Commons:Village pump/Archive/2023/12

Commons Gazette 2023-12

• The total number of files on Wikimedia Commons exceeded 100 million on 16 November 2023. This has taken 7 009 days since the founding of Wikimedia Commons on 7 September 2004.

Some files on Wikimedia Commons

Zimbabwe $100 000 000 (2008)

The 100 millionth file

Galaxy NGC 7479, approximately 100 million light-years from Earth.

Galaxy M82's burst of star formation is thought to have been initiated by a close encounter with M81 about 100 million years ago.

• Currently, there are 186 sysops.

References

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Edited by RZuo (talk).

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Commons Gazette is a monthly newsletter of the latest important news about Wikimedia Commons, edited by volunteers. You can also help with editing! --RZuo (talk) 12:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Bot to remind uploaders of corrupted files

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T350917

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=filesize%3A10239%2C10241&sort=create_timestamp_desc

i think, a bot, which detects these files and sends a notice to their uploaders asap, would be necessary. can someone code up something? or do a manual vfc once a few days before a bot takes over? RZuo (talk) 14:31, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

CropTool will soon be broken

Commons talk:CropTool#Grid engine will shut down on December 14th, tool will stop working. Discussion should probably take place there, not here. - Jmabel ! talk 18:01, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Importer for Yug

• Yug (talk · contributions · Statistics · Recent activity · block log · User rights log · uploads · Global account information) (assign permissions)

Lingualibre.org which is a Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Foundation supported web app, project, community and wiki plans to migrate its documentation to Commons. I would like to have the (Transwiki) importer right, so the wikipage could be migrated with proper credit history. Lingualibre uses Wikimedia oath connection to create accounts so usernames are similar to wikimedia's wikis. I'm administrator there, and there are about 30 pages and 120 translations to import. I'm familiar with lingualibre:Special:Export and Special:Import. It seems possible to import all our help pages at once, but I will need to try it. Yug (talk) 18:17, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

• @Yug: At least one technical issue: Lingualibre is not in the list of supported wikis to import from, that will need to be changed (I can file the phab task if you need once we agree that this should be done). And I'm not sure how to import translations, but you might need translationadmin rights for that in addition to transwiki importer; do you know how this works? Before we move forward, however, where on Commons do you plan to import these to? —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 19:31, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Hello Mdaniels5757, I anticipated some technical roadblocks as the one above so I'm coming early to solve them.

Timeline: Migration for the wiki pages is wished for Spring 2024.

• Place and move rights: Commons:Lingua Libre has been discussed as the main page. I have a few ideas for the documentations, be it Commons:Lingua Libre/* or Help:Lingua Libre/*. If necessary, I and several other members have move rights.
• Supported import Wikis: Yes, if possible to get Lingualibre on the import list you cited, I guess it would help to make cleaner, more automatized imports, so this is interesting as well.
• Technical connection level between Lingualibre ⇔ Wikimedia Commons: Not sure if this is relevant, but I will clarify the level of technical connexion. Users of Lingua Libre log in via Wikimedia oath system, so Lingua Libre accounts id and names and Wikimédia Commons accounts ids and names are identical. Lingua Libre is not completely connected : notifications systems are autonomous.
• Administrative connextion level: LinguaLibre.org is financially supported by Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimédia France, about 100k€ so far. See meta:Lingua Libre/Supports for a non-exhaustive review.

The most important for me is to get the Transwiki importer and translationadmin userrights. From what I understand of Special:Export and Special:Import, this alone allows me to work on batch of files from a same category on the origine wiki, then import them in one shoot to the target wiki. Since we only have about 100 pages to import, this can do the job. Yug (talk) 08:37, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

cc User:WikiLucas00. Yug (talk) 09:04, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Movement Charter

There has been little or no discussion on Commons of the pending Movement Charter (see especially meta:Movement Charter/Content and meta:Movement Charter/Content/Global Council) and whether the Commons community may have any particular concerns about how it is shaping up. The Movement Charter document is still an incomplete draft as of November 2023.

A few comments/questions:

• One portion of this seems relatively uncontroversial in its overview, with only relative details to be worked out (though, please, if you disagree, speak up!): meta:Movement Charter/Content/Hubs (draft) describes the formation of geographically- and thematically-based "Hubs" that will fill a space between affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). There are now nearly 200 affiliates, and that number presumably will only grow. Some of them are pretty tiny. It's become nearly impossible for each of these, especially the smaller ones, to maintain any meaningful relationship with the WMF. This has made it particularly difficult for smaller affiliates to seek grants from WMF, or even learn what other groups are doing successfully in their own fundraising, collaborations, etc. The hope is that the Hubs will be of a scale to be more tractable from both "above" and "below." (E.g., on the budgeting front, WMF can give a chunk of money to a Hub, which can make allocations "closer to the ground.")
• As far as I can tell, the main other goal of this process is to form a Global Council that (1) can remain reasonably light on its feet while at the same time (2) can, in some respects, provide a better representation of the broad Wikimedia movement than is provided by the WMF, which appears to be willing to offload/devolve some significant responsibilities to this Council. The best summary I've seen of this proposed delegation is at meta:Movement Charter/Content/Global Council.
• This will almost certainly be the largest change in Wikimedia movement governance in well over a decade. Because representatives to the Wikimedia Summit that will take place April 2024 in Berlin were selected through a process centered on affiliates, not sister projects, there is no formal representation of Commons as such, nor of people whose participation in Wikimedia projects is entirely online. Instead, representation consists of WMF itself and of the geographically or topically based affiliates.
• I believe we should have some forum to discuss whether the Commons community as such has any particular concerns about the Charter. I don't think just a section like this on the Village pump (or several such sections) is the greatest way to do it, but I suspect we should have some high-level discussion here first and then start a more dedicated page.
• After some back-and-forth on the part of the organizers, I will now definitely be attending the Summit, and intend to try to represent any concerns that the Commons community may have, both in the next several months and at the Summit itself. I suspect that the next several months will be more crucial than the face-to-face meeting: as with most "summits", the meeting itself is likely to be more of a pro forma ratification than a place where anything is hashed out.
• I'd be very interested to know if there are others who are significantly active in Commons and who will be there in Berlin or are otherwise actively engaged in this process, especially if you are also willing to commit to helping represent any concerns that the Commons community may have.
• My own two largest concerns, just for the record:
  1. I don't think enough attention is being paid to the type of contributors I see as the backbone of Commons and virtually all other Wikimedia projects: people who contribute entirely (or almost entirely) through on-wiki activities, and who never attend face-to-face meetings even locally, let alone ones that require travel. Unsurprisingly (but I hope not inevitably), the bulk of "movement" level decisions are made by a group of perhaps a thousand or so people who travel to meetings and have come to largely know each other; I'd consider myself to be roughly on the fringes of that group. In a potentially vicious cycle, the very people liable to be under-represented are also under-represented in the process of determining how the community is to be represented.
  2. I am concerned that the Global Council could become a "talking shop", the sort of thing that in my view has happened to the General Assembly of the UN: lots of speeches, some resolutions, no power or authority. I'm not sure how much that is a matter of what we say in a charter vs. what will happen over time once it is established, but I think that if this Council is going to create meaningful and beneficial change, it can't hurt to keep that in mind in drafting a charter.
• And one last remark: something like the Council should have happened ages ago, but let's face it: as WMF went from a handful of people in the 2000s to something much larger in the 2010s. Most of us with an on-wiki focus took years to even notice this change, and when we did notice it was because several things went wrong (I don't think I need to enumerate those here, but certainly the disastrous first release of the WYSIWIG editor for Wikipedia was a wake-up call for a lot of us). The relationship between the WMF and a lot of on-wiki participants was pretty awful in the mid-2010s. I think that has improved a lot, but not enough. I think a council like this is almost certainly a step in the right direction, but I also think it could be botched, and that we should be paying attention. I realize that "movement governance" isn't everyone's thing, and that's OK, but I think we need more than a handful of us to pay attention, and we need to recognize that if we are concerned with the shape this takes, we have way more chance to influence this the next few months than we will in many years after that.

Jmabel ! talk 02:55, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

thanks for making the effort to represent commons despite wmf's restrictions etc.

i dont intend to derail your discussion, but i just want to say this observation of mine in short -- no matter how hard people try to provide equal opportunities and rights universally, the majority of people often end up not reached and remain neglected, but power and control fall into only the hands of the power-hungry, unrestrained few. RZuo (talk) 12:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

• It mostly looks like a long-winded thesis consisting of either vague wordiness or explanations of the way things already work. I expect it will be much like the UCOC: quietly stored somewhere on Meta, 90% of contributors wont even know it exits at all, most of the rest wont read it, and most of the rest will immediately forget it. GMG^talk 13:12, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I am afraid the only way to be heard is to form a Commons User group. It will not solve the issues - in any case users who did not become (for one of thousands reasons) the members of the group will net feel represented, but at least there would be someone invited to these meetings. I believe that we have a Photographers user group or smth similar though. Ymblanter (talk) 16:09, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

@Ymblanter: we do have a photographers' user group (Commons:Commons Photographers User Group) but its focus is rather specific. Typical topics for the mostly Zoom-based meetings are things like " Underwater photography" or a "Post Photograph Processing Workshop" or "Wildlife photography and citizen science". That is to say, it is very much a photographers' group. It has zero concern with the roughly 50% of Commons' content that comes from GLAMs or other third-party sources such as Flickr; it is very little concerned with curation, not at all concerned with governance, and any concern with online tools is precisely about those that are useful to serious photographers.

At WikiConference North America I brought up the possibility that Commons as such could form a user group that could become a WMF affiliate. In general, this was not warmly received. There seemed to be a fear that each of the several hundred wikis in the WMF cosmos would form a user group, and that there would be an awful lot of separate, possibly redundant, entities. (On the other hand, a user group related to GLAM content would probably be welcomed, and there should be other appropriate themes for thematic user groups that would at least intersect Commons' work.) - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

@RZuo: I agree that is likely, and is a danger. What I'm saying is that I think there is more leverage than usual right now to do something about that, and it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

@GreenMeansGo: yes, these documents are tedious, and unfortunately blowhards are heavily drawn to working on these. But the Hubs are already starting to form, and the General Council will almost certainly happen. We need to identify our needs and work out how to get them met. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Aside: my biggest beef with documents like this in not so much the vacuous, ornamental declarations, as the parts that say something will happen without laying out mechanisms and responsibilities. I really do urge people to slog through at least some of the document, look for places where it could be improved—including where it could be improved by cutting something outright—and bringing that up on the appropriate talk page. The recently adopted Universal Code of Conduct also started out as a lot of vacuous blather, but it actually ended up being workable. Not necessarily pretty, but workable. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

this seems to have stalled out, so let me re-raise the two key points:

1. Will anyone else significantly active on Commons be attending the Summit?
2. Does anyone other than me have issues/concerns on Commons behalf about the shape that the Charter is taking?

Jmabel ! talk 20:46, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Prioritizing our technical needs

A largely separate issue that has come up in the course of this process. I've had several very good discussions with Selena Deckelmann, CPTO of the WMF. I have no doubt of her good will, and that if the Commons community can get reasonable consensus on a priority-ordered list of our largest technical concerns, that would influence where at least some technical resources were allocated, certainly in terms of projects taken on by WMF technical staff and possibly by WMF grants to build particular tools that are better built by someone other than WMF technical staff. As it is, descriptions of those technical needs are floating around as a bunch of phabricator bugs, and we have really given WMF little or no guidance as to how those might be prioritized. There is no guarantee we'd be listened to?, but as long as we don't have such a list, it is a certainty that we have almost no influence on how money is spent. - Jmabel ! talk 20:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

May be we can get here at least some of these Phabricator tags and then try to prioritize? I do not think there is a single person knowing all the issues, but collectively we might be able to find many of them. Ymblanter (talk) 21:13, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I think we often said that bugs in the file handling resulting in failed or corrupted uploads and bugs in the UploadWizard are our priority number one followed by batch upload desktop software and mobile upload apps. GPSLeo (talk) 21:42, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

i think many functionalities currently fulfilled by user scripts should be taken over by the software or at least maintained by wmf staff instead of volunteers.

i think we can divide commons into these different parts and list "feature requests" respectively.

1. file upload: better video/audio upload tool; batch upload tool (wizard often breaks for me when files exceed several dozen, and to batch edit description fields is hard and annoying); https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350917 ...
2. search and use media: better deepcategory search; sorting options (instead of only alphabetical); better video player (now cannot even jump forward or backward 5s by pressing left or right arrows); better document reader interface; super high resolution image viewer.
3. maintenance: category description that's more like wikidata items (meaning instead of a single title we can have multilingual titles. instead of constructing relations into the english title like "cat:2023 in France" we can have "this category combines topics '2023' and 'france'". etc.); licence review tool...

i also made Commons:Idea Lab where everyone can write ideas. i wrote quite a lot...--RZuo (talk) 22:56, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Fixing the issue where thumbails for other image file formats besides JPEG are fuzzy would be huge. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I would encourage folks to go into more detail than just "better X". The more explicitly needs are documented the more likely you get a good solution. Bawolff (talk) 02:50, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

In 3. I would definitely add improving VFC, notably adding "source" in the preview summary. Yann (talk) 11:40, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

my list is by no means complete. it's for everyone to add on.

this now sounds like perennial m:Community Wishlist Survey (CWS). maybe we can already start with Community Wishlist Survey 2024? which should happen pretty soon in jan 2024?

interested users can sieve thru past years' surveys for proposals that were already written and recommended but not implemented?

but unlike CWS, this time once we get a list of many detailed proposals, we can group them by urgency, keep them on a dedicated page and submit them to wmf as a list of "much needed technological developments" or something like that, so that wmf keeps working on this list and we dont have to write the same things for CWS every year. RZuo (talk) 11:52, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

I also would propose that we make our own wishlist and than we can show it to the WMF and we could also coordinate our votings for the official wishlist where we if we do not coordinate our votings do not have a chance against the Wikipedia related proposals. Unlike in the official wishlist we should also include the fixing of bugs and not only new features in this list. GPSLeo (talk) 14:37, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

I keep a list of wishlist items for myself. Anyone is welcome to take items from them. And use them as inspiration. And yes, please avoid “better X”. For instance “better file upload” is probably more accurately described as “more resilient against connection problems” or “resumeable uploads” or “make storage layer throw fewer exceptions during upload” or “better memory mangemant when uploading dozens of images at once with the uploadwizard” etc. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Additionally, I think this is EXACTLY what is wrong right now with the foundation development model. It should not be UP TO US to be our own product owner, who is able to analyze problems, describe them and turn it into an actionable roadmap to be pitched to the foundation management etc. This is EXACTLY what the foundation should be doing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:11, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

i dont know what the structure of wmf is, how the whole wmf is divided into departments and managed, etc.

it seems to me they are mixing different roles all in one. imo, there're 3 rather unrelated roles:

1. tech. to develop the mediawiki software, the software implemented for wiki projects, hosting of wiki projects' data.
2. outreach. to encourage participation in minority ethnolinguistic groups, countries... to coordinate between wmf and users.
3. money. raising/earning money and spending it on themselves and tech and outreach.

like whenever some new software comes out and we report problems, we often cant get the feedback directly back to the "tech" people but only the "outreach" people, then messages are lost in the middle. how about spinning off the tech part as a separate entity that focuses on tech like the Mozilla Corporation or Open Technology Fund?

most of the outreach part is basically the same as any NGO that aims to promote and preserve threatened minority cultures. it's not something that must be done by wmf with all that money raised from donations.

in https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2022-annual-report/financials/ it says it paid 88 mil usd as salaries. that's like hiring 400 people with 200k usd per annum (which is not small at all for any internet company). i wonder how many of the employees are actually involved with "tech". on the other hand, how much percentage of development and maintenance are done by unpaid volunteers? RZuo (talk) 13:16, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

The truly outreachy people rarely handle tech related things. Perhaps you mean community liasons, who often act as intermediaries? They would fall in tech side of any organization. In any case its not like the actual programmers are in charge of the strategic direction of WMF either. They have input of course, but really its management who makes the big direction decisions. Bawolff (talk) 17:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't have a number, and sometimes it is hard to say who is "tech", but from what I can gather the WMF is about 50% technical. - Jmabel ! talk 18:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

@TheDJ: as someone who worked 40 years in the software industry, I strongly disagree. We are the client and (collectively) the subject-matter experts. We should know and define our needs. The Foundation is, above all, an engine for raising money and providing resources. They have some goals of their own, but as far as the online projects are concerned their goal, at best, is "try to get them what they need". Relatively few people at the Foundation, even on the technical side, have any significant experience using Commons in any non-trivial way. Some of them are very good project managers or software engineers, but at best that means an ability to gather requirements translate those into functional and technical terms, and efficiently implement software that meets those requirements.

In WMF terms, Commons is a weird case. Among the hundreds of wikis they are responsible for, we are probably the only one that is focused mainly on file content; the only one other than Wikidata itself that makes such heavy use of its own Wikibase instance; the most multilingual. There is almost no chance that a team that is responsible for the support of hundreds of wikis, including well over 100 that are significantly active, is going to have a deep understanding of one that is so unique. It would be nice if there was a program manager for Commons, but from what I can tell they aren't organized that way; I don't think there is even a program manager for en-wiki, and (with all due respect to ourselves) that is an even more important project than Commons. There is perhaps a little too strong an assumption that a common set of tools will serve everyone, and we are probably the wiki where that is least true, so we need to advocate for ourselves and make it easier for someone to give us what we need. Perhaps what we need is a program manager, and if that's the case we should try to build a consensus toward that, but there is no way that anyone is going to come from outside, or on high, and be better able to analyze our needs than we are. - Jmabel ! talk 18:17, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Sure all that is true, and while I too have 30 25 years of software experience, we as a group are here for images. If people here are going to be defining software products, you wont get to do much of images any longer. I spend about 3 hours every week, just keeping up with MediaWiki software changes. I spend about 6 hours a week providing the community with support on technical issues. That leaves me about 2 hours a week doing some volunteer development. Yes we should be providing input, but the foundation should be facilitating PROCESS, so that we create a consistent, predictive and readable results that can create actionable results. And they are delegating even THAT to us. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:51, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

@TheDJ: (1) "the foundation should": Railing against the first-born of Egypt will have about the same result it has had in the past: nothing.

(2) "I spend…": If you personally don't have time for this, that's fine. No one individual is particularly responsible to take this on.

(3) Glad to hear you also have that level of experience. Insofar as you choose to participate in this, I imagine your contributions will be useful.

(4) "we as a group are here for images": up to a point. I can think of a lot else we do than warehouse images and other media. I could probably give 100 examples, but here's two from my own recent work: the edits at this or this are at least as useful as having uploaded copies of postcards that were already online on a library site and replicating the library's inaccurate description. Without descriptions, categories, generally accurate licensing, structured data, etc., Commons would not produce nearly the value that it does. There's a reason why, despite hosting 1/60 as many images as Flickr, at least as many Commons images as Flickr images get picked up to be used in newspapers and other traditional media.

Jmabel ! talk 19:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

My concern (which I think is similar to TheDJ's) is that these sorts of things often devolve into band-aid solution. The community wishlist is a good example of this - the top proposals are what sounds cool to a large number of people, but maintenance and any sort of long term strategy is left by the wayside. That doesn't mean good things don't come out of those processes, they do, but the processes rarely lead to the work being more than the sum of its parts. At best they are one-off solutions - rarely any sort of holistic solution to underlying problems. There is a reason why product managers are generally considered full time jobs involving specialized skills, not replaceable by a simple popular vote. Ultimately you're right though - The situation, for better or worse, is what it is, and commons should make the most of the opportunities that it has. Bawolff (talk) 15:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

@RZuo: it's interesting that you invoke Mozilla. I don't know whether you know that the aforementioned Selena Deckelmann, who became CPTO a little over a year ago, was about eight years at Mozilla/Firefox and worked her way up from Data Architect to Sr. Vice President there. I personally think she's in a position to change a lot for the better. - Jmabel ! talk 18:32, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

i didnt know. i'm a noob about all these things. just giving my uneducated opinion and hoping others forgive my ignorance.

1 thing about where feedback should come from though. is it like, no one from the whole tech team at wmf is a commons or wikidata user?

for example, the "add statement" button on wikidata is totally anti-user, because it appears in the middle of the page. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142082 is 7 years old! they cant put in any basic solution to this anti-user design that's the core to editing wikidata. any new user of wikidata will realise this is a problem after trying to find the button a few times.

an obvious problem on commons is the timedtext of audios/videos. take a look at File:10 Signs Your Mental Health is Getting Worse.webm, the only built-in way to check what subtitles exist is clicking on the CC button in the popup video player. there isnt a simple list somewhere. because this functionality is so badly needed, users had to create Template:Closed captions/layout by themselves! yet 10 years after users having DIY-ed this template, wmf still doesnt have a built-in solution for this need! (i wish i have 88 mil usd every year, then i will spend half of it hiring 4000 indian programmers and pocket the other half.)

we can see how our opinions on what needs improvement converge rather quickly, because we've all been active and know which problems exist. if the tech team has anyone who's an occasional, hobbyist commons user, maybe s/he would've shared some obvious things with colleagues already.

and even though there are hundreds of wiki projects, the real difference is probably only about 20, because most are just different language versions of the same thing that's supported by the same piece of software. RZuo (talk) 19:56, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

As far as I know there are multiple Commoners, Wikipedians and Wikidatans amongst staff. This does not mean they have the 'power' to prioritize technical tasks, or can speak on behalf of the community what needs to be prioritized. They have to work on tasks assigned to them by lead staff - like Selena. Ciell (talk) 20:12, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

I would guess (a guess, but from experience) that in any organization the size of WMF, several people in the middle of a hierarchy is making the decisions what work gets prioritized. At the top, they are managing managers, and probably setting policies for how work is prioritized, but except for very major projects no one at the top is deciding "this particular feature will get done."

If you think about it from a broad, organizational perspective, they are mainly maintaining mediawiki and (now that WMDE has handed it over to WMF) wikibase. Laying wikibase aside for the moment: we on Commons use mediawiki very differently from its hundreds of other uses by sister projects. We are probably the only wiki in the WMF world where categories are more important than mainspace (galleries for us, articles for almost everyone else) and media more important than either. It's not surprising that Commons' needs can get lost in the shuffle for a team that works on mediawiki. So, again: if we define our (probably unique) priorities, there is a fair chance that they will be attended to. If we do not, it should not be surprising that we remain the red-headed stepchild. - Jmabel ! talk 22:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

that makes me think of Mr Magnus Manske, the creator of mediawiki. he knows well commons' needs and has created so many tools that are essential and cater so well to commons: cat-a-lot, flickr2c, url2c, User:Magnus Manske/sdc_tool.js, GLAMorous, BaGLAMa... look at this list https://magnustools.toolforge.org/ . Orz. RZuo (talk) 06:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

“no one from the whole tech team at wmf is a commons or wikidata user” i dont see where you get that idea. At least half of the foundation tech team is sourced from the community. Visit any event and you would quickly learn this. No, the problem is that we have people doing 10000 different things. Dozens of workflows that are important to like 10 people each. There is no amount of employees that scales to our diversity, but don’t mistake that for the personal drive and commitment that people have to the projects. They just dont always want to edit any longer after a 40 hour workweek, because having the same work and hobby is not always a healthy mix.. This is a more a scale problem than anything else. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:04, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

the problem is that we have people doing 10000 different things. That shouldn't be an issue if they have a clear direction and goal to work around. There's naturally going to be 10000 different things being worked on at any given time if we aren't clear about what we want from them as a user base though. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:19, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

the feeling comes from the wikidata "add statement" button. adding every single statement (unless you're using some other tools) is done by clicking that button first, but that button has no fixed position.

cant imagine if a commercial company has UX like this in its products.

and users have reported this is a problem for 7 years now. yet developers do nothing about it. cant imagine if a company ignores customers like that. RZuo (talk) 14:21, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

You should ping Lea_Lacroix_WMDE in the Phabricator issue and see where it's at since she said they were going to deal with. Otherwise it does look kind of negligent on their part. Sometimes a little prodding can get things going again though. I doubt it's anything other then an oversight in this case since it seems like they were willing to fix it and in the process of doing so. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

an example for commons would be the uploadwizard. if you went on a trip and took 5 photos each of 4 buildings, how are you gonna upload the 20 photos? if you do it in 1 batch, then you have to scroll and copypaste the filename, the description, the categories separately for the 4 things. or you upload in 4 batches.

compare that to flickr's uploader. 1. you dont need to scroll. 2. you can select photos for batch edits.

this is the most fundamental part of a file hosting platform, yet it's so hard to use. even new users would feel the difficulty. why are devs oblivious? RZuo (talk) 14:37, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Its actually pretty common for commercial software to ignore user bug reports when they are not critical. Bawolff (talk) 18:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Hey there! Thanks Joe, for starting up this discussion. I'm following with interest.

A suggestion I have to help with clarity -- identify the priorities around which problems you'd like solved, and the audience the problem is being solved for. For example, @Fuzheado just held an unconference session at Wikicon NA to ask about tools and workflows folks in GLAMs are interested in, which likely intersects with some of the tooling issues flagged here. Getting clear about who benefits from certain changes the most, which usually is very related to who a change is being designed for, may help us identify areas to focus and also get clear about why. Ideally that will help support better prioritization decisions that must be made, even when everyone doesn't agree.

In addition, something helpful to think about are the ways in which we are evaluating the success of work. One of the ways is by coming up with measurement criteria that provides both leading indicators that the work is having the intended effect (these tend to be specific to individual changes), and also lagging indicators that help us understand more holistically impact as systems change (these tend to be more like "foundation-wide metrics" or lodestar metrics for departments and organizations). Happy to talk about this more with anyone interested. Finding good metrics is something I hope that we become really good together.

I have heard (in this thread and from others) requests for more support from the Foundation for Commons. Partly in response to the open letter, I asked the whole Structured Content team (who formerly worked on structured data related projects) to dive into an area that acutely needed support so that they could refamiliarize themselves with some aspects of Commons and the state of our infrastructure. After some research was done to identify acute issues, they decided to tackle improvements to the Commons Upload Wizard. After that's done, my plan is to reflect on the work, our understanding of volunteer needs and the needs of the many types of users of Commons, and find a path forward. Input from you all on priorities, and a willingness to engage in further conversations about purpose, metrics and outcomes, would all be really be helpful. SDeckelmann-WMF (talk) 23:06, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Again: if the head of the tech side of the Foundation says that the most effective thing the Commons community could do to make it more likely to get what we need from the Foundation is to create our own prioritized list, I see absolutely no reason to doubt her. There may be other things that might help us even more, but those other things are not in our own hands. - Jmabel ! talk 18:32, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

No offense to RZuo or anyone else, but Its not on the WMF to sort through random, years old discussions to suss out what our priorties and needs as a project are. Instead there really needs to be a list of issues, needs, wants, or whatever on our end sorted by priorty with the top 4 or 5 being the most urgent. We can't expect them to just somehow magically know what the community wants them to work on or fix though.Random, ambigious complaints about "issues" aren't a cohesive, actionable plan either. Nor are they going to spend the time and resources fixing things that might actually end up being low on the priority list just because a few users mentioned them in passing somewhere. That's not how organizations work. There should be a list of the top things Commons' users want them to deal with. Otherwise don't supprised if nothing gets fixed on their end. Something like Commons:Strategic plan perhaps? --Adamant1 (talk) 23:39, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm guessing that something we could call a "strategic plan" is more than we can hope for. But I think we should be able to identify (1) our biggest pain points and what we think could be done about them, (2) some "low-hanging fruit" (e.g. small UI changes that would have high return) and (maybe overlapping the other two) (3) things done by fragile bots that deserve a lot stronger technical backing. - Jmabel ! talk 00:53, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

@Jmabel: I agree a "strategic plan" is probably to lofty. It's mainly that there needs to be a more centralized, formal place for all of this outside of the village pump or the "Wishlist" pages that users have created so far. What the page is called doesn't really matter though. But so far there's a couple of pages that were created by RZuo and TheDJ, this discussion, and I'm sure others. The whole thing really needs to be more centralized and consensus based then it is currently. Your idea of what we need to identify sounds like a good starting point for whatever it ends up being though. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:50, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

for #3, i grouped some "tools" (user contributed) by their importance: Commons:Tools/Directory (not a complete list, feel free to keep cataloguing). all these are maintained by users. RZuo (talk) 06:21, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

One thing to keep in mind is that MediaWiki is sort of a hybrid project. There is the WMF, who acts very similarly to mid-sized commercial software company developing MediaWiki - with managers, product managers, scrum, agile, KPIs, etc. There is also MediaWiki the open source project, where random people contribute. Prioritized lists can often be quite compelling for the second group of people. People who contribute to MediaWiki in an open-source fashion are usually motivated by solving a problem that bothers them. However sometimes they like to do other things. Generally though (and this is a very rough generalization) they don't like the messy work of talking to 50 different people to try and figure out what people actually want. Well defined lists of desired improvements gives them something to work on. Bawolff (talk) 18:43, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I created a RfC page to make such a survey Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey. If everyone agrees that this method is what we need to get our priority list we could immediately start collecting the proposals. GPSLeo (talk) 09:01, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Looks like a good idea but probably needs to (i) be advertised project-wide, or may be even cross-project-wide (ii) have a closed or even a team of closers who would summarize the results in terms of the priorities. Ymblanter (talk) 18:23, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Strategic issues

Before anyone can come up with the specific proposals (see above) I think we need to discuss the big picture. From my perspective, I see four big things which we should have understanding of before writing any proposals. I am sure some of these are non-issues, and that there are some serious things I just do not see, but we need to start somewhere and discuss. (This may become sections of the wishlist discussed above, or not):

• Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to become a major audio and video repository? If yes, how do we make sure we are not a poor version of Youtube, vimeo etc.?
• Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to have a fully functioning mobile version and a mobile app, say for uploads?
• Are we ever going (have ambition, have resources) to fully replace categories by some more modern structure such as Structured Commons? (Multilingual categories go here as well).
• (Just to repeat the question which I asked at the top of the page, but more broadly): Do we expect any total-size-related limitations on uploads in the future and, if yes, are we going to restrict uploads or perform some form of cleanup of existing approach?--Ymblanter (talk) 18:33, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I think most of this was already discussed at Commons talk:Think big - open letter about Wikimedia Commons and there we also had the conclusion that we need a priority list but we never made the list. Of course we need a long term plan for what we want to be. The current idea of the priority list is more about what tools do we need fixed to keep the current state of Commons running. Both is needed but I think more or less independent of each other. GPSLeo (talk) 18:41, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I think that being audio repository then yes. Audio file size is pretty much trivial. About video, then question is that do we even want to be major videorepository? Handling video would mean that it would require much more server and bandwidth capacity in every level. Handling video in crowdsourced way (annotating, referencing, ... ) is much complicated than images and it is totally possible that world is outpacing the video with AI(or other automatic systems) which generates output dynamically from data. -- Zache (talk) 19:52, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

At least, we should a copy of a film if it is notable enough to have a WP article in any language (and in the public domain of course). Many old movies are being released again on DVD/Blu-ray, and we should have a copy of these. Yann (talk) 20:42, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Turning Commons into a full on video host sounds like a bad idea, if it's even doable to begin with. Although allowing for copies of older films that are notable enough to have a WP article seems like a reasonable standard. Just as long as it doesn't lead to Commons being a glorified PD version of PornHub. Audio files on the other hand seem like a mixed bag, but one that's at least doable. Although allowing for either one shouldn't come at the cost of other things or make it harder to get core issues dealt with. The time and effort it would take to make hosting videos somewhat viable would invariably mean less of both going into say fixing the UploadWizard or improving other neglected areas of the platform. Plus it's better to focus on the platforms core strengths and purpose instead of trying to turn it into the Swiss Army Knife of media hosting platforms anyway. It's always better to focus on a project's core strengths instead of making it into a multi-purpose tool for everything and everyone. I just don't think that's in hosting video or audio files. Although more so with the former then the later. --Adamant1 (talk) 03:41, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Avoid using video2commons for youtube temporarily

v2c has been uploading youtube videos in low resolution, because of a flaw in its code.

so far, i have found that this problem affects some recently uploaded youtube videos, but i am not sure if it affects other video websites or how long it has existed.

you can still use v2c but only with extra caution, as explained at Commons_talk:Video2commons#Summary.

if you know these users https://github.com/orgs/toolforge/people , please ask them to help with https://github.com/toolforge/video2commons/issues/173 . RZuo (talk) 13:15, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I had this issue some weeks ago. It uploads the 144p version, which is the smallest one. I used an online downloader to overwrite with the HD version --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:41, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Yup, I noticed probably the same problem while uploading File:Klášter Vyšší Brod, 2020.webm (now merged & deleted as File:Klášter Vyšší Brod, 2020 duplicate.webm). — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 21:20, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Category:Poland photographs taken on XXXX-XX-XX

Something has gone wrong with the categories in Category:Photographs of Poland by date, e.g. see Category:Poland photographs taken on 2023-11-11. You can see there are several thousand of these categories in Category:Non-empty category redirects. I have checked the templates {{Poland photographs taken on navbox}} and {{World photos}}, also Module:Countries/Europe (talk | +/− | links | doc | subpages | tests – results), but can't see any recent changes that should be causing this issue. The categories were all working fine last time I looked about a week ago. Can anyone shed some light on this? BigDom (talk) 08:56, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I added {{Poland photographs taken on navbox}} but it did not fully solve the problem. Ymblanter (talk) 09:23, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the problem happens whether you use the specific Poland template, or World photos. It seems to be limited to Poland though, see Category:Non-empty category redirects from page 2 onwards. There are thousands of Polish categories, but none from any other country. BigDom (talk) 09:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

It must be something in one of the templates upstream, but I can not really check this now, just too busy at my work. Ymblanter (talk) 09:52, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

No problem, I'll keep looking for now. BigDom (talk) 10:11, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

@Ymblanter: - found and fixed the issue. The cat= parameter had been removed at Template:Country label/N which was breaking the categorisation for Poland (turned out it was also affecting Portugal). I have pinged the user who made the edits in my edit summary to see why they did it. Cheers, BigDom (talk) 10:26, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Great, thanks. Ymblanter (talk) 10:39, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The Afrikaans Wikipedia

Hi Guys! I am the Director for Afrikaans on WikimediaZA. I want to load a bunch of picture re out 22n Birthday bash, High School Writing Competition and our Campaigners for the Afrikaans Wikipedia program onto Commons. Am I allowed to create a category Afrikaans Wikipedia or something similar? If not, where can I store the pictures? Regards. Oesjaar (talk) 11:41, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

@Oesjaar: there's Category:Afrikaans Wikimedia. you can also upload some photos first so that we can see what kind of photos you're uploading, whether they meet com:scope etc., and what categories are suitable?--RZuo (talk) 17:05, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

And you'll probably want to create a subcat for the specific event. - Jmabel ! talk 18:57, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Please, rev del the original photo.

I cropped out the building. File:Ashrarq_Interview_(cop28_0893).jpg Thanks, --Ooligan (talk) 21:59, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

@Ooligan: Done. Please use internal wiki links when possible: they work correctly on both PCs and mobile devices. - Jmabel ! talk 23:17, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Ok, I will. --Ooligan (talk) 01:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)