[Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects

[Michael Peel]

> From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
> 
> On 12 December 2011 18:18, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 
>> Technically, nothing was "messed up" by the feature. Rather, the
>> software previously did not take EXIF rotation into account, and some
>> images had incorrect EXIF rotation information to begin with. Those
>> images are now shown in an incorrect rotation to the user, because the
>> incorrect EXIF rotation info is being evaluated.
> 
> 
> That's ridiculous misuse of words. What was messed up was the
> presentation of images that were already displayed correctly.
> 
> It is entirely unclear to me why you appear to be evading rather than
> answering a fairly simple and straightforward question:
> 
> How many images used in the wikis had the pages they were on messed up by this?

Actually, I think Erik's use of words here is spot on. The previous images were messed up in such a way that they appeared right by fluke, but their metadata wasn't correct. Now, they can be easily identified and properly fixed by the community. This is a good and useful improvement - well done WMF + tech team for implementing it. :-)

> From: Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>
> 
> I agree applying it to old images was a bit of an odd thing to do (if
> they were visibly wrong, someone usually went to the effort of
> re-uploading them), but that doesn't mean applying it to later ones
> was somehow a stupid thing to do.

With this type of modification, it's natural that it would apply to all images rather than just images uploaded after it was switched on. It would be horribly unnatural and deliberately-buggy if it tried to take the date of upload into account when applying the modification...

Thanks,
Mike
P.S. am replying to the digest - apologies if this ends up in the wrong thread...