October 2007 - Commons-l - lists.wikimedia.org

Problems with derivative works
by Nilfanion 20 Jan '08

20 Jan '08

Whilst browsing over the QI candidates page I noticed this image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:EM_Spectrum_Properties.svg. The image itself is licensed as public domain. However it is a derivative of two images licensed under the GFDL (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:P_biology.svg and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyscrapercompare.svg). Unless I am misreading something quite badly, releasing a derivative of a GFDL-licensed work to the public domain is a violation of the GFDL. It is easy to fix one image, but I suspect we have deeper problems throughout the project with a lack of respect for copyleft. Establishing just how serious this issue is will be non-trivial, never mind resolving it. I can think of a number of approaches to this situation, some of which are obviously harmful to the project and/or the free content movement as a whole. * Ignore the terms of the GFDL (or any other copyleft licenses) in this context. * Treat them the same as any other copyright violation. * Contact the creator of the derivative and inform him of the pertinent terms of the original license; and ask him to change the licensing on the derivative. * Changing the licensing on the derivative work to be compatible with the original work, and inform the creator of the new work of the change and the reason why. Furthermore we probably have the difficulties associated with of a CC-BY-SA work and a GFDL work being combined. I'm no lawyer, but I suspect to truly sort these cases out will need an additional release from some of the creators of the original works. If we cannot enforce the copyleft terms on our own community, can we really expect external groups to?

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We may have somewhere to send the exhibitionists
by Brianna Laugher 16 Nov '07

16 Nov '07

Of tangential interest: http://bayimg.com/ Apparently "completely uncensored". ("We will not remove any pictures that are just immoral or in any way legal to host under Swedish law." - well, still seems like they'll have a lot of removing to do, to me.) They use a tag system - e.g. http://bayimg.com/tag/background . uploading is ultra quick. cheers Brianna user:pfctdayelise -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Credits in books
by Rama Rama 30 Oct '07

30 Oct '07

An author has contacted me to use some of my photographs in a book (a big, serious, scholarly, several-volume thing). He contacted me, and several other users, after seeing images on Commons. Consequences: 1) Commons does get some visibility, and provides images to serious work. Cheer up, people ! 2) The author is enquiring how I wish to be credited. What do you people think would be a concise yet effective way to mention Wikimedia Commons in such cases ? Cheers ! -- Rama

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Anyone making a bit of beer money
by wayne 29 Oct '07

29 Oct '07

> >From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> > >Anyone making a bit of beer money from contributions to Commons and >wants to let ORG know? > > >- d. I had mentioned earlier this week that I had used a few pics on a magazine and a book, but costs are more than sales for those. I did however use one photo (and today have permissions for more) whereby the cost of 50 postcards was $20 and profits from sales would be $30. I was going to make a donation to Wikipedia or Wikimedia with the small profit in the new year from the Wikicards. Wayne Ray

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Italian ministry of culture releases a 16 Gigapixel version of the Last supper
by Bryan Tong Minh 28 Oct '07

28 Oct '07

The Italian ministry of culture has released a 16,118,035,591 pixels (172181 x 93611), 16 bits per channel version of the Last supper by Leonardo da Vinci. We need this one on Commons. More info: * http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/cenacolo/look.asp * http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/ * http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:De_kroeg#Een_errrrrrug_GROOT_Laatste… Bryan

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Direct transfer of properly licensed images from wikipedias to commons?
by Magnus Manske 28 Oct '07

28 Oct '07

My watchflickr tool [1] includes an option to upload an image with a suitable CC license to commons using a "bot" account [2]. So far, I have received no complaints about bad uploads, and from its gallery it seems OK as well (except some duplicate uploads). Now, anyone can upload an image to flickr, and release it under CC-BY(-SA). Same as wikipedia, right? Except that wikipedia uploads are probably screened much more thoroughly for cases that are clearly not under the given license. My CommonsHelper tool [3] eases the transfer of images from wikipedia to the commons, and has been used a whooping 93435 times this year. Assuming that every use results in an upload on commons, over 330 images /per day/ enter commons this way, a not unimportant proportion of the 5000 uploads per day, especially considering that it will only take images that have a commons-compatible license. However, users still have to save the image on their own computer, then upload them under their own user account, which is annoying and time-consuming. CommonsHelper does have the functionality to do direct uploads via the aforementioned bot account, however, that has been deactivated since forever, due to concerns. I would like to propose the reactivation of that feature. Concernes about unsuitable uploads through the bot account are superflous, IMHO, since images are screened thrice this way: 1. On the wikipedia where the image was originally uploaded 2. By the CommonsHelper (e.g. it will reject "fair use" images from en) 3. On commons, by the usual suspects :-) Which is two levels of screening more than direct uploads to commons, which were, last time I checked, enabled ;-) With SUL in sight, new uploads will shift from wikipedias to commons, but there's still a lot of images around: en : >766,000 (but that includes "fair use") de : ~119,000 (no "fair use") fr : ~37,000 All in all, I'd estimate that there's between 0.5 and 1 million images on the wikipedias that would be suitable for commons. You can see how "save locally, then upload manually" annoyance can scale up :-) Cheers, Magnus [1] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/watchflickr.php [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:File_Upload_Bot_%28Magnus_Manske%29 [3] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commonshelper.php

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Fwd: [ORG-discuss] CBDE: Examples of businesses doing interesting things with photos
by David Gerard 28 Oct '07

28 Oct '07

Anyone making a bit of beer money from contributions to Commons and wants to let ORG know? - d. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Suw Charman <suw.charman(a)gmail.com> Date: 24 Oct 2007 17:04 Subject: [ORG-discuss] CBDE: Examples of businesses doing interesting things with photos To: Open Rights Group open discussion list <org-discuss(a)lists.openrightsgroup.org> Hiya, The Creative Business in the Digital Era wiki is coming along - http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/ - and we now have a blog too! http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/blog/ We are starting to flesh out the list of possible case studies a bit more - thanks to people who've already started adding stuff to this page http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/index.php/Research_Areas. We're particularly interested in case studies that involve photography - there are a few examples already listed, such as Flickr, Fotolia and Moo, but it would be good to both have a bit more detail about how these are open IP services, and to find any others that we can add to the list. I've started adding overview pages for the case studies that I know something about - they are just really short "who what when where" type pages, e.g. http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/index.php/Case_Study_-_Lawr… just designed to give us an glimpse of what is going on in that particular case. It would be great if anyone interested in this project could help us out by adding similar pages for the other cases. Please note the page naming convention: Case Study - Name of project/person - Overview. We're just trying to keep things consistent. Finally, if you are on any other mailing lists where people might be interested in this project, please do let them know what we are doing! Cheers Suw ------------------------------------------------ Creative Business in the Digital Era Wiki: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/ Blog: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/blog/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/creativebiz Del.icio.us tag: http://del.icio.us/tag/org-cbde Email: creativebusiness(a)openrightsgroup.org _______________________________________________ ORG-discuss mailing list ORG-discuss(a)lists.openrightsgroup.org http://lists.openrightsgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/org-discuss

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[job ad] We are looking for svg professionals
by Brianna 26 Oct '07

26 Oct '07

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Credits in books
by Aoineko 25 Oct '07

25 Oct '07

(Sorry, new comer to this ML, I didn't found the way to reply directly to Rama's e-mail) I was also contact by the same person (I suppose, according to Rama's description) for the use of 12 of my pictures! My work is done to be reused, but 12 pictures (+ those from Rama, /Magnus, etc./) is a much, isn't it? Can't we ask this publisher for a small insert to promote Commons as an exchange!? With all the money they will save using our pictures, I think it's a good deal for them. What do you think about that? Aoineko ----------------------------- *Rama Rama wrote: *An author has contacted me to use some of my photographs in a book (a big, serious, scholarly, several-volume thing). He contacted me, and several other users, after seeing images on Commons. Consequences: 1) Commons does get some visibility, and provides images to serious work. Cheer up, people ! 2) The author is enquiring how I wish to be credited. What do you people think would be a concise yet effective way to mention Wikimedia Commons in such cases ? Cheers ! -- Rama

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Commons reaches 1000FP
by Brianna Laugher 25 Oct '07

25 Oct '07

Well, actually, we did this a week or so ago. Now we can celebrate reaching 1013 FPs. :) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/1000FP If you want to do any interesting analysis or facts that would be great. For example I know our POTD is used by several other Wikipedias. It would be good to get a list of which ones, to show how Wikipedias are using our FP content. cheers, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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License in Books
by wayne 24 Oct '07

24 Oct '07

> > >I don't know how long the credit may be, but maybe something like this: >"Photographs on pages X, X, X by Rama Rama. Released under License X. >Distributed by Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org" I have used Commons images on three occasions in a book, an online magazine and on a postcard. I credited with the photographers name if it was there (not UserName) and Wikimedia CC license # but I did not use the website, I will next time. I left a note for permission on User page but no one replied. Wayne Ray

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Commons is not Represented on Cafepress Wikipedia Merchandise
by Eugene Zelenko 24 Oct '07

24 Oct '07

Hi! Sad news: Commons is not represented on Cafepress Wikipedia Merchandise: http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia/464182 :-( Other missing projects are Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, Meta. With best regards, Eugene.

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WikiAudio Tours
by Lexi Olian 22 Oct '07

22 Oct '07

I just returned from Spain where I was using those little hand-held audio devices to tour the Alhambra, etc. Just wondering whether audio tours are (or could be) collected on wikimedia wouldn't it be great if there were enough tours that you could log your gps position o and here something historical about the place where you are standing? Lexi

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Encroachments on crack
by David Gerard 20 Oct '07

20 Oct '07

Is there anything we can do about this sort of thing? http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/10/19/misunderstandings-of-the-words-%e2… Give all Wikimedia volunteer photographers a clue-shooting dart gun? - d.

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Fwd: [Clipart] Clipart mining guide
by Brianna Laugher 17 Oct '07

17 Oct '07

Could be good for Commons to have some help files on the best practices of extracting illustrations (if not clipart...) from scans. So this may be of interest and maybe folks here have some advice for using Gimp etc too. cheers, Brianna ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Olsen <johnny_automatic(a)mac.com> Date: 17 Oct 2007 13:21 Subject: [Clipart] Clipart mining guide To: clipart(a)lists.freedesktop.org I have had a couple of people ask me to go through the steps I use to get images from old books. I am happy to share them. I can only do a version using an Adobe Creative Suite workflow as this is what I am most familiar with and it seems the GIMP needs some additional helpers to handle PDFs. So I imagine this all can be done with an Open Source workflow. I just am not the authority to write on it. Maybe someone can translate it. Anyway, I have a draft below. I was thinking of adding it to the Wiki section "http://openclipart.org/wiki/Clipart_Acquisition" but wondered if that clutters up that section. maybe it is better in a separate subsection under either "Clip Art Information" or "Contributor & User Handbook". If so someone who can unlock the top level would need to set that up for me. Ryan? Any suggestions or ideas are appreciated. John Olsen == Guideline for Mining Images from Online Book Libraries == * Sites such as those collected under the texts section of www.Archive.org offer a gold mine of Public Domain images. This is a guide to how to extract these images for use here on OCAL. Please note the author uses a workflow using Adobe Creative Suite 3 because he is most familiar with this software. It probably can all be done using Open Source software. Someone else will need to add those instructions. * Find a book with images you would like to extract. Keep in mind that the resolution is not extremely high so small images may not have enough resolution to extract good SVGs. * Download the PDF version of the book. It usually has the best resolution. The black and white PDF will be made for reading the text and might not have the best images. it is better to get the full color PDF and do your own adjustments. * Open the PDF in Photoshop. You will be asked to select a page. Pick the page you want and open it. Then crop the image tight around the graphic you want. * Alternatively you can extract individual pages using Adobe Acrobat and then open these single pages in Photoshop. This can be faster and less memory intensive when mining large books. * Using Image>Adjustments>Black & White convert the image to black & white. The High Contrast Red Filter Preset usually does a good job. * Further enhance the image using Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast to increase contrast and brightness if necessary so you get a nice high contrast image. * Save the file as .PSD or .TIF or any format that Adobe Illustrator opens. * Open this file in Adobe Illustrator. * Use Live Trace to convert photo to vector art. The following presets usually give the best result. One Color Logo (give black lines only-smallest file size), Black & White Logo (white parts are filled shapes as well) and Comic Art. * When happy with the image, Save as SVG. Do not preserve Illustrator editing so file is basic SVG. * Using File>Save for Web & Devices make a PNG file to upload with SVG. * Upload file to OCAL. * You usually get better results with strong black & white images. They make nice clean traces with reasonable file sizes. It is easier to color these afterwards then try to trace a full color image and expect clean, crisp lines. _______________________________________________ clipart mailing list clipart(a)lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/clipart -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons reaches 2 million files
by Mike Linksvayer 16 Oct '07

16 Oct '07

On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 00:30 +0200, Erik Zachte wrote: > Samuel: > > This is really exciting. Any stats on how quickly audio and video > > filetypes are growing? > > http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm > > For monthly figures scroll to > 'Database records per namespace / Categorised articles / Binaries' > > Latest figures are for June 2007 (later dump was broken, no surprises here) > > June 2007: > > Gif Jpg Mid Ogg Pdf Png Svg > 34k 1.2M 879 31k 1.1k 262k 95k I'd be super interested in the licensing breakdown overall and by media type. :) (Yes, I know this is complicated by many items being multi-licensed.) -- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Mike_Linksvayer

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Creative Commons 3.01 Draft
by Gregory Maxwell 16 Oct '07

16 Oct '07

I'm just going to pass the link on for now so that other folks have a chance to comment. :) http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7718

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Wikimedia Commons now contains 2,000,000 media files
by Siebrand Mazeland 11 Oct '07

11 Oct '07

On 8 October 2007 Wikimedia Commons has reached a total of 2,000,000 media files. Growth is still rising. On 11 August 2007 the project reached 1,750,000 media files (~4,200 files/day to 2M). On 25 May 2007 the project reached 1,500,000 media files (~3,200 files/day to 1,75M). Congratulations. Let's try and keep up with the maintenace :) Cheers! Siebrand

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Backups (was: Re: Durova tries to get us more pics)
by Brianna Laugher 11 Oct '07

11 Oct '07

On 10/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I currently mirror commons (and all WMF images) at home. At the > current rates have space for a couple of years. Perhaps we'll have a > nice growth spike? that would be good: I'd rather outgrow my storage > before it starts failing on it. Are you planning to make it possible for others to mirror, or release any kinds of image dumps? or torrents? or send people disks in the mail? cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Durova tries to get us more pics
by David Gerard 10 Oct '07

10 Oct '07

http://searchengineland.com/071009-084922.php This is not the dazzling polished work of wonder she wanted it to be, as her hard disk went BANG on the weekend and she had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch yesterday. I added ideas and some quotes. I think the Richard Schiff vs Michele Merkin appproach might make the point clear! - d.

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International Cleanup Weekend (October 13th and 14th)
by Eugene Zelenko 09 Oct '07

09 Oct '07

Hi! This is complete off topic, but... We all take great care about our small but constantly growing online world Commons. However, physical world still need care too. I invite you to join a Google cause: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/cleanup/. Not because of Google PR, but because of great idea. I think to clean up a place where I took all my dragonflies images - there are many broken glass battles around. With best regards, Eugene.

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InGimp - instrumented Gimp for user interface research
by David Gerard 09 Oct '07

09 Oct '07

http://www.ingimp.org/ InGimp is an initiative at the Human-Computer Interaction department of the University of Waterloo. It's the Gimp, but it gathers anonymised data on how you use the application. If you use the Gimp, you may wish to start using InGimp so as to influence future Gimp versions to your way of working! Present version is 2.2.17. I've emailed asking about plans for a version of 2.4 (presumably when 2.4.0 final is released). I installed InGimp on Windows and it picked up my Gimp preferences just fine. Everything works the same. - d.

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Automatic messages to users: guessing user preferred language
by Alexandre NOUVEL 07 Oct '07

07 Oct '07

Hi list, I've seen that some users run bots that add some message templates to user talk pages, generally in order to warn them about missing tags and other similar problems. The problem is that bots are not able to guess the preferred user language :) As for now, here are some clues about the user preferred language: * he has a Babel box on his user page or on his talk page => the highest skill could do it * he has a Welcome template or another message template that is not in English => get the lang code from the template translation subpage, but actually this is quite difficult because templates are generally subst'd and no link remains to the translation page... Then, which tools could we set up to know in an easier way the user preferred language? I'd say: * other users check the user contributions and guess his preferred language, then add some {{guessed language|<language code>}} template to the user talk page. This very template would provide information about how to add a Babel box. This is not much better than adding a Welcome template, so I don't think it to be a good solution. * some toolserver asking the database and returning as raw text the preferred language code that the user has set up in his preferences. This seems to me the best way to handle automatically this information, but shall assume that the user has set up this information. I think it's okay because when we need to contact this user, that's because he interacted on the project and has a high probability of having set up his preferences... Any thoughts? Any volunteers to code such a simple tool? :) Best regards from France, -- Alexandre.NOUVEL(a)alnoprods.net |-> http://alnoprods.net |-> L'encyclopédie libre et gratuite : http://fr.wikipedia.org \ I hate spam. I kill spammers. Non mais.

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File types brainstorm
by Brianna Laugher 06 Oct '07

06 Oct '07

Hello all, It seems to me we haven't added any new file formats/types for a while now. Are there any we should work on adding? Are there any reasons we shouldn't add them? - something for Blender? (sth. like game environments if my impression is correct) - SMIL? (open standard alternative to Powerpoint, I think) - Open Office 2 formats? - what would be best for animations? I would find it hard to believe that GIF is optimal... TIFF was mentioned on wikitech-l recently. The comment was made that anything TIFF should really be a better format: jpg for photographs and djvu for scans, and maybe png for anything else. TIFF tiles are typically huge and all those options are much smaller. Someone else commented on the VP that we have no documentation on DjVu which I found to be true, from how to create DJvu files, to how to use them in MediaWiki. I had a look on mediawiki.org and couldn't find anything too useful either. So any hints here would be appreciated. cheers, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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WhatIsThat.php
by Florian Straub 06 Oct '07

06 Oct '07

Hi, I just wanted to thank Magnus again for reinventing the wheel (and such a nice one): http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/whatisthat.php Is there any chance to produce raw output and to include it via AJAX to the edit page? This would be really great, because you'd be able to see, if there are any translations available. Thanks in advance, Flo PS: Was this the right way or should I've used your Issue Tracker on TS?

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Commons-l October 2007