Commons-l December 2011

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

13 participants
7 discussions

Video skills and equipment
by Lars Aronsson 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

I just tried to watch some presentation videos from Wikimania. Some had very weak sound, some had no sound in the first minutes, some only played the first minute and then stopped. I don't think the Wikimania videos are unique in having such problems. Video is new to Commons, and the expert contributors are more familiar with still images. How can we learn to make better videos? Are there some good instructions? Perhaps a free instruction video (Wikibooks, but a video instead of a book) on how to produce good videos is what we need. In fact, the English Wikibooks has a title on "Video Production", http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video_Production but it doesn't have a clear focus (pun not intended). It starts out with discussing satellite TV and has long sections on file formats in different operating systems. There is a help page on Commons for converting video to the Ogg Theora format, but that is only the last step in a long chain. Given that video is new, how can we find and rate videos, nominate "good/featured videos", and give advice on how to improve quality? Is the Commons village pump enough for this? Commons has a separate graphics village pump. Do we also need a separate video village pump? Current digital video cameras use hard disks or memory cards, instead of tape cassettes. Many new models cost less than 300 euro (or dollars), some as little as 120 euro (memory card perhaps not included). Some have a special "Youtube mode", and I guess that kind of usage is what drives the price down. What models are good, and what should one watch out for? We can find free still photos on Flickr and copy them to Commons. Is there somewhere we can find free videos and copy them? Yes, at the Internet Archive. Somewhere else? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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translation of categories
by bawolff 19 Jul '12

19 Jul '12

Someone in the thread on friendliness mentioned that categories are always in one language (usually english). Well still a long way from fixing the issue, perhaps if we allowed unrestricted {{DISPLAYTITLE:...}}, combined with the {{int: hack, that'd allow better translatable categories. (of course you'd only be able to use the actual category name in [[category:Foo]] links. I suppose one could use a bot to automatically change links to redirect categories to their canonical name, but then we're getting really really hacky). Anyways, just a thought. cheers, bawolff

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Waverley Encyclopedia scanned
by David Gerard 27 Dec '11

27 Dec '11

http://fentonville.co.uk/waverley/ Put up by a J.G.Ballard fan, but those who like old encyclopedias will enjoy this. The colour plates would definitely be of historical interest. I've suggested Commons and Wikisource to Mike Bosnall, but you don't need to wait on that to grab anything good. - d.

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Creative Commons wants your input on the 4.0 license process
by Kat Walsh 12 Dec '11

12 Dec '11

Creative Commons is beginning the process of revising their suite of licenses, with the goal of having a 4.0 version by the end of 2012: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/30676 They have a set of goals, including better internationalization, better interoperability with other licenses, and addressing the needs of new communities like governments and other public institutions in addition to the communities already using the licenses. But this is the requirements gathering period--there is no draft yet. If you want your input considered, this is the best time to start thinking about what is and isn't working with the current version of the licenses. There is a public wiki explaining more about the goals, timeline, considerations, and ways to participate: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0 Wikimedia wants the 4.0 licenses to be better for us and for the commons than the 3.0 versions, which most Wikimedia projects are currently using; CC has already reached out to us, wanting to come out with a version that the Wikimedia community will adopt, and we'll be trying to make sure everything is coordinated and communicated well throughout the revision process. But if you are interested, you should be participating directly. This is doubly true if you are in a jurisdiction with unusual requirements, or part of a group of users with particular wants that are not handled well by the current version. Please pass this message on to other places where interested people will see it! Cheers, Kat -- Your donations keep Wikipedia free: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate Web: http://www.mindspillage.org Email: kat(a)wikimedia.org, kat(a)mindspillage.org (G)AIM, Freenode, gchat, identi.ca, twitter, various social sites: mindspillage

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Picture rotation: what on earth?
by David Gerard 09 Dec '11

09 Dec '11

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Gerard,_Heathrow_Terminal_5,_2… Who thought this was a good idea to automate? And how does one get this fixed? I can't even revert to a good copy. Has a list of these been made and human-checked? - d.

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Rotated images
by Howard Cheng 07 Dec '11

07 Dec '11

I've noticed recently a number of images that require rotation, usually photos that are in landscape orientation when they should be in portrait. What's weird is that in the articles, MediaWiki already "knows" the correct orientation and in some cases the file history even shows multiple uploads. It's hard to explain in words so here's an example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castelo_Sao_Jorge_Lisboa_3.JPG This image has been in the article since September 2006 so I can't imagine that nobody has noticed the wrong orientation for 5 years. Does anyone know what happened here? Is this related to the huge backlog for RotateBot? Thanks.

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Re: [Commons-l] [cultural-partners] [Wikisource-l] ABBYY Finereader 11 on Toolserver: do we like it?
by Lars Aronsson 01 Dec '11

01 Dec '11

On 11/28/2011 10:23 PM, Alex Brollo wrote: > [...] FineReader 11 [...] produces a complete djvu file [...] Text > layer hasn't full range of details, it's organized into two levels > (page and line), while OCR engine on IA servers produces a very rich > "tree" (page, column, region, paragraph, line and word). Has anybody designed a web interface that shows the scanned image and the zones or regions of the Djvu text layer? It would look similar to image annotation on Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Image_annotations For a Djvu file uploaded to Commons, could you automatically generate image annotations for the various text columns and illustrations? Does image annotation handle multi-page document formats such as PDF and Djvu? (Shouldn't image annotations and timed text be the same thing?) -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Commons-l December 2011