Commons-l

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7 participants
2055 discussions

French village pump (was the status of smaller languages)
by folengo＠netcourrier.com 06 May '06

06 May '06

Brianna http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-May/006995.html « (fr) Commons:Bistro Maintained, but not very active (6 topics). » Actually the French Bistro has around 5 new topics per month. The preceding months have been recently archived, and this is why it looks so short. I like your idea of classifying which language community is active or not. I'll try to write a longer answer to your interesting point of view. Teofilo

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Direct copy to commons
by Magnus Manske 05 May '06

05 May '06

My Commons helper tool [1] can now directly copy an image from a wikipedia to the commons, using a perl script written by Eloquence. Note that this is now the default behaviour for the "CO" button on "missing images" as well. You can also call the commonshelper with GET parameters (in the URL). This might assist an organized effort to copy GFDL/PD/CC images to the commons. Magnus [1] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commonshelper.php

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FlickrLickr hits 5K
by Erik Moeller 04 May '06

04 May '06

Thanks to some busy new users, FlickrLickr has recently crossed the 5,000 image upload threshold: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kate/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=FlickrLickr&dbname… FlickrLickr is a collaborative tool for choosing free content pictures from Flickr to upload to Wikimedia Commons. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:FlickrLickr for details. To join, drop me an e-mail. And to all those who still have slices to finish: I'm watching you! ;-) Erik

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Re: [Commons-l] [WikiEN-l] Upload by default to Commons?
by Brianna Laugher 04 May '06

04 May '06

(Fwding to Commons list as well) Hmm... as a Commons admin I find this very interesting. Does it imply that the universal login is really in sight? We can only hope! :) I hope that the universal login does bring with it some kind of universal talk page "you have new messages...somewhere" notice. Most Commons users don't check their Commons talk pages with any regularity and thus don't receive their image warnings, and feel quite slighted when their copyvios/unsourced images are deleted. Any opportunity to reduce that would be welcome. I guess I would say that it's a good idea, except it would very welcome if en.wp (and any other projects that do this) would consider "donating" a few admins/keen users to help us out on copyvio patrol. For non-English projects this is especially essential - it is just so fantastic to have a native speaker around to be able to ask/tell them, "you deal with this person, please" :) Also Commons is, I think, a little more stringent in its application of free image requirements (that is, when we notice). Last concern is that Commons really requires uploaders to categorise their images, something that is not so necessary on en.wp. Luckily there are a couple of tools to help with this, perhaps one of these could be worked into the interface somehow. See the recent commons-l archive for links. Brianna > Message: 4 > Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 16:05:28 +0100 > From: "Rob Church" <robchur(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] [WikiEN-l] Upload by default to Commons? > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>, > wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org, "MediaWiki announcements and site admin > list" <mediawiki-l(a)wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: > <e92136380605030805n7ccef094r346d29ca168037f3(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > [Cross-post to wikien-l, wikitech-l and mediawiki-l; apologies for duplication] > > On 03/05/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi all, > > The "Upload file" link in the left pane of monobook still takes you > > to the page for uploading an image to the English wikipedia. In most > > cases, it would be more helpful to be uploading the image to Commons > > (US fair use being the notable exception). > > > > Since I notice that certain other wikipedias at least make a commons > > upload link equally prominent, is it time we considered removing the > > upload-to-EN link entirely, or hiding it somewhere for those that > > really do want to upload fair use images? And instead, provide a link > > to upload to commons? > > Allow me to recall a #mediawiki anecdote from about a week ago. A user > new to the software wanted to set up about three wikis using a fourth > as a mini version of our Commons (their own implementation); the > "usage" side had been established, but the user queried whether or not > uploads from all wikis could be diverted to the new. > > Given that the "slave" wikis would all have access to the "master" > database (excuse the confusing mix of terminologies for those who are > placing this into 'SQL context), I considered it wouldn't be too > difficult. > > Now for the relevant bit. It's been discussed before, a little, and I > touched upon it in a recent discussion sparked off from the newbie's > questions...but it could be feasible for us to replace our > Special:Upload pages with something a bit more intelligent. Making use > of the licencing dropdowns, we could, I think, redirect free images to > Commons in a seamless fashion (after checking existence and providing > a courteous note to the user, of course). > > This has advantages and disadvantages. The user's upload experience is > simple, and the image can be used as before without trouble. On the > other hand, deliberate or accidental mis-selection of the licence > [cw]ould result in an influx of non-free materials arriving on the > Commons. > > Nevertheless, I think the idea has potential, and it's something I > might be interested in helping to hack together in the future. I'll > throw it out here and see what people think. And since I'm at it, I'll > cross-post to mediawiki-l and wikitech-l, too. > > > Rob Church > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 6 > Date: Wed, 03 May 2006 17:35:14 +0200 > From: Filip Maljkovic <dungodung(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] [WikiEN-l] Upload by default to Commons? > To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list > <mediawiki-l(a)Wikimedia.org> > Cc: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>, > wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org > Message-ID: <4458CDB2.90706(a)gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > Rob Church wrote: > > [snip] > > Now for the relevant bit. It's been discussed before, a little, and I > > touched upon it in a recent discussion sparked off from the newbie's > > questions...but it could be feasible for us to replace our > > Special:Upload pages with something a bit more intelligent. Making use > > of the licencing dropdowns, we could, I think, redirect free images to > > Commons in a seamless fashion (after checking existence and providing > > a courteous note to the user, of course). > > > That's a brilliant idea. I'd really like to see it implemented. Not only > for English Wikipedia, but for all Wikimedia projects. > > This has advantages and disadvantages. The user's upload experience is > > simple, and the image can be used as before without trouble. On the > > other hand, deliberate or accidental mis-selection of the licence > > [cw]ould result in an influx of non-free materials arriving on the > > Commons. > > > Even though I'm not a Commons expert, I can deduce that Commons too has > a problem with wrong licenses, hence some of the deletion. > > [snip] > Filip > > P.S. Sorry for doubleposts... I used Reply to all > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 7 > Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 16:53:22 +0100 > From: "Rob Church" <robchur(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] [WikiEN-l] Upload by default to Commons? > To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" > <mediawiki-l(a)wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: > <e92136380605030853v488e0b4btf0e62fa9f0d6275b(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > On 03/05/06, Filip Maljkovic <dungodung(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > That's a brilliant idea. I'd really like to see it implemented. Not only > > for English Wikipedia, but for all Wikimedia projects. > > If it wasn't clear that that was the implication, then I apologise. > > > Even though I'm not a Commons expert, I can deduce that Commons too has > > a problem with wrong licenses, hence some of the deletion. > > Yes, but how much extra workload would it produce, and would the > benefits outweigh the disadvantages? > > > Rob Church > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 8 > Date: Wed, 03 May 2006 17:58:41 +0200 > From: Filip Maljkovic <dungodung(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] [WikiEN-l] Upload by default to Commons? > To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list > <mediawiki-l(a)Wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: <4458D331.1020104(a)gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > Rob Church wrote: > > On 03/05/06, Filip Maljkovic <dungodung(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> Even though I'm not a Commons expert, I can deduce that Commons too has > >> a problem with wrong licenses, hence some of the deletion. > >> > > > > Yes, but how much extra workload would it produce, and would the > > benefits outweigh the disadvantages? > I think they would. But that's just my opinion and I can see why you > have doubts about this. It'd be a step that could have a great impact in > the future. I'm interested in what others think, though. > > Filip > > > ------------------------------

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RfC: A Free Content and Expression Definition
by Erik Moeller 01 May '06

01 May '06

Dear Wikimedia community, I am posting this to multiple lists, as I believe it is relevant to each of them (more on that below). For years, we have been using the term "free content" to refer to our projects. However, what exactly is free content? Does it include the right to make commercial use? Does it allow derivative works? A year ago, Anthere, one of our elected trustees, noted that the English Wikipedia article [[free content]] is confused and contains no clear definition. This is no surprise, as the term has evolved purely through its usage. One year on, the article doesn't look much better and still doesn't contain a single reference. It is clear that we need a definition. With the help of feedback from the likes of Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessig, and an increasing number of collaborators, I have drafted up a first version of such a definition, called the "Free Content and Expression Definition": http://freecontentdefinition.org/Definition You can also use the URLs <http://freedomdefinition.org/> or <http://freedomdefined.org/>. Please use the URL http://freecontentdefinition.org/static/ (with trailing slash) when submitting this link to high traffic sites. Licenses covered by this definition must grant the following freedoms: * the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it * the freedom to redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression * the freedom to make improvements or other changes, and to release modified copies The essence of these freedoms is not negotiable. However, in order to best express, interpret and elaborate on these freedoms, I would like to announce an open editing phase to push this Definition to a 1.0 version. There is a stable, protected version of the definition and an unstable, openly editable one. The openly editable one, which may already differ significantly from the one above by the time you read this, can be found at: http://freecontentdefinition.org/Definition/Unstable You can suggest changes on the talk page, or be bold and make them directly. The change process will be consensus-based. In order to decide when a consensus has been reached on a change, I have appointed three moderators besides myself: * Benjamin Mako Hill. Mako is a co-initiator of the definition and a prolific figure in the free software community. To quote Wikipedia, he "is a Debian hacker and author of the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible (...). He currently works in the electronic publishing group of the MIT Media Lab, and is on the boards of Software in the Public Interest, Software Freedom International (the organization that organizes Software Freedom Day) and the Ubuntu Foundation." * Angela Beesley. You may be familiar with her. ;-) She's the other of the two elected trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and also the Vice President of Community Relations at Wikia, Inc. * Mia Garlick. General Counsel at Creative Commons, and an expert on IP law. Creative Commons is, of course, the project which offers many easy-to-use licenses to authors and artists, some of which are free content licenses and some of which are not. None of them is acting here in an official capacity related to their affiliations. Please treat their comments as personal opinion unless otherwise noted. See <http://freecontentdefinition.org/Authoring_process> for details on the authoring process and <http://freecontentdefinition.org/Moderators> for more about moderation. The Creative Commons project has welcomed the effort to clearly classify existing groups of licenses, and will work to supplement this definition with one which covers a larger class of licenses and works. In addition to changes to the definition itself, we invite you to submit logos that can be attached to works or licenses which are free under this definition: http://freecontentdefinition.org/Logo_contest Why is this relevant to the projects I am alerting about it? Wikipedia Has the most significant problems distinguishing between free and non-free materials simply because of the sheer amount of uploads and user-submitted content. The English Wikipedia, for instance, allows limited "fair use" in addition to free content uploads, but prohibits licenses which forbid commercial use. This definition allows us to state clearly: "An uploaded work must either be free content, or fair use. If it is fair use, strong restrictions apply, and your upload may be deleted or replaced at any time." The definition also contains remarks about interoperability with other licenses. This is a problem that concerns us at the moment when it comes to importing texts under licenses which are philosophically similar, but legally incompatible with the GFDL. If the definition gets widely adopted, we can push for changes to licenses to make them more compatible with each other. Wikimedia Commons Commons was launched as a free content repository. We have effectively followed the terms of the definition in the licenses we allow and prohibit for uploaded files; however, the discussions about whether to allow, for example, pictures which cannot be used commercially keep coming up. Clearly labeling the repository as a free content archive under this definition will help to avoid that. Wikinews I've seen some uploaded photo galleries that were under licenses which forbid derivative works. If we limit Wikimedia projects to free content, that would explicitly not be allowed. This is an example of "non-free content creep" that may be observed on other projects as well. Wiktionary The definition contains recommendations about license complexity. Wiktionary as a resource for terminological and lexicological data does not benefit from the highly complex terms of the GFDL, which require, for example, reprinting the entire license text when copying a single page. Wikimedia The definition makes it easy to resolve the question of which licenses to allow or disallow across projects. For example, a Wikimedia-wide policy could be that: "All content in all projects must be free content as per the Free Content Definition 1.0, with the exception of works which are used under exemptions granted by national copyright laws, such as 'fair use' in the United States. These exemptions are defined on a per-project and per-language basis." Outside Wikimedia, the definition will make it easier for us to communicate. For instance, many people use the very vague terms "open access" or "open content", or simply talk about "a Creative Commons license" when describing licensing of their work. The term "free content" has an existing usage in the sense described herein. With the additional support of this definition, it is a powerful and simple way to determine whether a work is usable in the context of the Wikimedia projects. One note on the choice of name. Not all people will be happy to label their works "content", as it is also a term that is heavily used in commerce. This is why Mako and I have compromised on the name "Free Content and Expression Definition" for the definition itself. We are suggesting "Free Expression" as an alternative term that may lend itself particularly to usage in the context of artistic works. However, we remain open on discussing the issue of naming, and invite your feedback in this regard. All that being said, I hope that you will join the open editing phase or the logo contest. Even if there will be very little feedback, I hope we will be able to release a 1.0 version of this definition fairly soon. You will find a general announcement that you can copy and paste to other places at: http://freecontentdefinition.org/Announcement Please leave a quick note in the log when distributing it. As a final note, if you create an account on the wiki, I would appreciate it if you could use your real name as your user name. Thanks for your time, Erik

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Public domain worldwide?
by Fredrik Josefsson 29 Apr '06

29 Apr '06

Hi. Are images on Wikimedia Commons have to be public domain worldwide or should we take some prejudice of the servers location in the U.S.? As is well known, images published before 1923 in the U.S. are public domain in the U.S and probably worldwide (unless the opposite can be suspected). Images published anywhere in the world before 1923 is also public domain in the United States , but many other countries apply the 70 years pma -- "after death of author". How zealous should we be? Is the 70 pma always to be applied? What if it is uncertain who the creator is, and whether he did more than 70 years ago -- would it then be possible to keep the images for the time being if the image was created before 1923 (such as images from World War I)? / Fred (a.k.a. [[User:Fred-Chess]])

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GIF antialiasing
by Felipe Micaroni Lalli 27 Apr '06

27 Apr '06

What happens with the GIF antialiasing? It don't work a lot of time. Why? It never come back? Anyboby know about it? thanks, hugs, Felipe.

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an idea for a commons help tool
by Brianna Laugher 20 Apr '06

20 Apr '06

Since there are some really good tools being written lately, I thought I'd throw up a request for one. :) This one would be quite easy to make, I think. Just saves some typing. (I would like it for en.wp but I think it would be pretty easy to make for any language.wp.) Articles on Commons frequently have no contextual information - just a heading and images. Sometimes this is OK but usually short description blurbs and interwiki links would be better. The easiest way to make these is to find the en.wp article, copy the list of interwiki links, add the English interwiki link, then convert these to description tags and either leave just the article name as the description, or add the first sentence from the article. e.g. today I fixed up this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur%27s_Seat&oldid=1728248 The description tags look like this: {{en|This is where the first line of the article would go.}} not a far leap from [[en:article name]] at all, really. You can also link to the WP article in the description tag, or bold the subject, or do neither. Typically I only put the full description for English because I'm usually fixing up other people's articles, then I just put the article name for the other interwiki links _if it differs to the English name_. For example with species, quite a few wikis put them at the Latin binomial name (as does Commons), so I don't think it's necessary to list 50 "translations" of a word that already appears on the page. as an example see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Malamute , where I have only translated the labels that are not 'Alaskan Malamute' (in this case they are different scripts). Anyway does what I've described make sense? Basically I'd like to put in the name of the relevant en.wp article, and get out the description tags and interwiki links that I can paste right into my Commons article. Not at all urgent, of course... cheers, Brianna -- "Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."

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Missing images and commonshelper updates
by Magnus Manske 17 Apr '06

17 Apr '06

FYI I have added lots of nice functions to my "missing images" and "commonshelper" tools [1]. Missing images * This can now be invoked with a category name, and the script will iterate through all articles in this category * You can get the script source fro the page itself (so you can run it without the 30-second-limit) * Images ("good" and "unknown") on wikipedias now have a button leading to a prefilled commonshelper page Commonshelper * Now generated a description based on the {{Information}} template * Improved upload history parsing function thanks to a function provided by Marco Schuster * Now provides a direct link to save an image locally * Now provides a button to call up the commons upload page with the description prefilled Magnus [1] http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/

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[Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Commons moving helper]
by Magnus Manske 12 Apr '06

12 Apr '06

--------------040306030208030008050104 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hi, I recently noticed what a pain it can be to move image to commons, especially with the image description. To help this issue, I now offer this service: http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php where you can enter the wikipedia language code and image name, and it will generate a commons description consisting of link to original image page, original contents, and wikified upload history. It can also be called with the language/image as part of the URL: http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php?lang=3Dde&doit=3D1&ima= ge=3DStruktur_Luftwaffenamt.PNG For German language, it will also translate several copyright template names (e.g., "{{Bild-GFDL}}") into the the English (commons) version. This can be expanded for other languages as well. Magnus --------------040306030208030008050104 Content-Type: text/plain; x-mac-type="0"; x-mac-creator="0"; name="signature.asc" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline; filename="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFEOiQRCZKBJbEFcz0RAomwAJ9DhYsY1kiFL9A0TFUrDZaX+6WabACfSPXe IIJp8taWI60sXbMJNp0b9PQ=3D =3DrlCu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------040306030208030008050104 Content-Type: text/plain; x-mac-type="0"; x-mac-creator="0"; name="file:///tmp/nsmail-1.txt" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline; filename="file:///tmp/nsmail-1.txt" _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l --------------040306030208030008050104--

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