Re: [Commons-l] Status of upload wizard for Flickr uploading

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Is anybody willing to pursue having the Flickr upload wizard enabled for
everybody? I really don't want to port over my tool when the Toolserver
shuts down.


Bryan


On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 12:01 AM, Steven Walling
wrote:

>
> On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
>
>> 1. It makes it easy for anyone to import hundreds of images from Flickr
>> (via Photoset importing), which could mean a big increase in Flickr-washing
>> problems (i.e. unintentional copyvios).
>> 2. The feature still has some bugs (
>> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43450) and no one is
>> actively maintaining it at the moment (although hopefully the new
>> Multimedia team will be assuming that responsibility).
>>
>
> Neither of these things seem like legit blockers at all.
>
> You can make the same exact arguments against letting anyone upload
> anything. Bad shit happens sometimes with malicious uploads, but we assume
> good faith. Also, there are bugs, but that has nothing to do with whether
> non-admins want to/should be able to upload from Flickr. When it works,
> this tool is amazingly helpful, and should be more widely available.
>
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[Commons-l] Status of upload wizard for Flickr uploading

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Hi,


With the pending toolserver shutdown, I was thinking about retiring Flickr
Upload Bot. However, this bot is apparently still used about 2000-4000
times per month.
I was under the impression that the upload wizard would replace this bot,
however, I couldn't find any references to this. Does anybody know what the
status of uploading from Flickr using the upload wizard is?


Bryan
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[Commons-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Media infrastructure maintenance (uploads disabled) Friday Oct 5, 11 am UTC

[Bryan Tong Minh]

No uploading possible from Friday Oct 5 at 11am UTC, to 2pm UTC.


Bryan


-- Forwarded message --
From: Ariel T. Glenn 
Date: Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 2:19 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Media infrastructure maintenance (uploads
disabled) Friday Oct 5, 11 am UTC
To: Wikimedia developers 


We're going to swap out ms7, the current media server fallback, for a
netapp.  We'll start this on Friday Oct 5 at 11am UTC, to conclude at
2pm UTC or earlier.  This will entail turning off uploads to all
projects during the switchover.  It is possible that
ExtensionDistributor and captchas will be affected during this time as
well; other services should be fine.

Ariel



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[Commons-l] Possibility of broken upload tools

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Hi all,


As some you may remember, two years ago all upload tools to Commons
broke when changes to the upload interface were made. These changes
were reverted [1]. However, as it turned out that this had security
implications, the restrictions have been put back into place [2].
If you use an upload tool that used to work but doesn't anymore, this
might be the cause.


Bryan

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/56793
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35317

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Re: [Commons-l] Updated images don’t update properly

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 2:30 PM, Arne 'Timwi' Heizmann  wrote:
>
> I just made several changes to an SVG file:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_pyramids.svg
>
This is yet another incarnation of
. It appears to
me that this bug appears much more frequently lately.

I'll see if I can poke people to put more priority into this.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Gendergap] Photo of the Day on Wikimedia Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Op 16 mei 2011 22:53 schreef "Tobias Oelgarte" <
tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com> het volgende:
>
> Any
> action done without consent (like Jimbo did before) is offensive against
> the community, making her mistrusting the WMF, that interferes with
> community decissions.
>
Your analogy is misplaced.
The controversy started because of jimbo acting with his authority. That
analogy would be appropriate if neil would have threatened or had taken
steps against reverting his actions, which he clearly did not.
You seem to think that every action needs to be backed up by a discussion on
beforehand. This is in fact not how a wiki works.
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Re: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Gendergap] Photo of the Day on Wikimedia Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Béria Lima  wrote:
>> Actually, given that the template was cascade protected by virtue of it
>> being on the main page, only administrators can edit it.  You're not an
>> administrator on Commons, but you do have a staff flag.  Therefore I'd say
>> that's a staff action.
>
> That said, changed the picture without any discussion, only because some
> people don't want to see a half-naked anime girl on Main Page (btw: What is
> the problem with that picture? I'm a girl, and i'm not AT ALL offended for
> see that in main page) was a act that NO ONE should do without consensus.
> Not an adm, not an editor, not a staff.
>
I'm not going a statement about the appropriateness of the image
(because, in fact, I don't care), but I would like state that there is
nothing wrong with somebody changing content that they feel is
inappropriate. It is a wiki. Any action can be undone, and as a matter
of fact has been undone.It is important to our culture that making
changes, the {{sofixit}}, is promoted.
Be bold, revert, discuss.
The funny thing is though that such a situation probably shows both
the best and the worst of our culture at the same time.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] re-enabling sitemaps for Commons, or, why your image isn't in Google

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Krinkle  wrote:
> On 4 March 2011, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
>> Google has introduced some nifty extensions to the Sitemap protocol,
>> including geocoding and (especially dear to our hearts) licensing![2]
>> However we don't have such information easily available in the
>> database,
>> so this requires parsing through every File page, which will take
>> several millenia.
>>
>> This will not work at all with the current sitemaps script as it scans
>> the entire database every time and regenerates a number of sitemaps
>> files from scratch. So, what we need is something more iterative, that
>> only scans recent stuff. (Or, using such extensions will have to wait
>> until someone brings licensing into the database).
> ...
>>
>> --
>> Neil Kandalgaonkar     
>
> Bryan, Roan and me are working on this:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/License_integration
>
We got indeed started on this, but during discussion at this list I
found out that perhaps we were not following the proper approach.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Friendliness

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 9:02 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> On 23 February 2011 19:48, Daniel Schwen  wrote:
>
>> Boils down to my main point (don't worry David Gerard did not read it 
>> either):
>
>
> For someone going on (and on) about how thick-skinned everyone else
> should be, you're remarkably thin-skinned yourself.
>
> (This is, of course, a frequent pattern amongst those who think others
> should be less sensitive to the speaker's incredible rudeness.)
>
Since personal attacks appear to have become acceptable on this list,
let me get down to that road as well.

Your rude dismissal of any ideas that you do not agree with will not
improve Commons and refusal to discuss them in any other way than
attacking the person stating them, does not help this discussion, and
is wasting time of many people, so please stop commenting on this
mailing list.


Bryan

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[Commons-l] File licensing information support

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Hello,


As you may have noticed, Roan, Krinkle and me have started to more
tightly integrate image licensing within MediaWiki. Our aim is to
create a system where it should be easy to obtain the basic copyright
information of an image in a machine readable format, as well as
querying images with a certain copyright state (all images copyrighted
by User:XY, all images licensed CC-BY-SA, etc)

At this moment we only intend to store author and license information,
but nothing stops us from expanding this in the future.

We have put some information in a not so structured way at mw.org [1].
There are some issues open on the talk page [2]. Input is of course
welcome, both here or preferably at the talk page.


Bryan


[1]  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Files_and_licenses_concept
[2]  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Files_and_licenses_concept

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Re: [Commons-l] What do you like of the various Flickr upload tools

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Ryan Kaldari  wrote:
> Hey Bryan,
> Did you ever make any progress on getting a Flickr uploading extension
> going? If not, I would like to go ahead and propose it as a project for
> the WMF to work on.
>
Not yet, perhaps February or March.
I think it would be good to have it as WMF project, as long the
community stays involved with it. So make sure that your requirements
are public and that the community is involved evaluating them and make
design decisions public so that volunteer developers can collaborate
on the development.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] What do you like of the various Flickr upload tools

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Magnus Manske
 wrote:
> It should be comparatively simple
> to write a more generic "transfer" parent class, which then would have
> derived classes for each of these sites; a simple method (e.g. for an
> image page on flickr, give me the URL of the most high-res file) might
> be sufficient for specialization.
>
Good idea, I will take that into account

> Second, the special case of transfering from other MediaWiki sites.
> This includes all Wiki(m|p)edia projects, as I do in [2] with >400K
> uses (and [3], when it works), but also WikiTravel, and basically any
> other MediaWiki installation where a license can be determined. While
> it might seem to be easy to implement this, as we are more familiar
> with the site behaviour,

> there is no API for image metadata in
> MediaWiki,
There's a bug for that. 

> and transcoding the wikitext correctly, from all projects
> and languages, can be a real b***h, as countless more-or-less botched
> transfers from my bot show. Alternatives would be parsing the HTML
> (lossy), or putting more weight on the user to check for correctness.
>

> Even if you do not chose to implement any of these transfer options
> initially, I believe you should code with these as further additions
> in mind. IMHO it would be a real shame to "waste" such an opportunity
> on flickr alone.
>
I agree, but whenever I'm going to do this, I am going to make a
generic interface for sites that can output metadata in a structured
way. This means that Flickr, Picassa and others can be easily
supported, but that MediaWiki will only be supported when the
aforementioned metadata is supported by MediaWiki. I believe that
eventually MediaWiki will support such features, but we will by then
be well into the 1.20s.

> Cheers,
> Magnus
>
>
> [1] http://toolserver.org/~magnus/fist.php
> [2] http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonshelper.php
> [3] 
> http://toolserver.org/~commonshelper2/?language=en&project=wikipedia&target_file=&file=&use_checkusage=1
>



Reagards,
Bryan

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[Commons-l] What do you like of the various Flickr upload tools

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Hi all,

As most of you probably know, I wrote Flickr upload bot back in May
2007 because there was a lot demand for uploading free images from
Flickr to Commons. And apparently people find it useful, since as of
September 2010, over 80k images have been uploaded via this bot. In
addition over 50k images have been uploaded via a similar bot by
Magnus Manske.

Unfortunately as you may know, every other day those tools break (mine
more than Magnus'). Both have an annoying authentication mechanism,
which requires you to do extra stuff to be able to upload (either post
a token to a file page, or use TUSC). Both problems would be solved if
there was a MediaWiki extension to handle this task.

I eventually plan to write a MediaWiki extension that does such a
thing and get it enabled on Commons. Therefore, I need to know what
you like and dislike about those tools, so that I can take this
feedback into account when writing this extension. Don't expect to see
something in the short term though, but I hope that in the mid-long
term we will have such an extension on Commons.


-- Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Active projects on Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Magnus Manske
 wrote:
> Another idea: Instead of inventing new syntax or pseudo-HTML tags, why
> not use language links? On [[Tag:Flower]]
> [[en:Flower]]
> [[de:Blume]]
>
Because you want to avoid using a single syntax for multiple purposes
if different contexts. We should not tell our users "[[en:*" is an
interlanguage link, except when it occurs on a page that starts with
[[Tag:. It is already too damn confusing that [[en: is an
interlanguage link and [[w:en: an interwiki link. (Where I should add
that interlanguage and interwiki links are generally used in wikispeak
as synonyms for the same concept, but where the concept is ambiguous.)

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Re: [Commons-l] Active projects on Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Krinkle  wrote:
> Op 29 okt 2010, om 14:51 heeft Magnus Manske het volgende geschreven:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Bryan Tong Minh
>>  wrote:
>>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Krinkle 
>>> wrote:
>>>> For one, tags would not be hierarchical and not stored under a name,
>>>> rather a number (an id if you will).
>>>
>>> I would store the tag-i18n definitions in a separate Tag: namespace.
>>> Then you don't need to create the history tracking etc. all by
>>> yourself. You will need a unique identifier though, but I don't see a
>>> problem making the unique identifier equal to the content language.
>>
>> As to "tracking", IMHO it would suffice to just add [[Tag:XYZ]] to the
>> pages; that's rather inelegant from a database POV, but as Bryan
>> points out, it would take care of version tracking etc. All one would
>> need to do is to remove them from the rendering and display them
>> separately, like categories.
>
> @Bryan: Ah, excuse me. You were referring to the history of the File-
> page.
> I was under the impression it was about the version tracking of the
> Tags.
> Yeah, adding to the page would be similar to categories and extracted
> from wikitext
> to a taglinks table.
>
No you were right, I was refering to the history in the Tag namespace,
but history tracking equally applies to the use of tags on file pages
as well.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Active projects on Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Magnus Manske
 wrote:
> Multilanguage tags, as well as synonyms, could simply be implemented
> as #REDIRECTs, maybe. [[Tag:Blume]] would redirect to [[Tag:Flower]],
> so a search for "Blume" would know about "Flower" easily. However, the
> system would then have to search for both Blume and Flower internally.
> Also, that could be a problem with "false friends" (en:Gift=present
> vs. de:Gift=poison).
>
Or force the user to select a language when entering the tag. This
means though that we either need a pre-save transform to transform
[[Tag:en/flower]] and [[Tag:de/Blume]] to their canonical
[[Tag:flower]] and reject tags without language specified, or we need
to have tags entered separately from the page text. But then run into
the history problem again.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Active projects on Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Krinkle  wrote:
> For one, tags would not be hierarchical and not stored under a name,
> rather a number (an id if you will).

I would store the tag-i18n definitions in a separate Tag: namespace.
Then you don't need to create the history tracking etc. all by
yourself. You will need a unique identifier though, but I don't see a
problem making the unique identifier equal to the content language.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Active projects on Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:11 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar  wrote:
> (Of course, our main *disadvantage* is also MediaWiki, since random
> templates do not add up to a real indexing system. That's the main thing
> we need to build).
>
Related to that: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25624
Store author and license information in the database. If anybody has
comments about how to implement this, please comment on the bug.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Problems using pictures from Commons in Blogger - making it more of a stock photo repository

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Magnus Manske
 wrote:
> I put it in the top bar for now. It looked a little lost there, so I
> threw some  around it; besides uploading and editing, we probably
> have more customers interested in reusing files.
>
I like the previous position better. Perhaps we can combine it with
other interesting things like "Download in different sizes" and "Use
in Wikimedia wiki"?


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] [Wikitech-l] InstantCommons serving up non-free files

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Huib Laurens  wrote:
>
> When the files are on meta people can always use the meta api to get
> the logo's, we just move it arround.
>
Yes, but people who use InstantCommons on Commons are then guaranteed
to get free images, which is what most would expect. If they do want
the unfree Wikimedia logos, they can use meta as well if they desire
so.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] [Wikitech-l] InstantCommons serving up non-free files

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 12:24 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> But Commons contains a certain number of non-free files, specifically
> Wikimedia logos and so forth. I just noticed (on a wiki using
> InstantCommons) that these are served up through it just the same.
>
> Is there any relatively simple way to stop this happening? (Including
> not caring.)
>
Either not caring, or moving the Wikimedia logos to meta and
configuring meta as a second foreign file repo to the Wikimedia
projects. I think both options have been proposed before.


Bryan

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[Commons-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] image service switchover

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Forward from wikitech-l, no uploading from 9 pm UTC.


(timezone corrected with Ariel's second post)


-- Forwarded message --
From: Ariel T. Glenn 
Date: Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 7:54 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] image service switchover
To: wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org


We are going to move image serving from ms1 (plus a few other
miscellaneous things that also live on that host) to the new much bigger
ms7 starting at 1 pm PST, 9 pm UTC.

We expect 30 to 60 minutes of down time (= no uploads of media files).
Depending on how things go, reads of pages may be spotty as well during
this time.

Any questions or comments, I'm in the #wikimedia-tech irc channel.

Ariel Glenn


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Re: [Commons-l] GlobalUsage deployed an up to date

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Magnus Manske
 wrote:
>
> As of today, a weekly stats update will be added to u_magnus_glam_p.
>
Oh, I see that I forgot to mention it, but I have also been collecting
stats in p_globalusage_weekly_p


Bryan

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[Commons-l] GlobalUsage deployed an up to date

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Hi all,


As you may know I have been working on GlobalUsage, a MediaWiki
extension that allows showing on which Wikimedia wikis a Commons image
is used. We had some problems before, requiring it to be disabled
before deployment complete, but now it has finally be deployed and the
data set has been built.

You can now view where an image is used on the bottom of the image
description page, or via Special:GlobalUsage. [There is still a
problem in the special page causing the "prev" link to not work, but
the fix for that will be deployed soon hopefully]


Best regards,
Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Update from Paris

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Eusebius  wrote:
> Hi Gerard, thanks for your report,
>
>> there is now global usage for images from within MediaWiki itself.. so no
>> need for using the toolserver... The process of gathering all the necessary
>> data may now have ended..
>
> I hadn't seen that, that's nice. Results seem to be incomplete, though, is
> it working only on a subset of the servers?
>

Currently only data is available for pages that have been edited since
the extension was enabled. We are currently dealing with some
technical problems which happened in the process of populating data
from other pages, and I hope that we will soon have a complete data
set.


Bryan

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[Commons-l] Customizable forms using HTMLForm

[Bryan Tong Minh]

[cc commons-l, please keep the discussion on wikitech-l]


As you may know we use ugly uselang hacks on Commons to create our own
distinct upload forms. I want this functionality in MediaWiki.

HTMLForm provides a great way to abstractify form construction by
providing a descriptor that can be transformed into an HTML
presentation. What I want is to have allow Commons admins to create
custom uploads forms by providing a descriptor suitable for HTMLForm,
which is then translated to HTML and accessable via
Special:Upload/formname.

The question is how to allow admins to edit this descriptor. In PHP
this is simply an array. We could allow input as JSON or XML in a
MediaWiki: namespace message, which is then translated to an array and
then fed to HTMLForm. Or it could be only GUI editable via a Special
page and the forms can be stored elsewhere in the database.

Opinions, ideas?


Cheers,
Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Re : Almost 5 million free media files

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Otourly Wiki wrote:
> Hi,
> Wikimédia France and Wikimedia CH have published a common press release:
> (french)
> http://blog.wikimedia.fr/commons-5-millions-de-fichiers-930


Interesting release, it might be worth to translate it to English as
well. A minor remark: Please embed real thumbnails [1] instead of the
full resolution version; this causes pages to load faster.


Regards,
Bryan

[1] 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Kj%C3%B8benhavnsposten_28_nov_1838_side_1_%28protected%29.jpg/200px-Kj%C3%B8benhavnsposten_28_nov_1838_side_1_%28protected%29.jpg

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[Commons-l] Maintainers of collection of flickr tools

[Bryan Tong Minh]

Hi all,


In the past few years I have been creating some Flickr related tools. These are:
* FlickreviewR: A bot that reviews the licenses from images uploaded from Flickr
* FlickreviewR human reviewer: A bot that re-reviews reviews by humans
* Flickr upload bot: A web interface that allows easy access

FlickreviewR has over 110k edits and with Flickr upload bot over 12k
uploads have been performed. Unfortunately I have not always been able
to care of those bots decently.

Therefore I would like to propose to add maintainers to those bots;
preferably as a stable toolserver project on stable.toolserver.org.
Who would be interested in maintaining these bots?

The bots are written in Python and use the mwclient library to edit
and upload, which I also wrote. I will also give commit access to
mwclient on SourceForge to maintainers.

The FlickreviewR bots' code are in relatively good shape, reasonably
ok documented and can be easily understood I believe.

The Flickr upload bot however has horrible code. It was basically my
first large webapp and I had some strange design ideas by then. I have
attempted rewriting it, but have not had the time yet.


Feel free to forward this mail to other people who might be interested
in co-maintaining.


Regards,

Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Some reflections about the governance of Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 3:22 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> 2009/6/15 Rama Neko :
>
>> The "service project angle" worries me too. I have noticed that many
>> articles of Wikipedia, the service project that makes it easier to
>> find media in Commons by providing encyclopedic context to our
>> content, utterly lack the proper links to our galleries and
>> categories.
>>        Furthermore, I sometimes have the feeling that contributors of
>> Wikipedia expect us to host all sorts of unacceptable media in return
>> of the service that they provide; while we of course appreciate the
>> service projects, this is a problem, particularly when these files are
>> copyright violations.
>> In the particular case of Pikiwiki, it would of course be very
>> caricatural to say that all their images are copyvios. There are lots
>> of out-of-scope party snapshots, too.
>
>
> I'd hope this isn't a summary of the views of other Commons admins.
>
> Anyone else? Or is the Commons admin community this insular and derisive?
>
>
> - d.
>
I hope that this isn't the view of admins outside the Commons community.


Seriously with this kind of discussion we end up nowhere. Perhaps it
would be more useful to actually get to the points of problem or just
stop discussing at all.


Bryan

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[Commons-l] Image moving enabled for sysops

[Bryan Tong Minh]

A quick heads up: Image moving has been enabled for sysops per
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15842

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Re: [Commons-l] Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2008 voting now open

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Florence Devouard  wrote:
> I have meant to ask what happened with the toolserver (or the team
> dealing with the toolserver) so that it could not be used this year ?
>

I was unfortunately too busy to set that up.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] [Fwd: Pikiwiki - Israel free image collection project - Starting engines]

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:40 PM, Platonides  wrote:

>>> 1. Uploading - WikiMedia Commons does not have an API or other
>>> completely supported interface, to allow any operations in their system,
>>> without manual intervention.
>> Yes, it does. Check http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API for more info on
>> the MediaWiki API.
>
> Currently, the API doesn't provide a upload module, but it will soon.
>

I will *eventually* but I doubt it is soon.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] [Fwd: Pikiwiki - Israel free image collection project - Starting engines]

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 8:08 PM, ChrisiPK  wrote:

>> 1. Uploading - WikiMedia Commons does not have an API or other
>> completely supported interface, to allow any operations in their system,
>> without manual intervention.
> Yes, it does. Check http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API for more info on
> the MediaWiki API.
>

But the critical point, uploading, is missing.


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] 100k image donation to Wikimedia Commons

[Bryan Tong Minh]

That is not true.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-December/040520.html

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 1:32 AM, Sylvain Brunerie
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> With the new search engine implemented on enwiki, you could search «
> incategory:Images_from_the_German_Federal_Archive ». Unfortunately it is not
> implemented elsewhere.
>
> — Sylvain Brunerie
> [[w:fr:User:Delhovlyn]]
>
>
> 2008/12/6 Charlotte Webb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>
>> On 12/6/08, Daniel Kinzler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > It'S not coincidence that thea all have a specific template and are all
>> > in a
>> > specific source category :)
>>
>> Maybe not a coincidence for you but from my perspective it's dumb luck. :p
>>
>> I was originally thinking of something like this but with a "search"
>> feature:
>> http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Gallery.php
>>
>> Adding one might be useful in the long term, if this is possible.
>>
>> —C.W.
>
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>

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Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 11:31 PM, Lars Aronsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> But as soon as it comes to image uploading, an area where the
> elderly have decades of photos to contribute, we're sending our
> beginners off to Wikimedia Commons.  Even if the menues and most
> templates are localized in every major language, this is not true
> of the admin community there. If a beginner fails to fill out all
> details of free licensing, their user talk page will receive an
> image deletion request in English. Even if there is a translated
> version of that notification, the user's explanation in a local
> language might not be understood by the admins.  If the user has
> good credentials that are easily verified (retired schoolteacher,
> museum manager, ...) and has built a solid reputation in the local
> language Wikipedia, a Commons admin from another language might
> not fully understand this.
>
I can think of two solutions here. One is to simply have more
multi-project admins. Wikimedia ought to be one big community with a
commons goal. Unfortunately (but not unsurprisingly) Wikimedia has
been separated into many different islands separated by language
borders, which are very hard to open up. Commons was born as a
multilingual project, but in that aspect has failed I believe.

Another solution is to make image uploading much more transparent.
Uploading from the local wiki should be possible without needing to
browse to Commons. I cannot see unfortunately how we should handle
messaging in that case, but it would certainly make it easier to
communicate and monitor users.

I do not believe that returning to local uploading is a solution. It
will simply mean that the problem of categorizing images, deleting
copyright violations and similar will move to local projects where
obviously less attention will be paid to them.

> Adding to this, a culture of deletionism and arrogance has
> infested Wikimedia Commons in the last year or two.  So many
> copyright violations and half-free images are deleted, that little
> attention is paid to the individual contributors. The focus is on
> the image, not on the user.
That is certainly true. I have noticed myself that if you patrol new
uploads for some time your threshold for deleting or marking as bad
image is going down. It is then time to stop doing that for a while.

What I am wondering is how we can change the focus from the image to
user. What fundamental changes should be made for this?

> This system is also an open target for
> abuse. Sometimes deletions are requested anonymously or without
> substantial reasons, but this is not preceived as a problem. Only
> copyright violations are preceived as a problem.
Every system where anybody can make edits is inherently an open target
for abuse. The question is how we deal with abuse. I actually
currently do not know how we handle this. Do you have any examples?


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[Bryan Tong Minh]

The problems on Commons are a direct result of the enourmous growth in
Commons. Currently the counter is at 3.5M and that number is
increasing with 120K each month. Last time I checked (about a year
ago) about 10% to 20% of those images is deleted. If this value is
still the same, which I expect, then an unhealthy total of 20K images
per month are deleted.

A significant amount of the deletions could be avoided if every user
was helped personally in fixing the images. I'd wish every image could
go through a community review but with the amount of images this is
simply not possible. The backlog for regular deletion requests reaches
to 11 Feburary 2008. 10 months, and I have seen it slowly increase: 6
months ago the backlog reached to 30 December 2007, a backlog of 6
months. The backlog has thus increased by 4 months in 6 months. If
this trend continues we will have a backlog of one and a half year in
one year.

The problem is not specifically the lack of admins, but the lack of
community. Many deletion requests could use community input. Many new
users could use an experienced member guiding them through Commons and
help them fix their mistakes.

Unfortunately I see no solution (except, say, disabling uploads for
the coming month ;))


Bryan

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Re: [Commons-l] Video licenced CC

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Douglas Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I have been downloading some video that is made from old silent film
> movies.  They are licenced cc no derivatives.  Some are remixed.  How is
> this possible?   I am thinking these old films were in the public domain
> or the remixer bought the right to publish them.  How do these clips get
> published under CC.  How does a remixer  get the right  to not allow
> remixing or derivatives?   If he did a voice over it makes sense that he
> has the right to publish his added sound but how the video?

If you use a work that is in the public domain and add creativity to
it, you can get copyrights on it (if the threshold of originallity has
been passed) and thus license the work anyway you wish.

>If you buy publishing rights can you then publish under a CC
> licence. I am trying to figure out what I can use in making a video and
> how it is that I can't use some things and can others.  My video will be
> maybe 70% my own work but I would like to use CC music.some pictures,
> video and sounds, then publish in creative commons.
>
Usually when you buy publishing rights you buy a non-exclusive license
that is bounded to terms, which may or may not be compatible with a
certain CC license.

In principle you can use public domain works in it.

Make sure that the other CC licensed works are mutually compatible.
The vast majority of the CC licenses and musical works are under an
unfree CC license.

In case you want a reliable opinion, you should refer to lawyer.


Bryan

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