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2055 discussions

SXC poll
by Jean-Christophe Chazalette 12 Mar '05

12 Mar '05

Hello there, Short note to make you all aware that the poll I organized on Commons about the validity of pictures coming from the would be free site http://www.sxc.hu/ is about to end up, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Stock.xchng_images/vote This vote was based on my legal analysis of the situation (text - in English - at the top of the page), from which I demanded people their opinion about two issues. 1°) Can pictures from Stock.XCHNG be uploaded on Commons as long as there is no conflicting usage restriction explicitely decided by the copyright holder (the photographer) ? 2°) Should pictures from Stock.XCHNG not be categorized as such or listed as such in a special page to avoid setting up a Stock.XCHNG « gallery » ? The vote is over the day after tomorrow and appears to approve my analysis. Out of loyalty, I nonetheless prefer to tell you about the whole thing because it is not impossible that this new policy makes SCX.HU very unhappy. My opinion is that there is nothing to fear as long as SXC's terms of use are the way they are. But please speak up now if you're thinking to veto the community decision or to suspend it for a while in consideration of troubles that you might fear. Otherwise, I'm just going to close the vote on March 13th and to enforce it on the Commons. Thank you :) villy ~~JC

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion of my images
by Erik Moeller 07 Mar '05

07 Mar '05

(CC to commons-l) Ant- > * wikimedia projects do not respect the license by not always > displaying clearly that images uploaded on wikicommons are under gfdl > nor by mentionning authorship on the local projects In MediaWiki 1.5, a backlink to the Commons is automatically inserted. In 1.4, this was not the case, and it had to be manually put into the MediaWiki: message - some wikis therefore still lack the backlink. This will be fixed once 1.5 goes live, but can also be fixed by any sysop on the project in question. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sharedupload is a good example to use for this. You are correct that image license information should be displayed directly on the image description page. This is likely to happen soon. > * wikicommons does not provide a link to where the images are used, so > do not allow editors to check whether the way images are used are > following legal requirements or not Unfortunately, that is correct. Alongside automatic transclusion of image information pages, an EXTLINKS table on the Wikicommons might be used to store usage information. A quick hack using absolute URLs might be sufficient for now. > * uploading images unfortunately takes time, even more on wikicommons > where issues of duplicate in names begin to appear It is generally a good idea to make a name unique, for example, by adding your username at the end. No matter how large a wiki is, a filename like [[Image:Flower.jpg]] is simply not unique enough. Still, there are ways to improve the handling of the situation, for example, by providing an "Alternative filename" input box when a filename already exists. > * wikicommons is in english only, hence limiting access to those non > english speaking That is not a fair comment. The Main Page alone has been translated into over 30 languages. For gallery page titles, a carefully thought out policy is used (e.g., use native names for specialty foods, use latin binomial for animals and plants). The interface language of the wiki can be selected in the user preferences. Templates have been created to show what languages a user speaks and are actively used. Filenames are accepted in all languages. The main problem is with categories, which are, unfortunately, not easily internationalizable due to redirects from one cat to another not working -- a technological problem. > * wikinews does not allow uploading images, hence preventing the easy > use of images to non english speakers (since they can not easily > manage wikicommons) I do not see how limiting Wikinews to the Commons excludes non-English speakers, see above, though certainly it is a little more difficult. As you know, this is strictly for legal reasons until the fair use situation has been sorted out: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-February/002217.html This procedure has been directly approved by Jimmy. > The more time goes by, the less motivating it is to provide images imho. Personally, I find it more motivating to upload images now, because thanks to the Wikimedia Commons, I know that anyone on any project can easily use them. I agree with you that certain functionality would be useful and fun. I've only ever pledged to implement the baseline functionality for the Commons, which I have done. I'll try to find time to add some of the above discussed features, but frankly, coding and testing a new feature is not a lot of fun, and as I've said before, until the WMF goes into the habit of handing out development contracts, projects like Wikinews and Wikicommons will stagnate technologically. All of the above, plus more, could be fixed with a few strategic investments in developer resources. Single login alone would greatly increase cross-project usability, as language preferences could be persistent, and you could easily upload files directly from a local wiki to the Commons. As an elected Board member, you have the power to speed up the pace of innovation. I have offered many times to help with that. A handful of active developers will *NOT* be able to keep up with the needs of thousands of users. All best, Erik

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Image Permission (Location Maps)
by David Blomstrom 15 Feb '05

15 Feb '05

Wikipedia uses a series of location maps on articles about the states, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming - the the map on the right side of the page, just below the state flag and seal. It sounds like I'm allowed to use these images on my website as long as I include the proper credit. The only problem is the credits are awfully long for images this small; I don't want to insert a big credit on each page. So I wanted to ask if these maps belong to Wikipedia in the first place...or are they public domain? Incidentally, I will be linking my pags to Wikipedia; in fact, I already have. Thank you.

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SVG upload?
by David Gerard 22 Jan '05

22 Jan '05

I just uploaded [[Image:X client server example.png]]. That's a little network diagram done in Inkscape. So the native form is SVG, which is highly editable and thus makes some sense as a work to distribute under the GFDL - the SVG is the source code, the PNG is just a rendering. But I can't upload SVG. Is there a good reason for this, or is it just that no-one thought of it? (SVG is just XML text - I don't know of a way to include malware.) This goes for other image formats - GIMP, Illustrator, etc. For resources under a license that allows editing, it would make sense to allow upload of the source version. - d.

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Photo Information
by Richard Palmer 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

Hi, I posted a message about this to the Village Pump but got no replies, so either I'm making no sense or everybody agrees with me (perhaps not!). My proposal was to prompt for specific information on the file upload form for photos, such as Location, Country, Date and some technical information. All of this information could then be embedded into the file page, and displayed with the photo. I think this would help in categorising the photos, gives some information to users in all languages, and at some future point could allow for searching by country/date/photographer etc. Given the amount of meta-data digital cameras now save automatically with each photograph it seems daft not to use it. I did a quick mock-up of what I mean at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wombat/Upload although the forms are not interpreted. please respond!, Richard.

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This list as News
by Josh Gerdes 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

Hello everyone! Is there a way to subscribe to this mailing list as a newsgroup? I know that WikiEN-l and Wikipedia-l have that feature, but I can't find any mentions of it for this the Commons mailing list. Thanks, Josh Gerdes (User:JoshG)

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category problem
by Sabine Cretella 29 Dec '04

29 Dec '04

Hi, during the last days I uploaded several soundfiles in Italian and German - the strange thing is they are not included in the category listing even if on the page of the file itself the category is being showed. Example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:It-Felice_Anno_Nuovo.ogg On the bottom of the page there is Categories <http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Categories&article=I…>: GFDL <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:GFDL> | Italian pronunciation <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Italian_pronunciation> But when I click on Italian pronunciation it is not listed. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Italian_pronunciation So what is wrong? When I upload files I use a Summary like this: own recording [[User:SabineCretella|SabineCretella]] {{GFDL}} [[Category:Italian pronunciation]] Thanks for any hint! Best, Sabine

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Multi-language support (was re: Why not treat every page as a category?)
by Daniel Kinzler 18 Dec '04

18 Dec '04

For some reason, i'm not getting any mail from commons-l. I just found this reply to my proposal (Why not treat every page as a category?) in the archive and would like to answer it in the hope that the list will work now. (full quote, because this mail also goes to wikitech-l, as it is a request for a software feature) Delphine (notafish) wrote: > OK, I think I get the idea now. > > However, it still leaves open the discussion of multilingualism. If we > want to allow for every language to put in their categories, or do a > redirect, display will still be in whatever language has been > considered default, and not of any use to non-default language > speakers. > > On another note, while this may work for images, the display of other > media files will be rendered very complicated if those files are not > self-comprehensive, ie. if they're not named accoding to their > content, in a language everybody understands. > > How do you plan to address that ? Multi-Language-Support was not on my mind when I wrote that proposal. But thinking about it, I belive by adding a few more feature we would be able to cope with this, too. As I already wrote on [1], i would suggest the following: 1) It was much discussed that it would be good to show the link-title which is placed after the "|" in the category link in the category listing/as the thumbnail label, in order to have meaningful names in categories, especially for images. Also, as of 1.4 people can choose their preferred interface languag. We could combine those two features with the concept of named parameters [[...|foo=bar|...]] as used with templates: Allow a category-link to look like this: [[category:something|Something|de=Irgendwas|jp=....]] giving a default label and labels for specific languages. Then, when building the category listing, use the label corresponding to the users interface language, if it is given. If not, use the default label. The label should be used for sorting, and should be shown as the link text/thumbnail label respectively. 2) Maybe one could even use the same concept to implement localized image labels: [[Image:Foobar.png|The Foo bar|de=Der Fuh-Balken|jp=...]] - that should not be too hard. 3) The one think still missing would be localizing the name of the page/category. Maybe an #ALIAS [[category:xyz]] directive could be added for categories (or the categorisation-aspect of pages, as by my original proposal): If #ALIAS [[Foo]] is placed in category/article Bar, plages and images added to cat Foo and to cat Bar would end up in the same "pool". The Pages for Foo and Bar would have different textual content and titles, but would list the exact same articles, images and subcategories. Subcategories would need some more thought, though, because in the german cat I want to have the german names of the subcategories, etc. Dolphin already said on [1] there that he likes my first idea. what do you think? And especially to the developers - how hard would it be to do that? d. [1]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:VP#More_on_categories -- Homepage: http://brightbyte.de

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Why not treat every page as a category?
by Daniel Kinzler 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

Hello I just send the following mail to the wikitech-l list. As it mainly concerns the commons, i'll repost it here: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi all As you may now, there is some discussion about wether to use page to form galleries on the commons, or to use the new thumbnails-in-categories feature of 1.4 to do that. Both have their pros and cons, and no real solution has yet been found for this question (see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:VP for some discussion). I would like to propose to simply do away with the difference between pages and categories (see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:VP#Categories_or_.27normal.27_pages:_…) by treating every page as a category. That is, IMHO it would be best to drop the "Category:" namespace and list articles and images the contain a category link like [[category:Foo]] directly at the bottom of page "Foo". This way, pages can be used as a structured article or as an unstructured category, as need be. The category-ish list at the bottom could also serve as a todo-list of stuff that need to be integrated into a structured page. This would resolve the problem that categories aren't readily found by a simple search, and that there often is a category and a page for the same topic, containin different but overlapping sets of images, which would need to be kept in sync manually. This is annoying when looking for images about a specific topic. I would like to make all pages categories for the commons - maybe the same thing would be a good idea for the wikipedias, too, but i'm not yet sure about this. I had a conversation about his with Jamesday on IRC the other day, i'll try to summary some of the concerns and my answers below. Q: List-Articles would still be needed, because categories can only show articles that exist. A: We could still do that, either by simply not using the category-aspect of the respective page, or be keeping the missing things at the top and the existing ones in the category-ish listing. Q: Replication is a good thing, so users have a choice of how to ciew a gallery. A: Keeping the different views in sync is tedious and unrealistic. We already have a lot of images on the commons that can't be found because they are on no page and in no category. In cases where both exist, they are nearly never in sync, and they often do not link to each other. The entire structure is very inconsistent, and the distinction between pages and categories only makes things worse. Q: Galleries can not represent internal structure. A: In cases where internal structure is needed, just don't use the category-aspect of the page, or use it as a todo-list. A feature that allows for structure in categories is a different matter: maybe we could have sections in categories, using a syntax like [[Category:Foo#section-name]] or something. Or we could have a switch the shows sub-categories "inlined". Also, it would be extremely useful to show the link-text after the "|" in the category link (now only used for sorting) as the image-label in categories. But this does not really touch my idea. Q: Categories can be very lagre. This would hinder the loading / viewing of the respective Articles. A: In most cases, large categories (just like large pages) should be split into subcategories - that would resolve this isse in most cases. Bot some categories are large by nature, especially ones that are used for tagging images with copyright-information, etc. Those categories do not have a meaningfull article associated with them, they are simply very long lists, and it does not matter in which namespace they show. Keep in mind that categories are simply pages that are filled in a diferent way and have no internal structure. With regards to the commons, there is no "logical" difference: they both consitute galleries. In a nutshell: I can see only advantages to showing things in category "Foo" at the bottom of page "Foo". The distinction between articles and categories seems artificial and unneccessary, at least for the commons. I was thinking about submitting this as a feature request - but i'm not sure if this would be the right way to go, as this is not only a little software feature, but a request for a structural change, too. So i'd like to discuss it here first - and maybe on some of the other mailing lists? I'm not sure which one would be most appropriate. -- Homepage: http://brightbyte.de

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Commons gone beta
by Yann Forget 06 Dec '04

06 Dec '04

Hi, Le Monday 6 December 2004 06:59, Brion Vibber a écrit : > commons.wikipedia.org is now running on REL1_4. Overall it's looking > pretty good, but there may yet be surprises. Large categories full of > images present a bit of a difficulty, as least with the thumbnails not > all rendered yet... I noticed that some translations and customization are needed. The head message in French on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges French translation of "Special Pages" http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Specialpages Where is the place to translate this ? BTW, the favicon disappeared and the Special:Allmessages gives a error message when the language interface is not in English, cf. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Allmessages "Your current interface language fr is not supported by Special:AllMessages at this site." > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) Thanks, Yann -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux

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