Commons-l July 2011

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

14 participants
7 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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Closed Timelike Curve
by Paul Houle 29 Jul '11

29 Jul '11

Over the weekend I had some problem with causality. I found this page on Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pine_Grove_Springs_Hotel,_Spofford_L… which claims to have gotten an image from my web site, http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/picture/1849742/Pine_Grove_Springs_Hotel_Spof… which in turn claims to have gotten the image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pine_Grove_Springs_Hotel,_Spofford_Lake,_… which also claims to have gotten the picture from Ookaboo. Obviously this doesn't make sense. Although this image is old enough that we're not going to have anyone getting angry about attribution, but our users deserve to have sensible provenance information for this image. Ookaboo almost certainly got this image from Wikimedia Commons by an automated process. It seems that somehow, Wikimedia Commons re-imported the image from Ookaboo. I'll grant that a large majority of images on Ookaboo were gathered by an automated process that found images on Commons and enriched the metadata. However, Ookaboo now allows users to add images, and Ookaboo is now gathering images that aren't in Commons, see: http://about.ookaboo.com/a/about/add_a_picture Specifically, we're tuning our image loading process to fill gaps in what Commons has, so I'd like to invite people to add our images to Commons -- however, we ought to have a mechanism to prevent mistakes like the one above. Any ideas?

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Negative scanning (again)
by David Gerard 28 Jul '11

28 Jul '11

I asked on this list a few years about negative scanning. The topic's come up again at http://saveaussiemusic.org/ , so I wrote this up: http://wiki.saveaussiemusic.org/wiki/Negative_scanning (feel free to add, correct, etc - here is fine) - precis: flatbeds are unusable, Ion's is as bad as scanning a small print, professional ones are the only archival quality option. I am now told that high-quality negative scanners are not being made any more, and the remaining ones are becoming precious commodities ... And I'm still after anyone in London with a high-quality negative scanner to hand! - d.

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Fwd: [Communia] OutOfCopyright.eu makes Public Domain Calculators available for the entire European Union
by Federico Leva (Nemo) 26 Jul '11

26 Jul '11

I think this is worth at least a forward to Commons-l as well. Nemo -------- Messaggio originale -------- Oggetto: [Communia] OutOfCopyright.eu makes Public Domain Calculators available for the entire European Union Data: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:14:15 +0200 Mittente: Maarten Zeinstra OutOfCopyright.eu <http://OutOfCopyright.eu/> makes Public Domain Calculators available for the entire European Union Works that have fallen into the public domain after their term of copyright protection has elapsed can be freely used by everybody. In theory that means that these works can be reused by anyone for any purpose which includes commercial exploitation. In theory the public domain status increases access to our shared knowledge and culture and encourages economic activities that do not take place as long as works are protected by copyright. In turn the commercial exploitation of public domain works (for example out of copyright books <http://www.voyantes.net/blog/?p=589>) has the tendency to increase their accessibility. In practice however determining if a work has passed into the public domain can prove very difficult. This is especially true when attempting to determine the public domain status of content in multiple jurisdictions. As part of the EuropeanaConnect project <http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/> Knowledgeland <http://www.knowledgeland.org/> and the Institute for information Law at the University of Amsterdam <http://www.ivir.nl/> have developed public domain calculators to answer the question whether a certain work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights (related rights) has fallen into the public domain. These public domain Calculators have been developed for 30 countries (the European Union plus Switzerland, Iceland & Norway) and are available at www.outofcopyright.eu <http://www.outofcopyright.eu/> Users can use the calculators (and the underlying research <http://outofcopyright.eu/methodology.html> published at outofcopyright.eu <http://outofcopyright.eu/>) to determine the copyright status of works in all these countries. This is the first time that this question has been structurally researched across all European jurisdictions. The results of this research of national copyright laws shows a complex semi-harmonized field of legislation across Europe that makes it unnecessarily difficult to unlock the cultural, social and economic potential of works in the public domain. Identification of works as being in the public domain needs be made easier and less resource consuming by simplifying and harmonizing rules of copyright duration and territoriality. Outofcopyright continues to adjust and refine its calculators. It is also researching how to make calculation possible using large datasets like bibliographica <http://bibliographica.org/>, DBPedia <http://dbpedia.org/> and the Europeana <http://www.europeana-libraries.eu/web/api> datasets on cultural objects in Europe. We encourage everyone interested in the public domain to try the calculators, comment on them and re-use the published research. All research and other material on Outofcopyright is available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/> and the software <http://www.outofcopyright.eu/software_description.html> powering the calculators can be reused under the terms of the EUPL license <http://www.osor.eu/eupl> Kind regards, Maarten Zeinstra * * * Kennisland | Knowledgeland t +31205756720 | m +31643053919 | s mzeinstra www.kennisland.nl <http://www.kennisland.nl/>| www.knowledgeland.org <http://www.knowledgeland.org/> * * *

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Updated images don’t update properly
by Arne 'Timwi' Heizmann 05 Jul '11

05 Jul '11

I just made several changes to an SVG file: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_pyramids.svg However, the system refuses to update the image. It is still displaying the oldest version, which has been modified 9 times now. This is a severe bug and will likely cause frustrated users to stop contributing edits to image and/or encourage them to upload the edit under a new filename, causing duplicates. When a new version is uploaded, all caches must be cleared and all thumbnails regenerated when needed. Thanks! Timwi

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Call for image filter referendum
by Casey Brown 05 Jul '11

05 Jul '11

/Please distribute this message widely/ *Call for referendum*: The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the Board of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of images strictly for their own account. Further details and educational materials will be available shortly. The referendum is scheduled for 12-27 August, 2011, and will be conducted on servers hosted by a neutral third party. Referendum details, officials, voting requirements, and supporting materials will be posted at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum shortly. For the coordinating committee, Philippe (WMF) Cbrown1023 Risker Mardetanha PeterSymonds Robert Harris -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023

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Commons-l July 2011