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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/2024/04. 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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Women at the well, India, early 20th century. [add]

Centralized discussion See also: Village pump/Proposals   ■ Archive Proposal to prohibit political restriction templates (5 February 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) User talk:湯崩正海#Image Tagging File:青島ビール放尿動画事件.jpgとUser talk:湯崩正海#File:青島ビール放尿動画事件.jpgで議論しています。皆様のご意見を募集しています。是非、ご参加ください。(2 November 2023) Template: View   ■ Discuss    ■ Edit   ■ Watch

April 12

Category Intersections

I just run into Category:Painted portraits of men of France which seems like intersection of 4 basic categories:

1. Category:Paintings (1)
2. Category:Portraits (2)
3. Category:Men (3)
4. Category:France (4)

Logically it should be a subcategory of 4 intersections of 3 of above categories and 4 intersections of 2 of above categories:

1. Category:Painted portraits of men and Category:Portrait paintings of males (1-2-3) sub of
   1. Category:Portrait paintings (1-2)
   2. Category:Portraits of men (2-3)
   3. Category:Paintings of men (1-3)
2. Category:Paintings of men of France (1-3-4) sub of
   1. Category:Men of France (3-4)
   2. Category:Paintings of people from France (1-4)
   3. Category:Paintings of men (1-3)
3. Category:Portraits of men of France (2-3-4) (does not exist yet but there are images categorized as such and we already have Category:Portraits of women from France)
   1. Category:Portraits of people from France (2-4) we have portraits from 10 other countries loke Category:Portraits of Germany, etc.
   2. Category:Men of France (3-4)
   3. Category:Portraits of men (2-3)
4. Category:Painted portraits of people from France (1-2-4)
   1. Category:Portraits of people from France (2-4) we have portraits from 10 other countries like Category:Portraits of Germany, etc.
   2. Category:Portrait paintings (1-2)
   3. Category:Paintings of people from France (1-4)

Similarly we have many other intersections

1. Category:Painted portraits of women of Kalmykia
2. Category:Engraved portraits of women from France
3. Category:Painted portraits of women from Spain in national costume intersection of 5 basic categories
4. Category:Group paintings of nude males intersection of 4 basic categories

The number of possible combinations of intersections of 4 of 5 basic categories is astronomical and as Commons grows we will be filling all the missing combinations. I suspect that at some point this structure will become impossible to maintain. I would propose to change recomendation on categorization to cap number of basic concepts in a single category to 3 (4?) and put more effort into development of tools for tools for better display of category intersections. CatScan2 is a good start, but does not display thumbnails and often times out when working with large categories. Other possibility is tag based categorization. Sorry for the long post. --Jarekt (talk) 16:52, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I do agree on it and the exponential growth of overlapping "side" categories, such as in Category:Rivers of France by region, department, name ... makes it impossible to ensure consistency; we even don't have a tool that can make a proper category list of the rivers containing the parent categories (such a list is possible for images, not for categories). The result is that none of the categories is correctly filled up. Problem is that I have a problem to specify a simple rule that is easy to apply and enforce.

This tag thing would already be very useful to do a second display selection to filter out type of media (video, sound, jpg, SVG, B&W, ...), Names space (cat/gallery/templates/...) and date ranges along with potential category depth of display. . --Foroa (talk) 17:53, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm helping, I deleted 1400 categories today. -mattbuck (Talk) 18:05, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I noticed (and you restored many too); it takes along way to get the whole world down into Cumbria. --Foroa (talk) 18:11, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

My reference until now was Category:Black and white photographs of smiling women ; but I must say Category:Painted portraits of women from Spain in national costume trumps it all. Nice find ;-) Jean-Fred (talk) 18:14, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

You might enjoy reading User:Multichill/Next generation categories, it also touches the concept of intersected categories. Multichill (talk) 18:52, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I think three points you had in User:Multichill/Next generation categories are very concise description of what kind of category system is needed at Commons. The current system was designed for articles and it is probably adequate for that. En Wikipedia has less articles than we have images and they do not rely as much on categories to find things. So I feel like we are in unique position of bumping into the limitation of the current category system.--Jarekt (talk) 13:03, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

• I'm afraid Mattbuck's statement ("I'm helping ...") explains the case. One user concentrates on removing wacky categories. Another one sweeps Category:Stockholm. Yet another one classifies countless coats of arms by all sorts of possible grades... There's a very limited pool of volunteers doing mass categorization, and most operate in their own niches independently (talk about consistency...). There's simply no resources for a "general assault" (don't even mention continuous maintenance). NVO (talk) 03:00, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

• User:Multichill/Next generation categories is a good outline of where we might want to go. In the short and medium term, I think Jarekt's proposal would help improving categorization of images. --  Docu  at 07:12, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

• In the short term, I think this problem is adequately resolved by just not creating intersection categories unless the categories they are based on are already large (say, all have more than one page of files). Otherwise, the existing categories suffice, since one can simply browse them for the image in question. This will dramatically count down on their number. Dcoetzee (talk) 15:02, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
  • Building a structure based on the number of files in a category is hardly efficient and not really consistent with the current way of building subcategories. Further, I think this fails to address the main problem pointed out in the sample above. Given that one can move around the files in the sample above from one subcategory to the others, which ones do you think should have subcategories? --  Docu  at 02:26, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Hi. I am one of the guys creating dozens of subcategories of subcategories, eventually some of them as wacky as the Spanish women in national costume. I usually work with art, coats of arms and geography. Yesterday or the day before, by coincidence, I needed some files from Category:Painted portraits of men and stumbled upon the horrible mess in that category. There were almost 900 files, many of them very similar to each other, intermixed with some peculiar "men" such as Jesus Christ and Saint John the Baptist. I lost some hours trying to sort it out, and even with the help of AWB I could only move to subcats a little more than 300 of them until I got exhausted and bored beyond belief. That category, as it is now, is virtually unusable, and is a good example why subcats should be implemented there, the more the merrier. Until there is a more practical system to categorize in place, "wacky" subcats should actually be encouraged, if they help in finding what we are looking for.

I also disagree with Dcoetzee suggestion of using the "page" as limit. Take Category:Paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour, something I've been working in lately because I wanted to upload some paintings of him and wanted to find out which were already here. When I started out, it was a huge mess all in Category:Henri Fantin-Latour. It was a mess, even if it didn't exceeded more than one page. Drawings, pictures, photographs of the guy and even paintings of him by other artists, all mixed together - It was a headache to look at them and try to find the painting I was looking for. So, no, avoiding subcats by page limit is not helpful in the least, quite the opposite.

Actually I very seldom, if ever, found "wacky" subcats to be a problem. Thank God someone created Category:Painted portraits of women from Spain in national costume, so that those pictures are not populating the upper categories creating unnecessary noise. The opposite, however, has ever been the greatest problem I've had here, to the point that I more than often get distracted from what I am doing to sort out densely populated categories. It's boring as hell, but much less boring and less painful than to have to look into densely populated cats to find something.

Another problem I've meet upon is "parallel categorization". A while ago I was categorizing carriages, and was quite impressed by how few examples of them were available here, with many important models, such as the landaus, missing entirely. As I found out later, they were dispersed into the parallel system of cats "carriages by country", so to find the landaus I had to look into every damn subcat of "carriages by country". This is one case where it would have been much more helpful if they were categorized as "carriages" as well as "carriages in country X", that way I would only move them into the subcats instead of sweeping the parallel cat tree to find the models I was looking for.

Those are some thoughts on the subject, I wish this thread wouldn't die, since I believe it is a very important debate.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 19:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I think we are all searching for a golden middle between too many and too few categories, and everybody has different ideas how many categories is too many and what constitutes "useful" category. I personally like to categorize based on

• information found in matadata (date, location, identities of people)
• non-obvious features of the context (identification of animals, vehicles, weapons, geographical features )
• source categories (current location of artworks, books image was scanned from)
• author categories
• technique categories (etching / painting / rare photographic process / rare camera type, etc.)

The kind of categories I do not like are:

• very general - catch all categories like Category:Challenges to physical balance, Category:Aims, suspected Category:Emotions, etc.
• based on external features obvious in the image: type of hat (I was rather frustrated about someones effort to categorize holocaust images by the shape of hats worn by victims), color of someone shirts or shoes, orientation like Category:Facing right, beards (last few days a lot of images are added to Category:Male beards including some images from Category:Jewish_people_of_Poland_during_World_War_II - I bet there are over 200 images of males with beards in the latter category, and if we try to split it into sub categories we will probably have go by length).

I think a lot of effort is wasted on categories which are easy to identify by looking at image thumbnails while many non-obvious categories remain empty. --Jarekt (talk) 03:45, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for a good laugh so early in the morning! xD Indeed, I've never understood the usefulness of categories such as "facing left" or "facing right", unless it serves as a stratagem to relief pressure from upper categories already over-crowded, such as "Portrait paintings of men facing left". I personally prefer more useful categories like those you mentioned, but sometimes they get exhausted, and you end up with a still overcrowded category. I'm facing that problem right now in Category:Quarterly shields, which is bound to receive thousands or tenths of thousands of pictures over the time. I pretty much exhausted all the obvious subcategories already, and I'm not willing, at least not yet, to create something like "Quarterly shields with lions" as it would be both unscientific and distracting, burying down pictures that perhaps deserve a better categorization than those tricks to help empty the category. However, it will have to be done eventually, if no other triage method could be found. :S--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 06:45, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I do not think all categories over 200 images need to be split, since at some point you can not logically divide them. At some point I opened DR for some photos of a user who (along with great many very good images) had tendency to upload most of the images he took including: 20+ almost identical images of someones legs in stockings, pictures of back sides of large number of women he run into on the streets, or 20+ images of a landing plane where in most images plane is not bigger than a few pixels. The most obvious examples were deleted as out of scope, but the question remains: how would you categorize large volume of almost identical images? As for Category:Quarterly shields most of the subs are concentrating on apperance - I think it would be good to categorize them based on country of origin and possibly century of design. --Jarekt (talk) 13:12, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

When we are dealing with categories which are at the end of the line, there is no problem to have hundreds of images inside them, but a category like "quarterly shields" needs to be irradiated, it's a place where we can go "fish" for novelties and place them in the proper cats, and overcrowding really hardens that task. As for using appearance, the case of coats of arms really is one that needs to be like that, since that's the only thing we are certain about in a large number of them, and it's something than everybody can do without needing any local knowledge of other countries CoAs. Classifying by country can be quite annoying, since it duplicates the tree and is a completely artificial classification which does not fits well with coats of arms. COAs more than often do not recognize country boundaries. The Drummond coat of arms, which is originally Scottish, of course, ended up being extensively used in Portugal and is part of our nobiliaries and was effectively "created" here, based in the original. We share the Bettencourt CoA with Spain, and possibly even France, and it would be impossible to tell one from the other since the Bettencourts established themselves at the same time in Portugal and Spain. Many other cases are similarly unclear. As for the year of design, such things more than often are lost in the night of times. In the 1755 earthquake all the registry books for CoA charts were lost, and we only have secure information after that date in Portugal. Other countries have similar problems. In a later phase, when things would get more organized, it would be interesting to research each coat of arms and use more advanced cats such as year of attribution and so, but right now, at least for me, it's not that important.

My aim in categorising them is to make a systematic tree to be used in the future to classify even completely unknown CoAs, such as the ones one photographs in the streets of old towns. That is much more useful than using country and date of design, indeed. Country cats are, as I've already said, a pain in the a. sometimes, since people place there every kind of shield according to their limited knowledge. Therefore, a Portuguese CoA observed in a Spanish city will be classified as "CoA of Spain" until the day someone with some knowledge of Portuguese heraldry happens to see that category. I can well imagine that some of the CoAs we left in India will end up categorized as British or Holland CoAs as well, if they are not already. The only way to effectively correct and dispel such errors is to always give precedence to the categorization by appearance.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 13:56, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Some quick comments. Category:Quarterly shields is typically a case where additional display filtering tags would help to avoid an exponential increasing number of subcategories. This additional tag filtering (media and file types, date ranges, ...) will come one day for sure.

We are a media repository, so often visual categorisation is something that is never done on wikipedias and provides significant added value to Commons: red cars, green ..., round ..., red hair, ... Although for some of them (facing left for example) I have some doubts, but maybe it responds to a real need. --Foroa (talk) 15:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

At first sight, coats of arms are one of those cases where filtering tags would seem perfect for classifying, avoiding the fastidious work of creating endless categories to filter down the images. However, I have some doubts about it. I'm having some difficulty in understanding how it would work in more elaborate cases such as the one in the right (which is not even nearly the most complex ones). Would it be tagged with dozens or hundreds of tags describing every feature in the image? Have a look at the current categories (which are still developing, of course).--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 01:31, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Expansion depth limit exceeded

Jean-Antoine Watteau  (1684–1721)
	Alternative names	Jean-Antoine Watteau
	Description	French painter, graphic artist, drawer, artist, printmaker and architectural draftsperson
	Date of birth/death	10 October 1684	18 July 1721
	Location of birth/death	Valenciennes	Nogent-sur-Marne
	Work period	1700 –1721
	Work location	Paris (after 1702 date QS:P,+1702-00-00T00:00:00Z/7,P1319,+1702-00-00T00:00:00Z/9 ), Valenciennes (1709-1710), London (1719-1720)
	Authority file	: Q183221 VIAF: 46882028 ISNI: 0000000121311877 ULAN: 500032644 LCCN: n50043693 NLA: 36213816 MusicBrainz: 1a919252-dd1a-45a7-b2af-d4d910625a33 WGA: w/watteau/antoine Open Library: OL116012A DBNL: watt001 GND: 118629492 SELIBR: 213088 SUDOC: 027274063 BNF: 12645975w NDL: 00460309 NKC: ola2002153906 SBN: SBLV308469 BNE: XX967492 CiNii: DA01431755 NLP: a0000001184727 KulturNav: 12b1f371-9f01-4190-9dc9-37f75001563d RKD: 83063 J9U: 987007269783005171 Koninklijke: 069127050 Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural: pessoa284008/watteau NLK: KAC2018L7294 WorldCat

creator QS:P170,Q183221

Does anybody know how to avoid/fix "Expansion depth limit exceeded" error in the creator template above? --Jarekt (talk) 03:46, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like the $wgMaxPPExpandDepth variable was exceeded. As a guess, the {{Other date}} template is extremely complex (making use of other complex templates) and that creator template has it nested three times. The creator page template itself seems OK but once one additional level of transclusion (or worse, more like inside the Information template) and it gets far far worse. Not sure there is a way other than simplifying the template usage in the creator template, or simplifying the underlying templates themselves. Carl Lindberg (talk) 06:30, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

{{Other date}} is way too complex. If you look at its transclusion at File:Antoine Watteau 015.jpg Its biggest problem is that it handles the translation as switches, the nested transclusion mean these generate hundreds of template calls. It would be better if it was handled via internationalisation templates like {{int:license}}. As a simplification I'd suggest replacing "from late 1700s until 1721" with "early 18th Century", he worked from near the start of the century until (near) his death.--Nilfanion (talk) 10:15, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

The person(s) who build this tried to build semantic mediawiki with templates ;-) Multichill (talk) 10:19, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

As far as complexity goes I would rank {{Other date}} may be at 6 on the scale of 1 to 10. However, it relies on {{ISOdate}} which I would rank at 10 - most of complexity coming from dealing with quirky behavior of {{#time:}} magic word. Then when you start nesting {{Other date}} you run into trouble. I think we should recommend in documentation of {{Creator}} and {{Other date}} that template nesting should go beyond 2.

As for semantic mediawiki through templates check {{Technique}} where you can translate into numerous languages names of popular art techniques, like "pebble". For example in German that would be: "Kies" and in Polish "kamyk". All easily machine-interpretable. Aren't templates great? --Jarekt (talk) 03:38, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Building semantic mediawiki is not a goal, but building a localizable Commons. Building it in templates is just a crutch that is necessary because developers don't care about implementing it in the core. It wouldn't be a heavy task to create a version of {{#time: ... }} that is localizable and fails less hard. That would render the current esoteric ISOdate unnecessary.

A creator box does not contain any real language, just references. These references can be localized. And that's what we do. If developers decide to support our localization efforts by providing more efficient constructs: great! If not: then we'll dot it in the way we can do it with current code. Less efficient, but working. --Slomox (talk) 12:34, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Developers are listening, just tell us what you need (and try to be specific). Kaldari (talk) 17:48, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps a good first step would be a parser function for retrieving fallback languages so that this doesn't have to be done through switch statements in templates. Kaldari (talk) 18:29, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Pretty high up on my wish list from developers would be fixing already mentioned {{#time: ... }} magicword, so it works for any year we might have to date. If {{#time: ... }} worked properly than {{ISOdate}} and {{ISOyear}} would be one line templates or just unnecessary. Also notice that {{ISOdate}} is called over 9M times on commons (second most used template). But in the mean time those 2 templates are trying to deal with over 10 different ways {{#time: ... }} breaks down for some date ranges. --Jarekt (talk) 21:07, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

There are two things wrong with {{#time: ... }}: It's unable to render plain things like {{#time: Y | 1945 }} (resulting in "2011" instead of "1945"). It should support all the different types of ISO 8601 format that are supported by ISOdate. And second: It should support more than one language. The default language of Commons is set to English and therefore all dates are always rendered in English even if the user explicitly set the interface to a different language. Make the language a parameter to {{#time: ... }}. {{#time: Y | 1945 | hi }} should result in "१९४५". For backwards compatibility the resulting parser function probably needs a new name.

Improving {{#time: ... }} should be enough to fix all problems with the expansion depth limit. But I have many other things I'd like to have improved ;-) --Slomox (talk) 21:50, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

I added request to fix {{#time}} to bugzilla [1]. --Jarekt (talk) 12:24, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Fixed the '1945 problem' in rev 86805[2]. Will try to get it pushed out soon. Kaldari (talk) 01:14, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the #time pointer in 28655, I wasn't aware of this "new" (since 2006) feature. And thanks for the fix, dealing with PHP precision oddities in templates used to be a major problem some years ago when some servers still used 32bit platforms. –Be..anyone (talk) 21:14, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

English

I just noticed that there are links on the main commons articles to what are presumably translations to "British English". The link comes up in the centre of the top of pages, and seems to be rare so far.

I was wondering why this is. Surely categories for translation should be normal standard English (as spoken in its country of origin) by default, and translations for "American English" and "International English", or other versions, if necessary? --86.168.209.84 03:07, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Surely normal standard English is what's used by the largest body of native English speakers in the world, whether or not the US is the country of origin? And surely some agnosticism towards what dialect of English is used can help reduce the problem?--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:45, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

I haven't noticed such links but I do consider it a waste of time as either variant is largely understandable to speakers of another variant, due to differences primarily in spelling. However, thoughtful word choices can produce content that is not distinguishable as being one variant of English or another, but it requires an intercultural awareness. – Adrignola talk 12:44, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

I would have thought that standard English would be that which is spoken in the land of its origin, and any subsequent developments elsewhere, regardless of population size, would be a deviation from the standard. I do agree to an extent with Adrignola though: it is a waste of time. --86.168.209.84 13:47, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

The language option you get as an anonymous user at the top of the page is based on your browser setting so I guess your browser sends "British English" as the language ;-)

In practice you'll just get the English messages. Multichill (talk) 10:04, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

LOL --  Docu  at 10:06, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

there are still problems with thumbnail generation

See these files, purge did not help:

• some are working now
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• inserted later from various sources but also 403 errors
• 
  is also  Not OK for some sizes→ error 403. OK now
• 
  is also  Not OK for some sizes (e.g. 43px). OK now

I found the images in a large category, here about 1 to 2 % of the images have that problem. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 06:17, 22 April 2011 (UTC) (to gallery by Saibo (Δ) 22:27, 25 April 2011 (UTC))

I know, I still have a few of my images not showing. The problem is a permission issue I've already told the techs via IRC a week or two ago but nothing has been done to fix it. Bidgee (talk) 06:41, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

some of the images mentioned above are ok now, but not all. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 21:21, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Checked the missing ones: still broken. I will try to ask someone in tech channel tomorrow. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 02:48, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Is this still some leftover from the server hickups with migration to 1.17 and why does purge not work any more? Should it? Or do I need special permissions? The problem is not about the images mentioned (these are example images out of 6000 similar, so no need to fix single images), but more the general point. Or do we have to list image for image to get it fixed by the tech people? cheers --Herzi Pinki (talk) 18:26, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

No it is not because of 1.17. There were thumbnail problems ~ two weeks ago. They got solved except for some files. Some were fixed on 22 April (by Apergos) but apparently some still have a problem. Probably it is the same as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28653 because the thumbs of the files here also have a 403 error. Lets wait until this bug is resolved. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 22:27, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

all work for me now --Saibo (Δ) 02:29, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Surnames categories

How is a category like Category:Anderson (surname) useful? And why on earth would Category:Curtiss 1910 Pusher replica N28CD be a subcategory of it? - Jmabel ! talk 00:59, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

No comment on the surname categories other than they can be beneficial, though in limited ways. However, neither surname category serves a purpose in the N28CD category. Doyle was an owner's name, but I can't find any relationship to an Anderson. I've gone ahead and cleaned up the N28CD category to remove other pointless categories as well. — Huntster (t @ c) 07:10, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

There is some discussion related to surname categories at Category talk:Families by name#Sub categorization names. /Ö 07:44, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Surename categories are not usefull. Surenames are a topic for a list in Wikipedia or elsewhere, it maybe has an educational use to have a list of people by the same name. But it does not serve any educational purpose to group photographs of random people whith the same names together. --Martin H. (talk) 14:46, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Martin H. that is what search capability is for. --Jarekt (talk) 02:11, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

What about images related to a particular surname? Like coats of arms? Powers (talk) 14:44, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

And hotels, houses, buildings, pubs, streets, quarters, status, ships, films, songs, books, ... that relate to a certain surname without knowing to which one exactly ? --Foroa (talk) 15:46, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Foroa: What would make this any better for that than just search?

LtPowers: Usually a coat of arms would relate to a noble family, a clan, etc. As I understand it, most coats of arms that just connect to a surname at least border on non-notable fiction. I mean, if some relative of mine got a "Mabel coat of arms" made up, that would have about as much significance as his child's 3rd-grade drawing of their house, no? Or am I missing something? - Jmabel ! talk 19:49, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

There are some prominent families, like Category:Kennedy family in US, Category:House of Windsor in UK or Category:Radziwiłł family in Poland, which have long history and whose members should be grouped in categories, but there is no need to add all the people sharing the same last name to those categories, as there is no need to create categories grouping everybody with name Smith, or Kowalski, since very they have nothing in common other than last name. --Jarekt (talk) 18:12, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

One can see it equally as a presort as our basic search just returns hundreds or even thousands of hits. Through such a structure, I managed to find a relation between a particular house and the builder of it.

Look in Category:Surnames, most categories have loosely related images. If you stumble upon an image referring to for example D. Smith, you will be happy to check in Category:Smith (surname). Often, it is only be possible to discover the relations when you have several elements together. Even if the surname is only a potential or unconnected relation, it is a relation. --Foroa (talk) 18:24, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Agree with Martin H., these categories are not useful on Commons. Regarding the remote chance of use suggested by Foroa, just consider the harm of spamming the category list and making far more straightforwardly useful categories less easy to find. --ELEKHH^T 15:49, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

I tend to agree that surname cats are not very helpful. Please do not mistake coat of arms with "family name", they are totally different things, despite what many tend to believe. Coats of arms are attributed primarily to individuals, then in some cases their descendents can use it, but there are strict rules for that, including proof of ancestry. More than often this is completely independent of the surname actually in use by the bearer of the coats of arms. What counts is the actual lineage, and not the surnames he fancied to bear, picked from the usually huge pool available on his ancestry.

I can give as example the words of a cousin of mine, a well known genealogist (they were written in the 40s or 50s, so excuse the racial bias), when talking about this exact subject - they were roughly those: "We live in a country [Portugal] where the most noble and illustrious surnames have been given away countless times over the centuries to every Jew, slave and moor, to the point that today they mean nothing" - it was indeed the case. A surname on itself means nothing, or means the same as making a category to people named "Pablo" or "Mary". It means nothing and seems to be utterly pointless. Even in wikipedias - in fact, such categories and lists are even more pointless in wikipedias, tough some people have developed a fetish to create them under the guise of disambiguation pages.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 19:55, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Speaking on the Devil, just yesterday I stumbled upon this ledger stone from Estacio de Sá, featuring his coat of arms. Though his surname is Sá, the coat of arms features two entirely diverse families (one is the Correias, the other I could not identify, but it's not Sá). Just to illustrate the point that surnames really don't mean that much.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 21:49, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Commons also as a repository for templates and pages

Per the Bug 4547, we might need this thread for historical reasons. Please vote below. Btw, I am not the original nominator of this proposal; just passing the word. Please see the bug for further information. Rehman 13:25, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Support: makes sense to me. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 13:36, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose How do you deal with the language issue ? Commons exists because most pictures and videos are silent and can be used in a similar way by all language communities. The same hardly applies to templates. Teofilo (talk) 13:48, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

I think you're overstating the case a bit. Many images -- maps and diagrams especially -- have annotations that need to be translated to be useful in other-language projects, yet we still host them. Obviously, language-specific templates wouldn't be a good idea to host here, but language-neutral ones like {{Football kit}} ought to be fine. Powers (talk) 13:55, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Template:Football kit a) bears an English name; b) is inserted into English named "Category:Football kit templates"; c) is using English language variables such as |leftarm= , |rightarm= ; d) Is not documented, which is far from providing a multi-language documentation so that users not fluent in English can understand how to use it. This bugzilla #4547 creates a situation where non-English speakers are worse off than English speakers to use, modify an existing template or create a new one. See also my last post at this village pump. Teofilo (talk) 14:18, 25 April 2011 (UTC) As this bugzilla #4547 creates a modification of COM:SCOPE, I think a more formal vote announced in many languages on village pumps in each language and a sitenotice announcement is necessary. As for now, templates are out of COM:SCOPE (Commons is a media repository, not a template or software repository), and the answer to bugzilla #4547 must be "No" at Wikimedia Commons. Please consider creating a new wiki for software and template sharing at m:Proposals for new projects. Teofilo (talk) 14:32, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

• I'll play devil's advocate a bit here... the category is only on Commons, not transcluded to other projects, so the category name is fine. Projects could have a name in their own language on their own project, implemented as a redirect to or transclusion of the Commons template, so usage for people on that project is fine. The variable names are a fair point, but could also be implemented in a local template using local language names, just forwarding the values when transcluding the Commons template. The documentation though needs to be multilingual, something we haven't worried much about before. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:06, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
• Football is a game of English origin so there is English template on it. There are surely many well-constructed set of templates in other language wikipedias on topics related to respective culture. These templates could be moved to Commons without changing original non-English names, so other wikis could use it. This usage would not be anglocentric and would be a great way for promoting some non-English culture across other languages. --M5 (talk) 17:06, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
• I don't get Teofilo's argument. Many (most?) images around here also bear an English name and are inserted into English-named categories. Image descriptions are also mostly in a single language (and when this language is not English, we're even worse off than English-only content, since, like it or not, English is the default lingua franca' nowadays). If you look at the issue of text inside images (labels, etc), we can foresee how these global templates could work: translations would be created according to usage. Plus, we already have a quite complete template translation infrastructure here on commons. I really don't see this as such a problem, and can see many benefits with centralizing template development. --Waldir ^talk 15:04, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose. I have to agree with Teofilo on this. It's already a problem for some people that Commons is so much English-oriented, making being fluent in English almost a requirement to participate around here. Having templates hosted here for all projects would leak even more English-based syntax into projects primarily using another language. Of course, for the content of the template itself, there might be technical solutions such as auto-translation, but the template name and the names of the parameters seem to be more problematic. We need to work out what can or needs to be done in order to solve these issues, before we commit to extend Commons' scope. –Tryphon^☂ 14:43, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Your argument only works for top 10 language Wikipedia. There smaller ones are not concerned as much of "leaking English-based syntax" as of creating encyclopedic content without getting distracted on the useless task of inventing their own templates for the sake of "language purity". Proposition would greatly help the smaller language project and would do nothing bad to more established projects, since no one will force them to use common templates. --M5 (talk) 17:06, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

For MediaWiki projects outside of the WikiMedia family it would be very helpful to get some basic templates such as {{tlx}} or {{-}} from a central InstantCommons repo, even if the {{tlx}} variant existing here is the ugliest I'm aware of. There are lots of useful templates not affected by language issues at all if you accept English acronyms as template names. There are lots of smaller English MediaWiki projects without a working set of say cite-templates, because importing this stuff from Wikipedia or meta would be a PITA. The MediaWiki default Book sources for an amazon ISBN search were broken some weeks ago in the stable version, a working English Book sources page here would help. A missing translation is less work than starting from scratch for small projects. –Be..anyone (talk) 20:25, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Support. As far as I can tell, one purpose of doing this is greater internationalisation of templates, which is not going to be difficult. And why create a new project when it would be simpler to have one site for 'common' features of Wikimedia projects? I think that's the idea, and I certainly don't see major problems in it. —innotata 14:49, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Why did you change comments to "votes", Rehman? Anyway, yes, I'll say I support this. —innotata 14:57, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

This thread is basically to reach "a consensus from Commons", as a comment in the bug said was missing. The vote templates are just for ease of counting... I hope you didn't mind me doing that. :) Rehman 15:02, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose Commons is a media repository, not a repository of templates and interwiki's. Also the language problems above do not help. Multichill (talk) 15:04, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Comment This seems... problematic to me in most cases. Most templates use language, and are more appropriately hosted at their home projects. Each project typically has its own stylesheets, and the same style names can have different display characteristics -- i.e. each project will often want stylistic control over their project and may not want to use "standard" templates which don't fit that style. Mediawiki versions can sometimes also be different, and definitely can be configured differently per-project. This may also lead to editing conflicts between commons and other projects... well-meaning changes here may have detrimental changes to other projects. Dunno, it seems like this would be useful for only a very small percentage of templates actually used, but maybe there are situations where it could be very useful that I'm not thinking of. Usually having the ability doesn't hurt, since it's a choice whether to use it or not, but... hm. The interwiki links idea sounds useful at first blush, except that means now that Commons would be expected to store a template for (conceptually) every single article on all Wikipedias, so that it could be transcluded in similar articles in other wikipedias. Would editors need to login to Commons to edit those? I'm not sure of the real utility of that. The other example given is about current software versions... dunno, maybe, but currently if software program articles have an older version listed as "most recent" that probably indicates that was the last time the article was updated, meaning the information there is current only to that version -- having the "latest version" updated externally means that little hint is lost. I'm just not sure how useful this would be in practice. If this is something desired by other projects, perhaps it could be done. I guess I'm opposed mainly because I can't think of any really good uses but am certainly open to arguments. I think its utility would be very limited but perhaps in particular situations it could be useful. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:02, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support. The proposed common templates would be of great help to the smaller language projects. --M5 (talk) 17:17, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support I would assume that it would be implemented in a manner similar to the way files are visible at wikis. If local name exist than local template takes precedence (this feature can be used to "mask" undesired templates conflicting with local practices). Great many templates like Category:Translated license tags, Category:String manipulation templates or Category:Mathematical function templates are either already translated into multitude of languages or do not need translation. I always found it strange how much parallel development happens to create templates for the same purpose like Category:String manipulation templates for example. This way some templates would reside in single central location and would be available to all the wikis which would not have to be occasionally synch together to ensure that bugs corrected years ago let say at en wiki make it into Commons version. As for language issues local wikis can have redirects to help users find templates and hopefully they would help with translating documentation. --Jarekt (talk) 17:56, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support: That would be a nice feature with some caveats. E.g., Wikipedia apparently adopted a consistent template/doc-subpage style of template documentation. That's not required on say meta, where a simple <noinclude> documentation or a documentation section at the top of the template talk page are also permitted. There are also families of related templates for date calculations, where mixing sources from Wikipedia and meta could be tricky, and besides there are unfixed parser function bugs for MOD and DIV affecting date calculations since 2006, e.g., 6068 and 6356. –Be..anyone (talk) 18:53, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Oppose Makes editing more and more complicated, it is already a problem that newcomers leave wiki's for that reason. Make less templates and use template keys on your own computer instead. --Havang(nl) (talk) 19:19, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support As long as local projects can still have language-specific templates, etc. hosted locally, it's obviously beneficial for us to host language-neutral templates. Some templates are so complex that they are essentially becoming part of the software on Wikipedia, and forking them for each project is a guaranteed way to create a long-term maintenance nightmare as template fixes and new features have to be slowly migrated from one project to another, since nobody keeps track of the copy-paste movement of templates. Having templates in one place would also limit the degree of CC-BY-SA violation that frequently occurs when copying templates between projects. This is not only a good idea, but absolutely essential. Dcoetzee (talk) 19:26, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support. Let me give you the perspective of smaller projects. My home wiki is 'nds'. We have a stable but small community. When I recently created an article on a German highway I noticed the neat infobox in the German article that provides information on the junctions etc. My first idea was to copy the infobox and localize it with translated parameters etc. But my next thought was: how stupid would that be? German Wikipedia already has all the articles and I'd need to manually fill the template each time I create a new article on a German highway. If I just keep the German parameter names all I have to do, is to copy the box from the German article and that's it! Much easier. See nds:Bundsstraat 73. The infobox facilitates a number of subtemplates. It's not unlikely that the templates on German Wikipedia already have improved since I copied them and nds.wiki is now using outdated versions. If the templates were stored centrally our small wiki could benefit from any improvements immediately. By the way: the English Wikipedia went the same way and also uses German named templates like en:Template:B-Ort to create the infobox. And even the English Wikipedia with its massive userbase has problems keeping up to date. The article en:Bundesstraße 73 has a broken infobox.

  As a smaller project nds.wiki would greatly benefit from a well-maintained source pool of templates.

  Language is an issue. Carl Lindberg already suggested some solutions. Commons does really a good job on localizing and translating its own templates. We have the skilled people who can do the same localization work on the shared templates. Each project can create wrapper templates to localize parameters and can apply local CSS to change the design of the templates. If they absolutely dislike the shared template they can just use a local one. Nobody is forced to use the shared templates.

  And the potential becomes even bigger with a central datawiki. --Slomox (talk) 19:33, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Support as being long overdue. This would work exactly as it would for images, and local templates will always take precedence, so that isn't an issue. — Huntster (t @ c) 20:37, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
  •  Comment except the whole purpose is to standardise across all wikis and make available all updates/improvements available to all as they occur, the moment a local wiki template take precedence these purpose are negated rendering such a change as pointless. Gnangarra 05:35, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

    Wikipedia didn't like to import the technical help articles from Meta and created its own set of help articles more closely related to their elaborated policies and guidelines. Besides the manual import procedure was a pain. I guess they will also insist on their own templates, and they have the resources to maintain their own set of templates closely related to their convoluted policies, guidelines, help files, and procedures. Other WikiMedia and MediaWiki projects are not in the same position and could profit from shared resources. –Be..anyone 08:57, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

    Gnangarra, I'm really confused why you would say such a thing. Are you proposing that if this went through, that it should have radically different behaviour from the images we already host? That makes no sense, and it goes against long-standing practice to somehow force downstream users to simply accept anything we throw at them. Local projects must always have the final control. We're simply a service provider here.

    Be..anyone, what en.wiki wants to do is completely irrelevant to what happens here. If they don't want to use the product, that's their prerogative. — Huntster (t @ c) 19:44, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose We have already enough problems with media files.--Trixt (talk) 20:48, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Assuming you are referring to "problems with transcluding files from Commons" (which is the basis the proposal works on), could you point out to the current problems with media files? Rehman 00:11, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm referring to normal wikiactivity on Commons. I don't believe that you think Commons is, generally speaking, without any problems, actually (unless your purpose is to be argumentative). I think that our effort should be directed to solving these problems, not to adding others, and to be also a repository for templates and pages will certainly create others problems.--Trixt (talk) 07:44, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Support I agree with what Slomox said. Helder 00:48, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
• question. I'm confused about future administration of these shared templates. Right now, each wiki sets its own rules, creates and deletes templates per local "consensus". On a lower level, certain projects on certain wikis impose their own micro-rules (cf. "no templates in articles on classical composers" in en-wiki). What will change, and how? I have no objections to enabling opportunity of having shared templates, but think ahead - what happens when members of a larger wiki decide to delete a template which is also used by a smaller wiki? NVO (talk) 02:50, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Templates are rarely deleted if still used. Just like removing a file from en Wiki is not a reason to delete it from Commons and "smaller wikis", I assume the same will happen with templates. En Wiki can just stop using a template without deleting it. --Jarekt (talk) 03:35, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Templates are regularly deleted per BIO, BURDEN or NPV concerns; templates can be coattracks, spam, slur, you name it. It happened, and in such cases templates are deleted regargless of their usage. A Polish-POV template has no chances in Soviet wikipedia, a Soviet-POV template will not survive in Polish wikipedia - but what will happen here? Sure, very few POV-warriors will store their stuff here (instead of wikipedias) but what if they do? there's not enough volunteers to do even basic backlog work. NVO (talk) 15:33, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Support. Slomox has given a very good reason to provide us the technical ability of using shared templates. I believe that there are no language issues that can't be solved (autotranslation etc.) ; as there could not be any obligation to use central templates, all we possibly and hopefully get is a simplification of Wiki work. Grand-Duc (talk) 05:33, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support It does not matter much for the biggest mediawiki projects, which have the resources to create their own templates. It does matter for the smaller ones, which often lack these resources. No one is forced to use the feature. Commons can easily be common resources, not just common media. The reason it is common media now is that this is what the software until now allows to share. The idea of common is to share, not to limit sharing for historical reasons. If we start writing the wikimedia history in stone, we will wall ourselves in with the same stones. --Vigilius (talk) 08:29, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support Slomox makes a good case. All the issues I can think of are moot as long as a central template can be overridden by a local template. I don't really care whether this ends up on Commons or on another, newly created wiki. Pruneau^talk 08:50, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support to a template-repository in a separate project for templates that are language-independent, transclusion only with namespace-prefix;  Oppose using Commons. -- RE rillke questions? 10:17, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Strong oppose We already have technical issues with template limits for heavily used templates. Making them international would blow up that templates even further. Many templates are also designed for one language (formating) and so on. This would be a massive overkill. I don't even want to think about issues due to the language barriers, discussing which parameter is needed and which not. How about internationalized parameter names? Do we now expect any contributers to read them in English? Way to many open or unanswered issues to support. -- ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ 苦情処理係 10:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

  The problems we have with template limits are no big problem. Small improvements to the Mediawiki core could easily completely remove them. By the way: Commons templates are already internationalized at the moment. Nothing will change about that. About the parameter names: As Carl Lindberg stated above, local projects can easily build wrapper templates that allow the local project to use localized parameter names. Many templates are also designed for one language: What's the problem with that? If it's not useful for other projects, just don't migrate it to Commons. Local templates will work the same way as always. But even templates that are only relevant for one language have a place on Commons. If a template does for example French-specific formatting it's useful for French Wikipedia, French Wikibooks, French Wikisource, French Wikinews, French Wikiquotes, French Wiktionary, French Wikiversity and also French pages on Meta and Wikispecies.

  Language barriers may be a problem, but these barriers already exist on Commons. We cope with that problem since the creation of Commons and although it's certainly problematic, the benefits of Commons as a central repository have always outweighed these problems. Even if it fails, the worst case scenario would be the status quo, everybody proceeds to use the local templates. --Slomox (talk) 14:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

  "If it's not useful for other projects, just don't migrate it to Commons... " I see an opposite scenario: "if the template is likely to be deleted in its native project (for example, for violating NPV and POV and WEIGHT), just move it to commons! They'll waste another year sorting it out!". NVO (talk) 15:43, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

  There's "MediaWiki:Bad image list" to exclude problematic Commons files from transclusion onto local projects. The exact same mechanism could be used to do the same with templates. --Slomox (talk) 19:17, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

  And again, the local wiki can simply create a local "Deprecated template" in that namespace and they'll never have to worry about the Commons version. I think people somehow believe templates would work drastically different than how images do now. — Huntster (t @ c) 19:54, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose, reluctantly. I am swayed by the argument that this would be biting off more than we here at Commons can chew. I have great sympathy for the smaller wikis that would be helped by this, but this would be a massive change to the Commons philosophy and scope that needs to be carefully considered -- and to have supporting procedures and resources in place -- before being implemented. Powers (talk) 13:57, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

  It's always a good idea to be prepared. Could you elaborate on which procedures and resources you are thinking about? --Slomox (talk) 14:39, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Strong support -- this would change nothing in wikis that don't want to make use of the feature. As I see it, it's a win-win situation! --Waldir ^talk 15:10, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Oppose proposal:
  •  Oppose interwikis. It's already complicated to get them right for Commons.
  •  Oppose templates unless the pages using these templates are included here as well. --  Docu  at 03:29, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Strong support. I don't see things like "would create more work", anywhere near to being a problem. In that case we can limit Commons file uploads to a few hundred per day, because of the increasing work load of the expanding upload rate. Commons is a central repository of content; why wall ourselves when we really do much more that what we can currently do? Yes we would need to alter a few pages here to add templates+pages to our scope, and yes that means extra work, but saying no to a new feature just because I can handle the work, just isn't right, is it? From what I see, this feature is definitely a net positive, with the little negative just being the extra work load. I'm sure once we pull in the templates, there would be hundreds of more valuable editors from those wikis swarming in? As some have pointed out, those who wish to not use templates can simply create a local "depreciated template", to block the Commons version; it is as simple as that. Rehman 01:32, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support—There is a distinction to be made between templates which provide content and those which provide functionality. Many of the more complex templates rely upon other templates to render complete functionality. Re-creating the entire hierarchy of templates (I considered this at one time for Wiktionary from templates on Wikipedia) is a MAJOR undertaking. Thus, one could definitely look to commons as a repository for those elements which are required to provide functionality to complex templates. Granted, the WikiMedia software uses latin script and English syntax logic in the code, but I do not think that people are complaining about that as much as "the text of Infobox Company needs to be rendered in all of the languages in which Wikipedia is rendered" . . . and therein lies the distinction between templates as infrastructure and templates as presentation devices. Now, this being said, there are commercial systems which deal with multi-lingual lexicons in a rational fashion and one could envision a day when Commons provided template infrastructure support and faceted multi-language implementation options ... but that is something for an altogether different thread. -User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 04:24, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
  • Maybe you want to write a more detailed proposal. Bugzilla:4547 referenced just mentions two samples, neither seem to be covered by your interpretation. If we adopt this "just passing the word" proposal, in the short term, most Wikipedias would probably just end up with unusable data dumps. --  Docu  at 04:55, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Oppose, commons is designed as a global repository for images not templates, lets not try to add even more mess here, also since this also effects more than just commons the vote should be held else where (eg: meta) and every where that would be effected be invited to participate in the vote. And just as a note Bug 4547 only covers the implementation of such a feature that works, another bug will need to be filled for it to be activated once the feature is implemented. Peachey88 ^{(Contribs) (Wikipedia: User) (Wikipedia: Talk)} 06:01, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Oppose We need a formal strong proposal. Yes we need a very strong document. What have we to do exactly? Do you know how many tons of templates there are in Wikipedias? Who will patrol it? We must, we can, we can't discuss for their changes (ff course Commons is free but what exactly Commons community is expected to do)? We will protect it and then unprotect every time someone want to change a single dot? People loves to make and change templates the way they consider it an art work. And how many discussions:the color, the link, the shape, is useful, not useful, we can merge, no we can't (see #New copyviol template, i just express the need for a shortcut to work faster). In other way we have to change job or need a very lot of new admins.--Pierpao.lo (listening) 05:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood. All templates would not be transferred of course, just the core templates which most other templates depend on, plus those templates that can support the interlang functions. Also, there wont really be a need for that much of admins to handle it; most of the work can be handled by normal users itself... Rehman 06:03, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Very glad to hear it but just a little more optimistic about the work to be done--Pierpao.lo (listening) 07:31, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Weak oppose, not a bad idea, but not feasible. As others may have stated above, hosting templates heavily used on other projects puts an additional burden on us, that we are not able to shoulder. If such a template is vandalized and we don't correct it soon, this will add to the feelings of animosity against Commons that already exist in local projects. Though I am not a template coder, it's my superficial impression from earlier times on :de, that some of the coders are very specialists in the area for which they developed a template, but may not be well-versed in english and might not at all be interested to maintain "their" template on Commons. In addition, there is the potential language problem, already mentioned by others. No offense meant, but those long enough on Commons may well know that users from some language areas have emotional (or whatever) reservations against using english. --Túrelio (talk) 08:15, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

 Concern User:Pierpao and User:Túrelio have an excellent point the templates likely to be stored globally at Commons would also be likely to need protection from vandalism so only admins would have right to work with them. This might not go over well with wikipedia admins who currently perform all the maintenance tasks for those templates. Also Commons admins should not be the only ones allowed to maintain unfamiliar templates. So we probably should give protected page edit rights to all admins on other wikis. As an alternative we could employ system of sandbox and testcases templates for all protected templates. --Jarekt (talk) 12:50, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

 Comment There is already a feature implemented in MediaWiki to handle this concern: the flaggedrevs extension. It's an easy way to get and define a user group of people willing to maintain templates and to limit the fear of vandalism on heavy used templates. As there are already distinct user groups below the adminship for file moving, rollbacking and patrolling, it wouldn't be a big deal to have flagged template reviewer. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 19:06, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose as long as Commons isn't even capable of maintaining images and files properly (such as deletion-notifications, etc.), it will not be capable of more work. Seb az86556 (talk) 14:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Oppose I like the technical idea, but Commons is the wrong place! -- Lavallen (talk) 16:14, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Support I like the idea, although the language imperialism of English is a big problem and the edit rights should be solved in some way. --Petrus Adamus (talk) 18:43, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Strong support — It is high time for this to happen, if not from Commons at least from another wiki. We need to stop reinventing the wheel. 67.80.250.138 03:16, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose way outside Commons scope, tempates require a whiole different type of skill sets from that of a media repositiory. Also note that templates that try to create one size fits all uses become unweildly to use within a singl language project, to have that translated into multiple languages would only add unnecessary complication. If you look at en settlement template discussion page to understand how difficult it is get consensus and changes made, that page has 19 archived pages of such discussions.. Gnangarra 05:28, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose Seems to be a good idea, but Commons doesn't look as the right place to implement it, as many have said. Meta seems to me to be a more appropriate place to handle this.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 09:32, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

   Comment mw: already stolemoved many help pages from Meta, they would certainly deserve to get this zoo as free bonus. And infrastructure templates are very near to other mw: topics. But does InstantCommons work with other Wikis as source, or is it bound to commons, as the name says? –Be..anyone 09:58, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

  The Mediawiki wiki is about the wiki software our projects run on. It's not the right place for shared templates. Commons on the other hand is already exactly that: a wiki dedicated to host and maintain shared content that can be commonly used by all Wikimedia projects. --Slomox (talk) 10:39, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

•  Support. It's a long needed step forward both for Commons and for smaller wiki-projects. There are a lot of non-controversial culture-independent project-independent templates (like, say, population of a city, USD inflation-adjustment, string manipulation or license templates) need to be duplicated, supported, synchronized, updated in numerous of projects. It's just a waste, waste of resources, waste of volunteer effort. And Commons is a great and natural place to implement a shared template repository. Commons is already a shared repository for wiki-projects (for another type of content, but anyway), Commons community is the largest international multi-language community amongst all WMF wikis and already has a lot of experience with internationalized template building and cross-project cross-cultural interaction. There is no other project that fits for this task better. Of course, it's possible to create a new dedicated project especially for this problem, but really, is there a good reason to create a one more half-dead wiki? there is already a serious wiki-project bloat. --Trycatch 12:17, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
•  Support. The language issue is not trivial but using Commons for language neutral template could already be useful. Additionnally Commons uses multilingual templates, and some of them work pretty well. I think we should see it as an occasion to get some template designers from various projects cooperating here. And rather than a source of technical difficulties, we should see it as a way to disseminate best practices.--Zolo (talk) 04:49, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Enabling feature, not migrating content

From what I see above, I think there is a rather big confusion here. The original proposal is about enabling the transclusion feature in general, and not proposing a general migration of content (i.e. templates) all at once. Of course, one may do some "migrations" according to their will, or according to their wiki's decision, but that is not what is being discussed at here. Feel free to vote or comment below. Rehman 11:54, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Wouldn't both have the same effect eventually? -- Orionist ★ talk 18:53, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

There is no discussion or suggestion to mass-move templates to Commons. That would be pointless and counterproductive. Only templates that would prove useful to a wider, multilingual audience (less than you may think, I believe) need be transitioned. — Huntster (t @ c) 19:27, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

This discussion is silly

I don't think this discussion is helpful, prudent, or necessary right now. The feature doesn't even fully exist at this point. There are a lot of options for implementation (including Meta-Wiki, where most global pages are currently, Commons, or a separate wiki altogether), so debating whether Commons wants this with a vote, instead of first examining the technical aspects and what the best options might be, is silly. Please stop being silly. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:04, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid I'll have to agree with what you say.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 21:53, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Mmm, I actually started this thread per the "I actually see no discussion about enabling it on commons or consensus for it linked either" at the Bug. So I don't know... Rehman 00:08, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

This discussion is occurring because the bug report was frozen due to no evidence of consensus to implement such a feature. Rightly so, the devs didn't want to build the feature if it wasn't going to be applied. — Huntster (t @ c) 05:13, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

In the discussion above I seem to see a clear consensus for that feature, I believe everyone wants it implemented, the opposes are for implementing it here on Commons.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 08:10, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree that consensus seems clear for development, but I dislike the idea of a separate repository for templates. I fear that would only further subdivide the editor base and make keeping everything in line more difficult, not less so. Commons was necessary to allow for sharing of media...I don't see another such parallel project as being so useful. — Huntster (t @ c) 08:32, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Since there is significant support to bring it here, I say, why don't the people supporting it create a task force to do some tests with it? If it doesn't work well, the worst that can happen is to keep the few templates used in the test, and stop further uploads of such things. It seems to me that Meta is a more proper place to this, but I know nothing about tech limitations. And since there is a crowd asking for it's implementation, if the work stays with that crowd, I really can't oppose this.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 04:56, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

April 27

Oil on wood and oil on panel

Hello. I believe oil on wood and oil on panel are precisely the same thing, and actually {{Oil on wood}} redirects to {{Oil on panel}}. However, when using {{technique|oil|wood}} it places the files in a non existent Category:Technique parameter 2: wood which has already almost 1500 files within. Lest someone well intended has the awful idea of creating that category complicating things even further, can someone fix this in the {{Technique}} template? I had a look at it, but it seems quite complex, and I don't want to damage anything there.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 00:37, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that template is poorly thought out, and demands that users enter the correct parameters without actually checking that they've done so. Fixing the problem would require a complete rewrite, and I'm far too art-illiterate to make that work. — Huntster (t @ c) 04:44, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Clarification: it doesn't check if the category exists. Though, other problems are there too. Not sure I see any purpose to these custom categories...I have to imagine that regular categories exist for most of these terms as well. Also, there is a Category:Files with unrecognized term in template:technique, but obviously this doesn't work as intended. — Huntster (t @ c) 04:53, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that template is poorly thought out, and demands that users enter the correct parameters without actually checking that they've done so. As the number of possible parameter values is not limited, the template allows any value. It's indeed the task of the user to check whether the parameter values are used consistently.

You are right that "oil on wood" in most cases means "oil on panel", but it's not necessarily identical. "Panel" is a subset of "wood". A painting on a block of wood is not "on panel". The correct way to handle this, would be to check all files that have "oil on wood" and change them to "oil on panel" if they are on panel. --Slomox (talk) 08:35, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Hm, Special:WantedCategories is full of them. --Slomox (talk) 09:56, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

I added Category:Technique parameter 2: wood and many similar categories as temporary maintenance categories and did not get around removing them. I was trying to figure out how some terms which seems nonsensical to me are used, for example terms : form, style, examples, technique, pebble, etc. Many were not used and I removed them. Sorry about that - I removed temporary categories now. By the way I agree with Slomox, that the template has a lot of problems due to too many options, see for example extreme example of this template possibilities here (in bold). I am not sure if we need so many options. --Jarekt (talk) 14:31, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed, and will be archived soon.

---

New copyviol template

For your information. I created this template:copyrighted logo misuse because every time I take a look at into Category:Media needing categories i found a Copyright brand or logo without permission, one at least every 200 media. Every time with no exception till now. Thanks--Pierpao.lo (listening) 14:40, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

The template should not show in the Category:Copyright violations or it will be accidently deleted some time. -- RE rillke questions? 14:53, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

I may be missing something, but what does that add over {{Copyvio}}? If something is copyrighted, it's a problem whether or not it's a logo and whether or not it's used or misused. Not all logos are copyrightable of course, so make sure you aren't tagging anything which could be tagged {{PD-textlogo}}. Carl Lindberg (talk) 14:54, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

It's a matter of time. My job it's to pull out from messy media and categories and it is very very time-expensive. I intend to create a shortcut like template:clm. It's much faster writing {{clm|}} and past an url than "because its a copyrighted logo/brand see". I could call it "Clm" but was less explicative. For the second question: of course it must be used only in case of misuse (so the name) and in Italian Commons Pump we have an admin who teach us every single copyright law "way" to save a media when we can, like in the case of simple or text logos. Thanks to Rillke--Pierpao.lo (listening) 15:17, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Except that if you don't know it's a copyright violation (i.e. found a source, or it's obviously copyrighted and a known logo) then it can't be speedy deleted. Images where you just suspect a copyvio should be nominated via a regular DR. "Misuse" is irrelevant -- either it's a copyright violation or it's not. It still seems like a synonym for the copyvio template, unless it is for cases where it is obviously a copyrighted, unlicensed known logo and you don't want to hunt down a URL. Maybe. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:47, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes of course again. in fact it is a shortcut for copyvio. I want to use it instead of copyvio when i think to use copyvio. Not every time. In the template you can read "see the copyvio doc". I did not say that i want to use it for every logo I find. When i'm in doubt and it happens often, i did not use any template. I ask my bar what to do. I like to save media. For example when i found File:Nettool 1.jpg in media needing category i search in the net with Google if it was a commercial or free software. It was an open software. I saved the file. I made a search for every file. This is the heart of the matter.--Pierpao.lo (listening) 15:28, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

And no, i look every time for a url. You can ask Turelio or Foroa they usually answer to my deletion request. And the template ends with "see...". You can't use without a proof--Pierpao.lo (listening) 16:07, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Hello, we must adapt the commons rule of good faith and no longer use copyright violation, but Copyright infringment, which is more neutral and less agressif. --Havang(nl) (talk) 18:45, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

You have a point. Noted. Thanks--Pierpao.lo (listening) 19:43, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Having read this whole thread and looked at the template, I still don't understand its purpose or what it adds over {{Copyvio}}. We don't need a redundant template. Dcoetzee (talk) 23:50, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

 Comment and  Question: Note that we already have {{Derivative}}, {{Nonderivative}}, {{Delete-PD-Finland50}}, {{Flickrvio}}. In any case, if you have no time to compile {{Copyvio}}, why don't you use {{Logo|SOURCE IF NEEDED}}?--Trixt (talk) 10:19, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks i asked speedy deletion--Pierpao.lo (listening) 17:18, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is closed, and will be archived soon.

April 28

CommonsDelinker not working properly

CommonsDelinker just removes the listed tasks, but does not perform any replacements. What to do? --Leyo 08:08, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

I suppose that the page on toolserver which you linked is, for some reason, outdated; see, for example, this recent replacement.--Trixt 22:20, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. The same is true for de.wikipedia. I wonder if all requests are fulfilled or just some. Without a log (the one above is linked to on COM:CDC) it is difficult to check. --Leyo 22:29, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Information template date display problems

Getting displays like "2010-7-8" becomes 8 {{MediaWiki:July/<lang>}} 2010. I would have little idea where to even begin tracking down the problem... AnonMoos 21:06, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Apparently problem is only in English interface, other languages are working correct, anyway, I'm not sure either what is this about.   ■ MMXX  ^talk  21:23, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Yup; it's bugged up again. The date on File:Denmark - Faroe Islands - 5 ore 1941.jpg says 13 {{MediaWiki:May_long/<lang>}} 2008. Is this another software hiccup, or did an admin goof up one of the mediawiki page? Magog the Ogre 21:57, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

I think all of that functionality is handled by {{ISOdate}} and related templates. Might want to ask Slomox or Jarekt about it. I have some fixes to {{#time}} in the pipeline, but I'm pretty sure they haven't been deployed to the cluster yet. Kaldari 23:31, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

This is happening everywhere. I first saw it an hour ago on {{PD-Australia}}, and it looks like {{I18n month}} is where the voodoo happens, but I cant see any related changes. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 00:32, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

It is {{int:Lang}} that is broken returning "en" ("<Lang>") instead of your language. I expect that all Category:Internationalization templates using LangSwitch and Category:Autotranslated templates are currently broken.--Jarekt 02:43, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Purging the page seemed to help. {{Date|2011|04|29}} seems fine to me now producing "29 April 2011" ("29 April 2011"). I guess {{int:Lang}} had a hick-up of some sort. --Jarekt 02:50, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Template:See also (→ int:seealso) is also broken for (at least) English. de, fr, it work (see also talk page of this template). --Saibo (Δ) 13:32, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

It works fine for me. I think you have to Purge the page to clear the cache. --Jarekt 17:49, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Commons by language

Would anyone have a major objection to creating a new category called Category:Commons by language to hold the "Commons-xx" subcategories currently listed under Category:Commons? This change would allow people to link to a category specifically for Commons information in different languages, and also allow the other (non-language) subcats in C:C to be sorted under different letters, instead of everything being listed under " " (space) and "*". - dcljr 23:30, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. --Jarekt 02:46, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I have advertised this section at Category_talk:Commons. I have no objection, sounds good. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 13:29, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Round 1 of the Picture of the Year contest is now open!

Dear Wikimedians,

Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that the 2010 Picture of the Year competition is now open. We're interested in your opinion as to which images qualify to be the Picture of the Year for 2010. Any user registered at a Wikimedia wiki since 2010 or prior with more than 200 edits as of 1 January 2011 (UTC) is welcome to vote. Check your eligibility now! If you meet the criteria, you are able to vote.

Nearly 800 images that have been rated Featured Pictures by the international Wikimedia Commons community in the past year are all entered in this competition. From professional animal and plant shots to breathtaking panoramas and skylines, restorations of historically relevant images, images portraying the world's best architecture, maps, emblems, diagrams created with the most modern technology, and impressive human portraits, Commons features pictures of all flavors.

For your convenience, we have sorted the images into topic categories. Two rounds of voting will be held: In the first round, you can vote for as many images as you like. The first round category winners and the top ten overall will then make it to the final. In the final round, when a limited number of images are left, you must decide on the one image that you want to become the Picture of the Year.

To see the candidate images just go to: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2010/Galleries

Wikimedia Commons is interested in hearing your opinions on our featured images of 2010. The deadline for first round voting is the 4th of May at 23:59 (UTC).

Thanks, theMONO 00:10, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Please could you add the end date and the next deadline to Commons:Picture of the Year/2010 somewhere - I could not find it. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 01:41, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Also, for anybody interested, there are some debates going on about the new visual appearance of POTY. --ELEKHH^T 06:15, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I added the end date for the first round (not sure about start/end for final - depends on time taken for analysis of votes) to Commons:Picture of the Year/2010/en. The other languages need it translated. – Adrignola talk 13:03, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I have updated /de. --Saibo (Δ) 13:24, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

April 29

MediaWiki:Sitenotice id

Do we need MediaWiki:Sitenotice id and MediaWiki:Sitenotice-id ? They havent been touched in a long time, so I am guessing that they are no longer needed. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 00:49, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

If the site notice is changed and someone hid the notice and hasn't logged out, incrementing the sitenotice ID will cause it to reappear for them. – Adrignola talk 01:14, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Memorial page

FYI, now we have a memorial page for deceased Commons contributors: Commons:Deceased contributors. --Túrelio 12:14, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Just a comment. I have seen in the list people who have contributed for only 1 or 2 days. I would expect only names of people who have contributed significantly to Commons. Wouter (talk) 21:47, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Then what is "contributed significantly"? Recommend further discussion on the page's talkpage. --Túrelio (talk) 18:45, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

A good idea; I have put a comment there. Wouter (talk) 20:46, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Flickr source for royal wedding photos using Getty Images and tagging them as some rights reserved

The Flickr user chicagofabulousblog has posted numerous photos of the royal wedding and marked them as some rights reserved BUT - according to their own website, these photos are all by Getty and cannot be hosted here. However some users not knowing this have been uploading these photos here to use for the corresponding Wiki article. BrokenSphere (Talk) 18:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting these. If there are any other license-laundered images, nominate them for speedy deletion as copyright violations. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 18:48, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

So why did these get approved by FlickreviewR if the ID for the Flickr user is listed on User:FlickreviewR/bad-authors? – Adrignola talk 19:30, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Problems with porting code

I've tried porting fr:Modèle:Armoiries avec ornements communs to this wiki, with the name Template:Arms with common ornaments. As you can see below, instead of showing the image "Ornements_extérieurs_Archevêques.svg", it just shows the code. Is anyone able to fix this?

Template:Arms with common ornaments
Adelbrecht 21:44, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Fixed /Ö 07:14, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! This is awesome. Adelbrecht 07:55, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

File name and caption help

this diff seems to point to a real problem. However it may require fact checking before file renaming. Teofilo 23:07, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Instructional videos?

Have there been attempts to make instructional videos for the Wikimedia Commons and/or various Wikimedia projects? These videos could be about Commons, Wikimedia, and/or Wikipedia policies and procedures. From my understanding, all such videos would be hosted on the Commons

Some possibilities to consider:

• Dubs
• Subtitles (for any given language it may be easier to subtitle a video in an existing language first, then wait until that language gets a full dub)
• Sign language additions (American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Taiwanese Sign Language, etc)

Unfortunately I do not have experience making videos. Are there any interested parties who are willing to make instructional videos? What are your ideas? WhisperToMe 23:52, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Have you seen Category:Instructional videos on using Wikipedia, meta:Video tutorials, and outreach:Instructional videos? Powers 17:08, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! I did not know that these existed!

So some do have voiceovers. What those videos need are subtitles and/or versions with sign language interpretation

Some videos have on-screen text, and no voiceovers (not sure if it is intended for them not to have voiceovers)

Also, I will check relevant pages on the Wikipedias - If the pages lack links to the videos, I will link them

WhisperToMe (talk) 12:33, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

April 30

Commons-related Wikimania proposals

If you're going to Wikimania and any of the following programs sound interesting, please add your name to the respective pages under 'Interested attendees':

• Wikimedia and the Public Domain
• Freedom of panorama and Wikimedia Commons
• Digital restorations
• Wikipedia Takes Your City
• Wiki Loves Monuments
• What next in GLAM?
• State of GLAM in the Netherlands
• New opportunities in GLAM-Wiki collaboration
• GLAMDerby - Collaborating with a smaller museum
• Wikipedia Illustrated

Kaldari 01:05, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

User:Delimad

Hello!

Are those images of User:Delimad inside the encyclopedic usefulness? I know that the Commons is no cencored media library but this goes to far. --91.57.87.99 20:42, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Good gracious me, thank God I have not had my dinner yet. Please don't look at them if you are easily impressed. They seem to be copyvio, by the way, tineye returned this for one of them.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 22:45, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Have it out at Commons:Deletion requests/Scat uploads by Delimad where I've attempted to replicate the argument that prompted this thread. – Adrignola talk 03:50, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

May 1

File:L.K Advani & Buddhadeb.jpg

Today I upload one file File:L.K Advani & Buddhadeb.jpg from Press Information Bureau, Government of India website. Look their COPYRIGHT POLICY. Please advice are those images available in this website , reuse in wikipedia/wikimedia? If I am doing any wrong, I can nominate for deletion. Thank you. Jayanta Nath (talk) 08:57, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for being aware about copyright issues. The relevant clause on the website states:

Material featured on this website may be reproduced free of charge and there is no need for any prior approval for using the content. The permission to reproduce this material shall not extend to any third-party material. ... The material must be reproduced accurately and not used in a derogatory manner or in a misleading context. Wherever the material is being published or issued to others, the source must be prominently acknowledged.

I don't think the clause is clear enough for Commons purposes. It refers only to the reproduction of images and specifically states that "material must be reproduced accurately". This seems to rule out allowing people to modify content, and Commons policy requires files to be freely modifiable. I would suggest that you send an e-mail to the website owner requesting confirmation that content on the website may be modified and used for commercial purposes as well, and forward any positive response to OTRS for verification and archiving. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 11:11, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Bot rejects CC-BY_SA image

I'm trying to use the Flickr upload bot to upload http://www.flickr.com/photos/55592184@N08/567594852/in/set-72157626621430544 - but the bot says the image has an insufficiently free license. It's CC-BY-SA and looks OK to me. Have I missed something, or is there a problem elsewhere? Andy Mabbett (talk) 21:55, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Looking at this link shows an "Site not found: that's not what you are looking for". -- RE rillke questions? 21:58, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

That's very bizarre; I copied & pasted the URL, and it was working yestrday thanks, anyway. Andy Mabbett (talk) 15:49, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Pic, Roger (1920-2001) / Gallica

Gallica claims that photos collections of the photographer Roger Pic (1920-2001) in public domain. For example Danses de Géorgie. 1965 : photographies / Roger Pic or others her. Somebody knows anything about it? In generally, can we use this claim of Gallica? Geagea (talk) 22:30, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

When reputable large institutions claim some works are in Public Domain we often trust their judgment, unless we have clear reasons to believe they are wrong. I agree in this case it would be interesting to know the basis of the claim. --Jarekt (talk) 03:55, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

May 2

File:Royal Crown of Portugal.svg isn't showing up

For some reason, File:Royal Crown of Portugal.svg isn't showing up in any of the categories that I linked it to. What did I do wrong?--Glasshouse 02:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

It did not show up since you have modified the derivativeFX output heavily and deleted the last nowiki tag.

Which were the source images for this svg? You need to input all at the beginning of the upload process. Currently your description page is incomplete. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 03:17, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Originally, I used the Royal Crown of Italy with the Royal Monogram of King Peter V of Portugal.svg image and tried to reference both it and the source for the monogram itself, but now that I have the Crown of Portugal, I wanted to swap them out. I'm sorry for the confusion and the mess I've created. I have more monograms for which I'll be wanting to swap the crowns, but I want to make sure I do things correctly. Please advise, and thanks for your help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Glasshouse (talk • contribs) 2011-05-02T23:49:03 (UTC)

File:President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden.theora.ogv

President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden.
For those who do not have MwEmbed activated (seems not to work in Opera, works in Firefox):
• Watch with subtitles in your interface language
• Ansehen mit deutschen Untertiteln
• Watch with English subtitles

We need subtitles in various languages for

• File:President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden.theora.ogv

Lemme check to see which subs are already available WhisperToMe (talk) 06:13, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

• • I cannot find subtitles in any language for it... WhisperToMe (talk) 06:15, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
    • English subtitles are available, but we need subtitles in other languages WhisperToMe (talk) 17:28, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
      • I am working on the de version... at least a start of it. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 23:37, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
      • TimedText:President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden.ogv.de.srt the first half. It is translated until number 41. I have asked at Commons:Forum fro someone to complete. Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 00:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

• I have added a thumb here with view links. Maybe we should integrate those in the subtitle template ... at some day in the future. ;) Cheers --Saibo (Δ) 00:51, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Thanks for starting the German translation :)
  • Other translations I suggest are:
  • Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Urdu - and there are probably many more to add
  • WhisperToMe (talk) 03:53, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

• Even the English version is not complete. It only covers about half of the speech. Zginder (talk) 04:39, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Alright - How can I help with that? I'll be happy to help the transcription so that the translation process can be expedited - I will be available to do this in about over half a day WhisperToMe (talk) 05:30, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Problem with template

Template:MetaCat links to Commons:Naming_categories#Categories_by_CRITERION. However, the header of Commons:Naming_categories states unequivocally:

References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy".

This is skipped because the link leads to a section. By its use in "official" template, it is implied that the non-policy is policy, and in a very sneaky way it must be said (skipping a non-policy warning by using a redirect-to-secion; the user will not normally see the warning). The result of this is major cleanup workload like this, this, this and this; see also the discussion here and here and here. Please someone fix it. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 18:24, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I am not sure what you would like to fix: Template:MetaCat never describes Commons:Naming_categories as "policy". In the mean time Commons:Naming_categories serves as De facto policy: it is stable and mostly unchanging capturing best practices of naming categories, like many other would be policies nobody is in the hurry of pushing it to the next level of consensus building and approvals to make it into "proper" policy. We are much more disorganized as compared to other wikipedias in this department. If you are bothered by lack of official approval you can try to push Commons:Naming_categories further in the process. --Jarekt (talk) 19:29, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Overwritten file

Hi,

I'm not sure where to write this, but what happens when files get overwritten? File:Beit_Jimal_2.JPG was used in a portal header in Hungarian Wikipedia and someone overwrote it with a different picture. I'm not sure the uploader can communicate in English as his/her userpage is in Hebrew. Both images look good enough to keep, I don't want to revert the new one but we liked the original. – Alensha ^msg 19:37, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I have reverted to the original version. Someone can upload the intermediate version under a new name if they wish to use it. –Tryphon^☂ 20:15, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! – Alensha ^msg 23:23, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

May 3

Template:Share

I've just written some javascript code into User:TeleComNasSprVen/noTemplateShare.js which may be of some help to a few of the users complaining about the large Template:Share box located on the current Picture of the Year page. Unfortunately it has to be imported from a local js file, because for some reason, as I tried to load it with a &withJS= call in the url for index.php, MediaWiki:Common.js gives me an error message: "User:TeleComNasSprVen/noTemplateShare.js javascript not allowed to be loaded." So apparently this only works if my js page is in a MediaWiki file (in its namespace) or it is imported directly by a different js file, like:

importScript('User:TeleComNasSprVen/noTemplateShare.js');

:| TelCoNaSpVe :| 06:33, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Wire services routinely add public domain images to their libraries

Wire services routinely add public domain images to their libraries -- so those who claim images need to be deleted here when they find some element of an image has been published with a credit to a wire services' library.

I routinely come across images I know are in the public domain that I see published with a credit to a wire service. Today I came across yet another nomination to delete an image, where the nominator argued that the image had to be a proprietary image because it was credited to the associated press, here. With a few minutes work I found the same image credited to REUTERS, GETTY, AFP and SCANPIX.

I don't mean to pick on this particular nominator for repeating this terrible mistake. This was the time to voice this concern because w:tineye found so many instances.

So please, potential nominators, don't blindly nominate images for deletion just because you found an instance where the image was credited to a wire service. For all we know wire services employ people to go through public domain images our volunteers have found, and centralized, to add them to their library, so they can start charging their clients for indexing them. Geo Swan (talk) 09:15, 3 May 2011 (UTC)