Commons Gazette 2025-03

In February 2025, 1 sysop was elected; 1 sysop was removed. Currently, there are 182 sysops.

Election:

• User:Gnom was elected sysop (29/2/2) on 20 February.

Removal:

• User:Spiritia was removed on 12 February due to inactivity. She had served as sysop from 9 April 2008.

We thank her for her service.

Edited by RoyZuo.

Commons Gazette is a monthly newsletter of the latest important news about Wikimedia Commons, edited by volunteers. You can also help with editing!

--RoyZuo (talk) 01:55, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Webservice request timed out for glamorous tool on toolforge

Seems like there is not GitHub repo and the issues are also not tracked in phabricator. I don't understand why that is since that makes it unlikely for other to discover and help develop these useful tools.

Does somebody here know why the glamorous and glamorgan – which can be used to see file uses of files (example) – are getting the 504 Gateway Time-out – is there an issue somewhere?

--Prototyperspective (talk) 16:02, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Online again. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:56, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:57, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Unsourced Map Used on Many Pages

• 
  GIF uploaded 27 March 2010 by JWooldridge. 575 × 792.
• 
  GIF uploaded 23 March 2006 by en:User:Andrew c. Talk page reveals he has a vector version. 364 × 500.
• 
  Andrew c's source map. 4 March 2006. © Israel Central Bureau of Statistics.

I wasn't sure where the right place to discuss this is, but the image Galilee to Judea.gif is a map which was uploaded 15 years ago without comment and which is now used on something like twenty wikipedia articles across several different languages. It makes several claims about borders and political entities without any sources, and is placed very authoritatively at the top of some articles despite that. Is there a policy about this, or could someone familiar with the subject verify the contents of the map? I'm not very familiar with Commons so I'm sorry if this is confusing or if I'm making something straightforward into something very roundabout, but I'm very concerned about the idea of maps and other images which contain unverified claims being presented as authoritative. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Buglover100000 (talk • contribs) 19:15, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Looks to me like the source is Andrew c in 2006 with CC-BY 3.0. 364 ≈ 363.005. Aspect ratios are 0.726 and 0.728.

Andrew states:

This is a map of first century Iudaea Province that I created using Illustrator CS2. I traced this image for the general geographic features. I then manually input data from maps found in a couple of sources.

• Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar. The Acts of Jesus. HarperSanFrancisco: 1998. p. xxiv.
• Michael Grant. Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels. Charles Scribner's Sons: 1977. p. 65-67.
• John P. Meier. A Marginal Jew. Doubleday: 1991. p. 1:434.

Glrx (talk) 19:45, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

thank you so much! this had been bothering me for a little i really appreciate you taking the time to answer!

Buglover100000 (talk) 06:26, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Another place would be the Help:Misinformation talk page but it may be rather unlikely to get an as good reply there as quickly. For other similar cases, also see Files (datagraphics) without data sources that are used on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects can be found using the GLAMorgan tool here (alternative tool). on that page. In this case, if you found out what the source is, please add it to the file info. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:56, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:56, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

video2commons not working

Hello everyone,

I am writing an article about Katu Mirim and I found this CC BY video on youtube which would be a great illustration. When I try to pass it through https://video2commons.toolforge.org/ though, I get the error : Error: An exception occurred: DownloadError: b'ERROR: [youtube] RhbJjHhm6LU: Sign in to confirm you\xe2\x80\x99re not a bot.

Could anyone else try, see if you get the same error ? Thank you !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhbJjHhm6LU

have a good day Vache-crapaud (talk) 22:50, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello, if you check Commons:video2commons, you will see unfortunately it stopped working for YouTube videos for a while now. The problem came from YouTube itself so currently there are no fix for it. As a workaround, you just have to download the video manually then upload the file through videos2commons. Tvpuppy (talk) 23:53, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! Vache-crapaud (talk) 09:50, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Tracked in GitHub
toolforge/video2commons/issues/237

Created the issue. See Commons:YouTube files/Downloading for info how to download as webm without the tool. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:23, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

No to intimidation of volunteer contributors

Hello, just for your info, there is an open letter in the French Wikipedia fr:Wikipédia:Lettre ouverte : non à l'intimidation des contributeurs bénévoles in support to a user (also user here) who suffered pressure and threats from a newspaper journalist. Christian Ferrer ^(talk) 17:50, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Nazism vs National Socialism

Hello everyone,

I would appreciate it if other users could participate in this discussion to help reach a consensus. Your feedback and input would be valuable in resolving the matter.

Thanks in advance!

Nebula84912 (talk) 18:11, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

L'Illustration year

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. ReneeWrites (talk) 17:43, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Could someone edit this template so it appears in Category:Magazines of France, 1914, not in Category:1914? Rathfelder (talk) 11:03, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Done, I have edited it. Now it shouldn’t appear in the year category. Tvpuppy (talk) 12:05, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you Rathfelder (talk) 23:08, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Question to native English-speakers about correct category name

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. ReneeWrites (talk) 10:59, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Some time ago I created Category:Child victims of National Socialism, and since I'm not a native English-speaker, I used the already existing Category:Child casualties and Category:Child Holocaust victims for guidance on choosing a proper English name for my category - both categories use the singular form for the word "child". Recently, @Blackcat moved the category to the plural form "children": Category:Children victims of National Socialism. I asked Blackcat about the move, because the naming is not in line with the other categories and to me the singular form "child" sounds like the correct form. I might be wrong, of course, but Blackcat also doesn't seem to be a native English-speaker, so I'm hoping to get some input from native English-speakers on the category name. Should it be "child victims" or "children victims"?

(Side note: in the user talk page discussion, you'll see that "Japanese children" and "Children of Japan" were mentioned. This is in reference to some other category moves that Blackcat did (e.g. ) and which I absolutely support, because the original category naming in those cases was definitely non-standard and I only had chosen that non-standard naming because there was already a category with that naming pattern when I started to create similar categories for children of other nations; namely, it was this one: . But the non-standard naming also created issues with country-navigation template usage, so I'm glad that Blackcat fixed those with the move.) Nakonana (talk) 17:06, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I think that using the singular form "child" sounded more correct. Using the plural form, i.e. "children victims", doesn’t seem correct in the same way as using the plural form for “adult”, i.e. “adults victims”. Tvpuppy (talk) 17:35, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

"Child victims" is correct. "Children victims" doesn't make sense. --Adamant1 (talk) 17:44, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

"Child" is correct, and in this context it is an adjective, not a noun. English-language adjectives don't change forms in the plural. - Jmabel ! talk 21:51, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

"Child victims" is the correct plural. ReneeWrites (talk) 12:10, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

"Child victim" is a compound noun; plural is "child victims". See https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/nouns-compound-nouns Glrx (talk) 17:40, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

@Glrx: I know that "child" is used as adjective in that context (and as a matter of fact I know that English adjectives don't change in genre and number) but I thought it could be used "children" as noun ("Children [that are] victims of WWII". Anyway the consensus towards "Child victims" is clear, I'm going to revert my move. -- Blackcat 10:45, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

I think it might have worked as a noun if there was a dash: "Children — victims of WWII". However, that would be a very unusual category name, and there might be a subtle difference in meaning, too.

Anyways, thanks for undoing the move, and thanks to everyone else for the input. Nakonana (talk) 17:40, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

I proposed to change the GFDL cut-off date

Hi! Since this place is for discussing of policies I thought I would leave a notice that I made a proposal to change Commons:Licensing here: Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#Proposal_(change_GFDL_cut-off_date). --MGA73 (talk) 19:34, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

"This file did not pass file verification."

Hi all

I've just tried to upload some svg files (individual pages of a booklet I've been working on for a Wikimedia chapter) and I'm getting a weird message with about 20% of the pages, it says "This file did not pass file verification". Two things:

1. There is no further information about what this means and no link to documentation that explains this. How do I requestion this gets fixed?
2. Does anyone know if there is documentation on what this error means and how to fix it?

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 13:10, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

@John Cummings: Since you don't say the date or file name it's hard to be sure. You say you "just" did this, but the most recent Filter Log entries I can find for you are almost a week back. Those were for trying to add a permission ticket when you aren't a VRT member. Actually, that's what I see for all Filter Log issued for you in the last month or so. - Jmabel ! talk 18:40, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Normally it would mean that the file is not an svg or has the wrong extension (this would not show up in the abuse log). It would help if you could upload the file somewhere else and link to it so we can see. Bawolff (talk) 20:11, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Looking at logs, it looks like you tried to upload a 12mb file named "12 Case study pages Sudan.svg". Are you sure that wasn't supposed to be a .pdf instead? Case studies aren't usually in SVG format, and the error you got would be the one you would get if you tried to upload a PDF file with a .svg extension. Bawolff (talk) 09:39, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi Bawolff thanks, its definately an .svg, Jmabel, I don't understand what ticket you mean, am I doing something wrong? If so I'd like to correct it. To be clear, it won't show up in my uploads because it won't accept it as an upload. Here are the files which don't work, you can see from my recent uploads other svg files in the same series I made at the same time work completely fine Category:WikiGap Brochure...

• p3
• p7
• p10
• p12

I've started a phab ticket here

Thanks for any suggestions.

John Cummings (talk) 11:11, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

• • @John Cummings: if my theory is right, it wouldn't be a problem with the file, it would be a problem with the accompanying wikitext. If you tried to upload with the {{PermissionTicket}} template, that would be rejected, because only VRT members are allowed to place that in uploads. - Jmabel ! talk 23:31, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi Jmabel, thanks but I'm completely confused, I didn't try uploading these images with a VRT template, I think I've only ever uploaded anything with the OTRS/VRT pending template.

@John Cummings It looks like those files have very large embedded JPEGs in them. Commons does not allow raster images embedded in SVGs to be larger than 10mb (after base64 conversion). I think this is the issue you are having. Bawolff (talk) 03:53, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi Bawolff, thank you very much for explaining, is this documented anywhere? John Cummings (talk) 09:07, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

I added it to https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:SVG&diff=prev&oldid=912120003 last time this came up. As far as i can tell, its not an intentional change but a change because one of the programs mediawiki uses (libxml) changed its default. So all that would need to be done is for mediawiki to set the LIBXML_PARSEHUGE option to restore the old behaviour. Perhaps @Sannita (WMF) could convince the multimedia team to look into it. Bawolff (talk) 09:21, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Brunei Darussalam Newsletter

Hello! I came across the Brunei Darussalam Newsletter, where some of the older issues contain a sidebar on the left side of page 2 that states: "Brunei Darussalam Newsletter is published fortnightly by the Department of Information. It reports on government, social and business events in the country. All money values are expressed in Brunei dollars $, unless otherwise stated. Any information in this newsletter may be reproduced; a clipping of the publication would be appreciated. For free subscription (Excluding postage) write to Information Department, Jalan Stoney, Bandar Seri Begawan 2041, Brunei Darussalam." An example would be here. So my question is whether the term "information" in that specific issue could also apply to images.

This has been previously used in "Category:Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Brunei) News Digest issues". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pangalau (talk • contribs) 13:52, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

@Pangalau my opinions:

1. "information" probably only refers to facts, like if there is an article talking about economic projects, it's free to "reproduce the information" (by writing your own article with the same facts), but merely copypasting the entire article would still probably be violation of copyright.
2. users should be careful and should not construe any vague permission as compatible with com:l.

RoyZuo (talk) 09:52, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Noted, and I appreciate your opinionǃ Pangalau (talk) 12:43, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Is there a reason Commons doesnt allow us to convert MP4 files to WEBM when uploading?

Having to search out external software and websites just to even being allowed to upload videos in the first place is a huge annoyance which only helps discouraging users from uploading content here. --Trade (talk) 23:49, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

@Trade: Yes, "Commons does not support the more commonly used patent-encumbered video formats such as H.264 and H.265 that are used in MP4 and MOV files, since their use could require royalty payments" per COM:Video#Video formats.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 01:55, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

That's the whole point of converting the videos Trade (talk) 03:25, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

@Trade, this was a feature request in 2023: Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey/Video conversion support. That discussion mentions video2commons which may help somewhat. See Help:Converting video. Commander Keane (talk) 03:21, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

The reason is here: Commons:Requests for comment/MP4 Video. Pyb en résidence (talk) 18:52, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

That RFC was over ten years ago, though. Consensus can change - as can the facts on the ground; did Wikimedia even support video transcoding at the time? Omphalographer (talk) 19:56, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

• The conversation on this is scattered and needs to be centralized. The relevant mp4 patents will expire in maybe 2027 or 2028. Commons_talk:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video#6_years_later_-_patents_expiring_-_when_is_MP4_free_enough? I started some other discussion somewhere where WMF staff asked what community wanted for Commons, and the thought there was that whenever mp4 is off patent, it will be trivial for WMF to plan that year to permit mp4 uploads on the day it becomes open technology. Bluerasberry (talk) 21:36, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

  One problem with converting video in high quality is that it requires huge processing power. The other problem is that if we make it possible for everyone to upload their phone video snapshot we will have a huge reviewing problem as we need someone to watch the hole video and check it for copyright violations. GPSLeo (talk) 22:12, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

  We could make mp4 uploads as autopatroller only if necessary when we get to that. But we definitely should have some option in place to upload mp4 once its off-patent. That would certainly make it easier for me to upload videos I've captured off my tablet (as I would need to run them through Video2Commons to convert them to webm) Abzeronow (talk) 23:22, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

  For what it's worth, we already have a pretty serious "reviewing problem" for YouTube imports. It's not helped by the fact that we don't have well-established scope standards for video content. Omphalographer (talk) 23:52, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

  Didnt YouTube broke imports some weeks ago anyways? Trade (talk) 19:29, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

  For the moment, yes. But it's still a problem. Omphalographer (talk) 19:37, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Non-confirmed users still allowed to use Upload Wizard?

I previously discussed how to implement the consensus disallowing any more local cross-wiki uploading into Commons. Somehow, I hadn't seen one reply, so the discussion was then archived without such.

Maybe I should've specified further as I'm doing now. Does Commons still allow non-confirmed users to use Upload Wizard, especially to upload files as "free"? (A previous proposal to restrict non-confirmed users from uploading videos and audio clips didn't go well. I'm starting this discussion cautiously before making any more proposals.) George Ho (talk) 22:06, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

@George Ho, thanks for continuing to work on what I perceive is the terrible mess of cross-wiki uploads.

I can't work out the answer to your question:

Does Commons still allow non-confirmed users to use Upload Wizard, especially to upload files as "free"?.

Well, as far as I can see (and I am auto-confirmed so maybe non-confirmed can't even open the Wizard) the only way to progress past the release rights stage in the Commons Upload Wizard is to select either:

• This work was created by me and anyone is free to use it.
• This work was created by someone else and it is free to share.

Both "free". So your question is can users with an account less than 4 days old (non-confirmed) upload at all? As far as I can tell (if mediawiki:Manual:User_rights "user" corresponds to "Users" in Wikimedia world) this would be the "Users" group in Special:ListGroupRights and it says this group has "Upload" permissions. I have no idea if an edit-filter is being used to override GroupRights, but I think that would be very strange.

After writing all this I have confused myself. But I will post it in hopes that someone knowledgeable can participate. Commander Keane (talk) 21:53, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct annual review: proposed changes are available for comment

Decade by category navbox

This needs editting so things like Category:Cross-country skiing in the 1900s go into a subcategory, not into Category:1900s Rathfelder (talk) 13:35, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

I changed the template so it is now in the “Sports in the XXXXs” category instead. Tvpuppy (talk) 13:47, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. There are a lot of similar issues. Is this the place to ask them to be fixed? Rathfelder (talk) 09:56, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, usually for most you can do it here. If the page is using a template, you can go to the template discussion page instead. Tvpuppy (talk) 13:07, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Please can someone look at the templates for Category:1910s political cartoons of the United States, Category:Microphones in the 1910s, Category:Science fiction in the 1910s, and Category:Home kitchens in the 1910s and take them out of Category:1910s? Rathfelder (talk) 10:01, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Overcategorization like that is a pretty common issue for these types of templates unfortunately. At least IMO categories should just be added manually without the pointless navbox or there should at least be an approval process. By date templates are more trouble then they are worth at this point though. --Adamant1 (talk) 10:05, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

I’m looking into it. Will try to fix each of them. Tvpuppy (talk) 13:07, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

@Rathfelder Now they should be all fixed. Let me know if I have missed anything. Tvpuppy (talk) 15:54, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

I think that's it - for now, at least. Thank you very much.

One other question: English wikipedia has a very useful template {{Navseasoncats}}, but it doesnt work here. Is there an equivalent, or could one be made? Rathfelder (talk) 16:04, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

It would be very useful here, but to my knowledge, there isn’t an equivalent. One could be made, but that’s outside of my technical abilities. Tvpuppy (talk) 19:13, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Larger version is 180° rotated

When I click on File:Exterior del Museo.png to see the enlarged version the image has been rotated by 180°. How to solve that? Wouter (talk) 12:37, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

@Wouterhagens: Rotate it again locally. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Exterior_del_Museo.png looks fine to me on the latest Chrome and Windows 10.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 14:12, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

@User:Jeff G.: Thanks. I experienced the problem with Firefox and to my surprise not in Safari. Wouter (talk) 18:54, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

This general happens when there is conflicting rotational information in the metadata of the files. One type of metadata says one thing, and the other metadata says the other thing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:51, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Wishlist for new features on Commons

Hi!

I invite you to join the wishlist of proposals for new functions on Commons. The focus lays on the support of colored meshes, which is highly requested and elemental for future media, and the support for DNG files to be archived. Several additions have also positive influence on sister projects like Wikipedia. We're happy to see you there :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:26, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Theatre by year

Could anyone make some new templates for other countries like the one for Spain? Category:Theatre of Spain by year? Rathfelder (talk) 13:46, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

I will try to see if I can make one. Do you mean a template for “Category:Theatre of X by year” itself or its subcats i.e. “Category:YYYY in theatre of X”? Tvpuppy (talk) 15:27, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

I created a template for “Category:YYYY in theatre of X”, see {{Theatre of country by year}}. In theory, it should work for any country and any year, without adding any parameters. See Category:1936 in theatre of Spain for example. Tvpuppy (talk) 16:59, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

That's great! Thank you. Rathfelder (talk) 19:17, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

@Rathfelder I also finished making {{Theatre of country by decade}} for the decade categories “Category:Theatre of X in YYYYs”. It should also work without parameters, see example at Category:Theatre of the United States in 1910s. Tvpuppy (talk) 17:59, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Just what I need! Rathfelder (talk) 18:01, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

@Rathfelder I have just finished {{Theatre of country by century}} for the century-categories. It works the same as well. Tvpuppy (talk) 19:22, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

That is really helpful. Speeds things up no end - and I dont have to worry about miss clicking! Thank you very much. Rathfelder (talk) 20:25, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

File:Odawaa.jpg AI upscaled?

With all due respect this does seems to be something generated using AIGC, see the uniform which distorted the person's name stripe. I'm fairly new here so not sure if this is RD-able as it is used on a wikipedia article, while it also seems that alternatives are available, at Category:Odowaa Yusuf Rageh. These aren't that good but also not necessarily worse than an AI generated image? Again I'm not sure what I can do so I just want to report my findings.

Best regards, HanayoPlus LP (talk) 15:39, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

File:Odowaa Yusuf Rageh - 2021 (cropped).jpg looks better to me in any case so I replaced the image on English Wikipedia with that one  ${\displaystyle 999}$REAL 💬 ⬆   16:50, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that's obviously been through some sort of crappy AI scaling. Worse, it doesn't seem to be the uploader's own work either; similar images appeared on Twitter and Facebook in 2020-21, e.g. , , etc. I've tagged it for deletion. Omphalographer (talk) 20:10, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

It has been deleted now. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Clothing by date

Category:Clothing in 1957 - and later dates are this way round. Category:1899 clothing and earlier dates are the other way round. Wouldnt it be nice if they were all the same way round? Rathfelder (talk) 22:39, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

The proper name should be “Clothing in XXXX”, so I have renamed the categories for 1899 and before. Tvpuppy (talk) 23:44, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

• It seems that we already have Category:Fashion in 1957, do we really need two categories for the same concept? --RAN (talk) 01:53, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

  I also find it confusing figuring out the difference between the two. Furthermore, Category:Clothing in 1899 is a subcat of Category:Fashion in 1899, but Category:Fashion in 2025 is a subcat of Category:Clothing in 2025. Tvpuppy (talk) 02:10, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

  Clothing should be a subcategory of fashion. Clothing refers to the clothes themselves, whereas fashion also encompasses the industry, styles/trends, culture, and so on. ReneeWrites (talk) 19:29, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

  • @ReneeWrites: I'd look at it very differently: "clothing" can be purely functional. "Fashion" indicates some deliberate sense of current style. A beggar may be clothed, but their clothes are generally not an example of "fashion." Traditional dress of various countries and cultures is generally not "fashion", although it's not a firm line (e.g. the introduction of buttons into traditional Alaskan dress in the 19th century). - Jmabel ! talk 02:44, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

    I don't think of fashion as just being about trends. I absolutely think historical/cultural dress is a kind of fashion as well. ReneeWrites (talk) 07:43, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

    • @ReneeWrites: Certainly yes to "historical", but at least since the 17th Century it has had a connotation of conformity to some particular standard of taste. - Jmabel ! talk 04:57, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

      Yeah, an argument can be made for this to be the other way around as well, or them existing in parallel, but intersecting at various points. But the two terms are related, and I feel like if it doesn't get discussed/figured out now the whole "is X a subcategory of Y" will keep cropping up in the future, so maybe we should start a proper topic about this at CfD. ReneeWrites (talk) 10:28, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

      • Probably a good idea. Either way around is fine (probably with appropriate hat notes to explain the relation) but a mix is bad. - Jmabel ! talk 16:23, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Categories under Category:FoP-Switzerland

The categorizations of many categories here are problematic. Supposedly, {{FoP-Switzerland}} should not be used in categories of specific artworks and buildings, as country-specific templates are meant for file namespace only. Moreover, the categories of several artists were slapped with this template, making the categories ending up categorized under this category. It isn't correct to tag the artists' categories with this template, as the artists may have made artworks located in countries with no liberal panorama exceptions. I suggest using {{FoP-category}} for categories of Swiss works themselves, and removing the FoP tag from the categories of artists ({{NoUploads}} suffices). Since there are 700+ categories under Category:FoP-Switzerland, manual fixing of the categories is impractical. I hope there's "VisualCategoryChange" that can custom replace some content of multiple categories at once. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contributions) 12:33, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

•  Support I've never really been a huge fan of people adding licensing templates to categories myself. They should really only be used on files. Feel free to ping me when (or if) this is approved and maybe I can help clean some of it up. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:55, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

  I'm actually doing it now to some of the categories, replacing FoP-Switzerland with FoP-category. But I can't finish them all due to manual editing and that there's too many categories (less than 600 now but more than 500). JWilz12345 (Talk|Contributions) 13:09, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

  I think it should be possible to modify such templates in a way that it gives a different output depending on the namespace it is used in, so that it for example shows a big red warning "Please only use this template on file pages!!!" in category space. --HyperGaruda (talk) 19:47, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

  • But it looks like Commons does not have Template:Namespace detect, which is what I'd use for this on en-wiki. It looks like we formerly had it and it was deleted. @Fastily and Denniss: you both deleted this at different times. Is there a different way this should be done on Commons, or did Commons for some reason decide not to support this? - Jmabel ! talk 02:07, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Mainspace dab pages

Although mainspace dab pages are usually not formatted as gallery pages, COM:GAL does not mention anything regarding such pages. So, I think all mainspace pages should be considered "gallery pages", and they should be formatted like gallery pages. Windows is an example of a mainspace dab page that is also a legit gallery page by itself. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 17:53, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Movie dubbing map of Europe

Hello! I have some complaints about the video dubbing map in Europe. For example, should Russia be classified as a red zone? According to a March 2022 survey by Morning Consult, 86% of Russian respondents watch foreign films in their native language. At the same time, back in the 1990s, due to the strong spread of video piracy and cost reduction, video studios and television companies preferred voice-over translation of films.

Also regarding Ukraine - since 2006, films have only been shown in Ukrainian in cinemas with full dubbing. In Poland, many films and TV series are also released in professional dubbing. Therefore, I have a question primarily for participants from Eastern European countries. MasterRus21thCentury (talk) 07:46, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Tan (newspaper)

All but half a dozen of the 1448 files in this category are miscategorised. They should be in Category:Milliyet. Do we have any device for mass-processing? Rathfelder (talk) 16:42, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Help:Gadget-Cat-a-lot is really good at this. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Rathfelder (talk) 21:22, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by:  ${\displaystyle 999}$REAL 💬 ⬆   18:53, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

"Winners of [Award]" vs "[Award] winners" categories

Which formatting should be used for these categories? I noticed that Blackcat has moved many of these categories from "[Award] winners" to "Winners of [Award]" over the years. Category:BAFTA Award winners to Category:Winners of the BAFTA Award, for example. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Οἶδα (talk • contribs)

Should these categories exist at all? Having won an award is not typically a defining property of a person. Omphalographer (talk) 01:20, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Certainly some should. A Nobel or Pritzker or for that matter a BAFTA or Oscar are sufficiently prominent that you routinely hear someone referred to as a "Nobel Laureate", a "Pritker prize-winning architect" or a BAFTA- or Oscar-winning actress. - Jmabel ! talk 02:11, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Sounds like a separate discussion, one which has certainly been had many times on Wikipedia. A category like Category:Best Picture Academy Award winners exists on 64 different Wikipedia editions. Categories for lesser awards have been deleted before, but there hasn't been consensus to delete career-defining awards such as those mentioned by Jmabel above. Οἶδα (talk) 04:48, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

There's certainly a point where it gets needlessly obtuse. Like the categories for Recipients of Russian awards on here. Most of which are extremely minor, if not totally meaningless. The categories for the various recipients Jubilee medals of the Soviet Union are particularly bad. Category:Recipients of the Jubilee Medal "50 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR" contains like 1000 subcategories for recipients and most (or all) of them have recived all the other Jubilee Medals. So you end up with nonsense like the absolute mess at the top of Category:Vladimir Chernavin. It's not great to say the least. --Adamant1 (talk) 05:41, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

It's a different matter on Commons than on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; its subject matter is topics (like people, awards, and films), and categories which describe those topics (like what awards a person has received, or what films an actor has performed in) can certainly be within its scope. However, Commons is not an encyclopedia; it's a media library. We use categories to organize media and to describe its attributes. That organization frequently revolves around topics (again, like people) - but we don't need to replicate the work done by Wikipedia to fully describe those topics. A simple categorization, like describing a person as an actor or a science fiction author, can be sufficient. Omphalographer (talk) 17:57, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough. But that is still a larger discussion about awards recipients rather than the simple formatting inquiry I posted. I myself am not very familiar with Commons' process of category inclusion (i.e. overcategorization), which is why I invoked the analogue of Wikipedia, although I was not boldly claiming we replicate their standard of categorization. I have created many categories on Commons, but nothing like these awards categories. I've always been focused on the direct what? / where? / when? / who? / how? of files. Though I would be curious how Category:Recipients of the Legion of Honour or Category:Nobel laureates and its subcategories fit into your statement. Οἶδα (talk) 04:34, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Magazine template

This template {{:Magazine by year|L'Illustrazione Italiana|187|4|logo=Illustrazione Italiana - Testata.jpg|prev=L'Illustrazione Universale}} puts the results into Category:Magazines by year. They should be in Category:Magazines by year by country. Please could someone fix it? and maybe others like it? Rathfelder (talk) 19:27, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Rathfelder, the template {{Magazine by year}} is not country-specific, so it is correct to categorise into Category:Magazines by year. Do you mean you want a template similar to {{Theatre of country by year}}, but for magazines? Tvpuppy (talk) 19:57, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes please! Rathfelder (talk) 20:12, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

@Rathfelder It took a while since I had to make sure the template works with the existing categories for each country, but here’s the templates for magazines, it should work the same as the theatre templates before.

• {{Magazines of country by year}}
• {{Magazines of country by decade}}
• {{Magazines of country by century}}

Tvpuppy (talk) 06:43, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you very much. Magazines are a mess and this will be a big help! Rathfelder (talk) 10:05, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

@Rathfelder I can’t see your reply here, but it wasn’t working for Azerbaijan because the format of the category name is different. I have renamed them, so now it works. See Category:Magazines of Azerbaijan, 1924 for example. Tvpuppy (talk) 15:03, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. Rathfelder (talk) 16:48, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Your wiki will be in read-only soon

MediaWiki message delivery 23:14, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

In case users didn't realise the "14:00 UTC" link above takes you to a nifty local time converter so you see the impact time without straining too many brain cells. Commander Keane (talk) 23:33, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

JFK Assassination Records - 2025 Documents Release

Hi, Has anyone uploaded these documents, or intent to do so? . There is this category, but it doesn't seem to include everything (the source mentions more than 2,000 files). Yann (talk) 19:56, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm willing to get started on it. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:32, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

I have about 80% of the files downloaded, so now I'm onto uploading soon. I'll write here if I need more help, but assume that I'll have it done today. Thanks for escalating, Yann. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:01, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

About half are uploaded. I'm tired but will do the rest after rest. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:29, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

While it is very much appreciated, it is a little frustrating that several hundred of these were uploaded while I was asleep. Had I known someone else was going to do this, I wouldn't have spent several hours downloading, renaming, uploading, etc. Additionally, the uploads seem to have been done semi-automatically or automatically, as just a handful of documents were not uploaded: some documents were previously released with some redactions and new versions have been released in this data dump (e.g. see File:JFK Assassination File 104-10302-10000.pdf and File:JFK Assassination File 104-10302-10000 (2025 release).pdf). The bot or user with a semi-automated process just skipped those files with filename clashes, so this still required human discretion. I'm uploading the last few now, but the most efficient way to do that is to upload hundreds of files that are redundant and then remove them from the upload form. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:50, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

• Do the files come with OCR, or do we have to run it ourselves? --RAN (talk) 22:05, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

  Choosing the random file that I recently uploaded, File:JFK Assassination File 104-10071-10239.pdf, looking at the raw file itself and pressing Ctrl+F, I cannot find any text. Nor can I hi-lite text using my mouse cursor. These are typically accurate ways of telling if you have a text layer or just a photographic scan of a document. My suspicion is that these 2,148+ files are all photographic scans. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:19, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:35, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

Broken PDF display

Can anyone explain why the PDF display breaks after I upload it? I didn't have this issue last night, but now it isn't showing properly. --SDudley (talk) 14:37, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

It just needed to be purged a couple of times. This routinely happens with PDFs. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:09, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

thank you! That is super helpful :) SDudley (talk) 15:11, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

No problem, friend. Also, if you are going to make an index for this at Wikisource to transcribe, you may need to purge it there once or twice as well. i.e. go to s:en:File:The_Ring_on_the_Hand_of_Death_-_William_Rollins_Jr._(April_1924).pdf and purge on that page, not just here at Commons. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:20, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:37, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

"AutoCats" script for automatic categories

Please check out the new user script AutoCats - it attempts to provide a solution for what I think has long been a sticking point in Commons: the lack of translation for category names. Any feedback is welcome! Yaron Koren (talk) 16:32, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't fully understand: except for very rare occasions, only SD misses things that are in the categories but categories not things in the SD. Moreover, in the 1 in a 10-200 k case that SD has something that the categories don't, wouldn't the categories it displays be less specific? If this is about translation for categories, rel: Add machine translated category titles on WMC. Prototyperspective (talk) 01:02, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. It's true that there's generally less information in SD than in categories, but I wouldn't say it's that rare to find pages where SD holds information that categories don't. An obvious example is all the "quality image" assessments, which are stored in SD but generally not in categories. And there are other reasons to prefer SD to manually-generated categories, besides translation - a big one is that it's a lot less physical and mental work to deal with SD than categories. (If you upload a photo of the Eiffel Tower in fog at night, do you then need to tag it with six different categories?) I agree, though, that machine translation of category names would be a big improvement. Yaron Koren (talk) 18:15, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

I suspect that because SDC isn't well populated this is currently of limited use, but it has a lot of potential. Tools like this are part of what it will take to make SDC actually useful. Obviously, performance could be greatly increased in the future by some sort of caching, rather than having to come up with results on the fly each time you access a file. - Jmabel ! talk 07:24, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Upload of twenty-four files with wrong license tag

I have just uploaded 26 localized variants of the European Committee of the Regions (Q205203) logo (viewable here). They are not copyrighted but I don't have a plausible option in UploadWizard. Can it be fixed? My uploads are almost entirely below TOO (so copyright-free) and have to (!) select one of the five option (first published in US before 1930, author has been deceased for more than 70 years, original work from the US Federal Government, original work from NASA, I am not sure if it out of copyright in USA) is bizarre and awkward. Also I have to write always in the box below ({{PD-textlogo}}{{Trademarked}} or {{PD-simple}}). Why not simply add an option like "The work is surely below TOO in US". Also the date parameter: the date is always requested but with this type of files is rarely found and almost always unknown in logos (however sometimes I was able to recover it in the source file URL o in trademark offices registers), so I must write Unknown dateCategory:Unknown date for it to turns a blind eye. If I understood well the policies the date (of original publication) is used to check when the copyright expires, so it is also useless to add and search in files not copyrighted. ZandDev (talk) 17:21, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello @ZandDev, it might be helpful to see the discussion over at Commons:Village pump/Proposals#RfC: Changes to the public domain license options in the Upload Wizard menu, which discussed specifically about adding {{PD-textlogo}} option in UploadWizard. Tvpuppy (talk) 17:42, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

@Tvpuppy Sure! I replied here (and also on phab ticket). -- ZandDev (talk) 19:37, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I think however that the date parameter question aforementioned should be treated here. -- ZandDev (talk) 19:40, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Prompt for AI

Wikidata has implemented AI-generation prompt (P13381) (poorly named, if you ask me), intended for SDC to be able to track the prompt used to generate a particular AI work. I assume we should do whatever it takes to make that usable on SDC. - Jmabel ! talk 07:31, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I wonder how it would work with longer prompts. I could see it for simpler ones like "1960's art of cow getting abducted by UFO in midwest" but SDC doesn't seem to work well with long, multi-sentence blocks of text. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:39, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Seeing as this is used on media files alone, wouldn't this information be more suitable for the description field on Commons? We could even make a field for the prompt itself to put in the information template, if people feel the description isn't the best place to put it. But from my understanding SDC is not very well-suited to storing strings of text, and is more suitable to other nodes of structured data (e.g. where and when a picture was taken, who made it, what it depicts). ReneeWrites (talk) 10:20, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Note that it could also be in both places and that there already is some template for these.

General note regarding prompts: one should keep in mind that many use many prompts in succession for one image....I would even say that may be the normal case for higher-quality files. A singular prompt is still useful and should probably be the first prompt used for the image. Often, the prompt is altered by inserting a few words and removing some others and applied to the image (using img2img) created with a prior prompt to adjust the image to morph it closer to what the person has in mind or to fix issues in the initial version. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:11, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Does SDC not support the wikidata property series ordinal (P1545) to be used as a qualifier? - Jmabel ! talk 01:04, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

"language policy on Commons to use English" for categories named in proper nouns, true claim or false?

I contributed court judgements (originals but redacting privacy parts) from China from time to time. Six mostly-used titles of final (in one proceeding) judgement texts (a.k.a. adjudications) are:

1. Civil judgement; (民事判决书)
2. Civil ruling; (民事裁定书)
3. Penal judgement; (刑事判决书)
4. Penal ruling; (刑事裁定书)
5. Administrative judgement; (行政判决书)
6. Administrative ruling; (行政裁定书)

Where ruling means a adjudication decided purely by examing procedures. None of which have a perfect English equivalent as far as I can see.

For recent uploads, I categorize each ducument using its title (first two lines) as category names, which I think appropriate to preserve the Chinese form of terms (proper nouns). One example is File:（2024）鄂0102行初375号.pdf titled as "湖北省武汉市江岸区人民法院 / 行政裁定书" (Jiang'an Dist Court, Wuhan, Hubei / Administrative ruling). I added it to Category:湖北省武汉市江岸区人民法院行政裁定书, then add this category to Category:湖北省武汉市江岸区人民法院 (Court name, non-controversial) and Category:行政裁定书 (Adjudication type).

Some stalkers attempted to remove my contributions in mass, claiming that I don't respect "language policy on Commons to use English". (Actually, because I uploaded one real evidence that the Xi'an Government boycotted anti-Fascism making them uncomfortable.) One succeed today:

2025-03-14T18:44:00 Ameisenigel Deleted Q129843186 （Does not meet the policy: RfD]: Commons only category that does not follow language policy on Commons to use English）

The category isn't Commons-only: s:zh:Category:中华人民共和国行政裁定书 (prefixed with P.R.C.) & s:zh:Category:行政裁定书 (short). So the problem lies here on Commons: does the name "Category:行政裁定书" (lit. Administrative ruling) violates COM:CAT#Category_names? --XsLiDian (talk) 16:15, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, it does violate policy. You can add {{zh|行政裁定书}} as hat text for the category, but the category name should be in English if there is common English for it. This is especially true for languages that do not use some form of the Latin alphabet. - Jmabel ! talk 16:55, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I read from Commons:Language policy (· Category names should generally be in English, excepting some of proper names, biological taxa and terms which don't have an exact English equivalent. See Commons:Categories for the exact policy.) and followed it, as I don't know an exact English equivalent for Administrative ruling.

So the latest consensus is to prefer machine-translated messy text over proper nouns in their native form? It's a pity that this exact rule didn't appear in the guidelines yet! XsLiDian (talk) 17:20, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Administrative ruling is fine. I think Jmabel's suggestion to add a hatnote for these categories is a good compromise. ReneeWrites (talk) 19:24, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

The hatnote practise is what I'm already exercising. The problem lies with proper nouns that can't be translated well and sound. In this example, judgement and ruling are two main types of judgements in China. I don't know if native English speakers would find they're different things with legal powers of the same level. Should I think this much for future readers? XsLiDian (talk) 23:42, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Native English speakers will certainly understand that better than they will understand Chinese ideographs.

Again, if there are subtleties to be explained about the distinctions between two categories, that can go in hat notes. Also, you might want to create corresponding Wikidata items, which are more truly multilingual. - Jmabel ! talk 07:15, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Possible case of copyleft trolling

See Commons:Village pump/Copyright#Possible case of Copyleft Trolling.

The accusations seem quite serious to me, and both the evidence and the reasoning are solid. Since this is a user with nearly 300,000 edits, I believe this matter may require broader attention, which I assume the copyright Village pump might not fully provide (unlike this, the main one). Therefore, I am notifying you here as well.

Best regards, RodRabelo7 (talk) 01:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Can I run a pywikibot script with my regular account ?

I would like to use a pywikibot script to upload images with my regular account. The main reason is avoid all the clicking involved in uploads, not to actually run some kind of bot. I'm talking about a maximum (!) of one or two dozen files per day. Can I do this with my regular account and without a botflag? (Sorry for asking, but it has been >15 years that I ran a bot on a Wikimedia platform). Regards, --Polarlys (talk) 23:10, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't think you need a dedicated tool for this. The upload wizard can accept uploads of up to 50 files at a time. Omphalographer (talk) 23:31, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I use Pattypan for uploading more then a couple of files at a time myself. It makes things a lot easier because everything can just be copied and pasted in a spreadsheet. You might look into it. --Adamant1 (talk) 00:11, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

If the files are your own, I think using your main account is encouraged. Going by the discussion at my withdrawn bot request in 2018 the amount or bot flag is not a concern (I was using pywikibot to upload hundreds per day). pywikibot is very nice for uploading :-). Commander Keane (talk) 01:09, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

@Polarlys: Commons is fairly relaxed about using automated tools on non-bot accounts as long as you're supervising them. So I wouldn't expect using pywikibot to upload a few tens of files per day would be a problem at all. Bot accounts (and approval) are really needed if the bot is running automatically or making its own decisions about which edits to make. --bjh21 (talk) 11:27, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for all your responses. I already create most of my information templates using a python script, so adding a pywikibot script is the next step. Regards, --Polarlys (talk) 17:04, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --Polarlys (talk) 19:38, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

Possible mass upload of Trump-sensitive photos

Hi! In Denmark there are news reporting that Trump is trying to eliminate lots of photos that contain "sensitive" words. So Gay, Trans and Equity for example.

The story in Denmark is that it also affect Category:Enola Gay because of the word "Gay". And story also tells that people try to avoid words that include "trans" so for example "transaction" and "Equity" even if the meaning is w:Equity (finance).

I do not know if it is actually true but if it is true then I wonder if someone can do some magic and mass upload files to prevent them from being deleted. MGA73 (talk) 11:00, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Presumably you refer to works of the US Federal government. Such works are commonly bulk-uploaded here anyway; have you found any sets that are not? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:00, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Correct works of US Federal government. No, I have not found any good sets. I just thougt it would be good if "everyone" helped out. --MGA73 (talk) 18:03, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Commons have un million files from Department of Defense (DoD): 300 000 from Fæ, 300 000 from OptimusPrimeBot (which is still uploading new files) and 400 000 from different uploaders. DVIDS, the wikicommons of DoD contains 5 millions pictures.

I've created a cat to identify files deleted by DoD: Category:Images removed from DVIDS. Pyb en résidence (talk) 19:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Pyb en résidence's new category also includes a list of deleted files from the AP's recently published database of deleted DVIDS files -- is anybody working on bulk uploading those links from that database that do work? Is there anything other Wikipedians can do to help? -- Gaurav (talk) 23:38, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm using Openrefine to categorize uploads by Fæ based on the AP database. Don-vip is categorizing OptimusPrimeBot uploads with a deadlink to DVIDS. It's not perfect because some files might be delete for another reasons than anti-DEI. Pyb en résidence (talk) 08:25, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Is it actually assured that all the photos will continue to be archived on Commons? That would be important :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:39, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

IMHO that is assured as long as Commons and Wikipedia exist. But I fear the Trump and Musk will soon close Wikipedia or make it actually unusable. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm - p7.ee/p) (talk) 18:46, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Getty fotos are faked

The newspaper "NZZ am Sonntag"/"Neue Zürcher Zeitung international" reports today that images in the Getty stockphoto library that are marked as "foto", "for use in news media" - as authentic fotographs - are in fact computer generated images, with no way provided by Getty to find out. NZZ has found the creator of a "fiber cable in the occean" computer visualization that was used in news articles about the North Stream II explosion and sold to the newspaper by Getty as real fotograph. --C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm - p7.ee/p) (talk) 07:08, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

That's standard practice with these picture agencies, isn't it? They are quick to charge for public domain photos and historical images. No scruples --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:58, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Images from NASA, for example, often say “Source: dpa” or some such nonsense --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:59, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

At least that are real photos, not complete fabrication. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm - p7.ee/p) (talk) 17:46, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

The thing is that agencies are primarily concerned with profit and not necessarily with the veracity of the content. This must be taken into account when working with (news or press) media --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 10:15, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't think any getty stock photos are uploaded here. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:13, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@C.Suthorn can you plz give a link? would be interesting to read. RoyZuo (talk) 19:44, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Link: https://no-pony.farm/@Life_is/114170586739846604 C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm - p7.ee/p) (talk) 07:01, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't see how this is relevant to Commons. Getty photos are, as a rule, not freely licensed and can't be posted to Commons regardless of how they were created. Omphalographer (talk) 23:02, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

If they are AI-generated, with no further human contribution, then they are not copyrightable in the U.S., and we could choose to host them if they are within scope. Getty can't enforce a license fee on PD materials. - Jmabel ! talk 01:06, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

"Computer generated" doesn't imply "AI-generated", though. In any case, this seems kind of pointless to discuss in the absence of specifics. Omphalographer (talk) 04:40, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

"Computer generated" is common parlance for AI generated images. Otherwise is there another computers can "generate" images besides with AI? --Adamant1 (talk) 06:50, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Certainly. Graphics created by computer programs, like 3D rendered images, have been commonly referred to as CGI ("computer-generated imagery") since at least the 1980s. Omphalographer (talk) 07:06, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I thought the relevance to Commons was that it is increasingly important to distinguish between traditional and AI images to avoid disgrace and losing credibility. Archiving RAW files for photos would be a step towards that. Commons:AI-generated media is the relevant page. Commander Keane (talk) 07:04, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Gadget to find category redirects

As a categorist, I often want a dedicated gadget to find category redirects of a given category. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 15:28, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Sbb1413: Try Special:WhatLinksHere or the "What links here" link.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 15:46, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jeff G.: It gives me only hard redirects. I want the soft redirects to a given category using {{Category redirect}}. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 15:55, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Sbb1413: Such cats should be near the top of each given cat.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 16:05, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jeff G.: The top results for Kolkata are not cat redirects, despite having cat redirects like Category:Calcutta. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 16:17, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Sbb1413: So what (partial) results are you looking for, when given a certain cat you are familiar with?   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 19:32, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

1 way you can do that is https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=hastemplate:%22Category+redirect%22+insource:/\%7CKolkata/ . RoyZuo (talk) 19:48, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo: Thanks for this. I'll make a script out of it. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 02:40, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Sbb1413 for more search tricks: mw:Help:CirrusSearch mw:Help:Extension:WikibaseCirrusSearch. :) RoyZuo (talk) 07:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

What do you mean? Redirect pages using that template are also showing in "What links here". Prototyperspective (talk) 19:16, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: I meant that I should only get a list of soft redirects to a category using the template {{Category redirect}}. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs • uploads) 02:39, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

That would indeed be useful. One can "Hide redirects" but not vice versa see only redirects. If many pages link to a page, one has to scroll for long to manually find all the redirects. This also impedes redirect maintenance. It doesn't only affect Commons but all Wikimedia sites. A way to sparql query which pages redirects to a page would also be useful. I think it's not unlikely there already is a phab code issue about it, so I'd look for one and if it doesn't exist recommend to create the phab issue and linking it here. Thanks. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Help with uploading an image

Hi, can someone help me upload an image found at as a new version of File:Acrobasis_normella.jpg? If you click on the image on the website it shows a clearer version, but it's a png, which doesn't match the original version. What can I do? Myrealnamm (💬Let's talk · 📜My work) 00:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Myrealnamm: there are tons of ways to turn a PNG into a JPEG. My usual way is to download to my PC, open it in GIMP, and save it as a JPEG with quality=98. - Jmabel ! talk 01:14, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Myrealnamm: I was able to do this for you with the help of Image downloader - Imageye.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 01:22, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for your help. Myrealnamm (💬Let's talk · 📜My work) 20:09, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Does anyone want to look at a template issue?

Template:Italyeventyear isn't setting sort keys consistently -- at least not in a consistent way I can identify. If you go to Category:Events in Italy by year, the first page has some miscellaneous stuff at the beginning, then it starts with the "<year> events in Italy" categories. If you then go to the next page, you will see that some years, starting with the year 1647, are sorting after all the other years instead of in numerical order.

When I look at Category:1716 events in Italy and Category:2016 events in Italy, the only difference I see in the setup is the first two digits of the year, which you'd expect. However, the 1716 category is one of the ones sorting at the end, whereas the 2016 category is not. If anyone wants to investigate a mystery, here's one for you.

Bonus points if you figure out how to get Category:492 events in Italy to sort correctly, although I can understand why that one is where it is.

Thanks in advance! -- Auntof6 (talk) 07:52, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

For "Category:492 events in Italy" the sort key must be " 492" (i.e. "[space][space]492" — two spaces in front of the year). For four digit years it must be " 1716" (i.e. "[space]1716" — one space in front of the year). Nakonana (talk) 08:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Nakonana: OK, so a 5-character sort key. But why is the template treating 1716 and 2016 differently? -- Auntof6 (talk) 08:49, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't know what in the template is causing it but "1716" is seemingly using a 4-character sort key. It's using "1" as the first digit instead of ".". Nakonana (talk) 08:56, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

This code bit appears to be responsible for the sort key:

[[Category:Events in Italy by year|.{{#ifexpr:{{{1}}} < 100 |0}}{{#ifexpr:{{{1}}} < 10 |0}}{{{1}}}{{{2}}}]]

Pinging @Orijentolog who added this code bit. Nakonana (talk) 10:14, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Nakonana: Yes, I saw that but I couldn't figure out why it didn't seem to be doing the same thing with similar categories. -- Auntof6 (talk) 10:18, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I checked some other countries and one that I've found that does not seem to have any hick-ups is {{Japaneventyear}} (see Category:Events in Japan by year). It uses "Japan" as default sort key, and the following code bit for the year:

[[Category:Events in Japan by year| {{padleft:{{{1}}}{{{2}}}|4}}]]. Nakonana (talk) 10:29, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

No wait, "Category:Events in Italy by year" isn't using spaces for the year but peeiids/dots (.). So, it's ". 492" or "..492" and ".1716". Nakonana (talk) 08:50, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Auntof6: @Nakonana: Fixed --Orijentolog (talk) 10:43, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Orijentolog: Thank you! -- Auntof6 (talk) 10:54, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Auntof6: You're welcome. To explain a little bit: when sortkey is changed in some template, sometimes all subcategories are automatically refreshed (purged) in few seconds and everything is under a (new) order. However, sometimes it's not automatically purged so everything before editing template stays under an old order, while only later edits are under a new order. In that case, the solution is null edit one-by-one. I changed sortkey because I believe that ordering under point is meaningless since years are numerals, and numerical ordering on Commons works fine. --Orijentolog (talk) 11:09, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Stats about user tenure

Does anyone know the median and the average of the number of years a user remains a sysop? or know of data or ways to calculate this? i only know Commons:List of former administrators an almost complete list of former sysops and their removal date, but no duration. RoyZuo (talk) 09:33, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Charts in Category:Deaths from diseases and disorders

• Should charts in there be somehow separated more since these cats mostly contain people died from diseases?

• Could somebody categorize the charts in there or in Category:Epidemiology of diseases and related health problems that show deaths by age/age-group into Category:Deaths from diseases by age – that cat currently misses most items.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 11:25, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Video2commons still broken

It's been around a month now and video2commons is still broken and can't upload any videos.

It still shows:

Error: An exception occurred: DownloadError: b'ERROR: [youtube] [video id]: Sign in to confirm you\xe2\x80\x99re not a bot. This helps protect our community. Learn more'

when trying to upload any video.

Since this is the most-accessible most-used way to upload videos to Commons, could somebody please fix this problem or at least identify what the problem is? It's one if not the most critical tool for Commons and WMF has millions of dollars so I think a tool like this shouldn't be dysfunctional for over a month.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 12:28, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

+1, need to download and upload them by hand --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 13:21, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Might be a YouTube issue too given that error. Abzeronow (talk) 01:10, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

It's solved now, V2C is functional again! Prototyperspective (talk) 11:39, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:40, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Why is the Pixabay license not accepted

Hello. I came upon File:Palacio de gobierno de coahuila.jpg which is from Pixabay (which was not mentioned in the file description page) and I read from Template:Pixabay that Pixabay content uploaded after 9 January 2019 uses its own license that cannot be used on Commons. I read their terms and they state that content under their "Content License" license can be used for free for commercial purposes. Is it because they state "If your use of the Content is for commercial purposes (e.g. in conjunction with the sale or promotion of a product or service) then it is likely that you will need consent or a license." that Commons cannot accept files from Pixabay after 9 January 2019? Myrealnamm (💬Let's talk · 📜My work) 21:18, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Like many stock photo sites, Pixabay places conditions on the use of their content which directly or indirectly prohibit it from being uploaded to Commons. The most directly applicable one is "You cannot sell or distribute the Content (either in digital or physical form) on a Standalone basis" - since the purpose of Commons is to distribute files, this prohibits us from using that content. Other terms like "You cannot use Content in any immoral or illegal way" are also incompatible with Commons licensing. Omphalographer (talk) 21:26, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for the swift response. I understand. Myrealnamm (💬Let's talk · 📜My work) 21:47, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

@Myrealnamm: That is right. As such, I tagged it as a copyvio. I also reported the uploader and their copyvios - see Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Edujab7.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 21:36, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:13, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Undeletion

I just noticed that there exists com:deletion policy but no undeletion policy. The entire page Commons:Undeletion requests misses out the most common kind of undeletion: copyright expiry undeletion, which doesnt happen because of "appeal". RoyZuo (talk) 11:13, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

It's kind of tangential, but back when I was doing DRs more there was at least a couple of people who didn't know images on are undeleted after the copyrights on them expires. I suspect that's one of the reasons DRs can be so contentious sometimes. So it would be good if there was an undeletion policy and people were made more aware that deletion usually isn't permanent. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:29, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

If undeletion of an image is 60 years from now, I suspect that many people aren't much comforted by that. But, yes, it's something that needs to be present, in order to take into account the usefulness of Commons as a tool for long term preservation of files. I've even thought about the possibility to offer the option to intentionally upload non-free files, deleted from the very moment of upload, to be undeleted when they enter the public domain in the future, as a means to contribute content for future preservation (without it being considered a copyvio, and without penalizing the user as if something wrong had been done: the user clearly states that the file is not to be publicly viewable until many years in the future, when it enters public domain). Maybe this idea is a bit out of scope, since, without forgetting about the future, Commons is made for the present in the first place. MGeog2022 (talk) 14:09, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

If ever implemented, it should be restricted to specially important content (very relevant and/or in high risk of total loss). Of course it's not a good idea that 90% of storage size used by Commons eventually becomes used for non-viewable media. MGeog2022 (talk) 14:15, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@MGeog2022: I've actually done quite a bit of that, especially with works of major artists who died 50-70 years ago, or with endangered buildings that are still in copyright in countries with no FoP. As an admin, I've also arranged for others to do it on request.

I don't think that there is any likelihood that this becomes even 10% of content, given that most people want the gratification that their work is immediately available. - Jmabel ! talk 16:28, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@MGeog2022: Some users already do this, compare Commons:Deletion requests/File:Akte im Freien (Max Pechstein)-WUS07217.jpg. I'm doing it myself as well, immediately deleting the uploaded files and adding them to the respective undeletion categories (like Category:Undelete in 2030). --Rosenzweig τ 17:13, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel and @Rosenzweig, thanks for the information. It's good to know that the option is available, even if the help of an administrator is needed. If people become aware of that, this option could be more widely used, and many copyrighted songs or even movies could be uploaded for posterity (especially, those that aren't among the most widely known). MGeog2022 (talk) 20:35, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

This is really a great idea. An idea that needs wider use. At a minimum, this would help me and other volunteers preload files for all future "Public Domain Days."

• What would be the best process, to formally adopt a policy or to document the best method of upload, delete, future undelete this "Future Media?"
• And then what is the best way the communicate this to the wider Commons community, Wikipedians in Residence and GLAMs?

Ooligan (talk) 20:55, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

There're potential technical problems for the process yall mentioned above. (I'd name that process Commons:Upload, delete and undelete, which was why I started this thread in the first place.)

That is, it depends on successful undeletion of files.

That might be a big question. No one is actually certain, that WMF doesnt mess up the deleted (or say, hidden) files. Senior users will remember certain bugs in the past that prevented deletion or undeletion, or corrupted file revisions. On top of that, iirc, there're only 2 copies of commons. Incidents like Gitlab Dev Deletes Entire Production Database How GitHub's Database Self-Destructed in 43 Seconds could well happen given the lengthy future ahead. RoyZuo (talk) 18:04, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo, Can you ask WMF the current and future likelyhood of a "Gitlab" type database deletion or destruction. It would be helpful for this discussion as well as general interest. Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 20:24, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

I just tried looking for ways to contact WMF. After skimming through

1. https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Home
2. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/contact/

I dont seem to find any on-wiki feedback methods. I'm unwilling to email, because what happens in wiki stays in wiki; wiki things should be dealt with on wiki. RoyZuo (talk) 20:35, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Reading about media backups, I remember that it was said that deleted files were considered in the same way that regular files. That is, even if lost from production copies, there would still be backups. 2 production copies and 2 backups, of all files (visible or deleted), all of them stored in RAID disk setups. With this in mind, it would seem unlikely that most deleted files are lost. Let's hope that they can recovered, and undeletion dates work as expected.

Senior users will remember certain bugs in the past that prevented deletion or undeletion, or corrupted file revisions: this was more likely to happen before 2021 or so, when there were no proper backups in place for Commons media files. MGeog2022 (talk) 20:42, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Hopefully, I think that a GitLab-type incident is very unlikely in Commons. Even if files could get mass deleted by error from both production copies, there are still 2 backups at different places. Both backups use different credentials, that are also different from the ones in production servers. So a mass loss from all copies seems highly unlikely. That said, I myself proposed media dumps or, alternatively, additional backups, to adress this with even bigger security. MGeog2022 (talk) 12:32, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi, I have also uploaded, and then deleted, a number of files not yet in the public domain, setting a future date of undeletion. These were mostly movies. Also because video2commons only works for Commons, and I copied the files to the English Wikipedia, as they are already in the public domain in USA, but not in their country of origin.

I think there are probably quite a number of deleted files for which no future undeletion date was added. It is difficult to find them, as they are by definition, not publicly available. Yann (talk) 23:24, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@Yann, would a proposal to require "Undelete by YEAR" on Deletion Request/deleted files that have clear year for undeletion? It seems that currently "Undelete by YEAR" it is often not added to the deleted file- even where it is obvious. I agree the 1,000's of potential files that would qualify for future undeletion have been missed. So, can we stop lost opportunities to restore files in the future that were uploaded mostly by volunteers in good faith? Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 06:59, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

At least, it should be mentioned on COM:DR. But requiring that is a bit too strong. Yann (talk) 10:03, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

For many files we don't know when they could be undeleted: for example, work of living third party photographers in countries with copyright for 70 years p.m.a. - Jmabel ! talk 16:19, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

I would strongly recommend that if we do this more systematically:

1. If at all possible, we should set up a special way to upload these so that they do not pass through the state of being temporarily visible to everyone. If we cannot avoid that, we come up with some particular tag which will give a very visible warning on the file page during their temporary visibility.
2. We should limit this to users at a certain level of rights.
3. We should probably have a place to post where anyone who is doing more than, say 20 of these in a given week is expected to post what they are up to, and there is a chance to judge the advisability of larger projects like that.

Also, I'm very wary of uploading content that has no known date when it will become available (e.g. in most countries, work of living authors, including buildings in countries with no FoP for architecture). It's hard to keep track of when they would be undeleted and in most cases that is 70 or more years in the future, a really pointless amount of time over which to make plans. Possibly some exception to that for content of likely importance that is unlikely still to be available when it would become legal to publish. - Jmabel ! talk 02:27, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

I would limit this to files they become public domain within the next 20 years with exceptions possible. GPSLeo (talk) 05:58, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Most buildings, especially in rapidly developing cities; or even most things, would not survive for 70 years+the remaining lifespan of their authors.

So their pictures people now take are the only records of them once existing.

Some users be like: upload them to other image hosting sites like flickr... well, that means preservation of those images also hinges on the survival of flickr into the far future. If commons is the ultimate repository of history and knowledge, they should be here and commons should not depend on another website to then import them in far future. RoyZuo (talk) 07:15, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

+1 MGeog2022 (talk) 12:26, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

By the way, if Internet Archive had the financial resources and infrastructure (including backups) that WMF has, I wouldn't be worried about this at all. The place for that ultimate repository of history and knowledge would be Internet Archive, not WMF. The problem is that it hasn't. MGeog2022 (talk) 12:35, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Agreed with you 100%.

I've long criticised this. WMF has so much money but the impression left on me has always been that they waste all that money on dont know what. In comparison internet archive handles so much more with far less money.

https://archive.org/about/ : A single copy of the Internet Archive library collection occupies 145+ Petabytes of server space

Special:MediaStatistics: Total file size for all 116,084,240 files: 662,292,980,500,181 bytes (602.35 TB).

Commons is <1% of IA, but WMF funding is probably 10 times IA funding. RoyZuo (talk) 12:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Not to say the WMF couldn't allocate their funds better, but it's not fair comparison because the sites are different. The internet archive is super janky and always one lawsuit away from oblivion anyway. For all the WMFs faults at least this project is usable and it won't closed down because of a RIAA lawsuit. --Adamant1 (talk) 13:12, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes. With the money it has, WMF could have several offline backups in different places for even greater redundancy. But things are not so bad. WMF could remain operating and having several full backups of everything, even with a much smaller budget than it has, and if at the same time the total size of Commons increases greatly, that's the good part (WMF problem seems to be that there is so much money that it's hard to decide what to spend it on, there are far worse things than that).

I don't think a lawsuit will close Internet Archive. But Archive's content isn't well protected against cyberattacks or physical disasters. Of all content in Archive or its Wayback Machine, I only consider guaranteed the parts that come from third-party projects, such as Common Crawl, and perhaps also the content that uses Archive-it paid service. I remember how frustrated many people were last October when Archive went down. People seem to be unaware of the real risk of something much, much worse at any moment. MGeog2022 (talk) 20:12, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Anyway, i just wrote down a summary of this method Commons:Upload, delete and undelete. Feel free to edit, or suggest if you have a better title.

Commons:Undelete needs to be edited to include undeletion of free files, which is not contentious and doesnt need "appeal".--RoyZuo (talk) 07:43, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo: I made some significant edits there. - Jmabel ! talk 15:30, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

If we want files not to be visible, we could use something similar to Nsfw. However, these files should only be publicly accessible for a few hours, so I am not sure it is necessary. Yann (talk) 12:47, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel and everybody:

fyi, i wrote Commons:Upload, delete and undelete as a summary of current practice, not as a proposal of any possible future implementation of this mechanism. as mentioned above by many users, it's an informal method ppl have been using, and i felt it's necessary to write it down.

the info page could be a first step towards formalisation of this method, but i'm satisfied to bring this matter to wider attention and leave any development to the others.

and my key concern for my original post is, Commons:Undelete is seriously lacking info about many uncontroversial circumstances of undeletion of files. RoyZuo (talk) 16:29, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

I think it would be good to add a timestamp to uploads where you can set when the uploaded files are published. Copyright reasons may be the most obvious one, but sometimes I was requested not to upload specific content. In 20–30 years, it wouldn't be a problem anymore. And documentation of works that vanished or will vanish are a crucial argument, no matter as it is in form of photographs etc. --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 10:11, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

(And copyright legislation can change in the future) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 10:12, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@PantheraLeo1359531: we can do the same thing with "Undelete in YEAR" when the concern is something other than copyright. Has nothing systematic to do with the upload date. - Jmabel ! talk 16:10, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Hmm, interesting :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:32, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:L'Illustrazione Italiana by year

Could someone please fix these templates so they end up in Italian categories? Rathfelder (talk) 10:48, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Rathfelder: Could you what you think should be done? I don't understand your request, as there are no templates here except {{Magazine by year}}. Which Italian categories? -- ZandDev (talk) 11:14, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

They have a template Magazine by year- also for decades and centuries, which puts them in, for example Category:1911 magazines, not in Category:Magazines of Italy, 1911. Rathfelder (talk) 11:30, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Rathfelder, I didn’t edit the template too much, to avoid maybe accidentally breaking the template. So, I just added a |country= parameter. If you specify a country (e.g. Italy), it will categorise the page into the country-of-year category (e.g. Magazines of Italy, 1911), instead of the year category (e.g. 1911 magazines). See Category:1874 L'Illustrazione Italiana for example. Tvpuppy (talk) 16:39, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! Rathfelder (talk) 16:43, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

By the way, I also changed {{Magazine by decade}} and {{Magazine by century}} the same way as mentioned above. Tvpuppy (talk) 16:55, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Very helpful! Rathfelder (talk) 19:26, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

One more - could you do a similar job on Category:La Ilustración Española y Americana? Rathfelder (talk) 19:47, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

The template for the year categories and century categories already categorizes into the magazine-of-Spain categories. So, I only changed the template for the decade categories (e.g. the one in Category:1860s La Ilustración Española y Americana) since it didn’t categorize into the “YYYYs magazines of Spain” category. Is this what you were referring to? Tvpuppy (talk) 03:22, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes thank you very much. I hope that is the last one like that. Rathfelder (talk) 18:03, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Search for categories that have corresponding Wikidata items but no infoboxes

Anyone know if there's a way to do it? --Adamant1 (talk) 14:14, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Depends on what you mean with "corresponding". I think a bot adds the infobox automatically if it is linked. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:21, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

It's fairly difficult to identify what a "corresponding item" is outside of the most trivial cases, like entities which are already linked to Commons categories and lack only the infobox. Omphalographer (talk) 20:25, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Adamant1 and Prototyperspective: like this? Multichill (talk) 21:07, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

You might want to ask at Wikidata, too, whether there's a way. Or go through Category:Wikidata related maintenance to see whether there's anything that would fit the bill, e.g. something like "Creator templates with Wikidata link: item missing link back". Nakonana (talk) 07:22, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Photographic silhouettes of people against sunsets

I have been populating/adding photos to the Category:Photographic silhouettes of people against sunsets, which already existed but was practically empty. I believe I can only add a few hundred more photos. Questions: 1. The category name seems too complicated. Perhaps it could be changed to "Silhouettes of people with sunsets," since on Commons we are always dealing with photographs. 2. The category is becoming very crowded (with around 2,300 items) and perhaps it should be subdivided. One possibility would be to divide it by the number of people in the image, as dividing by color is not very useful (most photos have red backgrounds) and dividing by country also doesn't seem practical, since in most cases the country is not indicated and it is not very relevant to know where a photo of a black silhouette with a usually red and poorly defined background was taken. I would appreciate advice and suggestions from more experienced users. Thank you! --JotaCartas (talk) 09:59, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for populating that cat. I don't think there is any need to subdivide it further. It can be ideal and is refreshing to see a category containing its contents directly and I see no need for any particular subcategories like the number of people in the image or whether it's children vs adults. One could use the deepcategory search operator to combine it with other categories (example) and/or some search string to find results. However, if you are to subcategorize what likely would be most useful is distinguishing between images that show one person vs multiple/many. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:20, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer, and for the tip (example), I didn't know it, but it's very useful to avoid creating very complex Category trees, again thanks JotaCartas (talk) 17:48, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Photo challenge January results

Ovals: Entries • Votes • Scores

Rank	1	2	3
image
Title	Horseshoe Bend (Arizona)	Underpass of Michelinstraße in Hallstadt	Fontana in un giardino storico in Roccalvecce (Viterbo)
Author	Gzzz	Ermell	Albarubescens
Score	15	12	11

Leatherwork: Entries • Votes • Scores

Rank	1	2	2
image
Title	Tanners at work in one of the old tanneries of Fez, Morocco	Pilot with Leather Aviator Helmet	Handmade shoes
Author	Lusi Lindwurm	Roy Egloff	AK-Bino
Score	24	11	11

Congratulations to Gzzz, Ermell, Albarubescens, Lusi Lindwurm, Roy Egloff and AK-Bino. -- Jarekt (talk) 02:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Commons:Statistics of uploads vs deletions

Hi, I updated this page. Curiously, I got slightly higher numbers for uploads. Also why did the uploads drop in 2022 and 2024? Any idea? Yann (talk) 19:11, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Just a guess, but how do this numbers relate to the active user base? Grunpfnul (talk) 19:41, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Fæ's departure alone would have made a statistically noticeable difference. - Jmabel ! talk 01:09, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Would make sense. Fæ dropped out in 2021 --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:21, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Around September 2022 was a sudden increase of uploads, but the increase was deleted later. Maybe this lays heavy --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:24, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Syrian Flag, the third time around

Once again, the question of what to do with File:Flag of Syria.svg has come up in File talk:Flag of the Syrian revolution.svg#Move. I have changed the redirect target since the Revolution flag is now the official flag of Syria. As previously discussed it seemed as if the consensus was that we should try to future proof changes to flags in making "Flag of Example" a redirect. For some reason, templates love using Flag of... in them so adjustments tend to have to be made anyway. But the question that came up is that now Syria is treated differently from other countries in that their "Flag of..." is a redirect as opposed to a file page and so what would be our best practices in handling changes to flags of nations. As Jmabel points out, the flag of the United States had been changed twice in his lifetime, and it is possible that within our lifetime, that flag could change again.

So the reason for this thread is to ask what would be our best practices in future proofing flags and what steps should be taken in the future when flags do need to be changed. Since this is a question that would affect a lot of communities in Wikimedia, I felt the Village Pump is the best place to ask, and I would be willing to post about this thread in various Wikipedias if needed. Abzeronow (talk) 19:50, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Files should be identified and reused with a unique number like [[File:M56856129|thumb|example]]. This would eliminate 1 of 3 things doing roughly the same thing: filename, caption, description; and all the rules and maintenance tasks about filename like Category:Media requiring renaming. RoyZuo (talk) 17:07, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

I'll also mention in the interest of transparency that there is a proposal by User:Freedoxm to move the revolution flag to File:Independence flag of Syria.svg. Now that the revolution flag is the official flag of Syria, we probably should figure out what the permanent name for this flag should be where its usage would depend on a permanent name that doesn't change (unlike template that only care about what the current flag of Syria is). Abzeronow (talk) 17:25, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

how to undelete all my files which was deleted?

i'm new on commons i mistakenly claimed old pics as own work. those pics are free from copyright — Preceding unsigned comment added by RyanRai11 (talk • contribs) 07:00, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

• Hi! You can add a request at COM:Undeletion request and why the files should be undeleted. You need to say how the names of the files were. And don't forget to sign your posts ;) (type --~~~~) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:42, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Display bug with the Help icons on upload page

Just noticed this. I don't think these icons were like this previously, but instead fit the "display" box with perfectly round icons? (Firefox 136.0.2 here, have NoScript with nothing blocked on Commons and uBlock Origin). - The Bushranger (talk) 22:36, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

DESI releases the DR1 dataset

Hi!

DESI announced that they released a free dataset recently. It may have useful data to be uploaded here.

Greetings --11:52, 20 March 2025 (UTC) PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 11:52, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

software generated information

Screenshots are generaly treated as copyvio. However, there are cases the content, grafics, departure times, weather patterns, tracking information, etc, are automaticaly generated, with no human creative input. If company logo's and advertisements are avoided, I see no copyvio case. Excluded are maps extracts like Google maps, where the information and layout is protected. (database issue)

Example: Commons:Deletion requests/File:Schermafdruk treinpad test ECD naar Brussel.jpg Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:19, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

I cannot tell for this case, but we have to assume that more and more digital content will be generated by non-human actors (graphics and pictures, but also schemes and graphs or concepts) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:07, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

What you see on your screen is only partially a computer-generated database query output. Someone had to program the thing, design how all the software elements had to be constructed, decide on the positioning, what color scheme to use, etc. As you can see at COM:SCREENSHOTS, unless the software is freely licensed (which it is not according section 7) or as simple as en:Command-line interfaces, this is rightly considered a copyvio. --HyperGaruda (talk) 20:06, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Not sure I agree with HyperGaruda. Test case: someone working for another railway created a screen that looked just like that except for the (obviously not copyrightable) information about what particular train was going where when. Could NS possibly sue them for a copyright violation? - Jmabel ! talk 02:15, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

The software license is irrelevant. If I use Photoshop to edit or create images, the user (me) has the copyrigths, except of course if I use any copyrigthed material as input. This dynamic timetable information is publicaly available information. The train companies and infrastructure providers are legaly obliged to make this information available to all travel planners. There are no database rigths (such as by Google Maps). (Database rigths are different from the creative rigths)Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:24, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

The proper comparison with your Photoshop case would be: a screenshot of the Photoshop window with your image opened in there. That screenshot would be copyvio, as it includes the Photoshop interface around your image. Cropped to just your image without elements of the Photoshop interface would be fine. To extend this analogy to File:Schermafdruk treinpad test ECD naar Brussel.jpg, you would have to get rid of all the interface's creative visual elements like icons and color schemes, meaning you would be left with barebones {{PD-Text}} material. --HyperGaruda (talk) 11:15, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@HyperGaruda: which icons here do you believe to be above TOO? - Jmabel ! talk 17:09, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Individually, none. Together in this arrangement and coloring, however, is a different story. --HyperGaruda (talk) 04:38, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Coloring certainly won't take them above TOO, and the arrangement is just putting them evenly spaced in a line.

Again, as I asked above: if someone working for another railway created a screen that looked just like that except for the (obviously not copyrightable) information about what particular train was going where when, could NS possibly sue them for a copyright violation? If not, then nothing here is copyrightable. - Jmabel ! talk 16:07, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I would say yes, if someone (another rail company itself or just a freelancer programmer) creates an app with the same UI look-and-feel, the owner of the original app may sue for Copyright infringement. Design and layout matter. With just a different color scheme and different icons the infringement would be less obvious, but still noticeable to experts. I am using two different public transit apps than the one depicted here, and while the basic functionality is pretty much the same, there are also distinct design differences. --Enyavar (talk) 09:46, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

PD license template maintenance task

I discovered a strange pattern as I'm working through PD-Art license maintenance: files that don't have any PD templates, but are placed in categories that PD templates would place them in. These need to be reviewed and have the correct PD templates applied to them, and the manual categories removed. If you have some time and that sounds up your alley, I put them all into Category:Files placed manually in PD-Art categories. – BMacZero (🗩)

Good catch. A category alone isn't a substitute for a license statement, even if it's PD. At a glance I think most of these will be {{PD-old-assumed}} at a minimum. Omphalographer (talk) 04:20, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

@BMacZero, to Category:PD Art i added Template:Image template notice which now also provides an extra search link to find such files (which was just added). RoyZuo (talk) 11:30, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Rotating video

I have a video I'd like to upload to Commons. Unfortunately, my camera messed up the orientation. Right now I have two versions of it: https://vimeo.com/1069462147 would need to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise; https://vimeo.com/1069466797 is correctly oriented but is watermarked by the tool I used to rotate it.

Does someone have a way to do a rotation like this without getting a watermark slapped on the video? Obviously, correct orientation is more important than the lack of watermark, but I'd really rather have both. - Jmabel ! talk 06:08, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Best is to use ffmpeg for this https://stackoverflow.com/a/9570992 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:45, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

@TheDJ: is there a particular build of ffmpeg for Windows that you would recommend? I don't recognize the names of anything offering one, and am hesitant to trust a random build on my machine. - Jmabel ! talk 16:36, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

https://stackoverflow.com/a/27768317

com:videocuttool (not sure if still working). RoyZuo (talk) 09:57, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! Ffmpeg worked (though not easily). File is now on Commons at File:Pfeiffer Falls.webm. - Jmabel ! talk 04:04, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: Jmabel ! talk 04:04, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Excluded educational content

A certain user uploads a few raw text lists onto Commons and then places them in an article in some wiki project. Is this enough to ignore the Commons:Project scope#Excluded educational content policy? Please see Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by BlackStar1991 and User:Infrogmation's closure rationale. --Komarof (talk) 10:51, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes it is. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:33, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Hmm, I think it'S in scope but I am not happy about the file format. SVG would be much better --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:19, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

• That "excluded educational content" paragraph is poorly written and should be reworded. As written now it is used as a bludgeon in deletion arguments to delete historic news articles. There is a paragraph saying we do not want images of text, those should be hosted by other projects like Wikisource. Then we have another paragraph saying that we do want images of text, that they are actually demanded by Wikisource. Just combine the two into one well written paragraph instead of two contradictions. --RAN (talk) 22:13, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

  I think it is also important how text is depicted. Text uploaded as Commons file can be okay when it is a specimen of a font, a typologo or another special style of text presented (e.g. a glyph of a popular font or a unique glyph) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:32, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

There's obviously a huge difference between an image of a historical document and one of a modern spreadsheet some user put together in Excel. The former is (or at least should be) educational. Whereas the later IMO has no business being on Commons. Otherwise it should be as a proper table in the data namespace. That's what it exists for. Uploading images of self-created spreadsheets just seems like a way to get around the rules though. I can't create a page of text because it's OOS, but if I upload an image of the same text then somehow that's in scope? OK. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:44, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

• I think we are trying to exclude original text/data that is previously unpublished, not historic text/data already published. Also get rid of the phrase "Excluded educational content", it sounds like it was written by a lawyer.

User pages

I'd like to seek clarification from the community for questions about user pages, i.e. pages in the "user" namespace.

1. can other users make major edits/changes to a certain user page without that user's permission?
2. can a user put galleries of their uploaded files or other users' files on their user page?

Thx. RoyZuo (talk) 12:43, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

There isn't a simple "yes" or "no" to either of these.

The second question is the easier one to answer: generally yes, though if it becomes disproportionate to their other activity here, then that's not OK.

On the first question: usually not, but there are times when it is allowed, and I'd really want a more specific question. The most obvious cases are a deceased user or an indef-blocked user. - Jmabel ! talk 23:15, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Thx for answers.

obviously most of these questions were quite commonsensical. most users have basic etiquette and dont even need to be told a set of rules to behave. i merely wanted to generate a newer discussion for future reference.

otherwise, i could also quote something from 20 years ago such as Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2005/10#c-Ranveig-2005-10-27T12:02:00.000Z-Mark_Dingemanse-2005-10-27T10:48:00.000Z. RoyZuo (talk) 08:41, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

which peugeot model is this?

File:Ankara'da Üzeri İmzalanmış Pejo - 2025.jpg i uploaded this and cannot find exact model. please help me out. i suspect it is Category:Peugeot 207 Compact , but im not expert. please ping me when you find answer, thank you so much! modern_primat ^{ඞඞඞ ----TALK} 23:10, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

@Modern primat ChatGPT also says it's a Peugeot 207 --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 13:26, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

 Thank you. modern_primat ^{ඞඞඞ ----TALK} 20:20, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Kein Ding :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:30, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:53, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Donald Trump

Is it strictly necessary to have half an Wikipedia article in the category--Trade (talk) 01:35, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

• It is not necessary, and more importantly per multiple discussions long articles do not belong on Wikimedia Category pages. That's what Wikipedia articles are for. Long text removed. -- Infrogmation of New Orleans (talk) 14:28, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:52, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Respect and non-disturbance for long-term prolific contributor

A user has been contributing to Commons tirelessly for nearly 20 years now. His/her at least 110k photos can be seen at Category:Photographs by Anonymous Hong Kong Photographer 1.

A recent example of his/her prolific contribution can be seen at wikimap stats. S/he uploaded at least 7000 (6435 of them geo-tagged) photos of Okinawa this year (it's been only 2 months) alone. In comparison, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=deepcategory:%222024_in_Okinawa_prefecture%22 "2024 in Okinawa prefecture" has less than 400 files in total. 7k uploads are already quite a lot for any user, but just a fraction of his/her decade-long commitment. As far as I can tell, s/he has been doing so without much attention since 2006.

However, certain users have been targeting this long-term contributor in recent years because of this contributor's unusual habits. Actions they have demanded include but are not limited to: blocking, banning, locking all accounts; deleting all uploads.

As such, I would like to ask the community to help stop such harassment against the long-term contributor. In my humble opinion, anything, other than reasonable inspection of his/her uploads based on com:l, should be stopped. RoyZuo (talk) 07:30, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

+1 --Achim55 (talk) 07:34, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

+1 -- C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm - p7.ee/p) (talk) 12:58, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Shouldn't respect and non-disturbance be self-evident for every long-term prolific contributor on Commons? --A.Savin 07:54, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo: But there is abuse. LuciferianThomas wrote in this Edit Summary: "Intentional wrong-naming files and incorrectly categorising files is clearly abusive behaviour; in scale it is even clearly vandalism". See also m:Requests for comment/Blatant sockpuppetry in good faith.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 14:09, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

I recognize Anonymous HK Photographer 1 made a lot of good contributions here, but the problems extends beyond “unusual habits”, many of their uploads have copyright issues. Although this problem only concerns a small proportion of their overall uploads, but since they upload hundreds of images weekly, the problematic uploads pile up to a lot.

I agree with you that the actions demanded above are not suitable, but at the same time I don’t think it is harassment to demand when there are valid concerns. It would be better if you can suggest examples of which specific actions by specific users you think constitutes as harassment. Tvpuppy (talk) 16:05, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

I salute the anonymous HK user, this can't have been easy. Everyone can make errors, and there are many other ano- and pseudonymous contributors who can eventually fix them. Where there are valid concerns with some of the uploads, we should of course adress that, but overly punitive reactions seem like overkill imo. --Enyavar (talk) 17:14, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Cosigning the original post. We do not need yet another case of prolific users being scapegoated and insulted until all eternity, like has happened several times on enwiki. Gnomingstuff (talk) 05:07, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

+1. I don't see any bad picture in Category:Photographs by Anonymous Hong Kong Photographer 1. As long as they don't name files incorrectly on purpose (some visitors may not even recognizing Chinese characters), we can consider them as different good-faith one-time newbie users trying to hide their public IP addresses for whatever reason (e.g. overdue stay without a permit). We don't deprive their rights on Wikidata by criticizing them hiding IP addresses, unless it's confirmed via CheckUser that all accounts were signed in and contributing on a single IP address in a short time, which seems inpossible as I see different camera models used by them, which may be in the hands of different people. XsLiDian (talk) 15:12, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Pinging @Donald Trung, @Solomon203, @A1Cafel, and admins @Yann, @Bastique and @Taivo. 〈興華街〉📅❓ 17:11, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

@Donald Trung, Solomon203, A1Cafel, Yann, Bastique, Taivo, and The Squirrel Conspiracy: Please give opinions regarding this issue. 〈興華街〉📅❓ 11:50, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Please don't shotgun ping. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 14:45, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

@The Squirrel Conspiracy Sorry for that. 〈興華街〉📅❓ 14:54, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Communicating with other users, and changing problematic behavior (like uploading copvios) when notified, are non-optional parts of participating in Commons. Not only does this user not respond on their talk page, nor in DRs and CfDs, it is not even possible to communicate with them because they are constantly changing accounts. They are also violating multiple account policy by failing to link the accounts: Where a user has multiple accounts it is an expectation that they publicly disclose those accounts, usually on each of the relevant user pages providing links to each other. The use of numerous accounts also makes it extremely difficult to track issues like copyvios and improperly named files; however, it is clear that these amount to a non-insignificant proportion of their uploads, and thus add a great deal of work for the community.

I believe a good first step would be a one-account restriction, enforced by technical means as necessary. If the user cannot abide by that extremely basic standard to enable communication and tracking of their behavior, then they are a net negative and do not belong on Commons. No amount of being prolific justifies a user ignoring basic community norms and uploading significant numbers of copyvios. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 22:24, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

@Pi.1415926535: I agree.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 23:02, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

+1 Longterm users shouldn't get a free pass from following the same standards on here everyone else has to just because of how long they have had their account. Its super easy for newish contributors to be sanctioned or blocked over minor non-issues but there's zero consequences for longterm users who don't follow the rules or act abusively. The same goed for admins. Things like repeatedly uploading COPYVIO should be dealt with accordingly regardless of how long the user has been on here or what privileges they have though. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:27, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

I do not understand how a blatant long-term violator of the Commons:File naming guidelines (Correct – The name should describe the file's content and convey what the subject is actually called. Inaccurate names for the file subject, although they may be common, should be avoided.) is considered a "long-term contributor" by some users above, so apparently people can just upload tons of images and name them incorrectly just to make a mess of Commons to be called a contributor and not an abuser? The large number of files uploaded actually made a heck of a lot more abuse and disturbance to Commons than any other normal user naming files inappropriately. I am very certain that mass contributions does not allow mass disruption and guidelines-breaking in the same scale.

I agree that the upload images are contributions, but the naming of files to an extent of requiring lots of file renamings is definitely abusive editing behaviour, which shall lead to a damning sanction. If RoyZuo insists on calling this abusive user a "contributor" without considering the harm to Commons and unnecessary work to fix all those issues, then I would say they probably did not care about the negatives the abusive user brings, and does not respect the naming guidelines, to a point that they can flat out intentionally cover the intended accused violations and point fingers at the accusers for accusations that we did not make. LuciferianThomas 23:59, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

I could (but will not) name quite a number of long-term contributors whose work here routinely falls short in one or another respect. I don't see a reason to single out this one. Yes, technically you can communicate with most of the others, but in practice? If they ignore all comments, or brush them off, the result is the same as if there were no channel of communication. - Jmabel ! talk 00:44, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

I personally do think we need to be more strict about that sort of editor in general. In this specific case, the use of multiple accounts makes it easier for this editor to avoid scrutiny - it would require a great deal of work to determine how many of their uploads have been deleted, or if they have ever been blocked, because the contributions are spread over dozens of accounts. (If any of the accounts have ever been blocked, then this is block evasion, pure and simple.) It also means that the editor likely has not even seen DR and CfD notices because they abandon accounts after using them once, so they may not be aware of the hundreds of copyvios they have uploaded. Forcing them to use a single account would put them on the same footing as every other editor and allow the community to address their issues with file naming and copyvios. Right now, the community has no ability to even address their behavior because of the account-hopping. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 01:14, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Could you be more clear as to your issues regarding HKTA's problems with filenames? DS (talk) 14:35, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

It's never the actual issue that's the problem. It's pointing out the issue that's the problem. someone can harass you on here all day and no one will bat an eye about it. But then you can be blocked for intimidation if you dare to point out that's what they are doing. The priorities on here are just screwed and it's always an endless exercise in pandering to seniority. --Adamant1 (talk) 01:12, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

I would say both are problems as important as the other. The long-term disruption pattern shows the inability of the Commons administration to "see what the problem is" and to enforce the very rules of Commons, and the counter-accusation of harassment or intimidation by those who think such abuser is a contributor shows the inability of such users and the Commons administration to care about the actual issue instead of pointing fingers at those who raise a problem. LuciferianThomas 02:14, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

You're allowed to call this person something other than an "abuser," you know. It will not kill you to treat them like a human being. Gnomingstuff (talk) 03:25, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

You can keep on ignoring the abuse. It's clearly within my right to call this anonymous user an abuser for his blatant violation described below. LuciferianThomas 11:00, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

And in return, "it will not kill you to actually care about what is actually happening and not just blaming the one who points out a real issue, whether you like it or not." LuciferianThomas 11:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Link to evidence of "blatant long-term violator of the Commons:File naming guidelines".

Otherwise, I consider the accusation as invalid and personal attack against the long term anonymous contributor. RoyZuo (talk) 21:54, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

For the fact that I had only gone through 5 of 98 MTR stations in Hong Kong to move over 50 instances of incorrectly named files and incorrect categorisation for MTR stations? At this rate, there's probably thousands of files misnamed and miscategorised from this user just for the files uploaded for MTR. This is blatant violations and circumventing anti-abuse. LuciferianThomas 10:59, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

"the fact that I... move over 50 instances"

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=move&user=LuciferianThomas&wpFormIdentifier=logeventslist&wpfilters%5B0%5D=newusers 22 move logs.
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&target=LuciferianThomas&namespace=all&tagfilter=RenameLink&limit=50 7 edits

As of 17:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC), you have a total of 22+7=29 edits related to renaming any files by the long term contributor.

Is 29 even close to 50?

So you are making up "fact" and misleading the entire Commons community with exaggerated accusation against the long term contributor. It should be noted that you have repeatedly exaggerated this accusation since early 2024. In your own words, such repeated misleading actions are abusive and should lead to blocking of your account.

And this is only 1 single problem of your many similar accusations. RoyZuo (talk) 17:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

I definitely said "incorrect files and incorrect categorisation", but I guess you are just blindsided to the side of the fact you believe in. I might have miscounted moved files, but I have definitely removed hundreds of miscategorised images – pictures of shops (within the station) in the focus, or even their products, instead of the actual station. You tell me this is an image of Po Lam Station? Yes the picture might be taken in Po Lam Station, but it's absolutely nonsense to say it's a picture of Po Lam Station.

Heck, even 29 misnamed instances of say 600 images is a 5% mistake rate, not to mention all the other images that are miscategorised to the level of nonsense. If any editor makes so much mistakes in their editing, how is that not even disruptive? I won't call 22 images of cakes, Mrs Fields cookie products, convenience store products to be "contribution to a station category" – it tells nothing about the actual station.

Your repeated negligence to the actual happenings of the case, making up what I say when you just didn't read, and making up "facts" to mislead the entire Commons community with exaggerated accusation of harassment without caring for the actual disruption is clearly abusive behaviour and should lead to the blocking of your account here on Commons, just like you have been in three other wikis. LuciferianThomas 00:31, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Oh btw, the linked image is geotagged in LOHAS Park station. Guess that's an extra count of misnaming images, heh? LuciferianThomas 00:33, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

"At this rate, there's probably thousands of files misnamed and miscategorised from this user just for the files uploaded for MTR"

there are roughly 3600 files related to MTR https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?sort=create_timestamp_desc&search=MTR+incategory%3A%22Photographs+by+Anonymous+Hong+Kong+Photographer+1%22 .

Either you can prove your extrapolation, or it should be considered as nothing more than just another exaggeration and personal attack. RoyZuo (talk) 01:16, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

And you now admitted that you had removed photos taken in a train station from a category under that train station: that is definitely violation of policy Commons:Categories#Types_of_reflected_relations.

Here is 1 such violation of policy by LuciferianThomas https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=952770572&oldid=715233481 which removed the file from anywhere under Category:LOHAS Park Station, its location of creation (P1071).

Then you made the false accusation of incorrect categorisation against the original uploader and also exaggerated your accusation. RoyZuo (talk) 02:18, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

And also Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2024/01#Problematic_file_names_and_irrelevant_categorization_by_sockpuppet_group, issue has been detailed before. You can keep pretending that this has not been talked about before, and dismiss my accusations against the abuse, but you will not change the fact that there is indeed abuse, and that the abuse causing widespread inaccuracies in Commons. Heck, you can even keep promoting this behaviour as contribution or "not a serious problem", but this will only show that you don't really care about the truth. LuciferianThomas 11:05, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

And whether you like it or not, sockpuppetry is clearly a violation anywhere on Wikimedia. From the start, you are supporting sockpuppetry, and it doesn't really matter who was abusing socks. I personally never asked for files to be deleted, I would only ask for a block on sockpuppetry to prevent further disruption, and if they are willing to contribute by the rules (especially for content accuracy and sockpuppetry), I'm more than happy to see further contributions from the user. However before then, sockpuppetry and disruption by inaccuracy is a big fat no from my stance. LuciferianThomas 11:13, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Ah, one supports like. Not to paint a bad picture on RoyZuo, but being blocked in two wikis for uncivil behaviour and IDHT respectively doesn't seem to have stopped them from failing to actually get the point yet again. I won't dismiss what they say by their past history, but I will dismiss it for the fact that it is negligent the truth and accusative against the ones who actually care about accuracy and compliance. LuciferianThomas 11:23, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Commons:Administrators'_noticeboard/User_problems/Archive_110#RZuo, and it clearly isn't this user's first time defending the disruptive anonymous photographer with actions that do not comply to rules. Why would they now be caring about the truth? They won't. LuciferianThomas 12:00, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Just quickly skimming through Category:Yau Tong Station: I have already spotted 3 more files that are mislabeled, and are in fact taken in Tiu Keng Leng station. I guess here's your evidence? LuciferianThomas 11:57, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

If anyone tries to argue that Yau Tong and Tiu Keng Leng stations are easily mistaken for their similar livery, this is one example of the anonymous photographer labeling things completely and impossibly wrong. LuciferianThomas 12:03, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

+1 I don't think this contributor is a "net negative" for the project, but the issues he's causing are difficult to track because they are spread over literally hundreds of different (non-disclosed) accounts, and he is impossible to communicate with, and those are both problems. Enforcing a one-account policy restriction (with small carve-outs for things like disclosed alts or pseudonyms maintained for safety reasons) seems more than reasonable to me. ReneeWrites (talk) 10:13, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I do not understand at all why RoyZuo brought up this issue as an alleged supporter of the anonymous photographer. This was debated almost everywhere because someone was really busy to get the anonymous photographer blocked or globally locked for socking by whatever means possible. There were two unsuccessful attempts on Commons to have the photographer blocked. The latest ate issue was also ported to Meta, meta:Requests for comment/Blatant sockpuppetry in good faith, where the request was recently denied. I really think that this should stop now, unless someone thinks that yet another attempt at Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/User problems might have a different outcome. --Robert Flogaus-Faust (talk) 11:19, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

@Robert Flogaus-Faust the hostile actions against the user are succeeding and files are blindly massively deleted Commons:Requests for checkuser/Case/Anonymous Hong Kong Photographer 1.

It takes 1 sysop to give in to the relentless harassment and delete all the files, but it will take many more users' collective effort to fend for the contributor and their contribution, because they never dispute the attempts at deletion or defend themselves.--RoyZuo (talk) 22:03, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Then so be it. It is obvious that the anonymous photographer's socking without disclosure of the other accounts is not according to the rules, even though this had been tolerated for some time. The reason for the mass deletion is that there are FoP issues with many of the files. --Robert Flogaus-Faust (talk) 11:47, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

@Pi.1415926535 "They are also violating multiple account policy..."

that's not a policy, but merely an article, a write-up https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sock_puppetry&action=history .

all the policies (on meta) are here meta:Category:Policies. that page you quote is not part of them. RoyZuo (talk) 19:30, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Those alledged issues with "massive uploading of copyvios" etc seem to be massively overstated. First of all, these issues are not "these photos have been stolen from some photo agency and are falsely claimed own work" as it appears to being framed, but only FOP, where the uploading does not violate any copyright laws, only Commons policy which does not allow restrictions on commercial use. Then, the people who regularly nominate massive amounts of images uploaded by this person seem to be unwilling to use VFC for their mass nominations, which makes proper review of those DRs an incredible pain. Just a week ago I spend over AN HOUR copy-pasting keep under over 250 DRs, where the nominator apparently carelessly misinterpreted some FOP law (while reviewing them even longer before, and this is a pain when the files are in 200 seperate DRs instead of one or a handful). Those +250 (!!!) DRs have all been kept. The people witchhunting this anonymous guy keep creating massive numbers of questionable DRs, where commenters are unable to keep up with - most of the DRs have no comments as it is de facto impossible to properly review and comment on all of them. Also, many of the "issues" claimed at Commons:Requests for checkuser/Case/Anonymous Hong Kong Photographer 1 like "Using strange names in accounts.", "User pages only created as galleries." or "Indirect disclosure of personal information." are such non-issues to the point that they are laughable. Points such as a single instance of "Intentionally removing sockpuppetry tags." where it is zero indication that this was intentional, or "Systematic, but inconsistent categorization." with zero source, feels like "I just don't like that" instead of being based on any policy whatsoever. ~TheImaCow (talk) 00:46, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

@User:Krd has aparrently just casually deleted thousands of files uploaded by this anonymous person with the reason "created by abuser", without any consideration for anything. Where exactly is this mentioned as a valid reason at Commons:Deletion policy and how isn't this an act of massive vandalism? ~TheImaCow (talk) 00:58, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

I browsed through a good percentage of their files laat night and a lot of them had FOP issues. Its pretty clear that isn't something they know or care or about. Regardless, its super unrealistic to expect other users to sift through and nominate their uploads for deletion. Especially given the sheer amount of socks. That's on them for using so many alts and not following the guidelines on a basic level. --Adamant1 (talk) 01:14, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

okay, and I just browsed to some random of their galleries at User:Gindcheoutarkoadf_OK, User:GISTZIS rAhsueLLS pxwomc, User:GEEHAWUMENKIN 106, User:GAUAI Shfj 992833 --- +1000 images, maybe five where I'd say "not FOP compatible", ~15 redlinked images, none of the DR's I checked had any comments. Perfectly acceptable rate. ~TheImaCow (talk) 02:04, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

I'd keep the images of food myself. All the ones of store signs, packaging and the like are probably copyrighted though. Not to mention there's SCOPE issues with a lot of their photographs. I really don't see how most of the images don't go against the whole "must be realistically useful for an educational purpose" thing.

I forget where it is right now, but one of the policies says something about someone's personal vacation photos not being educational. That's essentially what these photographs are. 25 random, mundane shots of a hotel room the guy was staying at. Realistically how many photographs of a slept in hotel bed do we need on here? They are just using Commons as a personal file hosting site at that point. It would be a super pedantic time waster to separately nominate all of those images for deletion. --Adamant1 (talk) 02:19, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

I mean, there are also a ton of photos of items in shops in MTR stations. I have absolutely no idea what the photos are even trying to express for some of them, not to mention the other disruptive bad naming and categorisations. LuciferianThomas 13:30, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

One problem about interacting with HKTA ("Hong Kong Throwaway Account") is that, because they only use an account for three to five days, it's impossible to tell them that what they're doing is inappropriate. If you leave HKTA a message after an account's activity period, it won't get seen. I wouldn't call this "socking", per se, since there's no attempt to pretend that this isn't yet another HKTA account. I've spent hours analyzing HKTA's thousands and thousands of photos from art galleries and auction houses, identifying paintings and hunting biodata so as to ascertain whether a given photo is copyvio, and I do not feel that there is anything abusive going on here. DS (talk) 14:20, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Another very important question: do you believe that all the HKTA accounts are the same person? Because there's really only three options, and they all strike me as wildly implausible (even though one of them has to be true): that one person is doing all this, that multiple people are doing this independently, or that there's an organized effort to do this but it's been kept secret. DS (talk) 14:43, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Maybe we can determine this with the camera model used in the EXIF data. If it is the same, the images are most likely taken by the same person. However, HKTA do uses multiple camera models throughout the years, but generally they use the same model at one time period. Tvpuppy (talk) 14:58, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

It's weird but plenty of people use multiple throwaway accounts on these projects. Maybe the person works for the government or is otherwise in a position that requires anonymity. Looking through their photos they clearly stay in a lot of hotels and eat out a lot. So it wouldn't surprise me. It's not my area of expertise, but IP hopping doesn't seem like an effective way to stay under the radar on here. So it makes sense to do it this way if they are trying to stay anonymous because of a job or something. --Adamant1 (talk) 00:05, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

tldr: chatgpt summary:

A prolific contributor has uploaded over 110k photos to Wikimedia Commons for nearly 20 years but faces harassment due to unusual habits, including using multiple accounts and inconsistent file naming. Some demand bans, while others defend their contributions. Concerns include copyright violations and difficulty in communication. A one-account restriction is proposed to improve tracking, but opinions remain divided.

The conversation revolves around an anonymous Hong Kong photographer using multiple accounts on Wikimedia Commons. Some users believe this violates policies, while others argue the issues, like sockpuppetry claims and mass deletions, are overstated. The contributor's anonymity complicates communication, and their images often face deletion due to copyright and educational use concerns. There are debates about whether multiple people are behind these accounts and whether the community's reaction is fair or overly pedantic. The discussion highlights challenges in balancing policy enforcement and contributor rights.

thx.--RoyZuo (talk) 08:35, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Priority licence review - VOA

Since voa funding will be or is cut soon, their websites and youtube channels might soon shut down. as such, licence reviewers might wanna prioritise these files:

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=VOA+deepcategory:US_government_images_review_needed
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=VOA+deepcategory:US_government_videos_review_needed
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=VOA+deepcategory:License_review_needed_(audio)
4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=VOA+deepcategory:License_review_needed_(video)
5. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=VOA+incategory:License_review_needed
6. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=VOA+deepcategory:YouTube_review_needed

in total about 1000 files. RoyZuo (talk) 09:49, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

It's also important to have Wayback Machine snapshots of the source webpages --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 13:24, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I think it would be good if some bot(s) made sure all external links in the references on Wikidata and in file descriptions are archived (may be a problem if always archives the media as well – I think for Commons it only needs to make sure the website is archived without its video as well). Prototyperspective (talk) 11:39, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Aren't all VoA files public domain? Thus, license review is not needed and the tag should be removed from all files in that cat. Instead what would be good to prioritize is uploading all remaining VoA videos not yet on Commons in case these can't be found elsewhere anymore soon. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:39, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Arent all usa govt files pd? why review for them then?

The problem is, until a reviewer verifies that the file is indeed sourced from and produced by voa, its copyright cannot be confirmed. RoyZuo (talk) 13:52, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

For instance, i just uploaded File:美國陪審團的否決權 VOA.mp3 from https://voa-audio.voanews.eu/cant/2013/12/11/b9173473-1903-43bf-9fd4-c8ccdc20e763.mp3 , but i cant record the source evidence because Special:Upload doesnt allow imports from voanews.eu yet, and url2commons doesnt allow mp3, so i have no choice but to add the licencereview template. RoyZuo (talk) 15:04, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

 Comment Content created by VOA are in the public domain, but VOA also uses content from 3rd party sources. These are not automatically in the public domain. Yann (talk) 11:27, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Flickr - possible change of licensing?

Went to Flickr's search to look for suitably licensed photos of a topic. Seems it is no longer possible to search on Flickr: I got a splash screen requiring signing in to Flickr, with the search results blurred out and unclickable, so I couldn't search for photos. I suspect this may contravene Creative Commons licensing, and thus mean that Flickr is no longer a legitimate source, like when 500px stopped being a legit source in 2018? - MPF (talk) 00:44, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

The licenses for photos have not changed, nor has the ability to view the license of an individual file, so this does not change anything about copyright or our ability to transfer files here. The logged-in restriction on the search function doesn't have anything to do with copyright. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 00:53, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

For me Flickr works normally. You need first search something and after that one can filter results using licence. I am not logged in to Flickr (and I am accessing it from EU if location matters) --Zache (talk) 01:09, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Same for me. Weird change even if it doesn't effect copyright. --Adamant1 (talk) 02:02, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Same for me as Zache said. try https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-asc&license=4%2C5%2C7%2C8%2C9%2C10&view_all=1&text=love . RoyZuo (talk) 07:03, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

i clicked the link and did a search. everything works? RoyZuo (talk) 08:38, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

i also get the popup registration wall now.--RoyZuo (talk) 11:16, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

btw, i made User:RoyZuo/SearchFreeMedia.js that makes it easy to "look for suitably licensed photos of a topic". RoyZuo (talk) 08:41, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello. I got the same popup while visiting this (which I saved in my mobile browser's bookmarks). BTW, I'm accessing it from the Philippines. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contributions) 11:46, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the popup goes away if you press the Esc key. But no - if photographers have licensed their photos under a Creative Commons license, that license is valid regardless of any requirements the web site places on access to those photos. Omphalographer (talk) 21:19, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm not getting anything, though sometimes on a public network the search just doesn't load but doesn't prompt me to log in. Weird. Maybe there's too many people using flickr on your connection? Myrealnamm (💬Let's talk · 📜My work) 21:22, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks all! Pressing 'Esc' worked, though I had to do so multiple times in the search – thanks for that tip-off! - MPF (talk) 00:10, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Erotic paintings of the Qing dynasty

Hi, Many of these files do not a proper date and/or license. {{PD-Art}} should be replaced. At least {{PD-Art-two|PD-China|PD-US-expired}} should be OK for most of them. Also some English description would be useful. Help needed. Thanks, Yann (talk) 11:56, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

I tried one but couldn't find info. All are quite definitely made before 1911. This specific genre is called Category:Chungongtu. RoyZuo (talk) 15:38, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo: Thanks for your answer. I think these need renaming, and knowledge of Chinese is required for that. What is the approximate date of these? Yann (talk) 11:32, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

I tried to decipher the names and descriptions but failed. the paintings are chinese, no question. but these uploads were attributed to a vietnamese blog. the titles are vietnamese. i couldnt figure out what the original chinese titles might be. i also didnt find other versions in google reverse image search. RoyZuo (talk) 11:56, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

To be clear, i only tried a single file File:02 Bon mua vui xuan 2.jpg. i got exhausted and gave up. it's possible that some others can be found by google image reverse search, such as File:11 xuancunghoa (1).jpg. but now i fall into another rabbit hole of trying to sieve thru all sorts of content farms and unreliable web articles. especially problematic are web pages published after commons upload. they probably got the files from commons and then invented descriptions... RoyZuo (talk) 12:18, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo: OK thanks. So for now, I am changing the date to "Qing dynasty 1644–1911". Is it OK, can it be more precise? Yann (talk) 12:20, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

@Yann i think only if the original book is found, can they be more accurately dated.

it's also possible that some might be produced in ming dynasty.

btw, "xuancunghoa" (vietnamese) = "xuan cung hoa" = "春宮畫" (zh-hant), alternative name of "春宮圖" "chungongtu". RoyZuo (talk) 12:31, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

also some might be japanese works, which has another cat Category:Shunga. RoyZuo (talk) 12:33, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

OK. I will let someone else looks into this. I only want to fix the date and the licensing. It would certainly be interesting to compare these to Indian artworks from the Kama Sutra. Yann (talk) 12:36, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

@Yann if you want to compare, here are a ton more chinese and japanese works: https://old.shuge.org/ebook/yanben/ https://lapis.nichibun.ac.jp/enp/UserMenu . :) RoyZuo (talk) 19:45, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I give up about File:11 xuancunghoa (1).jpg as well.

i think this one and the other ones of the same style and quality in the category might have been scanned or captured from a 2002 book with ISBN 9787204062874 , which itself is a compilation of chungongtu from who knows where. (the descriptions in the book might not be accurate. the book seems to be published for making money by collecting all such porn the editor could find.) the real originals are probably in The Palace Museum (Q2047427) or some chinese museums or lost. RoyZuo (talk) 12:51, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Czech collections

Close to 100 digitised art collections in Czechia now available online. A large portion of this should be public domain material. Someone may want to look into the most efficient way to upload what is PD. - Jmabel ! talk 05:07, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Anyone with enough skills and drive, please have a look at User:Fæ. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 01:02, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Currency of Portugal

Hi, What is the copyright status of Portugal currency before euros? No information at Commons:Copyright rules by territory/Portugal and Commons:Currency. This concerns File:Banknote 20 escudos de 1940 - Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque.jpg and Category:Portuguese escudo banknotes. Thanks, Yann (talk) 17:23, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Can anyone fix File:Winsor McCay (1914)Gertie the Dinosaur.webm?

File:Winsor McCay (1914)Gertie the Dinosaur.webm is the subject of today's featured article on English Wikipedia. The file was clearly ripped from a DVD without any deinterlacing though. It shows really bad combing wherever there is motion. Could someone with a video editing program run it through a deinterlacing filter and fix it? Thanks! Nosferattus (talk) 21:02, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: ^ Nosferattus (talk) 21:04, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

AI-generated media

After Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Krutyvuss the uploader carefully adds these files to various articles and returns them if removed. Is this enough to consider these files in the project scope? --Quick1984 (talk) 05:24, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

• Pings to earlier involved users @Krutyvuss, The Squirrel Conspiracy, and Kadı: . --Quick1984 (talk) 05:24, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

  I apologize. I didn't understand the problem. Krutyvuss (talk) 05:35, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

@Quick1984: It shouldn't be enough. This crap doesn't need to be in articles.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 07:41, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree. If so, we need more grounds for deletion beyond COM:PS, while COM:INUSE allows to get around restrictions easily. Quick1984 (talk) 08:18, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

@Quick1984: I removed the bogus uses, nominated all of them for deletion, and warned the uploader.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 09:32, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:44, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

typo in upload wizzard (uselang=de)

Hi, there is the question Ja, der Urheber hat das Werkdie unter einer freien Lizenz veröffentlicht in the Upload Wizard on the second page when the license is checked. Did not find the source where I could fix this. The problem is the missing space in das Werkdie. Either just das Werk or das Werk / die Werke? not sure. best --Herzi Pinki (talk) 08:49, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Pinging @Sannita (WMF).   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 09:33, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Translations are done on translatewiki: https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&showMessage=mwe-upwiz-source-ownwork-origin-option-others-freelicense&group=ext-uploadwizard-user&language=de Pyb en résidence (talk) 15:51, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

 Done I fixed the text on translatewiki. Will soon be corrected on Commons. GPSLeo (talk) 19:13, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:43, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

19th century documents with no specific licensing - OK to upload?

I thought I'd check before I did this. If I wanted to take an image from this document, a scan of a page from 1874 San Francisco city directory on Archive.org (here: ), would that be allowed? There's no specific Creative Commons or other copyright info on the website, but the image is 150 years old and should be in the public domain. Peter G Werner (talk) 04:45, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

It should be fine. Any chance you could upload the whole book though? --Adamant1 (talk) 05:34, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

I suppose I could. As with any Archive.org source, it's simply a matter of downloading from there and uploading it on Wikimedia. I'm not sure what multipage document formats Wikimedia accepts, though. Peter G Werner (talk) 16:32, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

@Peter G Werner: For a full book, PDF or DJVU are appropriate. You probably don't have enough edits here yet to be allowed to upload those, though. I think for that you need autopatrol, but I'm not certain. Does someone know what level of rights are required to upload PDFs? Really annoying that it is not documented in several likely places I looked. In any case, if I'm right that it's just autopatrolled, we can probably grant you that. I don't want to go off half-cocked requesting that if it's not sufficient, though. - Jmabel ! talk 17:00, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

The edit filter which blocks PDF uploads from new users only requires autoconfirmed - not autopatrol. Omphalographer (talk) 19:28, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

DJVU? Never heard of that format. More like déja vu. Myrealnamm (💬Let's talk · 📜My work) 21:20, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

DjVu. - Jmabel ! talk 01:10, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

@Peter G Werner: I imagine you are already autoconfirmed, but if not you can request the "confirmed" right at Commons:Requests for rights. Do the upload with either Commons:UploadWizard or Commons:Upload (don't try to do it as a cross-wiki upload from en-wiki). - Jmabel ! talk 01:13, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Alright, uploaded: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_Directory_for_the_Year_commencing_April,_1874.pdf

BTW, Internet Archive has many years of this old directory series, scanned and uploaded by San Francisco Public Library. Peter G Werner (talk) 00:10, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Old enough for {{PD-old-assumed-expired}}. --HyperGaruda (talk) 05:57, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

The IA Upload tool can copy PDFs and DjVus from IA to Commons, along with most metadata. (Just don't try to tell it to convert PDF to DjVu, it can't do that any more.) Sam Wilson 01:20, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Documenting levels of rights

We seem to be lacking documentation of several aspects of the rights associated with "autoconfirmed"/"confirmed", and quite possibly other levels of user rights.

As far as I can tell, neither Commons:Autoconfirmed users nor Special:ListGroupRights says anything about needing "autoconfirmed"/"confirmed" to upload a PDF (this limitation is implemented through a filter, so I suspect it cannot be reflected in Special:ListGroupRights, but all the more reason it should be in Commons:Autoconfirmed users). Conversely, both of these assert that an "autoconfirmed"/"confirmed" user can overwrite an existing file; I'm pretty sure that they no longer can, except for their own uploads.

Would someone who works more in this area than me please update documentation? I suspect there are other similar cases. - Jmabel ! talk 01:27, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel: PDF uploads are monitored by Special:AbuseFilter/281. Mediawiki:Abusefilter-disallowed-pdf-new-user-upload has the untranslated disallow message for that. Technically, that filter requires any user wanting to upload a PDF file to have '"confirmed" in user_rights'. That equates to "autoconfirmed" user group membership (conferred automatically four days after registration) or "confirmed" user group membership (granted earlier by an Admin; currently at three members). New users (less than 180 days old or with editcount < 50 and not "confirmed" or "autopatrolled") may have also triggered Special:AbuseFilter/153 by trying to cross-wiki upload a PDF image. Mediawiki:Abusefilter-warning-cwuploads has the untranslated disallow message for that. See COM:Confirmed for more info. Users that try to overwrite files for which their username was not the first editor trigger Special:AbuseFilter/290. The proposal to "Limit file overwriting to users with autopatrol rights" was accepted with many supports and one weak oppose 15:19, 23 September 2023 (UTC). After an implementation problem in phab:T345896 and testing, Special:AbuseFilter/290 went live with the Disallow action 09:35, 28 October 2023 (UTC). MediaWiki:abusefilter-warning-file-overwriting has the untranslated disallow message for that. I advise users that they may request COM:AP at COM:RFR when they think they are ready (once they have made more than 500 useful non-botlike edits); having that should allow them to overwrite. They may also request an exception for a particular file at COM:OWR.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 05:53, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

That's all well and good, but Commons:Autoconfirmed users states that autoconfirmed users can overwrite files, and that appears not to be true. When I [Commons_talk:Autoconfirmed_users#"overwrite_an_existing_file" raised this issue several months ago] on the corresponding talk page, I was effectively told I was wrong. A rule implemented through a filter is still a rule, and I think our documentation should reflect reality. - Jmabel ! talk 16:13, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree with Jmabel, we should adjust that information to fit the current state of things where autoconfirmed users can overwrite their own files but not those of others. Putting this information in more places might help avoid extra work for Jeff G. in the AbuseFilter Reports and might slightly increase my workload at COM:OWR and COM:RFR (which I do not mind). Abzeronow (talk) 20:13, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel: Please go ahead, I don't have the bandwidth for that right now.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 23:26, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I fixed the couple of things I'm sure of, but I suspect that there are other issues that should be documented and that I don't know about. - Jmabel ! talk 04:51, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Grouping fallas by Sector Faller

@Coentor @Simon Burchell @Ponscor @Joanbanjo @Dorieo @Rafesmar

Junta Central Fallera web here/aquí/ací.

• English (valencià & castellano a continuació(n))

I've recently been working with the categories of fallas, in a more strict sense, those of the commissions falleres that are part of the Junta Central Fallera.

First, I should point out that the Junta Central Fallera integrates the fallas of five municipalities: València, Burjassot, Mislata, Quart de Poblet, and Xirivella. It extends beyond València municipality but doesn't include all the fallas from everywhere.

Second, the Junta Central Fallera organizes these commissions falleres into "sectors." There are 26 sectors into which the more than 300 commissions are integrated.

These sectors have names similar to neighborhoods or municipal districts of Valencia, and in some cases, the fallas are actually all located in that neighborhood or district. But most often this isn't the case.

In the case of Russafa, the neighborhood is divided into two sectors, Russafa A and Russafa B. In the case of Quart de Poblet-Xirivella, the sector extends entirely outside the municipality of València. In the case of Rascanya, it includes fallas from the municipal district of Pobles del Nord. There are other similar cases.

The idea I'm planning to implement is to group the commissions falleres into categories by Sectors Fallers. Each sector has between 11 and 19 commissions, which is a reasonable number to work with, without being absurdly small. It reflects an "administrative division" that is used (for prizes or in the Ofrena, for example) and is practical for organizing Wikimedia activities.

Furthermore, adding these categories does not mean stopping the use of others in parallel. For example, the Falla Plaça del Poble-Sant Roc category, a falla in Carpesa for which we don't yet have any images, would be in both the Carpesa category (for the neighborhood) and the Faller Sector Rascanya category (for the sector). There's no problem with that.

I'm sharing all this to clarify what I'm trying to do and in case there are any additional comments or anything I might have missed.

• Valencià

Recentment he estat treballant amb les categories de les falles, en un sentit més estricte, les de les comissions falleres que formen part de la Junta Central Fallera.

En primer lloc, he d'assenyalar que la Junta Central Fallera integra les falles de cinc municipis: València, Burjassot, Mislata, Quart de Poblet i Xirivella. Va més enllà del terme de València però no inclou totes les falles de tot arreu (no hi són les de Sagunt o Gandia, per exemple).

En segon lloc, la Junta Central Fallera organitza aquestes comissions falleres en “sectors”. Hi ha 26 sectors on s'integren les més de tres-centes comissions.

Aquests sectors tenen noms similars a barris o districtes municipals de València, i en algun cas passa que les falles realment estan totes en aquest barri o districte. Però no sempre és així.

En el cas de Russafa, el barri es reparteix a dos sectors, Russafa A i Russafa B. En el cas de Quart de Poblet-Xirivella, el sector s'estén totalment fora del municipi de València. En el cas de Rascanya, inclou falles del districte municipal de Pobles del Nord. Hi ha més casos semblants.

La idea que pense executar és agrupar les comissions falleres en categories per sector faller. Cada sector té entre 11 i 19 comissions, que és un volum raonable per treballar-hi, sense ser absurdament reduït. Reflecteix una “divisió administrativa” que es fa servir (per a premis o a l'Ofrena, per exemple) i que resulta pràctica per organitzar activitats wikimèdiques.

A més, afegir aquestes categories no implica deixar d'usar-ne d'altres en paral·lel. Per exemple, la categoria Falla Plaça del Poble-Sant Roc, una falla de Carpesa de la qual encara no tenim imatges, estaria tant a la categoria Carpesa (pel barri) com a la de Sector Faller Rascanya (pel sector). No hi ha cap problema.

Us comunique tot això per deixar clar el que intente fer i per si hi ha algun comentari addicional o alguna cosa que em puga haver deixat fora.

• Castellano

Recientemente he estado trabajando con las categorías de las fallas, en un sentido más estricto, las de las comisiones falleras que forman parte de la Junta Central Fallera.

En primer lugar he de señalar que la Junta Central Fallera integra las fallas de cinco municipios: València, Burjassot, Mislata, Quart de Poblet y Xirivella. Va más allá de València pero no incluye todas las fallas de todas partes.

En segundo lugar, la Junta Central Fallera organiza dichas comisiones falleras en “sectores”. Hay 26 sectores en los que se integran las más de trescientas comisiones.

Dichos sectores tiene nombres similares a barrios o distritos municipales de València, y en algún caso sucede que las fallas realmente están todas en ese barrio o distrito. Pero no siempre es así.

En el caso de Russafa, el barrio se reparte en dos sectores, Russafa A y Russafa B. En el caso de Quart de Poblet-Xirivella, el sector se extiende totalmente fuera del municipio de València. En el caso de Rascanya, incluye fallas del distrito municipal de Pobles del Nord. Hay más casos similares.

La idea que pienso ejecutar es agrupar las comisiones falleras en categorías por sector fallero. Cada sector tiene entre 11 y 19 comisiones, que es un volumen razonable para trabajar con ellos, sin ser absurdamente reducido. Refleja una “división administrativa” que se usa (para premios o en la Ofrenda, por ejemplo) y que resulta práctica para organizar actividades wikimédicas.

Además añadir esas categorías no implica dejar de usar otras en paralelo. Por ejemplo, la categoria Falla Plaça del Poble-Sant Roc, una falla de Carpesa de la que aún no tenemos imágenes, estaría tanto en la categoría Carpesa (por el barrio) como en la de Sector Faller Rascanya (por el sector). No hay problema en ello.

Os comunico todo esto para dejar claro qué intento hacer y por si hay algún comentario adicional o algo que me pueda haber saltado.

B25es (talk) 07:31, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

@B25es: May I ask: what content do you plan to categorize by Sectors Fallers? I would hope this won't become an additional category on every single image of Catalonia or Valencia. - Jmabel ! talk 16:26, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

These categories are for falla related stuff only. It would be used for categories such us Category:Falla Jesús Morante i Borrás-Caminot. That category is included in two categories:

1. Falles de València (which includes all commissions falleres in València municipality). This category should include many commissions, but those in Xirivella, Burjassot, Quart de Poblet and Mislata. That means about 340 included commissions.
2. La Punta (which is the municipal neighborhood). València municipality is divided into 19 municipal districts, each one composed of several neighborhoods. In this case, the neighborhood where the falla commission is placed belongs to the municipal district of Quatre Carreres, but the commission is "falleraly" adscribed to Poblats al Sud sector. Of course, all other things in La Punta not related to fallas are not subject to Sector Faller categories.

By adding category Falla Commissions of Poblats al Sud sector we are clearly grouping fallas within their sectors. And the other categories would not be removed.

Of course, individual files do not need to be categorized in such way, as they are often included in Falla categories or are not relatable to a particular falla group.

Another advantage is that fallas in the Benimàmet-Burjassot-Beniferri sector can be grouped together. This sector includes two different neiborghoods in València plus those in the municipality of Burjassot. Something similar happens with Quart de Poblet-Xirivella.

B25es (talk) 17:21, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

So, in short, handle this parallel to how we handle Catholic dioceses. - Jmabel ! talk 04:55, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Stamps

Large majority of the files are postage stamps, but there is no real integration of the subcategories. Rathfelder (talk) 11:50, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I tried to move image over to "postage stamp" categories as much as I could a few years ago but a couple of users edit warred me over it and continued creating "stamp" categories for images of postage stamps in mass. So I just gave up. Now its just a huge mess. I don't see that changing when the one or two main users active in the area don't care though. --Adamant1 (talk) 13:18, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Adamant1: Can you provide some links related to your edit wara and their category creations? Then we can see exactly who and what you are talking about. 11:27, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

@Ww2censor: It wasn't "my" edit war and it's been awhile so I don't have links to the exact edits at this point. That said, User:אוריאל כ was (and still is) one of the main people creating "stamp" categories, mainly for stamps by subject. If you look at their talk page there's multiple messages about it and creating "by year" categories for years where the stamps are copyrighted. Anyway, they just don't care about either one and I got tired leaving them messages about it. So they have been creating "stamps by subject" categories in mass for the last couple of years. A.Savin also edit wared me a couple of times when I tried to move some stamps of Germany to ones specifically for postage stamps. File:Sonderbriefmarke Leuchtturm Helgoland asv2023-07 Ausschnitt2.jpg being one example where he reverted me with the message "no improvement." So I dropped it. The continued mass creation of "stamp" categories by User:אוריאל כ is the main hold up to things being organized better though. --Adamant1 (talk) 12:42, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

1. It should be noted that many categories of stamps also include stamps that are not postage stamps, such as telegraph stamps, and more (especially stamps from fifty years ago or more). According to the proposal, we will have to split a large portion of the categories into several for no good reason.

2. There are so many categories of stamps, and far fewer of postage stamps. It's impractical to change so many categories.

3. Most people, when they say stamps, mean postage stamps, so I don't think this change is particularly helpful. אוריאל כ (talk) 17:50, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware this isn't a proposal. Although there was kind of one already in Commons:Categories_for_discussion/Archive/2022/06#Category:Philately where it was decided to create separate categories for postage and Cinderella stamps. Outside of that, Category:Stamps should be a top level category for adhesive stamps in general. Whereas, Category:Postage stamps and Category:Cinderella stamps exist for specific types of adhesive stamps. There's nothing abnormal about postage stamps and Cinderella stamps being mixed in a general category for stamps though. The problem comes in when you create "stamp" categories for images just of postage stamps.

On your third point, to most people the term "stamp" is used in reference to ink stamps, not postage stamps. Also, if you look at Wikidata or Wikipedia most of the items and articles use "postage stamp." So your simply wrong there. And as to how having categories specifically for "postage stamps" is helpful, it allows us to separate images of them from ones of Cinderella stamps. Which usually have a different purpose and licenses. As well at makes it clear that the categories aren't for ink stamps. It's actually not that much work to fix the problem either. Except that people like you refuse to stop creating stamp categories. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:20, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Source of source

I got a pdf from a website, which had made the pdf from jpegs from another website.

Is there a standard for recording such "source of source"? or should i just make a bulleted list? and sdc model? RoyZuo (talk) 19:28, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

• I don't think I've seen anything better than a bulleted list. - Jmabel ! talk 04:56, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Children riding donkeys

We seem to have a Category:Children riding horses, but not for riding donkeys.Smiley.toerist (talk) 09:33, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

@Smiley.toerist here you go: Category:Children riding donkeys. Ciell (talk) 10:07, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Cute pic by the way. ;-) Ciell (talk) 10:08, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:19, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

In which category?

I occasionally come across images like File:Ahmad ibn Abd Allah.png. In which category should they be put? Wouter (talk) 16:03, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

That would be Category:Names in Arabic calligraphy, though I sometimes find the designation "calligraphy" questionable (for example). --HyperGaruda (talk) 20:54, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Is there any more specific term for these circular renditions? Omphalographer (talk) 00:01, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I've seen them being called medallions here and roundels elsewhere. They seem to have originated in the Ottoman Empire. --HyperGaruda (talk) 03:58, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

It's kind of tangential, but I've been wondering what the educational value of these things are for awhile now since a lot of them are unused and have no descriptions. Does anyone have an answer to that? --Adamant1 (talk) 04:00, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

My hypothesis: depictions of people are rare in the pre-modern Islamic world, so editors came up with derivatives of these roundels to have at least some visual decoration on Wikipedia articles of Muslims. There is a very lengthy discussion going on related to them at en:Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles. --HyperGaruda (talk) 04:20, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Galleries without {{Gallery page}}

Is there some way to see all galleries without the {{Gallery page}} template at the top?

I think one way to do that would be to have the template add a category and then use a search like deepcategory:"Gallery pages" -deepcategory:"Galleries with gallery page template" after a day or so or is there another way?

I think with maybe few exceptions if at all, galleries that have a corresponding category should have that template at the top so even people new to this site and not yet familiar with the categories at the bottom of the page can find more images of the subject instead of assuming the – usually few – files in the gallery is all media on the subject that exists on Commons.

Many galleries are very outdated and contain just few images (e.g. found galleries about software linked from the Wikipedia article about the software have screenshots of the software up to a decade ago) and I found out that currently if a Wikidata item has both Commons gallery (P935) and Commons category (P373) set and no value in the multilingual links for Commons (a very common case), then the linked Wikipedia articles with a template usually in the External links section at the bottom link to the gallery. Sometimes the category is linked without a template which is not as visible and does not explain visitors that this a gallery page etc, example: Special:Diff/1013381391. I'd like to add this template to galleries that don't have it set if nobody else does it. Hopefully, it's not that many galleries though since if it's many probably a bot doing this would be best.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 01:34, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

First I've heard of this one. I've always used {{Maincat}}. Is there a significant difference between them and a reason this one should be preferred? - Jmabel ! talk 03:40, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I think I read a comment by you about the Gallery page template so I wonder why you'd use the Maincat template instead. Yes there is a very significant difference, see Sometimes the category is linked without a template which is not as visible and does not explain visitors that this a gallery page etc; also the Gallery page is the template specifically for this, not Maincat. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:20, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I'll go try to find mine & fix them. - Jmabel ! talk 16:16, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Using Special:Search, limit "Search in" to just "(Gallery)" and then search for -insource:"Gallery page", though for me, it opens a can of 127k worms; not sure if that is what you had in mind. I've noticed some results are maintenance galleries... --HyperGaruda (talk) 04:08, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

1. -hastemplate:"Gallery page" might be neater.
2. if that template were to be applied to every single page, then it should become part of mediawiki software and automatically displayed on all gallery namespace pages?

RoyZuo (talk) 09:59, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks you two, so this search query shows 127 k results which is far too many to edit manually by hand. I also could not get the VisualFileChange tool to work on that query result. I'll probably make a bot work request about this. Re 2: yes, I think that would be best but that may be difficult to implement and not feasible in the near future. If you know of a way to make it happen please comment – one difficulty is determining the category. As can be seen in the diff example, the category is sometimes named differently than the gallery so for these instead of {{Gallery page}} one has to add {{Gallery page|cat name}}. If categories are set, that is the category not starting with (Category:) "Gallery pages " (with very few exceptions that's just one category). Prototyperspective (talk) 15:34, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Wiki Photo competition

I would like to use the images for the wiki photo competition but its showing them as duplicates or already uploaded so i am failing to have them uploaded. Would like to reupload them. MohsenTaha (talk) 07:10, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Check those files that it says are duplicates – looks like they were already uploaded then. If that's not the case, refresh the page with ctrl+R and try again. If that doesn't work try the alternative upload form at Special:Upload. Prototyperspective (talk) 01:08, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

@Bantuarab:

• To upload a new version with minor improvements visit the file page and click the "Upload a new version of this file" link. This may not work if your account is less than 4 days old.
• If your file is new, maybe you are seeing the "This title has been used" error message in the Upload Wizard. Just put in a different, unique title. For example something more descriptive or put the date the photo was taken at the end of the title; instead of "Frogs" try "Frogs in Namibia March 2025" etc.

Commander Keane (talk) 02:57, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Mirror of destroyed USGOV websites

As websites like usaid.gov were perished, some people built a mirror of US government websites. More info here

Enjoy! --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:52, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Added it to the Wikidata items about the organizations (and in one case a new item for that NOAA Climate website). Prototyperspective (talk) 01:06, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Commons:Categorization requests

Could categorization requests please be added to Commons:Community portal? There users can add or take up categorization tasks. For people looking for things to do on Commons, that seems like a perfect way to get started and it would help get things done. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:51, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

'Statistics by field' and 'Category:Data graphics'

• Category:Statistics by field is about domains where statistics are applied and does not contain only statistical graphics. It contains lots of subcats and files.
• Category:Data graphics is meant to only include data graphics. Is missing many or most subcats / files.

Could somebody help populating the latter category using the former category?

Moreover, there are separate Category:Charts and Category:Statistical charts which could make it more difficult and less organized to find things. I think this kind of content is important (e.g. heavily used in Wikipedia and of public interest) and it needs some thought and work to make things clear and well-organized.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 18:57, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

How do we handle imaginary flags that have been uploaded as real?

Tfjbhugdw has uploaded a number of flags that purport to being flags for localities, mainly in Hawaii. However,

• A cursory Google search for flags for these localities turned up no matching images, except for the flags for Bristol, Rhode Island & Burrillville, Rhode Island.
• In Hawaii, localities are unincorporated as incorporation is only at the county level. Therefore, I know of no means by which these localities could choose such flags.
• Tfjbhugdw has cited no sources. Each images source is listed as Own work.
• None of the Hawaiian locality flags have any Hawaiian themes.

I do not know if there is a contingency for deleting fictional images that masquerade as something real. They certainly must be at least renamed, as I believe they give a false impression that they are actual flags for these localities. Peaceray (talk) 05:37, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

At least this image looks like AI upscaled slop regardless of if it's a real flag or not. Personally, I'd nominate all of them for deletion as OOS. --Adamant1 (talk) 05:54, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

@Peaceray and Adamant1 I warned them to stop uploading oos content for both of you. See also Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Tfjbhugdw.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 06:23, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

For flags that are still in use or cannot be deleted right away for some other reason, there is also Category:Fictional flags of historical entities (to be replaced and deleted). These are (afaik) all OoS. --Enyavar (talk) 06:46, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

@Enyavar: See also Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Fictional flags of historical entities (to be replaced and deleted).   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 13:25, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Just want to remark: the issue here should be flags that are truly imaginary, not flags that are unofficial. For example, the Cascadia flag is unofficial but widely used, and certainly belongs on Commons, while File:Potentional flag of Cascadia.png appears to be made up by a user, and I have no idea why we are hosting it.

I have no idea which is the case for these ostensible Hawaiian flags. - Jmabel ! talk 16:21, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I could not find the flags that Tfjbhugdw posted for Hawaii through a Google search. For instance, Tfjbhugdw uploaded File:Flag of Waimānalo, Hawaii.svg, & doing a Google source on (waimanalo OR Waimānalo) flag simply fails to retrieve the image from anywhere else. Its not even that these files are unofficial. Nobody, aside from Tfjbhugdw, seems to use these images.

Tfjbhugdw added the images for the fictional flags to Wikipedia articles. I have deleted these images in enwiki except for the flags for Bristol, Rhode Island & Burrillville, Rhode Island, which do seem to be versions of real flags. Peaceray (talk) 17:16, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

These uploads are part of a pattern of recent abuse; see also Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Dksbucyxn917, Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Dinttjurfjg15, etc. Omphalographer (talk) 18:58, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

The all seem to be socks of User:Jurisdrew or at least this user is. --Adamant1 (talk) 03:45, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

AI being creepy

Not necessarily calling for action, but I'd just like to share this gem of an AI's botched attempt at upscaling low-resolution faces: File:মাছ শিকারে ফলো হাতে ছুটছে বাউতদল.jpg. Be sure to check out the image at full resolution --HyperGaruda (talk) 13:20, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't see what you mean and also think you should clarify it along with what you suggest to do if there's anything. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:57, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

I doubt the man at left was this cross-eyed, and no human beard ever looked the way his is depicted. I could go on, but I think that's enough. - Jmabel ! talk 16:31, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

That is pretty bad. I've flagged as it {{AI upscaled}} and {{Bad AI}}, to categorise it as such. We should check whether other uploads from this user have the same problem. Belbury (talk) 14:31, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

That's quite horrible. Any reason not to list it for deletion discussion? If it's loosely based off some original real free licensed photo, the original might be in scope, but this AI nightmare is not. -- Infrogmation of New Orleans (talk) 21:14, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

If you're putting it up for a DR, then you'll get lots of comments like "Keep, COM:INUSE"... That said, I also have the opinion that AI upscaling mostly never does any good. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 23:41, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Why not just reach out to the BNWP community Trade (talk) 02:46, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Does anyone have the original image? If it's freely licensed, it could be uploaded to Commons and used instead. If it's not freely licensed, it's a derivative of a non-free image and should be deleted. I see no reason to keep this. ReneeWrites (talk) 10:51, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

@Infrogmation: Please see Commons:Deletion requests/File:মাছ শিকারে ফলো হাতে ছুটছে বাউতদল.jpg.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 13:12, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

How to avoid addition of categories bij Location info?

The File:Eizer J church.jpg has 3 categories (Eizer, Churches in Eizer and Cemeteries in Belgium) that can only be removed by deleting {{Location|50|47|57.9|N|4|32|54.6|E|scale:6000_heading:SE}}. How can I remove these categories without removing the location info? Wouter (talk) 09:29, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Somehow the categories managed to end up in the image title EXIF metadata. It has been 17 years since you uploaded the file, so I don't think you remember if you changed the EXIF title before uploading, do you? --HyperGaruda (talk) 10:38, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Wouterhagens, as mentioned above, the categories are there because the code for them was included in the EXIF caption (in the row “Image title”). The caption is currently this: Sint-Maria-Magdalena church in Eizer (Overijse), Belgium. {{Location|50|47|57.9|N|4|32|54.6|E|scale:6000_heading:SE}} [[Category:Eizer]] [[Category:Churches in Eizer]] [[Category:Cemeteries in Belgium|Eizer]]. Tvpuppy (talk) 10:45, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I don't think I changed the EXIF ​​before uploading, but it's been too long ago. I could download the image, remove the EXIF ​​info and re-upload, but since it turns out the image doesn't appear in any of the 3 categories I'm leaving it as is. Wouter (talk) 15:37, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

This looks suspiciously like a MediaWiki bug - might be worth reporting. EXIF data shouldn't be parsed as wikitext. Omphalographer (talk) 20:23, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

VFC dark mode fixes

Hi, I've made several dark mode fixes to VFC, if you guys could try adding importScript('User:Matrix/vfc.js') to your common.js, then changing to dark mode, which is on the sidebar if you are using Vector 2022, that would be very useful. Please report any bugs here or on my user talk page. —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {user - talk? - _uselesscontributions} 20:16, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

@Matrix: It looks good so far, but I haven't done any action with it yet but simple prepending.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 21:06, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

@Matrix: {{SharedIPEDU}} could use some love, too.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 21:10, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

 Done will upload VFC changes soon. —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {user - talk? - _uselesscontributions} 21:44, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

@Matrix: Thanks! Creation of Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Edujab7 went well.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 23:05, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

@Matrix: Also, Template:SharedIPEDU/doc (I tried purging), the "Deletion criteria" in Template:SD/doc/list presented by {{TemplateBox}} presented by Template:SD/doc; and the archived headings in cases like Commons:Requests for checkuser/Case/Nv7801 could use some love.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 08:47, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

I did the first two, though the problem with the third one is that Template:Rfcua is substituted so I would have to manually fix it for all checkuser cases before 2025. Whilst this is possible, I don't really think it's a good use of my time. —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {user - talk? - _uselesscontributions} 11:46, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Category for technology / software in public administration?

Are there any categories on that subject? I was looking to categorize File:Migration to LibreOffice and ODF for 30,000 clients in government of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.webm but I couldn't find such a category. Seems like a large subject with quite a few potential files here that would be contained in it.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 19:41, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

This is a related article and there could be a subcat for open source software in public administration: Adoption of free and open-source software by public institutions (it doesn't have any media files). I could not find even a somewhat related category so far from where files could be moved to a new subcategory. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:16, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

There is a lot in this area we don't have. I've also found it very difficult to work out where to tie in (for example) Category:Seattle City Light employees to indicate that these are people who work for a government (the City of Seattle). - Jmabel ! talk 14:42, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Is there a page to request changes to templates?

Seems like {{Edit request}} which sets the backlog category Category:Commons protected edit requests (or any subcat) is only for templates that are protected.

Is there a page where user not very experienced with editing templates can request edits to templates in general, including nonprotected ones? Maybe there are users experienced with editing templates that are looking for things to contribute and/or are simply far more skilled/experienced/efficient with editing templates that could implement the requests.

For example, I'd like to request that the category search box {{Search in category}} gets modified so that the namespaces parameter works again. Seems like changing that template to use MediaSearch instead of Special:Search makes that parameter not work anymore – it also only searches the file namespace also when for example using {{Search inside category |1= |namespaces=Help,Commons,Category,Data }} in e.g. Category:Pages with coordinates. (This is the page it should open.)
Prototyperspective (talk) 13:20, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

In such cases I'd usually ask at the template talk page or on the talk pages of the users who created the template or have worked on it. If those users are high-profile template contributors, their talk pages might be watched by other users who might chim in to help.

I'm also wondering whether Commons:Village pump/Technical would be an appropriate venue for such requests. Nakonana (talk) 10:08, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but usually these aren't watched by many active users. VP/T is about anything technical and may not be watched by those people or not checked because there's too many posts. For example, if somebody experienced with editing template was looking for tasks to do, then there seems to be no page and VP/T may not have any anymore due to them gotten archived. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:37, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Image need fix

I wish to report that File:Paolo Monti - Serie fotografica - BEIC 6334857.jpg is left-right mirrored. Need to be fixed. Many, many and many thanks in advance for all you can do!!! --Gatto bianco (talk) 19:20, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Use {{Flopped}}. Quick1984 (talk) 05:31, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Search for Geograph uploaded images not working?

I wanted to use a Geograph image in en.wiki, by uploading it to Commons (https://www.geograph.org.uk/reuse.php?id=4552154), and searched on "This search should find it if it has been [uploaded]". It found nothing, so I tried to upload it and was told that it already existed, as it does: File:North Bar Within, Beverley, Yorkshire - geograph.org.uk - 4552154.jpg. So it looks as if the search built in to Geograph isn't finding these files, as the string "geograph 44552154" isn't present, although the two words, separated, are in the file name.

Perhaps I should be complaining to Geograph rather than here - or is there a formal channel for communication between the two systems, through which this could be fixed? (Or am I misunderstanding or overlooking something!) PamD (talk) 21:41, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

This is indeed something for whomever is in charge of Geograph's website to fix. The search string should be without quotation marks and I do not think requires searching via insource:. So http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=geograph+4552154&fulltext=Search&ns6=1 instead of http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=insource%3A%22geograph+4552154%22&fulltext=Search&ns6=1 --HyperGaruda (talk) 04:37, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

The original definitely used to work, I think it was matching inside the geograph template eg ((geograph|57771|Chris Upson)) . But yes, doesnt seem to work, now seems to be replaced with some sort of strucuted data. The problem with searching 'unquoted' is it can have lots of false matches, eg `geograph 200` there may be lots of pages/images with `200` in somewhere, but it's not the actual image id. Any ideas how would match the id specifically - now that it buried in 'structed data' ? (I'm a Geograph developer) --BarryHunter (talk) 08:47, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Category for land

usually meant for buildings but construction work has not begun, or been abandoned, or such land as results of demolition of buildings originally occupying it? RoyZuo (talk) 19:29, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

What you mean is probably described in d:Q11448974, but there is no category. Wouter (talk) 20:27, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Unfinished buildings and Category:Abandoned buildings maybe. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:08, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo Maybe Category:Brownfields? Sam Wilson 02:26, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

This could be a parent cat of Category:Brownfields, but "brownfields" implies contamination. - Jmabel ! talk 15:25, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Maybe Category:Estates? Nakonana (talk) 10:00, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

No, definitely not Category:Estates. - Jmabel ! talk 15:26, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

@Wouterhagens's suggestion building site (Q11448974) currently has the english description as "place where a building is located, formerly was located, is under construction, or will be constructed"

what i'm thinking of is exactly "place where a building formerly was located, or will be constructed"

they are not natural lands (not yet developed for any purposes), agricultural lands (developed for agriculture) or construction sites (construction has begun).

perhaps Category:Building sites is good enough.

i found a legal jargon that might be close to what i imagine: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/vacant-lot . RoyZuo (talk) 08:45, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Vacant lots, accurate? RoyZuo (talk) 08:48, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

According to this, it's just land that is not being used so that would be much broader than buildings but construction work has not begun, or been abandoned, or such land as results of demolition of buildings originally occupying it. I'd suggest to simply create a new category about the subject and maybe add the two cats I mentioned to it. If there is in fact some cat that you don't know of that's about the same somebody would eventually notice and merge them. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:46, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

See also Category:Urban infills. Category:Vacant lots in the Netherlands fit well with building site (Q11448974). I think the idea of @Prototyperspective of creating a new category is the best. Wouter (talk) 14:29, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Why does no one ever email permissions-commons@wikimedia.org?

Even if the uploader owns the rights to the photos they upload 95 percent of the time they never bother to email permissions-commons@wikimedia.org with a written permission. Instead they just continue to reupload the deleted images over and over again until they eventually gets banned or takes their frustration out on the community that their images keeps getting deleted

Are the instructions really that complex?--Trade (talk) 06:06, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

@Trade: could you provide links to the instructions that these users are getting?

Last year's Crosswiki Uploads report recommended for the Upload Wizard:

Surface the VRT process in the upload process (this is #9 at the bottom of the file page).

If that has not been implemented and you can think of a way to achieve it, even in a small way, it may help for future iterations of the Upload Wizard. Commander Keane (talk) 07:50, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

I am talking about the user talk template created by the use of{{No permission since|month=|day=|year=}} --Trade (talk) 17:50, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Convenience links: {{File permission}} goes on the user's talk page. {{No permission since}} on the file page.

The talk page instructions are complex.

1. There is no indication to visit the file page to see the shiny "confirm copyright via email" button (release generator). The VRT release generator is nice to use, but could be enhanced. If the first step included "WAIT! If you place a link to an appropriate webpage with license information on the file page you don't need to bother with this messy email process" then you could simplify the talk page instructions and add a blue "Confirm copyright" button. People like wizards, not wading through documentation.
2. As far as I can see, the Upload Wizard doesn't include a pathway for providing a link to a webpage if you have already selected "own work", nor is there VRT integration. The UW could display your deletion log at the first step saying "Hey, we noticed you have been struggling, have you followed the instructions on your talk page?".

My first suggestion is doable now, you may want to look into it (and it will help the second suggestion if that is implemented). Commander Keane (talk) 01:39, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Umbrella cat for US GOV removals

Hi!

I created an umbrella category that covers (or aims to) all deleted files from the new Trump government here: Category:2025 United States government online resource removals. It makes it easier to cover the growth of deleted files.

Regards, --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:31, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Many study-specific short videos in category

What do you think of the many videos in Category:Experimental psychology?

Please first take a look. Another example is Category:Videos of biology.

Category:Videos of anatomy is a case where they have been moved to subcategory "Videos of biological studies relating to anatomy".

These clips were uploaded by the User:Open Access Media Importer Bot years ago.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 00:09, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: when you say "the many videos in Category:Experimental psychology" do you mean the videos in Category:Videos of experimental psychology or something else? And when you ask "what do you think" are you asking are they in scope, are there copyright problems, are there personality rights issues, do we personally like them, or what? - Jmabel ! talk 00:52, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

User Allforous just moved these there. So the other category is now a better example. Note that in the former cat there is this video File:Harm Aversion video explanation.webm which is not study-specific short clip. In other categories there are more videos like it, here there seems to be one exception. Below are some examples.

Prototyperspective (talk) 01:13, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

IMO, many of the videos imported by the Open Access bot - especially the ones used as experimental stimuli in neuroscience papers - are out of scope for Commons, as they have essentially no meaning outside the context of the papers they accompanied. I appreciate the intent of that import job, but it was perhaps overly broad. Omphalographer (talk) 03:51, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Agree. There are over 10,000 of these clips and the problems are:

• that they flood categories where it's then hard to see the actually useful videos / media and
  • (another example cat is Category:Videos of science which before I subcategorized a bit had 10 k files directly within it and even a category only containing subcategories is better than it being flooded with these clips)
• that they are a time sink for contributors who categorize these or deal with files that drown under these clips and
• that They can also substantially degrade the quality of search results, making this site significantly less useful

I also appreciate the intent and agree that they "have essentially no meaning outside the context of the papers they accompanied". I think something should be done:

1. Either deleting all of the clips from studies uploaded by the bot except for the very few clips that are in use (and any clip with more than e.g. 50 views per month if one can query for that) or
2. removing all their categories except for an Open Access Media Importer Bot-specific one like Category:Videos from studies uploaded with Open Access Media Importer which is removed from cats not specific to the bot since it screws up deepcategory search results (this doesn't address the search results but one could maybe add a deboost template) or
3. moving all of these to some separate Wikimedia project / related site like https://mdwiki.org/ or
4. something quite similar to any of the above to the same effect

I think option 1 would likely be the best (easiest to implement, most effective) option. If this isn't the right place to discuss this (and I think it is), maybe somebody or I should make a request for comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:55, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't think file deletion discussions for singular files are the right approach – there's over 10 k of these, and that's the reason they're a problem to begin with as they make so many categories unusable.

However, there are 2 deletion requests now: one and two (latter is a 1 second audio). I wonder whether other users have come across categories containing many of these clips. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:53, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

People spend so much time deleting single files. Yet here's 10 k of which just a few are useful outside the context of a study whose media is not useful. How can a video of a one second click be useful for example? There's so many of these and they make many categories unusable and drown the high-quality useful content in them such as the one on the right (moved the files by now). Moving files into subcategories also doesn't do anything about the search results. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:23, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

VOA likely to be shut down, help copying information

With the very likely shutdown of the Voice of America, I've begun copying what I can to Wikimedia Commons, before they start deleting their various websites. I'd encourage anyone who has a few moments to go to the VOA websites and copy anything that is copyright-free for use here. Especially if you speak another language, there's a trove of good information there that will likely be of interest in the future. I doubt much is getting archived by the current US administration either, making this even more important. Oaktree b (talk) 15:26, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I was just going to find people together for this, too.

Does anybody know of any coordinated effort anywhere? reddit?

If not, I'd start a telegram group chat for people to share updates real-time. RoyZuo (talk) 18:06, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I already asked on Reddit, let's see --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 18:48, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

@Oaktree b Some diligent people are working on it and I got the following links as recommendation:

• https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Voice_of_America
• https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
• https://tracker.archiveteam.org/voiceofamerica

The last link shows the amount of preserved data. 142.48 tebibytes at 2025-03-27 16:15 UTC+0. Hope it helps! --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:15, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

That's wonderful news. Thank you. Oaktree b (talk) 17:30, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Now it's 150.54 TiB. It shows how urgent it is --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:42, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

API failures

None of my uploads are working: I gett error messages like An unknown error occurred in storage backend "local-swift-eqiad" and Could not store upload in the stash (UploadStashFileException): "An unknown error occurred in storage backend "local-swift-eqiad".". Can anyone help? mr.choppers (talk)^-en- 02:14, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Oh good, it's not just me. Was trying to move+replace a file, and got

"Error while moving the page. A detailed description of the error is shown below: API request failed (backend-fail-internal): An unknown error occurred in storage backend "local-swift-eqiad". at Sun, 30 Mar 2025 02:14:39 GMT served by mw-api-ext.eqiad.main-8674c8fcdf-rwhwf"

Trying move+replace with a different one similar-but-different error, and some images are failing to load until one (or several) refreshes. I think this is an API error and it clears up by itself in awhile, based on past experience with a similar error while trying to upload in the past. - The Bushranger (talk) 02:18, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Probably the same problem as the one described here: Commons:Help desk#Errors in uploading media Tvpuppy (talk) 02:19, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks - sadly, this means I am missing my "children are going to bed" window for uploading photos. mr.choppers (talk)^-en- 02:20, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Oh hey, it just worked. Thanks, restless boffins! mr.choppers (talk)^-en- 02:29, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Probably related to phab:T389734. Yann (talk) 11:05, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Why PetScan on Category:"Camels" returns 2'622'475 results ?

Hi, Can someone explain to me why this (PetScan) produces 2'622'475 results ? thanks --JotaCartas (talk) 03:39, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Probably because of this subcat: Category:Uploaded with VicuñaUploader. It is 3 subcat down of Category:Camels, which will be included in the query you linked.

Camels -> Things named after camels -> VicuñaUploader -> Uploaded with VicuñaUploader Tvpuppy (talk) 04:07, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Ok, I see now. category "VicuñaUploader" is a subcategory of "Things named after camels". Should we remove it ? JotaCartas (talk) 04:17, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Checking the history, it was added to the category “Things named after camels” 5 years ago by Tuvalkin. VicuñaUploader is indeed named after the animal Vicuña, but I’m not familiar with the animal so I’m not sure if it is technically a camel or not. Maybe someone else more familiar with it can chime in? Tvpuppy (talk) 04:30, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

OK, I await other opinions, thank you very much for your help. JotaCartas (talk) 04:34, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Things named after categories are always a problem in our category system. For example you are looking for photos of a person and you get photos of a different person because the photo was taken in a building named after the person you were looking for. GPSLeo (talk) 04:57, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I have already notice that, but usually we get a few false positive results. In this case we get 2 millions, that is the problem. JotaCartas (talk) 05:05, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

• Yes, I think it should be removed for example because of the problem you just described.
• Furthermore, this case raises the subject whether we should delete or somewhat isolate the category "Things named after xyz" because they introduce these issues where entirely unrelated files are shown in such scans (including deepcategory walls of images [here just showing 1 camel image among unrelated ones])

• 

  Thanks for looking into this and asking about it here. It's part of a major issue of Commons as is. There are many more cases like that and that's partly exactly why I call again and again for a way to see source of categorization for files so one can fix flawed categorizations causing unrelated images showing up in the results. – see the screenshot and A way to see why files are included in the specified cats (source of categorization)

Prototyperspective (talk) 13:14, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

To Tuvalkin and everyone. In fact the animal "Vicuña" is not a "Camel" it only belongs to the "Camelidae" family. But that's not the problem! In my opinion it should not be in any "Named after any animal" category. I'm waiting for my opinion to be supported by some users before making the removal.--JotaCartas (talk) 06:01, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

I'd say remove it. - The Bushranger (talk) 08:05, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

A few points:

• The English word "camel" is an acceptable stand-in for what is more accurately termed a "camelid" (zool. fam. Camelidae) — that makes this categorization correct.
• Removal of correct categorization is… ungood.
• If search quearies yield incorrect results, then correct the searching algorithm.
• If otherwise correct search quearies yield unexpected results, then adjust your expectations or your search queary.
• Categories are meant to be browsed, not to be fed as raw text to a brute-force search engine.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 13:09, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Category:Uploaded with VicuñaUploader appears to be a hidden maintenance category that isn't even used directly. At least IMO such categories shouldn't be a part of the normal category structure. As users don't generally browse through or add files to them directly anyway. Nobody searching for an image of a camel is looking for one of a Floral design on the wall of a temple in the village of Maluti though and it follows that if something is in a subcategory of a particular topic then it should relate to it somehow. So the category should be removed. I'd say the same for similar categories. They should really be in their own space that's totally separate from the general category system. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:10, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

I agree with your opinion, which was also very well defended, thank you JotaCartas (talk) 21:34, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Low-quality structured data

I continually find people having added low-quality structured data, mainly depicts (P180), to content I've uploaded. It's not exactly wrong, it's just beside the point. For example, File:Solvej Schou, Michelle Threadgould, & Lucretia Tye Jasmine.jpg is a photo of three reasonably notable writer-musicians, but it is described as depicting blond hair (Q202466), name (Q82799) (presumably because of name tags), microphone (Q46384) (two microphones are visible in the picture, but not in a way that would make this useful as a picture of a microphone), and laptop (Q3962) (twice; there is a barely visible laptop near the lower right corner of the photo).

Is this actually considered desirable, and I'm just out of step? If not, would it be appropriate for me to remove this cruft? - Jmabel ! talk 16:44, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

After a quick glance in the history: these additions look like a perverted usage of Commons:ISA Tool. It may be kind of a game here, with a high score going towards those who put in the most SDC data, even when the sense of using a particular claim is marginal at best. Remove it, I'say, it does not advance our projects. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 17:14, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Lots of just plain wrong structured data too: e.g. some ignorant user uploads a public domain photograph from 1875, listing themselves as the author, and the "date" as upload date (May 5, 2021, ha!), and faithfully stupid bots dutifully transcribe such incorrect metadata into the structured data. And unfortunately it takes several more steps to correct or remove false metadata than to create it. --Animalparty (talk) 00:48, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Again, is it appropriate for me to remove this cruft when it shows up on content I uploaded? Does it have to be outright false (rather than merely useless) for me to remove it (e.g. laptop (Q3962) in the above example)? - Jmabel ! talk 01:31, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I'd remove it. On Wikidata's end they usually stick to having one best value for something like that. I don't see why Commons shouldn't take the same approach. Otherwise structured data is kind of useless. --Adamant1 (talk) 02:09, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I would strongly advocate to remove it, too. Knowingly or negligently using not suitable structured datasets is against Commons' aims, as far as I understand them, as it degrades the value of the repositories, making them somewhat less usable. It's comparable to introducing typographic errors in Wikipedia articles; both are behaviours that should be avoided to the best of one's abilities. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 03:11, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Jmabel removed the depicts which I agree is best. There is Commons:Depicts and depicts modeling documentation but they aren't really fleshed out and explicit; the project is in documentation and development limbo. I hope things like Commons:ISA Tool are no longer being used like this today.

In this case I guess Solvej Schou (Q133530638), Pop Conference (Q125552983): 2019 and location of creation (P1071): Museum of Pop Culture (Q1384356) could be applied. I was going to add these but the interface fails when I try to add value 2019 to a point in time (P585) qualifyer for the conference. So I gave up [shrug]. Commander Keane (talk) 05:42, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

@Commander Keane: "I hope things like Commons:ISA Tool are no longer being used like this today." I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying something may have changed since yesterday when these were added using ISA? - Jmabel ! talk 05:58, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Oh dear. For some reason I thought you were discovering 2019 additions closer to upload time. Someone needs to look into this then. Commander Keane (talk) 06:23, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I was going to say something about that myself. Structured data shouldn't be added by inexperienced users and/or through semi-automated tools like this. --Adamant1 (talk) 06:38, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

@Donia (WIA) organises campaign377 that involved Jmabel's file. There are gift card prizes associated. I will leave a talk page message and hopefully they can drop by and comment.

The wider issue of semi-automated tools needs evaluation. Commander Keane (talk) 08:37, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

It should be no surprise that the person who added this cruft is "winning" the contest. - Jmabel ! talk 16:14, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Depicted statements can refer to objects that only takes up a small amount of space on the photo

That doesnt make the data bad in and of itself Trade (talk) 17:33, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

@Trade: True. Are you saying that it is useful to add the particular values that were added to this particular photo, or are you just saying that, like categories, something can be worth adding without it being a large portion of the photo? If someone added Category:Microphones or Category:Laptops to this photo, that would also be cruft, no? - Jmabel ! talk 00:42, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

I think a category like "People sitting in front of microphones" would be appropriate if it exists but none of those two. This isn't a very rare incident, lots of files have SD like that and this case just shows how SD is not the panacea it's sometimes thought of by some and has quite some issues even if it was used widely – Trade makes a valid note, those depicts statements aren't even wrong which just shows how many items miss how many depicts statements OR how the ones set aren't necessarily helpful. If one was looking for a representative or good image of a microphone one would be better helped by going to the category. One could make a good case for keeping these depicts statements. I think categories are best for file contents and SD is mostly useful for keeping things out of the categories that aren't really helpful there. With that I'd think of metadata like captured-with:NikonD5000 or "Videos without audio" which could eventually be used by filters in the search, but one could also argue SD could be used to describe each and every thing in files. Prototyperspective (talk) 01:04, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

I use "depicts postcard" for scans of postcards. It's essentially worthless for anything outside of that though. I certainly wouldn't add something like "depicts ink" or "depicts cardboard" to an image of a postcard. There's a difference between something being "wrong" and being totally pointless. Like adding "depicts dirt" to every photograph taken outside. Your seriously missing the point of structured data if your saying people should do that because it's technically correct. Not Prototyperspective of course, I mean it more generally. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:22, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

@Adamant1: I'd actually be surprised if "depicts" is the best choice for that, but I'm a little surprised not to see something obvious at [Commons:Structured data/Properties table]]. Maybe genre (P136) or digital representation of (P6243)? I'd be interested in knowing how others are doing this. - Jmabel ! talk 16:27, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel: Yes please remove it. You get a light warning message if you upload something via the Upload Wizard and add more than three items to the structured data, which signals to me that it's really not supposed to be inclusive of background details, but meant to focus on the subject matter of the image itself. ReneeWrites (talk) 09:18, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

To me, the big question is: why on earth is there a contest encouraging something that we nearly all seem to agree is counterproductive? - Jmabel ! talk 16:29, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel: The top contributor to it User:Blessingedi76 was asked on their talk page to not use the depicts statement that way 10 days ago and it seems like they didn't get the message going by the edits to File:May's medical report.png from today. Perhaps you could give them a more stern warning now that it's clear no one thinks what their doing is a good idea. As I suspect it would deal with a lot of this if they got the message. --Adamant1 (talk) 21:17, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Bonsoir désolé je m'en excuse. Blessingedi76 (talk) 21:21, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

You are still doing it! Trade (talk) 04:18, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

I dont think the user understands what it even means for something to be depicted Trade (talk) 04:11, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Do you think limiting the scope of these contests is a solution Trade (talk) 04:13, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

I just had a look at the tool. It says:

• "Name the different elements that you can see in this image". That could be changed to:
• "Name the most important element(s) that you can see in this image".

@Eugene233 is active in ISA development, maybe they can investigate this change and if it is desirable.

The drop down selector has woman/human/sitting/writing/woman writing. I assume the contest organiser sets those. For future contests I would put more specific examples such as Âmiran Kurtkan Bilgiseven (Q29572828).

women reading (Q30672195) is an artistic theme and I don't know enough about Wikidata to comment on the appropriateness of that one.

The future validity of these contests is another matter. Commander Keane (talk) 10:47, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm not personally all that interested in warning each individual user who follows the terribly conceived instructions of an apparently official contest. If someone else wants to do that, fine. What I'm interested in is stopping having contests that basically invite vandalism. - Jmabel ! talk 14:46, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

That's fair. The contest should be stopped either way. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:54, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

On Commons:ISA Tool and its subpages, the inventors claim that bug reports and feature requests should go to Phabricator... Well, here we go: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T390391 . Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 18:00, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Just as a practical idea/solution: There are multiple sources for tagging data which don't match on the wanted abstraction level. For example, most archives and museum databases have a different abstraction level for their keywords than what is wanted in Wikimedia Commons for depicts (P180) values. Also, machine vision generally will create values which are at different abstraction level, and crowdsourcing will do the same. I think that a proper solution would be to have a different property than depicts (P180) for imported, generated, or tool-assisted crowdsourced values. New property should require information about source and method as qualifiers. As the abstraction levels are source specific if values aren't good to be usable alone, but would be usable when combined with other data (for example, if we want to confirm things to be correct or not using multiple methods or we need filters in SPARQL queries). --Zache (talk) 18:56, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

This whole SD depicts thing just requires ever more efforts and complexity when what's depicted can mostly be read from the categories. Also, machine vision generally will create values which are at different abstraction level That depends on its configuration and its technical design quality. Machine intelligence could for example read the categories and the with machine vision look at the image to see which things are depicted prominently. If SD was to be actually used (and widely set), then I think in a way that's similar to that which also cut or reduce the vandalism / polluted data (as arguably in the example) and maintenance needs. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:07, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Commander Keane and others. First of all, forgive me for my late reply but these days we have Eid al-fitr so things are getting too busy. As you mentioned, I am the creator of ISA 377 campaign, moreover, I am the facilitator of the tool if anyone face difficulty or challenges, or if we have an issue like what you provide here in this discussion. Actually, many useful campaigns were organised using ISA in several years, and in each campaign, we share in our social media posts and on commons page this link of guidelines and a published video on youtube to explain how to edit successfully in ISA campaigns. As I started organising ISA campaign last year, this is the first time to face this issue but I'd appreciate your suggestions. I read one suggestion not to have it as a contest, we may try not to offer prizes the next few campaigns to make sure that participants in the the upcoming campaigns not chase quantity but quality. I may also add the link of the guidelines inside the campaign page on ISA. I also read a suggestion in one discussion (not sure here or another place) suggest editing the sentence on ISA main page to make it explain that the one should depict the most prominant items. I'd appreciate all your suggestions as our aim is the same which is to improve images of wikimedia commons. For the current campaign, I see you already blocked some of the users, and the campaign has ended so no need to furtherly block them, I may discuss to prepare an online meeting and invite all the participants to explain the negative points and how they can participate successfully in the future. Best. Donia (WIA) (talk) 12:31, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

T390302: concerning Wikipedia app uploads

I just saw Phabricator task T390302: Native iOS App upload flow to Commons.

It seems to be a way to upload files directly to Commons from the Wikipedia iOS app, a bit like the cross-wiki upload feature on desktop (note current meta RfC to restrict that feature).

I brought up the issue of iOS and the HEIF format on Phabricator.

I imagine the barrier to entry for Android users of downloading a specific Commons app for uploading means we don't deal with a bigger influx of dickpics and selfies.

The task quotes Wishlist and Village Pump requests for a dedicated iOS app. This is not a dedicted app, and it is unclear to me what advantages this flow would have over the regular mobile upload process.

I am not sure if it is just an idea or resources are being allocated. @HNordeen (WMF) started the task. Commander Keane (talk) 16:12, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

I would really like to have this. I would not use it as uploading from mobile is not part of my workflow, but I think it is very good to get new people. Especially for the Wiki Loves contests people already see the banner in the app if they could then directly upload their photos to Commons could lead to many more participants. If that is combined with the map the app already offers it is a really great way fill photo gaps for locations. GPSLeo (talk) 05:21, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi @GPSLeo thanks for responding I agree that it would be powerful to connect actions like uploading images to campaigns. This is something we've thought about, so it is helpful to know that it would be a welcomed feature. Just so you know, folks who read Wikipedia using the Apps do not currently see Central Notice banners like those for Wiki Loves contests. Central Notice is not optimized for display in the app, and most of the links that are included in banner lead to Web pages which we've learned is a confusing experience for App users. We have thought about investing in the creation an announcements system for all types of announcements, events and campaigns in the Apps that would lead to a user friendly experience. While we continue to think about an announcement system, what are your thoughts about sharing about events through other methods like the recent Community Updates module, or the Collaboration list?

Also, great idea re: leveraging the map the Apps already have - I mentioned that below too :) HNordeen (WMF) (talk) 21:47, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Something I would definitely oppose is having an upload feature for media files in the Wikipedia app for iOS but not Android.

I think an iOS Commons app next to the Android app would be good but not overly important and only as long as it doesn't take too much resources (note the Android app is so far developed just by volunteers).

Adding an upload-only feature for iOS and Android to the Wikipedia is something I'm unsure about. It's not something I'd consider important and the downsides may outweigh the positives – people may upload lots of copyvios and mundane useless low-quality pics. Generally, smartphone photos are less likely to be useful than other kinds of photos. Nevertheless, it could make it much easier to upload media and bring new Commons contributors and smartphone cameras have gotten much better. Not unlikely it could be quite a good thing but I'd suggest to first implement proposal m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Bots detecting copyvios on Commons (image reverse search etc) and maybe also some work in regards to (semi-) automatic categorization but this the importance of such in this context may depend on how many files will actually get uploaded that way. There's thousands of copyvios that lingered on Commons for years undetected. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:01, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective I agree there are tradeoffs between making it easier and more discoverable to upload from Mobile for folks who genuinely want to contribute, and the risk of making it too easy for folks to upload low-quality images, or copyright violations that cause extra burden for moderators. I’m aware of the history of quality issues from mobile uploads, and we would not move forward with something like this before coming to an agreement with the Commons community on a threshold for access, and how files coming from this source can be identified. I am imagining the flow could have similar steps and checks to the Upload Wizard, which has been improved recently to reduce copyright violations. Do you think that the user flow for upload wizard mobile version is a good place to start? HNordeen (WMF) (talk) 17:18, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

It may be best to reuse (or adapt) the code used for the upload wizard. The functionalities it has such as autocompletion of categories are useful and important. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:04, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective I beg to somehow disagree on the aspect of photos taken from phones, as a user who currently takes photos using a Samsung Galaxy A20 (see File:Pulilan Church 20230410-2jwilz.jpg, for example). However, I do agree with the possibility of several people using the app to upload copyvio images. We have been battling copyvios every day (Category:Copyright violations never gets empty for at least 24 hours), and new WEBP uploads are being uploaded at almost every hour. Some may be decent, like faithful PD 2D works or from freely-licensed Indonesian government sites, but the majority are questionable uploads.

I am not against the app or the WEBP uploads. What I mean is that there should be more effective, proactive mechanism to discourage or at least slow down the uploads of questionable files. This seems to have been discussed at Commons:Village pump/Archive/2024/06#Uploading while editing wikipedias: beneficial or problematic?, though the flow of problematic files hasn't slowed down. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contributions) 00:58, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Wasn't saying there aren't many good-quality / useful photos uploaded taken by smartphone cameras (I don't think we disagree in principle – I just would implement methods for spotting copyvios first if possible). This photo of yours of the object would be a better example btw. more effective, proactive mechanism to discourage or at least slow down the uploads of questionable files agree and most of these could be spotted via bots, mainly using image reverse search but possibly also using other methods to identify likely problematic files – these bots could also set speedy deletion templates or make it quick and easy to solve DRs. There could be more methods, yes – like not allowing webp uploads from mobile. Prototyperspective (talk) 08:00, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

@GPSLeo: as far as I can see, in the Wikipedia app you can't visit Commons without opening a browser tab. I'm not sure what happens when you click the Wiki Loves banner to find out about that project. If it makes your browser visit Commons, and you decide to upload a photo why would you need to upload in the Wikipedia app? Or you mean they see the banner and later when using the app they upload. The dynamic between mobile web and mobile app is interesting; you can't browse Commons categories for example to see if a location is already photographed. Having said all that, the Wiki Loves contests generate lots of new interest and anything to aid that is important. Commander Keane (talk) 12:07, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes if you click on a link to Commons inside the Wikipedia app it opens a browser inside the app and it is possible to upload files using this browser. But a native app is always much smother than a web browser. The most important feature would be to have a map like the Android app has. GPSLeo (talk) 13:33, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

What would the map be used for? Maybe it makes more sense to integrate Commons into the existing Nearby/Places map of the Wikipedia app so you have some toggle option somewhere to include Commons things and probably some filter functionality to enable narrowing down the type of Commons/Wikidata content you'd like to see (such only images set on Wikidata items vs all images with coordinates vs items with coordinates missing a photo etc). Prototyperspective (talk) 13:48, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

I would use it for confirming location and direction where photo has been taken. Another use case could be that if we are adding depicts then use map for selecting depictions and for filtering categories. Zache (talk) 09:19, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

@GPSLeo, @Prototyperspective I'm curious what you think about a similar idea, but that utilizes the existing map on the iOS Wikipedia App: The “Places” map on iOS currently shows a placeholder “W” icon if an article doesn't have an image. I can see a potential flow being: users click on an article without an image on the map, they're prompted to add an existing image from Commons to the article (similar to our current media insertion flow). They could use Commons search, or see suggestions from the image recommendations algorithm. What do you think about that idea? Another possibility is that if there are no image suggestions already on Commons, only then do we surface the upload flow to users (something like this would be possible if we've invested in the upload flow already). HNordeen (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Could be a good idea and may get more people to edit Wikipedia, it may depend on how difficult it would be to implement this: I think it would need to smoothly show the images in the category (but also consider subcategories) so the user can select one of these or if finding no suitable one select upload new photo. Currently, adding photos to articles is something basically too complex than what I'd do on a smartphone because it requires some browsing and searching around but if the app makes it smooth and easy it could be good. However, I don't know how many and why would use the map to do something like that; maybe few use it with the intent of making sure all nearby articles have a photo but I don't know how many that would be. Media suggestions more broadly nevertheless would be good and I think currently missing is considering which media is set on the Wikidata item which usually is a fairly representative or useful one. Also: do they enable some 'add missing images' mode in the map or do they tap on the placeholder image to add images? I think more users at least of the Wikipedia app who tap on an article item would like to use the map for discovering places and getting info about places etc. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:14, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I think the more important feature would be to have an upload link for all objects on the map also if the are already linked to a photo, many photos are bad or outdated. Taking photos has to be done outside where people are around with the app. The management for existing photos is something to be done at home at the desktop computer. I also see participation using the app only as an entry step for people to join our project. Later I want them to move towards taking photos with real cameras and editing them in a more professional way. GPSLeo (talk) 06:35, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Commander Keane, thanks for tagging me in the discussion here! I’m a product manager on the Mobile Apps team, working a lot on the Wikipedia iOS App. The task to Prototype Native iOS App upload flow to Commons is a proposed project for the 2025 Hackathon, so it’s just an idea at this point, and we’ll have to see if there are enough folks interested in working on it at the Hackathon. I’m happy for it to continue evolving as we hear feedback in this discussion & on the task.

The reason we are suggesting iOS first is because a few members of the iOS team are going to Hackathon, and because we were recently talking with volunteers about their ideas around an iOS Commons app. It focuses on the upload flow, because my understanding is that the primary pain point for iOS users is the lack of an easy way to upload media from their iOS device to Commons (let me know if you disagree).

I want to stress that if something is developed at the hackathon, it will just be a prototype, and we would not move forward with something like this before coming to an agreement with the Commons community on a threshold for access, and how files coming from this source can be identified.

This would not preclude a separate Commons app for iOS, but rather would be a simple way to give some iOS editors easier access to upload to Commons from mobile devices. It could also make it easier for image uploaders to add their images to Wikipedia articles. HNordeen (WMF) (talk) 17:17, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

March 2025 update from WMF Legal on "Vogue Taiwan and possible Copyright Washing" discussion

Hi, I’m LRGoncalves-WMF, from Wikimedia Foundation’s legal department, and I just wanted to provide an update to the Vogue Taiwan situation discussed here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Copyright/Archive/2025/02#Vogue_Taiwan_and_possible_copyright_washing. We reached out to Condé Nast to give them a heads-up about the CC license in their Vogue Taiwan videos and specifically asked them if the content posted on their YouTube Channel is in fact CC-licensed. A couple of days ago they replied confirming that all videos on their Vogue Taiwan youtube channel were not available for reuse. In their words: “All copyrights are owned by the Condé Nast global network. The CC license was applied due to an unknown error. We have immediately fixed it and updated all videos and settings on the Vogue YouTube channel back to the "Standard YouTube License.”

Based on their answer, the Legal Department can’t confirm that the stills of Vogue Taiwan videos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons are openly licensed. As Condé Nast’s counsel and some commentators above pointed out, the attribution of the CC-license was made in error, and not a deliberate choice to freely license these videos. LRGoncalves-WMF (talk) 12:09, 13 March 2025 (GMT-3)

@LRGoncalves-WMF: Thanks, I started Commons:Categories for discussion/2025/03/Category:Screenshot images from VOGUE Taiwan YouTube account.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 15:59, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

@LRGoncalves-WMF: Thanks a lot. I am deleting these files. Hopefully, they will be more careful about their license in the future. Yann (talk) 16:37, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

For the record, there are still videos on the Vogue Taiwan channel with the CC license as of today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJmSD03kJ0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir8ALM3zIs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq37b2GZzGQ  ${\displaystyle 999}$REAL 💬 ⬆   16:41, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Given that they had mistakenly included CC license in their videos for many years, it isn’t far fetch for them to also missed removing the license for some videos. Maybe we can include a note somewhere for uploaders in the future, so they don’t mistakenly upload the copyrighted images here? Tvpuppy (talk) 16:56, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Side note, can some edit (or delete) {{Vogue Taiwan}}, since the license template is not valid anymore? Tvpuppy (talk) 17:11, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Please see Commons:Deletion requests/Template:Vogue Taiwan. Yann (talk) 20:37, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Since we forgive licensing mistakes by Condé Nast it may be worthwhile revisting other cases like this Auckland Museum marked cultural permissions deletion case that was closed as "Kept: no valid reason for deletion -- CC licenses are irrevocable". Maybe it was a different scenario though? Commander Keane (talk) 20:56, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

IMO the opinion of WMF Legal here is quite equivalent of a DMCA by the copyright holder. It means to me that WMF Legal would accept such a request if ever they would send one. Unless we have a similar legal opinion about other cases, I don't see any reason to change our decision. However I very much like to know the answer to PHShanghai's question below. Yann (talk) 21:28, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

As would I. Are Creative Commons licenses non-revocable or are they revocable when the licensor is a giant corporation with a team of expensive lawyers? I agree with Yann that WMF Legal seems to be saying they'd agree to a DMCA and thus I believe Yann's actions to be correct in terms of protecting our site and protecting our reusers (although we should also alert our reusers to this situation with Conde Nast). Abzeronow (talk) 19:10, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I second this. Not protecting the copyright on Night of the Living Dead was also a mistake (and a far easier one to make than positively choosing a CC-BY license!) and we don't just all agree "Whoopsies: we'll just take this out of the public domain for you". It's disappointing to see us taking free use media down that is clearly valuable for our mission. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:52, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

@Koavf: IMO there is a big difference between Night of the Living Dead or similar cases, and Vogue Taiwan. There should have been a copyright notice for the film, as it was the distributor's duty to add one. While as Vogue Taiwan is not the copyright holder of these videos, the license was never valid. These licenses were not more valid than the ones added by license washing people we often see on Commons. I would not accept Condé Nast argument (We made a mistake.) if the free licenses were added by them. The whole point is to determine who is the copyright holder. Yann (talk) 19:53, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

That's a valid concern and I'm not suggesting that you did the wrong thing as such. I respect your decision-making, in case that was not clear. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:52, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't really buy this "mistake". Unfortunate mistake, true, but these were under a CC license and if we are now deleting these it means CC licenses are revokable, which would set a dangerous precedent. On the basis of good faith I would support prohibiting uploading new Vogue Taiwan files from now on (even if CC licensed on YouTube), but those already uploaded on Commons or still CC licensed on YouTube as of 13 March should unmistakably be kept. Bedivere (talk) 22:26, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

The question to me is whether Vogue Taiwan actually had the legal authority to release the videos under a CC license. If the copyrights are owned by some other part of Condé Nast, and there was never internal authorization for Vogue Taiwan to release the files under a CC license, then the license wouldn't even be valid in the first place. To me, it's equivalent to the situation where a PR employee of a company uploads the company's logo to Commons without their company's legal department authorizing them to do so. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 23:22, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

There's always the possibility that someone went rogue on his last day of work and slapped "we license everything CC-BY" on a bunch of media, but if the holding company that owns them is just so big or mismanaged that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing, that's not something anyone else should have to adjudicate. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:34, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

@Koavf It shouldn't have anything to do with anyone going rogue. If Condé Nast owns the copyright and does not share ownership rights with VT, then VT putting a CC license on it may be invalid, period. VT could even have a good faith belief that they fully own the video--doesn't matter. If that belief isn't actually true, then any licenses they issue are likely invalid. I do not believe that this is a case of joint-ownership, but look at this family of cases for an idea of how a court would treat a situation like this, unless VT clearly had sole ownership rights over the video. You said above "It's disappointing to see us taking free use media down", but I don't think this was ever free use media. Alyo (chat·edits) 21:52, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

"If" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. We can make some perfectly reasonable assumptions here. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:42, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

What are those assumptions? I see no one in this thread putting forth legally reasonable assumptions that result in a world in which VT had the authority to publish those videos under a CC license. Is is theoretically possible? Sure. But it makes no sense legally, it makes no sense given the IP policies on all CN sites, it makes no sense from a business structure standpoint, and we have a direct statement from the copyright owner saying otherwise. And for what, screenshots from youtube videos? I don't think this is a fight worth fighting. Alyo (chat·edits) 23:16, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

But these are big companies, not a single individual, who left videos with a CC license for years. It's technically possible Condé Nast doesn't even own footage from their photographers (just example), but we assume big companies know what they are doing when they create, publish and license content.  ${\displaystyle 999}$REAL 💬 ⬆   05:40, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Agree with Bedivere that this is setting a dangerous precedent. I believe the WMF legal department's communication with Condé Nast has helped clarify the situation. We can be confident that, moving forward, even if their videos are mistakenly CC-licensed again, these will be considered errors and should not be used. However, CC licenses are supposedly non-revocable, meaning that videos licensed as such within that timeframe should remain free to use, regardless of the reasons Condé Nast published them this way. 👑PRINCE of EREBOR📜 09:38, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

@Bedivere and Prince of Erebor: It doesn't matter if the CC licenses are revokable or not. The files should be deleted so that we aren't endangering our reusers with lawsuits (meritless or not). This is the same reason we shouldn't be hosting images by copyleft trolls. "Welcome to Commons! The repository of technically free-license images you'll probably get sued for trying to use!" Is it any wonder that people prefer paying $40 for public domain images on Alamy rather than getting them here? Nosferattus (talk) 01:11, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for the update. For the record; just want to clarify how the non-revocable part of Creative Commons licenses work in this case? What is the official statement of WMF Legal regarding that? Thanks. @LRGoncalves-WMF: PHShanghai (talk) 20:43, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

I will reply to @Yann's DMCA comment down here. Looking at the original post WMF Legal doesn't say to delete all photos, just that an error has been made. Rewarding companies that have hypothetical DMCA capabilities and disadvantaging organisations (and regular people) that don't is weird to me. Commander Keane (talk) 22:59, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

I'd +1 to the PHShanghai's question in a personal capacity, although I do wonder if the Foundation's Legal folks would even be able to offer an opiniongiven that this isn't an attorney/client situation. Associated with that question, I'd opine that Yann's administrative decision to delete all of these images without additional discussion of this new viewpoint was made too hastily. As I've done previously, I'd encourage Yann to be much more careful when taking unilateral administrative actions—especially in a case like this, where deletion means that images have been removed from probably dozens of Wikimedia projects and cannot easily be restored. Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 01:44, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Dozens if not hundreds of articles are now imageless because the Vogue Taiwan images were hastily deleted, with A list articles such as Adele and Billie Eilish. May I remind you that this decision to delete hundreds of images was done without any consensus of the community and was just a broad action applied. I also don't like how Yann is going about this, they templated me on my talk page for uploading some of those Vogue Taiwan images despite knowing WHY those pages were deleted. Quite rude. PHShanghai (talk) 04:57, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

I think that's just the automatic behavior in VisualFileChange  ${\displaystyle 999}$REAL 💬 ⬆   05:32, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Editors are responsible for the edits made by the tools they choose to use. If the tool is wrongly templating people in such cases, it shouldn't be used for them. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:18, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I still agree with the argument Yann made previously; what court or judge will accept "Sorry, but the license which was published by our subsidiary company there for years is wrong."?  ${\displaystyle 999}$REAL 💬 ⬆   05:34, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

If the license is actually invalid/VT didn't have the authority to publish it? All of them. Good faith belief/reliance isn't a defense to copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is a strict liability tort. You either did it or you didn't. Alyo (talk) 21:18, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Come on, these videos were up with a free license, by a company with apparent authority to do so, for years during which anyone could find them on YouTube and use without knowing about whatever internal situation Condé Nast had. No judge is going to tolerate a claim of copyright infringement against users for using the media under the terms of the license.  ${\displaystyle 999}$REAL 💬 ⬆   15:49, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@999real: Do you really want to expose yourself to that risk?   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 15:58, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@999real, I have limited experience in copyright law, but do not agree with this assessment of the situation. More importantly, even if I did agree with your assessment, I have no idea how that supports keeping the files, rather than just being thankful that users wouldn't be on the hook for damages accrued before the WMF/CN statement.

Regardless, predicting that a judge will decide that a 50/50 error leans to your favor is very much "we can get away with it", and so we must delete these files per the precautionary principle. Alyo (chat·edits) 13:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@999real: I think most judges would have no problem following Restatement (Second) of Agency to find there is no apparent authority. Agents have a scope of employment, and VT's scope does not include licensing the content of other CN entities. If you had a reasonable and honest belief that VT could grant a free license (e.g., you did not know other CN websites did not use free licenses) a few months ago, you might escape liability. Given the current discussion about VT and CN's actions, your and Common's apparent authority defense has evaporated. Glrx (talk) 01:50, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

I suggest you refrain from playing copyright lawyer -- Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 08:55, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

 Comment Opinions seem versatile. Previously, a number of people argue for deletion of these files. Now that we have an opinion from WMF Legal department, people want to keep them... Yann (talk) 09:24, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

There was obviously a mixed consensus on the actual previous discussion. It was not a broad consensus to delete the files unless we heard from CN themselves. PHShanghai (talk) 12:58, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Well, we did heard from CN now. Yann (talk) 13:48, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree with Yann. And I say this as someone who uploaded 46 images for probably as many articles that were deleted due to this, and that makes me very sad. Yes, technically we could argue that the license was there on the files for many years, that we had every right to take the license as good, that many different articles are visibly the worse for losing these images, all that. But we're here to do a good deed, to make the single largest source of knowledge in human history, and not to be copyright trolls. If there is a reasonable chance that a good faith error was made - and that is what Conde Nast is asserting to WMF - then I can understand us forgiving the error, and letting the images go. So it goes. --GRuban (talk) 19:00, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Don't forget about downstream reuse, either. Displaying these images on Commons with a CC license is an assertion that "yes, you can use these images freely given these conditions" - if we have reason to believe that the images may not actually be CC licensed, and that reusing them may actually pose risks, we shouldn't offer them. Omphalographer (talk) 19:17, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I made a list of files, just in case: Commons:Deletion requests/File:陸弈靜.png. Yann (talk) 19:02, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

 Comment there's also Commons:Deletion requests/Files found with Vogue Taiwan Diddykong1130 (talk) 19:24, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

 Info I restored this from the archive.  Comment I think this is the case of "license laundering" on Vigue Taiwan's part. As per Alyo's comment below, "licenses are only "irrevocable" if they are properly granted. In this case, those of us arguing for deletion believe no valid license was actually granted. If we are correct, then this situation never reached the question of irrevocability." If this is the case, Vogue Taiwan committed COM:License laundering, because they had no authority to grant license in the first place. That authority comes from their parent firm or their "superiors": Condé Nast itself. I endorse deletion of all Vogue Taiwan files. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contributions) 04:21, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Category:Videos from public broadcasting by country

Anything missing in that new category?

Not familiar with all the public broadcast channels, there may be more – e.g. in Category:Videos by source.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 13:49, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Have you checked Category:Videos by state media and Category:Videos by governments Trade (talk) 11:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: --Trade (talk) 11:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

No I hadn't, thanks. The latter cat is kind of a different scope – I think some of its subcats maybe should probably be moved to the former. The former only has few subcats and seems very incomplete. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:44, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Do you think the Algerian categories from Videos by state media belongs in Videos from public broadcasting by country? Trade (talk) 11:49, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Maybe. I was asking others. Could somebody please clarify things and if possible populate the categories more? (Videos by state media misses most items that belong there and Videos from public broadcasting by country needs checking and misses many if not most subcategories). Relevant info:

• Entreprise nationale de télévision (ENTV) is the national entity that oversees public television broadcasting. It manages the television channels Canal Algérie, Algérie 3, Amazigh tv 4 in Tamazight and the religious channel Coran tv 5 which broadcasts Islamic religious programming. ~Mass media in Algeria#Television
• State media are typically understood as media outlets that are owned, operated, or significantly influenced by the government. They are distinguished from public service media, which are designed to serve the public interest, operate independently of government control, and are financed through a combination of public funding, licensing fees, and sometimes advertising. The crucial difference lies in the level of independence from government influence and the commitment to serving a broad public interest rather than the interests of a specific political party or government agenda. ~State media

Prototyperspective (talk) 12:14, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

BBC News article: "Amateur photographers hope to fix Wikipedia's 'terrible' pictures"

BBC News recently published this article which may be of interest to the community. Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 08:11, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

It's just about portraits. In my personal opinion I find it boring and unimportant. Celebrity pictures can simply be released under CCBY by the celebrities if they wished to.
They could release a pic they took themselves or pay/ask a photographer for it for example. It's also not the type of content that is missing much. On the other hand, Wikipedia articles about famous people seem to get read a lot (however many entirely unillustrated articles as well). I wonder why there are essentially no (or nearly no) media coverage about broader issues of missing free media, for example in subjects of science to name one broad domain. Also I think at least one of the photos on the left of that article could be considered better than the new one on the right. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:52, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

In many cases there are photos in articles taken with compact cameras from the time Wikipedia was founded. There are already many much better photos on Commons but there are not enough people checking if there are better photos available as these articles are not on the missing photos lists. GPSLeo (talk) 13:11, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

There is something ironic about a news site who cant tell Wikipedia and Commons apart complaining how the site is run Trade (talk) 17:52, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

"[Wikipedia is] full of notable people with very old or unflattering photographs"... Oh really? :)) --A.Savin 15:01, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

It was good coverage. No mention of Wikimedia Commons as Trade eluded to, we need to work better at making obvious links from Wikipedia. I was more concerned that the BBC didn't seem to meet file licensing requirements, unless they got permission from the authors? Commander Keane (talk) 23:31, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

"we need to work better at making obvious links from Wikipedia" What? Trade (talk) 19:00, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

It's sort of weird. We have to acknowledge that these images are made by volunteers, where you cannot expect to have always high quality footage and hardware (fortunately, many professionals are thankfully contributing here). It's also kind of funny, because many images of agencies are potentially worse --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:05, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

Excessive use of Permission pending

Hi, For some time now, I see many files tagged with {{Permission pending}}, where they won't obviously be any permission, e.g. File:Sean PNG.png. This last case is typical: no license and author is said as "unknown" and other nonsense information, so no one could send a permission. How brand new users got to know that adding this template might delay the deletion?

Another examples: . "Permission pending" but no license, where no permission is needed. File:Ian Veneracion2025.jpg: promo shot with bogus license. Yann (talk) 08:04, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

I was able to replicate this in a test upload. The template is automatically added in the upload process when when "This work was created by someone else and is free to share" and "I have permission to upload this work from my employer or the creator of this work" are selected. Ciell (talk) 08:36, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

OK, this should not happen. So now, we have obvious copyright violations pending for one month. Bad, very bad... Who can remove this "feature"? Yann (talk) 08:45, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

This is a good feature requested from us for cases where people have permission the problem is that some people seem simply lying when clicking the button that they have permission. Maybe there should be a large warning like "When you click this button without having the permission (or if the email is not sent in time) you might be blocked". GPSLeo (talk) 08:56, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes. And it should not be possible to add this template if the author is "unknown". Yann (talk) 10:38, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

@Sannita (WMF) who is responsive about Upload Wizard improvements. Or someone could post at Commons talk:WMF support for Commons/Upload Wizard Improvements. Commander Keane (talk) 11:39, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, I'll investigate it and let you know. Just FYI, we have a competing discussion about {{Permission pending}} at Commons:Upload Wizard feedback#VRT scenario. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:17, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

All these files still get tagged by the bot, right? So after 7 days some admin will come along and just delete it. Multichill (talk) 19:28, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

I tested it and when clicking the "I have the permission" option it is not possible to select a license. This is definitely wrong, choosing this option should always require to set the license. GPSLeo (talk) 20:14, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

@GPSLeo: exactly what I said in the discussion that Sannita (WMF) linked above. - Jmabel ! talk 23:16, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

@GPSLeo @Jmabel What would be the correct outcome in this case? I can file an urgent ticket to fix this, but I need to know what should happen instead of what happens. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 14:20, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I think simply adding the same license list from the own work licensing to the permission option and requiring the selection of a license from the list would be fine. GPSLeo (talk) 18:55, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

My inclination is the same as GPSLeo's here, but I'd like to see a little bit of data before making a decision: I'm afraid of flooding the field with junk uploads that look more plausible than before.

Do we have any data on how many uploads per month use "I have permission to upload this work from my employer or the creator of this work"? (I have a few other questions, but they are only relevant if that one has an answer.) - Jmabel ! talk 20:16, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

@GPSLeo Maybe I am wrong here, but if the work is already under a CC license, or any other free license, it would just be better to use another option and to clarify which license the media is released under. So maybe we can rework the prompt here, and make it more clear. Would it work? Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:59, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

@Sannita (WMF): If the work is already published under a free license, then they won't be under the "I have permission to upload this work from my employer or the creator of this work" case. This is about the case where they are going to have to use VRT. Commons requires that in addition to marking the file as "permission pending," they also must indicate what license is forthcoming. Right now, the latter requires them to edit again after uploading. Experienced users know to do this, but it is very opaque to relatively new users. - Jmabel ! talk 17:50, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

@Jmabel I see. I'm in contact with the designer, we'll think about a solution. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 16:12, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

@Yann @Jmabel @GPSLeo and the others: I discussed it with the team, and we thought of a possible way of action to fix the problems you raised. We opened phab:T391600 about the changes, where we put also screenshot of potential solutions. Please let me know if it works, in your opinion. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 16:27, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

I commented in the Phabricator. Thanks. - Jmabel ! talk 23:02, 10 April 2025 (UTC)