Commons-l August 2012

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

9 participants
8 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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Metadata Games
by Robinson Tryon 27 Oct '12

27 Oct '12

Hi Wikimedia Commons folks! Metadata Games (MG) is a FOSS project that we've been working on at Tiltfactor Lab at Dartmouth College. It's a bit of an experimental project using online games to help with the collection of metadata for images in various collections (libraries, archives, etc...). There's a bit of basic information up on the Tiltfactor website about the background and main goals of the project: http://www.tiltfactor.org/metadata-games And (because talk is cheap :-), source code is up on Gitorious here: http://gitorious.org/metadatagames If you promise not to explode our server too much, you can point your browser over to http://metadatagames.com and see a version of the software in action. Right now that's pointing to a test install with some pictures from Dartmouth's archives. We have some great black-and-white images from old Winter Carnivals, as well as some more modern color photographs from around the campus. We're mostly done collecting data with that particular test, so feel free to play around with the images and games we have up there. The MG system currently has a couple of different games for single and multi-player tagging of images. In the next couple of months we're hoping to add support for more media types (including audio and video) as well as making some big improvements to the backend of the system so that we can scale-up for big installs. We're currently collaborating with a couple of different groups including the Rauner Library here at Dartmouth, and we're eager to see more groups benefit from tagging media with MG. Sam Klein pinged me about working with Wikimedia, and we'd definitely be excited to collaborate on improvements or expansions to the current system. The simplest way to use MG would just be to funnel images from Commons through the system, and then export and use the highest-ranked tags. I haven't been very active in the Wikimedia community for the last few years, so I'm not quite up to date on all of the projects percolating out there, but there might also be some more creative ways in which the MG system could be employed :-) Cheers, Robinson Tryon (User:Womble on various wikimedia sites)

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Making it easier for non-Commons users to describe minimally described images
by Gaurav Vaidya 07 Sep '12

07 Sep '12

Hi there! Over the next year, the Missouri Botanical Gardens plans to identify and extract illustrations from the BHL's 39.3 million scanned pages as part of the Art of Life project [1], and then to publish those illustrations to the Wikimedia Commons [2] (as well as to Flickr [3] and ArtStor). My colleagues and I have spent the last few months developed a metadata schema to provide structured information describing an image -- subjects, "agents" (i.e. publishers, painters, engravers and writers) and inscriptions. Within the Commons, we've created a template to handle this structured data, which we call "Information Art of Life" (based on the ubiquitous Information template): http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information_Art_of_Life Since the BHL doesn't have the resources to comprehensively describe all the images itself, our plan is for BHL staff members to minimally describe the illustrations and then to rely on the Commons community to improve metadata, descriptions and categorization. So when images are uploaded to the Commons from the BHL, they will have basic metadata in their "Information Art of Life" templates and basic categorization, and nothing else. We hope to encourage users of BHL illustrations (artists, biologists, humanities scholars, library staff and educators, among others) to take it from there, improving the metadata, descriptions and categorization on the uploaded images. However, as many of them would not have much experience with Wikipedia, we fear that the learning curve in understanding the Commons' template-based metadata system might turn away potential contributors. To make it easier for non-Wikimedians to contribute, we have been considering developing tools to simplify updating these templates, such as by creating user scripts [5] to provide a form based interface to our template; maybe something visually similar to the Index page form that the ProofreadPage extension creates on Wikisource [6]. Do such tools already exist for the Commons somewhere? What do you think would be the easiest way to simplify the ways in which non-Wikimedians can use the Commons' cataloging system? Thanks so much for your attention! cheers, Gaurav http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gaurav [1] http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_the_Biodiversity_Heri… [3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary [4] Based on an external links search, see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=500… [5] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:User_scripts [6] An example of an index page form created by the ProofreadPage extension on Wikisource: http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Index:Field_Notes_of_Junius_Hend…

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Testing Upload Wizard Flickr import feature
by Erik Moeller 03 Sep '12

03 Sep '12

Hi, Kaldari has been polishing the work done during Google Summer of Code by Ankur Anand to support importing correctly licensed Flickr photo(-sets) using Upload Wizard. You specify a photoset URL, and Upload Wizard should treat it like a batch upload. You can test the feature here: http://mwreview.wmflabs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page (you'll need to make a new test user account) Just click the "Import from Flickr" button on the first page to get started. Since UW performs a license check, UW will also add a "VerifiedByUploadWizard" template which should help with the long term validation of licenses for Flickr imported content. Known issues: * Getting a better 'source' value for each image - ideally we want the regular Flickr URL, not the farm server URL * Getting the description for each image, this may require separate calls to the Flickr API. * Making the 'author' value a link to the Flickr account * Supporting the feature to copy metadata across a whole batch, which is shown for regular batch uploads Now's a good time to start playing with it. You can leave feedback here: http://mwreview.wmflabs.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:Flickr_testing - or file in Bugzilla against the UploadWizard extension. Thanks! Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Instagram CC licensing
by aude 23 Aug '12

23 Aug '12

FYI: Instagram photos can now have Creative Commons license: http://i-am-cc.org/ Cheers, Katie -- Board member, Wikimedia District of Columbia http://wikimediadc.org @wikimediadc / @wikimania2012

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Re: [Commons-l] TranslateSvg: beta version available for testing
by Harry Burt 06 Aug '12

06 Aug '12

Well Maarten, I'm assuming you're referring to the editable version, though I'm not sure why the English version (say) has had its text converted to paths (font issues?). Sure, I can try that and see. As a side note, you've got some serious licensing issues there: you can't just "add" licenses - CC-BY has to go as a start - and assuming we're calling this a derivative of all of the source files you're in fact into illegal territory because the GPL isn't compatible with a CC-BY-SA license AFAIK. Regards, Harry

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TranslateSvg: beta version available for testing
by Harry Burt 05 Aug '12

05 Aug '12

[Apologies for the cross-post] Hey all, After a short delay while I sorted out a Wikimedia Labs account, I am pleased to announce that version 2.0 of the TranslateSvg extension is officially available for testing [1]. TranslateSvg enables the easy translation of virtually any (currently 93.1%, but increasing all the time) SVG image containing text, with the result embedded into the SVG file so that graphical updates instantly propagate to all language versions [2]. Available for testing are three images to give you a feel for the interface. There's likely to be one future change - the introduction of an extra dialog box - but it's 99% feature complete. Well, until *you* tell me what's wrong with it :) So what are you waiting for? Find ten minutes and get yourself to http://translatesvg.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page . Many thanks, Harry -- Harry Burt Google Summer of Code student [1] http://translatesvg.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] http://www.harryburt.co.uk/blog/2012/07/20/translatesvg-whats-it-for/

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CC 4.0 draft 2 up
by David Gerard 02 Aug '12

02 Aug '12

https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33632 Speak now for changes to get into the final version ... - d.

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Commons-l August 2012