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COMMONS DISCUSSION PAGES (index) Commons Help desk Village pump (general discussion) Copyright Proposals Technical Graphics and photography discussion Photography critiques Image improvement Illustration workshop Map workshop Photography workshop Video and sound workshop Categories for discussion Undeletion requests Deletion requests Volunteer Response Team/Noticeboard Translators' noticeboard Work requests for bots Contact administrators Vandalism User problems (Dispute resolution) Blocks and protections Bureaucrats' noticeboard CheckUser requests Oversight requests Telegram IRC webchat Commons mailing list (archive) Commons' bugs on Phabricator Welcome to the Village pump This page is used for discussions of the operations, technical issues, and policies of Wikimedia Commons. Recent sections with no replies for 7 days and sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=--~~~~}} may be archived; for old discussions, see the archives; the latest archive is Commons:Village pump/Archive/2024/07. Please note: If you want to ask why unfree/non-commercial material is not allowed at Wikimedia Commons or if you want to suggest that allowing it would be a good thing, please do not comment here. It is probably pointless. One of Wikimedia Commons’ core principles is: "Only free content is allowed." This is a basic rule of the place, as inherent as the NPOV requirement on all Wikipedias. Have you read our FAQ? For changing the name of a file, see Commons:File renaming. Any answers you receive here are not legal advice and the responder cannot be held liable for them. If you have legal questions, we can try to help but our answers cannot replace those of a qualified professional (i.e. a lawyer). Your question will be answered here; please check back regularly. Please do not leave your email address or other contact information, as this page is widely visible across the internet and you are liable to receive spam. Purposes which do not meet the scope of this page: Please do not make deletion requests here: use the relevant process for it instead. For technical support and graphics talks (PNG, SVG, GIF, etc.), please post on the Graphics village pump. To ask for image improvement, see: Graphic Lab/Photography workshop for photographs. Graphic Lab/Map workshop for maps. Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop for other illustrations. To ask for video or audio improvement, see Commons:Graphic Lab/Video and sound workshop. For translation requests, please post at Commons:Requests for translation. For media requests, please post at Commons:File requests. Search archives:     Start a new discussion

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Village pump in Rzeszów, Poland [add]

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

Oldies

Christmas crossword

EFF Crossword Puzzle 2014: The Year in Copyright News

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published this (copyright related) crossword which you can play online at http://thedod.github.io/eff-crossword-2014/. It makes a nice break from feeding yourself with Christmas treats. Happy holidays everyone. Fæ (talk)   16:57, 25 December 2014‎ (UTC)

Removal of a category so the file left uncategorized

User:Alan Liefting removed all the files from Category:Israel so they left uncategorized. I was failed to explain to him why it is better that files be in category instead of being uncategorized. I explained to him that files better to be categories rather then to be un categories. In a working place when all the time new files uploaded you will find all the time files in this category to be classified not to be removed from the category. I'll be glad if someone can help in this matter. -- Geagea (talk) 08:05, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I prefer that people categorize files in a generic category, instead of not categorizing them at all. I often clean up Category:Berlin, for example. And since I do a lot of categorization work there, I know exactly where to put files, or at least where to look for categories. I do the same when I am not an expert in a subject matter. Just this morning, I categorized images without categories, and I put many in general categories, because I didn't know the exact sub-structure. And to be honest, trying to make sense of a such a structure takes a lot of time better spent - if I even get it right. TLDR: I agree with you. --Sebari (talk) 08:15, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

+1: I think it´s almost impossible to work the "uncategorized" heap and sort each file directly into the finest category. We should accept that it takes two or three steps as every level needs more expertise regarding the topic or the structure of the particular category tree. Country is a good first categorization step to increase the probability of someone taking further care of the file. --Rudolph Buch (talk) 10:36, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

It used to be that there was some kind of programming that prevented you from removing all visible categories, I guess now with cat-a-lot you can remove them in their hundreds and it is not so easy to undo, Maybe this should be fixed? The likely result of the files being removed from Category:Israel is that some editor with minimal knowledge of that country will come along and just add Category:Israel to the affected files Oxyman (talk) 10:38, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Agree! --Jwh (talk) 10:43, 26 January 2015 (UTC) Country is a good first categorization step to increase the probability of someone taking further care of the file

I think the biggest problem is that the vast majority of uploaders are not familiar with how the category system works (espectially the fact that they are not tags) and are not familiar with the HUGE range of options of suitable categories. Alan Liefting (talk) 19:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

What about adding Category:Unidentified locations in Israel instead? And with this search you can make an educated guess about a lot of uncategorized images in Berlin per year (e.g. 2014). --Herzi Pinki (talk) 12:54, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Not all of the images were of locations. Alan Liefting (talk) 19:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Geagea, removing the Israel category from 1,157 files was not a decision I made lightly. I recategorised some, some were already in suitable subcategories, a bot added categories to others, and what remains will be picked up as uncategorised and eventually categorised correctly. Sure, removing the cat was not ideal but neither was having over a thousand files in a category that should have few or no files. I made a pragmatic decision mindful of the cost benefit analysis of my action. Alan Liefting (talk) 19:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

The categorisation of images on Commons is an utter mess. I don't know how viewers of Commons find images (and I don't know if any usability surveys have even been done) but if they use the category system they are confronted with one hell of a confusing, jumbled mess. Alan Liefting (talk) 19:16, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I agree that, in most cases, a branch of Category:Unidentified locations is much to be preferred, I agree that our cat tree in general is a mess often of little value, and that the Mediawiki software, being designed for an encyclopedia and only slightly supplemented with specialized tools, deserves much of the blame. Jim.henderson (talk) 19:20, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Geagea that it is wrong to remove generic category like Category:Israel from files which are not in the subcategories of Category:Israel. In most cases, whoever added that category felt like it belonged to one of the subcategories of Category:Israel. It might have been locations within Israel or people, works (books, movies), crafts (airplanes, ships), etc. related to Israel. Alan Liefting, I agree that the category system is not optimal, but it is better to have some general categories than no categories, and If you are not willing to put effort to improve categorization of those files, at least do not throw away work of others who caried the categorization that far. Of course some files might have nothing to do with any aspects of Israel, but that is hard to decide automatically for 1,157 files. --Jarekt (talk) 19:54, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I also agree that Alan went the wrong way here. In the last 3 months, I've removed over 3000 photos from Category:New York City, but I've done it by moving them to a more appropriate category (typically a subcategory of Category:New York City, but not always: some were actually in New Jersey).

There is much more chance of a photo getting correctly categorized if it is in a too-vague but accurate category than if it is in no category at all. - Jmabel ! talk 01:32, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

In an ideal wikiworld yes it would be wrong to remove a category from a file that needed moving to a sub category. But we have a far from ideal wikiworld here at Commons. I am now curious to know how many files from which I removed the Israel category. If it is low enough that we can just move on, or is there actually an issue here? Alan Liefting (talk) 05:43, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

You removed it from 1,052 current images. See sandboxL. --Fæ (talk) 11:03, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

But the question is how many were left uncategorised and on how many was information "lost". Alan Liefting (talk) 17:45, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

This is a question you should have been able to answer at the time. I can draw up a query based on the list of 1052 images on the above page and tell you which have no categories after your change, however my programming time is better used elsewhere and you could go through the list by yourself to put this right. --Fæ (talk) 19:02, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

I made a judgement call at the time based on the contents of the cat, (the total number, the degree of categorisation of a sample of the files, etc), the type of category (high level), and based on past experience and concluded that on balance my action was justified. I agree the your programming time, and indeed the time of everyone here, is far better spent elsewhere. It is not as if there is nothing else to do around here!! Alan Liefting (talk) 03:51, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Geagea, it is not true that I "removed all the files from Category:Israel so they left uncategorized." Yes, I removed that category but only some files were left uncategorised. Alan Liefting (talk) 05:55, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

@Alan Liefting I don't know how many files are affected, I'm just gonna take some recent examples here and this one, both (formerly included in Category:Art) are now without any category and also they are NOT in Category:Media needing categories; with the result that there is no chance anymore that anyone finds and properly categorizes it someday. OK, I don't know if that particular files are in scope for Commons, but that are just two examples out of a very big lot, I guess. So, what you did is a blatant misuse of the Cat-a-lot tool and by no means helpful for the project. --A.Savin 07:06, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

The two images you mention, which are almost as far removed as possible from art, are far better off uncategorised than being in such a high level category and, as you say, they may not even be appropriate for Commons. Also, it is not true "that there is no chance anymore that anyone finds and properly categorizes it someday". YaCBot comes around (sometimes after about ten days) to mark files as uncategorised, and I am sure a database report could be made for uncategorised files. Alan Liefting (talk) 07:52, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Wrong. I occasionally do cleanup categories like Russia, Moscow and similar, so I know what I'm saying. Several times I found images having been without any categories (including maintenance ones) for two, three years. Here on Commons, you cannot entirely rely on bots. --A.Savin 08:12, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Point taken on the bots and that looks like yet another problem that needs addressing. I am pretty sure that a database report can be made on uncategorised files. Anyway, given the poor quality and poor documentation of some of the files added to Commons lack of categories is no great loss. I sometimes come across files that makes me think why am I bothering with spending time editing such utter rubbish. Alan Liefting (talk) 08:21, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Concerning two points addressed above, my humble opinion:

• Removing all categories from a file and leaving none is something better dealt with in a specific page, and that isn’t this one. (Simply — whoever worries about files being found in a too-general, or even wrong, category should also took the trouble of finding a better one.)
• Commons’ categories are a mess they say — this is heard a lot: But never followed by a description of a better system. Please come forward with a proposal for better categorization (something that can cope with millions of disparate formats and subjects); of course proposing better tools for the current system, and/or new features for the current system, and/or better/continued curation within the the current system — all that means that the current system is good enough, just needs some work. (On the other hand, everybody can think of much worse ideas, such as Flickr tags).

-- Tuválkin ✉ 18:35, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

I don't see why removing all categories would be seen as vandalism. There are sometimes files that are up for deletion and the uploader has spammed the image into lots up the upper level categories. Also, since categories are sometimes added by automated means there is nothing wrong with removing them by semi-automated means. And another thing, because of the HUGE workload that we have there is a need for expediency at the expense of thoroughness (but accuracy should never be compromised of course).

The categories are a mess because Commons is under-staffed and it is way to easy for uploaders to add files. Commons:Statistics suggests that it will get worse. Alan Liefting (talk) 19:05, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Someone could probably make an abuse filter rule to find edits which remove the last (non-hidden) category. That would make it easier to track this. As for (un)categorization statistics, see User:Multichill/Categorization stats. Multichill (talk) 18:41, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

That is a good resource. Can you move it over to Commons namespace? I want to link it from Commons:Statistics. The page confirms what I already know - there are too few editors for the amount of work that needs doing. Removing that last non-hidden category will not always be "abuse". Alan Liefting (talk) 19:05, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

@Alan Liefting: even though you disagree you must acknowledge that there is a vast majority that categories shouldn't be removed so the file left uncategorized. So please don't do that. There is more chance that file will be used when he is in general category rather then uncategorized. The only people that work on uncategorized files are Commons users and many times they categorize them in a general category.

I opend this discussion here and did not notify you on AN/U as I saw that your intention is to help and not to harm. I really want that you understand. If you think that it is incorrect please made new proposal, but in my opinion, before you do so try to work more with our understanding. -- Geagea (talk) 07:56, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

The situation here is that I think what I did was an overall improvement to Commons and you are saying that it was not. In actual fact, in the absence of in-depth usability surveys, we really don't know what the best course of action is. But I made a judgement call and you disagreed with my judgement.

I don't agree with you that a file should be left uncategorised. As I have already stated ideally all files should be categorised but there are situations where it is ok to remove categories and leave it uncategorised. One situation where I am sure we can all agree on is a file that has been placed in numerous high usage categories but it is a candidate for speedy deletion. The situation with my edits to files in Category:Israel is a bit more subtle and complex. There were over a thousand assorted files sitting in Category:Israel for a long time. That is of no use to those who use Commons as a resource. Having all the files in one place to be recategorised is of some use to Commons editors but that is not the function of a content category. We use maintenance categories for that sort of thing. If there was a Category:Israel files needing categorisation as a subcat of Category:WikiProject Israel I would have placed them there. But there is no such infrastructure. There is actually a lot of infrastructure missing on Commons but that is another story.

You say that Commons users (editors) add files to general categories. That is the wrong thing to do. Editors should always add files to the most specific category as per COM:CAT. Unfortunately that can be difficult to do but it is made easier with HotCat and systematic category naming.

As for a proposal the problems as I see them go way beyond that. But that is another story as well.

Finally, why would you think I am here to harm Commons? Do my tens of thousands of edits look harmful? Or is it only a few? If the tens of thousands of edits are constructive why would I then do unconstructive edits? Alan Liefting (talk) 10:00, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Looking this and this I can tell only that you have a lot to learn here. All your suggestions may be good and you may propose them, but please understand that the vast majority, of users working here for years, says don't remove category and left the file without category.

Please read again. I did not say you are her to harm. I said the opposite ot that. -- Geagea (talk) 10:14, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

@Alan Liefting: , please stop removing generic categories without replacing them with better ones. Last June user:Martin H. and user:Jmabel requested that you stop the same activity. After all those discussion and the discussion here, you are still doing edits like this, this or this. That is bordering on vandalism. Based on your edits and your proposal to delete template maintenance categories and your request to stop categorizing Institution templates, it is obvious that your ideas about categorization are quite different than of most other users, but you still need to follow the consensus of the community, or get blocked for vandalism. --Jarekt (talk) 20:04, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Alan, I don't think your intentions are bad, but I do think you are editing against consensus. - Jmabel ! talk 23:54, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that does appear to be the case. I am off on holiday and I have an ailing father so I probably wont be doing much editing over the next three weeks. Alan Liefting (talk) 06:31, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I curious to know why my editing would give the impression that they are "bad". Alan Liefting (talk) 06:37, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

If user contribute against the community consensus it considered as a problematic behavior. Call it whatever you want - vandalism, disrespect or harassment. All the users mentioned: Martin H., Jmabel, Jarekt, A.Savin and others including me are experianced users that working with categorys for years, so please take thiere advices. The comunity have the ability to inforce consensus. It starts with warnings in the talk page and then notification in COM:AN/U which may bring to yourblock if necessary. Willingness to help is not enough. Following community consensus and experienced users are necessary as well. So take the opportunity, read the comments above and try to work with the same rational. -- Geagea (talk) 01:59, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I know all that. I have been working on wikis for long enough to know how it works. I like to think my edits are based on sound rationale. With all due respect, I could argue that everyone else here is not being rational. Where is the evidence that my edits are problematic? My editing rationale is based on what is best for those who use Commons and it appears all the other editors commenting in this thread see Commons as something that is used by editors alone.

I have been editing wikis for over ten year but that is not relevant. It is the quality of editing that is important. Alan Liefting (talk) 06:16, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Everyone else can be wrong, but if you start accusing them of being irrational, then you're walking down a deep dark road that certainly leads to nothing productive on a Wiki or any other cooperative environment.--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:39, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

@Prosfilaes: , I did not actually directly accuse other editors of being irrational. Anyway, you highlight yet another problem that we have on wikis - sensitivities and emotions get in the way of good editing. Alan Liefting (talk) 21:16, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

I am slowly sticking the files without useful categories in Category:Israel_files_needing_categorization. If you follow the link cat-a-lot will work even if the category has not been created. It may not be a perfect search for these, but it'll do. --Fæ (talk) 00:16, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much Fae, your work is helpful like always. -- Geagea (talk) 07:45, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. The outcome was that 703 files out of 1052 checked were identified as needing 're-categorization' after removal of their last category. These have now been repaired.

This has been a long discussion over not much, however the resolution seems to be that it is a bad thing to remove the last meaningful category from an image, even if this is a category that needs diffusion. As @Alan Liefting: has kept this going, perhaps you could take the collegiate step of requesting a tick-box/preference to be added to cat-a-lot to prompt the user when removing the last visible category, it seems a realistic improvement? --Fæ (talk) 10:27, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

What about the 350 files? They should be also in this category. If they have extra category it have to check manually. If they have category like plants it should moved to plants in Israel. If they have correct category then it's ok but it have to checked manually not by cat a lot. -- Geagea (talk) 11:02, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Okay, adding the remainder for manual check. This will probably take about an hour. --Fæ (talk) 11:14, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll see about cat-a-lot (not today). It should be a button to undo cases like this. -- Geagea (talk) 11:25, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

 Done At this point in time the non-created category Israel_files_needing_categorization has 346 files in it to check. --Fæ (talk) 14:51, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Fae. -- Geagea (talk) 01:59, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

That looks like an eminently suitable solution. Alan Liefting (talk) 06:16, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@Geagea: why have you made the retrograde step of moving 800 odd files back into Category:Israel. Fæ has put forward a solution yet you choose to ignore it? It is good to see that you are recategorising them but it SHOULD' be done from out of the Category:Israel_files_needing_categorization. You are wasting your editing time (your choice) and messing things up for viewers (a concern for all editors). Alan Liefting (talk) 08:03, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Fæ, the removal of the last category is just as important as removing any one of the other categories. It is not the absolute number of categories a file has but it is whether the category is appropriate or not. Removing a completely relevant category is wrong. Removing any category instead of sub-categorising is not the best (which is what I did) but can be a means to an end. Removing a completely irrelevant category is right. Removing all categories can can be right. Etc. Alan Liefting (talk) 06:16, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

All the files should process manually. they should not removed from the category:Israel. I have no more arguments to explain you more then it discussed her. Even that you made a lot of category edits in other projects it is not the same her. Fell free report me in COM/AN. Please do not remove general categoriys from files in cat a lot. It should be manually and only if the file have an apropiet category include. -- Geagea (talk) 08:26, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't agree that all of the files should be processed manually. That is ideal but things are far from ideal here. If there are millions (or more) files that are automatically added along with inappropriate categories I see nothing wrong in using automated methods in removing those categories. We have a huge Commons:Backlog of work, increasing numbers of files being added, and an almost statice number of active editors. This all adds up to the need for expediency in editing.

I also disagree that none of the current files in Category:Israel should be removed. That seems to be a contradiction on your part since you are actually recategorising them at present. (There may be language barrier issues here?) Country categories should have very few, if any files in them.

I also don't fully agree with you when you say that other projects have different methods of categorisation. All wikis are essentially the same in how categorisation works. What does differ is the policies and guidelines. Here on Commons these are poorly developed (along with many others).

I see no reason to report you to COM/AN. I would do but only if it was really necessary but that is not the case. Alan Liefting (talk) 08:56, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

The category of Israel contains files to be processed by somebody that knows where to put them. Sometimes somebody adding a specific category but did not removed the category Israel. In that case it is o.k. to remove it. But many of the files have extra category which category Israel shouldn't be removed. For example. If the extra category is plants than the category Israel shouldn't be removed but both of the categories should move to category plants in Israel. If the file contain extra category December 2012 in Israel the category Israel shouldn't be removed only to move to specific one. The fact that you dont know what is the correct category that not means that you should remove it.

We are adding uncategorized files a general category like Israel and we expect that somebody from Israel will know to which specific category it belongs. It can be general category like maps. In that case we expect that somebody that maps is in his scope will categories the file with specific category.

Files in category Israel should be processed manually in any way. Uncategorised or not. You always find files in this category. That's the way it is working her. It is clear to me that you are not work here regularly. The category system here is definitely different than the other wikis because the aim of the projects is different and I already advised you to work with it before you come to conclusion. So please do not mass remove any general category from files with cat-a-lot or in another way. -- Geagea (talk) 10:42, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

It is clear to me that you do not see the usability of Commons as an important consideration. As an editor you seem to think Commons is for for editors only. This is wrong. Editors should be creating a resource for those who want to use it (rather than edit it).

I will reiterate my opinion that Commons categorisation is essentially the same as other wikis. The software is the same and looking at the difference between Wikipedia and Commons the only difference is the fact that Commons is focused on images and articles. The hierarchical nature of both is EXACTLY the same. You can see it in the systematic naming in the two wikis.

If your stance is the same as what the consensus is then I despair about the future of Commons. Alan Liefting (talk) 20:25, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

I have started a thread at Wikipediocracy about this and some of the comments are harsh. Mind you, Wikipediocracy seems to be very scathing of the Wikimedia projects. Alan Liefting (talk) 20:25, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Your actions are beginning to look like that of a troll's now, I read the forum you link to, It didn't seem to contain much other then the same old arguments about the categorisation system and what content should be kept Oxyman (talk) 23:53, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

I posted to Wikipediocracy to get a second opinion and yes the thread did move off topic. Call me a troll if you like but I have the interests of Commons at heart. However, it seems that creating an easy to use file repository is not what the community here wants to do. Alan Liefting (talk) 21:08, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

January 27

Auschwitz Album

Today, 70 years ago, Auschwitz was liberated. The Auschwitz Album created in 1944 is now in PD. I uploaded 22 pictures of 192 from Yad Vashem (labeled as PD on their website) in the Category:Auschwitz Album. Feel free to upload the other pictures, add them to articles and to help with identify persons --Hannolans (talk) 10:35, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Hannolans. It's great that you started to do this and thank you for informing other editors here. I would help you but I think this is probably better done by just one editor since it's difficult to tell where one person started and stopped (also I'm not sure what copyright license you are using) and it's not a huge project. I hope it isn't too much work for you but please know that your efforts are sincerely appreciated. CheersMonopoly31121993 (talk) 17:57, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes I can do this coming week. --Hannolans (talk) 11:33, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Those images would be "PD" only if their photographers died the same year the photos were taken (1944), and then only since January 1, 2015. --Rosenzweig τ 00:53, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

In EU countries they seem PD according to EU-law because they seem anonymous, and an institute in Israel and the US publishes them as PD. We have a discussion here Commons:Village_pump/Copyright#URAA_on_WWII_photos_of_Nazi_extermination_camps. --Hannolans (talk) 23:23, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

There are names of potential photographers discussed, so they are not anonymous. And why should a declaration by some institute determine copyright status? --Rosenzweig τ 19:07, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Category:Garden apartments

Apparently, several years ago Category:Garden apartments was deleted on the basis that it was "Not really that clearly defined as a category, moved contents to apartment buildings." This was apparently done without discussion. I agree that the term has more than one meaning, but is there some other term for the single-story, townhouse-like buildings, often with numerous units facing a common courtyard that are very common in the older cities of the western U.S. and certainly found in quite a few other places in North America? My concern is, there is something here that it seems deserves a category, and I don't have a different term for it. - Jmabel ! talk 02:46, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

• 
  Example of garden apartments
• 
  This image may better show the typical arrangement that gives these their name

How about creating the category but this time add a description similar to that you just gave to define the category? Oxyman (talk) 16:55, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

This makes me think on Hofje. Wouter (talk) 15:03, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Certainly physically similar structures. In any case, I will follow Oxyman's very reasonable suggestion. - Jmabel ! talk 07:28, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

January 30

Suggestion: create redirects to categories

Welcome.because thr theimportance of categories for Commons.I suggest Create redirects for all categories So:

• the redirect name:Category name

#REDIRECT [[:Category:Category name]]

(Except galleries names)

The process needs Bot, who can run a bot to do it? --ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 09:21, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

My English is not good, so maybe I do not understand your suggestion. But there is a well established policy for category redirects at Commons:Rename a category. One of the relevant points there (as far as I understand them), is to use {{category redirect|target}} for category pages instead of #REDIRECT, as this will allow a bot to automatically move files from the old to the new category and is recognized by the HOTCAT-Tool as well. --Rudolph Buch (talk) 11:51, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

My English is good enough to spot redirects for all categories and add a speedy  Oppose. Replicating a complete namespace foo: with its foo:bar pages by #REDIRECT [[foo:bar]] on bar pages in namespace 0 (articles, here galleries) would be a surprisingly bad idea. Many important cases of category:bar actually have a gallery bar, therefore the page is anyway not available for a bogus redirect. If you really MUST have a shortcut use page CAT:bar for the redirect, this is documented on Help:Namespaces and an established vintage 2005 workaround. –Be..anyone (talk) 14:52, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

My English is not good also.People are looking at the main namespace first and then categories.Why do not we help them to quickly access to the categories?! --ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 07:37, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

It seems that the software already does what you are suggesting. If you enter a name of something to the search slot, where there is a category, but not a page, you will get redirected to the corresponding cat. E.g. try Spitzerberg. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 00:26, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

closed deletion request of teaching materials

Hey everyone once there was a deletion request to delete the files uploaded by user:dapeldo. It was closed by User:krd with the statement that the files will be kept. Now the request was reopened by User:ellin Beltz and some files have already been deleted. I would like to ask these files to be restored. I am holding the MOOC on Web Science on Wikiversity v:Web_Science. We upload videos and exercise sheets on wikimedia commons. All content is original by me and my coworkers and we are fully aware of what we are doing by putting a creative commons license to them (especially there is no copy right violation since we also pay close attention on what graphics we can use (most of them are in public domain)). As far as I understand these files are Open educational resources which is one of the scopes of WMF. Since they are used on Wikiversity (currently not all of the files a linked in wikiversity, since some of the content is not completly produced yet) I do not see how they are out of scope of wikimedia commons which is the media archive of Wikimedia projects. Since we also use them in our lecture it is highly unconventient if these files get delted all the time. Since we link them from our university homepage and students cannot access them. --Renepick (talk) 11:14, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

All the files are uncategorised, the description is not very helpful and some of the files are not in use. So I can fully understand that they were deleted. I´d suggest to categorise them and describe their content and relation to the Wikiversity project in the description field of each file. Then all misunderstandings are avoided and they will surely be kept in the future. --Rudolph Buch (talk) 11:32, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

We can certainly do that. What category and discription would you suggest so that admins will understand the problem. And in order to be able to give descriptions the files have the ber restored first --Renepick (talk) 13:58, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

A Category like Category:Web science MOOC at Koblenz University would either fit in Category:Wikiversity projects‎ or in Category:Wikiversity courses (the two a not very distinctive against each other in their contents). I think files in this Wikiversity category tree are rarely deleted for scope, so this category is a bit like an DR-thwarting amulett :-) I can´t really help you with the file descriptions as I don´t know your project, but at least the fact that it is a Wikiversity project should be mentioned along with the institution that supported it, and perhaps a rough outline of the specific file´s content. Most files at Commons have just a few words of description, but nobody will accuse you of being chatty even if you donate your files four or five full sentences... --Rudolph Buch (talk) 15:07, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi: Agreed that the lack of description and category is part of the consideration here, but I'm still concerned about the statement "pay close attention on what graphics we can use (most of them are in public domain" and point out that all of them have to be public domain to be hosted on Commons. Sources for any open permission graphics which appear on the image upload page are required. For example File:Web Science MOOC Exercises Week 5.pdf please provide the source of the graphics in use on the page. The compilation may be your own work, but each item in it needs a source and a citation. Cheers! Ellin Beltz (talk) 16:45, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Especially the graphics on the seet of week 5 (with all the icons and computers) are completely from scratch made by us in SVG format with inkscape in 2013 by User:Rob-nowman... have a look at all the videos that we created Category:Videos_for_Web_Science_MOOC_on_Wikiversity as you can see in there either the used graphics are public domain (most of them) OR we have created them (some of them) OR at the very end of the videos we put references to the original files (which where CC-BY or CC-BY-SA). In the sense of creative commons we should probably quote our videos if we reuse the screenshot with the computer network for exercise sheet 5 but since we are the ones who created the files we can reuse them at any point since we are the creator. Otherwise in all the videos that we have created and used the graphic we would have to quote the first video since the computers have already been used in there. Our university spends 3 full positions to employ people to create original content for this course. Especially in order to not commit any copyright violations (which by the way makes the process of content creation much harder) We do this in order to be able to share the teaching resources under an open licence... What is happening here (not for the first time) is really frustrating. Asking if everything is cool is ok. Deleting stuff if you detect a copyright violation and can proof it perfect. But assuming that our material are copyright violations and deleting without asking and trial is really frustrating. --Renepick (talk) 22:08, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Let me see if I am understanding this... You write above that User:Rob-nowman created the graphics on images that User:Dapeldo uploaded and claimed as own work. Also, User_talk:Dapeldo has been fully noticed for the proposed removal of the files. Each DN one is given at least a week for discussion. I'm sorry you don't feel this is sufficient "asking and trial" but the concern at Commons is that the material be within scope, which includes full sourcing and open licenses. Cheers! Ellin Beltz (talk) 01:36, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Ok what do you want me to do now? Since the files have been deleted I cannot even correct the mistakes of sourcing done by User:Dapeldo. He together with User:Rob-nowman and me work all on the same project. We share the files in the same file server at the university sometimes we cannot even for sure say who of us was the original producer or if it was all of us or a subset. We can put all our names as sources. On the files we also stated who was the author. So the missmatch was only between what was written on the file and what was entered into the mediawiki system. So the files should never have been deleted but just tagged correctly. So would please someone restore the full list of files so that we can fix the problems?

1. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_1.pdf
2. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_2.pdf
3. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_3.pdf
4. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_4.pdf
5. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_5.pdf
6. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_6.pdf
7. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_7.pdf
8. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_8.pdf
9. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_9.pdf
10. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_10.pdf
11. File:Web_Science_MOOC_Exercises_Week_11.pdf

This is just a matter of correct tagging. And while we are doing this: Does someone have a bot or tool that can set rob-nowman and me as the author of all our videos. If not please feel free to also delete the video content that we have originally created and donated as OER since at the end of the video we do all the copyright stuff but it is not correctly reflected in the mediawiki system. As for the project scope discussion: I will not discuss this c.f. v:Open_educational_resources. I am sure you'll find more official documents... --Renepick (talk) 16:15, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Flickr accounts and License laundering

Regarding to this DR. Can someone make a list of files uploaded from Flickr account and the total uploades of the same Flickr account to Flickr is less then 10 (or 20). We can find possible COM:LL.
And one more - a list of of files uploaded from Flickr account which uploaded to Flickr in less then one hour before it uploaded to Commons. It could indicate of possibility to COM:LL. -- Geagea (talk) 12:27, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I was slightly confused by the DR referred to, as there is only the one file on Commons loaded from that particular Flickrstream. Here's a general rephrasing:

1. List all files uploaded from Flickr where there are fewer than 10 images in the Flickrstream
2. List all files uploaded from Flickr where the upload to Flickr time is less that one hour before upload to Commons

Both can be done, "fairly" easily. I would do this by calling the FlickrAPI using flickr_people_getInfo. I have run through two examples below using a small script, the first is the account in the DR you mentioned:

username Chris Baugher

photosurl https://www.flickr.com/photos/82271859@N00/

firstdatetaken 2013-08-19 11:40:02

firstdate 1376937739 19 Aug 2013

count 1

username Fæ

photosurl https://www.flickr.com/photos/50398299@N08/

firstdatetaken 2000-07-20 14:16:22

firstdate 1274272808 19 May 2010

count 6460

Checking "count" solves your first question, while "firstdate" seems to solve the second. "firstdate" appears to be the date in Unix timestamp format that the Flickr account was created first photo was uploaded to Flickr, while "firstdatetaken" is the date of the earliest photo in the stream deduced from its EXIF data.

If we were running a large report, we may have to throttle to 3,000 queries per hour or fewer (if from WMFlabs, this might not be the only app using the same IP address to Flickr).[1]

P.S. I'm overstretched right now, but I can imagine the solution and can add this to my backlog to do it later, if nobody else experiments with a report.

…

Here's an example of what can be done by first searching Category:Deletion requests January 2015 (4,816 files) for images with flickr.com in the image page text, then searching the resulting 190 images for related distinct Flickrstreams with fewer than 20 images. This search takes about 2 minutes in total (running from my desktop, not labs).

Suspect Flickrstreams in Deletion requests January 2015

NSID	Date	Username	Count
41599103@N05	2009-08-19	Ciko7	15

--Fæ (talk) 02:29, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Fæ. It is good to hear that it can be done easily. The two different cases above can help us to find possible license laundering. But the query should work for the existing files not those that already in DR. The EXIF is not important but only the dates of the uploads to Flickr and Commons. If file uploaded to Flickr and shortly to Commons there is good chance that it is license laundering. The files should be checked manually and carefully of course as it is not necessarily means it is license laundering. -- Geagea (talk) 04:02, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

This may be less of an issue for Commons than you think, in terms of quantities, though may be serious when it does happen. I have run a test last night which watched RecentChanges for uploads from distinct Flickr accounts and found about 1 per hour. All file edits were checked, so this does find accounts from old uploads with recent minor edits, though this may be useful if an old upload is now from a deleted Flickrstream. See Report, feedback or suggestions welcome. I'm imagining this can become a live report on Commons, updated every hour (only with suspect sources), with uploads dropping off the report after a week.

Based on the 2 highlighted suspect streams, I have created Commons:Deletion requests/File:The 2011 Film Independent Spirit Awards 2.jpg for one of them. So even now the process is adding some value. --Fæ (talk) 10:13, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank Fae. Maybe we can try less than one day instead of one hour? -- Geagea (talk) 12:05, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm running another test, just showing suspects. As I was getting false matches like this, I have changed the criteria to "Flickr account created within the last 30 days" OR "fewer than 30 photos in the Flickrstream". I'll link to results here when a few hours are done, then a full 24 hours. After that I'll think about putting it on WMFlabs and having it as a wiki page of suspected Flickrwashing for investigation rather than relying on my desktop. --Fæ (talk) 12:11, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much. It can be very helpful. -- Geagea (talk) 12:18, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

A test "live" report is at User:Faebot/Flickrstreams of concern. This "live" in that new entries will be added from recentchanges in realtime. However improvement such as checking the log for past NSIDs being reported has yet to be added. Based on the last soak test, the criteria are now:

1. Flickr account created in <= 30 days or photos in flickrstream <= 30.
2. Image on RecentChanges has a first edit < 90 days ago (taken as equivalent to image upload date).

By all means watch the test report, however this may be overwritten by better formatting or stop being updated while in a beta version.

Keep in mind this is "Flickrstreams of concern" rather than "Flickrwashers". Uploaders should be checked with a presumption of good faith, especially if they just need some advice on copyright before continuing to contribute to the project.

Update I have rethought the way RecentChanges is queried, so the report is a magnitude more efficient and is able to examine all new uploads in a given day. The report is now only looking at new uploads rather than all edits, but can go back in time to any day in the last month if needed. I consider User:Faebot/Flickrstreams of concern being effectively live as it is giving useful results and if it goes offline, it can now catch up with missed results.

I tried adding a bad Flickrstream to Commons:Questionable Flickr images, however the in-page tool to do this appears to just hang for me. Is this still working or maybe it is supposed to be limited to admins? --Fæ (talk) 11:09, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Commons:Questionable Flickr images not protected. this page is protected. -- Geagea (talk) 11:31, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I presume that has something to do with the QFI page not working for me. It would be a pity if non-Admins like Image reviewers are put off helping with investigating bad uploads from Flickr, due to the drag of having to go pester an Admin to take action to list the source every time. --Fæ (talk) 12:03, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference, April 9-12 2015, The Netherlands

Wikimedia Nederland welcomes interested Wikimedians and GLAM enthusiasts to join us at the GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference, from 9 - 12 April 2015 in The Hague, The Netherlands. The call for proposals and application for scholarships are now open!
Ter-burg (talk) 14:57, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Geograph upload request

A long-standing bug means I cannot use my TUSC login.

Pleaase could someone who can use geograph2commons to upload:

• http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2831892
• http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3702003
• http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3702006

and place them in Category:Chad Valley toys? Andy Mabbett (talk) 16:19, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Using image nominated for deletion, because its unused

I want to use a picture in a wiki article. But its currently nominated for deletion (because the picture itself is unused). So should I wait for nomination to close? Or should I go ahead & put it in the wiki? And if its being used in the wiki, that means there's no need for deletion. right? thanks Emphatik (talk) 20:42, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

If you use it and it stays, than it should not be deleted as "out of scope" because it is unusable by any wiki project. Although it is hard to imagine how such an image might be useful for anything. --Jarekt (talk) 21:14, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it is hard to imagine how such trivial lens flare images could be tout as a proof for the existence of a mythical brown dwarf companion to the Sun (as opposed to, say, data from orbital infrared telescopy), but indeed this happens (as reported by User:Emphatik) and that’s why they need to be kept and described as such in Commons. -- Tuválkin ✉ 21:28, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

You can use a picture here as you like, INUSE is relevant for deletion debates. If you don't mind the red link and the broken image link error tracking you can also link to it after it was (hopefully, in this case) deleted. –Be..anyone (talk) 08:28, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Alright. I've attached the pic to the wiki as per your suggestions. cheers Emphatik (talk) 16:49, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Wilfredor → The Photographer

Wilfredor changed his account name to User:The Photographer, and that needed to be fixed in references to the former name, namely in talk pages and file pages. While I’d expect to be taken care of by means of a redirect in the user pages of the former name (as, f.i., was done for the name change Wiebevl → Vunz), apparently User:Lucia Bot has been in the past few days editing most (all?) uses of the string "Wilfredor" to "The Photographer", not only in links but also in text, including archived deletion requests, admin noticeboars, etc., and affecting other people’s comments (see one example). This strikes me as technically unnecessary and prone to cause more confusion than it solves. -- Tuválkin ✉ 20:44, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I have corrected the above comment and section name so that it doesn't look as weird as it did. I am reverting that bot edits on my talk pages and archive pages, for that sole reason, they are unnecesarily editing historical pages. Diego Grez ^{return fire} 04:23, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

This bot was not approved for such a task. --Dschwen (talk) 00:49, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

January 31

POTY banner

At top right says "Image credit (2007 winner)." That seems pretty odd, in that it's hardly an image credit, but even beyond that the image shown appears to be a portion of the 2010 POTY winner, not the 2007 winner. I have nothing to do with POTY, but would someone who does please sort this out? - Jmabel ! talk 07:22, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Discussed on the POTY talk page and in an archived thread on en:VP/T. –Be..anyone (talk) 08:03, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

I was unaware of those discussions, but the upshot there seems to be "Yes, someone on Commons should fix that." Or do you read them differently? - Jmabel ! talk 01:49, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

{{BArch-image}} and Wikidata

I'm not sure if this should be a proposal or a bot request, but I was browsing through the Bundesarchive pictures and I noticed they reference people and places by links to de.wp (which is already very nice). It would be even nicer if we could use wikidata to allow for the internationalization of links. Any ideas on how to do that?--Strainu (talk) 17:15, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

What do you mean by "the internationalization of links"? Ruslik (talk) 17:34, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

On Commons most of the links to countries and big cities are internationalized. Try Paris, Warsaw or Bactria I think that what Strainu meant. Our links were created through templates created out of old style interwiki links. I assume that at some point we will do it automatically based on wikidata, but that is not doable at this stage. --Jarekt (talk) 17:42, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Yeas, that's what I meant, but applicable to any article. Something like {{Wikiarticle|wikidata_item=00000|default_lang=de}}. Sorry to hear this is not feasible at this point.--Strainu (talk) 21:30, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Can an administrator review his/her own uploads?

According to Commons:License review, Please note that as of 21 February 2012, image-reviewers may not review their own uploads unless the account is an approved bot. However, I don't know whether such a statement applies to any reviewer or just to non-admin reviewers. Any clarification? Best regards --Discasto _{talk | contr. | es.wiki analysis} 18:01, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

It applies to ANY reviewers, so administrators AND license reviewers cannot review their own uploads. — Revi 18:05, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

That's what I thought, but IMHO the redaction can be seen as ambiguous as "image-reviewers" is a explicit flag (implicit to admins). --Discasto _{talk | contr. | es.wiki analysis} 18:12, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

February 02

Flickr2Commons

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Jmabel ! talk 01:02, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Anyone else having troubles recently with http://tools.wmflabs.org/flickr2commons/? I've gotten several failures in a row just now, with no comments that give a clue. ~- Jmabel ! talk 00:46, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

• Aha! If the underlying photo is a GIF, Flickr2Commons suggests a name ending with .jpg, then fails on its own mismatch without any indication of the nature of the problem. Brilliant. - Jmabel ! talk 01:02, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

A Russian library caught fire

A fire has destroyed parts of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences, which was one of Russia's largest public libraries, containing more than 14 million items. Really wish they had scanned the books.--維基小霸王 (talk) 07:10, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Oh, no. Sad. — SMUconlaw (talk) 08:46, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Actually, most of the items survived, being encapsulated in concrete. But still, aparently, some books were lost.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:18, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Tram line 4

Can someone update this map with tram line 4?Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:24, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

WLM 2014 winners announced - did anyone notice, or care?

I checked the Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 winners page recently and noticed that the international winners had been announced. An edit on 22 December, with no edit summary, added the results. A WLM blog post on 29 December also published the list. Did anyone notify Commons? I can see no evidence on the "What links here?" list. I have to assume the winners were notified, because there's no evidence on their Commons user talk pages. For every other image-assessment forum on Commons, the photographers/nominators are notified when they get an award. But not WLM.

Why the disconnect? If WLM wants to encourage people to donate freely licensed educational images surely it has to interact with the contest-entrants on Commons as though they were part of the community, and to interact with the Commons community who then have to support these new users. Instead, I see empty user talk pages, some with some deletion notices posted. Of the prize winning entrants who were not already Commons regulars, none have continued here.

Is the jury system working? With every photo contest there will be grumbles over the winning choices. But WLM never seems to satisfy. A basic requirement, surely, is that the prizewinners could be published in a photography magazine or a gallery print displayed with pride. This happens with other major photography competitions at national and international level. But most of the national and the international winning sets on WLM had members with serious technical flaws. For example International winner with 3rd place: File:Jøvik handelssted 04.jpg. This has a heavily posterised sky that is visible even on thumbnail. And the, heavily foreshortened, pier isn't sufficiently in focus. Another concern is whether it is even a valid entry: it is a photo of an abandoned pier. You can see this from other angles here and here. But the Norwegian Listed Building description here is for "Seahouses - Traditional column / beam structure partly on piles in the lake", which can be seen in this photo in the same set by the photographer. Abandoned piers are common, a frequent subject of photography, and this image is a long way from being a remarkable example of the genre.

The only Featured Picture in the international list is File:Iglesia de San Pedro, Teruel, España, 2014-01-10, DD 11-12 HDR.JPG, which was taken by one of our Commons regulars and would probably have been taken, uploaded and nominated without WLM. What does this disconnect between WLM and FP say about whether the two projects are functioning to select the finest images of listed buildings? Since FP regularly reviews and awards listed buildings nearly every single day, is the WLM result and time-consuming jury system, actually of value? The WLM statistics are impressive: "9,000 photographers uploaded over 321,000 freely-licensed photographs of historic buildings, monuments and cultural heritage sites in 41 countries". But is WLM worthwhile as a tool to attract users who stick around, or as a photo competition that produces images we can be fully proud of?

Any constructive opinions on what could be done differently or better? -- Colin (talk) 13:19, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

• I'm not sure how much I am at liberty to say, as I was one of the three judges of the UK competition, but I too am fairly disappointed by the quality of the international winners. I agree with Colin that the winners should be presentable in a magazine or gallery and I don't believe many of the winners could comfortably be displayed without drawing derision from an educated public. I won't comment on the artistic merits of the images as I don't want to disrespect the artistic choices of the judges, but technical flaws are not particularly subjective and are, I think, a significant problem amongst many the finalists of the national competition, but even more so the winners of the international competition. As I said, I don't want to be too critical of the judges, but to be honest, I don't even know who judged the international competition, or what criteria was applied. There doesn't seem to be any information whatsoever on how the international WLM competition was judged, and the FAQ for the 2014 competition redirects to the FAQ for the 2013 competition. I know we had some difficulties attracting chapters to participate, and the appropriate skillsets to implement the competition in many of the local chapters, but I do believe that if we're going to continue running WLM in subsequent years, the organisation and quality of the competition does need some improvement - probably with more involvement from a central organising party at Wikimedia Foundation rather than leaving most of the work to the local chapters. This is not a criticism of any individuals, as I know all involved did their best. Diliff (talk) 14:22, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Diliff, the jury is listed here, though that list might not be complete. The criteria are (in no particular order)

• Technical quality (sharpness, use of light, perspective etc.);
• Originality;
• Usefulness of the image for Wikipedia.

as well as the entry requirements

• Self taken and self uploaded;
• Uploaded in September 2014;
• Freely licensed;
• Contain an identified monument;
• Nominated through a national contest

-- Colin (talk) 15:12, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I had a similar problem with WLE, when 11 of the 15 winners had no international assessment tag. My mad SoFixIt plan—just nominate the missing 2*5+1 pro forma as QI—did not at all work as expected, so don't try that, unless you really want a full QI review. OTOH some WLE winners are now also QI or even FP, and IIRC the WLE-folks later also added tags to their winners.

I just tried to find the categories or galleries of WLM winners, but all I found was a vintage 2010 COM:WLM, and lots of "by year and country" categories. The WLM-site is no MediaWiki, that's odd from my POV. Somebody with tact (maybe you, certainly not me) could invite them to form a kind of Wiki-project here, with the goal to create categories or galleries for their annual winners, and contribute to assessment templates (or roll their own) as they see fit. They could also nominate the winners as FP. Of course everybody could do all of this, but obviously it didn't happen so far. –Be..anyone (talk) 15:31, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

It might not be a bad idea to say all WLM finalists have to pass QI. There's some... oddities in there, found one that was only 600px wide. Adam Cuerden (talk) 17:05, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

• I am entirely satisfied with the result. WLM is still in an experimental state. It hardly has funding. It has made more pictures of monuments available than any other similar project, and in my opinion, its output and impact over the few years it has existed can be discussed on par with the entire output of UNESCO departments for cataloging and raising public awareness of monuments.

It seems obvious to me that the output of this project justifies a lot more financial support, at least on the order of multiple paid staff, when considered in the context of other programs which have similar aims, cost more money, and are less effective. For now I would be happy just to see the project apply for funds to document the extent of participation in it and apply for a grant writer to sustain its future more nuanced outreach into particular regions. It might also be useful to have a staff photography critic to pre-process photos before judging with notes on technical quality, which would both help voting judges and be a part of a fair reward for photographers who contribute photos as they learn their art. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:53, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I agree that it needs more funding, if funding will attract better photographers and increase exposure. But given it is a photography competition and not simply a project to attract a large volume of bog-standard photos, I don't know how you can say you are satisfied. Are you really concerned only by quantity and not by quality? Can you honestly look at the winning entries and tell me that you're impressed? About half of the winners would be outright rejected by QI or FPC projects for poor image quality. How is then that a 'successful' international competition involving 320,000 photos could feature winning images that I think, honestly, many decently talented photographers would be embarrassed to publish, let alone hang on a wall? I'm sorry this comes across a bit harsh to the winners of the competition, but I think WLM should rightfully aim to feature photography that matches advanced amateur, if not professional standards of excellence such as the Commons POTY competition. If it is not able to do that, and I don't believe it has, I cannot consider it a much of a success, and I cannot imagine that many talented prospective entrants next year will look at the winners and think "wow, that's a competition that I'd love to be involved in". That doesn't mean I think we should scrap it, but I couldn't in good conscience call it a success either. Diliff (talk) 19:03, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

ASI monument N-UP-P93, "Remains of a Fine Massive brick fort" at Chandravati. Note that the fort is not here

Diliff I imagine the event as more of a scavenger hunt than a photography competition, so any picture which presents the location and does not trigger aversion in my untrained eyes meets my expectations. Perhaps 2% of the people in the world can look at the WLM winners and say anything educated about the technical execution of the photograph. While I hope that someday WLM attracts advanced amateurs, in my opinion that is not the target audience in this.

I am sharing my favorite WLM entry, the fort at Chandravati. This is in a rural area hours from any place where tourists go, and not even accessible by roads. Sometime in the past 30 years the fort has been dismantled so that poor people could use the bricks for other projects. WLM is the first time an international audience took interest in the place, and it was because one person in the area made a long trip to its site. Just having this information alone about this one site justifies all cost and expense of the entire WLM project, because now we have valuable information about the upkeep of an international treasure. The entire fort has disappeared since the last time someone checked. I would not care if this were on a camera phone, and in my opinion, this picture is as deserving of a prize as any other in the WLM project.

Photography is only one part of this. The biggest part is promoting pride in people's own cultures. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:18, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

If it is a photo collection project then just say so. Have a big "Donate Images to Wikipedia Month". Encourage talented amateurs and professionals alike to donate a small part of their archives or to go out and take new photos. But WLM claims to be "the world's biggest photo contest". If photography isn't actually the main part of it, as you strangely claim, nor recruiting and celebrating high quality image submissions the focus of it, then it isn't a photo contest at all. We should be honest if that's our aim. There are projects such as the UK's Geograph that aim to document thoroughly without any focus on producing works of art. Those 321,000 images required thousands of hours of study by dozens of reviewers, all of whom thought they were working towards choosing the finest images in a photo contest. We persuaded external judges to aid some national competitions, who also thought they were part of a serious photo competition. I'm sorry but the Chandravati fort story doesn't move me. Buildings disappear and we fail to capture them -- it certainly isn't WMF or Commons responsibility or mission. Nor is encouraging pride in local culture. I'm not impressed with the idea of paying multiple-salaries to achieve countless more bad-quality photographs -- and I'm not talking about the prize winners here, but about the 300,000 images that stood no hope. If WMF have funds to spare on photography, there are people on Commons who would benefit from equipment, software and computers. And there is one I can think of, who for the sake of some petrol money and other minor expenses, has in a few months produced more world-class quality photographs of listed buildings than the whole of WLM ever. There are, I've no doubt, out-of-work pro photographers or photography students, who could be financed to produce images for Commons if that was wanted. Plenty ways of spending money than phoney photo competitions. If we have money, let's at least aim to make photos that are of minimal professional competence, than to be happy with a huge pile of barely usable ones.

Having said that, WLM has produced many photos that illustrate our WP articles, though the laws of diminishing returns mean that the low-hanging-fruit is going. But please don't claim one photo "justifies all cost and expense of the entire WLM project" because you didn't spend it -- those who reviewed and organised the competition spent it with their own time. The church I photographed for WLM 2013 has a dwindling congregation and may also one day be demolished yet is among some of the finest church architecture in Scotland. I would have photographed it regardless of WLM, and my photos of it are the only high quality photographs available online. Plenty other people on Commons take pictures and can tell such stories without dressing it up in a photo competition. -- Colin (talk) 20:25, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Colin I understand why you are not satisfied, and by what you say you indicate that you understand the reasons why I am satisfied. For your sake, I hope something changes about WLM to increase the quality of submissions over time and I hope that for my sake, you will leave the project to continue to generate what benefits me and my community. This project means very different things to different people. Blue Rasberry (talk) 02:57, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

• To answer the o.p. title — no, and no. Concerning #3 international winner (indeed a comparatively poor photograph), I have to say only this. -- Tuválkin ✉ 18:30, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

One goal of WLM is that photos are taken of monuments. In certain cities there are thousands of buildings considered as monuments. For example in Leuven, Belgium. That means that there are photos which are not so nice for example this one and other ones are better as that one. It all depends on the time you are there to take the photos. For certain monuments it is in my opinion not worth the effort to come back when the light conditions are better. A good recording is sufficient. Other monuments deserve to come back for example in early spring when there are no leaves on the trees that hide the building and in the early morning because than the sun shines from the right side. Wouter (talk) 20:44, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

• • Can I just weigh in with a basic "whatever"? I take a lot of pictures of monuments, and a good number of them have been good enough to end up on calendars or in magazines, and once I saw that I had to go through extra hoops to have them considered for a contest I just didn't bother. - Jmabel ! talk 20:55, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Colin and Rasberry for your remarks, as they were a nice opportunity to rethink why I´ve lost the motivation to take pictures of monuments for Wikipedia and Commons: I admit that I´m one of the bad guys who didn´t know the function of the tiny plus and minus buttons before having done the first 100 uploads (always heavily overexposing from then on) and didn´t start to wonder about falling lines before 200 more. My pictures of west-facing facades tend to look better than those at the other side of the road because I love to sleep long on weekends. And many of my pictures are a study of garbage bins and mid-class cars, because if they stood between me and the registered house, that was how it was (but I eventually learned to focus on the house rather than on the garbage bin). But I really enjoyed filling the empty spaces in the lists of cultural heritage monuments in DE-Wikipedia (and exploring obscure little villages while doing this). Definitely not as the best picture but as a temporary placeholder until someone with more photographic aptitude came along on a non-garbage-bin-collection day. Then came the first WLM-event and it was still fun, WLM being just an additional opportunity to motivate the more ambitious contributors. But in the second round it became clear that bad pictures like mine were seen rather a nuisance than a gain. Of course, I never had tagged more than one image for WLM (and this just to improve the statistics) but I still felt that even the general expectations for contributions in that area were getting higher than I was able (or willing) to fulfill.

In my home state are about 17,000 cultural heritage monuments. The number of Commons contributors who systematically tried to collect them was once 8 and now is around 4 (give or take one or two, I just see the additions in the lists). Your pay-for-better-pictures approach, Colin, will mean paying for around 40 man years to get the job done. Or return to the fun-for-all aspect, expand it and live with what you get until you get something better. --Rudolph Buch (talk) 21:54, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Rudolph I'm not advocating a "paid for better pictures approach" -- just brainstorming ways the money could be spent since BlueRaspberry suggested WLM could use WMF funds. Crowdsourcing is a great way to fill-in-the-gaps with useful but not artistic images. And I agree that 99% of listed buildings are not going to win any photo competitions -- the point is to catalogue them with freely licensed images. But then why pretend it is a photo competition? Do many/most of the thousands of photographers who took ordinary images of awkward-to-photograph listed buildings think they stand a chance in the competition? Surely not. So is there a way to motivate people to do such photography without the dishonesty of a photo competition where producing the highest-quality photographs of significant buildings is not actually the aim? -- Colin (talk) 22:25, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I agree with you Colin. There are many ways that we can collect simple but effective photography of the countless monuments around the world without having to call it a photo competition. We just run regular banners on Wikipedia that encourages people to go out and shoot historical buildings. But if we're going to call it a photography competition, that means that someone has to go through all the images to find a winner. Perhaps it could be as simple as a dropdown menu on the upload form: "Do you want to enter this photo into the competition?" Two options: "Yes, please enter this image into the competition." and "No, don't worry, I know it has no chance of winning, I just wanted make a token contribution to the 'sum of all human knowledge', thanks anyway.". That would likely significantly reduce the burden on reviewers. It wouldn't necessarily improve the quality of the winners though, but it would at least recognise that quality and quantity are two disparate goals for the WLM project. Diliff (talk) 22:55, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I'd ask whether the criteria was being that crefully applied, given this is on the finalist page:

That's not a thumbnail, that's the full-size image. Is there any reason why passing as QI or FP (any wiki or commons) can't be a requirement? It would weed things down immensely. Adam Cuerden (talk) 22:59, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Adam Cuerden The reason is that it is an all-inclusive project, and not a celebration for the wealthy. I want pictures taken with mobile phones to be included especially if that continues to get participation from the developing world. I want undocumented things to become documented, rather than documented things to become better documented. After all the monuments in the world are well-photographed then there will be time to start excluding participants. I do not want to reject participants before they even try, and especially not over lack of money to join.

Many people in developing countries upload thumbnails even if they have expensive cameras because they do not have fast Internet. I do not want thumbnails excluded, and the best contributions may not be the technically best pictures. If there were different standards for judging pictures from wealthy countries then I would support that. Blue Rasberry (talk) 03:04, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

There is certainly reason to encourage mobile phone images as useful, but not to make them finalists, particularly given File:Château_d'Aigle.jpg is more or lesss the same view, but not a thumbnail. A finalist should be something Wikipedias are encouraged to use, if there's a half-dozen better choices, it's not finalist material. Further, this is from Switzerland. We're getting far better pictures than this from third world countries. Adam Cuerden (talk) 07:57, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Bluerasberry, last time I checked, Switzerland wasn't a developing nation :-). The Canon EOS 500D that took that photo is capable of fine 15MP images, whereas the above is 0.24MP. Adam, each country had its own review system, and in the UK this year an image below 5MP didn't stand a chance. We chose that figure as it is the kind of resolution you'd need to print A4 to high quality. Setting that in our guidance for the competition, significantly increased the size of this year's entrants compared to previous year. Photographers who aren't at heart free-content hippies will tend to donate the most miserly resolution they think they can get away with. Making QI/FP a requirement wouldn't work (think of the edit conflicts with 300,000 images dumped on QI :-). One might have thought, with 300,000 images entered to a contest, that the winning selection could at least have some technical competence and generous upload dimensions, leaving aside artistic opinions which will vary. Bluerasberry, it is all well and good hoping for an inclusive project but you are mixing your hope for worldwide contributions to a collection project, with the purpose of a photography competition, which this claims to be. Beware the laws of unintended consequences -- we've had some fine multi-megapixel panoramas of India in previous WLMs. Now if you introduce your "Developing nation images will be judged at 200x300px thumbnail to level the game for those with poor cameras and bad internet" rule then those photographers who might have donated a 12MP or 36MP or 50MP image will now only donate 0.1MP thumbs. And then all WLM India would have to show for its efforts would be thousands of thumbnails of very limited utility. And the photographers in developing nations, who are Commons regulars, who understand free-content projects, and who donate high resolution images, will be upset when their generous donations are overlooked in order to praise some little thumbnail. And so they won't take part. And this brings me to the other issue: you assume WLM will somehow function if the motivation to win a prize worth winning is gone. That the teams who reviewed all those images will continue to give their time when the result is no better than an average week at FP. This year many countries did not take part in WLM (many countries do not have that many historical listed monuments compared to Europe). Bluerasberry, you say you don't want thumbnails or cameraphones excluded but by "included" do you mean they stand a serious chance of winning vs a proper high-quality photograph? If so, that is not a competition I would enter, nor would I see any chance of us persuading non-Commons amateur photographers to enter a "thumbnail competition" when there are plenty serious photo competitions. -- Colin (talk) 08:24, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Moreover, this photo of the Chateau d'Aigle needs a release via OTRS as it's been published already in 2011 at [2]. Lupo 09:19, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

And that's the other problem with letting thumbs in. Far easier to grab thumbs off the internet... Adam Cuerden (talk) 09:31, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

@Be..anyone, the winners of previous years can easily be found by replacing 2014 with the relevant year:

• Wiki Loves Monuments 2010 winners
• Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 winners
• Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 winners
• Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 winners

Mvg, Basvb (talk) 09:24, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, missed that, and the shortcut is also okay, it doesn't go to the old page. –Be..anyone (talk) 10:47, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

See Category:Highlighted content from Wiki Loves Monuments, an issue might be that the actual quality and FP images are there but don't end up on top. I count around 150-200 FP's and around 5000 QI's there, with this we have to consider that many uploaders don't nominate their images because they are not familiar with the QI and FP processes, thus the number of eligible images could be much higher. In issue which I found while judging was that specifically the professional photographers amongst the judges weighted being artistic way more than being of very high technical quality. It could be a good suggestion for next years that photo's should pass a QI test, however this would have some issues, the QI's are judged by one person and all sorts of bias issues arise from that. Te other issue would be that it would put a high load on the QI process. Another approach could be allowing the persons here who are very critical of the quality to join judging and highligh the importance of technical quality. I agree that a 600 px image shouldn't stand a chance (people should donate their full size photo not just a thumbnail), and I've thrown pictures out for that reason. Mvg, Basvb (talk) 09:24, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Also, I would like to point out the strength of Pakistan and Columbia's contributions. Third-world countries are providing some top-notch work. Some of the images aren't perfect, but they're still pretty damn good. Adam Cuerden (talk) 09:30, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Colin for bringing up WLM to discussion. I was rather involved in all of the WLMs in Austria, so my opinion expressed here is just a local view. Critics from my POV include:

• WLM creates much too many images especially of monuments we already do have a lot of images of. It does not help to fill the gaps in the national lists effectively (this was done mainly by Wikipedians uploading images all the year without needing the motivation of a contest). It also provides a lot of stunning bad quality images (an example with worst images already deleted. Too many images are an extraordinary burden for the whole process chain including welcome to new contributors, categorization, checking relevance as a protected monument, adding descriptions and IDs, adding images to lists & articles, doing the jury work etc.
• Any proposal about putting this quantity to a QI / FP process would create a supernova there.
• Quantity is a quality measure on success for the WMF. Because it can be easily done. Like counting LOCs, which does not say anything about the quality of software, quantity of images can easily be measured and does not say anything about the overall quality. On the contrary, it encourages contributors to upload more and more images. Many of them being an annoyance for the jury without having any chance to get to the final round.
• We tried to do something Diliff mentioned above, to allow uploaders to select images for the competition. It was proposed over and over again, but the local organization was not willing nor capable of implementing such stuff. The chapter is measured by sheer quantity, so it is not in the chapter's interest to limit the numbers of nominated images. I implemented a selection based on a special category with was added by default through the UW, but could be removed manually to de-nominate an image. This poor man's solution was accepted by the uploaders, about 10 % of all images have been de-nominated that way. In the end the chapter did not care and put all the images again to the jury. I would strongly support a button to allow de/selection for competition. Although it will not help for mass uploaders during competition time only.
• In the backoffice we are running out of resources. Nobody bothers about WLM after all those years. The local organization propagates huge number of images, but they neither do nor do organize the work resulting from those huge numbers (Austrian experience only).
• To sum up: Quantity is triggered by WMF, propagated to the local chapters and implemented in their grants. The organization is biased to quantity. So how will you get more quality?
• We should welcome every photo showing the monument especially if it is the first and only image of that monuments, especially if it is originating from some lonely areas of the world (in terms of active Wikipedians). Agree with Bluerasberry on that topic. But we should not put every photo to competition. Which also could be done silently, there is no legal right to win. And the process of selection of the finalist images is only transparent from the organization, not from the arguments for non/selection.
• see my slides (German, but you will understand the graphics) on this topic, which I presented at the denkmal 2014 at Leipzig. Main points: contributers are going down, number of images per monument is going up, number of images of monuments not already documented (e.g. images that can be used to fill the gaps) is going down dramatically.

regards --Herzi Pinki (talk) 10:05, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

• Of course the most popular and famous monuments will attract the most attention and be photographed over and over. I don't have a problem with having multiple photos of certain monuments, because if we get a better photo of a monument than we had previously, isn't that just as useful as getting an average photo of a monument that was previously not represented on Commons? I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just saying both have genuine benefits for us. The main problem is of course that when we have countless bland images of the same monument, the burden to review them all becomes substantial.
• As for my suggestion for reducing the number of entrants, I don't see why it would be such a problem, because they are all still uploaded as part of WLM and we still benefit from the images - they just aren't all entered into the competition. The local chapters can still claim that they received a large number of images as part of the WLM project, even if not all of them are entrants in the competition. I can see that it might prove a problem for the 'marketing' of the competition, where it is touted as being the world's largest photography competition. Reducing the volume of entrants would perhaps jeopardise that. But so what? Are we really basing the credibility of WLM on that sales pitch? "World's largest photography competition" sounds great, but when you see the quality of the average entrants, you quickly realise that quantity does not equate to quality. Perhaps we need to provide feedback to WMF that we don't believe that quantity is an important metric to be measured on, and that it is potentially jeopardising the enthusiasm we have for the project.
• Also, you said that you believe not every photo should be entered. I completely agree, but how could that be done except to ask the uploader to decide whether they really feel it is a worthy entrant? To separate the quality images from the poor images, it requires manpower to review them all. Yes, certain things can be automated, we can have a minimum resolution requirements, but that is only one small aspect of what makes a good image. 90% of it is subjective and cannot be identified with metadata. Of course we can assume that many contributors would also not be capable of rationally considering if their photos are really capable of winning, but I think it's the only way we can do it without shifting the burden onto volunteers to review them all (which I think we can agree is a large burden indeed, given the volume of images we receive with WLM).
• It sounds like the common experience here is that local chapters don't have the manpower and/or expertise to implement WLM with all the nuances that this project requires. It's a catch-22 situation, because as you say, there wasn't much motivation this year to make it a big success, and that is perhaps reflected in the result we received. To turn it around, I think we need to have a competition in which we can be proud of the winning entries. For this, it makes far more sense to me for the competition to be more centralised by WMF with better advertising to really get the word out to quality photographers and make it something that people want to contribute to. Currently, I don't think this is currently the case, either because photographers are completely unaware of the competition (likely), or because they are aware of it but don't see the incentive of contributing. In the UK, the top three winning entries were actually all by the same professional photographer, which is great, except he has not contributed anything before or since. The result is that we got some nice images (and he got a substantial amount of prize money!), but I don't think there were new contributors who decided to stick around and continue to contribute to Commons. In any case, although I think it would be better for WMF to centrally manage the competition and boost its ability to attract talent, the judging, defining the term 'monument' as it relates to each country and anything else that needs to be decided locally could still, of course, be done by the local chapters, but actually running the competition and implementing the considerable work required for a functional web interface really should be a centrally managed thing IMO. I see that as the only way WLM is going to evolve and mature into a respectable international photography competition. If people are happy for it to remain a high quantity, low quality upload-fest, then that's what it will remain. Diliff (talk) 12:38, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

I agree that maintaining the "worlds largest" adjective isn't important if it requires us to emphasise quantity over quality. I'm not convinced there's much marketing achievement for WLM beyond the banner on projects. Every year we fail to supply magazines with information about contest in time -- in fact we only just got the UK website operational in time. I don't know whether the "[x] don't bother entering this into the competition" upload option would work. I'm not totally convinced enough people would choose it to make a difference. It would need to substantially lighten the load on reviewers. And wouldn't make a lot of difference for those countries where the judges had a filtered shortlist. Some central organisation and money would no doubt help, but the identification of listed buildings/monuments is probably something each country would need to help with. If you add other factors such as the "at risk" register, then I know that England, Wales, Scotland and NI all have separate lists; the Welsh one is not online and the NI one has a seriously broken search function and none of them let you extract the whole list.

But I still have a fundamental doubt over the purpose of this as a competition. It is an extremely expensive competition in terms of volunteer time compared to FP/QI/VI and yet the results in terms of winners-chosen don't achieve more than FP does regularly. We could set some minimum quality threshold similar to FP. I think also the use of external judges has to be questioned, if the experience seems to be they don't share our values. Could the competition be fully judged by the crowd - and if so how? -- Colin (talk) 13:19, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Not being involved in WLM in any kind of way, I'm getting the impression that maybe it would be wise to put the whole thing on hiatus for one year to take some time to figure out where we want it to go. For example, we could still encourage contributors to upload as many images as they like but require them to pick a maximum of – say – five images to be entered in the "competition" part themselves. However, that would require development of an online-interface that guides people through that and keeps an eye on how many pictures one has already nominated etc..

Try to recruit external reviewers from reputable photography magazines (be bold: NatGeo, Outdoor Photographer ;-) and get the winning pictures published there. --El Grafo (talk) 14:36, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

We did something similar in the UK - we had a judge from English Heritage, but as I said already above, I think of those kind of reputable organisations would be embarrassed to be publish and be associated with our WLM winners. It's a catch-22, we can't attract reputable organisations for support if we can't demonstrate that we have a reputable competition with reputable winning photos. Diliff (talk) 16:49, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

@Diliff, I want to clarify the first point. In an economic sense, it is a question of marginal utility. The first image of a monument compared to the 501^st of yet another. While each photo makes the same effort in the process chain, it is different with respect to coverage. We do wanna document the world's cultural heritage, don't we, as complete as possible. All images are welcomed, but some are more useful than others. The headline for the competition should take this into account. In 2014 in Austria the headline was something like: As there are already photos of the vast majority of protected monuments in Austria, and the few unphotographed are difficult to reach or to find, you can contribute with different perspectives, details, different seasons and time of day of already photographed objects. This formulation opens the door for some images that increase the count, but do not increase the coverage. Instead we should direct contributors to the gaps while still allowing every photo of a monument of course. If we can get rid of the stigma of the world's largest photo contest, we could ask the contributors to select your best photos at home and upload only those. Or do you find something like this (not a monument, all superb photos) useful and valuable? So the criteria would be, it must be an image of an object we did not have images before, it must be at least as good as already existing images of the same object we had before (based in your individual judgement as a photographer), or it must demonstrate some special aspect of the object not shown before or not shown that well before. Do not upload a lot of similar perspectives of the same object. We will only get more quality, if we demand it. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 17:40, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Something's screwed up about the nomination for deletion script

I tried to nominate File:ThrillingComics60.jpg - it failed to ever finish the script. Really malformed deletion, and, unfortunately, since we all use the script, not very good instructions to finish. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:50, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Confirmed, happens for me, too. @Rillke: any idea what's up? Lupo 15:18, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Entirely my mistake. While I as inserting assertions that user is still logged on when performing a change if the action was started from a page where the user is logged on, I made a mistake. This change was important for privacy reasons. Thanks for pinging me. -- Rillke^(q?) 15:27, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Please purge your browser’s cache or enable JavaScript in your Browser's settings. (You only need to do it once.)

Operating system Browser	Microsoft Windows or Linux	macOS
Internet Explorer	Press Ctrl+F5
Mozilla Firefox	Hold down ⇧ Shift while clicking Reload (or press Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+⇧ Shift+R)	Press ⌘ Cmd+R (reload page) or ⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+R (reload page and rewrite cache)
Opera	Press Ctrl+F5 or ⇧ Shift+F5
Konqueror
Apple Safari	Hold down ⇧ Shift+Alt while clicking Reload
	Press Ctrl+R	Press ⌘ Cmd+⌥ Option+E (clear browser cache) or ⌘ Cmd+R (update)
Chrome	Press Ctrl+F5 or ⇧ Shift+F5 or hold down ⇧ Shift while clicking Reload	Press ⌘ Cmd+F5 or ⇧ Shift+F5 or hold down ⇧ Shift while clicking Reload

Fixed 5 minutes ago. I fear load.php is updating things very slowly so try emptying your network cache. -- Rillke^(q?) 15:25, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Uitnodiging Wikimedia Belgium Project Days

Wikimedia Belgium wants to work on a better Free Knowledge and wants to support all efforts in this regard. Wikimedia Belgium cannot do this on their own and needs your help. We can assist you with your plans and projects. Please talk to us during the Wikimedia Belgium Project Days, organized every three to six months. The first Project Day is scheduled for Wednesday 4 February 2015. Lotje (talk) 16:20, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

February 03

Template edit not transcluding

Curiously having made this edit, the removed details still appear in the transcluded template at COM:LR and at the various language versions, and at which I use a lot. Yes I have purged all those pages in my browser. Any ideas why those removed details still appear? Ww2censor (talk) 00:24, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Maybe a missing translation admin, as on {{Commons upload tools}}. Something is odd with this procedure, should there be a request page, or a request template populating a pending translation category, or should everybody with some edits in the template namespace automatically be a TA, with a help page explaining what this means? –Be..anyone (talk) 05:17, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Offer of 300+ railway images

Via an OTRS ticket we have been contacted by Ben Brooksbank with an offer of 300+ railway images from outside the UK. Ben has been a prodigous uploader of free images (see Category:Photographs by Ben Brooksbank for the numbers of UK images) to Geograph but the images offered now are from Europe and North America. I'm wondering what is the best way to process the images as many will need checking for Freedom of panorama restrictions before uploading? Nthep (talk) 14:30, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Most railway-themed photos wont pose FoP issues, as they depict mass-produced utility items outdoors. Photos of tickets or signage, maps, and advertisements, though is another matter. -- Tuválkin ✉ 15:52, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Knowing Ben's topics there will probably be quite a few buildings as the subjects. Nthep (talk) 16:27, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Being unable to see the OTRS correspondence, or any details of what /outside the UK/ means, makes it impossible to give a firm answer without reiterating COM:CRT and COM:FOP. You may wish to ask on the OTRSwiki where most readers can see the queue and all are knowledgeable on IP law, or alternatively ask Ben if he actually wants the details to remain limited to OTRS volunteers. --Fæ (talk) 21:26, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

There won't be any copyright issues as the images are all Ben's own images, taken by him over 50 years. but as a number were taken in countries where FOP is an issue then the images need assessing for any potential FOP issues. All I'm asking at the moment is what is a convenient method of getting these images into a forum where this assessment work can be done and any that are suitable subsequently uploaded. Nthep (talk) 22:34, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Considering how a recent offensive email from a leading OTRS volunteer makes it clear in exactly how much contempt some OTRS volunteers hold the Commons community, while at the same time claiming to represent us, "without prejudice", maybe your starting point should be with that person rather than us plebs. I certainly do not feel that my views as a non-OTRS volunteer would be of any importance compared to the grand discussions you have in secret on the otrs-wiki where your decisions are apparently able to bypass the rest of us, or indeed our community agreed policies. --Fæ (talk) 22:46, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

I have no idea what you're on about and don't want to know either. I raised this topic on behalf of someone who wants to donate a load of images but there is some checking needed to ensure they don't fall foul of FOP. All that's wanted is some assistance with that. If you don't want to help because you have some issue with another OTRS agent or OTRS in general then fine but don't jump on me just because I happen to be the next OTRS agent who walks into your path. Nthep (talk) 23:09, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

As the statement claims to speak for all OTRS volunteers and the Foundation has instructed you to act ("As we have been advised by the Foundation to cease working with you immediately, please consider this decision final, and we will not be open to appealing it at this time." and "... agents will be instructed to report any works that they know of that have been uploaded by you for deletion on the appropriate projects." - emphasis added) you should have some idea as you are under instruction to comply with it.

By the way, as I worked with Russavia for a couple of years sorting out avionics related uploads, this instruction appears to encompass around 200,000 images. Please feel free to raise a deletion request for their deletion. --Fæ (talk) 10:35, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I'd say just upload it all and let us deal with it once it is on-wiki. I don't see why OTRS should bother with issues going beyond the verification of authorship. --Dschwen (talk) 23:09, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Let me second this. Against popular belief, it is railway themed images, not pornography, that get a touhrough scrubbing by regulars here — be it cleanup, categorization, documentation, or solving of copyright issues (just yesterday a Karlsruhe tram was saved from deletion by renaming and cropping off of a rather large, yet incidental, advertisement panel…): Any FoP issues will be promptly detected, reserched, and dealt with. -- Tuválkin ✉ 00:38, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the positive responses, I'll talk to Ben and see if we can work out an upload process as these images aren't already on line e.g. Flickr. Nthep (talk) 15:11, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

February 04

Upload wizard not working

There seems to be some problem with the upload wizard. It is asking me to "select media files to share" (ie the usual question) or "share images from Flickr" (an option I haven't seen before), but when I click the former option and select a file, the wizard doesn't actually upload the file. I suspect that someone's testing a beta version of the wizard incorporating a new Flickr upload option, and that the beta is malfunctioning. Bahnfrend (talk) 13:20, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

You didn't recently become a licence reviewer, did you? The Flickr upload option is available for licence reviewers. — SMUconlaw (talk) 13:55, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I just checked it using flickrupload and it seems buggered - I select the files I want to upload and once I press upload it pops up a massive load of script error messages and doesn't actually upload anything. -mattbuck (Talk) 14:06, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

What else is new? Lots of reports on Commons:Upload Wizard feedback and Commons:Upload help. This is getting silly. Commons really cannot be the Mediawiki developers' staging system for smoke testing. —LX (talk, contribs) 14:29, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I get the same behavior as described by Bahnfrend since about 14 UTC. UW not working. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 15:26, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

This behavior was already reported some weeks ago. I can't find the original report at Commons anymore, but it I remember correctly, it resulted in phab:T86680 – which was closed as fixed. Try disabling your adblocker – if the problem goes away, we may need to re-open that ticket. --El Grafo (talk) 15:55, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I do not have an adblocker, just noscript. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 16:32, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I just tested UploadWizard on Firefox and Chrome, and can confirm that it is still broken. I don't think the problem is related to phab:T86680, as I used UploadWizard earlier today without any issues. Anyway, I've reported the problem as phab:T88576, so feel free to comment there. — SMUconlaw (talk) 17:08, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the bug reports. The problem is getting urgent attention. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Aside from the immediate problem, is the bigger problem of systematically deficient QA processes getting any attention? Given the Upload Wizard's track record, testing, stability, testing, bug fixes, testing, technical debt and testing really needs to be the priority rather than new, untested features. —LX (talk, contribs) 18:36, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the multimedia team has been working pretty heavily on Upload Wizard's technical debt for the past couple of months now and will continue to do so. No new features are being built into it, this outage was related to something much bigger being worked on, as Mark notes below. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Noscript... that's like tying an anchor to your bicycle and complaining it doesn't go faster than 1mph anymore. Well, at least nobody will want to steal it! :-/ --Dschwen (talk) 20:29, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

The noscript issue was recently discussed on the (German) Forum, folks found two workarounds. –Be..anyone (talk) 21:46, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for comment on noscript. Removing noscript will make the UW run like a cheetah? I just keep it for nostalgia to pre-Snowden era. At least my paranoia was cured. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 23:30, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Hier werden digitale Globuli gelutscht :-P --Dschwen (talk) 03:50, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

:-) Immer wenn der UW mal nicht gehen sollte, dann ist die erste Idee immer den adblocker oder noscript zu deaktivieren. Genausogut könnte ich mir ein Loch ins Knie bohren und Milch hineingießen. Oder eine Nadel in meine UW-Puppe stechen. lg --Herzi Pinki (talk) 09:14, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Resolved. I synced everything (some things two or three times) and now it's working again. The ResourceLoader cache was updating while we were deploying a rollback of wmf15, so it got corrupted and the version mismatch caused the bug. Sorry about that. --MarkTraceur (talk) 18:34, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

@MarkTraceur: Could we have known that ResourceLoader cache was updating? Was it easy to spot or will this issue likely happen again? -- Rillke^(q?) 18:49, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

@Rillke: Actually, Roan clarified - when the timestamp for the modules went backwards, RL got confused, and spat out the newer versions. But only for some modules. I think this is going to always be bad luck, and not foreseeable, but next time I won't try to be surgical and we'll just sync the whole kit and kaboodle from the start. --MarkTraceur (talk) 18:58, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like a rock solid solution. Well if I know Roan correctly he'll figure out some kind of solution or notify people of upcoming trouble in future. -- Rillke^(q?) 19:03, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

My thanks to all of those who had a hand in fixing the problem. Bahnfrend (talk) 05:26, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for addressing the issue promptly! — SMUconlaw (talk) 14:21, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Notices

If I have accidentally dismissed the box of notices that pop up at the top of web pages, is there a page I can visit to read such notices? — SMUconlaw (talk) 17:34, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

You mean like Special:Notifications? —LX (talk, contribs) 17:51, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

No, not notifications specifically for me, but the general box of announcements or notices that would normally appear at the top of each web page unless dismissed. The announcements are usually about matters like encouraging editors to take part in GLAM events or invitations to participate in discussions. Just wondering if there is a page I can check for the latest announcements if I have accidentally dismissed the box, because it doesn't "come back" once I've done that. — SMUconlaw (talk) 18:13, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

For local site notices, see the page history of MediaWiki:Sitenotice. For centrally administrated (typically multi-project) notices, see meta:Help:CentralNotice and the pages it links to. —LX (talk, contribs) 18:27, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Funny, the history of MediaWiki:Sitenotice doesn't seem to contain the messages that I can see briefly before they disappear. Also, the last entry in the history is dated 1 February 2015, and I'm sure I saw some new notices today. — SMUconlaw (talk) 18:54, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

February 05

Help:Typing page

I put a DR in for the Help:Typing page (see Commons:Deletion requests/Help:Typing) but it was quickly closed with the comment that it should be discussed here. It is all about Narayam rather than typing, and the extension it uses is disabled. It therefore serves no purpose and should be deleted. Alan Liefting (talk) 04:54, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

I've tested {{fact|Appears to be outdated|category=[[category:non-standard deletion requests]]}}, but it's okay now, fixed by Praveenp. –Be..anyone (talk) 11:09, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Suggestions sought on a category loop

Category:Recording studios and Category:Music recording mutually include each other. Anyone have any clarity about which way it should be? I would think Category:Recording studios should be in Category:Music recording rather than vice versa. - Jmabel ! talk 06:14, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

I agree. I think "Music recording" is the broader concept. "Recording studios" are one way in which music can be recorded. — SMUconlaw (talk) 09:10, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

+1 Every recording studio is related to the activity of "music recording", but not every music recording has to be done in a recording studio. --Sebari (talk) 18:24, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Will do. - Jmabel ! talk 18:29, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Isn't it overcat for Recording studios to be in both Sound recording and Music recording? Recording studios can be used for recording any kind of sound according to w:Recording studio. --ghouston (talk) 21:47, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Results of deletion request

I don't understand, why Administrator kept this file in deletion request with my controversal opinion about this image and tagged it as "In use". Can you help with undersranding this? ← Aléxi̱s Spoudaíos ^talk_rus? 18:23, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

In use means the image is used in Wikipedia articles. As such it should not be deleted. It does not mean that the flag is used by any national entity. If you think the use of the image in those articles is wrong, discuss it there. Commons is not the right place for such decisions. --Sebari (talk) 18:26, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. ← Aléxi̱s Spoudaíos ^talk_rus? 04:52, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Public statement from Ktr101 and OTRS

I would like to make public my serious disappointment with the network of volunteers on OTRS who have used the last two days discussing the email sent to Russavia, yet have made no public statement about it. The email was highly inappropriate in my view, with an OTRS volunteer claiming authority to represent all projects with the power to delete uploads and being "advised by the Foundation" to do so, though no public evidence of this has been provided by the Foundation. Since Ktr101 was asked by a Commons Bureaucrat to account for his actions,[3] the OTRS ranks have visibly closed. There has been further discussion, but this has been in secret. In the days since the question was raised, Ktr101 can be seen to be busy contributing to several other projects, but carefully avoiding this one.[4]

Could we please follow the values of openness and transparency that all Wikimedians believe in, and move the discussion and find a better way forward in the open with our primary concern being accountability to, and engagement with, the whole community affected?

We are unpaid volunteers on an open knowledge project. We are a community first, not employees of the WMF. The Foundation does not exist without our good will, our continued belief in the mission and our decision every week to come back and volunteer more free time. I suggest we start behaving like the the mission to preserve all of human knowledge just might be more important than damaging our mission due to the passionate desire we have seen to punish Russavia for whatever dark unspecified malfeasance has been claimed in secret by a WMF employee, and might just be more important to us than petty internecine politics.

Ktr101, please withdraw your obviously inappropriate misguided email and make a statement we can all read, rather than only to your privileged OTRS peers. I at least, would like you to reconsider taking any further action with regard to handling the repercussions of Russavia's WMF ban, and please reconsider your OTRS access, at least as it relates to Commons especially considering you have so rarely used the facility for this project.[5] If WMF employees as part of their jobs are directing OTRS volunteers to certain actions, it would be ethical for a public statement to be made, rather than politically "influencing" decisions with a cloak of plausible deniability.

Note, I declare a personal interest, as Ktr101's email stated "As such, we will also no longer be accepting images uploaded, solicited by, or respond to e-mails to OTRS regarding permission of images, which are sent by you or someone who has worked with you in any way." as I am someone that has worked with Russavia on literally hundreds of thousands of image uploads, possibly more than any other volunteer.

Thanks. --Fæ (talk) 19:41, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

This seems to be a logical consequence of the ban. Ruslik (talk) 20:39, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Can we please keep this nonsensical drama out of Commons? Thank you. --Sebari (talk) 21:08, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

I agree. Can't believe I wasted five minutes of my life reading such bias drama. Also, we all know Otter is one of many (well handful) Commons Bureaucrats and he doesn't speak for them, so just say his name rather then using 'Commons Bureaucrat'. Bidgee (talk) 21:55, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Well, the fact that OTRS volunteers speak on behalf of commons make it inside Commons. This nonsensical drama would be avoided if the OTRS volunteers didn't exceed their competencies. --Discasto _{talk | contr. | es.wiki analysis} 23:04, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Go and have a whinge to the Foundation then. There is nothing we can do. Bidgee (talk) 23:30, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons has 7 Bureaucrats listed, of which 5 can claim to be currently active. Part of the role is leadership, particularly in difficult areas, such as this one when OTRS volunteers, who are not elected by any community process, lay claim to have authority to instruct those who have been elected. I believe it is a good thing to have at least one Bureaucrat that is prepared to ask difficult questions in public. The final decision on how to proceed, is fundamental to how Commons works, and should not be done in secret between unelected and unaccountable people. --Fæ (talk) 23:08, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

but yourself and Odder are friends of Russavia and are doing his proxying for him. Have you contacted the WMF (no doubt have you on the ignore list, and couldn't blame them). Bidgee (talk) 23:28, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Your random allegation of "proxying"/meatpuppetry is defamatory tangential nonsense. Brushing off basic questions about the authority of OTRS volunteers to overturn Commons policies as a "WMF matter" is contradictory. Unpaid OTRS volunteers are not the WMF, as the footer of every email out of OTRS makes clear. --Fæ (talk) 23:37, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

I for one find the idea that OTRS volunteers take it upon themselves to email contributors and say that their images are no longer welcome just because the person who solicited them has since been banned to be rather worrisome. -mattbuck (Talk) 00:18, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

There is ongoing discussion on otrs-wiki, which does not have a conclusion yet. (I'm not sure if I am allowed to say more than this...) — Revi 03:05, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

@Fæ: OTRS agents are not representing WMF or Commons; so anything out of their role and authority can be ignored. But if you have a complaint against an agent, the right place is to contact OTRS admins, not wasting your our time here. Jee 03:10, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jkadavoor: In theory, yes; however, the recent discussions on the OTRS wiki, which luckily have been leaked, make it plainly clear that at least some OTRS agents have a different view on the matter. Take these quotes from @Kevin, for example: "Still, when it comes down to it, the WMF is our boss (…) and we are operating on their behalf on the projects.'' and "Based on what Philippe said above, I get the impression we're working for the WMF over the community." To say that such statements are worrying is a great understatement. odder (talk) 04:57, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Commons App discontinued

Development on the Commons App has apperently stopped (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88746). The fact that many people were interested in the app makes me wonder why this hasn't been discussed anywhere. If it was discussed in the past, could somebody reply me the link. Thank you! --Tobias1984 (talk) 22:35, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

It was on the mailing list but I think it was discussed on Commons as well IIRC. Bidgee (talk) 22:43, 5 February 2015 (UTC)