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2055 discussions

Proposed deletion of images by Luc Viatour
by Rémi Kaupp 19 Aug '07

19 Aug '07

Dear all, You may have heard of Luc Viatour, aka [[User:LViatour]] : he is one of our best contributors on Commons, has uploaded hundreds of very good quality pictures and about 30 of his pictures have received the "Featured Pictures" status. Now someone has proposed his "copyright template" for deletion, while saying "Unless his template is moved to userspace and substed in all cases, it and all it tags (all images of Lviatour) should be deleted", which I think is very rude and aggressive. The deletion request is on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Images_of_Lviat…. Now I'm asking, what is this stupid rule about about personal copyright template ? This one (ie http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:LviatourCredit ) doesn't do any harm : 1) It includes a double license GFDL-CC-BY-SA, and that's all. 2) It tells people who is the author and how to re-use the image, which is very good (see the related discussion about people not knowing how to reuse images from Commons) 3) It says that "an email would be appreciated", which is not against the rules as it is not mandatory. Now if we start deleting templates like this, we can surely say goodbye to our best contributors. We surely do not want people like Luc Viatour to get out from Commons, do we ? Regards, Rémi http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Korrigan

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en.wiktionary discussing disabling local uploads
by Chris McKenna 18 Aug '07

18 Aug '07

There is a discussion that is just starting on the English Wiktionary about the possibility of disabling local uploads. I don't have figures, but there are not many images used on the project and I doubt there are many uploaded anyway. Of the images that are used, I'd be suprised if more than a handful at most were fair use and thus unsuitable for commons. Most of the media is audio files, and again I don't have figures but if even 1% are not suitable for Commons I would be suprised. The discussion is at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour#Disable_file_uploadin… Chris -- Chris McKenna cmckenna(a)sucs.org www.sucs.org/~cmckenna The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart Antoine de Saint Exupery

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SVG Open Conference: Tokyo, Sep 4-7 2007
by Brianna Laugher 16 Aug '07

16 Aug '07

There's a reasonable amount of stuff about SVG + mobiles and SVG + GIS. If anyone just happens to be hanging around Tokyo in the next two or three weeks it might be worth popping in. ;) cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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WMI PicWik update
by Brianna Laugher 16 Aug '07

16 Aug '07

WMI = Wikimedia Israel, a chapter PicWik = "pictures for Wikimedia", internal name for their historical picture collecting project An English translation of the project spec is available at meta, who are interested to know more about it: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Free_image_collection_project cheers, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Complete brokenness of categories is making me mad.
by Gregory Maxwell 15 Aug '07

15 Aug '07

In short, our category system is completely screwed up. I've complained about this in the past, but it only seems to be getting worse. If you follow the category hierarchy you'll find over 26,000 sub*cats* of Category:GFDL, for example. On the mean number of decedents of commons categories is 110 subcategories after full expansion. There are 29 categories from which you can reach at least 90% of the total categories used on commons. Just a list of all the categories and their children is over 400mbytes of text. Limiting the depth of traversal doesn't work because doing so would result in terrible brokenness, such as randomly failing to return a particular flower picture when someone searches for "flowers" just because someone decided to split Category:White Flowers into "Grey flowers" and "light white flowers" thus moving some of the images a level too deep. Many of the broken linkages aren't especially deep. This is brokenness which goes far beyond the semantic drift issues that I've argued make implicit category assignment fundamentally flawed. (although some of it is through semantic drift, cat:astronomical objects includes everything on earth through a completely useless but piecewise sensible path) What I need to know is: What do you need from me in order to fix this? I can provide, via JS insertion of data from a toolserver tool, a list on the category page of all the children of that category. However, which many cats with over 1000 decedents... you might be waiting a while for some pages to load. Alternatively I could provide. via the same means. a list of the children of a category at the top of the category (working around the subcats display complaint in bugzilla). I can provide reports such as what are the deepest linkages which carry the most children, and which categories have the most descendants. What do we need to fix this? I've already given my solution (apply all categories that make sense to images, and only use the hierarchy to help with finding and suggesting cats). Some background: I recently put up a tool which enables very fast intersections of commons categories. The same back end can be used for blindingly fast geographic searches, and text searches. http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/cgi-bin/cattersect.py It's already a useful tool for finding images, but it's substantially limited by the fact that categories are broken into tiny groups and the tool can not dynamically walk the category hierarchy. I've long argued that we need to avoid the category hierarchy issue by applying all applicable categories directly to the image, and reserve the hierarchy for pure category maintenance purposes. I've realized that despite the merits of my position (argued elsewhere), it simply isn't going to get traction in our community. So in the interest of making progress I started working on finding a solution to making the tool support following the category hierarchy. I've got something which I think will work fairly well, ... it doesn't break live update for image data, though it does require batch updates of the category tree data. ... I would have had it up tonight were our category data not so badly broken.

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commons (sic) confusion
by Brianna Laugher 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

I ran across this blog post in my technorati feed for the keywords 'wikimedia commons': http://www.smm.org/buzz/blog/challenging_fossils_found_in_africa "Photo courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons." LOL :) Is is a harbinger for the future? cheers, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Re: [Commons-l] New de-adminship policy
by Herby 13 Aug '07

13 Aug '07

With all respect to those affected concerns were raised about inactive Admins on various community pages in March & April. Discussion on the policy started in May and was advertised on the Village pump and the Admin board. The vote when it took place was also advertised similarly. I guess it surprises me that people who consider themselves active do not watch such pages. Equally be signing up to request retaining the rights they retain the rights for six months at least. My fervent hope would be that they again become active admins on Commons however the only way they would not have known about the discussion is because they rarely read community pages on Commons. Herby -- Herby herbythyme(a)fmail.co.uk -- http://www.fastmail.fm - A fast, anti-spam email service.

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New de-adminship policy
by Matthew Brown 13 Aug '07

13 Aug '07

I just love the way that 21 users can vote to make a de-adminship policy without notifying any of the users concerned, including AFAIK on here. Nonsense like this only makes those more active on other projects tempted to only contribute to those projects and not Commons. -Matt

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All about Wikimania, future projects, licenses, etc etc
by Brianna Laugher 13 Aug '07

13 Aug '07

Hi folks, 0. intro/about Wikimania 1. POTY07 2. 1000FP book 3. Project with Wikimedia Israel 4. Goals statement 5. Tech 6. SVGs 7. FLOSS Manuals 8. Joi, CC 9. Licenses, GFDL, GSFDL drafts (long) I'm back now from Wikimania. It was a really exciting event, and just so cool to be able to speak to so many different people about lots of different things. I will write below a summary of some of the Commons-related things I talked to people about. Florence used a slide of the Wikimedia logo mosaic in her opening speech. I felt very proud for us :) and I still think that was a great project. I think maybe it made a good impression on the board in terms of our relationship with them. I gave a 'Commons HOWTO tutorial' which started with about a dozen people attending and by the end there was another dozen or two. I talked briefly about how Commons works, deriv works, licenses, categories, CommonSense tool, Mayflower, Extra-tabs.js (although I didn't call it that, and one person commented that they had never seen them before - we DO have them installed for EVERYONE, right??). We did a transfer of an image from en.wp to Commons. We got some tough questions like 'I'm uploading these for my wife - what should I do vis-a-vis permission?' (I said ask her to send you a confirmation email. This case of genuine verbal permission is tricky to handle.) It was fun. BTW I hope next time that a lot more Commoners are there. :) This was more or less your Commons representation: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikimania_2007_Commons_puzzle_piece… It was super fun, and anyone who is a 'wikiholic' should at the very least apply for a scholarship!! ==POTY07== I will post separately about this. But I think we should start getting into gear or at least thinking about things. I think we should close submissions by the end of Nov, hold two weeks of voting, and use the results to make calendar/s. I also think we should have 12-15 different categories of voting and more or less use those as the calendar pictures. ==1000FP book== I did a 5-min lightning talk mentioning the idea about the 1000FP talk and Evan P... (Wikitravel guy) was there. He told me he knew that Flickr had done some partnership with Blurb.com (print on demand) with a book called something like '24 hours on Flickr'. And apparently they are interested in this kind of 'new technology' internet stuff. So I'm going to try and talk to Blurb and see what they think. Blurb was something I originally thought might work because print-on-demand saves a lot of hassle like worrying about sales numbers, and Blurb also have a special template for photobooks. Let's face it if you're going to make a photobook you really want decent print quality. I think we should try to distribute books (of Wikimedian works)+CDs (with all 1000FP). According to CatScan we are up to 913. I now think that instead of asking/wishing for the board to promote us, we need to force them to have to talk about us by creating the interest ourselves. I really think this project could create some serious interest. And maybe if enough proceeds go to the WMF, then we can demand with a little more conviction that they should be earmarked for Commons-specific development. :) Reminder: if you're interested in book development, please join http://groups.google.com/group/commonsbook . ==Project with Wikimedia Israel== I spent some time talking to a lovely chap named Dror (User:Drork) who describes himself as the "foreign minister" of the Wikimedia Israel chapter. Their chapter is planning to start a big project with another company in Israel to ask people to look for historically significant images in their private collections and donate them to the public domain. (Israel is having some anniversaries so it is timely for them.) He basically wanted to know that such images would be welcome in Commons. I said of course! Then we discussed about how the images should be collected. We decided it would be better if the images were submitted to a gateway before being added to Commons. The organisation that he is working with is willing to write the open source SW to collect all the structured data that they want to collect (and also deal with hebrew, arabic etc interface stuff which we do poorly at best). So the idea at the moment is that their partner org will write this interface, we will install it on the toolserver, and from there it can be appropriately formatted etc and go into Commons. So we have quite a few toolserver users working for Commons, that won't be a problem I think, just thought that was a pretty cool project. They plan to run a pilot project and if it's successful (they don't know what kind of stuff people will even submit), then a full-on project may run for like a year. ==Goals statement== I am even more convinced now that having a clear goals/aims statement will help guide the growth of the wiki by providing direction. So I plan to try and work on this. If you are interested in it then let me know (or keep an eye on my userspace :)). ==Tech== I spent a little time talking to Tim Starling about Commons' tech priorities and even showed him the Mayflower search engine which he was unaware of (!). I intend to write up a summary for wikitech-l about what I consider are Commons' tech priorities. One of them will be replacing/integrating Mayflower as our search engine. I really consider this a major priority for us. ==SVGs== Apparently the Inkscape founder went to Wikimania. I only found this out at the airport as I was leaving. :( I am thinking of trying to contact him to make them aware of the work we are doing with SVGs, because as far as I can see no one else anywhere is doing the kind of things we do with them. Surely someone somewhere must care! :P ==FLOSS Manuals== I ended up spending quite a bit of time talking to Adam from FLOSS Manuals. http://flossmanuals.net/ He gave me a copy of their first printed manual on Audacity. Part of their thing is really concentrating on high-quality documentation. I suggested a chapter on how to edit human voice recordings would be really useful for Wikimedians. He told me they use TWiki. If you check out their site and the section called 'Remix' you can see how it's possible to pick and choose particular chapters to be included in a print-on-demand book. Now this is amazingly cool. I imagine a really useful thing - FLOSS Manuals having a 'Wikimedia Commons Media Handbook' with chapters on Inkscape & GIMP, and Audacity & Ogg Theora (same book? separate book?). Now our Images for Cleanup people already know a lot of this stuff. If Commons people think something like this could be useful, I will let them know there is interest in it. If Commons people are interested in writing for it, that's all the better I think. I think he is even trying to get sponsorship to be able to retrospectively pay contributors. I think there's just great power in having something in your hands to demonstrate what you're doing and help spread the word, convince others. Those of us who find this kind of tech second nature are a very small minority. ==Joi, CC== Joi gave a speech about the 'sharing economy' and I managed to talk to him briefly afterwards, about how I have this feeling that we have this great resource that no one knows anything about. We have the Commons know-how, he has the media contacts, maybe we can make something happen. I think it's a very cool thing that some of the Creative Commons people take part on this list. To me it shows that they are reaching out and want to work with us and I think we should be reaching back too. Wikimedia is a bit insular sometimes... We have much more in common than we do different. ==Licenses, GFDL, GSFDL drafts== So there was actually a surprising number of talks about licenses and licensing. Although there are some of us who know a ton about licenses there are still many of us who don't. So although some of us will feel like we are repeating ourselves it still seems really important that we keep re-iterating the basic messages about how copyright works, how free licenses work, how to use them, etc. I mean at the same time we still have to deal with the nitty-gritty crap like interpreting licenses in different jurisdictions and deriv works and the like. So it's not easy but I think it's really important we keep walking along both lines. I went to this talk http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:MH1 in which I found out a new draft of the GFDL is open for comment at the moment. The new GFDL has a clause about 'excerpts' where an excerpt can be distributed without the full license text. see http://gplv3.fsf.org/fdl-draft-2006-09-22.html clause 6. Bizarrely this mentions how an excerpt of a text document should be interpreted, and an audio and video document, but not an image. Er???? Is it that an excerpt of an image cannot exist? Is an excerpt of an image like a crop, or a thumbnail, or like nothing at all? If 'excerpt' has no meaning the field of images then they should explicitly say that, I think. The other complaint I have about this new draft is that the wording is still oriented to text documents (and even very long ones at that), despite the fact that they acknowledge other works can and are used. How should a 'title page' be interpreted in terms of an image? I intend to make a comment asking them to reword such things or else explicitly state the interpretation of the terms for various media. It also has this important clause 8a: "If the Work has no Cover Texts and no Invariant Sections then you may relicense the Work under the GNU Simpler Free Documentation License." So maybe we (Wikimedia) could have this: (now) GFDL1.2 -> GFDL2 -> GSFDL === CC-BY-SA? OK why is this important? Creative Commons' goals are not necessarily ours, etc etc. I think this is a direction we should try to go forward in because in essence we have the same goals, and keeping distinct licenses for no good reason makes understanding the situation unnecessarily complex, and thus harms our ability to communicate our mission and vision to as wide an audience as possible. Note 'no good reason'. If good reasons exist, we should keep the distinctions. Is the 'fulltext-copy' condition of the GFDL a good reason? I don't recall ever seeing anyone put forward a reason why it's actually vitally necessary. So, GSFDL. The GSFDL currently has a very stupid clause called '0a. FREE MANUALS ARE ESSENTIAL'. When they just acknowledged that the license can be used for even non-text works, I dislike the inclusion of this unnecessary clause a lot. The GSFDL also has the 'Excerpts' thing. The main difference between the GFDL and the GSFDL is this in the GSFDL: "You need not include a copy of this License in the Work if you have registered the work's license with a national agency that maintains a network server through which the general public can find out its license." Hm, I don't know quite what that implies, but hopefully it leads to a situation of not needing to copy the license fulltext with each use. That was my impression from the talk. regards Brianna user:pfctdayelise -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Project Peach
by Erik Moeller 12 Aug '07

12 Aug '07

Those of you using Blender for 3D graphics may be interested in Project Peach, the follow-up to the "Elephants Dream" open source movie: http://peach.blender.org/ They are currently accepting DVD pre-orders. E.D. led to significant progress in Blender development & I expect the same will be true for Peach, so this is a great way to support open source software that is relevant to WM projects. -- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

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