Commons-l

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

7 participants
2055 discussions

Cross project perception of Commons?
by Herby 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Hum I'm guessing some section of the population of this list will have a go at this BUT I do think we need to look at some PR issues. A while back there was a sharp rap on the knuckles on Meta about deleting images because it was "better to have them locally as Commons just delete things without warning". That one I think was pacified in part & I cannot put my finger on a link. However... I have recently spent rather more time on en wp (please don't get me started, I'm not keen on the place or indeed the interactions that go on there). I felt folks should be aware of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incide…. There are some pretty strong views aired there & I would ask that folks think before they are tempted to join in (removal of previously licensed material will get some folks hot under the collar!). To me this is a wider PR thing. When I was on en wp I knew next to nothing about commons. On this list recently we were equated with a "service" to Wikipedia. Elsewhere (I forget again where) I mentioned that I changed an upload warning template on Meta that suggested uploading material to en wp. I really do not think that we (our function & us) are well understood and I think this is worth some thought. I'm off to sit quietly somewhere and not go back to my mailbox for a while!! Just thought people should know. Me :-) -- Herby herbythyme(a)fmail.co.uk -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an unladen european swallow

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And not for the embarrassing part...
by Magnus Manske 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

As {{Information}} will be one of the primary sources of image metadata for years to come, I thought it important to find all images that I, personally, uploaded to Commons that lack said template. So I wrote Yet Another Tool. Turns out, over 48% of my images lack that template! Well, I've been uploading to Commons since forever, that is, before {{Information}} existed. So much for rationalization... But, check yourself! Of Brianna's uploads, less than 9% lack {{Information}}. Yay! http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/mynoinfo.php?user=Pfctdayelise Also, she has uploaded exactly 333 files now, and has to buy a round! ;-) Cheers, Magnus

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American non-acceptance of the rule of the shorter term of the Berne Convention is impeding our site developments
by J JIH 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Please take a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/American_non-acceptance_of_the_rule_of_the_s… to see how American non-acceptance of the rule of the shorter term of the Berne Convention is impeding our site developments. The Meta page says: "Current U.S. copyright laws, under 17 U.S.C. 104(c) and 17 U.S.C. §104A, seem not to accept the rule of the shorter term, creating confusions for users wishing to post foreign works and putting burdens on administrators who must verify if a work is in fact copyrighted in the United States even if it has already been in the public domain in the country of original publication." 17 U.S.C. §104A makes the restored copyright automatic. Filing with the USA Copyright Office a notice of intent to enforce that person's copyright is to show formal intention. If any users can contact foreign authors or their successors to ask whether they will pursue USA copyright even if they can no longer copyright their works at home, please forward the message to permissions at wikimedia dot org, but if they cannot be easily contacted, the works are orphaned. British governmental works under Crown Copyright are known not affected by American non-acceptance of the rule of the shorter term when British Government does not pursue copyright beyond its home term abroad. Regards, Jusjih as Administrator in (same username in all of these sites) 1. Chinese Wikipedia 2. Multilingual Wikisource 3. Chinese Wiktionary 4. English Wikisource 5. Chinese Wikisource 6. Wikimedia Commons 7. English Wiktionary 8. English Wikipedia 9. Chinese Wikiquote 10. English Wikiquote

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Category RSS feed
by Magnus Manske 22 Aug '07

22 Aug '07

Like this? ;-) http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/catfood.php?category=Flags_of_Costa_Rica I'm new to RSS feed generation, so please text and tell me if there's something broken/odd. Tech info: This shows the latest 10 images in a category, according to img_timestamp, not cl_timestamp. So, it really does show the latest images uploaded into that category, and not the latest added to that category (though these are often the same!). Magnus

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EXIF
by Gregory Maxwell 20 Aug '07

20 Aug '07

On 8/20/07, Robin Schwab <contact(a)robinschwab.ch> wrote: [snip] > Exif information > is not altered when uploading. Exif date/time original is not altered > when edititing in Photoshop. This brings us back to an old issue as well.. right now EXIF data isn't copied into thumbnails. This is annoying because our thumbs lose all this nice data. It would also be useful if we added 'thumbnailed flag' and a link to the wikimedia image to the EXIF of thumbs that we generate. This would make detection of uploading images derived from our thumbnails much easier. It would be even better to also copy the entire text of the image page, but just the URL would be a big improvement. We don't copy the EXIF today for good reason: some jpegs have huge blobs of data stuffed into the jpegs. A complete matrix+shaper ICC profile is much larger than most of our thumbs. There are also thumbs in the EXIF of a lot of images. Has anyone seen any written recommendations on exif data that should stripped for thumbnails?

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{{EXIFDATE}}
by Magnus Manske 20 Aug '07

20 Aug '07

For a tool that tries to fill in {{Information}} templates on commons based on the current, unstructured text, I have it fill in the "Date" parameter from the EXIF data of the image, if available. I just thought: How about a new magic word, {{EXIFDATE}}, that would extract EXIF data from the image? It could be used in {{Information}} as a default in case no "Date" parameter is provided. {{EXIFDATE}} would return blank on namespaces other than "Image:", of course, and for files that have no EXIF data. There could be {{EXIFTIME}} and {{EXIFTIMEDATE}} as well, but that would be luxus :-) Shouldn't be too costly for the parser (on image pages, image data will be needed anyway). Anyone opposed? Anyone willing to code? ;-) Cheers, Magnus

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State of the projects and other tips on how to make sure projects are well known (was: All about Wikimania...)
by Delphine Ménard 20 Aug '07

20 Aug '07

I like clear threads. On 8/12/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: > know about Wikipedia, so they ignore the rest. So then the thing to do > is change the journalists. :) As Florence mentionned, this has been done, especially in countries where 1) there is a chapter 2) there is a strong figure in one of the projects but no chapter 3) there is both In short, it takes people on the ground to change the journalists, it's not something that happens on a top down basis. Most European press has now learned to address either the chapter/the community members responsible for press or the Foundation depending on the nature of the article they want to write. And if not, it should be a very clear things for the chapters as well as for the Foundation to direct them to the right people, "on the ground". > On 12/08/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > > What would be real cool would be to try to keep a written state of each > > project, what is hot, what is working, what is not working, technical > > wish list, biggest issues, big figures etc.... so that all participants > > could "follow" what is going on. I know all this is actually available, > > but only in a very dispersed manner, so not so easy to find out. > [snip] On 8/12/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: > OK here is an idea for Florence. Write a post to foundation-l > addressing all projects (e.g. enwikipedia, frwikisource). Ask them to > put together a 'state of the wiki' report, with the things you > mentioned: > * progress reports on pages, users, admins, policies > * success of any special projects like printed material, wikiprojects > * any special policy or practice that they have developed, that is not > seen on other projects > * technical wishlist > * "perennial debates" - controversies that often come up in the community > > Tell them it's optional to submit a report, and they have a month to write it. > > If nothing else it would make for seriously interesting reading. :) > And the Board can just, you know, publish it on the foundation wiki. > They don't have to do anything else with it. But just having this kind > of 'official' request may make people think about these kind of > things. This is, unfortunately, not a new idea. Quarto [1] lived and died a beautiful death and was exactly about that. Making sure that all projects had a place to express themselves, raise their issues, tell about the state of their project. So let me try a different approach. Rather than waiting for Florence to try again something that she and other people have tried before, or for "the Foundation " to issue a dealdine, why don't you, Brianna, come up with a "state of commons" that you broadcast across lists and projects and ask for the same from other projects, just because you're interested? I am a fervent believer that top down has its limits, and that a call from a "fellow community member" might be better heard altogether. My take being that an "official" request is not always the answer to everything, on the contrary. Delphine [1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto -- ~notafish La critique, art aisé, se doit d'être constructive. -- Boris Vian in *Chroniques du menteur* NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will probably get lost. NB. Cette adresse est utilisée pour les listes de diffusion. Tout email personnel envoyé à cette adresse sera probablement perdu.

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Towards a Commons API
by Brianna Laugher 20 Aug '07

20 Aug '07

Hello, First, an anecdote. I have had on my Google Reader for a while now, a feed from Technorati which picks up any blog posts with the words 'wikimedia commons'. A lot of crud comes through, but also a fair number of real bloggers who use our photos to illustrate their blog posts. And let me say, they almost always get it wrong. They fail to link. They fail to mention the license. They fail to mention the author. Probably we are lucky if they manage to mention the site name. While I look at all these random blogs, I notice the proliferation of Flickr plugins...part of Flickr's success, I feel certain, is due to their API which allows anyone to easily "plug" Flickr into another application - a blog, a website, facebook, etc. And in multiple ways: by license, by keyword, by author(or, close enough: uploader). They also have that Commons could do this, but first we need to standardise. Anyone who actually has tried to write a tool to pick up this stuff will know it is hit and miss. So, I am not really planning to work on this in any big hurry, but I'm just saying it for reference and in case anyone else has a particular interest in it. The two main problems are keywords and licenses. Uploaders at least MediaWiki takes care of. :) first, the easy one: licenses. There is a painful problem at the moment that we have no way of knowing which templates are license templates and which ones are not. New ones are created all the time and old ones may be converted to deletion templates. (ook.) so, my proposal. 1. ask for new License: namespace to be installed at Commons. 2. move all license templates into the License: namespace. 3. separate any template which conflates license and source, e.g. "PD-NASA", "GFDL-GeoDB" (or whatever). Anything which is in the public domain, regardless of how it got there, should have {{License:Public domain}}. Indicating source by text + template is fine. Now I am not sure if there is actually a good reason we have license categories. Is it safe to assume that no one ever searches via license? If so, is there any extra functionality we gain from having the category? If not, we can quit using categories as well as templates to indicate licenses. If it is useful, we should change all license categories to be prefixed with License:. So instead of [[Category:GFDL]] we would have [[category:License:GFDL]]. I know technically "Public domain" is not a license. but close enough. So, the second problem, keywords. Let's reduce this to an easier (although less complete :)) problem: categories. Being able to have per-category feeds would be extremely cool. Imagine such a feed on QI or FP. Totally awesome. So in general we can assume that categories on a file act as describing keywords. There are two exceptions. One is license categories (see above). The other is maintenance categories, such as deletion, cleanup, user. So I propose we rename all these kinds of categories, to "Maintenance:X" or "Meta:X" for deletion and cleanup, and I guess "User:X" for user. I dunno. maybe these don't interfere too much. Sometimes they are useful. This change is not as important as the license one. In general, I think it is good for us to look at Flickr and say: how do they facilitate sharing their content? how can we do that too? cheers, Brianna user:pfctdayelise -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Does Commons need a separate server for external tools?
by Brianna Laugher 19 Aug '07

19 Aug '07

Re: the discussion about an API and external tools, We have a bit of a problem in that we are using both the toolserver and the regular servers in ways they were not intended for. They are both really intended for Wikimedia-internal use. If we use them for external tools, Wikimedia does not directly benefit. If we were to have any great success, it would likely backfire and result in the thing being shut down or restricted. So, do you think we should (sometime in the future, not tomorrow :)) consider approaching a chapter or outside org to donate hardware specifically for this purpose? Call it the Commons thumbcache server. cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Swiss images needed for Wikipediaday Berne
by Robin Schwab 19 Aug '07

19 Aug '07

Hello I'm part of the organization commitee for Wikipedia Day Berne 2007 which will take place Sept 29th. To show that Wikimedia is not equal Wikipedia we decided to print 12 images about Switzerland poster size and glue them on aluminum plates. The images will be shown on Open Expo in Zurich on Sept 19th too. So all we need is good nominations of Swiss images. You know some? Nominate here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikipediatag-2007-Galerie Thanks! Robin Schwab OK Wikipediatag Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens

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