Commons-l February 2015

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

18 participants
12 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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Project Wiki Loves Art in Belgium
by Romaine Wiki 25 Mar '15

25 Mar '15

Hello all, Hereby I like to announce the project Wiki Loves Art in Belgium. In November we had a meeting with a museum and we noticed that they were very enthusiastic about Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but they experienced it as difficult and maybe dangerous to open up their collection. This relatively closed attitude appears to be not unique, but often occurring among Belgian cultural institutions, compared with other countries, as we understood from various organisations in the open knowledge sector. Therefore we have thought about how to work together with cultural institutions and we came up with Wiki Loves Art. This project has been organised earlier in various countries, and in 2009 also in the Netherlands. A Dutch team is currently working on organising Wiki Loves Art in 2016 again, and that gave us the inspiration to start with the organisation in Belgium as well. Wiki Loves Art is a photo contest in what participants visit the museums, galleries, archives and libraries which have determined a part of their collection to be photographed and published under a free license. Wiki Loves Art gives participating photographers often a unique possibility to take photos in a cultural institution and/or to visit an organisation behind the scenes. This has resulted in other Wiki Loves Art projects in many photos that are widely used on various Wikipedias. For cultural institutions this project gives the opportunity to collaborate with Wikipedia/Wikimedia in a save way, without having opening the doors of their entire collections, and show a part of their collection with relatively little costs. In an organisational point of view the project is intended to make the Belgiumgap less wide and the availability will increase the coverage of Belgian art on Wikipedia. In comparison with other countries, relatively less articles have been written about subjects in Belgium in the various language versions of Wikipedia. This project tries to stimulate to fill this gap and that Belgian art and more is better visible and described on Wikipedia. Wiki Loves Art is a project under the flag of Wikimedia Belgium, but is a joint project in what we work together with several organisations with a long-term expertise in working with cultural institutions and/or open knowledge projects. Together with them we had last week a meeting and agreed on how we want to organise Wiki Loves Art in Belgium. We need to start in time as the project is very labour intensive with much time spend on communication with the various cultural institutions. The Dutch team has therefore highly recommended to hire someone for one or two days a week during the project to be able to manage all the communication and organisational needs. We are also going to set up a website, print flyers and leaflets, and after the contest we organise a jury to judge the photos and organise a prize giving ceremony. Therefore we created a grant request at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/WM_BE/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016 If there are any suggestions or feedback, please let us know. The project will be brought in at the General Assembly coming Saturday. If you are interested in volunteering as part of the organisational team, let us know! The project page can be found at https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016 Kind regards, Romaine

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Help fund a macro lens for a Commons contributor
by Tomasz W. Kozłowski 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Hi list, this is just to let you know that a group of Commons volunteers have just launched a crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo to fund a macro lens for Jeevan Jose a.k.a. Jkadavoor so as to allow him to take even better pictures of the amazing biodiversity in his home state of Kerala, India. The pictures, of course, are released by Jee under a free licence and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and then used in Wikipedia articles in multiple languages. As an uninvolved person who has just been made aware of this, all I can say is: have a look at the campaign page at <http://igg.me/at/jkadavoor> and decide for yourselves whether this is a project you want to help with. [CC-ing this to the Commons mailing list as well.] Regards, -- Tomasz W. Kozlowski a.k.a. [[user:odder]]

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soy yo marco antonio hurtado
by marco antonio hurtado 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

gracias por confirmarme que ya estoy suscrito

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Structured data on Commons update
by Keegan Peterzell 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Greetings, After a delay in updates to the Structured data on Commons[1] project, I wanted to catch you up with what has been going on over the past three months. In short: The project is on hold, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening. The meeting in Berlin[2] in October provided the engineering teams with a lot to start on. Unfortunately the Structured Data on Commons project was put on hold not too long after this meeting. Development of the actual Structured data system for Commons will not begin until more resources can be allocated to it. The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany have been working to improve the Wikidata query process on the back-end. This is designed to be a production-grade replacement of WikidataQuery integrated with search. The full project is described at Mediawiki.org[3].This will benefit the structured data project greatly since developing a high-level search for Commons is a desired goal of this project. The Wikidata development team is working on the arbitrary access feature. Currently it's only possible to access items that are connected to the current page. So for example on Vincent van Gogh you can access the statements on Q5582, but you can't access these statements on Commons at Category:Vincent van Gogh or Creator:Vincent van Gogh. With arbitrary access enabled on Commons we no longer have this limitation. This opens up the possibility to use Wikidata data on Creator, Institution, Authority control and other templates instead of duplicating the data (what we do now). This will greatly enhance the usefulness of Wikidata for Commons. To use the full potential of arbitrary access the Commons community needs to reimplement several templates in LUA. In LUA it's possible to use the local fields and fallback to Wikidata if it's not locally available. Help with this conversion is greatly appreciated. The different tasks are tracked in Phabricator[4]. Volunteers are continuing to add data about artworks to Wikidata. Sometimes an institution website is used and sometimes data is being transfered from Commons to Wikidata. Wikidata now has almost 35.000 items about paintings. This is done as part of the Wikidata WikiProject "Sum of All Paintings"[5]. This helps us to learn how to refine metadata structure about artworks. Experience that will of course be very useful for Commons too. Additionally, the metadata cleanup drive continues to produce results[6]. The drive, which is intended to identify files missing {{information}} or the like structured data fields and to add such fields when absent, has reduced the number of files missing information by almost 100,000 on Commons. You can help by looking for files[7] with similarly-formatted description pages, and listing them at Commons:Bots/Work requests[8] so that a bot can add the {{information}} template on them. At the Amsterdam Hackathon in November 2014, a couple of different models were developed about how artwork can be viewed on the web using structured data from Wikidata. You can browse two examples[9][10]. These examples can give you an idea of the kind of data that file pages have the potential to display on-wiki in the future. The Structured Data project is a long-term one, and the volunteers and staff will continue working together to provide the structure and support in the back-end toward front-end development. There are still many things to do to help advance the project, and I hope to have more news for you in the near future. Contact me any time with questions, comments, concerns. 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Berlin_bootcamp 3. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing 4. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89594 5. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_sum_of_all_paintings 6. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive 7. https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html 8. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests 9. http://www.zone47.com/crotos/?p=1&p276=190804&y1=1600&y2=2014 10. http://sum.bykr.org/432253 -- Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Product Wikimedia Foundation

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Media Viewer 2014 Reports
by Fabrice Florin 18 Feb '15

18 Feb '15

Hi folks, The multimedia team completed a review of Media Viewer in recent weeks, and we'd like to share a few highlights of what we learned from this project in 2014. 1. Research Here are some key findings from our research about this product: • Media Viewer serves a lot more images than before (17M intentional views/day) • Most users keep Media Viewer enabled (99.5% enabled) • Media Viewer key features were found easy to use • Media Viewer is more useful for readers than active editors More information can be found in this Media Viewer Research 2014 report: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Research_2014 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Research_2014> See also these companion slides for a visual presentation of more findings: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Media_Viewer_Research_-_2014_Slides… <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Media_Viewer_Research_-_2014_Slides…> 2. Retrospective The multimedia team also discussed lessons learned from this project in 2014, identifying what worked and what didn’t work, in order to inform future product development. Here are some highlights of that team review. The Media Viewer project ran from July 2013 to November 2014 and was more challenging than expected. While the product received favorable or neutral feedback on most Wikimedia sites, it was met with negative reactions from many contributors on the English and German Wikipedias, as well as on Wikimedia Commons. This caused the team to work longer than planned, to improve features based on user feedback. What worked well: • Detailed activity and performance metrics. • Design research -- before and after implementing a feature. • Working with community champions in different projects. • Agile development process and tools. • Unit tests to improve the code. What didn't work well: • Many community discussions did not effectively inform product development. • Surveys were not representative, because they were optional. • We lacked the tools to get productive feedback from different user groups. • Juggling feature and platform development at the same time was hard. • Scope creep; the workload kept growing beyond available resources. • No clear success metric; we couldn't tell if we had met our goal. More findings can be found in this Media Viewer Retrospective summary: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Retrospective <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Retrospective> Please let us know if you have any questions about this research or retrospective. You’re also welcome to add your feedback on the Media Viewer talk page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Media_Viewer/About#Media_View… <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Media_Viewer/About#Media_View…> I'm grateful to all the team members who worked on these documents, especially Gergő and Gilles. These findings can help us better understand how Media Viewer serves our users — and how we can improve not only this product but also our development and release process. This will be my last post on behalf of the multimedia team, as I have now transitioned into a new role at the Wikimedia Foundation, working as Movement Communications Manager. Senior engineer Gilles Dubuc is now leading the multimedia team and can answer questions related to upcoming projects. I’d like to thank all the community members who worked closely with us on this project, as well as my colleagues on the multimedia and product teams. We learned a lot together, and I really enjoyed creating a better product with you all. I look forward to more collaborations in coming years. Regards as ever, Fabrice _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Movement Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)>

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Elog.io now up w/ Commons data
by Jonas Öberg 13 Feb '15

13 Feb '15

Dear all, thanks for all your help with answering questions and giving feedback over the last couple of months. I'm happy to say that we're finally at a stage where we've hashed 22,452,638 images from Wikimedia Commons and launched Elog.io in public beta: http://elog.io/ Elog.io is an open API as well as browser plugins, that can query and get information about images using a perceptual hash that's easy and quick to calculate in a browser. What the browser extensions allow you to do is match an image you find "in the wild" against Wikimedia Commons. If it can be matched against an image from Commons, it'll show you the title, author, and license, and give you links back to Wikimedia, the license, and a quick and handy "Copy as HTML" to copy the image and attribution as a HTML snippet for pasting into Word, LibreOffice, Wordpress, etc. Our API provides lookup functions to find information using a URL (the Commons' page name URL) or using the perceptual hash. You get information back as JSON in W3C Media Annotations format. of course, the information you get back is no better than the one provided by the Commons API, so if you already have a page name URL, you may as well query it directly, and rely on our API only for searching by perceptual hashes. The algorithm we use for calculating perceptual hashes, which you'll need to query our API, is at http://blockhash.io/ Sincerely, Jonas

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Re: [Commons-l] [Wikimania-l] Wikimania Documentary Done
by Daniel Schwen 11 Feb '15

11 Feb '15

Crossposted to commons-l. This is about making the Video transcoding/upload tool on labs a bit more visible for potential video contributors on commons. Nkansah Rexford <nkansahrexford(a)gmail.com> wrote: > The video upload convert tool on wmflab, likely is exactly what I need(ed), > however I wished it was easy to find. Just recently that it was added to the Good point. We should think about adding it onto [[Special:UploadWizard]] for example in the form of a third button below the "Share images from Flickr". Although I foresee some demand for discussions about this, as the failed MP4 RfC may be relevant here. Daniel

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Database transclusion table inconsistent with the file metadata
by Tuszynski, Jarek W. 10 Feb '15

10 Feb '15

Hello all, Lately I was searching the Commons files for files without Information template or other maintained infobox templates mentioned in Commons:Infoboxes<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Infoboxes> [1] and adding them to Category:Media_missing_infobox_template<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_missing_infobox_template> [2] so me and others can add the information templates. One of the reasons why file might be missing infobox template, is that there is a problem with parsing of existing infotmation template, usually through some sort of {{}} [[]] bracket imbalance, such files go into Category:Pages_using_Information_template_with_parsing_errors<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_using_Information_templat…> . Files with such problem are found through CatScan3 queries for files not transcluding {{Information}}, but which contain string "{{Information". Lately I had a large number of "false positive" files that according to the CatScan do not transclude {{Information}}, but which clearly have the template. That seems to happen occasionally but usually edit required to add the category is enough for the database to refresh it's links and a second CatScan query like [5] can find them. However this time it does not work. Any idea how to purge such files? See also [6] Jarek T. (user:Jarekt) [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Infoboxes [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_missing_infobox_template [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Adding_the_In… [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_using_Information_templat… [5] https://tools.wmflabs.org/catscan3/catscan2.php?language=commons&project=wi… [6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jarekt#file:Amsterdam_P1080037…

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Help find great images about love
by Fabrice Florin 08 Feb '15

08 Feb '15

Hello everyone, What is your favorite image or media file about love? As millions prepare to celebrate Valentine’s Day around the world, we’d like to know how the topic of love is covered on Wikipedia and its sister projects, for a special blog post at the end of next week. We’re looking for great wiki articles, images, sounds or videos on this topic -- from platonic to fraternal or romantic love. Please add your suggestions on this email thread -- or on one of these pages: On Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Love_on_the_wikis On the Blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/06/wiki-articles-about-love/ Be sure to include a link, with a sentence or two about why you picked it! We welcome your suggestions until Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015 at midnight PST. We'll post some of your top picks next Friday on the Wikimedia Blog and social media -- just in time for Valentine’s Day. Thanks for sharing the love :) Fabrice on behalf of the WMF Comms team _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Movement Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

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Commons-l February 2015