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— Preceding unsigned comment added by RoySmith (talk • contribs) 11:26, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

Testing, maybe adding a comment will archive this thread. Tvpuppy (talk) 00:29, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --Tvpuppy (talk) 00:30, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Anyone into making ship categories?

I've done some of these, but it's not really my thing. I recently was cruising around Seattle's Lake Union and the Lake Washington Ship Canal, and I can see that I photographed a fair number of ships that doubtless deserve categories of their own and don't have one. I did a few myself (including extracting a couple of images of particular ships), but I don't think I'm going to get around to doing all of what deserves to be done.

Some of the pictures where this would be worth doing for one or more ships (& as of this writing I'm still uploading more):

• 
• 
• 
  DONE
• 
• 
  DONE
• 
• 
• 
• 
  (mostly the same ships as the previous one)
• 
• 
  (mostly the same ships as the previous one)
• 

Jmabel ! talk 22:14, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Is there some better place I should post this, or some relevant maintenance category to add? - Jmabel ! talk 19:36, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Sheesh, the amount of things you have to take care of... Well, never done this before, but tried my hand at it. Now, we have: Category:Point Nemo (ship, 1993) and Category:IMO 9043914 to deal with what I though as simple case from File:'Andrew Foss' and other ships at Northlake Shipyard, Seattle.jpg - "simple" because you provided an IMO number and the vessel's name. I hope that I did the Wikidata stuff right enough; I more or less copied the patterns of Category:COSCO France (ship, 2013) and Category:IMO 9516416 (as I knew that on this photo of mine, there were ship categories available). But Category:Point Nemo (ship, 1993) still has an issue: it's not mounted in any of those "Ships by XY" categories, I wasn't able to find out what its homeport is - searching for external imagery to maybe see the homeport painted on the ship wasn't successful, as Marinetraffic and other AIS trackers had image galleries, but only with probable sister ships of Point Nemo. @Joe, do you have any clue? I will also try to ask our marine buffs on DE-WP who likely have paid accesses to those databases, let's see what will come out. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 06:42, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Done: de:Portal Diskussion:Schifffahrt#Heimathafen für ein US-Arbeitsschiff?. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 06:50, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

@Grand-Duc: Looks like you did a fairly thorough job (more thorough than the average, in my experience). I'll make a few changes on things that weren't quite right. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting! - Jmabel ! talk 16:19, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

@Joe, could you advise for which ships you deem actually deserving categories? I'm not deep enough into the usual local practice about categories for that to be able to decide that myself. I won't mind doing that at least for all vessels with known IMO numbers, but I'd like a second opinion. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 18:13, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Made another one: Category:Dominator (ship, 1979) / Category:IMO 7940467, advising it here so that interested parties may add anything useful. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 21:04, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

@Grand-Duc: Thank you very much. Usually, any shop with an IMO number for which we have media that could reasonably be used to illustrate the ship merits this pair of categories (and the corresponding Wikidata items); there are certainly a fair number of ships without IMO numbers that also deserve categories, but that is harder to delineate. - Jmabel ! talk 00:15, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

Report on File:Seattle - boats on the north side of the Ship Canal, near NW 40th Street - 2025-07-09.jpg: Category:Wide Bay (ship, 1977) pair created, no IMO number for Lady Joanne (MMSI 303419000) found. We have Category:Vessels by MMSI number, but I did not unearth enough details about the vessel (like the launching date) to be confident in creating a category for the Lady. Grand-Duc (talk) 12:09, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

& just to confuse things further, there is a different Lady Joanna (not Joanne) with an IMO that fishes in the Gulf of Mexico. - Jmabel ! talk 18:43, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

@Grand-Duc: The completely useless file names aside, a user is in the process of dumping a bunch of uncategorized images of boats into Category:Port of Kołobrzeg. Anyway, it would be cool if they were categorized by ship if you want something else to do that's related to this. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:45, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

@Adamant1: Precisely how are my filenames above "completely useless"? These are primarily pictures of locations, which happen to have ships in them. The names accurately describe the locations. - Jmabel ! talk 19:37, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

It depends on the image. Like with File:Kołobrzeg port 41.jpg it would be cool to know what the name of it is, if it has one to begin with, or what it exactly it is by looking at the file name without having to open the file page and read the description. Not that the description says anything anyway though. Cool its a port though. We know that from the category the files are in. What exactly am I looking at though? --Adamant1 (talk) 19:50, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

That is not one of my images on which I was requesting help here. - Jmabel ! talk 23:02, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

A European, or a German, would often know that Kołobrzeg is a city in Poland, but I admit that this knowledge is not necessarily present stateside. But, @Adamant1, that wasn't a so great idea to highjack this thread. If you happen to know some German, you may very well ask for assistance on de:Portal Diskussion:Schifffahrt for the polish images, my German colleagues are often quite eager to lend a helping hand. In fact, one of them enhanced Category:Point Nemo (ship, 1993) quite a bit and wrote de:Responder-Klasse, likely motivated by this thread here (so, thanks @Joe, you indirectly made for a new article on DE-WP )! I'll try to see what I can do, but not immediately. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 00:26, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Category:Recipients of awards

Over the years users have built these cat trees like Category:Recipients of awards. are they actually useful, when most files under the persons' own cats are not actually related to (receiving) the awards? RoyZuo (talk) 14:29, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

This feels suspiciously like yet another instance of misusing categories as metadata ("person X received award Y"). Some of the subcategories like Category:Nobel laureates are justifiable, as the awards are significant enough to be a defining property of the recipient, but most (like, say, Category:Brian Piccolo Award winners) aren't. I've also removed a couple of categories for individual people - describing a person as a "recipient of awards", without specifying an award, is meaningless. Omphalographer (talk) 18:42, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

without specifying an award, is meaningless. There might just not be a category for said award yet (or someone could not have been bothered to find the correct sub-category). Nakonana (talk) 19:12, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

If the award is significant, a category should be created for it. If not, it doesn't need to be represented as a Commons category. Simply saying that a person is a "recipient of an award" says very little - there are a lot of awards in the world, most of which are completely non-notable and do not need to be annotated in Commons. Omphalographer (talk) 21:27, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

I'd go beyond that, though. There are awards that deserve categories, but not every winner of the award needs to have that as a parent category. E.g. we appropriately have Category:Order of Labour Merit to show what the medal itself and its ribbon bars look like. That doesn't mean it is an important enough award that our category hierarchy should track who won it. Similarly for Category:Jubilee Medal "80 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945", where I see we have an (empty) Category:Recipients of the Jubilee Medal "80 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"; I don't think we should. - Jmabel ! talk 23:12, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

I was just going to mention the "Recipients of Whatever Jubilee Medal" categories. Their a perfect example of where this whole thing goes wrong. From what I remember there's a rather rude, aggressive user who won't allow the categories to be removed and/or deleted though. Although I think they are being added on Wikidata's end through infoboxes. So I'm not sure it's something that can be dealt with anyway. --Adamant1 (talk) 00:50, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

That medal was recently created in September 2024 and the first medal weren't handed out up until 2025, so, that might explain why it's still empty.

It might actually be one of the more interesting categories of the jubilee medal series because they are awarded to veterans, but there are hardly any veterans left. The veterans must be around 100 years old by now. If we'd delete recipients' categories of the jubilee medal series then I'd rather argue to get rid of the first awards of the series, e.g. Category:Recipients of the Jubilee Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" because they are flooded with 1154 sub-categories, which isn't really helpful.

Ah, interesting. I know at some level we get to control what comes in via {{Wikidata Infobox}}, but I've never been involved and don't know the granularity of control. - Jmabel ! talk 17:35, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel: Do you happen to have any idea where to even start with figuring out where the categories come from or how to remove them? I looked into a few months ago but couldn't find jack myself. It seems to involve multiple templates from both here and Wikidata that work on top of each but that's as far as I was able to get. I'm a strong believer that Commons should have control over, or at least a say in, things like this though. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:50, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't know. I've seen discussions that led to changes before, but I don't know who tunes this, or how tunable it is. If you've found the relevant templates, you might look at who edits them, and ping them here. - Jmabel ! talk 19:13, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

As far as I understand, the Wikidata Infobox template (or one of its integrated templates) probably makes some property call (e.g. https://wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P27) and that's what probably adds the category. So, when going through a template's code you'll probably have to look out for the mention of those properties. Ruwiki infoboxes often use such calls, example: . There, you can see code lines like:

|изображение2 = {{wikidata|p94|{{{герб|}}}|.

So, here we see the property p94 and the purpose of the line is to automatically add the image of the Coat of Arms (герб) to the infobox on ruwiki from the wikidata item that is associated with the article. More specifically, this will add the image that can be found on wikidata under the p94 property (or under the statement "coat of arms image" https://wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P94). Similarly, there are properties for awards received, but I don't know their p-numbers. Nakonana (talk) 19:15, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

OK, the number was easier to find than I thought: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P166. Does the code of {{Wikidata Infobox}} mention p166 anywhere? If so, then that might be what's adding the categories. Nakonana (talk) 19:25, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

There's a whole list: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikidata_Infobox/doc/properties Nakonana (talk) 19:30, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks for looking into it. I left @Mike Peel: a message on his talk page about the discussion since he seems to be the main editor of the infobox template. Hopefully he can add some information to this. --Adamant1 (talk) 19:36, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

And Adamant1 is right, those categories are added via the Wikidata Infobox. People probably see that the infobox creates red link categories and then go ahead and create those categories so that they aren't red links anymore. Nakonana (talk) 16:04, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

I pretty much agree with Omphalographer. Nobels, Oscars, César Awards, Congressional Medal of Honor, British knighthood, Order of the Paulownia Flowers: sure. Stranger Genius, Purple Heart, Order of the Rising Sun Sixth Class: no. Sometimes in between it is hard to know exactly where to draw the line. - Jmabel ! talk 19:08, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Seconding (thirding?) this. I also agree that it's hard to draw the line, but a line should be drawn somewhere. ReneeWrites (talk) 09:18, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Category:Wakkerpreis-Prix Wakker Wakker Prize (Q689888) a bunch of towns. RoyZuo (talk) 17:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Axe the subcats. Kind of a funny side find to that is the nesting doll categorization of Category:Architecture awards by genre and type ---> Category:Architecture awards honoring architects ---> Category:Viktor Kovačić Award ---> Category:Viktor Kovačić Award laureates ---> Category:Juraj Denzler ---> Category:Buildings by Juraj Denzler ---> Category:Faculty of Economics & Business (Zagreb).

That's what, 7 categories before you get to an image? And heck if I know what the first category has to do with the last one. I really do wonder what some people on here are thinking sometimes. At this point the whole thing is just an endless shell game of categories inside of other categories that never get to an actual image. --Adamant1 (talk) 17:54, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

So, the way this works is that categories like Category:Recipients of the Jubilee Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" have associated Wikidata items, here Category:Recipients of the Jubilee Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" (Q9983554). These are linked from the award item like Jubilee Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" (Q783270) using category for recipients of this award (P2517). Individual items on people then link to the award item using award received (P166). {{Wikidata Infobox}} follows that logic from the individual's Commons category back to the award Commons category, and then auto-includes the category in the award category. If I recall right, it only does this where the Commons category for the award exists - it doesn't create redlinks - but I'd have to go back to the code to confirm that. That means that the level of granularity is in Commons' control - if we think award winners should be collected into a category, then we can create that - but if we don't, we just don't have the award category, and that can be discussed using the usual categories for discussion process. Does that make sense? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:16, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: That kind of makes sense but the whole thing just seems circular. Like with the category for Pierre Dansereau it's in Category:Honorary doctors of Université Laval which is being automatically added to it through the infobox. The category can't be removed though and non-empty categories can't be deleted. So what's the solution there if I want to nominate the category for the award for deletion? I assume the same issue would still exist if there was a CfD since non-empty categories can't (or at least shouldn't be) deleted regardless. But from what it sounds like the category will be added by the infobox as long as it exists on Commons but it can't be deleted from Commons as long as it's being added to categories. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:24, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

@Adamant1: You just nominate it for discussion/deletion as normal? There's no requirement that the category has to be empty to be deleted (you just can't get it speedily deleted - but then you shouldn't be emptying categories out to qualify for speedy deletion anyway). After deletion you can just do null edits to each of the categories and that should empty out the redlinked category fairly quickly. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 09:11, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo: , @Jmabel: , @Nakonana: , @ReneeWrites: , @Omphalographer: Any of you want to do CfDs for the categories? It seems like we all agree the "Recipients of the Jubilee Medal" categories shouldn't exist (except for maybe the last one) but apparently they can't be nominated for speedy deletion. So oh well on those ones I guess. But there's plenty of others. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:01, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

How should courtesy deletion requests be handled via VRT?

I'd like to raise a broader question on how courtesy deletion requests should be handled when they come through the VRT system, especially in cases where a subject contacts WMF Legal or VRT directly (e.g. via info-commons) rather than using the public DR process. Let me describe a general situation:

A person depicted in an image on Commons has contacted WMF Legal to request its removal. Legal defers to community processes and suggests the person request a courtesy deletion. However, due to the sensitivity of the situation (potential embarrassment, privacy, safety concerns, etc.), the person prefers not to go through the public deletion request system. Legal then points them to VRT for more discreet handling.

The relevant guidance is spread across multiple pages:

• Commons:Courtesy deletions notes that admins are "normally sympathetic to well-reasoned removal requests" even if no policy is violated.
• Commons:Photographs of identifiable people says requests from subjects may be considered even if there's no legal violation, and can be routed via Commons:Contact us/Problems.
• The Contact us page explicitly acknowledges that there's no uniform policy and such requests are handled case by case, but they can email VRT to request deletion ("For quick help, you can email the support team").

However, these statements leave some open questions from a VRT or admin point of view:

• What discretion do VRT agents (who are also admins) have to act on these requests without requiring a public DR?
• Is it within scope to process a request entirely via VRT and delete a file under courtesy grounds with admin tools?
• Or is a DR always required, even if the requestor has compelling personal reasons not to go through a public venue?
• Is there a meaningful difference in expectations when the request is coming via WMF Legal's advice?

I’m asking both as a VRT agent and as an admin. My default has been to suggest DR even for sensitive cases, but that seems to contradict the guidance that discretion may be used, or that VRT can serve as an alternative path. Would appreciate clarity from the wider community. If these policies guidelines are meant to grant discretion, it would be good to know what the limits are. And if they're not, then maybe the language should be clarified so requesters (and WMF Legal) are not misled.

Thanks in advance for thoughts and input. --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 23:05, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

In my years in Wikimedia projects I feel that deleting without DR /under the radar is not appreciated by the community and should be avoided (or should be kept to an absolute minimum).

Also, I would like to point out, that deleting without DR could also cause a backlash and attract unwanted attention (like en:Streisand effect).

VRT-agents could still help, for example, write up a good DR that expresses what original itent, but is more in line with the typical language we have here --Isderion (talk) 23:28, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

As an admin, I can also see how a DR could also attract undue attention to a matter that could be handled discretely. Generally if the person isn't notable and there is an actual privacy concern, I'd close as delete as far as a DR. Notable people is more a case by case basis where if we have a number of photos of the person, I'd also probably delete. It's tougher when there are fewer or the only freely licensed photograph of the person. Abzeronow (talk) 00:12, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

It's tougher when there are fewer or the only freely licensed photograph of the person. At the same time, there are also some people who Commons may not have photos of because they've tried to maintain a low public profile, and (IMO) Commons should aim to respect that where reasonably possible. Omphalographer (talk) 01:17, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

This exact conundrum has come up recently, and I would tend to agree that Commons should aim to respect someone's desire for privacy if they have made a reasonable effort to remain private. 19h00s (talk) 13:32, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

Very few people outside the Wikisphere are even aware that DR exists. I'm not really sure how much undue attention there really is attracted here Trade (talk) 12:05, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

I think that all we can do as VRT members is to confirm the requester identity if they explicitly wishes so and express our personal opinion about deletion reasons without revealing what the reasons indeed are. I think that I participated in a courtesy DR when the real deletion reason could not be revealed and I just supported the DR providing info that a strong deletion reason has been provided to VRT. I think that we should not go beyond this line. Ankry (talk) 00:19, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

I'd have no problem with a VRT member who is also an admin deciding to do a courtesy deletion on this basis, as long as they (1) verify that if this came from an online source, it has already been removed from that online sources, (2) believe that a courtesy deletion is genuinely appropriate, (3) make sure that if the image is in use there is an appropriate substitute image, and they do that substitution everywhere, and (4) indicate clearly in the deletion log that this was a courtesy deletion. - Jmabel ! talk 01:24, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

Josve05a, Thank you for bringing this to the attention of the Village pump. It is an important matter. The relevant modifications to the guideline "Commons:Photographs of identifiable people" (COM:PIP), and the related modifications to the information page "Commons:Contact us/Problems", were made in connection with this discussion on the page "Commons talk:Photographs of identifiable people" from November 2013. (Special attention can be given to the comments by Maggie Dennis (WMF)). My understanding of it all is that the (only) role of VRT, whenever it receives a deletion request, is to determine what type of case it is and then to dispatch, to judiciously redirect it to the proper decisional entity: either to WMF Legal, in the cases that require it, or to the Commons deletion procedure. It must be noted that at the time of the discussion, in November 2013, the relevant section of the page "Commons:Contact us/Problems" mentioned only "Inappropriate images of children" and such requests had necessarily to be sent to WMF Legal . The November 2013 discussion started when a user controversially added to the COM:PIP page a suggestion to send other types of deletion requests directly to WMF Legal . After the discussion, the wording ended up being "In any case you may address a removal request through the normal public process of a regular deletion request. if discretion is required a deletion request may also be sent privately through this page." ("this page" meaning "Commons:Contact us/Problems"). Then there was a discussion at "Commons talk:Contact us" to change the wording of the page "Commons:Contact us/Problems", which was changed on 26 December 2013 . That change added the email address related to en.wikipedia ("info-en-c") as a possible entry point for more general deletion requests related to COM:PIP. That was later changed for the email address related to Commons ("info-commons"). The role of an entry point is to evaluate and send the request to the proper decisional entity. It doesn't seem that there was any intention to confer to VRT members any decisional power to decide to delete files. (That doesn't mean that an administrator can never take the initiative to delete a file after receiving a deletion request through VRT. Administrators can delete files in cases of copyvios and other cases covered by the deletion policy such as "Commons:Criteria for speedy deletion". It doesn't matter if the administrator became aware of the case through their own research or through a mention on Commons or through VRT, as long as the deletion is allowed by the deletion policy. But that is unrelated to the matter of the present discussion. An administrator cannot invoke their additional VRT membership in order to bypass the deletion policy and to surrepticiously delete a file in cases when deletion is not allowed for an administrator who is not a VRT member. In other words, VRT membership doesn't change anything to the powers and duties of an administrator in their role as administrator.) As for the guideline "Commons:Courtesy deletions" (COM:COURTESY), it merely says that it can be an acceptable reason for deletion. It doesn't change the procedure. Courtesy deletions follow the established procedures. In cases that do not require any confidentiality, the deletion rationale can be explicit. If a level of confidentiality is required, the problematic details are left out. In most cases, there can be at least some indication of the general type of reason. In extreme cases, I think the comment above by Ankry states a proper course of action. Extreme cases should be rare. Could there be even more extreme cases that would justify that Commons might change its deletion policy to allow an administrator (or an administrator from a small subset of administrators who happen to be VRT members) to unilaterally decide to secretly make courtesy deletions? Maybe, although given the inherent subjectivity of courtesy deletions and without the possibility to check, there would be a serious risk of abuse when giving someone an unchecked power to perform actions in secret. If there are cases so extreme that total secrecy is required, they are likely cases that should be sent to the WMF. -- Asclepias (talk) 15:40, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

One situation that keeps recurring in VRT is when someone contacts us with a clearly sincere and understandable wish to have a file deleted for personal, sensitive reasons. Legal has no basis to act (as nothing illegal is involved), and the person does not want to file a public DR, as even doing so might draw attention to themselves or suggest they're trying to "scrub the web".

In some of these cases, I personally believe the file should be deleted. But I don't have a deletion rationale of my own to point to, especially not if the person is notable and the image is otherwise "in scope" (I can make up a scope reason I don't actually believe in, but...). And as VRT is NDA-restricted, I can't share the details without consent; so it ends up in a catch-22: they don’t want to go public, I can't make the case without breaking confidentiality, and deletion policy offers no discrete pathway.

This does happen from time to time. Often the person gives up after realizing there's no viable option, which I find unfortunate. If we want to offer meaningful privacy options, maybe we do need to revisit whether some narrowly defined process could exist, perhaps through a confidential committee as GPSLeo suggested below, or a revised understanding of what admin discretion can cover in extreme courtesy cases. --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 16:01, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I can think of some legitimate cases for which it could be much preferable to have a more discreet procedure and avoid starting a DR. (Although there are probably not many cases for which it would be absolutely necessary.) I remember a case from a few years ago, when someone contacted me about photos she had taken of her home and then, because of some events, she had actual reasons to fear for her safety. At that time, I wasn't sure what to do with that (I had not researched the matter as I did here), so I contacted an admin and asked if that required a DR or if the files could be speedy deleted. I was prepared to start a DR although a speedy deletion seemed preferable if possible. The admin kindly speedy deleted the files in good faith. I suppose that such cases may happen from time to time although we don't realise it. Maybe someone can think about a change of policy to officially allow it. The concern, of course, is the obvious risk of abuse. Just like with anything else in life, we would like rules to be flexible enough to allow good and wise people to do just and fair actions, and strict enough to prevent bad or irresponsible people to do abusive actions. That balance is difficult to reach, maybe sometimes impossible. There's the risk of a slippery slope where actions that were intended to be rare exceptions become widely abused. Wikimedia projects have always been aware of that danger and they insist on transparency. GPSLeo's idea can be explored. And other ideas that people might think of. -- Asclepias (talk) 17:55, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

I do not see deletion request through VRT any different than, deletion request on admin's talk pages or noticeboards, as long as deletion follows Commons:Courtesy deletions and the reasons are clearly stated in deletion comment, I do not thing they need to go through DR. In my experience many such files are borderline in scope, so there is no loss. At the same time, I had cases of VRT requests by celebrities because the only photo we had of them was not flattering. In such cases I was suggesting uploading a good quality selfie, to replace the photo in Wikipedia article, which is all they cared about. Another case was an amateur-photographer who was an author of some well known historical photographs, who gave very broad permission for all his photographs to be released under CC years before selling his whole portfolio to a 3rd party. It was unpleasant to inform him that we can not delete those photographs. --Jarekt (talk) 04:03, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Question time

• Should people requesting courtesy deletions be expected to provide a reason behind their request? Anything beyond "I dont want this photo up anymore"? It can more difficult to convince the community to delete photos when no actual reason is provided i often feel
• Should DR be consideerd mandatory in cases where the image in question is used to illustrate the subject on Wikipedia?

--Trade (talk) 12:08, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

• • "I don't want this photo" is certainly sufficient in some cases and not in others. If we have (say) 5 photos from the same photo session, and one of them is uncomplimentary, we should be willing to delete the one that makes the subject look bad. Conversely, if (again, for example) we had a free-licensed photo of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump wanted it deleted, no way in the world should we do such a thing. - Jmabel ! talk 19:19, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

    Yeah shouldn't we at least encourage people to provide a better reason? It's much harder to justify without a proper reason in cases where the photo is clearly in scope Trade (talk) 20:02, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

I also already thought about this problem. I think we need a decision body that works like the ArbCom for such cases. Such a "Privacy complaints committee" or how ever we call it consists of elected community members who decide on privacy related deletion requests in a confidential way. If there is a public reason for the decision has to be decided based on the case. GPSLeo (talk) 14:29, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

I'd support the creation of such a body. Abzeronow (talk) 00:05, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

I thought the "privacy complaints committee" is the group of oversighters? Krd 07:54, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Or just make it so oversighters are automatically members of the committee. For all we know it might get too much of a backlog in the future Trade (talk) 20:03, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

We could bundle this task with existing oversight. But this would mean that we would have many more (I think 5 to 7 would be needed) users with potential access to the sensitive suppressed content. Most cases we are talking about here do not require to be suppressed and therefore giving these users the right is not necessary. On the other hand adding this task to oversight tasks would have the benefit that existing structures could be used. What do the current Oversighters think about this @Minorax@Odder@Raymond? Do you think making handling of privacy related non public deletion requests an Oversighter task would be a good idea or should this better be done by a separate group? GPSLeo (talk) 21:32, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

I can't imagine any privacy complaint being more sensitive than what oversight already have to deal with. In my mind if you can be trusted with privacy complaints then you can probably already be trusted with oversight tools Trade (talk) 22:11, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

I think GPSLeo's concern is that the existing Oversight team isn't equipped to deal with an increased volume of requests. Omphalographer (talk) 22:58, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

At the current volume of tickets received, they are responded to within minutes to 2 hours. If the privacy-related requests as mentioned don't come in a bulk, I generally don't expect this response time to change. --Min☠︎rax^«¦talk¦» 00:00, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

"privacy related non public deletion requests": yes, as always, this is our mandate. But as OS I do not think it would be our task to do courtesy deletions of i.e. an image of a building or other non-personal images. Raymond (talk) 06:15, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

This discussion per the initial post is specifically about personal rights courtesy deletions, and the question was who is in charge of that. I thing it will be consensus that the OS team is in charge, and there is no reason for an additional group to be invented. As far as non-privicy courtesy deletions are concerned, they can and should be handeled via normal deletion request. Krd 06:49, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

The scenarios I have in mind are like these:

• Photo under free license on own website now removed there
• Photo of person speaking on stage/during sports where photographing was generally allowed but the photo is not that good
• Crops of group photos
• Photo of a crowd with person clearly visible maybe in an unpleasing situation like eating

GPSLeo (talk) 07:23, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

When was the last time we had a courtesy DR not related to privacy? Trade (talk) 15:41, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

We often have own work deletion requests more than 7 days after upload. In many cases we accept these requests. GPSLeo (talk) 18:32, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Those DRs usually refuse to provide any reasoning behind them so i just assume they are for privacy as well Trade (talk) 18:14, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

I would note here that privacy/courtesy deletion requests are quite ofter in VRT, thay not always and up in DR. In many cases bluring/cropping is an available option and I am not sure if they also need to go to oversiters (and possibly be redirected). These may be cases like:

• I do not want a photo of my car in the public (bluring plates solves the problem)
• My mirrored image is visible on the glass
• My room is visible through the window
• Local law does not allow to publish my image without my consent
• Due to political changes in my country I do not feel safe as I am visible on this photo (during a public event)

Cases like above may be resolved with just bluring, while they are initially privace-related deletion requests. So if we want to leave decisions in some border cases to oversiters, I am not sure if we should direct users with all cases like above to them. Ankry (talk) 12:23, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

"Local law does not allow to publish my image without my consent"

From your experience are the people saying this telling the truth? Trade (talk) 18:13, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

@Trade: They may if they are in the Netherlands, but I don't know if the copyright grant was retroactive.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 15:20, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

@GPSLeo: To an extent, oversighters already do fulfill this role. Reading the example scenarios provided by @Jonatan Svensson Glad, we already do suppress files that people ask to have removed for "personal, sensitive reasons" (mostly privacy) as this is specifically allowed under the global oversight policy. These are very much run-of-the-mill requests that we attend to on a regular basis; currently anywhere between 1–3 times per month (although third-party reports/requests arrive more often than that). We do also sometimes reject requests that we assess don't qualify for suppression under the policy, such as these examples you provided immediately above. I do appreciate that the wider community might not be aware of the specifics of oversight work—something that we could improve on perhaps—but generally speaking, we respond to any file removal requests sent to us for privacy/safety reasons quite swiftly and engage the Wikimedia Foundation whenever required. odder (talk) 18:26, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

I didn't know oS'ers did that. I only ever knew you hid edits such as text content and diffs, not file deletions (which normally does not require oversighting, only file revision hiding). Perhaps Commons:Oversighters can be updates as to include the fact that you delete files as well, as it does not state any such information at the moment (it may do so over on meta, but would be good to have clear guidance here on who does what) and with what mandate. Perhaps these kinds of requests and tickets sent to normal info- queues on VRT should be directed to an oversight queue instead then? --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 19:41, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

@Jonatan Svensson Glad: There is no oversight queue on VRT, however we do have a mailing list on Wikimedia Mailman; you are more than welcome to forward any requests from VRT to that mailing list (as English Wikipedia VRT queues do on a regular basis). As for your other suggestion, I made a small update to Commons:Oversighters to help better reflect what we can do. A detailed explanation on what oversighters do (and how they do it) is available at Commons:Oversighters/Handbook if you'd like to have a look. odder (talk) 17:56, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps from now on whenever someone complains about their photo being on Commons we should just redirect them to the Oversight email instead of asking them to make a DR. How does that sound to you? Trade (talk) 18:12, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

I would think (per discussion above) that very few of these require an oversighter, and unless the person in question is the primary subject of the photo they can by solved by retouching and revdels. - Jmabel ! talk 18:18, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

The thing oversight can do is responding within a reasonable timeframe Trade (talk) 20:48, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Signupstart

1. Why an imperative phrase saying that people "should" create an anonymous account, as it should be a choice? And most of us are photographers, have our name spread is not a bad thing, quite the opposite, and for legal reasons, would be more efficient use our full legal names, as we can prove that the photos were licensed by us, seems an import from Wikipedia with the fear of the violence spread around there, not the ideal
2. How can we translate this warning (after fixing it)? By now, seems that the warning is only in English.

I suggest:

1. "Creating an account with your full name can make you not anonymous, as this will be a public account."

-- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton ^m 16:30, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

• That's terribly roundabout. How about, "Your account name will be public. In selecting an account name, choose carefully whether or not you want to use your real name." - Jmabel ! talk 19:23, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

  I like that wording. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 23:28, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

  Or perhaps a little more specifically: "Your account name will be publicly visible on all edits you make and files you upload. Only use your real name as your account name if you are comfortable with it being shown." Omphalographer (talk) 01:08, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

  not sure, too wordy -- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton ^m 21:50, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

  The organization is better, the only thing that bothers me is "choose carefully", sounds dangerous @Jmabel...

  how about:

  • We want you to be comfortable with your public profile. Please choose an account name that you are happy for others to see, whether it's your real name or not.
  • Your account name will be visible to others, so feel free to use your real name or a creative username you're comfortable sharing.

  -- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton ^m 21:54, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

  • • @Rodrigo.Argenton: A little wordy. If anything, we might also spell out that you cannot "borrow" the name of a well-known person or organization (we get that a lot).
    • Maybe: "Your account name will be visible to others. Feel free to use your own name or stay more anonymous with a creative account name you are comfortable sharing, but please use a name that could not readily be mistaken for some well-known person or organization." - Jmabel ! talk 22:18, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

      @Jmabel

      it's better to start a new paragraph

      And you created an away more wordy than my. And maybe this warning could have an opposite effect... If necessary, we can include there, but more like: Accounts in the name of a brand will be locked. -- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton ^m 05:21, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

      1. "Accounts in the name of a brand will be locked" would not be an accurate statement of Commons policy. (Current policy at Commons:Username policy, and it looks like the verification policy is about to be significantly weakened.) - Jmabel ! talk 06:14, 30 July 2025 (UTC)
      2. My last phrase would be better stated as, "please do not use a name that could be readily mistaken for some well-known person or organization." - Jmabel ! talk 06:14, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

• You can change your "author name" via Preferences. Go to Preferences -> Upload Wizard -> Licensing. You will see "Author's name". Nemoralis (talk) 23:10, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

  I am talking about: MediaWiki:Signupstart -- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton ^m 23:17, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

  If someone can also replace the blue text by a Codex-token for readability, that would be nice. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 08:44, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

  Agree. -- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton ^m 21:48, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Is there any notability rules for creating { {creator} } template

When we upload images to commons, there's a parameter for author. For famous art, photograph, sketch, the author is also famous. So, we add that. Suppose a user from commons creates his own { {creator} } page in commons and add it to his uploaded image (Taken by him). Are there any notability guidelines like Wikipedia on creating such template? Rafi Bin Tofa (talk) 17:22, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

@Rafi Bin Tofa: it is not normally acceptable to make a {{Creator}} page for someone non-notable. The closest that is permitted is to create a Commons:User-specific galleries, templates and categories#Categories user category for your own work. - Jmabel ! talk 19:44, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! Rafi Bin Tofa (talk) 23:02, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

I am not aware of a policy establishing notability criteria for Creator: pages. There are actually some Commons users who have their own page, e.g. Creator:Raimond Spekking (User:Raymond) or Creator:Yann Forget (User:Yann). I'd say if a user is an established contributor and uploads a significant number of images, it is perfectly fine to create a Creator page for them. Regards, ChrisiPK (Talk|Contribs) 19:29, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

I always though we have the same criteria as for Wikidata items. So very low requirements but you need some publication that adds you to the large researcher databases. GPSLeo (talk) 20:12, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Please check page for File:Amsterdam-apierson-egyptian-death-papyrus-0.jpeg

Hi Village pump. I uploaded File:Amsterdam-apierson-egyptian-death-papyrus-0.jpeg. This is the first time I upload this genre, an ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead papyrus, so I'd appreciate if someone could help check the description page. I'm not sure what templates to use and how, so I'd like help in that, as well as in categorization. Also I'd like to know how to present the license templates in this case to make it clear which one is for the original papyrus and which one is for the photo.

The photo is of a reproduction in Amsterdam, where the sign only says that the original is in the Louvre and it's from c. 150-100 BC, Thebes. I found a few other photos on Commons that seem to depict details of the original papyrus in the Louvre, as well as link the specific catalog entry page of the Louvre. Sadly the museum catalog webpage only has a low-quality photograph, and Commons doesn't have photos of the whole papyrus. Anyway, I copied the object description part from such a photo of the original on Commons. I think the catalog entry is useful, since it lets you find the original.

– b_jonas 23:15, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

@B jonas: you might find {{Art Photo}} a better way to handle something like this. But that one remove of a reproduction makes that tricky, too. - Jmabel ! talk 04:05, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Issue with page specific search boxes

Hi. If I do a search for "postcard" in the search box at the bottom of Commons:Categories for discussion it just does a regular search instead of searching in the Categories for Discussion archives, which I assume it's suppose to be doing. Instead of giving me a bunch of results that have nothing to do with Categories for Discussion. The same goes for doing a search on this page. If I do a search for my user name I get a bunch of results for past uploads, not conversations on here that I've participated in. Does anyone know what the deal is with it? --Adamant1 (talk) 03:18, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

@Adamant1: try it now, I think this fixed it. This is related to phabricator:T378756 about allowing mw:Extension:InputBox to use either normal search or media search, and somehow it now defaulted to media search. MKFI (talk) 06:47, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Actually, I think all Commons search boxes might now be broken. Does anyone know if it is possible to set a global default search engine for inputbox? MKFI (talk) 06:48, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Yikes. That sucks. Thanks for the information though. Someone should post a comment about it on Phabricator or something if there's no way to set a global default for the inputbox. --Adamant1 (talk) 06:53, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

@Adamant1: Sorry about this! The change is to make MediaSearch be used for InputBoxes, and it now honours the user's preference unless a specific parameter is given (i.e. searchengine = Search as @MKFI mentions above). This is from a Wishlist wish. The general idea is that there are actually more inputboxes that are for searching media than there are for searching categories etc. and so defaulting to that (or rather, defaulting to the wiki's default search, which here is MediaSearch) is the more useful thing to do. The places that search talk pages, categories, etc. are more often in templates and so can be changed centrally. If you want a quick fix, you could change your preference to Special:Search. Sam Wilson 08:39, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Categories. Conciseness vs extensiveness

As an editor on Commons, I see it as my main task to categorize files, and then mainly files that are donated/made public by museums, archives and libraries. My goal is to categorize the media files as best as possible, and then I think in terms of questions likeː who is on it? What depicts it? Where and when is it made? Who made it? On what occasion? And who made it available? If that all is categorized, I think I did a good job in helping to create a well-organized media collection. See for example here and here.

However, I recently discussed this matter with User:FotoDutch, someone with a different opinion. He adds lot of categories to photographs, adds a new, extensive description of what can be seen, and often adds the phrase "free photo" to the description. See for example here and here.

His arguments (translated from Dutch to English by Bingː

Just because the idea of Commons is that all photos are free to download, you will need to include that with every photo. People always search online with keywords to find their photos; otherwise, they find nothing. I discovered on Google Trends that a lot of people often add the words: photo/photo - free download - image - when searching for the subject they want. Especially when they are looking for photos they want to download!! If you don't include those words with a photo, you exclude all those people. Because most people are not familiar with Commons at all, as they don’t come across it during their searches. When I ask around, no one knows about it. Wikipedia does. And also Pexel, Unsplash, Alamy, Instagram, etc..... They ensure that! (...)

What good is 'a well-organized media collection' if little use is being made of it? Why do they exist then? As a goal in itself?

Moreover, Wikimedia will become quite dependent on donors in the future. But who will donate money if you are hardly known as an organization? In the long run, little recognition means a lot of uncertainty about the survival of this media collection. Or you become dependent again on that one rich American.(...)

I describe what the photographer shows and what I am looking at in the photo. A photo is communication, isn't it?

My question isː what is the policy Wikimedia Commons would go for? I feel a bit uneasy if the goal is to make Commons a top find on Google. But that is me, as one can read above, others see things differently. So let's discuss. @JopkeB: @Mdd: @Mr.Nostalgic: @Pelikana: and @Antoine.01: ,I am curious for your input. Kind regards,Jeff5102 (talk) 07:21, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Explicitly adding "free photo" to descriptions is not needed. Otherwise FotoDutchs edits seem fine, perhaps some COM:Overcat but mostly ok. Descriptions are verbose but certainly not against policy. MKFI (talk) 07:50, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

+1 to MKFI's comment. COM:Overcat being the main issue IMO outside of it being redundant to put "free photo" in descriptions. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:07, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Also +1 to MKFI's comment. I don't think this approach is a matter of being a top find on Google, but just being a find on Google because Google search appears to have a negative bias against Commons (I remember reading discussions about this). But even to be helpful to those people who know of Commons' existence you have to keep users in mind who reuse images outside of the wikiverse (e.g. magazines that regularly look for stockphotos). For such reusers it might be really helpful to have very specific (and sometimes seemingly useless looking) categories, such as Category:Women of Iran giving V-signs, but for a magazine editor from a Muslim country who is looking for stockphotos of women this might actually be a helpful category because they likely can't use photos of women who are not wearing headscarves.

As for FotoDutch's descriptions, I don't even find them that long, I've seen and written longer ones. The required detail of description depends on context. In my given example, the photo is from a rural area with a small population, so finding information on that place would be really hard, and if I wouldn't mention those things then people would likely never even learn that those things ever existed in that place. Nakonana (talk) 16:17, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

As an aside, the categories on these photos make a fairly compelling argument that we need better tools for allowing users to search by category intersections. The vast majority of categories on these photos are intersectional in nature - e.g. Category:Hand carts in the Netherlands, Category:Pedestrians in Amsterdam, Category:Black and white photographs of people wearing hats, Category:Demonstrations and protests against the Vietnam War held in the Netherlands - and many of them are redundant to each other. (For instance, there's a lot of repetition of "Black and white photographs of..." or "... in the Netherlands".) Being able to specify these properties once and search for images which have them in combination, rather than having to include every relevant combination as an individual category, would dramatically simplify a lot of category work. Omphalographer (talk) 18:44, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

After ReneeWrites's recent category removals from the Dutch example, the only further category I'd be inclined remove is Category:Human faces. I would think almost no photo belongs directly in that category; if this one belongs there, then so do literally a million others. - Jmabel ! talk 00:45, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

+1 to Adamant1's comment. My policy would be: make short file names (without "free photo") and put the rest in the description (I assume that Google will search file names as well as descriptions). I do not mind long descriptions as long as they are to the point. I'd even rather have a long description with a lot of information about the image, that can be helpful for searchers (a long description offers more search terms) and researchers alike, and for reusers to judge whether the image is what they are looking for.

By the way: you can easily find "free photos" with Google, by clicking on "Images", "Tools", "usage rights" and "Creative Commons licenses" (though a lot of photos shown are still not usable on Commons). I may hope that (professional) users looking for free photos "who reuse images outside of the wikiverse (e.g. magazines that regularly look for stockphotos)" know this trick too. And when I use it, Commons images appear in the search results as well. I never experienced that "Google search ... has a negative bias against Commons".

About category intersections: they may have multiple purposes, like make it possible to find images about very specific subjects or relieving overcrowded parent categories. Looking for color photos is easier if the black-and-white photos have been put into categories of their own. So I am pro intersection categories as long as there is not a large string with subcategories just holding one subcategory or only a few files. JopkeB (talk) 06:50, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Yes, the "free photo/free download" thing is pointless. - Jmabel ! talk 07:08, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

On category intersections: A lot of categories are quite interesting, and once a pattern is found, similar photos should be grouped together. "people with flags of..." or "voting lines in..." are very specific descrptions and the variety among the images is often great. However, JopkeB is right, highly specific categories with very few images should not be created in the first place, instead collecting images in less specific categories beforehand seems like the way to go.

A lot of categories could be handled better by structured metadata, especially stuff that is visible but not the main feature of an image (combatting overcat!); and especially time-properties. There is little difference whether an illustration of Notre Dame was created in 1877 or 1882, so these images should not be placed in different by-year categories. Their common trait is that they are paintings of the same object.

On descriptions: These should be allowed to be as long as editors wish, provided that they are useful for understanding the image: transcripts of scanned/photographed infographics, for example, to help vision-impared users or to allow them quicker machine translations. Or, a text description of which details are visible in some painting (again, combatting overcat by not tagging a still life painting in 50 "food in art"-categories). In that matter, what I've seen from FotoDitch seems just okay.

Long description text should however not be generic (like, an uploader visiting a historic site, and the description of all 80 files is the same ten-paragraph blurb copied from the location website, never describing the actual objects depicted): That redundant content should find deletion and replacement with actual descriptions, Other generic stuff like "free to download" is not a great when the content us already published under CC0 license already. --Enyavar (talk) 23:06, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

a lot of people often add the words: photo/photo - free download - image - when searching for the subject they want. Especially when they are looking for photos they want to download!! If you don't include those words with a photo, you exclude all those people. this is something that Commons would probably benefit a lot from discussing in a broader sense – I think this isn't things that should be added manually by uploaders but e.g. be part of the Commons site which have descriptive terms that people search for so that people who search the Web for "free photo" etc can find the Commons pages. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:38, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

I did a bit of investigating, and apparently if you google "free media repository" from an incognito tab using a US VPN, Wikimedia Commons shows up on the first page, with Commons:Free media resources at the top and Main Page following. However, if you google "free image respository" the bad resources comes up, with occasional exceptions like Openverse, but not Wikimedia Commons. "Free photos for commercial use" also has similar results. I'm thinking that if we just use those buzzwords like "free images", "for commercial use", "royalty-free", "free photos", etc. into the Main Page rather than the files, it could maybe, just maybe, increase the SEO rankings. HyperAnd (talk) 00:01, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Private promotional campaigning in editorial space continues till today and contitutes a clear Conflict of Interest (COI) which should be avoided. Free spam belongs neither in title nor in the caption nor in descriptions. Author is already mentioned as photographer/uploader and (free) license is already on the page as public domain. Please stop repeating the obvious. As for the horrible ill categorizing, stop repeating the inherently obvious, it can be cleaned up, but not as long as it feels like a sevice to a personal spam campaign which harms principles of NPOV. Peli (talk) 01:30, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

Which King?

There seems to be some confusion as to the subject: is it Charles IX, king of France, or François II, ditto?

(This was originally raised at en:Wikipedia:Teahouse#Linked portrait is of a different person.) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:55, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

What was the basis for the claim that it is Charles IX? The source for cited on upload, still online, states it is François II and that source appears to have been based on an auction of the piece; it is quite a claim to say that the auction house misidentified the piece, and would call for a very strong citation. - Jmabel ! talk 00:57, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

@FDRMRZUSA: can you explain? Unless I'm missing something, it looks like both mutually contradictory identifications (title and descrption) came from you. - Jmabel ! talk 01:03, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

The image is used on en:Francis II of France and 60+ similar articles in other languages. A sketch of this privately-owned painting, is in Bibliothèque Nationale de France] and is titled "François II". Portrait of Charles IX, brother of François by the same painter in the same pose and at the same ago, looks strikingly similar, but I do not think there is a confusion between the two. --Jarekt (talk) 03:40, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Request for Assistance Uploading Matilda Magazine Materials to Wikimedia Commons

With permission from the author I would like to share the following letter:

"Hi Donald Trung,

I hope this message finds you well.

I’m reaching out to kindly ask for your help in uploading some historical materials to Wikimedia Commons. I am working on a Wikipedia article about Matilda Magazine, an Australian political satire magazine that was published in 1985–86, and I have several original scans that need to be cited in the article.

The material includes:

• 1. A scanned original covers of Matilda Magazine
• 2. A set of archived newspaper clippings referencing the magazine and its public impact

These materials belong to Mr. Robbie Swan, the magazine’s original publisher, who is now 80 years old and unable to upload them himself or engage directly due to age and access limitations. He has explicitly authorized me to share these materials for publication on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license so they can be used in the upcoming Wikipedia article.

Unfortunately, Wikimedia Commons is currently blocked in my region, which is why I’m requesting your help.

Would you be willing to upload these files on his behalf? I can provide:

• 1. All the files (cover + clippings)
• 2. File descriptions and metadata
• 3. Statement of permission on his behalf

Your help would be deeply appreciated and credited appropriately.

Please let me know if you’d be willing to assist and where I can send the files. Thank you so much in advance for considering this.

Warm regards,
Krista Watson Acting on behalf of Mr. Robbie Swan
[Redacted e-mail address]
(user:Krista.Watson1)

-- This email was sent by Krista.Watson1 to Donald Trung by the "Email this user" function at Wikimedia Commons. If you reply to this email, your email will be sent directly to the original sender, revealing your email address to them. To manage email preferences for user ‪Krista.Watson1‬, please visit the following URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Mute/Krista.Watson1 "

I have instructed them to contact the VRTS and if anyone else is interested in helping them with this project, you could message them on their talk page. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 19:22, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Can anyone explain the "Wikimedia Commons is blocked in my region"? - Jmabel ! talk 01:06, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Maybe they are from one of the countries that have blocked Commons? (i.e. China, Myanmar and North Korea). Tvpuppy (talk) 02:46, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Though the user appears to be from Australia. Perhaps she was using VPN or what? (Or are there any instance of some Australian places blocking parts of Wikimedia platforms?) JWilz12345 (Talk|Contributions) 03:10, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

The most likely reason is a blocked (transparent) proxy for "Unfortunately, Wikimedia Commons is currently blocked in my region", IMHO. Or the user is connected to some kind of corporate intranet with a weirdly configured exit to the general WWW, where maybe file transfers get blocked; or something similar. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 03:26, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

So "region" was probably a mis-conjecture?

Usually when we block IP ranges, we allow logged-in accounts. She appears to have an account, and obviously any effort to upload would have been made while logged in.

Jmabel ! talk 07:12, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

"These materials belong to Mr. Robbie Swan, the magazine’s original publisher, who is now 80 years old and unable to upload them himself or engage directly due to age and access limitations." In other words, Robbie Swan has limited access but the sender of the email can upload the material. They just want someone else to do it for them. Not to be bad faithed about this but uploading COPYVIO and/or paid editing by proxy maybe? --Adamant1 (talk) 08:37, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

That's surely not a copyright violation, as the actual rights holder is aware of the proceedings and endorses them, as far as we can tell. "Paid editing" and "editing by proxy"? The latter yes, as it is clearly described; and I think that the declaration with "on behalf of" also signalize a relationship possibly involving payments - likely sufficient per Foundation:PAID. This transparency by Krista Watson is welcome, in my eyes. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 09:01, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

@Grand-Duc: That assumes Mr. Robbie Swan indeed owns the rights to Matilda Magazine, which I don't think is a given. If I were to guess being involved in similar situations, probably not. With the "paid editing by proxy" thing specifically, the proxy here would be whichever user decides to take the bait as it were and upload the material for Krista Watson. They can of course upload images as a paid editor themselves, but IMO it's an entirely different thing to email random users asking them to do it on their behalf. There's no reason to think Donald Trung is the only user who received an email either. Honestly, why go that route instead of just posting a question about it here if everything is completely aboveboard about it? --Adamant1 (talk) 09:48, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Hi, As these covers are not in the public domain yet, we first need a confirmation from the copyright holder that they are released under a free license. This should be done via COM:VRT. If the copyright holder is not comfortable doing this online, it can be done on paper, then scanned, and the scan sent to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org by a third party. Yann (talk) 09:12, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

More than 123,456,789 files

Now Commons has more than 123,456,789 files :). Does somebody know what the 123,456,789th file is? --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 11:16, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

I would not bother. Its the last File when the list/count was made. Better to use the xxthe File of a round number or a specific time. That last would be dificult as the count is very fast and in many places.Smiley.toerist (talk) 15:09, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

culturalia.ro

culturalia.ro seems to have a ton of interesting content related to Romanian culture; we seem to have very little of it on Commons. They don't mark what is and isn't public domain (though much of it clearly is), and they don't make it easy to download content, so this would take someone who knows what they are doing, but I would guess that there are literally tens of thousands of files there worth having. Anyone interested in researching? Or any suggestion where I might better post this? - Jmabel ! talk 19:23, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

It seems to work pretty well with Dezoomify. I could open and download images with Dezoomify plugin on Firefox browser. Herbert Ortner (talk) 21:37, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Good to know. I admit I have not come up with very effective search strategies to find materials of more than routine interest, but there is a lot there. - Jmabel ! talk 03:44, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

@Herbert Ortner: If you'd be willing to try one experiment to determine feasibility, https://culturalia.ro/search/8d943e55-8226-497d-ad00-9ed38ea4b85e/view looks like it has a better image of the painting we currently have at File:Nicolae Grigorescu - Fete lucrand la poarta.jpg. - Jmabel ! talk 03:49, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Worked flawlessly. I did an upload of the new version over the existing one. Hope that's ok since I got an error message about not overwriting of existing artworks but it seemed reasonable to overwrite that old small image which was barely more than a thumbnail. Herbert Ortner (talk) 07:37, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. It's OK, but should indicate the different source (which I've done). - Jmabel ! talk 18:23, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Note that many of the artefacts in Culturalia are also on Europeana with clearer free licenses. Strainu (talk) 08:23, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

I left a short note at Romanian Wikipedia's Villlage pump too. --Pafsanias (talk) 07:23, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Photo challenge May results

Flags: Entries • Votes • Scores

Rank	1	2	3
image
Title	Rettungsschwimmer im Parque Natural de Corralejo, Fuerteventura	Flag of Namibia on an airplane winglet	Parachuter with the national flag of Italy
Author	Fischer1961	Mozzihh	Marcxosm
Score	18	7	5

Flowers: Entries • Votes • Scores

Rank	1	2	3
image
Title	Sunflower field in Burgundy	Waterlily	Hasenglöckchen eingerahmt
Author	Ibex73	Peterdownunder	Englandfan~commonswiki
Score	12	8	8

Congratulations to Fischer1961, Mozzihh, Marcxosm, Ibex73, Peterdownunder and Englandfan~commonswiki. -- Jarekt (talk) 02:47, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

A crazy side story about May Photo Challenge were contributions by user:Djae26, who created multiple sockpuppets, who all voted for their entries. That was enough to be in top 3 in one of the topics. Thank you user:Lymantria and User:Bait30 for investigating. --Jarekt (talk) 02:59, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Cleaning Category:Historia Naturalis Brasiliae

The category is kinda a mess. Excluding Category:Animal illustrations (Historia Naturalis Brasiliae) and Category:Plant illustrations (Historia Naturalis Brasiliae), all files related to the book where put straight in the main cat, including scans of the pages, covers, PDF files and some random cropped images. I've managed to organize it a bit, and even created Category:PDF files of Historia Naturalis Brasiliae cuz the book was uploaded 7(!) times, but the main issue is the pages.

All pages from the scan in BHL plus some random scans from other sources were uploaded as separate .jpg images and placed in the main cat, but at the same time we have Category:Pages of Historia naturalis Brasiliae, where all pages of a different scan of the book were uploaded again—in the end we have a total of 779 page files of a roughly 550-page book.

So, for this last bit, what would be the best approach: 1) move all the files to Category:Pages of Historia naturalis Brasiliae regardless; 2) try to divide them into subcategories by source; 3) delete the duplicates and just keep the highest quality pages or 4) delete everything and just keep the PDFs? Trooper57 (talk) 18:26, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

@Trooper57: Any idea how many of those page images are being used? They are certainly more tractable for reuse than a PDF, and they look like they have reuse potential (typically with CSS cropping). - Jmabel ! talk 19:21, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel: only the cropped images in Category:Illustrations from Historia Naturalis Brasiliae are being used in Wikisource and Wiktionary AFAIK, which have a link to the original page image with {{Extracted from}}. That's about 60 pages in use if they're all properly linked, but some of them were extracted from the same page (File:Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Page 209) BHL289302.jpg). Trooper57 (talk) 21:34, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Hmm. Apologies for butting in, I don't have a strong opinion. - Jmabel ! talk 22:23, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

The author of the photo does not have an email address to send permission

A 64-year-old woman sent me via Facebook messenger photos she had taken herself (to illustrate a Wikipedia article about a temple in a village). In such cases, I upload the photo to Wikimedia Commons, mark it with the Permission pending template and ask the author to send permission to VRT. But here I came across a case where this woman does not have an email address! Only Viber, WhatsApp and Facebook Mesenger. What are the options? --Perohanych (talk) 20:08, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

By the way, that’s quite an interesting question. Just leaving a comment so I get notified too. Incall ^talk 21:07, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

I think there was once an address to send physical mails to but I could not find if this still exists. GPSLeo (talk) 21:28, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

@Perohanych: Just get it in writing and email VRT a photocopy. Try to get it all right the first time, because the back-and-forth that sometimes arises could be very difficult here. - Jmabel ! talk 22:25, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Does she have a smartphone? If yes, she does have an e-mail address, as any appstore needs one as account name and simply setting up WhatsApp means an access to one. Facebook too ties the messenger to an @facebook.com address IIRC, but I don't know whether this one can be used to actively send outbound mails. But if she's not aware of that, then making her send mails may be difficult.

Can you make her use a service like WeTransfer instead (sending the links through FB), to preserve the EXIF? That way, it could work out to:

1. Download the imagery from WeTransfer, upload them on Commons with "permission pending";
2. Take a screenshot of the pertinent messenger exchange with the permission statement, especially if it displays the images;
3. Send the info to VRT. That way, it is demonstrated that the uploads are most likely genuine, I think.

Still, it would be more convenient to get her to set up a freemailer address... Reg Grand-Duc (talk) 23:17, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Dark mode

How do I enable dark mode here? My eyes are burning. Einsof (talk) 02:06, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

If you use the default skin, there should be a menu on the right hand side, or you click the glasses icon at the top, which present a drop down menu. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:20, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Global ban for Chealer

Hello, this message is to notify that Chealer has been nominated for a global ban at m:Requests for comment/Global ban for Chealer. You are receiving this notification as required per the global ban policy as they have made at least 1 edit on this wiki. Thanks, --SHB2000 (talk) 11:19, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Categorization challenge on Lingua Libre

Greetings all,

There is a new campaign project on Wikimedia Commons that my community is developing, called the Wiki Audio Walk. The aim is to record words of any language under this campaign using Lingua Libre. All those audio files recorded on Lingua Libre will be channeled into a particular category in Wikimedia Commons, let's say to "Category:Wiki Audio Walk 2025/Tyap", if the campaign were on the Tyap language (ISO: kcg); or to "Category:Wiki Audio Walk 2025/Tyap/Kanai", if the campaign was on the Kanai dialect of the Tyap language. This project aims to be able to record words of the dialects of a language, or a minoritized language without literacy documentation, and have a category on Wikimedia Commons to serve as a voice library for that dialect or language. Right now, my community has been able to record words from five Tyap-speaking communities and would like to upload them through Lingua Libre. But the concern now is that if we do so, the entire sounds would fall into this Commons category, "Category:Lingua Libre pronunciation-kcg", which we don't want. Please, how do we get to solve this challenge? Thanks and warm regards, 18:23, 28 July 2025 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kambai Akau (talk • contribs)

The categories you're trying to use here are not consistent with Commons category naming. Can you explain what you're trying to accomplish here, and why these files need to not be categorized in the standard fashion for Lingua Libre recordings? Omphalographer (talk) 17:05, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't see anything particularly wrong with those categories (though usually we try to avoid "/" in category names) but they should be used in addition to the more usual Lingua Libre categories, not instead. - Jmabel ! talk 06:19, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

An artificial resolution in File:Behzad timur egyptian.jpg?

Can someone tell if the resolution of the latest version of File:Behzad timur egyptian.jpg (this) is comletely artifial comparing to the previous one (this)? Should the previous resolution be restored? פעמי-עליון (talk) 18:32, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Looks like a pointless upscaling. Larger, without actually gaining any real information. - Jmabel ! talk 22:22, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Basque diaspora

I think there are some problems with this image. No sources provided, only a link to en.wiki (Basque diaspora).--Carnby (talk) 16:12, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

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