Commons-l July 2012

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

21 participants
16 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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Re: [Commons-l] translation of categories
by Federico Leva (Nemo) 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

WereSpielChequers, 23/07/2012 13:47: > We need to enhance the upload wizard so that it works like hotcat and > gives you the redirected category MediaWiki assumes that redirects to categories don't exist, Hotcat is arguably broken rather than not. > I didn't address your localisation nightmare comment because I don't > understand localisation well enough to comment on it. Creating potentially hundreds of categories not linked to each other in any way is the wrong way to localise any kind of string on a wiki. Have you ever tried an old translation request on Meta, and compared it to how it works with the Translate extension? See also <https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Translating_the_wiki_w…> Nemo

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Re: [Commons-l] translation of categories
by Federico Leva (Nemo) 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

WereSpielChequers, 23/07/2012 12:30: > That's about recategorising articles that have been put in the > redirected category, and yes if that became a big problem it would be > worth resolving. But if you have category redirects and you use hotcat > to add categories it will automatically add the category that you are > being redirected to, not the category that you typed. I love HotCat and cat-a-lot, but only a fraction of users use them and we can't expect all tools to work like that, they're broken enough with the current categorization system (think of the Upload Wizard). > > And if people do add the redirected category I believe there is a bot > that will move it to the target category > > Conversely if you were searching for a particular category in Tamil, if > there were a category redirect it would take you to the corresponding > English category and tell you that your search word redirects there. > > All that currently works, I don't think the search works like that at all. > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Category_redirects_suck would > seem to be a dormant draft that discourages people from creating > category redirects. But it may be time to reopen the debate and make > this an opportunity to make Commons more multilingual. > > How about a policy of "Our category names are in English, but you are > welcome to create category redirects from other languages". The category system seems to be hard enough to understand without redirects. That's why redirects are disabled on category namespace pages. Besides, you didn't address my comment that it would be a localisation nightmare. Really. Nemo

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Re: [Commons-l] translation of categories
by WereSpielChequers 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

Message: 2 > Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 10:50:14 +0200 > From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> > To: bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com, Wikimedia Commons Discussion List > <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Commons-l] translation of categories > Message-ID: <5007CA46.6040100(a)gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > bawolff, 25/02/2011 22:53: > > 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. > > There's a feature request for the Translate extension (which is needed > anyway to make MediaWiki a multilingual wiki) at: > https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29975 > > Nemo > > > Is there anything to stop us using category redirects to resolve this? Currently I think there is advice to use them sparingly, but that could be out of date. I can see that in the past there may have been processing overhead concerns, but category redirects do strike me as the most logical way to resolve this. Of course with 2 million categories and over two hundred languages there is a possibilty of there being quite a large number of category redirects and that having an impact on Hotcat and catalot. But there would be a way to resolve this, categorise those category redirects as redirects from particular languages to English and enable editors to pick and choose which languages in addition to English that they want Hotcat and Catalot to offer them in auto completion - the default obviously would be your language preference and the babel boxes on your userpage. WSC

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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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New stats for Commons
by Erik Moeller 18 Jul '12

18 Jul '12

Hi all, Erik Zachte has compiled some new statistics for Wikimedia Commons. Previously, WikiStats primarily captured the standard metrics (editing activity etc.). Since Commons is first and foremost about media, those metrics weren't as useful to see trends in activity. You can see the new numbers starting here: http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm#upload… .. and they should be reliably and automatically generated going forward. There are also some new summary graphs: http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/SummaryCOMMONS.htm Note that we can break out in both tables the impact of Upload Wizard. The numbers show that the growth rate of Commons increased very significantly after UW was enabled in May 2011. The number of contributors grew by about 25% from March 2011 to March 2012, compared with ~12% in the prior year. The numbers also clearly show the impact of "Wiki Loves Monuments" in terms of the number of uploaders -- in September 2011, 22642 people uploaded at least one file to Commons, a huge jump from the previous month (16869). The number of uploaders quickly returned to previous levels, but it's fantastic to see that a single event can bring in so many new people. Erik's working on some additional stats, but I wanted to share this date with you. He's also going to write a blog post about this new data. Please report any oddities or inconsistencies directly to him. I also want to give a shout-out to Bryan Tong Minh who's been maintaining the incredibly useful commons-stats here: https://toolserver.org/~bryan/stats/ - which previously were my primary source of relevant data (and there are still some stats there that don't exist anywhere else). Cheers, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [Commons-l] Moving forwards (Was "Does Commons have a policy of violating UK copyright?")
by Adam Cuerden 12 Jul '12

12 Jul '12

Perhaps we can best move forwards by dealing with some concrete examples. So long as there IS a level above which you're willing toa ccept my rights, that some things fall below it isn't as bad. Here's my restoration of Left Hand Bear http://adamcuerden.deviantart.com/art/Left-Hand-Bear-Oglala-chief-190160390 And here's the original. As can be seen, I have had to do reconstruction work in all four corners (as well as a hell of a lot else, but let's leave that aside for now) http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.15973/ Can we at least agree that if major damage can be seen at low resolution in the original that I can claim copyright?

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(no subject)
by J.P.HLAVAC 11 Jul '12

11 Jul '12

sababa

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Does Commons have a policy of violating UK copyright?
by Adam Cuerden 11 Jul '12

11 Jul '12

So, let me get this straight. Commons' argument is that a database of match schedules is, without any test of this argument in the courts, legally equivalent to a 8 to 50 hour restoration job on an artwork, which may include reconstructing missing parts of the image. ...Seriously. That's your final word on the subject? -Adam

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Fwd: Does Commons have a policy of violating UK copyright?
by Harry Burt 10 Jul '12

10 Jul '12

Cary wrote: > > On 7/9/2012 5:33 AM, Harry Burt wrote: > > Likewise, Cary's suggestion that Commons takes a view on "bad law" is > > clearly not correct, as can be seen over the PD-1996 discussions. > I did not suggest that 'Commons takes a view on "bad law".' Where did > you read that? > > - C That was a reply to your final line: > You will never convince Commons users to use a copyright tag on > something that is not enforceable by copyright law which either doesn't > exist (US) or is bad law (UK). > > Cary -- Harry Burt (User:Jarry1250)

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Commons-l July 2012