I am quite appalled about how things have a nasty tendency to a nasty
outcome on commons. München is being moved to Munich, Praha is moved
to Prague,... and all on a specious kind of based argumentation. I
know how the cities are called. I have seen the traffic signs! The
cities are actually called München, Praha,...
I read e.g. that [München, Germany] would look silly. Yes it does.
That is why it should have been [München, Deutschland] in the first
place with the redirect being [Munich, Germany] or even a
disambiguation on [Munich] as it already is on the en-WP. What was
clear to many people in the beginnig of commons now gets overthrown
and people keenly start their bots.
Moreover I do not mind having [東京] as log as there is a
redirect on [Tokyo], [Tokio] etc.
As far as I remember commons was planed for all projects to coexist
but not to assimilate them until a bad english gets the upper hand.
I am appalled about this and do not know if I carry on in this pile of
shards.
disappointed greetings
paddy
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The Commons Picture of the Year 2006 will be chosen in February.
Participate by voting for a picture out of the featured pictures
promoted in 2006. This vote is open to every established Wikimedian.
The election has two phases. In the first phase, taking place from 1st
to 14th February 2007, the ten best pictures will be chosen among all
2006 Featured Pictures.
At the end of phase 1, the top 10 images by number of votes will go to
phase 2 (the final). Only images with 3 or more votes are eligible for
phase 2.
During the final, to take place from 15th February to 28th February,
the Commons Picture of the Year 2006, and the two runners-up, will be
chosen from the eligible images.
The three winning pictures will be displayed on the Main Page and
enter the History Books of Wikimedia Commons forever :-)
Participate! The election is open from tomorrow on
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2006 !
On 1/29/07, Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote:
> > I think galleries are useful. I do not think they should be deleted.
> > Instead, I think we should make a new namespace called "gallery" and
> > move all the galleries there.
>
> Well I understand, but I am not sure what is the benefit expected here
> with the deletion of many pages from main namespace, and I don't see how
> it will be achieved.
We would automatically mass move all the pages with galleries to the
gallery namespace. Deletion could also be done automatically.
> Commons is generally very badly referenced.
> I think this is mainly because of the category system (maybe developers
> could give more hints here). For "Mohandas Gandhi" in Google Images, you
> won't find any images directly from Commons. That's very surprising
> seeing that Commons is now the biggest source of free (as in beer)
> images of Gandhi.
The biggest factor for this is that most search engines will not index
pages with names which look like image names, for example
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Foo.jpg. They would index
Image:Foo but our image pages are not named like that.
Since most of the time when other sites (including Wikimedia's own)
link to commons they link to image pages, we do not gain 'googlejuice'
from those links.
There are a lot of things we could do to enhance the popularity of
commons, but the page name issue really should be solved first.
It's in the long term plans for mediawiki to support filenames which
are unrelated to the file type.... but even using that will require
massive renames on commons. Does anyone have any suggestions? There
are a lot of possibilities.
Another question is.. are we ready to handle an increase in public visibility?
Hello,
One problem when checking licenses of images coming from Flickr is some
users provide the static link to the image on Flickr, instead of the
description page showing the license. That makes the verification very
difficult because you have to search Flickr images hoping you'll find the
good tag that will lead you to the good image.
I've contacted the Flickr support team to know if there was a tool or a
special page to help finding the description page from the static link.
Their answer is below and it seems to work. I hope it will help.
Cheers!
Guillaume
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Flickr Support <case202439(a)support.flickr.com>
Date: 29 Jan 2007 20:41:51 +0000
Subject: [Flickr Case 202439] Re: Other Issues
To: guillom.pom(a)gmail.com
Hi there,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you -- we're
swamped!
You can find the original photo page thusly:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/357298706_b406a56e06.jpg
to:
http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=357298706
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Ben
--
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
http://www.wikimedia.org
Did you know that "Bundt pans" is a copyright status?
[[:category:Copyright_statuses]]->[[:category:Free_licenses]]->[[:category:GNU_licenses]]->[[:category:GFDL]]->[[:category:Periodic_table]]->[[:category:Chemical_elements_by_periodic_table_group]]->[[:category:Periodic_table_group_16]]->[[:category:Oxygen]]->[[:category:Oxygen_compounds]]->[[:category:Organo-oxygen_compounds]]->[[:category:Carbohydrates]]->[[:category:Sugars]]->[[:category:Sweet_food]]->[[:category:Cakes_and_cookies]]->[[:category:Cakes]]->[[:category:Bundt_cake]]->[[:category:Bundt_pans]]
It was news to me.
I guess I always knew that being a Harry Potter character would impact
something's copyright status, but without commons I never would have
known that this connection involved the humble hydrogen atom:
[[:category:Copyright_statuses]]->[[:category:Free_licenses]]->[[:category:GNU_licenses]]->[[:category:GFDL]]->[[:category:Periodic_table]]->[[:category:Chemical_elements_by_periodic_table_row]]->[[:category:Periodic_table_row_1]]->[[:category:Hydrogen]]->[[:category:Hydrogen_compounds]]->[[:category:Water]]->[[:category:Bodies_of_water]]->[[:category:Islands]]->[[:category:Islands_of_Europe]]->[[:category:Ireland_(island)]]->[[:category:Ireland]]->[[:category:Culture_of_Ireland]]->[[:category:Languages_of_Ireland]]->[[:category:English_language]]->[[:category:Literature_of_England]]->[[:category:Writers_from_England]]->[[:category:J._K._Rowling]]->[[:category:Harry_Potter]]->[[:category:Harry_Potter_Characters]]
(nevermind the fact that anything in the child cat is almost certainly
an unlicensed derivative work...)
I don't think most people realize it... But our category system is
terribly broken today. I have provided just a few example which are
fairly easy to fix, but everywhere you look in the category system you
can find problems like this.
Sometime in the not too distant future we will gain a search system
which allows us to perform category intersections. People will be able
to search for images which are in combinations of categories. It could
be very powerful...
But it will not be very powerful, because categories have been broken
into zillions of tiny sub-categories.
Instead of Category:Men or Category:Human_males we use
Category:Human_male_who_lived_in_the_1960s_and_liked_to_wear_funny_hats.
You might think that there would be a Category:Men which would be a
parent of this category, and you would be right.. But it is not useful
because even if we ignore the large computational burden of finding
all the children of a category, we're still left with the sad fact
that due to semantic drift, the supercategory would contain many
things we do not want, just like my examples at the top. Many higher
level categories often a substantial subset of all the categories on
commons. (Copyright statuses is a 'parent' of about 13% of all the
commons cats).
Direct navigation is nice, but it doesn't scale to millions of images.
For people to be able to find images on commons they will increasingly
depend on search.
We need to radically change how we use categories if we are going to
make them 'machine readable' in a manner which enables search.
To facilitate this change, we need to stop breaking categories into
tiny subcategories. Instead, we should use broad conceptual categories
which will work well when intersected with other categories. We should
also include all categories that apply. For example, a antique car
might be placed in [[Category:Transportation devices]],
[[Category:Cars]], [[Category:Ford motor products]],
[[Category:Manmade]], and [[Category:Antiques]] rather than in
[[Category:Antique ford motor products]].
This shift will make categories less useful as a direct navigational
tool. However, many categories are already poor devices for direct
navigation due to an inability to place their content in order which
is sane to humans, and an inability to include explanatory text
inline.
For human navigation we have gallery pages, which are more powerful
for that application.
Categories would still keep their parent child relationship, but we
would acknowledge that fact that such categorization is useful for
humans to navigate to find categories... and that it's not a useful
too to have the computers traverse.
Unless I find huge opposition here, I'm going to begin changing the
commons instruction pages to reflect this use of categories rather
than our historic use.
On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/29/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Instead of doing that, I think it would be more sensible to continue
> > the tradition of only putting the most specific cat that applies, and
> > adjusting the software to have an option to display subcategory items
> > into the current category (like "flatten" I think) when desired. (bug
> > 2725)
>
> I thought I provided some pretty clear examples of why flattening is no good.
> Is there a reason you ignored that point?
> :)
It works poorly if you expand all the way, and the higher up in the
tree you start, the worse it works. In my experience using
Duesentrieb's tool, it works quite well when you specify a low depth
(depth=1,2,3). Often 1 is appropriate.
As is obvious to anyone who works with categories on a regular basis,
several types of relationships are encoded in category relations (3
examples: is type of, is component of, is related to).
Simply using broad categories instead of narrow ones, as you suggest,
will not stop unexpected results because not every category link is a
"is type of" which is what is needed for it to work.
some examples.
[[category:Hominidae]] is type of [[category:primates]] (I think all
TOL stuff would be like this)
[[category:wheels]] is component of [[category:automobiles]]
[[category:Culture, People, Geography, States, etc of Country X]] is
related to [[Category:Country X]].
I don't think you are suggesting we should stop including links like
these are you?
insert blah blah Semantic MediaWiki blah blah... until there is
something extra available to us to distinguish between itypeof and
isrelatedto category links, and the rest of them, the tree will ALWAYS
be "broken". That doesn't mean it's not useful in its current status
though. Ways to improve it are always welcome. But I am not certain
this will be one of them.
cheers
Brianna
I see a lot of misplaced pages, spam, and utter insanity appear in the
main namespace on commons. There is also a lot of confusion about how
the main namespace should be used.
What do you think of the idea of moving all the galleries to a
gallery: namespace, then reserving the main namespace for main pages
and pretty much nothing else. After that point we could prevent main
namespace page creation and make the edit page give a nice "You are
confused, here is how you find help" message.
The work it would take to accomplish this could be completely
automated, although some inter project cooperation would be required
to fix gallery linking templates and the like.
I see a lot of potential to reduce confusion, and not a lot of real
downsides. So I must be missing something. Thoughts?
Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> said at 2007/01/29 Mon AM 01:58:38 EST:
> From: "Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>
> Date: 2007/01/29 Mon AM 01:58:38 EST
> To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Commons-l] Killing the main namespace?
>
> I see a lot of misplaced pages, spam, and utter insanity appear in the
> main namespace on commons. There is also a lot of confusion about how
> the main namespace should be used.
There are a substantial number of other namespace junk pages as well, talk pages, unused help pages, etc. These also need to be addressed. Not as many, mind you, but they are still neglected.
If you want a quick url to get to the new pages, <http://tinyurl.com/nrf7v> is what we have listed on the Commons IRC channel.
Also, non-admins *can* participate. Simply put {{speedydelete|not in Project scope}} on a page and it will be taken up in the next run of speedies.
Cary Bass
User:Bastique
User portraits are welcome at Commons, as long as they have source and
licensing info. "Self-portrait of [[wn:user:foo]]. {{self|cc-by-2.5}}"
is sufficient (for example). I suggest putting them in
[[Category:Wikimedians]].
regards,
Brianna
commons:User:pfctdayelise
On 26/01/07, Brian W <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Note: this is in reference to the english wikinews
>
>
> We have tons of personal photo's of users for userpages. most of them
> are not licensed freely, if licensed at all (some of them even claim
> they are ''fair use'' which is a total load of ...). I personally
> think that they shouldn't be on wikinews whatsoever (as they'd
> probably also be on the user's page at wikipedia, etc, and we
> currently have no policy's regarding them, so it'd just be easier to
> make them go somewhere that already has a policy), so I propose:
>
> *All new self photo's for user pages go on commons, and follow their
> policies ([[Commons:Criteria for
> inclusion#Wikimedia_Commons_is_a_common_central_media_repository_of_all_Wikimedia_projects]])
>
> *old ones can stay [at wikinews], we won't delete them for now if
> there inproperly licensed as the user clearly wants them here, or
> decide what to do with them later
>
> *any new one's have to be at commons, or they go into the black abyss
> of death and doom.
>
> note: I'm cc-ing this commons-l, as it concerns them, and I have no
> idea if they'll like it or not, so if they say no, its not happening.
> its also posted on the wc at wikinews.
>
>
> --[[user:bawolff|Bawolff]]
>
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