Hi. Are images on Wikimedia Commons have to be public domain worldwide or should we take some prejudice of the servers location in the U.S.?
As is well known, images published before 1923 in the U.S. are public domain in the U.S and probably worldwide (unless the opposite can be suspected). Images published anywhere in the world before 1923 is also public domain in the United States , but many other countries apply the 70 years pma -- "after death of author".
How zealous should we be? Is the 70 pma always to be applied?
What if it is uncertain who the creator is, and whether he did more than 70 years ago -- would it then be possible to keep the images for the time being if the image was created before 1923 (such as images from World War I)?
/ Fred (a.k.a. [[User:Fred-Chess]])
Since there are some really good tools being written lately, I thought
I'd throw up a request for one. :) This one would be quite easy to
make, I think. Just saves some typing. (I would like it for en.wp but
I think it would be pretty easy to make for any language.wp.)
Articles on Commons frequently have no contextual information - just a
heading and images. Sometimes this is OK but usually short description
blurbs and interwiki links would be better. The easiest way to make
these is to find the en.wp article, copy the list of interwiki links,
add the English interwiki link, then convert these to description tags
and either leave just the article name as the description, or add the
first sentence from the article.
e.g. today I fixed up this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur%27s_Seat&oldid=1728248
The description tags look like this:
{{en|This is where the first line of the article would go.}}
not a far leap from [[en:article name]] at all, really. You can also
link to the WP article in the description tag, or bold the subject, or
do neither.
Typically I only put the full description for English because I'm
usually fixing up other people's articles, then I just put the article
name for the other interwiki links _if it differs to the English
name_. For example with species, quite a few wikis put them at the
Latin binomial name (as does Commons), so I don't think it's necessary
to list 50 "translations" of a word that already appears on the page.
as an example see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Malamute ,
where I have only translated the labels that are not 'Alaskan
Malamute' (in this case they are different scripts).
Anyway does what I've described make sense? Basically I'd like to put
in the name of the relevant en.wp article, and get out the description
tags and interwiki links that I can paste right into my Commons
article.
Not at all urgent, of course...
cheers,
Brianna
--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."
FYI
I have added lots of nice functions to my "missing images" and
"commonshelper" tools [1].
Missing images
* This can now be invoked with a category name, and the script will
iterate through all articles in this category
* You can get the script source fro the page itself (so you can run it
without the 30-second-limit)
* Images ("good" and "unknown") on wikipedias now have a button leading
to a prefilled commonshelper page
Commonshelper
* Now generated a description based on the {{Information}} template
* Improved upload history parsing function thanks to a function provided
by Marco Schuster
* Now provides a direct link to save an image locally
* Now provides a button to call up the commons upload page with the
description prefilled
Magnus
[1] http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/
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Hi,
I recently noticed what a pain it can be to move image to commons,
especially with the image description. To help this issue, I now offer
this service:
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php
where you can enter the wikipedia language code and image name, and it
will generate a commons description consisting of link to original image
page, original contents, and wikified upload history.
It can also be called with the language/image as part of the URL:
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php?lang=3Dde&doit=3D1&ima=
ge=3DStruktur_Luftwaffenamt.PNG
For German language, it will also translate several copyright template
names (e.g., "{{Bild-GFDL}}") into the the English (commons) version.
This can be expanded for other languages as well.
Magnus
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Does anyone have a really succint, persuasive argument for this? I
understand it and accept it, but I find it hard to respond to users
who say, "Silly me, I thought we were building an encyclopedia here"
and think that "educational/non-commercial purposes only" should be
OK. Saying "Well, we might want to sell a DVD one day" sounds a bit
weak. As does "We also building a totally free stock photography
database". It's not hard to feel gypped when we should be serving WM
projects first and foremost (and at the moment I doubt there's much
outside use, but it's hard to tell).
So... anyone have a killer response that will instantly make a user
see why this requirement is necessary?
cheers,
Brianna ([[commons:User:pfctdayelise]])
--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."