Shortcut: COM:VP

Centralized discussion See also: Village pump/Proposals   ■ Archive Commons:Requests for comment/Hosting of free fonts in Commons (18 July 2024) How do we organize categories by date (14 May 2024) Should PD-CQ Roll Call be used for recent images? (5 January 2024) Technical needs survey (17 December 2023) When does PDART apply to textile works? (15 November 2023) Does this image contain "love hearts"? (17 August 2023) Overhaul of categories by period (5 December 2022) Version of Saudi flag to use (11 July 2022) Concern regarding revocability of KOGL licenses (22 December 2021) Should deleting content from your own talk page be forbidden? (11 November 2021) Revise the COM:FOP Sweden section (1 February 2021) Change technical name of LRs to license-reviewer from image-reviewer(2 November 2023) Template: View   ■ Discuss    ■ Edit   ■ Watch

If I apload an image at commons, and later I want revoke my permission I can delete that image. Might be someone has copied the image from commons into his computer, or in a site web, that is well, no problem, but I am giving a permission in Commons to copy and release that image and I want stop it. How can I stop it.

It is logic: for example I give every day some money to a non profit organization (for example, Wikipedia, Wikimedia, or Commons) if I give a new order to my bank I can stop the donation, it is legal.

The author of a work can give his copyrights, but he has a moral right on his own work, for example, Velazquez is death for 400 years at least, but he has the right to have his pictures in El Prado Museum, is his moral right. I think I have a moral right to delete my own work from Commons if I want it. If someone has a copy in his computer, at that moment, he can release it, at his own responsibility, but I can delete it on Commons.

How can I delete my own work on Commons? Vibria (talk) 08:18, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Once you've released the images in the public domain or free-use (Creative Commons license) it can't be revoked. Bidgee (talk) 08:24, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can't formally legally unilaterally revoke permissions which you previously validly gave, but you can request that the images be deleted by nominating them for deletion through the usual process. Such concerns are often listened to if there is a good valid reason, but images won't automatically be deleted just because the original uploader requests it... AnonMoos (talk) 10:01, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. Once the money has already left your bank account, you may find it very difficult to retract a charitable donation... AnonMoos (talk) 10:05, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

At least as a moral right, and it is a moral duty, at least, for Commons, Wikimedia, or Wikipedia, if I thought it can damage me, I have the right to delete it. Vibria (talk) 13:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You'll probably get a whole lot farther here by going through normal procedures and adducing specific valid reasons for the actions which you reqest be taken -- rather than loudly insisting on alleged "rights" which you simply do not have in a formal legal sense. AnonMoos (talk) 15:50, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If X donates images to Commons under freelicense, Y copies it, then Y copy carries freelicense. You say "I want to revoke permission" but.. as Y site has free license allowing ANYONE to reuse, we can copy it from Y and host it with freelicense

That's the point of free licenses, you're not granting a license to commons or to "Y". You're granting a license to ***anybody***, so you just can't "revoke only Commons". 15:54, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

• • I do not revoke the copy on an alien computer, only on the computers of Commons. I don't ask the bank to return the money to my accounts (in that example) I revoke the order of a continuous transfer, then the bank do not return la sent money, but they stop all the new transfers. Other example: you do stop to my car to go from New York to California, I keep you till Chicago, very far from California, I stop my car there, I have no duty to keep you the rest of the journey. Vibria (talk) 17:24, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Vibria, when you upload a file to the Commons, you make a single, non-revokable transfer. You give up a portion of your rights, and you can't get them back without the Commons' agreeing with you. The free licences are very strict in this sense. You can't get your pictures deleted, and whoever may start distributing the images you've uploaded to the Commons anywhere in the net, provided he uses the same licence as you do and complies with it. It's like a thrown spear; you can't get it back. --MPorciusCato (talk) 18:31, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Car analogy does not work (it's a unique material object, impossible to copy for reasonable cost). The bank is much closer: whatever you tell the bank, you don't control the money already spent, neither does the bank. It's gone, it's in someone else's hands, changing hands all the time. When you release some unique information (image) to the public, it's like spending money for a moment of pleasure - you give up your own asset for free, and it's gone. NVO (talk) 06:45, 19 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• • But, if, for example, this image can damage me in any way, Commons or Wikipedia or Wikimedia must delete it. I have the right to ask it. Vibria (talk) 13:26, 22 October 2008 (UTC) At least as a moral right, and it is a moral duty, at least, for Commons, Wikimedia, or Wikipedia, if I thought it can damage me, I have the right to delete it. Vibria (talk) 13:32, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

you have the right to ask, and if the image is deleted other site's can still use it under the same licence. It is almost inpossible to make sure the image isn't used any where Sterkebaktalk 13:43, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My unordered comments:

• AFAIK, personality rights are not a copyright issue, so by some laws you can’t make a photo of a person completely free by releasing it under a free license, although you can release it under it (at least Commons does so). I have deleted your image. Even with JPEG, the person’s face (and other identifiable parts of their image) can be pixelized without affecting the quality of the rest of the image (using a program like jpegpixi, but not a usual image editor).
• The problem was that you’ve failed to make a proper deletion request; consider using the “Nominate for deletion” button when you want to propose something for a deletion discussion. When you need something to be deleted quickly, there are other templates like {{Speedy}}.
• Depending on how important it is, there is the template {{Personality rights}}, pixelization, speedy deletion… At least sometimes, a photo of a person made in a public place is not illegal.

--AVRS (talk) 16:12, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Licences that are revocable are considered non-free here. The point of free content is that it has to be usable by anyone for any purpose at any time. Basically, if there is a copyright related loophole that allows you to revoke the licence, it is not free. ViperSnake151 (talk) 21:54, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If I upload an image on Commons I have the right to revoque it and to delete the image, and I have the right to change my image and, for axample, to upload on that image an image saying "deleted", it is a right of anyone in Wikipedia and Commons. Vibria (talk) 19:55, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, you don't. By uploading you release the rights to it, you can't claim them back at a later date. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:57, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

And I have the right to ask in a court to delete my own work. Vibria (talk) 19:58, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Ok, which license is your work under? Read its terms. Show us where it says you can revoke it. It's a legal agreement, you cannot. -Nard the Bard 20:09, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have the right to ask it in a Court i si m'emprenyau ho faré. Vibria (talk) 20:11, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You have the right to ask, but you'd lose. By DONATING (read UPLOADING) images to Commons, you release AT LEAST the following rights:

• Republication must be allowed.
• Distribution must be allowed.
• The creation of derivative works must be allowed.
• Commercial use must be allowed.

By trying to withdraw an image, you are stopping distribution of the image - a right you released. You're welcome to publish elsewhere under a different licence, but your donation to commons includes the agreement that anyone has the rights to reuse the image and distribute it as they see fit (subject to licence terms). -mattbuck (Talk) 20:17, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The image has been deleted because it was obvious that you’ve requested deletion in good faith and not just decided that Commons doesn’t deserve to have your images. --AVRS (talk) 14:00, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever I create templates on Wikipedia, Wiktionary or another project I try to make it as efficient and flexible as possible. Today I spent some thoughts on a template for one of the minor Wiktionaries. My thought was, that all Wiktionary entries on animals and plants should have info on the scientific latin name of the species and an image. But I didn't like the idea of having to choose an image of a prototypical exemplar from Commons for every single one of them. Too much work to go to categories and galleries to choose the best of the best and the most examplary image of the species. I thought about a bot using the English translation given in the dictionary entry to get the name of the image used in the infobox of the English Wikipedia article on that species. But the Wiktionary interwiki link doesn't necessarily match the title of the Wikipedia article... Then I had a much better idea. Choosing the best and most examplary image of a specific species shouldn't be the job of the creator of the entry on Wiktionary, that job would be much better done by the people on Commons. They are the experts on images. They know the available images better. Image redirects do work now, so we could create redirects like Image:Bos taurus.jpg pointing to the most examplary image of a cow or bull available on Commons. Image:Megachasma pelagios.jpg would redirect to the most examplary image of a Megamouth shark available on Commons. We actually have no image of a Megamouth shark on Commons at all, but that would be another advantage: If an image of a Megamouth shark becomes available, we have to manually update all Wikipedia articles and all Wiktionary entries to include this new image. But with the proposed naming scheme we could create templates using #ifexist: which look for the existance of those image redirects. That would mean, our Megamouth shark would immediately be visible in all Wikipedia articles with these flexible templates after we create the Image:Megachasma pelagios.jpg redirect.

What do you think about this idea? --Slomox (talk) 23:58, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's just asking for editwarring. It's already the case on en: that a large number of image uploaders think that the "most exemplary" image is the one that they just uploaded, no matter what was there already. There is also a problem in that "exemplary" depends on the use, so a cookbook might prefer a picture of a cherry fruit, while the gardening manual wants a picture of the cherry flower. Even so, I could see maybe introducing a mini-voting or ranking scheme of some sort. For redirects, exemplar images would need some unique name prefix/suffix, since many of the "genus species.jpg" names are in use already, often by poor images to boot. Stan Shebs (talk) 16:23, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's just asking for editwarring Every edit can cause an editwar. You could create a catologue of needed features for "exemplary images" (like "the face of an animal has to be visible", "organisms should be shown in their natural habitat" etc.). It would only be accepted to change the redirect to another image, if the new image fulfuls more criterions from this catalogue. For example the English Wikipedia article on tigers shows a tiger in his natural habitat (Image:Tigerramki.jpg). But the tiger does not look at the photographer and the face is only visible half. The German Wikipedia articles has an image of a tiger in a zoo (Image:Panthera tigris tigris.jpg), but it looks at the viewer and the resolution of the image is higher. Both are okay, but Image:Panthera tigris tigris.jpg would be preferred, cause it has more advantages. For example images of white tigers, lying tigers, close-ups of tiger faces, bathing tigers, dead tigers etc. are all not examplary enough.

a cookbook might prefer a picture of a cherry fruit, while the gardening manual wants a picture of the cherry flower Of course you could extend my proposed scheme to Image:Prunus avium (fruit).jpg, Image:Prunus avium (flower).jpg, but my basic proposal is about biology and thus about the whole plant or animal (for plants with roots only the normally visible part, for insects the imago etc.).

If image names consisting of the taxon already exist, you can just move them. --Slomox (talk) 18:27, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The editwarring comes from asking people to pick just one of several possibilities, using what are basically subjective criteria. To use your example, is "in habitat" less important than percentage of face visible? What if the profile of the face shows the defining characteristic of the species, but the full face image is higher resolution? What do you do when everybody ranks the different criteria differently? Stan Shebs (talk) 19:32, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's not a problem specific to my proposal. You have to do the same as with all disputes. Try finding consensus. My proposal demands the same decisions, which are also to be made when choosing a picture for the taxobox of a Wikipedia article. The difference is only, that from a standard scheme directly on Commons all projects can benefit immediately. --Slomox (talk) 20:24, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Some species exhibit sexual dimorphism where male and female have different colour/size/presence or absence of body parts, so it won't work. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:55, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I already had some thoughts on possible criterions for above-mentioned catalogue and sexual bimorphism was one of it. The image should show both a male and a female if there is a relevant sexual bimorphism. If there is no image available showing both a male and a female, we have to use an image of only one of both for the time being. That's actually what Wikispecies and Wikipedia do too, see fo example species:Tetrao urogallus and the Wikipedia articles linked from it. --Slomox (talk) 15:41, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User talk:SterkeBak is locked. I do not think that is acceptable. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 21:20, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why am I not surprised ? - Erik Baas (talk) 21:36, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It expires in a few hours. Probably just a test. Lycaon (talk) 21:41, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What is there to be tested? This admin is writing on his talk page, but it is now not possible to leave a message. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 21:46, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, there's something going on between him and MarkMu, which started months ago on nl-wiki. Look at the history of the page. - Erik Baas (talk) 21:48, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User MarkMu was importing problems from a other wiki (where he is block for two years) to commons. I have reverted him a few time's but he didn't stop. So i protected my talkpage so he had to stop (he is going true email but that is something that i can ignore). I removed the protection after 10 minutes so i don't see the problem really. Pieter next time send me a email or something like that. Posting in the villagepump was not needed. Sterkebaktalk 21:56, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

10 minutes is not true, it was 44. Why do you lie about that ? - Erik Baas (talk) 23:54, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just add to your .css file .usermessage { display: none; } if the orange banners are annoying you. Administrators should not use their powers for their own convenience. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 23:24, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Which brings me to the next question: what if an administrator tries to get an image deleted, just because of a personal conflict about it on nl-wiki ? And what if he does so anonymously ? See here. - Erik Baas (talk) 23:54, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sterkebak, you should probably ask someone else to protect your talk page rather than doing it yourself, but would you two please quit the mud-slinging, it's fun when there's a hot girl involved, but unless you two are willing to go on webcam and prove that you are hot girls, it's just annoying. I don't see the relevance of an IP nomming an image for deletion, even if it is Sterkebak. HOWEVER, having looked at the (fairly terrible) google translation of the revisions to Sterkebak's talk page, I don't see why it needed protecting at all. Seemed like a legit grievance to me. -mattbuck (Talk) 00:24, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• I hate to say it, but I'm starting to believe Sterkebak should not be kept after his probationary period. He knows far too little for copyright, even nominating an image of a dsl modem as a "derivative work" even with no artwork on it, and apparently knowing nothing of fop, nominating an image from the UK. -Nard the Bard 01:39, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mattbuck i ask twice on the irc channel but no one give a respond. I really believe if you are vandal on a other project and are blocked there, you don't have to come to commons and leave messages like [1] or send me hatemail. After the protection the user ask te be blocked. If MarkMu want's to say sorry or something like that he can do before attacking me with talkpage messages and emails over two years not here en now. Nard the Bard i am very sorry to hear that, but if i am not sure about a image i nominate it for deletion. I didn't really know a admin should know all COM:FOP rules.If I am not sure i nominate. Sterkebaktalk 03:43, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• I take back what I said, as Sterkebak points out on my talk page there is a legitimate question whether fop applies where the statue was. I'm sorry maybe I was just doubting too much. -Nard the Bard 16:44, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As some one who voted *against* Sterkebak for commons administrator may I please try to help out here? Please give this guy the leeway and allow help and coaching from his mentors now and do not jump on him. Also I do hope that he can constrain himself and not react on comments received from blocked wiki-nl user MarkMu at all how hard this may be sometimes for him. Mark knows he should not do this but I understood that due to serious personal problems he wrote about he cannot sometimes restrain himself so if those of you please focus on judging Sterkebak on his willingness to work hard and allow his mentors to help him learn the "how to" do well and improve hopefully up to standard and do not jump on the bandwagon. If some one has a problem with work done by Sterkebak I suggest focus on the case involved and contact one of his mentors describing the problem encountered factually. Kind regards, MoiraMoira (talk) 08:07, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The category Cathedrals by Country has the cathedrals listed in alphabetical order of the country. However, each individual sub-cat begins with the word "Cathedral", as in "Cathedrals in France" etc. Probably for this reason a number of the countries are listed under "C" for "Cathedral" rather than under the appropriate initial letter of the country. So, under "C" are listed "Cathedrals in Canada", "Cathedrals in Australia", "Cathedrals in Serbia" etc etc. There are about four countries wrong listed, and I have no idea how to fix the problem. Mandy (talk) 08:29, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info. I've fixed a couple so if you check my last edit you will see one I got right first time (!). Basically you need to pipe the name of the country to get the sort correct. So for Serbia for example you need to add |Serbia to the end of Cathedrals by country and that will work. There may be better ways to do it of course but taht is the one I know. Thanks --Herby ^{talk thyme} 08:37, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Does this happen very often? Otherwise i could write a bot to check all the ..by country categories every once in a while. Multichill (talk) 12:12, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Happens relatively often, especially when using HotCat. While at it, one could check the of/from or in/of consistency and cat naming consistency (I.e. "Topic from France" vs "French topic"). The sooner those problems are detected, the less effort needed for correcting. --Foroa (talk) 12:46, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, i'll write something. In the meantime, take a look at User:Multichill/By country to fix & User:Multichill/No country. Multichill (talk) 13:18, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What are you saying here? Are these lists of errors that must be tackled manually- or lists, that one of your bots is about to do and you are wanting manually confirmation that these are the correct changes?

Also, the of/from or in/of consistency - can you remind me where I find the current thinking on which style to adopt?ClemRutter (talk) 13:58, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Manual labour unfortunatly, from the second list i'm doing some (not much) with a bot.

As for the of/from/in consistency, i just look at the other categories. Dont know if we have a style guide somewhere. Multichill (talk) 14:18, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There exists Commons:By location category scheme, but it's messy and not followed. It would be great to have more consistency for this. Pruneau^talk 15:33, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fully agree. If it is messy, so it is normal that it is not followed. To put it politely, de commons scheme and rules is growing organically and I am somtimes amazed about (some of) the resulting consistency. so it might be the right time to review that category scheme. --Foroa (talk) 16:48, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Herby! Mandy (talk) 00:36, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since my complaint above was completely ignored, I'll try again:

Any idea what's wrong with these images: Image:2D33.png, Image:2D3A.png, Image:2D42.png, Image:2D65.png, Image:2D6F.png? None of them will load for me. Similar images, such as Image:2D32.png work fine though. In case it's not clear, these images are not loading in actual articles, so this is somewhat of a serious problem. Kaldari (talk) 21:23, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As far as i can see whe have the discription page but the files are missing. I think whe must upload the files again. But i am not sure enough, the problem could be solved in a few day's as it is a server error. But i am not sure. Sterkebaktalk 21:33, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Seem to be on the missing images list too. Multichill (talk) 22:27, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There was a glitch a couple months ago and some images were permanently lost -- no option but to find copies and re-upload them. One way is to see if the Wayback Machine has copies. Find the actual image URL from the link on the image page, for example http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/2D33.png . Then search on archive.org, using the URL http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/2D33.png (note it is web.archive.org, not www). That may show results (sometimes multiple copies), and if so they could be downloaded. archive.org does have access errors on some of its versions, so it doesn't always work. In this example, http://web.archive.org/web/20080229090350/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/2D33.png does seem to be there. It may be an interesting bot to write to see how many of the remaining missing images can be retrieved this way, for folks who know how to do that sort of thing. Carl Lindberg (talk) 03:58, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I restored these five images using archive.org copies. Carl Lindberg (talk) 18:39, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've got such a script on the toolserver, and I just updated it to parse the format of Tim's latest report. It's running right now. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:09, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Here they are. There were quite a lot of 503 errors, so I may be able to recover a few more if I run it again in a few days. Note that these are the latest versions archive.org has, which may not always be the version that was lost. Also, I didn't even try to recover the ones listed as "size mismatch", both because my script can't tell them from already fixed images and because some of them may have more complicated issues than the ones that are simply missing. Now running the same script for enwiki... —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:41, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Very, very cool -- can those just be moved back into place, or do they have to be manually uploaded? You can check the archive.org timestamp (part of the URL) against the image history's version list to see which version it is; not sure how easy that is in the bot. For the above few images, I had some 503 errors the day before, so trying it even the next day may have good results. Really cool though. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:41, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

At least 19 individual image files in Cyrillic alphabet and Early Cyrillic appear to be broken for some time.

I can replace 16 from my originals, but three were created by another editor.

Does anyone know what happened? How many images in the database have been permanently lost, hundreds, thousands, or an unknown number? How do we identify them? Is there an effort to recover them from backups, from their creators' originals, or from mirror sites?

Am I to understand that my efforts in creating files for the commons will always be in danger of being lost permanently? This appears to be a newsworthy failure, and a very serious threat to confidence in the Wikimedia projects. —Michael Z. 2008-10-24 21:26 z

A lot of the Cyrillic images seem to be on the missing images list. Multichill (talk) 22:26, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What is this list? —Michael Z. 2008-10-25 00:21 z

List of images which are in the database, but not or corrupted on disk. Quite a lot of images went MIA as you can see :( Multichill (talk) 00:27, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone know when and why these images disappeared? Is this something that happens regularly? Is there no backup?

I've had three hard drives fail without warning in my office this year—it has to be planned for. Is this project with thousands of contributors operating on the “hope the inevitable never happens” theory? —Michael Z. 2008-10-25 16:13 z

The backup was erased too, if I remember correctly. Human error. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 16:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Where are the details? I have a link to one incident, but it has a different list of lost files. Is there a list of incidents? Has the cause been identified and steps taken to prevent a reoccurrence? —Michael Z. 2008-10-25 17:56 z

My understanding is that there was only one incident, but it was difficult to check what images had disappeared. The current list should be authoritative.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 18:05, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Where are the details? The Sept 5 incident report says that exactly 496 images were lost, and doesn't mention any difficulty checking. The other list, with no explanation, shows over 1,500 missing images.

Is there any documentation of this large list, the causes of missing images, and the steps taken to prevent a reoccurence, or is it all “if I remember correctly” and “my understanding,” and everybody's just pretending it can't happen again? Is there a backup somewhere which can't be destroyed by the backup process? —Michael Z. 2008-10-25 18:32 z

Fortunately th:user:Octahedron80 uploaded the three other broken image files in Cyrillic alphabet. --Ukko-wc (talk) 13:12, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've gone through the email list archive linked above, and found relevant discussion in September under the subject “Massive image loss”[2] and October in two threads under “More image loss”[3]

I don't understand the technical explanations, but it appears that a developer made a mistake and lost 3000 images, recovered all but 496, and many of those were replaced by members of that list since. But later it was discovered that the scope of the loss was larger, and a list of over 1,500 missing images was generated.

It appears that the particular set of circumstances which caused this loss has been changed so it won't recur again. It appears that a safe set of backup snapshots will be regularly generated after some ZFS server setup is complete, but not yet.

It is unclear whether the list of missing files is complete, or whether the loss was caused by the one incident. I don't know whether actions are still being taken to recover the remainder.

Unfortunately, it also appears that an undetermined number of image pages were permanently deleted because they had missing image files. I don't know if they have been identified.

I am disappointed that a problem which affects many Wiki projects for nearly two months is being kept close to the developers' chests. Why not post an announcement and systematically canvas image contributors to re-upload their files?

This looks like a serious failure to me:

1. data and its backup were lost
2. recovery has been partial
3. there is no systematic recovery effort
4. basic information about this not being reported to Wikimedia's users
5. information about the scope of the problem and its current status isn't available anywhere

I'll consider re-uploading my lost images, and making any more image contributions, after these issues are addressed. Frankly, I'm now concerned about making any contributions at all, and about the safety of the hundreds or thousands of hours of work I've put into Wikimedia projects up to this point. —Michael Z. 2008-10-25 19:05 z

I agree. Something official should have been stated somewhere on Commons. Even if "official" is a bit misleading here, something authoritative should have been stated. If this happens again, the effect on morale would be devastating. Carcharoth (Commons) (talk) 16:43, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think there may be communication issues in both directions. I doubt Tim Starling or any of the other server admins read this page very often, so if you want your (quite legitimate) complaints to have any chance of actually improving things, you should probably contact them directly. Or post on the relevant mailing list. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:52, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I tried to contact him on en.wikipedia recently. --Ukko-wc (talk) 23:13, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps you're simply not aware that there was an official announcement. It was made immediately following the incident, and there was discussion here and on mailing lists regarding it. There have since been further announcements of subsequent developments. You can say that "a problem which affects many Wiki projects for nearly two months is being kept close to the developers' chests" but that doesn't make it true.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 23:32, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Were announcements made on the affected Wikipedias and other projects, or on uploader's talk pages? I'm not accusing anyone of keeping secrets, but there's no effective communication. I'm going on and on about it here, but still no one knows the current status of this very serious problem (I don't think that asking individuals to join an email list or write personal requests to a developer are appropriate venues for something affecting thousands of images). And as I write this, someone is posting deletion notifications to my talk page, so it appears that the “official announcement” just didn't do the trick. —Michael Z. 2008-10-27 06:31 z

We have used the best communication methods we have available. If you want something better, please propose it or implement it. Tim Starling is not responsible for notifying every contributor - he made a notification to the appropriate mailing list. That notification was spread by interested users, including to this page about 3 or 4 weeks ago. Apathy from contributors is not his fault, nor anyone else's - we cannot force people to listen.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 17:57, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Apathy?? For most contributors, Commons is a depository, which they seldom need to visit. That is why it does not work to notify commons accounts (I am talking in general now, of license problems and things like that). Typical contributors look in here only when they upload. Users that take images from here may not even own an account here. Commons needs to reach out more, and warn people on their home acounts. And also, how about instructing a bot similar to the commons delinker, to leave messages on talk pages of articles with threatened images ahead of deletion? /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 18:32, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's been seven weeks since the accident happened. I have some proposals on what to do now.

1. Post a prominent note at the top of Commons:Deletion requests asking admins not to delete corrupt images, because this will cause irretrievable loss.
2. Create a page to keep track of the current status of this problem, and ask the mailing list members who are working on this to update it.
3. Post an announcement with a link to that page which will show up at the top of all registered editors' pages, until they hit “dismiss”.
4. Identify uploaders of the broken images and ask them to re-upload.

I don't know exactly how to do any of these things. If no one else can do any of these, then I will gradually start working down the list myself. —Michael Z. 2008-10-27 23:54 z

@Mike.lifeguard: I just did not find any information what to do now. Am I right that this list is still up-to-date, and that the authors of the images should be informed to upload lost images again if possible? At least for de.wikipedia most of the images are still broken, and I would try to encourage people to upload them again before they are deleted or removed from articles. --Ukko-wc (talk) 19:05, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, there's a newer list (which was announced by Tim in the same message as the earlier one, so I'm not sure why the older one is making the rounds). Also, I recently went through the list and recovered what I could from the Internet Archive: those images are here. Note that some of those may be older revisions. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:15, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Pieter, please feel free to implement that bot idea - it sounds quite useful. You may wish to contact Melancholie, who is working on something similar. However, I think adding a diplomatically-worded note to the watchlist notice is perhaps a good idea; I will do that now.

Michael, deleting the images will not cause a loss any more irretrievable than is already the case. Thumbnails for the images still exist, only the full-resolution files were lost. Thus, it is less likely that anyone will remove the images from the pages where they are used. That said, all admins should be aware that images on that list should not be deleted. Nominations of images for such reasons as "corrupted file" should be checked against the most current list of lost images.

I understand that you are upset at this situation, however some rationality and care with both words and actions is prudent always, and in this context in particular. Thanks for your calm.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 01:29, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mike, some of that is incorrect. My missing uploads are also missing their thumbnails (e.g., in infoboxes in w:en:Ksi (Cyrillic letter) and w:en:Izhitsa), and editors have been posting deletion requests for them on Commons, with the reason “corrupt image” (see user talk:Mzajac). If an image is deleted here, then it may be removed from articles in an unknown number of Wiki projects, untraceably I suppose. This cannot be undone. —Michael Z. 2008-10-28 23:36 z

Thumbnailing is probably a different issue, but I will try to grab Tim for a moment.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 00:10, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that while thumbs were unaffected, if the thumb got purged for any reason, it'd not be replaced as there's no file. So I will update the watchlist notice.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 00:15, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. —Michael Z. 2008-10-29 01:00 z

Okay, there's now a tracking category for these images at Category:Images affected by the September 2008 image loss bug. All of the images from the 2008-10-19 report that are still broken should be there, except for the ones listed as "size mismatch" (those seem to be more complicated). I've also reuploaded all the ones I could managed to recover from archive.org. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:53, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! This category will help very much. --Ukko-wc (talk) 08:15, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

One note -- the message on the watchlist page links to the 2008-10-10 list of images, not the 2008-10-19 list... that should probably be fixed. Another note, I randomly noticed that Image:Narmername.png is a missing image, and Image:Narmer.png was previously deleted as a duplicate -- can an admin retrieve the image that way? Not sure if there is any way to trawl through deletion logs looking for links to some of these missing images, but that may nab a few more if so. Carl Lindberg (talk) 05:13, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another way to recover some files is to look for files transferred from the different wikipedias. Even if they were deleted there, admins on the respective projects still should have access to the files (unless they were deleted before a certain date which I don't remember right now, three years ago or so). I have already recovered some files from the German wikipedia, and I've seen other files which were originally transferred from the English, Dutch, Italian, French and Japanese wikipedias. --Rosenzweig δ 00:29, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I recovered some more, all recoverable images from de.wp should now be restored. A lot of images were transferred from the English wikipedia, anybody reading this who is an admin there please try to recover the files. Regards --Rosenzweig δ 16:33, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have crafted a SQL query that lists people who have uploaded images made by different cameras. These may be people who are very rich and can afford multiple cameras, people who often upload images from other projects... or, people who snatch the first image they find from the web and upload it here.

Probably, people more versed in Commons procedures should go after such uploaders, so if someone is interested, (s)he may ask that this query is run at the Toolserver's Query service. The query follows:

select *,sum(cnt) as num_images, count(*) as num_cameras, sum(cnt)/count(*) as image_camera_ratio from

(
select
--      img_metadata,
        trim(substr(img_metadata,locate('s:4:"Make";s:', img_metadata)+13+length(substring_index(substr(img_metadata,locate('s:4:"Make";s:', img_metadata)+13), ':', 1))+2,substring_index(substr(img_metadata,locate('s:4:"Make";s:', img_metadata)+13), ':', 1)))        as      img_metadata_make,
        trim(substr(img_metadata,locate('s:5:"Model";s:', img_metadata)+14+length(substring_index(substr(img_metadata,locate('s:5:"Model";s:', img_metadata)+14), ':', 1))+2,substring_index(substr(img_metadata,locate('s:5:"Model";s:', img_metadata)+14), ':', 1)))     as      img_metadata_model,
        img_user,
        img_user_text,
        count(*)        as      cnt
from image
where img_metadata <> '0' and img_metadata regexp 's:4:"Make";.*s:5:"Model"'
group by img_user,concat(img_metadata_make,img_metadata_model)
--limit 50
) a

group by img_user
order by num_cameras desc, image_camera_ratio asc;

Nikola (talk) 21:40, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean by go after such uploaders? I'd be one of them, and I'm neither very rich, nor do i snatch the first image they find from the web and upload it here, nor do I often upload from other projects. I simply a) upgraded to an SLR a 1.5 years ago, and uploaded occasional edits of other peoples' images. --Dschwen (talk) 21:46, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think uploading from 10 or 20 different cameras gets somewhat suspicious, warranting a closer look. Lycaon (talk) 21:50, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I believe I'd have 5 cameras (6 next year), some Flickr uploads, a couple grabs from Creative Commons websites, some diagrams I whipped up in Powerpoint, a couple figures I threw together in CAD, a screenshot, a couple USGS images, and... hmm I'm sure I could think up some more. Perhaps the intent is good, but I'm a bit skeptical of the value. Er, unless I'm misunderstanding this whole tool to begin with... always a very likely possibility. --Bossi (talk • gallery • contrib) 22:01, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know. I am aware of a user uploading from HP Photosmart E327, HP Photosmart E427, SONY DSC-H2, SONY DSC-F828, SONY CYBERSHOT, SONY DSC-H9, SONY DSC-P73, Premier DS 3090s (3MP-9CA), SAMSUNG DIGIMAX A503, DV 4MP-9TU, Olympus C5050Z, Fujifilm FinePix4900ZOOM and plenty without exif, claiming them all his own... Lycaon (talk) 22:12, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If we would have a scoring filter for suspicious behaviour, uploading images from all sorts of camera's would certainly improve the probability. Nikola, did you already test or do the query? Multichill (talk) 22:22, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I know a couple camera gurus whom collect a whole swath of different cameras, and they use pretty much all of them for various purposes. I agree with Multichill that this would be a great component of a greater tool which scans across numerous suspicious indicators, but on its own: I'd take it lightly. --Bossi (talk • gallery • contrib) 17:17, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I did run the query, it didn't took too long. The biggest culprits are bots, as expected, and I haven't actually found some copyright violators - probably because I haven't looked into number of cameras vs total number of pictures uploaded. But results from running it on some Wikipedias were more useful. I can put the results somewhere for download if someone is interested. Nikola (talk) 19:36, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are many reasons why people upload photos from multiple cameras. For example somobody works for magazine that test cameras etc. I declared my cameras at userpage, but some photos that I made are also from different cameras. --Dezidor (talk) 16:55, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, check manually users who look suspicious based on this. Nikola (talk) 19:36, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is outrageous. Professionals and amateurs may have access to several cameras at schools, user groups, their own studios, or large agencies. They may also be reposting images from open sources—you know, like Wikis or something. To automatically consider them suspicious is not only a blatant disregard for good faith, but potentially casting aspersions on projects just like this one.

This may also be a violation of privacy, and a great tool for thieves who can fence expensive collections of cameras, and for overzealous police agencies who harass people when they take their medicine on the plane or take pictures at a public place. If people around here start treating my personal information this way, then I may reconsider what contributions I want to make.

To be clear: my beef is not about what data is available and how can be processed. It is about the attitude of the way it is being interpreted. —Michael Z. 2008-10-25 19:19 z

Please. No one suggested automated people hunting, but simply using this as a pointer for people to check potential violators. Nikola (talk) 19:36, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The trouble is, for the reasons given above, it will be almost useless as a way to catch copyright violators. Most people who do that sort of stuff strip meta data before uploading. Better to tackle this from a different angle. Identify images lacking paperwork and then examine other uploads by the uploader. Better still would be a reliable method of image patrolling, such that all images can be checked by reliable people who will take responsibility if they mark a dodgy image as patrolled. Also, image patrolling would avoid the same images being checked over and over again by different people. Carcharoth (Commons) (talk) 16:40, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't such image patrolling be a bit too authoritarian (not to mention an excessive burden), though? I must agree with Bossi above; this could be an useful tool for help in generally indicating possible trouble, but by itself it just doesn't do much. Besides, considering how inexpensive and "borrowable" digital cameras are these days, I don't think it even amounts to much of a wealth indicator either. Nikola overstated the matter with that talk of "very rich" people. But it is still a good idea to try and find possible fakes, so this tools is not without value, if taken with a grain of salt, as an aid for other tools. Luis Dantas (talk) 09:56, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The wording on the original post isn't all that great; it does seem to imply that multiple cameras is grounds for suspicion (which it is not). It is an interesting idea, though my gut feel is that there is going to be a lot of "noise" (i.e. absolutely legitimate uploaders) in the results (and quite likely the large majority of them). Most images you randomly grab off the net do not have EXIF info in them. You would also have to do a lot of legwork to find the original versions of the photos (existing elsewhere prior to their upload to Wikipedia/Commons) to show that there is in fact a problem (multiple cameras in and of itself indicates nothing). That said, speculation is just that -- there is no way to tell for sure (either way) without actually running the query, and actually investigating the results. Someone may indeed come up with a pattern or filter that can identify at least a number of problematic uploads. Was this query actually run, and did any of the higher results seem to show actual problems? Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:44, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Michael, there is a privacy concern here. Generally, it's not a good idea to collect this kind of information about people unless there is a very good reason to. Guido den Broeder (talk) 21:23, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That is also a good point. Technically, the information is already available for everyone, just not formatted, but it still would not be a good idea to make the statistics easily available. That in turn may lead to people stripping EXIF information from uploads, which is not something we want to encourage. Carl Lindberg (talk) 03:38, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I ran it (after my initial comment), and all the suspicious people I looked into manually were people who were uploading images from Wikipedias. Nikola (talk) 21:09, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Could you please post this image onto this discussion. EvP (talk) 12:59, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why can you not do this? -mattbuck (Talk) 13:10, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Because it's semi-protected and I don't have an auto-confirmed account on Wikipedia. EvP (talk) 13:21, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

On what place of the article do you wan't it? Sterkebaktalk 14:51, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In the top right hand corner of the sub-section called "UK vs. worldwide perspective". It would also be better as 300 or 400 pixels wide instead of a thumb. Thank you very much. EvP (talk) 15:13, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

 Done Sterkebaktalk 15:30, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• • Wikipedia has it's own procedure for this kind of request and has a much larger community of editors and admins to help. Just drop the tag {{editprotected}} on a talk page with an explanation of the request. J.smith (talk) 22:52, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Under section for uploading using "US federal government source", I recommend adding

• "Original work of the US Marine Corps"
• "Original work of the US Department of State"

FieldMarine (talk) 15:06, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is this the correct place to make recommendations? FieldMarine (talk) 12:55, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Why separate tags? I think the rules are the same. J.smith (talk) 22:50, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are lots of PD-USGov sub-tags, which somewhat show a source (and sub-categorize) as well. {{PD-USGov-Military-Marines}} and {{PD-USGov-State}} tags exist and can be typed in manually; I think the "easy" dropdown is probably for government sites which have a large number of available images (especially image databases) and so are particularly common, but that is just a guess. Department of State may be a good idea to add since that could encompass all the embassy-made images too. Carl Lindberg (talk) 05:44, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Hi, this is Rod Stewart in 2004. But who is the woman with the violin? Has she an article in wikipedia?
• And who is the guy with the guitar solo after 2' 45" ?
• And are the black beauties/background vocals notable? Regards Mutter Erde (talk) 19:16, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Go try the en.wp RD. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:40, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If it is the 2004 tour, this page may help. Carl Lindberg (talk) 20:34, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, that's interesting. Youtube has some more of this concert in Royal Albert Hall, October: So it should be: en:J'Anna Jacoby - Violin, Mandolin, Guitar & Backing Vocals , en:Natasha Pearce - Backing Vocals, en:Esther Nicholson - Backing Vocals, en:Julie Delgado - Backing Vocals and en:Robin Le Mesurier - Guitar.

Thank you very much :-) But no articles :-(. Regards ;-) Mutter Erde (talk) 20:43, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks to Carl Regards Mutter Erde (talk) 12:31, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any way to make it larger, more washed out, and more obscured? ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:57, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• I already complained about it. They said "tough luck". See Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2008Sep#big-ass_Commons_logo_in_the_background. -Nard the Bard 05:51, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think it needs to be more visible. -mattbuck (Talk) 13:12, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the problem is that the visibility is highly variable. On long pages like this, it's almost invisible, but on short pages with only a line or two of text, it really jumps out at you. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:05, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't help that the image uses nearly-white colors: the appearance of such colors varies greatly across monitors. --Carnildo (talk) 20:27, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the problem is it's twice the filesize of the old image & over four times as tall, and you can barely make out what it is even the 0.00001% of the time it isn't obscured by content. That and as far as I can tell it's just another unilateral change by an admin that has nothing to do with consensus and has no oversight. ¦ Reisio (talk) 20:23, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You're complaining that the file is SIXTEEN kilobytes? It's 16kb which you download ONCE because from then on it's in your temporary internet files. -mattbuck (Talk) 20:32, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have re-opened a deletion request for this file at Commons:Deletion requests/Image:Commons-bg.png. I hate this file, please show the admins the community does have a voice. -Nard the Bard 21:21, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy kept - Don't open a DR just to complain that you don't like the background. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:43, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure you just forgot to include suggestions on what we should do instead (like Bastique), and that you didn't just dismiss our opinions because you're a self-serving admin. You aren't so crass and obtuse an administrator as to deem normal users' actions "irrelevant", like some admins. ¦ Reisio (talk) 03:34, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It was already being discussed at Village Pump; and it was a bad faith deletion request. Let me state again, whether we use the image as a background has nothing to do with the merits of keeping the image and making it a deletion request was out of order. Your sarcasm is crass and obtuse and unconstructive. Bastique ^demandez 15:44, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There was no direction given "on what we should do instead" at that discussion either. My sarcasm pales in comparison to an administrator calling several users' collective opinion "irrelevant" and blocking their pursuits without so much as attempting to explain why or what should be done instead. If such a response had been given to my face, that would have been the end of his participation in the discussion. Is there a single virtuous administrator who sees this travesty? SPEAK. ¦ Reisio (talk) 21:57, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is a good place to have this discussion, DR is not. Even if the file ends up getting removed from use as the background, there isn't really any need to delete it.

In any event, lets see some alternatives. Just whining about it is not very useful. As Reisio is requesting, I can upload a ligheter version of the file. Another idea is a few very stylized polaroids strewn about. Make them about the same lightness as the current background. I'll throw a few ideas together tonight and upload them. J.smith (talk) 22:44, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Side note - you should be able to set your own background in your monobook file.[4] J.smith (talk) 22:48, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

…and I can replace every last bit of content on this site with userContent.css, but I'm not going to do that, either. ¦ Reisio (talk) 03:34, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

One has nothing to do wit the other Bastique ^demandez 15:44, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

They clearly do to me; can you say how they do not, or would you prefer just saying something that makes no sense, and then not explaining at all, as you apparently have become accustomed to doing? ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:17, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can we please have some maturity? If you don't like the skin, you can change it. If you don't know how, please ask for help. POINTy deletion requests and name-calling are unhelpful at best and disruptive at worst. Continuing in that vein will be bad for the project.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 16:00, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not nearly as bad for the project as administrators doing whatever they please without being held accountable — instead lecturing people on how they are immature. ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:08, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please remove this default background image. Those that like this kind of stuff, can put it in their .css-files or skins. I have now seen on a different computer how distracting this strange thing can look like. Get rid of it. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 16:44, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What exactly would you prefer? It makes commons look slightly different, which IMO is a good thing. -mattbuck (Talk) 17:06, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I rather think it quite obvious that those of us not taking your position would prefer the way things were before. ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:13, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure whether this is already familiar, but thanks to the Sevenval AG a mobile phone version of Commons is available, online: http://commons.wikimedia.7val.com/ --Melancholie (talk) 16:35, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I use the mobile version of the Opera browser. That one can also view commons. (it is pretty fast also) but gonna check it out :-) Sterkebaktalk 21:52, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unable to upload image of Nicholas Carr from Flickr [5]. I have tried twice. It's upsetting.Manhattan Samurai (talk) 00:59, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean?Manhattan Samurai (talk) 01:07, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is this some kind of a joke? Why the hell won't it upload... and why is it red? Look in my contributions history and you can see my attempts. Please help.Manhattan Samurai (talk) 01:09, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It appears to have worked. -mattbuck (Talk) 01:17, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, great then. The first upload still doesn't work though. But who cares.Manhattan Samurai (talk) 01:56, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Would anyone be able to remove the sound component from an ogg video, or provide instructions how to? I have one of birds taking a bird bath, but there is some distracting radio and a little talking in the background which would probably be best removed. It would be nice if the sounds the birds made could be kept, but that seems like a far more difficult task. Richard001 (talk) 01:42, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Sure. It's relatively easy to do with VLC or en:Super (software), both of which are free. -Nard the Bard 01:46, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• w:MediaCoder works well if you know what you're doing.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 18:20, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I often want to add categories to a file/page, and use en.wikipedia as a guide. However, categories here and at Wikipedia don't match up all that well, often because WP has a more extensive system of categorization than Commons and thus many of the links are red. When I encounter such a red link, I generally look at what the parent categories are at Wikipedia and add them instead. Sometimes you have to go to the 'grandparent' or further to find a suitable category, and some of these will be irrelevant. We seem to have bots that do this automatically, selecting parent categories if a redlink is found, when images are moved from Wikipedia. They are not very good at it of course (an area to improve), but a they provide a good base of categories to choose from - the irrelevant ones can be removed, and the relevant ones are quite likely to be there. Is there a way I can get a bot to do this when I'm creating, say, a new category? This way I could just trim down the ones the bot provides rather than tiresomely go through the process myself. The results might not be quite as good, but for the time it would save it would be worth it. Richard001 (talk) 03:27, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that automatic moving of EN:WP categories is good idea. There are some differences (for example foo people <-> people of Foo and so on). --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:31, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What of it? These are just category redirects (or should be); a bot can deal with them. Ideally a category redirect would not show up in blue at the bottom but another colour, just as non-existent categories show up in red. Richard001 (talk) 23:57, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has a more extensive system of general-purpose categories, while Commons often has a more fine-grained special-purpose system of categorizing images... AnonMoos (talk) 14:55, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

One can still refine one's categories as well, but some automation would surely speed the process up tremendously. I'm going through and writing down the process I use when categorizing here, and two things are clear - it's very algorithmic (and hence both boring and capable of being done by a machine) and takes a very long time to do thoroughly. It would be much more efficient to let a bot do the majority of the work, then I could look at what it had suggested/done and make any additions/removals etc as needed. Richard001 (talk) 23:57, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I AM TRYING TO DOWNLOAD THE DATABASE TO MY IPOD TOUCH BUT THIS LINK KEEP GIVING ME "INTERNET EXPLORER CAN NOT CONNET TO WEB SITE. "http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 HELP!!!

• Try downloading it with a real browser. Firefox sees it just fine. -Nard the Bard 18:50, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to Commons, and was recommended I patrolled new images as they were uploaded, as a way of helping out. Having asked on the IRC channel, I added a few gadgets in order to help with tagging images for speedy deletion. However, in the toolbox for such images, I'm left with two identical links to create a DR page, which is unnecessary for obvious copyvios. This obviously isn't right; there should be more links on the toolbox, and certainly not duplicates. I'd appreciate some help here, if possible. Thank you very much. How do you turn this on (talk) 14:32, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have the same thing with two DR options - I think that each tool adds one, so you get both. -mattbuck (Talk) 14:36, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you use monobook, it is best to add the script there with importScript(); rather than add it via gadgets.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 17:24, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Would you mind explaining how? Thanks. How do you turn this on (talk) 17:50, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Add the following to your monobook.js:

importScript('MediaWiki:Gadget-QuickDelete.js');

 — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 21:13, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. How do you turn this on (talk) 23:09, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The picture here was used in this revision on EN [6] - The description was "A classic example of a baby exposed to Cocaine and Meth while in the womb."

I don't believe the description. We need to rename this photo. WhisperToMe (talk) 06:58, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Deleted. Privacy issues as their was no parent's consent. Lycaon (talk) 07:03, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Do we have a maximum size for image galleries? Is there a number beyond which it won't display? Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 11:06, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User:FredrikT has brought to my attention a German law of 1907 by which photographic works are protected for 10 years from publication in 2nd Reich. This would put German images published before 1918 in the public domain.

I have drafted a template for these cases, which can be seen at User:Rama/PD-2ndReich. I submit it for review, particularly from people knowledgeable in German law. Thank you in advance. Rama (talk) 14:14, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Forget about it. EU directive 93/98/EEC has revived expired copyrights in July 1995. Within the EU, you need to apply a general copyright term of 70 years. See also User talk:MichaelMaggs/Archive/2008#The EU and historic copyright terms. Lupo 14:27, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That is not really true in all of the EU, see for example {{PD-Sweden-1969}}. EU directives are not really law, and implementations differ in different countries. The German court decision s:de:Oberlandesgericht Hamburg - U-Boot Foto 1941 which resurrected copyright might very well have had a different outcome in other EU countries. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 14:45, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For photos, there is the fact that some countries have a high threshold of originality for "photographic works", and a lower protection for photos that don't meet that threshold (so called "simple photographs"). That's what this {{PD-Sweden-1969}} tag is about. Germany, however, has a low threshold of originality for photos, and so does (and did) Spain. Therefore, apply 70 years to German (and Spanish) photos. Besides, a Swedish photo that is a simple photograph in Sweden may well be a "photographic work" elsewhere in countries with a low threshold (e.g., in Germany, or in Spain, or also in the U.S., who have a very low threshold of originality), and thus we shouldn't rely on simple photograph rules at all. But that is another old discussion that never came to a real conclusion.

And this EU directive 93/98/EEC is law, or at the very least as good as law: its implementation was mandatory, it was implemented by all EU members, and it had to be implemented by the "new" EU members before they joined. There are court cases from the European Court of Justice that have settled this revival of copyrights clearly enough. Lupo 15:56, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am deleting User:Rama/PD-2ndReich, then. It seems obvious that it will not be needed, and I would rather avoid any possible confusion caused by this template. Thank you, Lupo, for keeping the global picture in mind, your reminder is most appreciated. Rama (talk) 16:04, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Now wait here a minute! I've just studied the article "Oberlandesgericht Hamburg - U-Boot Foto 1941" on German Wikisource, and as far as I can see the conclusions made in this case regarding a photo from (or rather published in)1943 are not valid for at photo from the 1910s. Under 3) the court explicitly says that the copyright of the 1943 photo was renewed because its original copyright protection (25 years from publication) had not yet expired when the new copyright law of 1965 was launched ("§ 26 KUG ist durch das jetzige UrhG vom 9.9.1965 aufgehoben worden (§ 141 Nr.5 UrhG). Für vorher geschaffene Lichtbildwerke, die zum Zeitpunkt des Inkrafttretens des heutigen UrhG noch geschützt waren - dies war auch nach dem Vortrag der Antragsgegnerin bei dem streitgegenständlichen Foto der Fall - trat aufgrund der Übergangsvorschrift des § 129 UrhG die erst 1985 aufgehobene Bestimmung des § 68 UrhG in Kraft."). I can only understand this as:

• photos from 1940-64 whose copyright should have expired by the end of the years 1965-89 got their copyright renewed (with regard to the date of death of the photographer) with the new law of 1965,
• photos taken/published before 1939 whose copyright had already expired in 1965 (which would include all phots taken during the 2nd Reich) would not have had their copyright renewed in 1965.

Am I right or have I missed something? /FredrikT (talk) 19:38, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

PS The above would seem very similar to the rule in Sweden that photos taken before 1944 are not included in the current copyright law since their copyright had already expired by the date the new law became effective. /FredrikT (talk) 20:23, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You're certainly right about the non-revival of expired copyrights in 1965, but what is the connection with the EU directive, which did revive already expired copyrights? My take would be to look at §137f(2): "Die Vorschriften dieses Gesetzes in der ab dem 1. Juli 1995 geltenden Fassung sind auch auf Werke anzuwenden, deren Schutz nach diesem Gesetz vor dem 1. Juli 1995 abgelaufen ist,..." (emphasis added). §129(1) says "Die Vorschriften dieses Gesetzes sind auch auf die vor seinem Inkrafttreten geschaffenen Werke anzuwenden, es sei denn, daß sie zu diesem Zeitpunkt urheberrechtlich nicht geschützt sind oder daß in diesem Gesetz sonst etwas anderes bestimmt ist." (emphasis added). In my view, §137f(2) does "provide otherwise" because following §129(1), the 1965 UrhG did not revive already expired copyrights and thus such works had the same (already expired) term as under KUG. Since this term expired before July 1, 1995 (in fact, before 1965), §137f(2), which implements the EU directive, is applicable. But IANAL. Maybe ask User:Historiograf, he's the specialist for the German Urheberrechtsgesetz. Lupo 22:29, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Darn EU! I'm more and more proud that I voted against Sweden joining it. Pity it didn't help... /FredrikT (talk) 17:19, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It deffinitelly a wrong licence, because it's a derevativ work and thereby not {{tl|self}-made, even the author claims that it is. Because there is "San Francisco 1863" written below the picture I would use {{PD-old}}.
Does anybody else have another idea?
thx --D-Kuru (talk) 17:15, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If the original is PD, then the author has full rights to any derivative work, and the license is not necessarily wrong (the photo itself is certainly self-made). In this case you could maybe argue that the slight reflection in the glass and other effects, as silly as it may seem, is enough extra expression to qualify for a thin additional copyright. On the edge, but maybe in some jurisdictions. In this case, the original work is PD-US and probably PD-Old (apparently an 1863 edition of a work first published, and copyrighted, in 1862[7]). I don't think it's really worth changing the license (though noting that the primary part of the image is PD-US wouldn't hurt). Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:29, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think we should compile a list of people who are unwilling to change the license status of their uploads at Flickr. From my experience, the majority (who reply, at least; one never knows what to make of non-responses) seem willing to change the license. Those unwilling can be added to a list so that we don't have to bother them more than once. Additionally, a Commons-friendly list could also be added for those who say that they are willing the change the license on any image if requested. People could then look through their images to see if they have other ones that are needed here.

This is based on the assumption that I'm not the only person that requests images at Flickr (well, not the latter list actually, which could still be of some use to others if they asked me to make the request), which may not be the best one at this stage (there are one or two that I know of, but not many). However, if you look at the stats, you'll see that very few Flickr images are Commons compatible, yet as I have pointed out far more are with a request to the uploader. And Flickr has hundreds of times more images than we do, so if I am the only one that needs to change! Richard001 (talk) 00:07, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I can't say I see the need. There are thousands, if not millions of flickr users, and generally the chances of two commons users wanting the same user's photos is fairly small. Besides, it's a pointless exercise. Say I want photos from a flickr user, I would have two options:

1. Check the database, find out if the user is on it, and ask accordingly.
2. Just ask.

Option 2 is much quicker, involves less hassle, and doesn't cut us off from potential photo suppliers. If I go for option 1, and the person is on the list, then yes they won't get asked. But they may well be willing to licence some images but not others - ie, they may not be willing to release photos of a construction project they worked on, but would be willing to release pictures of a railway they visited on holiday. If you don't ask, you won't find out. And if they're not willing, well, that's a shame, but one extra request isn't going to make much difference, and since it's unlikely they'll be asked often anyway, it's not an issue.

All in all, it would be a waste of time to make it, it would be impossible to maintain it, it wouldn't be remotely complete, and it would just slow down the process of actually asking. -mattbuck (Talk) 01:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I guess the people who say no can always specify this in their profile if they are getting bothered by it. Flickr friendly users who take a lot of good photos on the other hand could be worth keeping an eye on, especially if the initial contact doesn't want to search through all their photos or is only looking for photos within a narrow range. Richard001 (talk) 08:13, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I asked for a rename of my account User:Miho_NL to User:Miho, both global owned by me. This was done (see http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3AChanging_username%2FCurrent_requests&diff=15544016&oldid=15520918) but as a result of this my account iho_NL is now permenantly blocked. Email with User:Giggy resulted in this anwser:

Hi Miho,

My understanding is that as part of a new feature of the renaming system, the Miho_NL account has been locked out. Nobody can access it, nobody can create it, or anything like that. It's blocked by the system.

I don't know of any way you can get access back. You might want to ask on the village pump or on some bureaucrats' talk pages to see if they do. Sorry...

So here I am in the village pump... Does somebody know how I get acces back on this Miho_NL account? Maybe by renaming this one and then creating a new one? Miho (talk) 19:05, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You want to undo the rename? I think that would need to be requested in the same place. If you just want to have both accounts then you'll need to file an usurpation request. I have no idea who does it here... :( Sorry. On English wikipedia it's done here: en:Wikipedia:Changing username/Usurpations. I think the Bureaucrats have the tools to usurp. J.smith (talk) 16:41, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why is not the survey conducted also here? And why there is no choice of Commons as home wiki? Why it is so wiki-and article-centric? Too little interest in people who spend most of their time working in the background on sister projects... :-( --Miaow Miaow (talk) 01:22, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I know. So for the question From your point of view, what is currently the best way to gain reputation in the Wikipedia community? I put "Be a complete idiot and go shouting at other projects demanding they comply with you because you happen to be big. Well, I can delete your featured pictures, so fuck you." To be honest, that's probably a bad thing. -mattbuck (Talk) 01:43, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well that's hardly productive. A better idea might be to contact those who were involved in drafting the survey at the Foundation and beginning a dialogue concerning these issues, and work towards a Wikimedia survey which might address such issues. I hope to begin a conversation with Sue shortly about related concerns. I suspect a rational post to foundation-l might be welcome. I may do so myself if the issue isn't brought up by someone else.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 03:26, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Choices of editing styles are too limited. I primarily do administrative stuff, having stuff deleted, fixing histories and sourcing, fixing categories, etc, but I am not an administrator -Nard the Bard 03:58, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I have sent some critical remarks to those conducting the survey already yesterday, but no response so far. Maybe they have too much comments to deal with... :-) I am very disappointed the survey page contains no "internal" link to Meta with some background info about the survey and no section for general comments in its end. It would be really nice if someone more fluent in en: and with better diplomacy skills than me addressed directly the Foundation. --Miaow Miaow (talk) 13:03, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Considering the volume of responses, and the general level of activity for them right now (the survey isn't happening in a vacuum) I find that unsurprising.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 18:18, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I filled in the survey. On many places it is possible to give comments in the field "Other". I think it is good that more people working predominantly in Wikimedia Commons fill in the survey so they see that their survey is somewhat "unbalanced". --Wouter (talk) 20:31, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is, deliberately, a Wikipedia survey -- that's why it's not featured in the sitenotices of other Wikimedia projects. We hope to survey other projects in the future, but I don't think there can be a "one size fits all" solution.--Eloquence (talk) 01:59, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nor would that be desirable depending on the information your looking for. J.smith (talk) 16:46, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

QI, VI, and FP all exclude videos and sounds. Neither have any recognition system in place. This arbitrary exclusion - there is, after all, no reason sounds couldn't be included in VI, or why FP couldn't be Featured media instead - means that people., like me, who work in sounds, pretty much get a big slap in the face.

I really think this is inappropriate and unfair. Can we do something about this? Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes you can set up a valuation system for sounds and/or video :-). IMO this calls for a new system with likely a new public. Lycaon (talk) 07:14, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, but that really isn't a good answer, because there's a strong benefit to having things in the same place. It encourages participation and pulls people into the project, particularly in the early stages. If we made FP into Featured media, then, after a while, split ift off again, people would know that such things were wanted and encouraged. If we made a new project, but told them they must be kept in their own ghetto, then how would people ever find them? You'd end up with an incestuous project isolated from all active commons communities.

I'm going to have to insist on integration, at least into VI, the duplication of which would be pointless. Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:21, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree Valued Sounds (and Video) could be a valuable and relevant addition to Commons. But not as an integrated part of VI as there is a mismatch between names, logos, templates, criteria and instructions. Adjusted tagging logos, templates, guidelines and instructions could be developed (quite easily I think), and VS could be launched as a paralled subproject to VI under a new top-level project, which could be called Valued Media. I am unsure whether we have enough qualified contributors and reviewers for VS to be meaningful, but it is worth a try. For this to succeed I think it should be planned and a launch date be set and a substantial amount of promotion be done beforehand to give it a boost from the start and exceed the critical mass for the process to get going. See Commons talk:Valued image candidates for more details. -- Slaunger (talk) 12:03, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me. Sorry if I ranted a bit, I'm kind of used to en-wiki, where getting things done can feel like pulling teeth =) Adam Cuerden (talk) 15:05, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's one reason many of us are here. We're mellow; please join us.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 18:14, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just wish that Valued Images weren't almost exclusively oriented towards photographs (as it currently is -- on page Commons:Valued image criteria under point #3 there's absolutely nothing as to how a non-photographic image can qualify, only an apparently somewhat token mention under point #4...) AnonMoos (talk) 11:40, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is a misconception that VI is almost exclusively oriented towards photographs. These are several examples of VIs of scans, litographs and other non-photographis images. There is a current ongoing MVR where I argue a historic scheme of a plant species is better than a photograph, so I do not understand what the problem is... -- Slaunger (talk) 13:36, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Scans are photographs taken flatly; what I was referring to is that there seems to be very little room in the VI process for diagrams, charts, and abstract graphics (symbols etc.) made from scratch without digitizing a photograph, or attempting to look photorealistic in any way. The only current non-photographic VI candidates are labelled figurative drawings (a very small subset of all non-photographic images). There certainly don't seem to be any detailed criteria by which images which are non-photograph-based and not detailed figurative drawings can be evaluated for valueableness... AnonMoos (talk) 15:18, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, OK. Well, I think that mostly reflects that there have not been so many nominations of this kind (do nominate some). I do not see any obvious things in the guidelines which would leave us clueless as to how to evaluate such types of images. And if we do, well, we will just make the relevant additions. No big deal. -- Slaunger (talk) 18:23, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think sounds are different than images. So I think keeping VI for images is a good approach. But just as en:wp has featured sounds, so could Commons. If someone wants to to to the effort of setting up the process (or perhaps first just trying to see if there is enough interest to make a go of it) I'm all for it. Sounds like a great idea. Adam: this subject line could stand to be a bit more mellow though... that's not how you get things done here. which as a soon to be admin, is an important thing to keep in mind. ++Lar: t/c 01:32, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What about having a Valued Media (FM and QM also) for sounds and videos but it excludes photographs/images? Bidgee (talk) 02:03, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Video is a special case. It's not really a sound or an image; it often includes sounds (but sometimes has no audio) and its pictures are not static. Putting video in with sound isn't really much better than putting it with images. I'm not really sure what to do on this one - the featured media thing seems a bit neglected (the media of the day files seem to be arbitrarily selected long before time with no apparent discussion), but then there aren't that many people to work on it, and it is quite different from images. I haven't uploaded any audio here myself but do try to make people aware that Commons isn't just about images, and have started uploading videos lately (which often include audio). I think turning 'media of the day' into something more formal, like 'featured media' might be a good idea. But would you get enough new uploads to produce a new featured media file every day? The standards would have to be pretty high, otherwise it wouldn't be worth doing. Richard001 (talk) 08:52, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As I have stated on Commons talk:Valued image candidates I think Valued Media is a good idea as a top-level container for several subprojects:

• Valued images (existing)
• Valued image sets (existing)
• Valued sound (proposed here)
• Valued sound sets (I think this could be meaningful, consider e.g. a set of all letters of the alphabet pronounced in a certain language or dialect)
• Valued video (why not)

It may be possible to develop a set of common criteria for all media classes from Commons:Valued image criteria and then have additional media specific critera. -- Slaunger (talk) 18:23, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Summary: MOTD is broken, and the best way to fix one aspect of it involves making sure the monthly listings used in the POTD localisation/caption translating process also suggests localising MOTD. All other parts of POTD should stay exactly the same, and the code should default to its current behaviour unless specifically told to use the new functionality, to make it backwards compatible. It should be relatively easy to make the archives return to displaying just POTD once the month has passed.

Full explanation: Media of the day (COM:MOTD) is... frankly, broken. It's on a one-year repeat of sounds and video chosen three or so years ago mainly by Raul618 or whatever the number is. Changing these without breaking MOTD is almost impossible, because MOTD does not give any way to find out what languages have captions for which day, meaning that any changes risk breaking things for all languages but English, or, at best, English and the few other languages the person checks.

What I propose we do instead is fuse the translation and selection aspect with the monthly n COM:POTD pages, setting up the code in such a way that the MOTD intrusions disappear from such pages once the month is finished. Keeping the main page caption-translation projects together is a sensible move that will assure MOTD is localised, whereas I don't think - I can't tell for sure because of the problem mentioned above - that the current MOTD ever got translated into more than three or four languages at best.

Obviously, the code changes will need to be done in such a way that they do not break the functionality of any POTD archives. I believe this is thoroughly possible, indeed, even easy

Here's how I see it working: The monthly listings, e.g. Template:Potd/2008-12, should, for each day, give the proposed POTD, and the proposed MOTD, and allow both to be selected and localised. However, once the month is passed - easily determined by comparing the year and month number to the current year and month numbers - the archive should revert to displaying only pictures, to minimise the impact. MOTD can be archived elsewhere, but the localisation needs to be central, or it won't actually happen.

This leads to the last problem: Selecting MOTD. We will need to set up a selection prcess eventually, but the current set of MOTDs was largely whatever people wanted to add three years ago, and, desite it breaking foreign-language captions, it has been free to edit for some time. Having the choices be done in the open would be an improvement on this, and would encourage the initial community building that would allow a more targeted project. Alternatively, we could set up a project to select the sounds - say, a suggestion and seconded by one other person - and springboard off this to other sound-related projects. Adam Cuerden

It seems like that you people think that there are many ways to write in Chinese. However, there are only two ways to write in Chinese; Simplified (zh-hans) and Traditional (zh-hant). I think you guys should really fix that. --Mr. Mario (talk) 23:46, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you're complaining about the existence of Wikipedias such as cdo:, wuu:, and zh-min-nan: , then you really need to go to http://meta.wikimedia.org/ to do so, because we at Commons can't do anything about them (and 99% of the people here don't care anyway)... AnonMoos (talk) 11:35, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Now that Mayflower's index is well over a year old, hasn't been updated for a long time and doesn't seem like it's ever going to be - can we delink it from Special:Search now? Or do some people still find it useful? TangoTango hasn't edited any wiki since May and hasn't responded to any requests to update it this year, so.. is it still 'Recommended'? Nanonic (talk) 00:19, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think default MediaWiki search is good enough this days. There was attempt to improve it even more in Google style but unfortunately reverted in SVN because of some problems.

So we could retire Mayflower. Anyway it have problems with non-Latin scripts since beginning.

EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:36, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Given time and commitment by wikimedia, I will look into the possibility of building a language-indepednant search for commons. I think that would be a real improvement. -- Duesentrieb ⇌ 20:46, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think what we really need is for it to be forked, maintained and extensionised. Any takers?... --pfctdayelise (说什么?) 07:01, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I still can't understand the point to re-engineering Mayflower. It provided image search possibility in times when MediaWiki search was bad. From my point of view, MediaWiki search is good enough for images now.

Last experiments with MediaWiki search interface looked very promising (see http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Code/MediaWiki&offset=42496&limit=500), so may be we need to direct scare resources to this direction?

EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:10, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think we can remove the link. If the database is more than a year old... It has 1.000.000 image's les than mediawiki search. And the mediawiki search is better than before. Sterkebaktalk 17:53, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is too bad. From an interface and output perspective mayflower is still much better than the internal search. Rather than removing it, we should update the database. :( --Gmaxwell (talk) 19:25, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I really like the Mayflower search. It is a shame that it isn't self-updating. I think all that would need to be done is to point it at the tool-server's dump instead of it's own private dump. Oh, and a port to unicode to fix the issues with nonlatin characters. I wish I knew enough to take it over. --J.smith (talk) 20:25, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Do we know how to update the db it uses? I like the UI too. (I'm delighted with the improvements with the MW search but more ways are better) ++Lar: t/c 02:29, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What I want is a cross between Mayflower and Catscan. My specifications are:

• Should be able to scan for category intersections at a specified level, and also category NON-intersections (ie in A but not B, to level X).
• Should be able to give results as either plain links or thumbnails
• Doesn't go to the new page in current window, even when you open it in a new tab (as mayflower does currently, very annoyingly).

I feel that this combined tool would be very useful. -mattbuck (Talk) 02:58, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible to re-use DB of MediaWiki search? Indexing Commons DB dumps and re-indexing them againg means more storage requirements and servers load. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:01, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just checking -- this image -- w:Image:Screenshot from the video of the USS Cole bombing.jpg is not free, without regard to being shown as evidence at the alleged videographer's Guantanamo military commission? The videographer's intellectual property rights remain, even if the product is considered a war crime?

Thanks! Geo Swan (talk) 02:05, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The copyright on a photograph is not affected by the legality of it's creation. Or at least, I cannot think of a counterexample.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 02:20, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Geo Swan (talk) 19:22, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, the standing Commons policy on photographs of anonymous street graffiti is that it can be affected (though I don't think that precedent would apply to this particular case...) AnonMoos (talk) 11:26, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Special Operations Command came up on Wikipedia, the contents here is for USSOCOM and police, but it is held in the Singapore Police category tree... so it needs fixing. 70.55.86.100 17:58, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Half of the pictures display Singapore Police Special Operations Command and the rest US Military. The category must be split somehow. Sv1xv (talk) 18:40, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are tens of countries with some sort of Special Operations Command, so with such a general name, one attracts images from allover the world. --Foroa (talk) 19:03, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand this deletion as this portrait was an original drawing (on paper) and not a Derivative work of a photo. There is a serious misunderstanding here. -- Perky (talk) 09:04, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well I was against deleting too but eventually the uploader was persuaded he did violate the rights of the photo and made a new drawing. It's kind of hard to keep figthing it if even the uploader gives in. -Nard the Bard 13:35, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Too right, about this case. But it might be useful for the futur to clarify this point, in the legal sense of course : How a portrait drawned by an artist can be a Derivative work of a photo and therefor deleted for copyviolation ?!? -- Perky (talk) 14:25, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If the artist is too young to have met with the model (who died many years ago) it is fair to assume that the artist copied a photo. (Or the picture has nothing to do with what the model actually looked like, and such a picture would have no encyclopaedic value). Teofilo (talk) 15:06, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is Derivative work ? , on a legal field, of course. -- Perky (talk) 15:22, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think so, because the photographer assume his work. -- Perky (talk) 15:24, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It would be, except that Spain has freedom of panorama, which means this particular situation (photos of public sculpture) is OK. See Commons:Deletion requests/Image:Dalí.Rinoceronte.JPG. We do delete photos of copyrighted statues which are located in countries which do not have this provision in their copyright law. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:46, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The U.S. Copyright Office, in Circular 14, explicitly mentions Drawing (based on a photograph) as an example of a derivative work. In this case, the expression seen in the photograph must be present in the drawing. Based on a Google cache of the drawing here, and a link to the original photo in question here, the expression particular to that photograph is still present in the drawing. The angle of the face and body, the details of the lapel, the shadows on the face and shirt, the exact facial expression, etc. to me shows that the drawing is of this photograph in particular. That would seem make it derivative, and the copyright owner of the photo (in this case probably the German government) would have the right to prevent exploitation of the drawing as well. The artist does own a part of the copyright of the drawing, but not all of it. Interesting cases might be derivative works made when the German photo was public domain (Germany had a 25-year-from-publication term on photos, so it would have become PD by 1970 or so, but the copyright was retroactively restored to 70 years p.m.a. in 1995), but I don't think this is one of them. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:46, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for the explaination. As you may know, the law in France is different and more protector of the person (author). Sincerely. -- Perky (talk) 20:08, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't it protect the author of the photograph as well? Pretty sure derivative works are the same way there. If the drawing was made with permission, that may be different, but from what I see from a translation of the French law, Article L 122-4 says Any complete or partial performance or reproduction made without the consent of the author or of his successors in title or assigns shall be unlawful. The same shall apply to translation, adaptation or transformation, arrangement or reproduction by any technique or process whatsoever. Carl Lindberg (talk) 04:43, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a direct port of the Berne Convention to the french law. I don't really know what Perky means by the 'french copyright law being more protective'; Are you referring to the right the author has to remove his artwork (also known as 'droit de retrait' in french)? Are you referring to the privacy rights the drawn /photographied persons have? Still, the France has signed the Berne convention and must apply it, Derivated works entering in this scope. To talk about his DR, we don't know who the original author is, Of course, there are websites hosting the photograph, still, they probably don't own any rights to it, basically we are forced to delete this picture from Commons the same way we delete orphans pictures that are not old enough...Esby (talk) 08:32, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am talking of the qualification of original work with "a definite artistic character" which is the essence of the Droit d'Auteur in France, not about Any complete or partial performance or reproduction which is (i agree) a derivated work. In other words, and artist create an original work, as long as it is not a art forgery. To make it short the easy and old fashion way. ;-) About the larger protection in France (droit moral), an exemple : a territorial right extend to all authors whathever their nationality or the origin of the work : Art L. 111-4 Code de la propriété intellectuelle. It has been judge that the coloration of John Huston 's film was an altération of his original work and could not be done without the autorisation of the heirs, altought the same opération was done legaly in the US, because of the copyright law. Cass. 1ère civ., 28 mai 1991, JCP 1991,II, 21731, note A. Françon. Sincerely. -- Perky (talk) 09:41, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A "work with a definite artistic character" is basically the en:threshold of originality, i.e. the dividing line between copyrightable and non-copyrightable works -- there are differences between the two countries in that area, but it is not all that big. The drawing is protected certainly, but it is also a reproduction/adaptation/transformation of the photograph. The colorization issue you mention is actually more about the "moral rights", which is separate from the copyright. You are correct that the U.S. has far less protection in that area. If Huston owned the copyright he could have prevented the colorization (since that is most certainly a derivative work), but as he does not own the U.S. copyright then he could not. Moral rights are usually specified as part of the overall copyright law, but the right is separate. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:49, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Would others like to comment on the importance of photograph 2 in this series of 6 photographs? Does anyone have experience in having a photograph released from the Vatican to Commons? http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Vatican-October-31-British-professor-Stephen-Hawking-Pope-Benedict-XVI/photo//081031/photos_ts/2008_10_31t141054_450x340_us_pope_hawking//s:/nm/us_pope_hawking;_ylt=AsC90Yb5bXnPLLKnfWju_bSGWo14#photoViewer=/081031/ids_photos_wl/r1025343356.jpg

From the POV of a secular scientist: This pope has the reputation of being a very conservative theologian. Nevertheless, it does not look like even he seeks to put Galileo back into the category of heretic (I am not even sure how that would be done). I am not sure if I was previously aware of "theistic evolution." I guess it is a bit reassuring that the catholic church is willing to recognize at least some of the progress that has been made by science and scientists (albeit sometimes a few hundred years late).

From the POV of a Christian Apologist: This looks like something out of the Book of Revelation.

From a hopeful and Catholic POV: Is this the most important conversion since the Apostle Paul?

From the Commons POV: How do we get a license to the copyright of the photo? Doug youvan (talk) 03:56, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The image is credited as "Osservatore Romano/Reuters". I don't see any chance for a free license. --Túrelio (talk) 08:43, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Túrelio, Thanks - From your contributions to Commons, it is very clear that you do know about things like this! So, could others comment on whether one of us, with some artistic ability, is allowed to upload a hand-drawn image that shows this Osservatore Romano/Reuters image in a semi-photo-realistic fashion? Doug youvan (talk) 11:34, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In case the image was originally taken by Vatican press staff, another possibility might be to ask them directly if they would be willing to provide a version in a sufficient resolution/size under a "controlled" free license such as CC-BY-SA or similar. But if the image actually belongs the Osservatore Romano (photo archive[8]), there is little chance as the conditions for paid use are rather strict [9], and we at Commons aren't even media. --Túrelio (talk) 12:45, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Such an illustration would be a derivative work and thus subject to the same licensing restrictions as the original image, while being less encyclopedic as well. Powers (talk) 21:06, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi people, i could use some help with the images in Category:Media needing category review and Category:Media needing categories requiring human attention.

• Category:Media needing category review - these files were categorized by a bot, but the categories should be checked. Usually you just have to remove some redundant categories.
• Category:Media needing categories requiring human attention - bot could not find any categories (orphaned images), maybe you can?

Thank you, Multichill (talk) 14:02, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• I'll do a few. -Nard the Bard 14:15, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• • Regarding Category:Media needing categories as of 23 June 2008 - we desperately need a Chinese language speaker to review these images. Right now these are the oldest uncategorized images. J.smith (talk) 16:36, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• What about this? 1964 - and now. Categorize or not? Mutter Erde (talk) 17:12, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• • • For images containing a lot of non latin characters, it would help indeed if some files would be split in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, ... categories. How clever can a bot be ? I stumble frequently on sets of such images with a strange category name, without the faintest idea how to tackle this. --Foroa (talk) 17:28, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]