Commons:Village pump
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November 25[edit]
Change file extension[edit]
I want to turn File:Noam_Chomsky_portrait_2017_retouched.png into a jpg, how can I do that while preserving its upload/revision history? Σ (talk) 01:33, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Σ: I believe the only way you can do this is to download, create a JPEG in a tool such as GIMP, and then upload the JPEG to a new file page as a derivative version (linking the two with {{Derivative works}} / {{Derived from}} and otherwise copying the content of the original page; you will almost certainly want to use Special:Upload for this purpose rather than, for example, Special:UploadWizard. The JPEG's file page won't have the history, but the PNG's file page will retain that, and it can be found by anyone who is interested. - 06:22, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
- Yes, these are different MIMEtypes, so an extra upload is necessary --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 18:09, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you, I've gone and uploaded File:Noam Chomsky portrait 2017 retouched.jpg. Is it possible to turn the PNG into a redirect or is there a script to run to replace the usages across wikis? Σ (talk) 06:29, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Σ Redirecting would require the intermediate png to be deleted - we don't normally do that. For replacing: CommonsDelinker might be able to do that. El Grafo (talk) 09:31, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Σ: I replaced all the usages that were left. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 13:58, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you, I've gone and uploaded File:Noam Chomsky portrait 2017 retouched.jpg. Is it possible to turn the PNG into a redirect or is there a script to run to replace the usages across wikis? Σ (talk) 06:29, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
500 terabytes (455 tebibytes) threshold exceeded[edit]
Hi!
Commons just exceeded the data amount of 500 terabytes. See: Special:MediaStatistics. 1 PB is expected to be reached in this decade. --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:49, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
- @PantheraLeo1359531 Thanks, added to The Commons Log. El Grafo (talk) 09:43, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
- Cool, thanks :D --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:23, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
November 26[edit]
We now have 2,544 uncategorized (parentless) categories, down from about 8,000 in the beginning of September. At this point, most of the "low-hanging fruit" is taken care of. User:Billinghurst and I have done the bulk of the cleanup, although a few others have also helped in various degrees. We could definintely use more help, most of which does not require an admin as such.
- Most of the remaining listings are legitimate categories, with content, but lacking parent categories. They need parent categories and they need incoming interwiki links from any relevant Wikidata item.
- A disproportionate number of these would best be handled by someone who knows Hungarian or Estonian.
- Some categories just need to be turned into cat redirects ({{Cat redirect}} and have their content moved accordingly.
- A few categories listed here will prove to be fine as they stand; the tool messed up and put them in the list because it didn't correctly understand that a template had correctly given them parent categories. Many of these are right near the front of the (alphabetical) list, and involve dates.
- Some categories probably either call for obvious renaming or should be nominated for COM:CFD discussions.
- Some empty categories (not a lot of those left, but new ones happen all the time) need to be deleted.
- At the end of the alphabetical listing (5th and 6th page) are about 75 categories that have names in non-Latin alphabets. It would be great if people who read the relevant writing systems could help with these. Probably most of these are candidates for renaming.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give. - Jmabel ! talk 03:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
- I'm a bit confused about something @Jmabel: I checked the page and some of the categories on there are for example Category:April 2016 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (through 2023), but these were created years ago in some instances and already had parent categories from the start. How do categories like that end up there? ReneeWrites (talk) 02:09, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- @ReneeWrites: Insufficient follow-through and patrolling, combined with out of control back end processes. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 02:48, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- @ReneeWrites: Actually, in this case this appears to be some sort of flaw in the software that creates the Special page. As I wrote a couple of days ago, "A few categories listed here will prove to be fine as they stand; the tool messed up and put them in the list because it didn't correctly understand that a template had correctly given them parent categories. Many of these are right near the front of the (alphabetical) list, and involve dates." It looks like today's run added a bunch of these false positives and that (unlike the previous bunch) they are more scattered through the list. I believe all of the 100+ files that use Template:Month by year in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté are on today's list; none of these were there three days earlier. That probably has something to do with User:Birdie's edits to yesterday to Template:Month by year in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté; those are complicated enough that I have no idea what in particular might have confused the software. The categories still look fine from a normal user point of view, but the software that creates Special:UncategorizedCategoriesn is somehow confused.
- Other than that: we're a couple of hundred fixed or deleted categories closer to where we'd want to be, compared to a couple of days ago. - Jmabel ! talk 04:23, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- Server-purges should fix this but apparently it doesn't. Some categories that didn't appear last time after purging the cache have disappeared now so I'm more confused as to what the problem could be since the iirc the refresh time was after some pages were updated (it has problems when pages get all their categories from a template). There should probably be a phrabricator issue about this, albeit it's possible things work fine once there are always just a small number of cats there which seems increasingly feasible. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:35, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Jeff G., could you explain what "... out of control back end processes" means, so I can understand your comment? --Ooligan (talk) 16:54, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Ooligan: As I understand it, there are processes that run on WMF servers that run too long or get caught up in race conditions or whatever, and that get terminated after running too long. I think updating this special page may be one such process, sometimes. Certainly, updating the read / not read status of stuff on my watchlist seems that way, especially when using this new reply tool. Turning off the big orange bar before displaying my user talk page would be helpful, too. <end rant> — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 19:26, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Jeff G., could you explain what "... out of control back end processes" means, so I can understand your comment? --Ooligan (talk) 16:54, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- Server-purges should fix this but apparently it doesn't. Some categories that didn't appear last time after purging the cache have disappeared now so I'm more confused as to what the problem could be since the iirc the refresh time was after some pages were updated (it has problems when pages get all their categories from a template). There should probably be a phrabricator issue about this, albeit it's possible things work fine once there are always just a small number of cats there which seems increasingly feasible. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:35, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- @ReneeWrites: Insufficient follow-through and patrolling, combined with out of control back end processes. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 02:48, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
Even with those 100 or so "Bourgogne-Franche-Comté" false positives, we are now down to 2079. Again, we could really use help from people who know languages with non-Latin scripts, all of which are grouped toward the end of the list. Also, Hungarian and Estonian, scattered throughout. - Jmabel ! talk 23:08, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
Role accounts[edit]
Have the unresolved policy issues raised by User:Bluerasberry in Commons:Role account ever been resolved? If so, what has been the resolution? - Jmabel ! talk 05:01, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
- I developed that policy in the mid 2010s. There is still ambiguity about how organizations can have role accounts. Here are some developments that come to my mind -
- The advent of Wikidata has probably recruited more organizational staff to contribute to Wikimedia projects on behalf of their organizations than any other effort. One example of a major successful outreach effort was d:Wikidata:WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot/Participants, which recruited a lot of university staff and librarians to contribute ot d:Wikidata:WikiCite. In all cases so far as I know, the account pattern has been personal accounts, to individuals, who never share them, and who are under no obligation to design the account to indicate their institutional connection, and whose activity is not anything which has ever triggered a conflict of interest concern. If anyone else from the same institution wanted to pick up a project, they would make their own account. No account sharing here, and no account interlinking.
- The state of United States GLAM partnerships is in existential crisis as the Met Museum in New York and the Smithsonian ceased renewal of their Wikimedian in Residence programs and consequently, much of their relationships with Wikimedia NYC and Wikimedia DC. While these relationships were not fundamentally critical, it was very helpful in outreach to be able to point to existing, ongoing, long-term, journalist-documented Wikimedia cultural partnerships with high-profile institutions. My own view of what these organizations would have wanted is communication metrics reports of the impact of their Wikimedia engagement, which they cannot get due to lack of software maintenance. I think these relationships could have been saved if there was continuous funding for 0.5 FTE software development for the GLAM space, but there is no Wikimedia community connection to any such development support.
- Rumor is that outcomes of meta:GLAM Wiki 2023/Program may include conversation notes about potential crisis of institutional partner outreach. I am unsure who might or will post notes. If anyone has anything to say, English Wikipedia's Signpost is a possible channel.
- Advancement of policy discussion is generally bleak in the Wikimedia Movement. At the last https://wikiconference.org/ in Toronto in November 2023, the organizers got a WMF grant, an additional grant from another sponsor called Credibility Coalition, and the conference was hosted in the city's public library. Despite all this support, there was no money available for video recording most talks, there was little money available for English/Spanish translation to include Spanish speakers in American/Canadian conversations, and the conference lacked money for the normal amount of conference catering. WMF is simply not adequately funding community conversation as a strategic priority through conferences or otherwise.
- These are big issues! I wish that we could set in-kind donation of institutional staff time as a strategic priority for Wikimedia outreach. I think the community wants this, but I am unaware of WMF efforts to recognize, measure, track, encourage, and sponsor this activity. Bluerasberry (talk) 13:14, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Bluerasberry,
- You wrote, "My own view of what these organizations would have wanted is communication metrics reports of the impact of their Wikimedia engagement, which they cannot get due to lack of software maintenance." (emphasis added)
- Could you link to an example of a "communication metrics report?"
- If these reports are not available, what "metrics" should they typically contain?
- Specifically, how can "the impact of their Wikimedia engagement" be differentiated from other the "impacts" of other (non-Wikimedia) engagements? --Ooligan (talk) 21:37, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Ooligan: meta:BaGLAMa is not maintained. Suppose that a museum uploads 10,000 images. They would want to know how many times those images are viewed for a given year.
- Compare this to for example, any twitter dashboard, which would report how many times people viewed all the tweets from an organization, or tweets containing images.
- Social media professionals routinely operate social media accounts and their deliverable product is "impact metrics", which is a report from that platform of how much audience engagement the posted media generated. Wikimedia is different because we do not convert people to do sales, and hardly have equivalents to "like" buttons or "share" buttons, but such as is our nature, we do have some metrics. Social media professionals provide metrics, and if the wiki platform cannot generate metrics, then we block the possibility of professional communication service development.
- I presume that we have nearly universal consensus that professional communication engagement in some form is highly desireable for Wikimedia Commons and all Wikimedia projects. If we had tools in place, then we could scale outreach of institutional partnerships, and get professional engagement from major institutions spontaneously without investing in outreach for every single institution, which is the current institutional engagement model. Bluerasberry (talk) 22:15, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- I know for me even as a non-institutional contributor that not knowing how many people, if any, have viewed my uploads can be discouraging. I've actually been thinking about mainly uploading images to Flickr where they provide basic metrics due to it. So metrics would really be net a positive to the project all around. I guess there is the "page views for this category" template. But it's less then optimal, seems to be broken a lot, and doesn't provide per file or per user statistics anyway. So it's not super helpful in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, I could see why institutions wouldn't want to contribute to Commons if there's no way for them to know even on a basic level what kind of engagement their contributions are having. So hopefully that's something can be remedied at some point. Otherwise there's no reason they wouldn't just upload files to somewhere like Flickr or a media website instead of Commons. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:14, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
- there're some tools that can show usage or calculate views. i integrated some in {{Category helper}}. for example, Category:Images from the Nationalmuseum Stockholm, two links let you use http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php and https://glamtools.toolforge.org/glamorgan.html .
- in addition, User:DPLA bot created pages like Category talk:Images from the Nationalmuseum Stockholm/Views. i guess the same can be done for any category if needed. RZuo (talk) 19:33, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
November 30[edit]
How to find images added since a given date in a category with multiple sub categories[edit]
Hello,
How could i dectect in a simple way images uploaded since a given date in a category containing many subcategories ? --Pline (talk) 07:22, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Pline: try Petscan with Page properties options "Last edit"->After and "Only pages created during the above time window": example. MKFI (talk) 07:58, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- I think WMC is missing ways to have pages display images, if toggled also of some/all subcats, sortable by things like upload date (or other things, maybe also 'number of Wikipedia inclusions'). Despite of the neglection of MediaWiki and WMC code development, I'm a bit surprised something like that has not yet been built in:
- in many categories there are tons of outdated images where sorting by upload date would be very useful (example).
- Let me know if there are plans or a phabricator code issue about this. Sorting by upload date and ways to have images of subcats displayed on a page sorted by proxies for 'most useful/quality/relevant' would be a common use-case and extremely useful (and I know about PetScan). Prototyperspective (talk) 11:11, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- i made a gadget Help:Gadget-DeepcatSearch that you can enable at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets.
- the gadget works if the categories that would be searched are less than 256 due to mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Deepcategory.
- currently it only has two links, but i've thought about making more links like filtering by filetype, sorting by upload date, etc. RZuo (talk) 19:08, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Subcategories Rail vehicle doors[edit]
I created a new Category:Rail vehicles sliding doors. There are other types of doors: Folding doors (Category:Rail vehicle folding doors), the 'swerve-swing door' (Category:Rail vehicles swerve-swing doors) and the 'sliding-plug door' (www.schaltbau-bode.com) The 'sliding-plug door' and 'swerve-swing door' are in in most cases imposible to visualy determine, because closed doors are flush with the outside vehicle surface and only the study of the door mechanisme can determine the difference. The difference is movement: one slides along until it is pulled in at the last moment (plug), while the other door swings and moves further outward. I propose to put both in the same category: Rail vehicles with sliding-plug doors or swerve-swing doors.
Another usefull subcategory could be: Rail vehicle doors with stairs. Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:30, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- It's not really the doors that have the stairs is it? --Adamant1 (talk) 12:49, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- No but the stairs are an integral part of the dooropening and passage, necessary to negociate the high differences. Sometimes there are folding steps that move simultaniously with the door.Smiley.toerist (talk) 13:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- A better name would be: Rail vehicle with doors and stairs combinations.Smiley.toerist (talk) 21:22, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- No but the stairs are an integral part of the dooropening and passage, necessary to negociate the high differences. Sometimes there are folding steps that move simultaniously with the door.Smiley.toerist (talk) 13:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- If there is 4 separate things to categorise then I'd prefer 4 separate Categories, But I'd only categorise files which display relevant content such as the opening/closing mechanism, rather then here's a distance view of a train in which you can barely see the doors let alone discern the type of doors. If you do not know the type of doors then just don't categorise it. Rather then just guess or use an imprecise and therefore ultimately pointless category. Oxyman (talk) 17:35, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Oxyman: +2. Although I'm at a lose as to how the categories should be named or organized. Like you say, it's hard to do in the first place when the are barely disernable to begin with. Let alone what type of opening mechanisms they have. Really, images should probably just go in a single category for rail vehicle doors. Instead of micromanaging images of them at such unverifiably minor level. --Adamant1 (talk) 13:22, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- There special type of folding doors, that are frequently in international and long distance coaches. d:Q1256461 What is the name in English? If I try to translate Drehfalttuer, I get Hinged folding door. Is this correct? Smiley.toerist (talk) 21:45, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- DeepL says yes :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:23, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Update[edit]
I created 4 type train doors categories:
- Category:Rail vehicles sliding doors
- Category:Rail vehicle folding doors
- Category:Rail vehicles swerve-swing doors
- Category:Rail vehicle sliding-plug doors
I have added the Czech Republic, Belgium and Russia to the country category trees. By the swerve-swing and sliding-plug I selected some good 'open door' examples. Of course, once it is determined that a particular type of of train has X type of doors, closed door viewed from outside can be selected. (Outside there is no visual difference). I would prefer that in this fase of classifying, no subdivision by country is applied. The next train door type to classify is the classic slam door, hinged door, but I first wil take a holiday break.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:16, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Transcribe[edit]
At File:"The Glandon family around the fireplace in their home at Bridges Chapel near Loydston(sic), Tennessee. Glandon's... - NARA - 532689.tif there is a transcribe button, to add a transcription. It seems to be added to NARA tif images. How do I get rid of it? Since it is a photo, it only needs a caption, which it already has. It appears to be designed for text documents. RAN (talk) 16:39, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- @Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ), looks like you want to set
Text=no
in the invocation of {{NARA-image-full}}. According to the documentation for that template, Use "no" if there is no text to transcribe. (Note: Depends on the 'TIFF' parameter being set to "yes".) --bjh21 (talk) 17:25, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
December 01[edit]
Movement Charter[edit]
There has been little or no discussion on Commons of the pending Movement Charter (see especially meta:Movement Charter/Content and meta:Movement Charter/Content/Global Council) and whether the Commons community may have any particular concerns about how it is shaping up. The Movement Charter document is still an incomplete draft as of November 2023.
A few comments/questions:
- One portion of this seems relatively uncontroversial in its overview, with only relative details to be worked out (though, please, if you disagree, speak up!): meta:Movement Charter/Content/Hubs (draft) describes the formation of geographically- and thematically-based "Hubs" that will fill a space between affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). There are now nearly 200 affiliates, and that number presumably will only grow. Some of them are pretty tiny. It's become nearly impossible for each of these, especially the smaller ones, to maintain any meaningful relationship with the WMF. This has made it particularly difficult for smaller affiliates to seek grants from WMF, or even learn what other groups are doing successfully in their own fundraising, collaborations, etc. The hope is that the Hubs will be of a scale to be more tractable from both "above" and "below." (E.g., on the budgeting front, WMF can give a chunk of money to a Hub, which can make allocations "closer to the ground.")
- As far as I can tell, the main other goal of this process is to form a Global Council that (1) can remain reasonably light on its feet while at the same time (2) can, in some respects, provide a better representation of the broad Wikimedia movement than is provided by the WMF, which appears to be willing to offload/devolve some significant responsibilities to this Council. The best summary I've seen of this proposed delegation is at meta:Movement Charter/Content/Global Council.
- This will almost certainly be the largest change in Wikimedia movement governance in well over a decade. Because representatives to the Wikimedia Summit that will take place April 2024 in Berlin were selected through a process centered on affiliates, not sister projects, there is no formal representation of Commons as such, nor of people whose participation in Wikimedia projects is entirely online. Instead, representation consists of WMF itself and of the geographically or topically based affiliates.
- I believe we should have some forum to discuss whether the Commons community as such has any particular concerns about the Charter. I don't think just a section like this on the Village pump (or several such sections) is the greatest way to do it, but I suspect we should have some high-level discussion here first and then start a more dedicated page.
- After some back-and-forth on the part of the organizers, I will now definitely be attending the Summit, and intend to try to represent any concerns that the Commons community may have, both in the next several months and at the Summit itself. I suspect that the next several months will be more crucial than the face-to-face meeting: as with most "summits", the meeting itself is likely to be more of a pro forma ratification than a place where anything is hashed out.
- I'd be very interested to know if there are others who are significantly active in Commons and who will be there in Berlin or are otherwise actively engaged in this process, especially if you are also willing to commit to helping represent any concerns that the Commons community may have.
- My own two largest concerns, just for the record:
- I don't think enough attention is being paid to the type of contributors I see as the backbone of Commons and virtually all other Wikimedia projects: people who contribute entirely (or almost entirely) through on-wiki activities, and who never attend face-to-face meetings even locally, let alone ones that require travel. Unsurprisingly (but I hope not inevitably), the bulk of "movement" level decisions are made by a group of perhaps a thousand or so people who travel to meetings and have come to largely know each other; I'd consider myself to be roughly on the fringes of that group. In a potentially vicious cycle, the very people liable to be under-represented are also under-represented in the process of determining how the community is to be represented.
- I am concerned that the Global Council could become a "talking shop", the sort of thing that in my view has happened to the General Assembly of the UN: lots of speeches, some resolutions, no power or authority. I'm not sure how much that is a matter of what we say in a charter vs. what will happen over time once it is established, but I think that if this Council is going to create meaningful and beneficial change, it can't hurt to keep that in mind in drafting a charter.
- And one last remark: something like the Council should have happened ages ago, but let's face it: as WMF went from a handful of people in the 2000s to something much larger in the 2010s. Most of us with an on-wiki focus took years to even notice this change, and when we did notice it was because several things went wrong (I don't think I need to enumerate those here, but certainly the disastrous first release of the WYSIWIG editor for Wikipedia was a wake-up call for a lot of us). The relationship between the WMF and a lot of on-wiki participants was pretty awful in the mid-2010s. I think that has improved a lot, but not enough. I think a council like this is almost certainly a step in the right direction, but I also think it could be botched, and that we should be paying attention. I realize that "movement governance" isn't everyone's thing, and that's OK, but I think we need more than a handful of us to pay attention, and we need to recognize that if we are concerned with the shape this takes, we have way more chance to influence this the next few months than we will in many years after that.
Jmabel ! talk 02:55, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- thanks for making the effort to represent commons despite wmf's restrictions etc.
- i dont intend to derail your discussion, but i just want to say this observation of mine in short -- no matter how hard people try to provide equal opportunities and rights universally, the majority of people often end up not reached and remain neglected, but power and control fall into only the hands of the power-hungry, unrestrained few. RZuo (talk) 12:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- It mostly looks like a long-winded thesis consisting of either vague wordiness or explanations of the way things already work. I expect it will be much like the UCOC: quietly stored somewhere on Meta, 90% of contributors wont even know it exits at all, most of the rest wont read it, and most of the rest will immediately forget it. GMGtalk 13:12, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- I am afraid the only way to be heard is to form a Commons User group. It will not solve the issues - in any case users who did not become (for one of thousands reasons) the members of the group will net feel represented, but at least there would be someone invited to these meetings. I believe that we have a Photographers user group or smth similar though. Ymblanter (talk) 16:09, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Ymblanter: we do have a photographers' user group (Commons:Commons Photographers User Group) but its focus is rather specific. Typical topics for the mostly Zoom-based meetings are things like " Underwater photography" or a "Post Photograph Processing Workshop" or "Wildlife photography and citizen science". That is to say, it is very much a photographers' group. It has zero concern with the roughly 50% of Commons' content that comes from GLAMs or other third-party sources such as Flickr; it is very little concerned with curation, not at all concerned with governance, and any concern with online tools is precisely about those that are useful to serious photographers.
- At WikiConference North America I brought up the possibility that Commons as such could form a user group that could become a WMF affiliate. In general, this was not warmly received. There seemed to be a fear that each of the several hundred wikis in the WMF cosmos would form a user group, and that there would be an awful lot of separate, possibly redundant, entities. (On the other hand, a user group related to GLAM content would probably be welcomed, and there should be other appropriate themes for thematic user groups that would at least intersect Commons' work.) - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- @RZuo: I agree that is likely, and is a danger. What I'm saying is that I think there is more leverage than usual right now to do something about that, and it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- @GreenMeansGo: yes, these documents are tedious, and unfortunately blowhards are heavily drawn to working on these. But the Hubs are already starting to form, and the General Council will almost certainly happen. We need to identify our needs and work out how to get them met. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- Aside: my biggest beef with documents like this in not so much the vacuous, ornamental declarations, as the parts that say something will happen without laying out mechanisms and responsibilities. I really do urge people to slog through at least some of the document, look for places where it could be improved—including where it could be improved by cutting something outright—and bringing that up on the appropriate talk page. The recently adopted Universal Code of Conduct also started out as a lot of vacuous blather, but it actually ended up being workable. Not necessarily pretty, but workable. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
this seems to have stalled out, so let me re-raise the two key points:
- Will anyone else significantly active on Commons be attending the Summit?
- Does anyone other than me have issues/concerns on Commons behalf about the shape that the Charter is taking?
Jmabel ! talk 20:46, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Prioritizing our technical needs[edit]
A largely separate issue that has come up in the course of this process. I've had several very good discussions with Selena Deckelmann, CPTO of the WMF. I have no doubt of her good will, and that if the Commons community can get reasonable consensus on a priority-ordered list of our largest technical concerns, that would influence where at least some technical resources were allocated, certainly in terms of projects taken on by WMF technical staff and possibly by WMF grants to build particular tools that are better built by someone other than WMF technical staff. As it is, descriptions of those technical needs are floating around as a bunch of phabricator bugs, and we have really given WMF little or no guidance as to how those might be prioritized. There is no guarantee we'd be listened to?, but as long as we don't have such a list, it is a certainty that we have almost no influence on how money is spent. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- May be we can get here at least some of these Phabricator tags and then try to prioritize? I do not think there is a single person knowing all the issues, but collectively we might be able to find many of them. Ymblanter (talk) 21:13, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- i think many functionalities currently fulfilled by user scripts should be taken over by the software or at least maintained by wmf staff instead of volunteers.
- i think we can divide commons into these different parts and list "feature requests" respectively.
- file upload: better video/audio upload tool; batch upload tool (wizard often breaks for me when files exceed several dozen, and to batch edit description fields is hard and annoying); https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350917 ...
- search and use media: better deepcategory search; sorting options (instead of only alphabetical); better video player (now cannot even jump forward or backward 5s by pressing left or right arrows); better document reader interface; super high resolution image viewer.
- maintenance: category description that's more like wikidata items (meaning instead of a single title we can have multilingual titles. instead of constructing relations into the english title like "cat:2023 in France" we can have "this category combines topics '2023' and 'france'". etc.); licence review tool...
- i also made Commons:Idea Lab where everyone can write ideas. i wrote quite a lot...--RZuo (talk) 22:56, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- Fixing the issue where thumbails for other image file formats besides JPEG are fuzzy would be huge. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- In 3. I would definitely add improving VFC, notably adding "source" in the preview summary. Yann (talk) 11:40, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- my list is by no means complete. it's for everyone to add on.
- this now sounds like perennial m:Community Wishlist Survey (CWS). maybe we can already start with Community Wishlist Survey 2024? which should happen pretty soon in jan 2024?
- interested users can sieve thru past years' surveys for proposals that were already written and recommended but not implemented?
- but unlike CWS, this time once we get a list of many detailed proposals, we can group them by urgency, keep them on a dedicated page and submit them to wmf as a list of "much needed technological developments" or something like that, so that wmf keeps working on this list and we dont have to write the same things for CWS every year. RZuo (talk) 11:52, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- I also would propose that we make our own wishlist and than we can show it to the WMF and we could also coordinate our votings for the official wishlist where we if we do not coordinate our votings do not have a chance against the Wikipedia related proposals. Unlike in the official wishlist we should also include the fixing of bugs and not only new features in this list. GPSLeo (talk) 14:37, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- I keep a list of wishlist items for myself. Anyone is welcome to take items from them. And use them as inspiration. And yes, please avoid “better X”. For instance “better file upload” is probably more accurately described as “more resilient against connection problems” or “resumeable uploads” or “make storage layer throw fewer exceptions during upload” or “better memory mangemant when uploading dozens of images at once with the uploadwizard” etc. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- Additionally, I think this is EXACTLY what is wrong right now with the foundation development model. It should not be UP TO US to be our own product owner, who is able to analyze problems, describe them and turn it into an actionable roadmap to be pitched to the foundation management etc. This is EXACTLY what the foundation should be doing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:11, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- i dont know what the structure of wmf is, how the whole wmf is divided into departments and managed, etc.
- it seems to me they are mixing different roles all in one. imo, there're 3 rather unrelated roles:
- tech. to develop the mediawiki software, the software implemented for wiki projects, hosting of wiki projects' data.
- outreach. to encourage participation in minority ethnolinguistic groups, countries... to coordinate between wmf and users.
- money. raising/earning money and spending it on themselves and tech and outreach.
- like whenever some new software comes out and we report problems, we often cant get the feedback directly back to the "tech" people but only the "outreach" people, then messages are lost in the middle. how about spinning off the tech part as a separate entity that focuses on tech like the Mozilla Corporation or Open Technology Fund?
- most of the outreach part is basically the same as any NGO that aims to promote and preserve threatened minority cultures. it's not something that must be done by wmf with all that money raised from donations.
- in https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2022-annual-report/financials/ it says it paid 88 mil usd as salaries. that's like hiring 400 people with 200k usd per annum (which is not small at all for any internet company). i wonder how many of the employees are actually involved with "tech". on the other hand, how much percentage of development and maintenance are done by unpaid volunteers? RZuo (talk) 13:16, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- The truly outreachy people rarely handle tech related things. Perhaps you mean community liasons, who often act as intermediaries? They would fall in tech side of any organization. In any case its not like the actual programmers are in charge of the strategic direction of WMF either. They have input of course, but really its management who makes the big direction decisions. Bawolff (talk) 17:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- I don't have a number, and sometimes it is hard to say who is "tech", but from what I can gather the WMF is about 50% technical. - Jmabel ! talk 18:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- @TheDJ: as someone who worked 40 years in the software industry, I strongly disagree. We are the client and (collectively) the subject-matter experts. We should know and define our needs. The Foundation is, above all, an engine for raising money and providing resources. They have some goals of their own, but as far as the online projects are concerned their goal, at best, is "try to get them what they need". Relatively few people at the Foundation, even on the technical side, have any significant experience using Commons in any non-trivial way. Some of them are very good project managers or software engineers, but at best that means an ability to gather requirements translate those into functional and technical terms, and efficiently implement software that meets those requirements.
- In WMF terms, Commons is a weird case. Among the hundreds of wikis they are responsible for, we are probably the only one that is focused mainly on file content; the only one other than Wikidata itself that makes such heavy use of its own Wikibase instance; the most multilingual. There is almost no chance that a team that is responsible for the support of hundreds of wikis, including well over 100 that are significantly active, is going to have a deep understanding of one that is so unique. It would be nice if there was a program manager for Commons, but from what I can tell they aren't organized that way; I don't think there is even a program manager for en-wiki, and (with all due respect to ourselves) that is an even more important project than Commons. There is perhaps a little too strong an assumption that a common set of tools will serve everyone, and we are probably the wiki where that is least true, so we need to advocate for ourselves and make it easier for someone to give us what we need. Perhaps what we need is a program manager, and if that's the case we should try to build a consensus toward that, but there is no way that anyone is going to come from outside, or on high, and be better able to analyze our needs than we are. - Jmabel ! talk 18:17, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- Sure all that is true, and while I too have
3025 years of software experience, we as a group are here for images. If people here are going to be defining software products, you wont get to do much of images any longer. I spend about 3 hours every week, just keeping up with MediaWiki software changes. I spend about 6 hours a week providing the community with support on technical issues. That leaves me about 2 hours a week doing some volunteer development. Yes we should be providing input, but the foundation should be facilitating PROCESS, so that we create a consistent, predictive and readable results that can create actionable results. And they are delegating even THAT to us. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:51, 3 December 2023 (UTC)- @TheDJ: (1) "the foundation should": Railing against the first-born of Egypt will have about the same result it has had in the past: nothing.
- (2) "I spend…": If you personally don't have time for this, that's fine. No one individual is particularly responsible to take this on.
- (3) Glad to hear you also have that level of experience. Insofar as you choose to participate in this, I imagine your contributions will be useful.
- (4) "we as a group are here for images": up to a point. I can think of a lot else we do than warehouse images and other media. I could probably give 100 examples, but here's two from my own recent work: the edits at this or this are at least as useful as having uploaded copies of postcards that were already online on a library site and replicating the library's inaccurate description. Without descriptions, categories, generally accurate licensing, structured data, etc., Commons would not produce nearly the value that it does. There's a reason why, despite hosting 1/60 as many images as Flickr, at least as many Commons images as Flickr images get picked up to be used in newspapers and other traditional media.
- Jmabel ! talk 19:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- My concern (which I think is similar to TheDJ's) is that these sorts of things often devolve into band-aid solution. The community wishlist is a good example of this - the top proposals are what sounds cool to a large number of people, but maintenance and any sort of long term strategy is left by the wayside. That doesn't mean good things don't come out of those processes, they do, but the processes rarely lead to the work being more than the sum of its parts. At best they are one-off solutions - rarely any sort of holistic solution to underlying problems. There is a reason why product managers are generally considered full time jobs involving specialized skills, not replaceable by a simple popular vote. Ultimately you're right though - The situation, for better or worse, is what it is, and commons should make the most of the opportunities that it has. Bawolff (talk) 15:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- Sure all that is true, and while I too have
- @RZuo: it's interesting that you invoke Mozilla. I don't know whether you know that the aforementioned Selena Deckelmann, who became CPTO a little over a year ago, was about eight years at Mozilla/Firefox and worked her way up from Data Architect to Sr. Vice President there. I personally think she's in a position to change a lot for the better. - Jmabel ! talk 18:32, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- i didnt know. i'm a noob about all these things. just giving my uneducated opinion and hoping others forgive my ignorance.
- 1 thing about where feedback should come from though. is it like, no one from the whole tech team at wmf is a commons or wikidata user?
- for example, the "add statement" button on wikidata is totally anti-user, because it appears in the middle of the page. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142082 is 7 years old! they cant put in any basic solution to this anti-user design that's the core to editing wikidata. any new user of wikidata will realise this is a problem after trying to find the button a few times.
- an obvious problem on commons is the timedtext of audios/videos. take a look at File:10 Signs Your Mental Health is Getting Worse.webm, the only built-in way to check what subtitles exist is clicking on the CC button in the popup video player. there isnt a simple list somewhere. because this functionality is so badly needed, users had to create Template:Closed captions/layout by themselves! yet 10 years after users having DIY-ed this template, wmf still doesnt have a built-in solution for this need! (i wish i have 88 mil usd every year, then i will spend half of it hiring 4000 indian programmers and pocket the other half.)
- we can see how our opinions on what needs improvement converge rather quickly, because we've all been active and know which problems exist. if the tech team has anyone who's an occasional, hobbyist commons user, maybe s/he would've shared some obvious things with colleagues already.
- and even though there are hundreds of wiki projects, the real difference is probably only about 20, because most are just different language versions of the same thing that's supported by the same piece of software. RZuo (talk) 19:56, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- As far as I know there are multiple Commoners, Wikipedians and Wikidatans amongst staff. This does not mean they have the 'power' to prioritize technical tasks, or can speak on behalf of the community what needs to be prioritized. They have to work on tasks assigned to them by lead staff - like Selena. Ciell (talk) 20:12, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- I would guess (a guess, but from experience) that in any organization the size of WMF, several people in the middle of a hierarchy is making the decisions what work gets prioritized. At the top, they are managing managers, and probably setting policies for how work is prioritized, but except for very major projects no one at the top is deciding "this particular feature will get done."
- If you think about it from a broad, organizational perspective, they are mainly maintaining mediawiki and (now that WMDE has handed it over to WMF) wikibase. Laying wikibase aside for the moment: we on Commons use mediawiki very differently from its hundreds of other uses by sister projects. We are probably the only wiki in the WMF world where categories are more important than mainspace (galleries for us, articles for almost everyone else) and media more important than either. It's not surprising that Commons' needs can get lost in the shuffle for a team that works on mediawiki. So, again: if we define our (probably unique) priorities, there is a fair chance that they will be attended to. If we do not, it should not be surprising that we remain the red-headed stepchild. - Jmabel ! talk 22:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- that makes me think of Mr Magnus Manske, the creator of mediawiki. he knows well commons' needs and has created so many tools that are essential and cater so well to commons: cat-a-lot, flickr2c, url2c, User:Magnus Manske/sdc_tool.js, GLAMorous, BaGLAMa... look at this list https://magnustools.toolforge.org/ . Orz. RZuo (talk) 06:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- “no one from the whole tech team at wmf is a commons or wikidata user” i dont see where you get that idea. At least half of the foundation tech team is sourced from the community. Visit any event and you would quickly learn this. No, the problem is that we have people doing 10000 different things. Dozens of workflows that are important to like 10 people each. There is no amount of employees that scales to our diversity, but don’t mistake that for the personal drive and commitment that people have to the projects. They just dont always want to edit any longer after a 40 hour workweek, because having the same work and hobby is not always a healthy mix.. This is a more a scale problem than anything else. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:04, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- the problem is that we have people doing 10000 different things. That shouldn't be an issue if they have a clear direction and goal to work around. There's naturally going to be 10000 different things being worked on at any given time if we aren't clear about what we want from them as a user base though. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:19, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- the feeling comes from the wikidata "add statement" button. adding every single statement (unless you're using some other tools) is done by clicking that button first, but that button has no fixed position.
- cant imagine if a commercial company has UX like this in its products.
- and users have reported this is a problem for 7 years now. yet developers do nothing about it. cant imagine if a company ignores customers like that. RZuo (talk) 14:21, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- You should ping Lea_Lacroix_WMDE in the Phabricator issue and see where it's at since she said they were going to deal with. Otherwise it does look kind of negligent on their part. Sometimes a little prodding can get things going again though. I doubt it's anything other then an oversight in this case since it seems like they were willing to fix it and in the process of doing so. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- an example for commons would be the uploadwizard. if you went on a trip and took 5 photos each of 4 buildings, how are you gonna upload the 20 photos? if you do it in 1 batch, then you have to scroll and copypaste the filename, the description, the categories separately for the 4 things. or you upload in 4 batches.
- compare that to flickr's uploader. 1. you dont need to scroll. 2. you can select photos for batch edits.
- this is the most fundamental part of a file hosting platform, yet it's so hard to use. even new users would feel the difficulty. why are devs oblivious? RZuo (talk) 14:37, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- Its actually pretty common for commercial software to ignore user bug reports when they are not critical. Bawolff (talk) 18:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- As far as I know there are multiple Commoners, Wikipedians and Wikidatans amongst staff. This does not mean they have the 'power' to prioritize technical tasks, or can speak on behalf of the community what needs to be prioritized. They have to work on tasks assigned to them by lead staff - like Selena. Ciell (talk) 20:12, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- Additionally, I think this is EXACTLY what is wrong right now with the foundation development model. It should not be UP TO US to be our own product owner, who is able to analyze problems, describe them and turn it into an actionable roadmap to be pitched to the foundation management etc. This is EXACTLY what the foundation should be doing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:11, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- Hey there! Thanks Joe, for starting up this discussion. I'm following with interest.
- A suggestion I have to help with clarity -- identify the priorities around which problems you'd like solved, and the audience the problem is being solved for. For example, @Fuzheado just held an unconference session at Wikicon NA to ask about tools and workflows folks in GLAMs are interested in, which likely intersects with some of the tooling issues flagged here. Getting clear about who benefits from certain changes the most, which usually is very related to who a change is being designed for, may help us identify areas to focus and also get clear about why. Ideally that will help support better prioritization decisions that must be made, even when everyone doesn't agree.
- In addition, something helpful to think about are the ways in which we are evaluating the success of work. One of the ways is by coming up with measurement criteria that provides both leading indicators that the work is having the intended effect (these tend to be specific to individual changes), and also lagging indicators that help us understand more holistically impact as systems change (these tend to be more like "foundation-wide metrics" or lodestar metrics for departments and organizations). Happy to talk about this more with anyone interested. Finding good metrics is something I hope that we become really good together.
- I have heard (in this thread and from others) requests for more support from the Foundation for Commons. Partly in response to the open letter, I asked the whole Structured Content team (who formerly worked on structured data related projects) to dive into an area that acutely needed support so that they could refamiliarize themselves with some aspects of Commons and the state of our infrastructure. After some research was done to identify acute issues, they decided to tackle improvements to the Commons Upload Wizard. After that's done, my plan is to reflect on the work, our understanding of volunteer needs and the needs of the many types of users of Commons, and find a path forward. Input from you all on priorities, and a willingness to engage in further conversations about purpose, metrics and outcomes, would all be really be helpful. SDeckelmann-WMF (talk) 23:06, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Again: if the head of the tech side of the Foundation says that the most effective thing the Commons community could do to make it more likely to get what we need from the Foundation is to create our own prioritized list, I see absolutely no reason to doubt her. There may be other things that might help us even more, but those other things are not in our own hands. - Jmabel ! talk 18:32, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- No offense to RZuo or anyone else, but Its not on the WMF to sort through random, years old discussions to suss out what our priorties and needs as a project are. Instead there really needs to be a list of issues, needs, wants, or whatever on our end sorted by priorty with the top 4 or 5 being the most urgent. We can't expect them to just somehow magically know what the community wants them to work on or fix though.Random, ambigious complaints about "issues" aren't a cohesive, actionable plan either. Nor are they going to spend the time and resources fixing things that might actually end up being low on the priority list just because a few users mentioned them in passing somewhere. That's not how organizations work. There should be a list of the top things Commons' users want them to deal with. Otherwise don't supprised if nothing gets fixed on their end. Something like Commons:Strategic plan perhaps? --Adamant1 (talk) 23:39, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
- I'm guessing that something we could call a "strategic plan" is more than we can hope for. But I think we should be able to identify (1) our biggest pain points and what we think could be done about them, (2) some "low-hanging fruit" (e.g. small UI changes that would have high return) and (maybe overlapping the other two) (3) things done by fragile bots that deserve a lot stronger technical backing. - Jmabel ! talk 00:53, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Jmabel: I agree a "strategic plan" is probably to lofty. It's mainly that there needs to be a more centralized, formal place for all of this outside of the village pump or the "Wishlist" pages that users have created so far. What the page is called doesn't really matter though. But so far there's a couple of pages that were created by RZuo and TheDJ, this discussion, and I'm sure others. The whole thing really needs to be more centralized and consensus based then it is currently. Your idea of what we need to identify sounds like a good starting point for whatever it ends up being though. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:50, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- for #3, i grouped some "tools" (user contributed) by their importance: Commons:Tools/Directory (not a complete list, feel free to keep cataloguing). all these are maintained by users. RZuo (talk) 06:21, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- I'm guessing that something we could call a "strategic plan" is more than we can hope for. But I think we should be able to identify (1) our biggest pain points and what we think could be done about them, (2) some "low-hanging fruit" (e.g. small UI changes that would have high return) and (maybe overlapping the other two) (3) things done by fragile bots that deserve a lot stronger technical backing. - Jmabel ! talk 00:53, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- One thing to keep in mind is that MediaWiki is sort of a hybrid project. There is the WMF, who acts very similarly to mid-sized commercial software company developing MediaWiki - with managers, product managers, scrum, agile, KPIs, etc. There is also MediaWiki the open source project, where random people contribute. Prioritized lists can often be quite compelling for the second group of people. People who contribute to MediaWiki in an open-source fashion are usually motivated by solving a problem that bothers them. However sometimes they like to do other things. Generally though (and this is a very rough generalization) they don't like the messy work of talking to 50 different people to try and figure out what people actually want. Well defined lists of desired improvements gives them something to work on. Bawolff (talk) 18:43, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I created a RfC page to make such a survey Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey. If everyone agrees that this method is what we need to get our priority list we could immediately start collecting the proposals. GPSLeo (talk) 09:01, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- Looks like a good idea but probably needs to (i) be advertised project-wide, or may be even cross-project-wide (ii) have a closed or even a team of closers who would summarize the results in terms of the priorities. Ymblanter (talk) 18:23, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Strategic issues[edit]
Before anyone can come up with the specific proposals (see above) I think we need to discuss the big picture. From my perspective, I see four big things which we should have understanding of before writing any proposals. I am sure some of these are non-issues, and that there are some serious things I just do not see, but we need to start somewhere and discuss. (This may become sections of the wishlist discussed above, or not):
- Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to become a major audio and video repository? If yes, how do we make sure we are not a poor version of Youtube, vimeo etc.?
- Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to have a fully functioning mobile version and a mobile app, say for uploads?
- Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to fully replace categories by some more modern structure such as Structured Commons? (Multilingual categories go here as well).
- (Just to repeat the question which I asked at the top of the page, but more broadly): Do we expect any total-size-related limitations on uploads in the future and, if yes, are we going to restrict uploads or perform some form of cleanup of existing approach?--Ymblanter (talk) 18:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- I think most of this was already discussed at Commons talk:Think big - open letter about Wikimedia Commons and there we also had the conclusion that we need a priority list but we never made the list. Of course we need a long term plan for what we want to be. The current idea of the priority list is more about what tools do we need fixed to keep the current state of Commons running. Both is needed but I think more or less independent of each other. GPSLeo (talk) 18:41, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- I think that being audio repository then yes. Audio file size is pretty much trivial. About video, then question is that do we even want to be major videorepository? Handling video would mean that it would require much more server and bandwidth capacity in every level. Handling video in crowdsourced way (annotating, referencing, ... ) is much complicated than images and it is totally possible that world is outpacing the video with AI(or other automatic systems) which generates output dynamically from data. -- Zache (talk) 19:52, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- At least, we should a copy of a film if it is notable enough to have a WP article in any language (and in the public domain of course). Many old movies are being released again on DVD/Blu-ray, and we should have a copy of these. Yann (talk) 20:42, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- Turning Commons into a full on video host sounds like a bad idea, if it's even doable to begin with. Although allowing for copies of older films that are notable enough to have a WP article seems like a reasonable standard. Just as long as it doesn't lead to Commons being a glorified PD version of PornHub. Audio files on the other hand seem like a mixed bag, but one that's at least doable. Although allowing for either one shouldn't come at the cost of other things or make it harder to get core issues dealt with. The time and effort it would take to make hosting videos somewhat viable would invariably mean less of both going into say fixing the UploadWizard or improving other neglected areas of the platform. Plus it's better to focus on the platforms core strengths and purpose instead of trying to turn it into the Swiss Army Knife of media hosting platforms anyway. It's always better to focus on a project's core strengths instead of making it into a multi-purpose tool for everything and everyone. I just don't think that's in hosting video or audio files. Although more so with the former then the later. --Adamant1 (talk) 03:41, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- At least, we should a copy of a film if it is notable enough to have a WP article in any language (and in the public domain of course). Many old movies are being released again on DVD/Blu-ray, and we should have a copy of these. Yann (talk) 20:42, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Commons Gazette 2023-12[edit]
- The total number of files on Wikimedia Commons exceeded 100 million on 16 November 2023.[1] This has taken 7 009 days since the founding of Wikimedia Commons on 7 September 2004.
- Currently, there are 186 sysops.
References
Commons Gazette is a monthly newsletter of the latest important news about Wikimedia Commons, edited by volunteers. You can also help with editing! --RZuo (talk) 12:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
December 02[edit]
Bot to remind uploaders of corrupted files[edit]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=filesize%3A10239%2C10241&sort=create_timestamp_desc
i think, a bot, which detects these files and sends a notice to their uploaders asap, would be necessary. can someone code up something? or do a manual vfc once a few days before a bot takes over? RZuo (talk) 14:31, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
CropTool will soon be broken[edit]
Commons talk:CropTool#Grid engine will shut down on December 14th, tool will stop working. Discussion should probably take place there, not here. - Jmabel ! talk 18:01, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
December 03[edit]
Avoid using video2commons for youtube temporarily[edit]
v2c has been uploading youtube videos in low resolution, because of a flaw in its code.
so far, i have found that this problem affects some recently uploaded youtube videos, but i am not sure if it affects other video websites or how long it has existed.
you can still use v2c but only with extra caution, as explained at Commons_talk:Video2commons#Summary.
if you know these users https://github.com/orgs/toolforge/people , please ask them to help with https://github.com/toolforge/video2commons/issues/173 . RZuo (talk) 13:15, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- I had this issue some weeks ago. It uploads the 144p version, which is the smallest one. I used an online downloader to overwrite with the HD version --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:41, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- Yup, I noticed probably the same problem while uploading File:Klášter Vyšší Brod, 2020.webm (now merged & deleted as File:Klášter Vyšší Brod, 2020 duplicate.webm). — Draceane talkcontrib. 21:20, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- Yug (talk · contributions · Statistics · Recent activity · block log · User rights log · uploads · Global account information)
- Lingualibre.org which is a Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Foundation supported web app, project, community and wiki plans to migrate its documentation to Commons. I would like to have the (Transwiki) importer right, so the wikipage could be migrated with proper credit history. Lingualibre uses Wikimedia oath connection to create accounts so usernames are similar to wikimedia's wikis. I'm administrator there, and there are about 30 pages and 120 translations to import. I'm familiar with lingualibre:Special:Export and Special:Import. It seems possible to import all our help pages at once, but I will need to try it. Yug (talk) 18:17, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Yug: At least one technical issue: Lingualibre is not in the list of supported wikis to import from, that will need to be changed (I can file the phab task if you need once we agree that this should be done). And I'm not sure how to import translations, but you might need translationadmin rights for that in addition to transwiki importer; do you know how this works? Before we move forward, however, where on Commons do you plan to import these to? —Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 19:31, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- Hello Mdaniels5757, I anticipated some technical roadblocks as the one above so I'm coming early to solve them.
- Timeline: Migration for the wiki pages is wished for Spring 2024.
- Place and move rights: Commons:Lingua Libre has been discussed as the main page. I have a few ideas for the documentations, be it Commons:Lingua Libre/* or Help:Lingua Libre/*. If necessary, I and several other members have move rights.
- Supported import Wikis: Yes, if possible to get Lingualibre on the import list you cited, I guess it would help to make cleaner, more automatized imports, so this is interesting as well.
- Technical connection level between Lingualibre ⇔ Wikimedia Commons: Not sure if this is relevant, but I will clarify the level of technical connexion. Users of Lingua Libre log in via Wikimedia oath system, so Lingua Libre accounts id and names and Wikimédia Commons accounts ids and names are identical. Lingua Libre is not completely connected : notifications systems are autonomous.
- Administrative connextion level: LinguaLibre.org is financially supported by Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimédia France, about 100k€ so far. See meta:Lingua Libre/Supports for a non-exhaustive review.
- The most important for me is to get the Transwiki importer and translationadmin userrights. From what I understand of Special:Export and Special:Import, this alone allows me to work on batch of files from a same category on the origine wiki, then import them in one shoot to the target wiki. Since we only have about 100 pages to import, this can do the job. Yug (talk) 08:37, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- cc User:WikiLucas00. Yug (talk) 09:04, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
December 04[edit]
Random deletion of perfectly good files from Gallica[edit]
There are literally tens to hundreds of thousands of books and files that overzealous editors will start in on deleting thanks to this apparently random edit of PD-GallicaScan by User:Rosenzweig.
- A) I'd revert/undo it myself except I apparently lack the permissions to do so (?). Anyone know what's involved or where I sign up for those?
- B) Can one of y'all undo it in the meantime?
Even if we are officially depreciating this template, 1st the phrasing should reflect that almost all of the affected files are old and in the public domain and simply request that the license be changed and 2nd whoever decided on this should be the one shunting over 1.4+ million pages to whatever they think the appropriate license is, not purging that many files from the service for no particularly good reason. Is there any evidence we even have files from Gallica that are so recent that PD is an issue? Gallica shouldn't be hosting most of those online itself. Are there any? - C) There should've been more discussion somewhere to link to before this change went through. That should be somewhere on the template's page or its talk page.
- D) If the general response here is to pound sand and that it's great that we're deleting all these perfectly good files... well, for the several thousand of those files that I've been working with—from the 18th century for what it's worth—is there any product like HotCat where I can mass replace their PDs? Someone needs to be doing that with the new change and it can't be by going through 1.4 million files by hand.
— LlywelynII 00:10, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @LlywelynII: Please see COM:VPC#Deprecate Template:PD-BNF and Template:PD-GallicaScan. You may also use {{Editrequest}} at Template talk:PD-GallicaScan. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 00:16, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Jeff G.: Thanks for the links but, if you're already that knowledgeable, do you know where I need to go to just get the permission added to my account to fix things like this on my own? (Obv not going to remove the change if there has been more discussion that Rz just forgot to link back to, but the wording could be much better and much better formatted and a link provided to that discussion. See also my long edit history and general trustworthiness.) — LlywelynII 04:47, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @LlywelynII: You can post on COM:RFR, and if that lacks any section for the right you want, COM:AN or Commons:Administrators/Requests. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 12:32, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Jeff G.: Thanks for the links but, if you're already that knowledgeable, do you know where I need to go to just get the permission added to my account to fix things like this on my own? (Obv not going to remove the change if there has been more discussion that Rz just forgot to link back to, but the wording could be much better and much better formatted and a link provided to that discussion. See also my long edit history and general trustworthiness.) — LlywelynII 04:47, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Similarly, there are multiple thousands of images I've probably edited from Gallica that now need to preemptively get this fixed to avoid 'helpful' deletion. Are there any mass PD template-shifting add-ons or programs to make this reasonable work? — LlywelynII 04:52, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Rosenzweig: FYI. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 00:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @LlywelynII: "Is there any evidence we even have files from Gallica that are so recent that PD is an issue?": Yes, there is. Gallica is hosting newspapers and magazines up to ca. the 1950s, where the BNF itself says they are "consultable en ligne" (viewable online), not 'in the public domain". These contain texts and images by authors who died less than 70 years ago. Compare Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Robert Fuzier, Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Paul Poncet, and others from the same date. The wording says might be deleted, not will. If you think the specific wording of the deprecation needs to be changed, feel free to chip in at COM:VPC#Deprecate Template:PD-BNF and Template:PD-GallicaScan (as already mentioned by JeffG, thanks). Regards --Rosenzweig τ 00:40, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- My experience is planting enormous THIS FILE MIGHT NOT BE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND MIGHT BE DELETED AT ANY MOMENT headers is just begging "helpful" "editors" to go around deleting absolutely everything they can, frequently with bots and without any care. If you've found a few newspapers, put the header on those items. At minimum, the template replacement should be rephrased to This template has been depreciated and should be replaced with ... like normal, instead of begging for people to go around destroying things for no particularly good reason.
- If there's a separate location for feedback, remember to put it in your template edits or edit summaries to help fix problems like this. — LlywelynII 04:42, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- You're over-dramatizing this. Nowhere does it say that files might be deleted "at any moment". And I fail to see how you come to the conclusion that users might be deleting "absolutely everything they can" with bots (!) --Rosenzweig τ 05:46, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- I agree with Rosenzweig here. When over-broad mass-deletions come in as DRs, there is usually a quick "this is too many files with different issues for one DR", and it gets closed with no action.
- There were similar issues with some of Fæ's massive batch uploads. I continue to track his user talk page for what is DR'd. So far, I can't recall seeing any "obvious keeps" get DR'd, and most have been such obvious copyvios that in other circumstances they would likely have been speedied.
- We should think about categories that will be useful in sorting this out. Besides any possible maintenance categories on the files themselves, we should probably put a new subcat Category:Gallica-related deletion requests somewhere under Category:Sorted deletion requests; I'm not sure where, but we'd want to make it easy for someone to track these.
- By the way, is there any evidence that there have been bad deletions on this basis? - Jmabel ! talk 06:24, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Jmabel: See Category:Gallica-related deletion requests. --Rosenzweig τ 07:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- According to https://templatecount.toolforge.org/?lang=commons&name=PD-GallicaScan&namespace=10#bottom there are 1,403,251 transclusions. That's an impractical amount of work without bot help, and I'd suggest undoing the depreciation until a bot can, in the first instance, spot every extant use where other copyright explanations exist, and replace it with a suitable note explaining, briefly, what the template said outside of the PD declaration. In many cases, I believe this was just a specific variant of PD-scan. Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:12, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Simply undoing the change "until a bot" can replace something (when will that be?) won't discourage people from uploading still protected Gallica scans like they are doing now, which will only make the problem worse. I don't think that's a good idea. And yes, bots will almost certainly be needed to help here. --Rosenzweig τ 07:18, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- I think a literal over a million files losing a PD tag is a bigger problem. Files without a PD tag get put up for deletion. Prolific uploaders could be looking at thousands of files to review at once. Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:23, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Why would prolific uploaders be looking at thousands of files to review at once? No one is requiring uploaders to do that and nothing in the template says anything even slightly along those lines either. Really, they can just ignore the change completely if they want to and literally nothing will happen. Except clear COPYVIO will be deleted going forward, but that's probably about it and doesn't involve anyone reviewing thousands of files. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:30, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- At this point, not a single one of those files has actually "lost a PD tag". The tag is still there. It's just deprecated. --Rosenzweig τ 07:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- I've changed the template a bit so that the collapsed section with the deprecated tag is now expanded by default. --Rosenzweig τ 07:59, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Are you aware of User:AntiCompositeBot? If the tag isn't listed in a way that categorises an image as public domain, I'm pretty sure it will be automatically listed for deletion. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- If that bot didn't
listfiles (or rather mark them as missing a valid license tag) tagged with PD-GallicaScan before, it won'tlistmark them now. Why should it? Nothing in the actual file pages has changed. --Rosenzweig τ 08:31, 4 December 2023 (UTC)- Missed a closing > there, but no matter. I believe it's down to PD-GallicaScan's inclusion on lists of valid PD tags, things that it could readily be removed from now. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:39, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Commons:Bots/Requests/AntiCompositeBot 4: “The bot uses a query [...] to find potentially eligible files that are in Category:Files_with_no_machine-readable_license, were uploaded in the last 1 month, and are not currently tagged for deletion. The restriction on upload time is to prevent the bot from tagging files that may have previously had a license or otherwise need human review.” --Rosenzweig τ 08:42, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Missed a closing > there, but no matter. I believe it's down to PD-GallicaScan's inclusion on lists of valid PD tags, things that it could readily be removed from now. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:39, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- If that bot didn't
- Are you aware of User:AntiCompositeBot? If the tag isn't listed in a way that categorises an image as public domain, I'm pretty sure it will be automatically listed for deletion. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- I think a literal over a million files losing a PD tag is a bigger problem. Files without a PD tag get put up for deletion. Prolific uploaders could be looking at thousands of files to review at once. Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:23, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Simply undoing the change "until a bot" can replace something (when will that be?) won't discourage people from uploading still protected Gallica scans like they are doing now, which will only make the problem worse. I don't think that's a good idea. And yes, bots will almost certainly be needed to help here. --Rosenzweig τ 07:18, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
@Rosenzweig: thank you for creating Category:Gallica-related deletion requests. All six of those I see at this time look valid, or at least plausible, to me. Yes, it is too bad that we have been trusting that mere inclusion on this site meant things were in the public domain, but clearly it does not.
One further suggestion: when URAA is the basis for proposed deletion, probably they should be marked with {{deletionsort|URAA}} as well. Note that per Commons:Licensing, "A mere allegation that the URAA applies to a file cannot be the sole reason for deletion" (italics in the original). - Jmabel ! talk 20:10, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- Apparently you need to "subst" {{Deletionsort}} when adding. - Jmabel ! talk 20:14, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Jmabel: Try {{subst:deletionsort|URAA}}. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 06:46, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Jmabel: I know about the whole URAA thing (and I'm not making "mere allegations" when URAA is concerned, I check the country list at en:WP:Non-U.S. copyrights if I'm not sure). But frankly I wonder if the URAA tracking category for deletion requests (and several other DR tracking categories) still make sense or make sense at all. The FOP categories, yes, whenever South Africa actually does introduce FOP we can use the South Africa FOP category to restore files. But what's the point of the URAA tracking categories these days? The Supreme Court case (Golan v. Holder) was over a decade ago, the URAA was upheld. Does anyone still think this will change? --Rosenzweig τ 07:37, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Rosenzweig: I don't honestly know. I just know there has never been any overt decision to stop tracking them; feel free to push for such a decision. - Jmabel ! talk 18:53, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Search for filetype among user uploads?[edit]
I wanted to find out how many videos I had uploaded, but realised there was no way of searching for that specifically in my upload list[1], or among the uploads of others, for that matter. Am I overlooking something, or could that actually be a nice, probably easily implementable feature? Seems you can already sort uploads by date by clicking the black arrow, why not by filetype or name, or even size? FunkMonk (talk) 20:38, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @FunkMonk: Help:Searching: "filemime" to specify MIME type. - Jmabel ! talk 21:49, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- But can I use that to only search for files that I (or any other specific user) have uploaded? Doesn't seem so from that page? FunkMonk (talk) 22:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
- @FunkMonk and Jmabel: Mine are easy, Category:Videos transferred by User:Jeff G. — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 07:21, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- yes it's a good feature to have.
- for your personal request, without a way to batch filter upload logs, what i would do is to take the lists from https://xtools.wmcloud.org/pages/commons.wikimedia.org/FunkMonk/6 and use regex to filter videos or filter out non-videos. RZuo (talk) 07:36, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- So a text file is downloaded to search through, or? FunkMonk (talk) 09:14, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- @FunkMonk here's my silly way, because i'm pretty noobish with coding:
- open https://xtools.wmcloud.org/pages/commons.wikimedia.org/FunkMonk/6
(alternatively and a little faster but CAUTION page might be slow to load because it's large https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/upload&user=FunkMonk&type=upload&offset=&limit=5000 ) - ctrl+a
- ctrl+c
- open https://regexr.com/
- left click the part "RegExr was created by gskinner.com..." once
- ctrl+a
- ctrl+v (this means, i copied the whole text to the input field on regexr.com)
- replace the expression field (website default ([A-Z])\w+ ) with
File:.+\.(webm|ogv|ogg)
- click "List" in the "Tools" below
- replace the default $&\n with *[[:$&]]\n
- then you can copy paste the list to a wiki page. (double click anywhere in the list so your cursor selects a word, then ctrl+a, then ctrl+c).
- open https://xtools.wmcloud.org/pages/commons.wikimedia.org/FunkMonk/6
- add more extensions to #8 as you like.
- repeat this 6 times (because xtools shows 1000 files on 1 page and you have 5000+ logs), or 3 times for Special:Log. RZuo (talk) 11:04, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks, already a little over my head, but I'll try it out. Do people think it makes sense if I made a proposal for stuff like this to be implemented directly in the uploads list so we don't have to do it in all sorts of ways? Doesn't sound like it would be a huge change, but many people seem to need such a feature, but are forced to work it out themselves. FunkMonk (talk) 13:09, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- @FunkMonk here's my silly way, because i'm pretty noobish with coding:
- So a text file is downloaded to search through, or? FunkMonk (talk) 09:14, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
December 05[edit]
Category:Poland photographs taken on XXXX-XX-XX[edit]
Something has gone wrong with the categories in Category:Photographs of Poland by date, e.g. see Category:Poland photographs taken on 2023-11-11. You can see there are several thousand of these categories in Category:Non-empty category redirects. I have checked the templates {{Poland photographs taken on navbox}} and {{World photos}}, also Module:Countries/Europe (talk | +/− | links | doc | subpages | tests – results), but can't see any recent changes that should be causing this issue. The categories were all working fine last time I looked about a week ago. Can anyone shed some light on this? BigDom (talk) 08:56, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- I added {{Poland photographs taken on navbox}} but it did not fully solve the problem. Ymblanter (talk) 09:23, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- Yes, the problem happens whether you use the specific Poland template, or World photos. It seems to be limited to Poland though, see Category:Non-empty category redirects from page 2 onwards. There are thousands of Polish categories, but none from any other country. BigDom (talk) 09:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- It must be something in one of the templates upstream, but I can not really check this now, just too busy at my work. Ymblanter (talk) 09:52, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- No problem, I'll keep looking for now. BigDom (talk) 10:11, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Ymblanter: - found and fixed the issue. The cat= parameter had been removed at Template:Country label/N which was breaking the categorisation for Poland (turned out it was also affecting Portugal). I have pinged the user who made the edits in my edit summary to see why they did it. Cheers, BigDom (talk) 10:26, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- No problem, I'll keep looking for now. BigDom (talk) 10:11, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- It must be something in one of the templates upstream, but I can not really check this now, just too busy at my work. Ymblanter (talk) 09:52, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- Yes, the problem happens whether you use the specific Poland template, or World photos. It seems to be limited to Poland though, see Category:Non-empty category redirects from page 2 onwards. There are thousands of Polish categories, but none from any other country. BigDom (talk) 09:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
The Afrikaans Wikipedia[edit]
Hi Guys! I am the Director for Afrikaans on WikimediaZA. I want to load a bunch of picture re out 22n Birthday bash, High School Writing Competition and our Campaigners for the Afrikaans Wikipedia program onto Commons. Am I allowed to create a category Afrikaans Wikipedia or something similar? If not, where can I store the pictures? Regards. Oesjaar (talk) 11:41, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Oesjaar: there's Category:Afrikaans Wikimedia. you can also upload some photos first so that we can see what kind of photos you're uploading, whether they meet com:scope etc., and what categories are suitable?--RZuo (talk) 17:05, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Please, rev del the original photo.[edit]
I cropped out the building. File:Ashrarq_Interview_(cop28_0893).jpg Thanks, --Ooligan (talk) 21:59, 5 December 2023 (UTC)