Commons-l November 2011

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

13 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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translation of categories
by bawolff 19 Jul '12

19 Jul '12

Someone in the thread on friendliness mentioned that categories are always in one language (usually english). Well still a long way from fixing the issue, perhaps if we allowed unrestricted {{DISPLAYTITLE:...}}, combined with the {{int: hack, that'd allow better translatable categories. (of course you'd only be able to use the actual category name in [[category:Foo]] links. I suppose one could use a bot to automatically change links to redirect categories to their canonical name, but then we're getting really really hacky). Anyways, just a thought. cheers, bawolff

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Re: [Commons-l] [cultural-partners] [Wikisource-l] ABBYY Finereader 11 on Toolserver: do we like it?
by Lars Aronsson 01 Dec '11

01 Dec '11

On 11/28/2011 10:23 PM, Alex Brollo wrote: > [...] FineReader 11 [...] produces a complete djvu file [...] Text > layer hasn't full range of details, it's organized into two levels > (page and line), while OCR engine on IA servers produces a very rich > "tree" (page, column, region, paragraph, line and word). Has anybody designed a web interface that shows the scanned image and the zones or regions of the Djvu text layer? It would look similar to image annotation on Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Image_annotations For a Djvu file uploaded to Commons, could you automatically generate image annotations for the various text columns and illustrations? Does image annotation handle multi-page document formats such as PDF and Djvu? (Shouldn't image annotations and timed text be the same thing?) -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Wikimedia Poland to start a travelling POTY pictures exhibition in Warsaw (an announcement)
by Tomasz Kozłowski 24 Nov '11

24 Nov '11

[I am crossposting this announcement to two mailing lists, feel free to pick up the topic on either of them.] Dear All, I am--yet again!--delighted to announce that Wikimedia Polska, the Polish chapter of the WMF, is organising a travelling exhibition of the winning POTY contest pictures. 16 images chosen by Wikimedians from all over the world in the annual POTY contests from 2006 onwards are going to be shown at exhibitions in various places around Poland. As some of you may recall, the exhibition premièred during the 10th anniversary of the Polish Wikipedia conference, having been visited by a few hundred visitors in just two weeks; some images from the pubic viewing of the exhibition are available on Wikimedia Commons at <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Picture_of_the_Year_exhibition_-…>. Our first stop is Przystanek Książka (a Polish wordplay for "Book Break"), a media library of the Public Library of the district of Ochota in Warsaw. The exhibition starts on Monday, November 28, and will remain until the end of the year. 16 pictures, the best of the best of the Wikimedia movement, will be shown in an exhibition open for the public, with descriptions available in Polish, English and German. For those of you currently living in Warsaw or going to visit the capital in the upcoming weeks: the library is located at 42 Grójecka Street, just two tram stops (and 8 minutes) away from the Warsaw Central railway station (tram lines "9" and "25"), and is open on working days from 10 AM until 7 PM (2 PM-7 PM on Wednesdays). We are still looking for more organisations and institutions willing to hold the exhibition--if there's anyone from the neighbouring (European) countries willing to get involved or just looking for some information, feel free to approach me at <tomasz.kozlowski @ wikimedia.pl>. We hope to have a great event, and even if you can't visit the exhibition, please keep your fingers crossed that it goes well, and spread the news! PS For those going to take a peek at the exhibition _in real life_, there's also a Facebook event: <https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=100219446762276>. Regards, -- Tomasz Kozłowski | [[user:odder]]

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Al Jazeera in Flickr goes cc-by-sa
by Liam Wyatt 24 Nov '11

24 Nov '11

Dear Cultural-patners-l and Commons-l, As some of you know I'm currently in Qatar at the invitation of CreativeCommons Qatar talking to various GLAMs. We met with the good folks from Al Jazeera English the other day and discussed various ways that we could work together in the future - based on the great early work of the Al Jazeera CC portal: http://cc.aljazeera.net/ (copied in to this email is Bilal from Al Jazeera and Brian from CC.Qatar). One of the specific questions that they asked me was about why does Wikipedia use screenshots from those videos rather that using their still images from flickr directly. The reason is, as we know, was that the Al Jazeera photostream on Flickr was licensed as cc-by-ND. So... It is now my pleasure to pass on a message from Bilal: Hi Liam - I've updated our Flickr account and all images are now available under the CC share-alike option. EXCELLENT! :-) Everyone, have a look at some of the gorgeous photos available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aljazeeraenglish/sets/ they cover topics from Hajj to the Gaza War, and many different countries involved in the "Arab Spring". Not only are these beautiful pictures with great provenance they are also extremely encyclopedic and impossible to replace. They are all taken by Al Jazeera journalists in the field. Furthermore, this is an amazingly fast turnaround time for changing a large institution's copyright policy :-) Let's start getting these across to Wikimedia Commons in the Category "files from Al Jazeera" http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_Al_Jazeera and start integrating them into various WP articles! Is there someone who can dedicate a bot to sucking these across to Flickr straight away? Perhaps we can also create a nice "partnership template" too? http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnership_templates Sincerely, -Liam wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata

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Mobile Photo Uploads: Android uploader and more
by Erik Moeller 15 Nov '11

15 Nov '11

Hi folks, as you may or may not know, we ran a coding competition in October which included mobile photo upload as one of the challenges. You can see the submissions here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/October_2011_Coding_Challenge/Submissions The submissions include a "Share with Commons" application for Android. It can be installed through the Android market and the source code is available on GitHub. https://market.android.com/details?id=nl.michiel1972.main https://github.com/michiel1972/shareWithCommons The application adds a "Share with Wikimedia Commons" option to the "Share with" menu that's available in the Android Gallery app. That is, when you're viewing a picture on your phone, you can easily upload that particular picture to Commons through the same process that's used for Picasa and other websites. I've tested it, and it works. It doesn't prompt for categories and the license selection is basically just a template field, but it gets the job done. Images uploaded using the app are added to this category: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_uploaded_by_Android_app We'll reach out to the author to see if they're interested in continuing to develop it and host it in Wikimedia's SVN. There are some other submissions as well: * An effort to build uploading functionality into the official Wikipedia Android app by User:Tpt * Three iOS / Objective C implementations of varying degrees of completeness. I haven't tested those yet, but we'll review them as well and share notes. The full list of submissions can be found here -- please add your own comments on the talk page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/October_2011_Coding_Challenge/Submissions Thanks :) Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Overzealous Commons deletionists
by David Gerard 12 Nov '11

12 Nov '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com> Date: 12 November 2011 14:11 Subject: [Wikitech-l] Overzealous Commons deletionists To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, info(a)wikimedia.org I've noticed a problem with overzealous deletionists on Commons. While this may be something of a legal and political issue, it's also operational and affects multiple *[m,p]edias at the same time. I've spent some time over the years convincing public figures that we need official pictures released for articles, rather than relying on fan (or publicity or staff) produced pictures. Because of my own experience in the academic, computing, political, and music industries, I've had a modicum of success. I also ask them to create an official user identity for posting them. Since Single User Login (SUL), this has the added benefit that nobody else can pretend to be them. From their point of view, it's the same reason they also ensure they have an existing facebook or linkedin or twitter account. This week, one of the commons administrators (Yann) ran a script of some sort that flagged hundreds of pictures for deletion, apparently based on the proximity of the word facebook in the description. There was no time for actual legal analysis, at a rate of more than one per minute. The only rationale given was: "From Facebook. No permission." https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Sharon_Ag… In this case, timestamps indicate the commons photo was posted before the facebook photo, and the facebook version is somewhat smaller, so there's not even the hint that it was copied "From Facebook." Besides, many public figures also have facebook accounts, so it shouldn't matter that a photo appears in both places. A bot posted a link to the notice on the en.wiki talk page that used the photo, where in turn it appeared in my watchlist. Then, despite my protest noting that the correct copyright release was included, the administrator (Yann) argued that "The EXIF data says that the author is John Taylor. The uploader has another name, so I don't think he is allowed to decide a license." That appears to be post-hoc explanation, as the facebook one obviously wasn't applicable. Self-justifying strawman argument. In this case, as is usual in the most industries, the *camera* owner appears in the EXIM file. A public figure who pays the studio for headshots owns the picture itself. The photographer would need the public figure's permission to distribute the photo! After pointing out the nomination didn't even remotely meet the deletion policy nomination requirements (that I cited and quoted), this administrator wrote: "I see that discussion with you is quite useless." Then, minutes later, another administrator, Béria Lima, deleted the photo without waiting for the official 7 day comment period to expire. That indicates collusion, not independent review. There are a number of obvious technical issues. YouTube and others have had to handle this, it's time for us. 1) DMCA doesn't require a takedown until there's been a complaint. We really shouldn't allow deletion until there's been an actual complaint. We need technical means for recording official notices and appeals. Informal opinions of ill-informed volunteers aren't helpful. 2) Fast scripting and insufficient notice lead to flapping of images, and confusion by the owners of the documents (and the editors of articles, as 2 days is much *much* too short for most of us). We need something to enforce review times. 3) Folks in other industries aren't monitoring Talk pages and have no idea or sufficient notice that their photos are being deleted. The Talk mechanism is really not a good method for anybody other than very active wikipedians. We need better email and other social notices. 4) We really don't have a method to "prove" that a username is actually under control of the public figure. Hard to do. Needs discussion. 5) We probably could use some kind of comparison utility to help confirm/deny a photo or article is derived from another source. If there's a better place to discuss this, please indicate. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Wikiguides with subs on Youtube
by Andrea Zanni 11 Nov '11

11 Nov '11

[sorry for cross-posting] Hi all, I just wanted to announce that the wikiguides produced by Wikimedia Italy are now on Youtube with subs in different languages. If you are interested in translation, just contact me. The videos have proven themselves as a good introduction to the wiki world (a fourth video on Wikiquote is under production), and (at least in Wikisource) we have seen a significant improvement in access and use of the website. Hope you will enjoy too. *Wikisource *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR0g5ACaC-g *Wikipedia* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoLBZ7_vY-k * Commons* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOTlhuokVDs Aubrey

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Please test multi-file selection
by Erik Moeller 05 Nov '11

05 Nov '11

Multi-file selection, perhaps the single most requested feature for UploadWizard, is now ready for testing on a staging wiki. Please see Neil's announcement here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Multi-file_selection… I'm really excited about this, as it's the first step to making large uploads a lot more manageable without the use of third party tools like Commonist. Other improvements in the next release that you can test now will include a better licensing workflow, including support for custom wikitext licenses, and automatic extraction of file-embedded geographic coordinates and display of those coordinates using a template. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Commons-l November 2011