, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Object name

Locator maps, location maps or ?; I prefer Location maps. --Juiced lemon 14:39, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Why is localization unused? --Juiced lemon 23:00, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Some links:

--Juiced lemon 10:58, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


  • I prefer locator -- pretty much every map is of a location, so "locator" seems to me to be more precise, and less likely to have other types of maps be inaccurately placed within the category. Jkelly 19:53, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support location maps locator - I agree with Jkelly --Enricopedia 22:54, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support any of the above as long as it is consistent. Siebrand 12:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support locator, with location being acceptable. Localization would be an unnecessary bias towards American English spelling (localisation being the Commonwealth English spelling). LX (talk, contribs) 13:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Preposition 2

  • Support Juiced Lemon's proposal -- Bryan (talk to me) 19:41, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support Aye! --Enricopedia 22:55, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support Of in all cases for consistency Siebrand 12:31, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
  • ...is more complicated and is part of a greater naming inconsistency. (Is there a central discussion on this?) In a sentence, one would be less likely to say that "Lake Ladoga is a lake of Europe" than "Lake Ladoga is a lake in Europe". Therefore, I dislike the "lakes of Europe" naming convention and prefer "lakes in Europe". The case of political subdivisions is more ambiguous: "Quebec is a province in Canada" and "Quebec is a provice of Canada". To me, the latter seems slightly more natural, since it primarily concerns an abstract entity whose connection to a geographical contexts is largely incidental. Therefore, I propose of for administrative regions (including countries, provinces, municipalities, and similar) and in for other entities (including bodies of water, islands, cities, buildings, and similar). LX (talk, contribs) 13:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • One exception to my argument above is that the Canary Islands are more often considered "islands of Spain" than "islands in Spain". I said it was complicated, didn't i? LX (talk, contribs) 13:42, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Just curious...

Doing some random browsing through commons... are "text only" pages useful? See Aimf for an example (I have no idea what the content is, but it doesn't seem to be used for organising media files). --SB_Johnny|talk|books 23:07, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Generally, text only pages are not considered useful in the main namespace. This one, a news report in Vietnames, was not linked to any pages, so it served no purpose on Commons; I've deleted it. Cnyborg 23:15, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


December 13

Image Transfer

I'm trying to transfer image files to Wikipedia for a page I'm editing. How do I do it? Message the Trekphiler page there. Thanks (comment by User:24.66.94.140 - maybe en:User:Trekphiler?)

Well, you can upload them here. Is that what you asked for? --Enricopedia 00:43, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I am also not sure what you are asking for. If you want to upload Wikipedia images onto Commons, then read en:Wikipedia:Moving images to the Commons. However, if you want to use Commons files onto a Wikipedia article, see en:Wikipedia:Commons. Zzyzx11 00:47, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

CAT:CAT scheme

Cat silhouette.svg

Hello, I am currently discussing the category scheme for Category:Felis silvestris catus subcategories with User:Salix. Anyone interested in cats is welcome to discuss the issue too, please read Category talk:Felis silvestris catus and also user talk:Salix. Thanks, pfctdayelise (说什么?) 00:32, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

I like the Image:Cat silhouette.svg --Cat out 07:06, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

French copyright law wrt. PD-old

Image:Cambrai_1915.jpg was deleted for not having enough information on it's copyright status; supposing it really was taken in 1915 in w:Cambrai, France, would it be PD-Old or not? Alphax (talk) 08:39, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

When did the author die? Jkelly 17:43, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok, so it's not a case of "anything before 19xx is out of copyright" then? The problem is that I don't think that the author was known, so we'd have to assume that they lived for another 90 years after 1915... Alphax (talk) 07:05, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Is it a free for all?

I've found images of goats, cows, cats, eggs and even self portraits of users in Category:Bangladesh. Is there no guideline stating what we can upload and what we can't? Something like notability or NPOV or whatever... else, it's becoming a real free for all. - Aditya Kabir 14:52, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

It is very easy for me to imagine that someone may want pictures of goats in Bangladesh. Just refine the photographs into appropriate subcategories so that people navigating Category:Bangladesh don't have to sort through agricultural pictures if they happen to be looking for maps. Jkelly 17:46, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
What do you think of Category:World War II, which need 4 pages to be displayed?
There are a lot of general categories, in Commons, which are cluttered up by unsorted media files. We need people to help to sort these files. However, it would be better to stem the source of unsorted files and to educate uploaders, or other users, who don't learn (or don't want) to categorize properly.
I suggest to complete Commons help regarding categories. In particular, to identify some basic rules about categorization; so, an user who would badly categorize a file (like Category:Green Category:Geography Category:People by occupation Category:Sport) would receive a friendly message recalling the infringed rule(s). --Juiced lemon 18:55, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
You don't need a policy to tell people to use better judgement. Please go ahead and do so, pointing them to pages like Commons:Categories. More widepsread use of the CommonSense tool has introduced more poor categorisation like Juiced lemon mentions. No categorisation is worse than poor categorisation -- but only just. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 14:48, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
It's a shame you can't watchlist Categories for new additions. This would allow each of us to monitor categories we're fond of and subcategorize them accordingly. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 19:04, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Absolutely. Jkelly 19:23, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Hear, hear. Is there a listed bug for this on Bugzilla? Jastrow (Λέγετε) 19:33, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Its a shame we dont have a quarter of our tools. And far worse we lost our existing ones....--Cat out 07:08, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

"It's a shame you can't watchlist Categories for new additions." Re: We could if someone would install DynamicPageList on the Commons wiki :-) --OsvaldoGago 20:57, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

On fr.wikipedia, there is a wikiproject called WikiFourmi (Fourmi= Ant), whose task is to clean up cluttered categories. You just go on the page, you tell them there's a category to sort, and they go and do it (sometimes create a small debate before if needed). Maybe the same could be done here ? I guess many users enjoy cleaning categories :-) 80.47.129.100 11:02, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

That is like, the whole organisation job of Commons :) it's not a small part!
I encourage people to develop commons category schemes for topics they are interested in, to help keep order and especially keep useful categories < 200 members. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 14:48, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

December 14

Check usage broken.

When will we have check usage tool to be working again, without the ugly 500 Internal Error ? --OsvaldoGago 09:11, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

When the toolserver again has access to wiki data. That is, when the wikimedia admins have created huge dump files, transferred them to the toolserver, and applied them there. This is made more difficult by the fact that some wikimedia server failed recently, so none can currently really be spared for making dumps. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 12:03, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Checking license of 3d images.

Hi.

How can I check the images in Category:3D computer graphics. The page shows beautifull images under the header "Media: Autodesk Maya & Mental Ray".

The user claims this are licensed under GNU Free Documentation License and CC-BY-SA. Can anyone confirm ? --OsvaldoGago 10:46, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

The images can all be found at the artist's website, and (with the descriptive text) at several 3D gallery sites (e.g.[10], [11]). None of them appear to mention GFDL; the gallery sites tend to say "All Rights Reserved". The uploader's username matches the artist's e-mail address, but without some real proof they're the same, it looks like a copyvio. --Davepape 15:58, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Category:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism Volume I

This category holds over 500 files of scanned pages of approx. 150.000 bytes each. I feel that's waste of disk space. Anyone agree? Floris V 11:12, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

1981 just called, they want their floppy disks back. :-) But seriously, it's a microscopic fraction of the space used here, and all of commons is still less than 1TB I think, just a couple modern drives' worth. Stan Shebs 14:48, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I feel certain this is being used by Wikisource. Whatever is useful to a Wikimedia project, by definition belongs here. Plus, we are not under serious space constraints and never have been, so it's something of false concern. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 14:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Request for Commons to install DynamicPageList2 extension

Hello,

I just requested that this extension be installed for Commons. bugzilla:8261. The extension is described in detail at m:DynamicPageList2. The short of it is that it allows you to generate dynamic lists to see what new stuff has been added to a category.

Comments are welcome here about how great having this installed would be. :) I noticed half a dozen open requests from other projects for this extension to be installed. If there is no response from the dev's within a couple of weeks, I will harass them in more detail armed with support from this thread. (so please reply, if only to say "great!")

thanks, pfctdayelise (说什么?) 15:02, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

  • Voted for it and Symbol support vote.svg Support this. Alphax (talk)
  • "great!" ... er, voted for it (not that votes mean anything per se but hey, I like to vote) and Symbol support vote.svg Support this. It would be very handy to be able to generate these for a wide variety of reasons. ++Lar: t/c 16:43, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
It seems Wikinews is still using the DynamicPageList1. Is the 2nd version tested enough? Symbol support vote.svg Support --OsvaldoGago 19:06, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Don't know. DPL2 appears to be used on a good number of wikis, and is well-supported, but not yet on any WM wikis. We can actually have both DPL1 and DPL2 installed simultaneously, since they have different syntax. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 01:21, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol heart vote.svg Love this idea. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 19:16, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support We need this extension more than any other Wiki project. --Juiced lemon 21:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol heart vote.svg Yay! --Ranveig 00:31, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support This would be enormously useful. -- Arvind 00:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support This will solve so many issues cats vs galleries Gnangarra 01:48, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Symbol support vote.svg Support Lets have both 1 and 2. --Tarawneh 04:55, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

DPL2 is big, ugly, and potentially unfriendly to the servers; just the sort of thing we're very unlikely to want to ever install. It would be nice to hear what people actually want to do so we can have specific, targetted support for these things. --brion 22:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I had good experiences with DynamicPageList1 in the past, on Wikinews. My idea is to create portal pages, to help tracking changes, in certain categories and new additions. It's very effective doing this. --OsvaldoGago 23:00, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Primarily, the ability to effectively watchlist categories (bugzilla:1710) - to track new items added to and removed from specific categories. Without it categories are painful/impossible to maintain. (By "maintain" - see which new items have been added and move them to more specific subcategories if appropriate.) DPL1 would be fine for this too, I think. --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 11:28, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
You can already effectively watchlist categories. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Electromagnetism For example]. --Gmaxwell 02:32, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
Recentchangeslinked doesn't show items they have been removed from a category (eg I have done lots of work with CAT:CAT lately, none of my removals from this category are shown). It also can't be transcluded and doesn't have a proper watchlist view. This is not "effective". DynamicPageList offers much greater control over the output including the date an item was first added to a category, category intersection, ability to restrict to specific namespaces, the total number of items to show and order by date item was added to category/last edit date.
I don't understand why we have to beg for this. It is already intalled at Wikinews and Meta. What is the problem with giving us access to useful tools that are available? --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 03:07, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Because developers are arbitrary and hate you, of course.
Seriously, the reason is because it DPL has scalability problems. We have categories with many tens of thousands of pages, this isn't a bad thing (infact it's rather good.. breaking up categories dramatically reduces the usefulness of intersections and intensifies semantic drift), but it means that DPL can't be used here because it is not sufficiently scalable. If wikinews had over a million pages it would be off there too. Scalable intersections are a occasional discussion point on wikitech-l. Lots of people want it for good reasons, and we will get it some day. There just is no magic bullet.
On the subject of using related changes, there is a tool on the toolserver (requires no db access so it should be up) which reformats related changes into a proper watchlist. It doesn't, as you point out, catch removals.. but the use case you gave didn't need to catch removals. --Gmaxwell 03:14, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't think we have too many content-describing categories that have tens of thousands of members. Can we not install DPL with a warning that anyone who tries to run it on Category:GFDL will be banned? :)
If "DPL can't be used here because it is not sufficiently scalable" then I suppose a dev will close my bug request with a WONTFIX, despite the fact that "we can always turn it off later". I will watch with interest.
What is the harm in giving it an explicit trial? Say, four weeks. We could try it out. Then people can evaluate if it's too harmful. If so, turn it off again. I can understand that and I guess most other editors can too.
Which toolserver tool were you referring to? --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 03:31, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Another solution would be to have pages like:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Portugal

as an Rss Feed. It would allow us to manage several pages on a Rss Reader and make changes imediately. Perhaps an external app in php or python could transform the page in a RSS feed. This way we would't overload the servers ? --OsvaldoGago 23:01, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

The use of company logo's

In dutch copyright law, I found some funny section. It concerns section 38 [12] (english):

Article 38

1. The copyright in a work of which the author has not been indicated or has not been indicated in such a way that his identity is beyond doubt shall expire 70 years after 1 January of the year following that in which the work was first lawfully communicated to the public.

2. The same shall apply to works of which a public institution, association, foundation or company is deemed the author, unless the natural person who created the work is indicated as the author on or in copies of the work which have been communicated to the public.

So this might mean that the logo's of some old Dutch companies are no longer restricted under copyright law. They may however be subject to trademark restrictions. So, is my point valid and can't there be any copyright on company logos older than 70 years? And more important, would it be allowed to be uploaded to Commons? -- Bryan (talk to me) 18:54, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Template:Trademarked. Jkelly 18:58, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
But what does the template mean? Is commons only subject to copyright law or also to others? -- Bryan (talk to me) 19:18, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Commons is bound by any laws applicable to it, of course, including trademark law. The real issue is if we should only consider copyright law when we determine which content is "free", or if we have to consider other laws as well. The current trend seems to be to allow some restrictions imposed by other laws, such as personality rights on portraits, for example. Trademarked logos however are generally frowned upon: they are hardly usable beyond the scope of fair use, which isn't considered "free enough" - think, for instance, of putting logos on t-shirts and selling them...
The question is difficult and there seems to be no simple answer. The issue of trademarked logos has been discussed several times, with the result of a general bias against having them on commons. So the current modus operandi seems to be not to allow plain logos, but to allow images containing logos in a larger context (i.e. a logo on a car, or on a street panorama or something). A picture of, for example, a coca cola can, would be borderline. -- Duesentrieb(?!) 19:36, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Linking from sister projects

I'm sorry if this question is asked over and over again. But I don't see how to use files from the commons on sister projects [wikiversty for example]. I didn't see the topic in First Steps or FAQs either. Could someone help me?--Taeke 20:28, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

You do not need to do anything special. Use normal wikisyntax for images. If there is no local file with that name, the file with that name on Commons will render. Jkelly 21:07, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

December 15

Cosmic Era Mobile Weapons are Disappearing

Umm.. Can does anyone know why many articles about mobile weapons from the cosmic era universe of the metaseries Gundam are disappearing, because I've noticed they've been removed. If anyone does know, please tell me. The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ninjaclown (talk • contribs) at 02:27, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Because they're not free. Commons is a repository of free content, not copyright infringing screencaps. Alphax (talk) 05:08, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Flag of Poland

Hi I am from Polish wiki, recentely a couple of users have replaced Flag and Coat of Arms of our country with gray and pinkish versions, which are not the official flags as presented by Polish state on internet. They have been now outvoted on Polish wiki, however those who engaged in this rather tiresome debate have little knowledge of Commons technicalities, what measures have to be made to replace the flags to official ones on Commons ? Official flag of Poland as presented on Presidential website of Poland [13]

The pink and greyish ones that now spread across wiki [14] [15] [16] --Molobo 12:10, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

So actually we were first having problems with a grey-red flag and now with a pink-red flag? -- Bryan (talk to me) 12:35, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Molobo. The colors of the Poland flag in Commons are unsourced, since they have been determined by an user in an unverifiable way. Everybody can check that official Polish sites don't use the “Commons” colors. --Juiced lemon 13:06, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
This was a verifiable way. You really can get any closer to not making OR then go straight to the source and in this case this is our law. The problem really is that the law doesn't specify colors for screen displays, but rather printed or material (textile) versions... Anyway we are waiting for the Polish Heraldical Committee to speak. Please do not mess with those flags more then they are already. Nobody really says that such law does not exist, they simply question the looks&feel of the flag. I can understand that - when I saw it first I said to myself "we do not have such nice flag as I always thought", but then again dura lex sed lex (it's a hard law but it's the law). The pink-red version was in reality a kind of a hack in recalculation of colors to RGB to make it look more as one would expect... It would probably best if Polish Sejm would release a new act that would settle such things in a decent manner, but I guess that even the Committee won't answer too fast. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 13:49, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
P.S.: As for Presidential website - you don't really expect webmasters to read acts of laws before drawing pictures, do you?

Anyway we are waiting for the Polish Heraldical Committee to speak. The Polish Heradical Comitee only makes rulings towards administrative and government institutions. Wikipedia isn't one of them. This was a verifiable way Yes-looking at how official sites present the flag.

Please do not mess with those flags more then they are already I am not askings to "mess" I only asking to restore flags to their official versions.

but then again dura lex sed lex (it's a hard law but it's the law Which you interpret in your own way. Obviously you did it wrong since EVERY official presentation is different from Wiki versions. So Wiki can't create its own reality.

As for Presidential website - you don't really expect webmasters to read acts of laws before drawing pictures, do you? Presidential website isn't made by a private person but by government of Poland. So far nobody has shown any court ruling that says they are breaking the law. So far the coloristics on Wiki are only on Wiki, and every official site uses different coloristics from Wiki. --Molobo 14:03, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Please cool down. As far as I remember flags colors was chosen from Pantone (textile) colors approximation. Situation with flag of Poland is not unique. Anyway, communication with officials of Poland on this matter is good idea. --EugeneZelenko 15:47, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

As far as I remember flags colors was chosen from Pantone (textile) colors approximation. Situation with flag of Poland is not unique They are other flags whose coloristics are only found on Wiki, and don't match any official flag presentation ? Anyway, communication with officials of Poland on this matter is good idea. We already tried that, they sent us to Comission, but it has no obligation to answer-it only deals with state institutions. On top of that the user who created those pink and grey flags sent some very rude letters to them, which may discredit us as talking partner(the content was "I am outraged that you have false flag, my flag is correct, immiedetly correct your flag to mine-it is on Wikipedia. I ashamed for you."(he posted the letter's contentent in plWiki) :( After this I doubt they will answer. Please help. --Molobo 16:47, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

That's not what those letters said. He simply asked some questions, not easy questions, but I don't find them rude. Besides he finished his letter with "best regards" so it wasn't disrespectful in any way. Anything close to what's said above was in the last paragraph of those letters saying something like (rough translation) "Please correct Your web page, because it is a shame to spread such untruthfulness from a government web page about topics so emotionally close to Polish people as our flag, coats of arms, and national colours". Besides most of Polish Wikipedians agree that we should wait for the Committee to speak. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 18:47, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Besides most of Polish Wikipedians agree that we should wait for the Committee to speak

Most of Polish Wikipedians have agreed that they want normal (old) white and red flag[17]. And you now that Comittee only gathers on special occesions and only on questions asked by official institutions. It is likely it will never answer. Let's respect the vote, and stop this OR. --Molobo 01:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Most that had knowledge of the vote which was neither properly announced, nor in the right place, yes agreed they like the white-red, but their was no conclusion of what colors should be used and most seemed to agree the we should wait some officials to speak (first e-mail was sent to the mail given on the presidents website, the second one went to the Committee). Someone also send some e-mail to some politician. Personally I'm considering writing to press, so politicians would hop faster ;). --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 02:15, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
I would like to point out there was no vote on gray and pink flag at all, and the vote that did happend came to conclusion that we don't want gray and pink flags at all. Thus unless new versions arrive it would be best to restore the flag before the pink and gray one were placed. How can one do that.

--Molobo 14:07, 16 December 2006 (UTC) Ps:And seeing as authors of this rather bad joke, now proposed this flag[18] to be used, I don't consider them serious. --Molobo 14:07, 16 December 2006 (UTC)


Article 28 of the Polish Constitution, pt 2:

Barwami Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej są kolory biały i czerwony.

English:

White and red shall be the colours of the Republic of Poland.

The Contitution itself is available on the Sejm page (second lang. is English). So, no gray, no pink. Period. Let's not stick blindly to imperfect translations from the trichromatic scale (whatever that is) but rather to what it is supposed to be. Howgh! A Pole has spoken! ▄▄▄ Миша13 21:21, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

This debate is rather pointless, and a waste of good time. The original specifications of the Polish flag are in CIE 1973. Let me quote the ultimate source of wisdom: Programmers and others often seek a formula for conversion between RGB or CMYK values and L*a*b*, not understanding that RGB and CMYK are not absolute color spaces and so have no precise relation to L*a*b*.[19] (where CIE 1973 is L*a*b). This concludes that this debate is pointless, and thus that there is no official definition for the colors of the polish flag for display on computer display. So none of the images is right or wrong. I suggest we keep them both under a distinctive, NPOV name, and and this fruitless debate. -- Bryan (talk to me) 21:36, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Of course we should also consider superiority of those coloristics presented by official institutions of Poland. --Molobo 01:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

"no precise relation" doesn't mean that the conversion is not possible. Some tried to recalculate this so the white will be close to #FFFFFF, but they failed to do so (resulting only in "pink-red" version). BTW there is something like slivery-white (at least in Polish) so there is nothing wrong with the so called "grey-red" flag in accordance to the quoted statement either. Some even say that there is no such thing as "white" in polish heraldry, but I'm not even close to being an expert on this subject so I may only rely on their word for it. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 02:15, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
so there is nothing wrong with the so called "grey-red" flag in accordance to the quoted statement either.What is wrong, and in rather obvious way, is the fact that such colorisitcs are used only on Wiki, all official sites of Poland use different ones from Wikipedia. --Molobo 14:09, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
What I'm trying to say is: the CIE coordinates are possibly the best approximation of the white color the authors could provide. Instead of relying on their possible errors, we should drop conversion attempts and fall back to the origin (constitution, knowledge of history) and use our best abilities to approximate the white color in a new colorspace (RGB/CMYK). Luckily, there's no trouble with that: it's #FFFFFF what we're looking for (and "red" = #FF0000). If we want to keep the ugly grey/pinkish flag, we should at least rename it & explicitly tag as a conversion (possibly inaccurate) from another colorscale. Миша13 11:01, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Just a note fore everyone. Sorry to say that, but the Presidential website is in obvious mess - compare colors here (flags) and here (COA) - red is obviously different and so is the embedded COA in one of the flags (embedded seems to be brightened a lot). And I will say no more. We have problems about the flag noted in the article about it (including difference with the flag found on the website mentioned above), I see no other way to solve this until we get some official answers. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 16:36, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to say that, but the Presidential website is in obvious mess -
Sorry to say that, but it is not for you to determinie if Presidential site is doing anything according to law. Unless you have some sources from Polish court or Heraldic comission that colours presented on presidential site are wrong, then I see your claim as baseless original research. As it is know I can say that obviously the responsible authorities have determined that the flags are appropriate. I may point out once gain, that none of the flags presented by official sites of government of Poland are of the colours presented on Wikipedia(grey and pink)
I see no other way to solve this until we get some official answers.
As it is quite obvious that we won't get any answer-Heraldic comission only answers to administration and official institutions on special occasion-especially after that rude letter, then such position would result in the gray flag as remaining. In contradiction of official sites of Poland, which never use such colours. The solution is simple-restore the old flag, and then put the grey one under vote. The old flag fits those presented by official sites of Poland the best, and Wikipedians have already given their opinion that the gray flag is not apppropriate. --Molobo 17:32, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
And this is again not true (or not the whole true). Again this two [20] [21] differ and should be the same in colours. There is no way to fit to both, and this leaves official sites to be unreliable. Also Molobo didn't mentioned here that pl:NIK investigation on this subject also concluded that Polish flags are generally not in accordance to the colours stated by the Polish law. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 03:47, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
User Nux has threatened to block me if I will continue to disagreee with him and engage in discussions here. What should I do in such situation ? I think it is against rules ? --Molobo 01:15, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
After consulting other users, I simply warned him that he will be blocked (mainly) for misleading people here and on pl.wiki. I had also problems to find people that haven't already argued with him, so it is possible I will be the one who will block him (if it comes to it that is). This is all as according to our rules. Sorry to bring this here on Commons, but I can't leave accusations like that unanswered. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 03:47, 17 December 2006 (UTC).
Please note Bryan's comments above: Programmers and others often seek a formula for conversion between RGB or CMYK values and L*a*b*, not understanding that RGB and CMYK are not absolute color spaces and so have no precise relation to L*a*b*. [22] This concludes that this debate is pointless, and thus that there is no official definition for the colors of the polish flag for display on computer display. So none of the images is right or wrong. I suggest we keep them both under a distinctive, NPOV name, and and this fruitless debate. It seems as if you have only to continue the argument with each other rather than acknowledge that both sides are right and both sides are wrong. We should have two versions. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 02:47, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Commons:Villige Pump is for commons related discussions. This is a discussion related to a specific image. The image talk page is the approporate location for this discussion. Also please do not bring your disputes from Pl.wiki to here. --Cat out 02:57, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

unknown & unidentified

Where should I post picture of unidentified mammal under Category:Unknown mammals or Category:Unidentified mammals? --WikedKentaur 20:32, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

You might try on Commons:WikiProject Tree of Life. --SB_Johnny|talk|books 22:09, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Two questions regarding Commons

Hello, I have been uploading quite a few images in attempt to make a complete pictorial database of Lepidoptera (moths/butteflies). I have two questions though.

First, I began browsing some of the wikis in different languages and was surprised to discover they were using my images as well. However, on several occasions, they were identified incorrectly. I also noticed that on the "links to" part of the image description that it only lists English pages that are linked to that image. Is there a way I can see ALL links to it in all wikis?

Second, I noticed another user uploaded the image "Luna moth.jpg" but the picture is clearly of a sister species. It is an Actias selene not an Actias luna. The French wiki at the least referred to the file name and cited is as a luna moth. What procedure could I undertake to have the file name changed and how would I be able to tell which wikis are linked to it so I could change them as well (part of the first question).

Thanks in advance! --Kugamazog 22:46, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Use CheckUsage (Commons:Tools) when it comes back up (it's been down for a week now) to find usage on most wikis. Add a note to the description of the image with the bad ID correcting it. You might fix its category and move it to the proper gallery page, as well. --Wsiegmund 02:33, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
The problem is the file name is "Luna moth", so even if I change the description other people still assume that it is a luna moth. Am I allowed to nominate it for deletion, name change, or similar method?--Kugamazog 10:39, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
You can tag the picture with {{Rename image}} or rename it yourself. Unfortunately, you cannot rename a picture the way you can with a Wikipedia article: you've got to download the picture, rename it on your disk and re-upload it with the correct description. Then you ask for the deletion of the older one with {{duplicate}}. Jastrow (Λέγετε) 10:56, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

December 16

Republished magazine covers

Hi. I'm discussing with Registro bandini about some old magazine covers he has been uploaded here. Those magazine covers are not old enough to be under the PD, but they were republished in a book that we seem to have proper permission over (the permission is even registered at the OTRS system).

The question is: if the copyright owner of the original magazine (covers) it's not the same that the copyright owner of the book (as it seems to be so far) then we need additional permissions about those images, right? Please take a look at User talk:Dodo#Do_you_know_what_means_GFDL.3F and User talk:Registro bandini. Thanks. Regards. --Dodo 09:01, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Need help checking 1257 image

Using the most recent database dump of commons, I have created a list of thumbnails that were uploaded to Commons, and possibly originate from Wikipedia. If a user for example just saves Image:foo.pg from an article, it is likely to be a thumb. The image will then probably be Image:200px-foo.jpg. The list is located here. Most of those images will exist in some larger format on some Wikipedia. -- Bryan (talk to me) 12:33, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

What should we do entries in the list once we've dealt with (ie. found the larger/SVG version) them? Alphax (talk) 02:08, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I found at least one image (Image:800px-Sveriges riksdag 2001 a.jpg) with a duplicate on Commons under the expected proper name (Image:Sveriges riksdag 2001 a.jpg). You may want to turn that page into a table with links to the corresponding name so that people can see whether they exist and are duplicates. LX (talk, contribs) 03:40, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I put them in a table so it is easy to see if the "correct" named file exists, and also put a field for people to mark off images that they have dealt with. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 04:23, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
Nicely done! I took the liberty of changing the look of the table to the sortable wikitable class for some extra flexibility. LX (talk, contribs) 04:27, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
Bryan: Over what period of time were these uploads made? Do you know what percentage of total uploads over that time they constitute? Just out of interest. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 04:37, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
It's 1257 uploads since the beginning of commons. That is not much relatively, about 0.1%, but still much. I have now also extracted the images from en, de and fr, and I am currently comparing those against each other. I will post a list later this afternoon, what the possible source of these images is. -- Bryan (talk to me) 12:07, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I have done the cross check, and it seems to be quite useful. The crosscheck has been performed against the three biggest wikis, en, fr and de. I am looking into also using nl, sv, pt and es. Ja will probably cause some more troubles due to encoding. -- Bryan (talk to me) 15:37, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Picture of the day and problems

Hi. Sorry my bad English, but this question is very important.

The image of this day, Image:Blum3.jpg, is with heavy problems. The license is incomplete and there is no voting. The picture was chosen only by the Brazilian user João Felipe C.S (the same who uploaded the image) in [23], who already had problems here and in lusophone Wikipedia. In Commons, he had problems using of illegal way sock puppets and recently has been warned because he has tried to make something like the first case at Template: Potd/2007-02-13 (only for sysops).

About the Image:Blum3.jpg, it was uploaded without an author and presented as the source http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagem:Blum3.jpg. The picture in pt.wikipedia was deleted because of {{NowCommonsThis}} inserted by Rei-artur (User:Rei-artur). I had, as a sysop in lusophone Wikipedia, to verify the origin of picture. It was uploaded by pt:User:Mcidral, who contributed only with only 3 images without source and author (including this one) to the article pt:Blumenau (the only one where he contributed). After, João Felipe C.S uploaded the picture in Commons placing it with a wrong license.

It is. The current picture of the day is with wrong license and without voting. Thanks for the attention. -- Fernando S. Aldado 03:15, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Bastique added the POTD tag, so I presume he knew what he was doing. Alphax (talk) 03:56, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I presume that Bastique don't perceived what happened. -- Fernando S. Aldado 04:03, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Seems to be identical to en:Image:Blumenau_-_1.jpg, which was uploaded in April 2006 and claimed PD-self (but copyright is questioned there, and the uploader never answered from the looks of it). Carl Lindberg 06:29, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Given the original uploader's history (see en:User_talk:Jhowcs), this image is almost certainly a violation too. The user (Jhowcs) is now banned on en due to persistent copyvios, and that name looks very similar to the uploader of this image. Ah, I think I found the original source. I don't speak Portugese so I can't tell for sure, but I don't see anything on that page or site that would indicate a free license. The home page has a copyright 2002 notice. Carl Lindberg 17:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
You're right, Carl. -- Fernando S. Aldado 10:39, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
POTD policy about being Quality images and Featured Pictures did not start until January 2007. Everything from December is prior to that decision. As a matter of fact, Jhowcs's persistent addition of images resulted in these actions being taken. However, images by the Brazilian government's website are public domain, and therefore the image was, free. Have no fear, because of our new rules, this will not be occuring again. Check my delete log to see how many POTD image choices I've had to delete in the last few days. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 16:57, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Metadata

On many image's pages there is a headline "Metadata" with information from the Exif-section of the picture (example). On others, while taken with a digital camera as well, there is no such information (example). I could not find any information as to when it is shown and when it is not. Does it depend on the editing of the image, if it has been edited with a graphics editor? --Tsui 12:54, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

In this case it seems to depend on the editting program. An other common mistake is that quite some people upload a thumbnail from for example wikipedia or flickr. Thumbnails usually haven't any exif information neither. -- Bryan (talk to me) 13:06, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
So, in the example above, it seems, that Adobe Photoshop prevents the Exif-data from being shown - maybe only when the image is saved through the save for the web option. I will make some tests (save the "normal" way with save as, save with another software etc.). Thank you for your answer, Tsui 13:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

POTD again

A suitable candidate for POTD?

Could someone please have a look at Template:Potd/2006-12-18, and decide quickly, if is really reasonable to put a national flag on the main page for a day?

For what reason? What is with flags of other countries? Do we want a "US day", a "North Korean day" or else in 2007? And what if I suggest this very nice flag? No, I think we should not choose any flag for POTD at all.

PS: No offense meant against any nationality. --D. 20:10, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

I personally would not choose something so simple as a featured image. ¦ Reisio 20:32, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree. I thought the Pictures of the day were meant to showcase the best and most interesting pictures on commons, not simple flags or symbols... --88.134.44.28 20:54, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
One could argue that it is often easier to shoot a nice photograph when one is at the right time at the right place, where it may not be trivial to create an efficient and correct SVG file. Even though I rarely vote for images of the day, I wouldn't know why this image could not serve as a prime example of what the Commons has to offer, as we literally have thousands of flags. I have always wondered why some gems of SVG maps have yet to be chosen as pictures of the day. Just my $0.02. Siebrand 22:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
First of all to take a photograph you have to be in that place in the right time and secondly you have to have at least a decent camera and you should see what others didn't to make it interesting. Finally you have to be able make shoot this photograph so others can see what you did, or be so luck that it will seem you did. As for this SVG - I see nothing so nice about it. So it uses flipping here and there, but it could use one single path element to achieve exactly the same and it could be processed much, much faster. Besides this unneeded (IMHO) technical stuff in the source, what makes it better then almost any of these SVG COAs? And further more I don't see it neither in COM:QI nor COM:FP. BTW I'm putting Image:Snooker table drawing.svg on next snooker event ;P. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 13:35, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Someone put it up a while ago, and nobody took it down. There was one replacement with a fairly obnoxious waving gif version, that was even less valuable. With rules beginning January first about images being FP and QI, rest assured this will not be happening again. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 17:21, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
I havenoticed the flag two weeks ago before it was effectively displayed on the front page. I noted that it wasreally boring (just a symbol,bestvoewedat smaller sizes) and was noting that someone has put this image, despite it was never selected as a featured image and not even a quality image. Changing it to the waving form was a replacement suggestion that was less boring than the flat flag, but this was reverted back to the boring flag (I would have much prefered to see a quality image and some comments added, grrr...).
Due to this precedent, now we see people putting flags in next February (I saw Flag of Germany.svg).
Really, the selection isbogous if such error (where a date limit is exhausted for changing it long before the effective publication, and the image really did not qualify as suitable). Anemergency should allow changing a forgotten image and replacing it by an image with the same general subject, but with a good quality (too late to get a vote on a featured image, but a quality image should be possible, or at least something less boring than such flat flag)... Verdy p 03:14, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
It was a poor selection, but now it's over and done with. The flag of Germany was removed as it was not a QI or an FP. It is now a rule that images be FP or QI before being POTD. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 03:23, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

SVG problem

Sigh…

This week I have made new SVG municipality maps for all municipalities in Norway. I uploaded one first, to check how it would look, and was horrified: the beautiful gradients I added in Inkscape were totally ruined, showing ugly stripes in web-colours instead. See the result to the left; download it and open it in Inkscape to see how it should look. Is there any way to fix this? All 400-something maps have this gradient. Jon Harald Søby 08:50, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

And now, all of the sudden, it is alright! I don't know who fixed it, but thanks to whomever it was! Jon Harald Søby 09:23, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
  • I don't like gradients which are not meaningful. On the other hand, I would like to know why we use so ugly colors for such maps. --Juiced lemon 17:37, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
  • I dont like gradients in maps too. Someone made maps for Switzerland with these. It looks always totally unprofessional. --N3MO 10:42, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Me neither. Gradients could be used, for example, to show a smooth transition from one point/quantity/state to another, but in my opinion they should never be used as a simple fill for a clearly-defined geographic area. Yes, I have used gradients in two of my maps (see User:MapMaster), but in an attempt to show that there were no clearly defined borders. You'll never see, for example, National Geographic using gradients for a map of the 50 U.S. states. MapMaster 15:24, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd concur. Gradients generally should not be used for a flat-area map. However, it is up to the artist's tastes to make the graphic they wish. I'd generally encourage them not to, but the ultimate creative control is with the contributor. --Petercorless 23:14, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

December 18

Macropus parma

I made some pictures of wallabies in the Zoo of Budapest, which were then labelled Parma Wallabies. I uploaded the photos (Image:Macropus parma.jpg; Image:Macropus parma with calf.jpg; Image:Macropus parma with calf 2.jpg; Image:Macropus parma a.jpg; Image:Macropus parma b.jpg; Image:Macropus parma c.jpg; Image:Macropus parma d.jpg; Image:Macropus parma e.jpg). When I went back, I found that the animals were called then Derby Wallabies (Macropus eugenii), and the staff admitted that there had been a mistake.

I don't usually edit stuff here, only upload pictures, so I would like to ask you what should be done? Can the photos be renamed to Macropus eugenii etc., and put into their proper place?--Mathae 17:16, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Just upload images under new names and mark old ones with {{bad name}}. Unfortunately we can't rename images :-( --EugeneZelenko 16:06, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Railroad/Railway

Hello,

Have a look Category:Railroad maps of Europe: we have Category:Railway maps of France, but Category:Railroad maps of Germany.

I would like standard terms for these categories (Category:Railroad maps and subcategories).

In Commons, we usually categorize railroad/railway maps in Rail transport categories. We also have Railways in <country> categories, while the English Wikipedia uses various forms in en:Category:Railway lines by country.

So, I suggest to standardize with one of the following forms:

  1. Railroad maps of <location>
  2. Railway maps of <location>
  3. Rail transport maps of <location>
  4. Railway lines maps of <location>
  5. What you want (specify)

Please, vote according to your preference(s). --Juiced lemon 18:54, 18 December 2006 (UTC) Corrections. --Juiced lemon 21:07, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

  • I prefer Railway maps of <location> -- Rüdiger Wölk 02:53, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Railway is the term preferred or used exclusively in all English-speaking countries except the United States, where railroad is used exclusively. (Canada uses both terms, but railway is preferred.) It would not make much sense to have a category called Railway maps of the United States nor one called Railroad maps of the United Kingdom. I therefore prefer Rail transport maps of <location> as a more neutral term. LX (talk, contribs) 06:38, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Railway is even heard here--just less commonly. It is certainly understood, and railroad carries a faint hint of a specific railway, as in toll road. // FrankB 02:23, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I prefer Rail transport maps of <..> to allow subcategories Railway maps of <..>, Tram maps of <..>, etc when we have enough to make a distinction useful. Thryduulf 03:08, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I prefer simply "rail maps", which is in common use in all dialects: [24] --NE2 12:35, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

December 19

Some proposed POTD images are now inconsistent with the Poll result

The recent POTD poll decided that from 1st Jan 2007 all POTD must be featured images. But there are still a number of images which were listed before the poll for January 2007 which are not featured. One example, proposed for 18th January, is Image:Uppsala_Cathedral_two_towers.jpg. That image is a Quality Image, which is allowed only if we run out of Featured images, which we have not. Does anyone object if I go through and replace these? It will of course mean that the translations for replacement images will have to be updated as well (which I can't do). --MichaelMaggs 17:15, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Non-English-language propositions that were voted on (viz. the ones I read) state that either Featured or Quality images may be used. Have the instructions in respective languages been updated to reflect the new rule? {I've updated Commons:Image du jour) Man vyi 17:51, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm. The conclusion at the top of the POTD poll page (in English) includes the reservation that QIs may be used "if there are not enough candidates" which are Featured Images. The French and German language versions, at least, don't include the "if there are not enough candidates" text. The wording on which the vote was taken didn't it seems include this limitation, and allows both types of image to be used as POTD. I think it's the summary of the poll result, at the top of the poll page, which is slightly wrong. If so, Image:Uppsala_Cathedral_two_towers.jpg and some others are perfectly ok. --MichaelMaggs 18:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I will correct the English POTD instructions and the poll summary. --MichaelMaggs 18:10, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

The poll stated that images begining January 1, 2007 will take this into consideration. You are correct, the poll does not specifically exclude Quality Images "unless no Featured could be found". This was merely based on comments of some users and should not be taken into consideration. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 18:10, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Implementation of CSS and character entity refrence for SVG

The Wikimedia SVG handling software seems not to understand CSS and character entity reference. It does not present the original design of a certain SVG image posted by me which includes CSS and character entity references.

Must I modify the SVG source to make it fit the current implementation of the software?

I hope the software will comply with CSS and character entity reference. --Trashtoy 19:05, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

  1. <style> elements belongs to <defs> element ref.
  2. You can use the character itself ("►"), but you can fill a bug report for that.

Cheers, Nux (talk··dyskusja) 19:54, 19 December 2006 (UTC).

The SVG engine we use (rsvg) doesn't support CSS. Batik and Inkscape do, however. For now, you should edit your files to conform to our limitations. In the future our SVG support will improve (either via enhancements to RSVG or via a transition to another engine). --Gmaxwell 00:10, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
It does support CSS from some time. The SVG file just have to use the correct syntax (as mentioned above). See e.g. Image:Suffix tree BANANA.svg. --Nux (talk··dyskusja) 02:41, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

I appreciate your feedback. I have ascertained that rsvg supports CSS except Descendant selectors. CSS without descendant selectors works all right. (Factory Method UML class diagram.svg)

By the way, the character "►" (UTF-8: E2 96 BA h) could not be displayed. I think the glyph is not available. --Trashtoy 23:29, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

December 20

What happened to my article?

Hello

I create a new article and save it only to find later that it has dissapeared. The article describes my business and includes a logo that I have capyright tagged.

Any ideas why I cannot publish my article?

Thanks

Chanetsa

What was the name of the article? Thryduulf 12:17, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Normally business logos are copyrighted with a restricted license, unaceptable on Commons. I don't know if speaking to the "very boss" (whatever it's called) would fix the problem (or if it is you, demonstrate it and free the logo).
Some laws are strange... :)

Nethac DIU, always would speak here
12:23, 26 December 2006 (UTC)


picture of the day for december 31

There's a problem on the image server for the pic of the day programmed for december 31. The image does exist, but there's no way to have the 300px image displayed.

The 300px thumbnail has existed and was displayed, but apparently it was deleted from the image server, and the software still "thinks" it is there: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg/300px-Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg

In fact, the imageserver returns a "404 not found" (that URL is still containing a 300px JPEG image in my browser cache, which is displayed briefly, and replaced by the "alt" string when the server returns a 404 error). And there's absolutely no way to have it regenerated using the normal syntax: The image at 300px "Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg" which generates the URL above.

The same is true from other wikis as well; Note that if we use a different size, than the default 300px, the thumbnail gets generated (here at 299px): Bratislava New Year Fireworks.jpg

And we can have a 300px thumbnail generated using an alternate URL: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg/300px-Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg This demonstrates that the image is not incorrect, only the server has a problem when managing its images cache.

It seems that there's a database entry to store the thumbnails that are already prepared for a (image,size) pair, and it should contain the path under which it is generated for HTML page preparation. The record for (Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg,300px) exists but it points to the path of a deleted file.

So the problem may be when the server was restarted on last sunday (around 16:00 UTC): an image was deleted from the file cache, but not from the database (possibly because there was an SQL error: apparently the database was restored and about one hour of database updates was lost, so the database record for the image cache was restored). Can some one perform an SQL check for the image cache (at least this record)? Verdy p 11:46, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Note that there's a bug in MediaWiki: when the image description ends with "px", the whole description string is interpreted as the image size even if the size was already specified in a prior parameter ending with "px". Then, if the description string before "px" is not a number, the image size is considered invalid (even though there was a valid size specified in a previous image parameter). For example this code causes the image at full size (not a thumbnail) to be generated:

[[Image:Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg|300px|The image "Bratislava_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg" at 300px]]

An image size should be parsed only once (the first one with a valid number before "px")! Verdy p 12:03, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Um... the picture displays fine for me. Are you able to see it now?
No, it is still the same 404 error. You're probably looking at it through your browser's cache. The first link above still displays as alternate text, not as a 300px image! Same thing when accessing it with the full URL generated by Wiki and listed above (the URL containing /7/70/). The problem may be within some Squid proxy... Verdy p 18:05, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
No, I can see it very well, after purging my cache and trying with other browsers as well. The error comes from your side, verdy. le Korrigan bla 11:15, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
For the second problem, I opened a bug report: bugzilla:8335. thanks, pfctdayelise (说什么?) 12:36, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Note that for the bug fix, may be you should be careful of images included images with sizes ends in "pxpx" (this is generally caused by templates taking a image size in parameter, and adding the "px" suffix internally, even if the specified size in the actual parameter already ends with "px"). So a size like "30pxpx" should probably remain valid as if it was "30px", otherwise, the image will show at its default size (if this is a national flag or a quality image, this will be too large for most pages containing it, unless the page is corrected)... Verdy p 19:00, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Template:Bild-by

Shouldn't that be in English or at least have an English translation? --Cat out 12:18, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

(Rough translation) "The author of the representation permits the use and further spread of the picture further with or without change on the condition of the appropriate denomination of its authority (e.g. in the caption)." It seems to be redundant to Template:Attribution/de. --tomf688 (talk - email) 02:03, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Just a question...

I have found a lot of stupid pages made by not-logged-in users today (20 December 2006) looking at Special:Newpages [25]. So I got a question: is it technically possible to find out pages (in definited namespaces) that have been made by not-logged-in users ? I guess we can find a lot of that mess... -- odder 14:42, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

I think this idea is worth to be filed in bugzilla:, if it was not already filed. --EugeneZelenko 15:49, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Just thoughts... I think this feature could be implemented in Special:Newpages by adding show/hide filters as in Special:Recentchanges (bots, registered, anonymous, own, patrolled). --EugeneZelenko 16:24, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Actually bugzilla:1401. --EugeneZelenko 16:28, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
When looking at what you have deleted blindly, there are discussions that should not have been deleted, as they were not spam,not stupid, but taliking about the image or looking for information related to the image... Be careful when using logs, and look at the "Talk" prefix in the pagename! Verdy p 18:02, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, they were, you're right. But commons it's not Wikipedia and there's no need to give the readers such information. They'll better look for them e.g. in the English/other Wikipedia/Wikimedia project. -- odder 08:29, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. The talk page of an image is the correct place to ask about the image. If somebody asks about the subject of the image there, then reply directing them to where the information may be found, don't just delete it. Thryduulf 12:23, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
It doesn't list "all pages" either. Just by namespace. It would be good to be able to see all pages created rather than just per namespace. Cary "Bastiqe" Bass demandez 18:03, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Are you talking about Special:contributions/newbies ? guillom 18:11, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

December 21

A file from Wikipedia

I want to upload a file that's already been uploaded at Wikipedia by the creator, who removed all restrictions (the name of the file was "Image:Aponogeton crispus.jpg" at the English Wikipedia). Should I use the GNU license, attribution license, or something else? (Sorry if this question's been asked quite often before.) Galanskov 09:58, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

You should use the template {{PD-user-w|en|English Wikipedia|type username here}} and all the informations are in the template. You must use the same license as the user. -- Rüdiger Wölk 11:02, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Strange templates

I found some strange templates and categories for interwiki linking to English WP from Commons. There is an explanation of them at User talk:Fabartus#NPOV templates. But they still looks very strange to me, probably because I have not read all the Commons policies and because my English is not so good. Can someone explain in simpler English and link to the relevant Commons policies? /82.212.68.183 14:59, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

There are no relevant policies, consider it experimental at best. Using regular interwiki links is fine. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 13:24, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Recreating image in vector

Hello. As of late I have been redoing jpg/gif/png as svgs, first on en.wikipedia but more recently on commons. I have been asking the original authors which license I should use but I am not sure if I need to do this. I want to publish under public domain but all the people I have asked so far have asked to keep their gnu/etc. For example, yesterday I made Image:Wikimedia_server.jpg --> Image:Wikimedia_Servers.svg. I did not simply do shift+alt+b in inkscape and trace... I found all the images myself from commons and put them together. Well this is a bad example, as the wikimedia logo isn't in the PD. How about Image:Map_of_Sealand_with_territorial_waters.png and Image:Map_of_Sealand_with_territorial_waters.svg ? I used Image:Map_of_Sealand_with_territorial_waters.sxd as a template (only the text/scale /circle/etc were in vector) but ended up only keeping the scale and I redid it all myself. Then I did use inkscape trace tool to trace the mainland/uk map, but I redrew the towns and roads and whatnot by hand. Thanks. --Indolences 16:05, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, on the Image:Wikimedia Servers.svg image: Can someone inform me as to what is missing? I know the Paris servers are missing, but I don't know what kind of servers/etc are in Paris. I simply based my svg off of the other guy's png. --Indolences 16:10, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't know the answer for certain, but where I've created a vector based on an existing raster image I've kept the same licence(s) as the original. For example Image:Ffestiniog Railway map (en).svg is based on Image:FfestiniogRailwayMap.png, and so I've used the same GFDL license even though this is not a license I typically use for my own work (I'd most likely have put it under cc-by). Thryduulf 17:34, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
If you are publishing a work based on a copyrightable, copyleft-licensed work (and I would say that it looks like you are), then you have to adhere to the licence of the original work, including preserving the licence, because nothing else grants you the right to use the original work to create derivative works. It appears unlikely that you would create such a similar image without actually relying on the original. LX (talk, contribs) 19:38, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Images from Star Wars and other fiction works like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter

Can these images be used under a free license? I have been told that many of them are "unauthorized derivative work", but i'd like to know more about this matter. Canderous 18:55, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Please see the discussion from 12 December. LX (talk, contribs) 19:23, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Flickr... once and for all

Hi, I've created a summary and set of guidelines on Flickr imagery here. Discussion on what to do with the possibly unfree images would be appreciated on the talk page there. Let's try and sort this out :)--Nilfanion 22:42, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

December 22

Deviant Art

I noticed while uploading files to DeviantArt [26] that they ask you which license you wish to use, which includes Creative Commons. I however do see nothing on the image pages regarding licenses. Does anybody know more about this? -- Bryan (talk to me) 19:30, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

December 23

Name of picture containing an Ampersand

Since some time names of pictures containing an Ampersand are not shown. Only if you click 2 times on the area you are linked to the page of the picture and there you can see the picture.

Image:Inverness_Ness&Castle_15751.JPG

Image:Oaktree&mirrorimage.png

What has happened? Who can help?-- Josi 15:11, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

The thumbs seem not be generated:
The requested page title was invalid, empty, or an incorrectly linked inter-language or inter-wiki title. It may contain one more characters which cannot be used in titles.
-- Bryan (talk to me) 15:27, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Bryan, but the pages existed even for a longer time and all ran well. I think the reason is a change in the wiki-software. There must be a different set of characters, which are accepted now. Or the treatment of some special characters have changed.(?)-- Josi 19:16, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

It looks like the thumbnails with the minus - signs are not building either. I think either the bug should be fixed ASAP or we have to move all the images to the names without that characters (a bad job even for a bot) Alex Bakharev 07:11, 23 January 2007 (UTC)


Please just repeatedly purge the image page until the thumbnail reappears. Don't do anything silly like mass-moving images. :( If the system works, and it stops, we will figure out how to get it working again, sometimes that means bugging the developers, but not in this case. --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 10:12, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Commons:Copyright rules

Hi,

We need more clearer and detailed copyright rules. Please to complete this page. Thanks, Yann 15:33, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

December 24

Amusing size change confusion

Checked my watchlist, saw this:

(diff) (hist) . . Crowea‎; 00:20 . . (+122) . . Melburnian (Talk | contribs | block) (+ images)

and thought, "OMG, somebody added 122 images to a gallery!!" But no, that was the number of bytes added, just two images involved... :-) Stan Shebs 15:32, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

December 27

How do I transfer image into Commons that has already been uploaded to Wikipedia?

Hell, all:

I uploaded AirPollutionSource.jpg into the English Wikipedia about 2 days ago. What is the easiest way for me to get it into Wikimedia Commons as well? Step-by-step please! Thanks in advance, - Mbeychok 02:07, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

You'll just have to reupload it here and put a deletion template on there, there's no process to transfer images between projects directly. +Hexagon1 (t) 05:35, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Please use a tool like CommonsHelper to preserve information that was present at the original page, like uploader, upload timestamp, and more. Siebrand 09:01, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
For full detailed information, see en:Wikipedia:Moving images to the Commons. Zzyzx11 18:42, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Superseded on Reason: {{{2}}}

Hello there, please, could you revel what is Reason: {{{2}}} What it means and how it occurs. Found here : Bruegel, Pieter de Oude - De val van icarus - hi res.jpg as superseded. And enjoy the turkey :-) -- Perky 14:41, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Not for worrying, it has been deleted. Simply, it was a parameter of the template left out. It should say {{image|reason}} and it only said {{image}}.
In the code of the template, parameters are written in triple brackets. For more information, see meta:Template, 'coz I'm screwing up myself and don't want to explain everything about parameters. :)
And the turkey was very tasty. :)

Nethac DIU, always would speak here
21:05, 27 December 2006 (UTC)


What is this?

I wanna know what's the use of the Creator namespace...

Nethac DIU, always would speak here
20:57, 27 December 2006 (UTC)


It is much the same as the template namespace, but specifically for authorship information. See, for example, Creator:Yousuf Karsh for how it might be useful. Jkelly 18:25, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Oh, thanks.

Nethac DIU, always would speak here
12:25, 29 December 2006 (UTC)


December 28

Licensing tag question

I wish to upload some digitally scanned images and articles from microfilm of old newspapers which are published in 1923 and 1924. What is the proper licensing tag for these? Since they are not published before January 1, 1923, they are not public domain in the US. Thank you! Miracleimpulse 22:52, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Folks from the Online Books Page have reported that "No daily newspaper outside New York renewed [copyrights on] issues prior to the end of World War II", so the papers you're interested in may very well be public domain. The PD-US tag includes this possibility (vaguely worded). You'd want to do some more research to confirm it in your case (there are various caveats, such as the work possibly having been copyrighted outside the US), and include as much supporting information as possible with the images. You can find more details, and scans of the Copyright Office's renewal records, at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/. --Davepape 03:55, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Caspano

I am Carol Caspano. I am trying to get in touch with other Caspano's in Italy since I will be visiting there in May 2007. Please help me, if you can. my email is: cj.scussel@spa02.usace.army.mil

700,000 US$ bug (wiki funraising 2006 12 28)

Screenshot as of 11:55, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello, is it my computer... As visible on the screen shoot on the right, I see 700.000 US$ on the wiki fundraising. 1 hour before it was just 500.000 US$.

Yersterday I already had the same screen bug. My computer jumped from 300.000 to 500.000 and then down to 310.000 one hour later.

And you, what do you see ? - lyhana8 (Talk) 11:55, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I see the Ugly Richard Bronson from Virgin, and it gives me nausea. -- Perky 13:02, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm pragmatic : if we get more help, that good. 82.244.80.175 15:55, 28 December 2006 (UTC) (just doing maths)

Here it's currently 710.886 USD. Don't know if that will shrink again.  :) --Enricopedia 16:47, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

From what is said on http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/ it jumps when they add the matched donations. The going down is strange. Maybe an error or cache issue. Platonides 19:27, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Q: Why did the meter jump up over $200,000?
A: We added the anonymous matching donation.

kmz-files

I would like to upload a kmz file with a 3d model of an historic building for Google Earth (created with Google ScetchUp), that could be downloaded via the article about the building. Is that possible in any way? --N3MO 13:46, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Is the kmz file format a free one or propietary? Platonides 19:28, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
It is free, I think. The program is freeware, so it should be. --N3MO 19:36, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Free as in speech, not as in beer. Is the source code of the program available, or the kmz format documented? -- Bryan (talk to me) 20:10, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Google Earth is definitely not free. -- Drini 06:21, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

But I dont mean the sattelite-pictures from Google Earth. I know, they are not free. But the link to a place with a builing made with free software by myself must be free, or not? I dont know anything about the status of the program code. Why is that important? --N3MO 10:01, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, Google Earth is "free" as it is freely downloadable, but not "free" in the Wikipédia-Commons sense as it is under a proprietary license. For the KMZ files, they are only XML-markup files, so I don't know their status... le Korrigan bla 10:58, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

List of images to be reviewed

I created a small list of images whose copyright status needs to be verified, since derivative work is apparently not allowed.

Also check GLogan's images, listed in -> Star Wars

Canderous 14:22, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Yousuf Karsh on the Commons

Hello.

Yousuf Karsh on the Commons? Are you sure the uploaded work is Public domain worldwide?

Category:Yousuf Karsh. I love Karsh, if it's PD I'm gona make some nice t-shirts :-) --OsvaldoGago 21:56, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

The pictures are Public Domain in Canada. In other countries they might not be PD, like in Germany, where the creator has to be dead for at least 70 years. I don't know about your countries laws. Greetings! --Enricopedia 22:29, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Right. Karsh's pre-1949 images are PD in Canada. Unfortunately, they're copyrighted just about anywhere else, including the U.S. (Those published before 1955 might be PD in Australia, too.) The images should be removed from the commons. Lupo 07:03, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
We have a lot of {{PD-Canada}} media. Think we should get rid of all of it? Jkelly 07:44, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
If we still follow the rule that an image must be PD in the source country and in the U.S.: yes. (But check them individually!) Concerning Karsh, there's the additional complexity that he maintained for years two offices, one in Ottawa and one in New York City. Many of his works were published in his books, and many of these books were simultaneously published in the UK and in Canada or in the U.S. and in Canada or the UK. Furthermore, Karsh was rather diligent about registering his copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office, and also renewed his copyrights. We already removed his photo of Albert Einstein. Lupo 08:51, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
I should qualify that "yes" above: only those that are PD in Canada only, but still copyrighted in most other countries (and especially in the U.S.) should go. The rest could stay, of course. Lupo 08:59, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
This would effect {{PD-Australia}} media too. With the Karsh photography being published originally / simultaneously in the United States (or, at least, we should probably assume it was), I understand why we are on shakey ground. I don't think that this particular issue is a problem with most of the material there; it is mostly media from the countries' government archives. Jkelly 18:41, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

December 29

Category deletion request

Pls remove this category - Category:Taxis in Hong Kong, all the pics have been moved to Category:Taxis_of_Hong_Kong. thx.Stewart~惡龍 09:06, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

These categories are the same. Mediawiki automatically replaces a space bij an underscore. -- Bryan (talk to me) 10:03, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Bryan, the difference lies in the "in" vs. the "of"... Lupo 10:17, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Taxis, like buses or trams, are in <location>, because there are located in a place (Hong Kong in that case). Here, we don't care about vehicles built by Hong Kong companies. So, please (Steward) , apply our conventions (see category:Taxis by country) and save our time. --Juiced lemon 10:23, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Oops, didn't notice the in/of that. -- Bryan (talk to me) 11:20, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Licensing question

Hello everybody, I'm a bit puzzled. I can't find the NC (non commercial) on the CC list provided by Wikimedia Commons. Is it possible to find a non commercial license here ? Kindly Yours. -- Perky 15:13, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Noncommerial images are not allowed here. Please see Commons:Licensing. Regards, -- Bryan (talk to me) 15:23, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Atlas

In the last weeks a Wiki/Atlas has been established. It can be found at Atlas. You are welcome to assist and add maps. A project page can be found at Update the atlas. Electionworld 18:48, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

How to become an administrator?

I am an administrator at the English wikipedia. I transferred a lot of my work to the commons and would be pleased to become an administrator here? What is the procedure?the preceding unsigned comment is by Electionworld (talk • contribs)

See Commons:Administrators. le Korrigan bla 19:28, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
en:User:Electionworld does not appear to have admin rights on en. Jkelly 20:06, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
en:User:Electionworld appears on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers/sysop. Where should I be looking to check? William Avery 20:50, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
My mistake. en:Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Electionworld does not exist. Bad assumption on my part. Jkelly 20:58, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
This user seems to have got rights out of process [27]. I'm going to ask about this at WP:AN...--Nilfanion 13:11, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, this was a user rename. The RfA is w:Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Wilfried Derksen. Is there any reason why the paper trail should be hard to follow in this case?--Nilfanion 13:15, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
I think several Wikipedia admins chose to take a pseudonymous user name after a few cases of people being harassed in real life. —Angr 21:55, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

New categories

I defined two new categories, category:filters and category:fibers. Now I remembered that some people prefer the word fibres. Hopefully there is no word filtres as well...

Question: Has fibers to be renamed to fibres? Or is it possible to have two names for the same category? Akroti 20:25, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know we don't have any preference of British over American English or vice versa. -- Bryan (talk to me) 22:07, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Correct. Generally whoever "gets there first" can choose which they prefer - so you should check if the alternative exists before creating such a category. RDRs should be created in all cases (eg Category:colors category:colours - I sincerely hope one of them is a RDR). they don't work properly, but at least they are a hint. Subcategories should respect the convention of the parent category (eg it would be bad to have Category:Colors and then something like a subcategory Category:Dark colours). --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 04:01, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Image thumbnails won't refresh

I'm having a problem refreshing the 120px and 200px thumbnails for Image:The Rainbow Bar & Grill.jpg. Someone on en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) pointed out that I could force the thumbnail to regen by adding extra characters to the end of the upload.wikimedia.org path, which allowed me to see the thumbnails, but it didn't affect images fetched with the original path (even with a forced refresh in the browser). I also tried purging my gallery, which had no effect either. Any ideas? Mike Dillon 20:49, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

I have purged the thumbnail. It does now show up when looking at the thumbnail itself, but still not on your gallery. :( -- Bryan (talk to me) 22:11, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. It didn't show up in my gallery initially, but it did after I bypassed my browser cache. Mike Dillon 22:05, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Architects' designs

We know that an architect's design is copyrighted. But let's say that I draw a w:floor plan or a section based on a visit that I have done to a building or on somebody else's study of that architect. Will that drawing (which indeed is not the design of that building: it's only a drawing of it) be a copyright violation? Now let's say that I also draw a floor plan or a section from an old building (one which design is not copyrighted: an gothic cathedral, for example) based on an study published by some scholar. Would it be a derivative work?--Gaf.arq 21:58, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Oh my goodness, you ask tough questions. :) If no one answers, it is usually because no one is too sure. Lawyers might not even be sure about such details. What do you mean by drawing a floor plan "based on" a study, what is a 'study' in this instance? pfctdayelise (说什么?) 03:57, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. You'd find it hard to get a lawyer to give a clear-cut answer on that one. My layman's err-on-the-side-of-caution principle would be to assume that your drawing is a derivative work if you would not have arrived at the particular drawing were it not for the original design or study being what it was.
In reality, you would probably get away with the former. According to Swedish copyright law (which happens to be what I'm most familiar with), "buildings may be depicted freely". Depending on the level of detail of your drawing, it might be covered under this provision, but this kind of detail tends to vary enormously from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
In the latter case, I'd be more sceptical. If you are relying on elements of the scholarly study which in their own right constitute a copyrightable work of the scholar and are not trivially derived simply from looking at the building, your work is most likely a derivative work of the study.
LX (talk, contribs) 09:41, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

I have two sets of architectural drawings made by myself of different buildings (and I'd like to turn them free to Commons): one of them depicts a house designed by a brazillian architect who died in the 60s (and therefore is not in Public Domain). I made this set by visiting the place and comparing it to the project (which was already published and well known). That's why I'm questioning... Would it be a derivative work? A derivative work of the house's design, the published drawings of both? Remembering that archictectural drafting is covered by normative procedures on drawing (which turns drawings much similar, yet different). The other set is composed by similar drafting of an XVIIth Century house (and so it's obviously on the public domain). Yet again, I made the drawings based on a study by a professor of a local university and comparing them to my visit of the place.--Gaf.arq 15:44, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Nobody else?--Gaf.arq 21:09, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

December 30

License

Hello, I'am very disappointed by the public domain license of Image:Donaldduck-thespiritof43.jpg. It's very strange because Disney is'nt a company that "forgot" to renew their copyright and the Copyright Term Extension Act (promote by Disney). --Gdgourou 11:25, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Can we confirm this? Is there any public archive of (un)renewed copyright in the US? -- Bryan (talk to me) 11:33, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
The US Copyright Office maintains the archive of copyright registrations and renewals. There is an online version for books here, but I don't think it includes movies and other items. The IMDB trivia page for this short mentions it is in the public domain, so there is at least a chance the tag is correct. The WWII propaganda films were not direct moneymakers (more likely to be forgotten), so it's entirely possible that Disney slipped up and forgot to renew copyright. Carl Lindberg 07:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Category:Flat River, Michigan, taken by Lar

This Commons picture WhitesBridge FlatRiver SouthEnd DSCN9928.JPG is currently displayed on the en:Main page of the English Wikipedia.

This picture, and some other related ones are categorized in Category:Flat River, Michigan, taken by Lar. This category is categorized in Category:Media with locations | Category:Taken by Lar | Category:Flat River, Michigan.

In my opinion, that doesn't respect the scheme in Commons:Categories, which plans clearly separated structures with root categories Category:Topics and Category:User.

So, we should add to each media file a category which only belongs to the topics structure. In this case, the extra category would be Category:Fallasburg Bridge or Category:Flat River (Michigan). Do you agree with me?

nota bene: there are some other similar categories in Category:Taken by Lar. --Juiced lemon 11:35, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed: every file should belong to at least one category which is exclusively within the topics structure. I would further argue that user gallery categories should not be placed in the topics structure. LX (talk, contribs) 12:35, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, the result of placement in that category (which is an intersection of Lar and Flat River (michigan) puts the picture effectively in both categories. I had been using this structure lately and in fact was going to convert earlier pics of mine to it.(with different topic categories at the leaf) But if it's not correct, I'm very open to changing it. I had it that way because we don't yet have intersecting categories but am certainly not wedded to it! ++Lar: t/c 12:58, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Btw, next time anybody wants to discuss a category on VP, it is always nice to notice the main contributers about that, so that they can participate in the discussion. -- Bryan (talk to me) 15:37, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

This is sorted, I think, as are all the other cats that were set up this way by me. Please LMK if you spot any mistakes, thanks! ++Lar: t/c 03:44, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikispecies-logo.png

Hi everyone,

Image:Wikispecies-logo.png is superseded by another beautiful Image:Wikispecies-logo.svg, but... only administrators can add a supersededSVG template. See the page discussion. A lot of pages are already changed with the SVG file but there is still pages waiting... Thx and have a good year ! --Patricia.fidi 14:26, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Done. --EugeneZelenko 16:15, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
BTW... Should we add Image:Wikispecies-logo.svg to Category:Wikimedia official logos? Could somebody who well knows current state of affairs with Wikimedia logos update this category, please? --EugeneZelenko 16:27, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't think there is anyone in the whole of Wikimedia who meets this requirement (knows current state of affairs with Wikimedia logos) :) I would just add it. --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 03:55, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Doubt on copyright

I have just uploaded [[Image:Haggadah_cover_1945.jpg]]. This is a scan I made of the cover of a Haggadah found in family archives - since I could not find any reference to the Jewish Welfare Board to ask permission, and the book itself (or at least its content) is of course PD, I have taken the liberty to show a GFDL licence. But I am not sure of that - nor I am of the formal liceity of the use of the image, although it seems legal if one thinks to basics. Could you confirm please on my it.wiki discussion page? Thanks--Ub 19:21, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Please disregard. I have found a reference to the Jewish Welfare Board, and I have applied for authorization (if necessary). For the time being I do not put any tag on the image for deletion, since I really believe the image may be considered as PD. I will revise if necessary.--Ub 20:11, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
I received the following answer : The Jewish Welfare Board - Jewish Chaplains Counsel of The JCCA does indeed still hold the copyrights to the Haggadah in question and will not grant a GFDL for its use. However we will allow a one time use that indicates it is copyright material printed by permission and fully credits. Difficult to understand. It seems a fair use or something. Well, can anybody tell me if I can use the image? Thanks.--Ub 21:38, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
There are a couple of problems here. One is the statement that the text is in the public domain. If this was published in 1945, what would lead you to think that would be the case? The second is that if the text is in fact in the public domain, your scan of it does not grant you copyright protection over that scan, and you cannot license it under the GFDL. If you want to use this image at en:, you should upload it there with en:Template:Bookcover and note the additional permission. Jkelly 21:56, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Oooops. The problem is different : in simple words : does the phrase The Jewish Welfare Board - Jewish Chaplains Counsel of The JCCA does indeed still hold the copyrights to the Haggadah in question and will not grant a GFDL for its use. However we will allow a one time use that indicates it is copyright material printed by permission and fully credits allow me to use the book cover in Wiki? and if yes, un which grounds (license)?--Ub 20:19, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
On those projects that allow fair use claims, upload the image locally and note the permission on the image description page. On en: the correct "license template" would be en:Template:Bookcover. Jkelly 19:53, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Users uploading essays

htere have been many users uploading essays during the past weeks (mostly spanish and portuguese users), I've deleted a few per copyright reasons (bad license, etc). But, what's the usual stance towards such uploads?. For instance, the last one I've catched is Image:Cuando lo animal ataca.pdf about the relationship of faith and religions. IS there any precedent on such files? should they be allowed (is commons a webhost?) should they be deleted? I just want more feedback for I've deleted a dozen of them in the past month and I don't want to screw things up. Also, what about books? (some users uploaded books as well as essays) -- Drini 06:20, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Commons is not a webhost and random documents should be deleted and discouraged. Usually you can tell by reading the documents if they are relevant (they might be to Wikibooks, Wikiversity or Wikisource, for example), but if they are cruft, delete them with an eye to commons:Project scope. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 06:39, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


December 31

Digital Negatives

I would like to upload Digital Negative to Commons.

There is a standatized approach by Adobe. Called DNG format. see [28] Which would provide a conviniet way to do what I want, and use a well established file format. So I would like to you the WikimediaCommons to accept files in the DNG format. Cheers Dirk [29]

Yes, it was previously mentioned here: Commons_talk:File_types#DNG. Apparently ImageMagick can also create thumbnails from DNG, which is nice. We don't currently allow any "RAW" image format. There was a discussion on wikitech-l recently about allowing TIFF files [30]. It ended up being a discussion about how efficient TIFF, DJVU and PNG were at compression. So I guess maybe a question is, if we should ask to whitelist a RAW image format, should it be TIFF or DNG? (DJVU is already enabled.) --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 09:28, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Note DNG gets a bad rap [31] for not being totally open and documented, so maybe it's not the best one for us. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 09:33, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I agree that, there is currently a lot of discussion about DNG. Maybe it really does not fit out purposes. Currently I would favour the white list of RAW formats you proposed. I like to point out some technical issues on RAW imaging. A RAW image contains data that has been measured by the electronics of the camera. I can only be realetead to a real world image that was observed by the camera, if you know (at least to some extend) how the electronis (and optics) of this specific camera work. But the design of these parts is obviously interlectual porperty of the camera manufacturer. Where the picture and thus the image obviously belongs to the person who owns the camera and took the picture. So the legal situation looks very wired to me. Especially as I got no idea about law. Appart from my legal doubts about RAW formats, there is the problem of displaing RAW images. Nearly all computer screens / graphics adapters use 3 colors with a depth of 8 bit per color at each pixel. Typical digital cameras use 12 bits per color, but use only one color at each pixel, (and not necessarily 3 colors). This causes a lot of free paramters (or even methods) that can be adjusted when a raw image is to be displayed on a screen. Still it is clear only RAW images contain the full information captured by the camera, and thus should be used in favour of any other format.
Suggestion: I would like to upload a JPEG compressed file to the commons. And a tag linking to the (compressed) RAW file that is hosted as a plain file on the commons. So a simple user can just quickly use the JPEG file. The advanced user can still access the RAW file and use it in the way s/he desires. The advanced user will of course have to install special software to uncompress my file as well a well as to import the file into his/her graphics software, which will be time consuming, but that would currently be the most promising approach to me.
FileSize I am using a 5MPix Minolta Dimage 7i. Computer Software is Debian open source. Starting with the original MRW file (9.5 MByte).
  • Lossless compression with 7Zip -> 5.3MByte RAW (compressed final size)
  • dcraw convertion -> 16 bit ppm file (29 MByte) -> cinepaint conversion to 8 Bit per color RGB JPEG (highest quality)-> 3.5 MByte JPEG (final size)
Conclusion This approach would work. The total space used is 2.5 times the space used by the plain jpeg file. The software does not need to be changed since the RAW image does not need to be changed since the RAW image will not be displayed. The Bandwith usage will go up a factor 1.5 since users who download the RAW image will not download the high resulution JPEG image. Ok I agree that I only used one file which makes my study a bit small scale. But I am quite sure to have given a proper estimate of the order of magnitude
Cheers Dirk [32]
My raw files are 11-21 MB and don't 7zip. So your size arguments don't apply to all folks. Not all camera raw files are sufficiently free (more recent Nikon files, for example)... Figuring out which is which will be annoying and time consuming. I'm not sure that I see compelling reasons to encourage the upload of such files at this time. --Gmaxwell 20:52, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
I see, the size argument has analyzed further. You are also right that not all camera formats are sufficiently free (none can be totally free since the camera design, which is essential to interpret the RAW data belongs to the manufacturer). It is always annoying and time consuming to convert RAW data to any usable format (no matter how well documented and open source the data acquistion device was). Any observing scientific astronomer will tell you :-). Still if you do not allow for upload of RAW data, you loose data. Or even worse people might convert their RAW data to a 16 BIT RAW PNG File and write human readable meta data explaining how it is to be interpretet, such a file would look like noisy greyscale image in any viewer or editor, and anybody who would like to view it properly would have to interpret the human readable meta data, and very likely have to write C code. Ok I see it is not likely that non geeks might actually act like that. So the main problem is actually loss of data. I am sorry that I can not give any solution to that problem. Dirk Hünniger 18:32, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

This CAPTCHA is screwed up again

I absolutely cannot add {{nsd}} or {{nld}} to Image:Thorp.jpg, which clearly lacks both because the CAPTCHA comes up and refuses to accept correct answers to mathematical problems. 68.39.174.238 18:57, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

I cannot investigate the CAPTCHA situation, but I did mark the image as you requested. Thanks. Let's hope someone can troubleshoot the technical problems. —UED77 19:07, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Upload-Button

What about the upload button at the side bar? Since a couple of hours there is no possibility to load up any pictures and other files into the commons. Is there a discussion for the correct appearance of the commons side bar? --Markus Schweiss 21:16, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[33] I've not noticed any changes of the sidebar.--Borheinsieg 21:19, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, really strange. Some find this change; some not. In #de.wikipedia I've asked the members there and least one of them gave an acknowledgement of these circumstances. --Markus Schweiss 21:29, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

I have also noticed absence of this part of the sidebar during last hours. Still logged in, using IE 6.0. At this moment I can upload images only through link in history of the browser. --Miaow Miaow 21:44, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Upload seems to be back. Now I'm just curious about the cause... --Miaow Miaow 21:57, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

My sidebar was different (shorter) as well; I tried browser-reloading the page, it wouldn't change, so I purged Main Page to refresh the squids and now it seems to be working. —UED77 22:39, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

A tentative/experimental stab at an "image quality project"

I brought this up a few months ago, and have been thinking about it ever since: I'd like to have some system set up on commons to "weed out" low-quality images that have high-quality replacements. While I understand completely that there are a lot of good reasons why this would be problematic (mainly POV issues: "who's to say one is better than the other?"), I do think that this could be done in a constructive way, and I think it could be done experimentally in my field of interest (images of living things) without stepping on too many toes.

I invite you to have a look at Phytolacca americana. The majority of the images on that page have serious problems. Then have a look at Phytolacca americana (for example), which annotates the images according to quality. Please note that the second heading (Images needing replacement) is for images that can be "used for now" (but hopefully we'll have something better soon) and the third heading (Images needed) is for encouraging people to create or find new images. I'm generally not a deletionist, I just want to encourage people to add more good stuff to replace the not-as-good stuff (all of which was contributed in good faith... something is better than nothing).

My concern arises from my own exeriences while "surfing" at commons for good images that I can use on other wikimedia projects. I end up wasting a bit of time here and there looking for good images, because when I "blow them up" I find serious problems with the image quality that wasn't apparent in the gallery thumbnail. It seems to me that commons should make it easy for contributors from other projects to "get in and out" quickly, in order to find what they need and put it to use. Our users shouldn't have to sort through blurry/overexposed/etc. images to find what they need. If we have good images, we should highlight them. If we have images that are unuseable, we should get rid of them.

So I propose an experimental program within the "Tree of Life" domain to do a bit of cleanup. This would involve setting up some standards for gallery pages that collect the "high quality" images at the top of the page, showing all the aspects of the organism needed to describe it in a wikipedia article. Aside from rearranging the galleries, the "replaceable" images should have some sort of template, and another template to ask the contributor if they agree with the replacement. If the author agrees, we'll ask them to put a delete tag on it. If they can't be reached, perhaps we could delete 1 year after author notification (we've developed some "countdown" templates on wikibooks that could be used for that purpose).

The template for deletion by contributor preference could be put into a separate category to be monitored only by administrators interested in this particular brand of cleanup. I am an administrator now, and I'll take on the onus... this will not be "yet another backlog" (if it's too much, I'll encourage other TOL people to become administrators). Doing this within the ToL "sphere of influence" would keep this strictly limited, and would serve as a good way to "work out the kinks" of weeding out low quality images, which I suspect other parts of commons will need to adopt in the coming years. --SB_Johnny|talk|books 23:05, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Quality is something that we haven't really addressed much as a community, and there are a number of ways we could go about it. (BTW are you familiar with the Quality Images project?) While I doubt anyone has a problem with highlighting excellent work, deleting "bad" work is more contentious (if there is a way to separate/highlight the better work, is letting the "bad" work sit dormant such a bad thing?).
I think setting up another deletion mechanism is a bit overkill at the moment. Certainly creating and publicising quality standards and expectations is no bad thing.
It seems to me that commons should make it easy for contributors from other projects to "get in and out" quickly, in order to find what they need and put it to use. Our users shouldn't have to sort through blurry/overexposed/etc. images to find what they need. If we have good images, we should highlight them. If we have images that are unuseable, we should get rid of them. I see a couple of problems here. One is that we can't read the user's mind. They might be looking for an image for a Wikipedia article, or they might have followed a link to look at more images, or any number of other goals they might have. Also, any picture that is truly "unusable" can be nominated for deletion on that ground. But many poor quality images can nonehtless be used to some extent. A variety of photos from a variety of photographers can be useful, especially for plants I imagine - different specimens. Even though one might be a FP and the other, a blurry camera-pic... they can still serve a purpose for someone. If we assume too much about our users' desires we also do them a disservice.
--pfctdayelise (说什么?) 16:12, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Licensing is another reason to not delete things; someone might rather use a public domain image that is not quite as good as one licensed with the GNU FDL. In general, I think that gallery pages should be the best images of x, and that categories should have every single image of x. The trick is figuring out how to decide that. --Benn Newman 18:17, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

So what about organizing the galleries as in Phytolacca americana (for example)? It's fairly objective (blurriness, depth of field issues, etc. are all pretty easy). I'd be perfectly happy to just go that step and no further, because I agree that sometimes the lower-quality pix can still be useful (even on that page they're ok when viewed as small thumbs). For botanical pages in particular, it would be nice to have a "prospectus" which offers the best images for each aspect of the plant, then the second/third/etc. best below which can be browsed through if the prospectus images aren't fitting the need.
I guess the thing it that I get frustrated when I have to go through so many and find only one (or none) that is suitable for a larger format (when there's none, I just add another photo of course). It would be nice if it were permitted and/or encouraged to reorganize the galleries in this way.
The category thing gets tricky... for some reason they get removed and put back in on a regular basis, so after time I started avoiding them (as long as they're in a gallery, they're at least able to be found). --SB_Johnny|talk|books 18:42, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, TOL tends to like to use galleries to display all images on a topic, rather than a selection. Also, organising the gallery by quality is a different method to their current method of organising by what is shown, eg. diagrams first, then maybe leaves, berries, stems, then the whole plant, something like that.
I would start a discussion with TOL about the best way to highlight high quality images, and see what they come up with. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 01:12, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I have (both here and on en.Wikipedia), and it's recieved support in both places. --SB_Johnny|talk|books 14:11, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I think basing deletion of images on subjective opinions dimishes the value of Commons. When considering this look at FP as the quality of current equipment improves older FP are delisted as they dont compare with the newer quality requirements. Deleting images from Commons purely because of subjective quality will only see Commons being a collection of images that are less than 3 years old. Such an action would be slap in the face to contributors who have freely given their images to Commons. Museums, Art galleries etc value items as they age they dont throw them away, Commons collection obviously becomes more value with the increase in quantity and quality, but by keeping older lower quality images Commons as a historical record of images will out grow anything quality and quantity can offer. Gnangarra 11:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
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