Commons-l September 2010

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

18 participants
9 discussions

Video skills and equipment
by Lars Aronsson 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

I just tried to watch some presentation videos from Wikimania. Some had very weak sound, some had no sound in the first minutes, some only played the first minute and then stopped. I don't think the Wikimania videos are unique in having such problems. Video is new to Commons, and the expert contributors are more familiar with still images. How can we learn to make better videos? Are there some good instructions? Perhaps a free instruction video (Wikibooks, but a video instead of a book) on how to produce good videos is what we need. In fact, the English Wikibooks has a title on "Video Production", http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video_Production but it doesn't have a clear focus (pun not intended). It starts out with discussing satellite TV and has long sections on file formats in different operating systems. There is a help page on Commons for converting video to the Ogg Theora format, but that is only the last step in a long chain. Given that video is new, how can we find and rate videos, nominate "good/featured videos", and give advice on how to improve quality? Is the Commons village pump enough for this? Commons has a separate graphics village pump. Do we also need a separate video village pump? Current digital video cameras use hard disks or memory cards, instead of tape cassettes. Many new models cost less than 300 euro (or dollars), some as little as 120 euro (memory card perhaps not included). Some have a special "Youtube mode", and I guess that kind of usage is what drives the price down. What models are good, and what should one watch out for? We can find free still photos on Flickr and copy them to Commons. Is there somewhere we can find free videos and copy them? Yes, at the Internet Archive. Somewhere else? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Wikidata
by John Vandenberg 24 Nov '10

24 Nov '10

It looks like a solution to bug 4547 is on the horizon. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4547 See also [Wikitech-l] Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/197322 This will be very useful for templates which Commons has developed, especially language related templates, however I am concerned that people are also planning on using Commons as a repo for Wikipedia infoboxes, and including the *data* on Commons rather than just the template code. e.g. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Peter17/GSoc_2010#Interest This centralisation of data makes sense on many levels, however using Commons as the host of this data will result in many edit wars moving to the Commons project, involving people from many languages. Even the infobox structure can be the cause of edit wars. I think it is undesirable to have these Wikipedia problems added to Commons existing problems. ;-) Tying Wikipedia and Commons closer together is also problematic when we consider the differing audience and scope of each project, especially in light of the recent media problems. If the core templates and data used by Wikipedia are hosted/modified on Commons, it will be more difficult to justify why Commons accepts content which isn't appropriate on Wikipedia. A centralised data wiki has been proposed previously, many times: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/historical http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_%282%29 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiDatabank Non-WMF projects, such as freebase, dbpedia, etc., have been exploring this space. Isn't it time that we started a new project!? ;-) A wikidata project could use semantic mediawiki from the outset, and be seeded with data from dbpedia. A lot of existing & proposed projects would benefit from a centralised wikidata project. e.g. a genealogy wiki could use the relationships stored on the wikidata project. wikisource and commons could use the central data wiki for their Author and Creator details. -- John Vandenberg

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Add this at Commons
by Maarten Dammers 07 Oct '10

07 Oct '10

Hi guys, I keep coming across http://www.addthis.com/ . It's an easy way to share things on allmost 300 websites. Would be great if we had something like this on our image pages at Commons. You click it, select your site where you want to reuse the image and you're done. Clicking the image should bring you to the image page at Commons. This would be a great way to promote reuse of our content! Maarten

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Another view of wikimedia commons...
by Paul Houle 29 Sep '10

29 Sep '10

Lately I've been building a photo collection that's referenced to "linked data" terms, which, for the most part, correspond to pages in wikipedia. I've developed some other sites based on a process that uses flickr and paid crowdsourcing, but I was having trouble with people who thought that the NYSE was the "American Stock Exchange" -- so I got the idea of building a database of reference images from wikipedia + commons... That turned into a bigger project than I expected, and I figured that I might as well (a) put those images in my collection, and (b) develop my import system to the fullest extent. Right now, http://ookaboo.com/ is a photo-geo mashup that combines photos from Wikimedia Commons with maps from Open Street Maps. Although it's not hard to find coordinates that are off, it provides a really fun browsing interface. We're working on improving the browsing interface, doing data cleaning and such -- for at least the six months, I think we'll still primarily getting images from Commons, but we eventually expect to restart an improved version of our old pipeline, as well as allowing volunteers to contribute content. I hope that there's a day that Commons will be getting images from Ookaboo rather than the other way around. Any thoughts?

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Problems using pictures from Commons in Blogger - making it more of a stock photo repository
by Gerard Meijssen 29 Sep '10

29 Sep '10

Hoi, Blogger is the platform I use now for many years to blog about the subjects that are important in my appreciation of a Wiki world. At first I did not illustrate my blogposts but thanks to Pfctdayelise I started to pepper my blog posts with illustrations. At this moment it is no longer possible for me to upload pictures to blogger. The message that I get is that I have to ensure that I have a license for the pictures that I upload. This is true for pictures that I have downloaded from Commons and cropped, it is for screen shots of the interaction with the Blogger user interface.. It is possible for me to get pictures displayed when I refer to the upload page of a Commons picture but that does me no good when it is a svg picture. Obviously I can download the picture and save it as an png ... but that does me no good. There are several "solutions" to this problem. I can upload the png, I can use Wordpress instead. The obvious solution is for Google to get its act together. The solution that I like best is for Commons to become a true repository of images that is not only intended for the illustration of Wikipedia and its sister projects but also for the illustration of blogs like mine. Commons is my first choice for illustrations for my blog but for some topics it just does not provide me with the illustration that I am looking for. I think that Commons has already many images that are usable, what would be needed is just a different kind of pictures or more pictures that are grouped by subject and easier to find. Thanks, GerardM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Farsi.svg The svg I would like to use as a png http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/08/big-boost-for-mediawiki-localis… blog post that needs an illustration

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Suggestion: Improve Panoramic viewer
by Robin Schwab 20 Sep '10

20 Sep '10

Dear commoners We see an increasing number of spherical panoramics on commons [1], which makes me happy. Those pictures are best viewed in a panoramic viewer. Unfortunately when I compare our panoramic viewer [2] with the one i.e. on 360cities [3] - they use krpano [4] - I conclude: -Our Java system requires a faster computer than the Flash player resulting in slow loading or errors. -Our system is not able to progressively display the current view. That means it takes a longer time until you can start browsing. -The User Interface looks rather spartanic compared to the smooth one of krpano. So the question is why not switch to a better system if it's available? After a quick look I got the impression that krpano is currently state of the art but you may know another program. I'm interested to hear your opinions. Regards Robin [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Category:Spherical_pano… [2] http://toolserver.org/%7Edschwen/pano/index.php?f=Spitzkoppe_360_Panorama.j… [3] http://www.360cities.net/ [4] http://krpano.com/

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Study of Controversial Content
by R M Harris 16 Sep '10

16 Sep '10

As promised, the draft report on our study of Controversial Content on Wikimedia projects is now available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_Content. We're actually planning to release the study on that page in three segments, with a day or two in between This first one discusses the general principles that animated our observations and recommendations. We are very interested in your comments, and will be monitoring them carefully. Your feedback will be built into the report we eventually make to the Board in early October. And thanks to all for the welcoming reception we've been given since our appearance in late June. These are difficult questions to deal with, as you all know -- your openness has made it easier for us to do so. Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris.

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"Session data" bug
by Hay (Husky) 13 Sep '10

13 Sep '10

Hi, i got this error uploading a file to Commons: "Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in." It seems to happen pretty irregularly. I'm using Chrome 6 / Mac OS X. Is this a known bug? Regards, -- Hay

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Reminder: Open IRC meeting with Wikimedia Trustees: Saturday, 1600 UTC
by Samuel Klein 11 Sep '10

11 Sep '10

Reminder: we are having an open meeting in an hour on #wikimedia. -SJ On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Samuel J Klein <sj(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hello, > > In an annual effort to welcome new Board members with an informal > chat, the newest Wikimedia Trustees (Phoebe and Bishakha) are taking > part in an open meeting on IRC this Saturday. This is a forum to > discuss Wikimedia issues and anything else that's on your mind. > > Where : #wikimedia on irc.freenode.net > When : Saturday September 11, 1600-1700 UTC > (That's 0900 PST / 1200 EST / 1800 CEST / 2130 IST) > > All are welcome - please join the meeting with ideas or questions > about Wikimedia and the Projects, or simply with good cheer! If you > have a topic to add to the agenda, please add it on Meta: > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_meetings#September_2010 > > We will keep the meeting to an hour, and will cover the agenda before > moving to an open discussion. Summary minutes will be published. > > I hope to see many of you there, > Sam > -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj

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Commons-l September 2010