Shortcut: COM:VP

#	💭 Title	💬	👥	🙋 Last editor	🕒 (UTC)
1	Help choosing scanning resolution for photos	9	9	Prosfilaes	2025-05-07 01:51
2	Naming conventions for flags (for example Flag of Honduras)	12	5	Abzeronow	2025-05-11 00:15
3	Commons Gazette 2025-05	0	0
4	Are we nearly there yet? 5000 media of 2018 needing categories, please	3	1	NearEMPTiness	2025-05-11 09:23
5	Unsure how Canadian and USA copyright law interact here regarding AI fan art	12	5	Robkelk	2025-05-07 14:38
6	Category:2 men with other organisms; 1 boy with 4 women; 5 women with other people; etc	18	6	Omphalographer	2025-05-05 22:10
7	Category:Listed medical buildings in France	6	5	Baidax	2025-05-06 09:27
8	Bahnhof Bergen auf Rügen?	6	3	Grand-Duc	2025-05-06 15:59
9	Poland bans photography of military and critical sites, including bridges, tunnels, viaducts, port facilities and the National Bank	17	11	Smiley.toerist	2025-05-09 11:44
10	Flag of the Council of Europe	7	4	Carnby	2025-05-06 11:40
11	Speedy deletion criterion	4	3	Jmabel	2025-05-08 19:35
12	Proposal: New set of categories for UK and IoM	11	5	Mjroots	2025-05-09 08:03
13	We will be enabling the new Charts extension on your wiki soon!	3	2	Sannita (WMF)	2025-05-06 19:48
14	Unusual process	5	3	Basile Morin	2025-05-09 03:55
15	Enabling Dark mode for logged-out users	2	2	Prototyperspective	2025-05-07 11:06
16	Copyrighted material deliberately being uploaded and deleted	29	8	Chris.sherlock2	2025-05-09 04:32
17	Historic Baltic ferry shedules	7	5	Gestumblindi	2025-05-12 09:02
18	File:Mouth and gums of a lead-mill worker Wellcome L0062322.jpg	4	3	Quick1984	2025-05-08 21:09
19	Video Player	7	4	RoyZuo	2025-05-10 19:51
20	Systemic flickerization of hrefs and anti-Latin OCR-ization, a case from 2014	2	2	Prototyperspective	2025-05-09 13:17
21	Wikidata links beginning with M	7	6	Bawolff	2025-05-11 09:45
22	Fuzhou Metro logos	4	2	御坂雪奈	2025-05-10 16:14
23	Suggestion of merge (Potd)	4	2	Una tantum	2025-05-11 09:24
24	Flickr searching closed again	3	3	Gestumblindi	2025-05-12 08:54
25	Óscar E. Duplán Maldonado (1890-1942) in 1915.jpg	2	2	Jeff G.	2025-05-11 15:24
26	Help with preparing a page for translation	1	1	Gestumblindi	2025-05-12 08:51

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Centralized discussion See also: Village pump/Proposals   ■ Archive Commons talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Explicitly expand F10 to include AI? (1 May 2025) Discussion on Copyright law of North Korea (16 March 2025) Commons_talk:Freedom of panorama#Proposal to abolish acceptance (2 March 2025) Categorization of SVG files (13 February 2025) Costumed character files (14 October 2024) Third-party images published by the National Weather Service (26 August 2024) Commons:Requests for comment/Hosting of free fonts in Commons (18 July 2024) How do we organize categories by date (14 May 2024) Should PD-CQ Roll Call be used for recent images? (5 January 2024) Template: View   ■ Discuss    ■ Edit   ■ Watch

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I am writing to get advice on what resolution I should use to scan film photos, and an explanation for how to make that decision. It is costly to scan at the highest resolution, and if I use high resolution, I want that choice to make sense for the photos that I have.

Are low, medium, and high resolution scans different in this case?

I see guidance throughout the Commons documentation that users should upload content at the highest resolution, but I am questioning that advice.

• Commons:Why we need high resolution media
• Commons:File_types#Highest_resolution

I am scanning physical film taken in 1993 from a camera. The time difference to scan low / medium / high resolution is significant. As I look at the different outcomes, I personally cannot identify great differences in detail. The photo File:Aerial view of five Parkmerced apartment buildings.jpg is elsewhere used as an example of why uploaders should use high resolution photos, and I understand that because by zooming in, it is easy to see more detail. That file zooms in nicely, but is only a small 8mb. With my photos, high resolution makes 25mb files, and to me it appears that zooming in just makes the pixels larger without clarifying anything. Any computer can zoom in on photos regardless of resolution, and when I zoom in with my device, I see no difference between low resolution and high resolution scans. I am not sure when the benefits diminish for higher resolution scanning.

I uploaded three resolution versions in a single Commons file. Here they are -

• File:Freaks for Freedom.jpg - low, 1mb file
• medium, 5mb file
• high, 25mb file

Please advise - what is the difference in value for archival scans at these three resolutions? Bluerasberry (talk) 22:43, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It can depend on the scanner but I have an Epson Scan 600 and have found that scanning at 1200 DPI and saving the images as Jpegs is the best way to do it. I use to scan images at 1200 DPI and save them as TIFF files but they ended up being to large and I don't think people are using images for print much these days anyway, which is the only justification for TIFF files. Really, you could probably get away with scanning 600 DPI jpegs and you'd be fine. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:58, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If all of the photos were taken with the same camera and type of film, your "medium resolution" scan should be sufficient for all of them. The film grain is already clearly visible at that resolution - there's unlikely to be any more detail left to capture in the original photos. Omphalographer (talk) 23:09, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

e/c

I'll approach it from a different perspective.

If you want to print something at a size of 8 by 10 inches, then you want to have a resolution of at least 8 megapixels.

If you want to print something at a size of 4 by 5 inches, then 2 megapixels is enough.

Many photos taken on 35 mm film are suitable for 8 by 10 inch prints. If you want to go larger, then one needs a very fine grain film or a larger than 35 mm film format.

The Freaks photo does not seem suited for 8 by 10 reproduction. It is either grainy or blurred, so the medium resolution (6 MP) is enough. The large banner does not have a uniform color, and some text on a white sign is not sharp. I do not know why. I did not see a place in the photo that has substantially better focus than other. The film may be grainy, old, or a long exposure with camera movement. Colors on old prints would bleed.

I am not happy with the Parkmerced photo either. The cars at the upper left look like they are double exposed: steady for half the exposure and then a jump movement to another steady half. That seems an unlikely circumstance.

When I was using film, there was a huge difference between Plus-X and Tri-X. With Plus-X one could get fine details. Not so with Tri-X.

I had seen the black and white movie Arsenic and Old Lace on TV, but several years ago I saw a 35-mm print at a theatre. I was blown away by the resolution.

Resolution is not everything. Compare

• File:Sir Winston Churchill - 19086236948.jpg 6 MB 45 MP with
• previous version 1 MB 11 MP

The smaller size, lower resolution is sharper. Look at the weave of his shirt.

Glrx (talk) 00:22, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A higher resolution image can carry more information than a lower resolution one, but that's not necessarily always the case. Commons policy acknowledges this - somewhat - for example COM:OVERWRITE states that images shouldn't be overwritten with artificially upscaled versions. The higher-resolution version of the example above is indeed of lower quality than the lower resolution one, so I've reverted it. ReneeWrites (talk) 11:43, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In short: The best quality available. Scanners usually allow choices like 1200dpi or more, in theory. But above a certain border, a scanner cannot achieve more details when increasing the dpi rate. Many scanners reach their physical resolution at 800dpi, which means that scans of 1200dpi or more don't achieve better quality. A research can be useful, depending on the model --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:48, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The answer depends strongly on what kind of camera and film were used, what the lighting conditions were, and how sharp the focus is in the image. There's no point scanning a blurry or noisy photo at 1200 dpi. Personally, for non-professional photographs I don't think scanning at higher than 600 dpi is usually necessary. In the examples that you present, I would choose something higher than medium, but lower than high. Nosferattus (talk) 05:20, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry: The simple answer is to use the most resolution one can get their hands on. However sometimes when scanning low quality image, high resolution will not get you better quality image, so more nuanced answer would be depending on what you are scanning. For scanning sharp photo prints I would use the highest resolution I can, prints in a book would require lower resolution, and scanning bad newspaper prints would require the lowest resolution. --Jarekt (talk) 22:59, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Analog stuff is harder than digital, but if you're scanning a 640x480 pixel image, you need at least a 1280x960 scan to be able to reproduce it, theoretically (w:Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem), and I'd want at least 2560x1920 to get it exactly. If someone wants to work on your example image, I'd say that newspaper print is scanned at too low a resolution; I'd want at least double that resolution to try and remove the half-toning.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:51, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Given the ongoing discussion of the Syrian flag, and by request of User:Panam2014 on my talk page (and discussed with User:Jmabel briefly), I wanted to discuss further our naming conventions of recently changed flags and Honduras's flag in particular because that may be one of the least controversial to discuss. Abzeronow (talk) 23:02, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Abzeronow: Are you saying you want to discuss it here (in which case, start by laying out the issues) or that you want people to participate in a discussion elsewhere (in which case, link)? - Jmabel ! talk 23:07, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, I should have been more clear, I wanted to start the discussion here and I didn't want to forget to do it. Basically, as evidenced on the of Syria (2025-) talk page], there is an idea that "Flag of Foo" (where Foo is a country) should always be a redirect so our templates can always stay up to date when they just want the country's flag. Regimes and flags can change within some of our lifetimes (my country the United States has last updated its flag in 1960) and we obviously also want a stable name for the current flag of a country, which is why the current flag of Syria is named File:Flag of Syria (2025-).svg. Some are resistant to this idea and always want the current flag to be a file. Since we are doing this for Syria, there is the question of "renaming the flags who have been adopted recently, like Honduras, Kyrgyzstan, South Sudan, Mauritania, Malawi, Myanmar, Libya, Turkmenistan, Iraq, DR Congo, Georgia, Rwanda" that was posed on talk page. Of course, we should start where the discussion would be least controversial. Honduras in 2022 changed the color of its flag from navy blue to turquoise in accordance to a 1949 decree that had never been carried out as en:Flag of Honduras explains. The file File:Flag of Honduras.svg shows revisions with the old navy blue flag and the new turquoise flag. So if the Honduras flag file should be a redirect, should the file be split and then older versions merged with the file depicting the old flag? Should all revisions be moved to a File:Flag of Honduras (2022-).svg file? Basically, it would be a good idea to hammer out what we should do when flags of countries change so the disruption to various Wikimedia projects is minimal and have a good idea of how to "futureproof" flags of countries. I hope I've started to lay out the issues that make for a fruitful discussion on these matters. Abzeronow (talk) 22:09, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Abzeronow: as you know, I'm on the side of moving toward having File:Flag of FOO always be a redirect. Then we can tell sister projects that if you want an article (e.g. about a particular city, or the national football team) to just show whatever is the current flag, use File:Flag of FOO; if it is important that it show a particular flag and not change over time (e.g. you are writing about a particular event, and want the article to retain the chronologically accurate flag for that event) you use something more like File:Flag of FOO 1928-1972 or File:Flag of FOO 1972-.

In theory, the redirect between File:Flag of FOO and, say, File:Flag of FOO 1972- could go either way. I favor having File:Flag of FOO be the redirect, because it seems to me to leave the histories clearer when the flag might later change. If File:Flag of FOO is a redirect, and the flag of FOO changes in 2027, we just:

• upload the new File:Flag of FOO 2027-
• use the usual means to move File:Flag of FOO 1972- to File:Flag of FOO 1972-2027 (keeping the resulting redirect)
• make File:Flag of FOO redirect to File:Flag of FOO 2027- (so its history will show where it used to redirect).

If the redirect is the other way around, we have to do something like:

• move File:Flag of FOO to File:Flag of FOO 1972-2027 (deleting the resulting redirect)
• change the redirect File:Flag of FOO 1972- to point to File:Flag of FOO 1972-2027
• upload the new flag as File:Flag of FOO (note that this will have no record of the history of what was at this name)
• create a new redirect from File:Flag of FOO 2027- to File:Flag of FOO so people have some way to refer to this specific flag that will be stable over time.

There are other ways to do it, but I think they all leave behind confusing file histories. - Jmabel ! talk 03:47, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think we should not have such naming guidelines and redirects. The template use case is exactly what Wikidata is for. If the templates just use the current flag from Wikidata the name of the file on Commons does not matter. GPSLeo (talk) 05:11, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@GPSLeo: are there any Wikipedias that currently do this through Wikidata? (Let me guess that if there is one it is de-wiki, because so much of the Wikidata expertise is in Germany.) I know en-wiki does not. - Jmabel ! talk 17:53, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I do not know. Dewiki is also one of the wikis using the lowest amount of Wikidata. Not even simple info boxes use Wikidata as fallback for photos. Wikipedia and Wikidata community in Germany are quite separate. During the introduction of structured data we even had discussions if it would be better to get rid of the file names entirely and use the M-ID instead. We should not support using a system of file names and wikitext page redirects to keep old templates working. Instead we should encourage everyone to use a more reliable solution using modules and Wikidata. GPSLeo (talk) 18:28, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes we should get rid of filenames and use m id. i had the same thoughts special:permalink/1026118809#thoughts. also cat titles, all page titles in general. RoyZuo (talk) 12:37, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

for 2 obvious reasons:

1. we shouldnt and cant decide what's the "correct" title for a file or which file is "correct" for a title.
2. we can host a myriad of different versions and leave what they should be called to people who use those files.

RoyZuo (talk) 06:04, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I support the changes. We should split the current file and transfer the pre 2022 versions to File:Flag of the Republic of Honduras (1949-2022).svg. Panam2014 (talk) 10:55, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If no objection, I will start working on that tomorrow night. Abzeronow (talk) 02:14, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've moved the 2022 version with history. I'll do the history merge of pre-2022 version tomorrow. Abzeronow (talk) 00:15, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In April 2025, 1 sysop was elected. Currently, there are 178 sysops.

• User:Kaganer was elected (34/4/2) on 26 April.

We need your help, please, to categorise 5,000 files from "M" to "W", or by adding categories to more obvious candidates in between. We started on 6 November 2024 at 43,242 files, but now it is getting more and more difficult. --NearEMPTiness (talk) 04:09, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keeping up the momentum. We need your help, please, to categorise 4,000 files from "O" to "W", or by adding categories to more obvious candidates in between. --NearEMPTiness (talk) 10:25, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Now, we need your help, please, to categorise 3,000 files from "R" to "W", or by adding categories to more obvious candidates in between. --NearEMPTiness (talk) 09:23, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have used AI to create an image of the character Jirel of Joiry, and would like to upload it here. However, I'm not sure how Commons treats the interaction of the copyright laws of Canada (where I live) and the USA (where Commons' servers are located).

The description that I intend to use is:

AI-generated fan art of the character Jirel of Joiry as she appeared at the beginning of the story "The Black God's Kiss" by C. L. Moore.

"The Black God's Kiss" was published in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which is stated by the Internet Archive to be in the Public Domain. This, there is no copyright issue with making a derivative work based on a story published in that magazine issue.

The image was created by User:Robkelk using Google's ImageFX tool, with the seed 999660 and the description "A realistic image of a tall woman in her mid-30s, with an athletic build and a face that is more handsome than beautiful with an expression of barely-contained anger. She has short red hair and hazel eyes. She wears a sleeveless chain-link tunic over a long-sleeved doeskin leather shirt, doeskin leather leggings with Roman-style greaves, and leather boots. Her belt has a sheathed dagger, and she carries an old but sharp shortsword. She stands in front of a simple wooden throne that is sized for her to use." That prompt is the sixth iteration of the prompt used to create earlier versions of the image, so the creator assumes that this counts as human-guided creation rather than sole AI creation.

Canadian law is silent on the copyright status of human-guided AI-generated images. Assuming that the AI tool is just that – a tool – Rob Kelk claims copyright of this image and licences it under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.

I would tag the upload with the template "Fan art" and the categories "AI-generated fan art" and "Jirel of Joiry".

Is it permitted to upload the image here? If "yes", is there anything else that I need to add to the description and licence texts?

--Robkelk (talk) 14:25, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Robkelk: The character itself would be in the public domain, so any copyright of fanart would transfer over to the creator of the image without it being shared by other copyright holders. Whether Canadian law says this author is you, or considers it to have no author due to the image being AI-generated, Commons should be able to host the image either way. ReneeWrites (talk) 14:58, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Don't be surprised if it gets nominated for deletion. Uploading AI generated fan art of something that's already PD is super pointless and goes against the guideline that Commons isn't a personal file host. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:34, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Given that, I think that perhaps I should wait until there's a decision as to the status of AI works under Canadian copyright law. (If somebody's going to think this is using Commons as a personal file host instead of being me sharing a work, that would be two possible strikes against Commons keeping the file.) Thanks for the help anyway. --Robkelk (talk) 21:50, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is no "decision" to be made. If it's not covered already then it's not protected by copyright Trade (talk) 13:20, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That is not how the copyright law works in Canada. --Robkelk (talk) 13:58, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's no evidence of any court ruling that AI pictures are inherently copyrighted by someone other than the prompter. I wouldn't let Canadian legalities stop you from uploading it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:42, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I live in Canada. I must take into account Canadian legalities, just as you appear (from the content of your User page) to need to take into account legalities of the USA. --Robkelk (talk) 14:38, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Making a picture of a PD character that we have no visual representation of is useful in many contexts; it is certainly not super pointless. I'd certainly use it over the cover of the magazine that does not depict her on w:Jirel of Joiry.--Prosfilaes (talk)

The question is if there's a cover of the magazine that depicts her. If so, then its pointless to upload a generated image of her to Commons. I don't see why there wouldn't be a normal one but the burden should be on whomever wants to upload an AI generated version of an exiting character to at least look first and upload a non-AI generated verison instead if one exists. Otherwise there's no point in doing this. --Adamant1 (talk) 01:50, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Or, you know, we can be less stressed about it and not demand one true solution. If someone wants to upload a picture of a PD character with limited available art, we could let them and not slap them down or demand they do in depth searching first. Build up instead of tear down.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:03, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think there's two solutions there 1. Look for an image 2. Upload an AI generated one if that's all there is. I'm just saying people shouldn't skip the first step because its easier to push the "AI go burr" button then it is to look through search results. --Adamant1 (talk) 02:24, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is a cover image that has fallen into the Public Domain in the USA (File:Weird Tales October 1934.jpg), but it's what I would call a "cheesecake" image of the character that does not match the character's personality as described in the story itself. --Robkelk (talk) 14:38, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please see Commons:Categories for discussion/2024/10/Category:2 men with other organisms regarding such categories.
Prototyperspective (talk) 11:28, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Prototyperspective: There are a lot of these categories. Check out Category:Adult humans in groups of 5 -> Category:Adult humans in 5 people -> Category:Clothed adult humans in 5 people -> Category:Clothed adult humans in 5 clothed people -> Category:Clothed men in 5 clothed people -> Category:2 clothed men in 5 clothed people -> Category:2 clothed men in 5 clothed adult humans -> Category:2 clothed men with 3 clothed women. Notice that none of them actually have any files except for the last one. Nosferattus (talk) 15:43, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

These are absurd. What next, "2 cats and a toaster"? - Jmabel ! talk 17:08, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Guess what, they have potential for expansion. Why should I take anything I read on this page seriously when in previous discussions, I read complaints about cats which are underpopulated and have little or no chance of expansion, all the while they continue to proliferate on the site and there's no evidence of the regulars here doing anything about it? I certainly don't have time to hang around here and constantly comment simply for the sake of commenting. It might help to look up "paper tiger". RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 18:15, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

no evidence of the regulars here doing anything about it? Not sure what you mean. a) This seems not relevant to the categories this particular thread is about and b) There's at least two ways people do things about underpopulated categories: there's many people categorizing files when they find them into such and there is Commons:Categorization requests where people can list such underpopulated cat if adding the note "This category is missing many files" (see examples) is not enough.

Guess what, they have potential for expansion The possibility of getting files added doesn't mean a category is useful / good to have. We also don't have Category:English-language PDF files containing the word example for example. (However, I don't really fully understand your comment.) Prototyperspective (talk) 19:52, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

One of the things that sucks about the category system is that it's impossible to keep people from creating categories and there's a lot of bureaucratic hurdles in the way of dealing with ones that end up being an issue. Some can create thousands of clearly problematic categories in a matter of minutes but then it takes months of back and forth in a CfD for them to be deleted. It's not a great system by any means. --Adamant1 (talk) 21:17, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some can create thousands of clearly problematic categories in a matter of minutes I haven't seen any such cases. but then it takes months of back and forth in a CfD for them to be deleted if it's actually problematic it usually just takes a small number such as 1 user to support deletion and if there are no objections it will simply be deleted without much of back and forth. Relative to the total number of categories there is quite little bureaucratic cost for deletion. One way to get rid of lots of misleading and/or useless categories would be deleting all categories that have stayed empty for months and aren't maintenance categories but that didn't gain traction and other than that I haven't seen many cases of problematic categories and it doesn't seem to be a problem. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:23, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't seen any such cases. I was being slightly hyperbolic but it's certainly a lot easier and quicker to create categories a lot of the time then it is to get rid of them.

It doesn't seem to be a problem. It really depends on the situation and who created the category. It's usually not a problem to delete a single category that was created by someone who isn't a contributor anymore. That's not what this discussion is about though. It certainly takes a lot more time and effort to clean up category systems like this one then it does to create them. Anything beyond a couple of a categories that were created by a dead account is going to take some time, effort, and jumping through multiple bureaucratic hoops to deal with. Even then people just recreate previously deleted categories. Then it turns into edit wars, ignored talk page messages, baseless ANU complaints about harassment or some nonsense Etc. Etc. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:23, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is definitely my experience that the "splitters" have a great advantage over the "lumpers". Anyone can unilaterally create an overly narrow or utterly useless category in seconds, and populate it with Cat-a-Lot or similar tools in minutes; undoing that normally takes (1) noticing it, (2) writing up a CfD, (3) building up something of a consensus, and (4) even if that consensus is relatively easily built, doing at least as much work after that as it took to create and populate the category in the first place. Plus, in many cases, splitters have the advantage of always having on their side the argument, "you are removing information from the category portion" which unless the category is a strict intersection of preexisting categories will always be at least technically true, even if the category is (as I remarked above) "2 cats and a toaster" or "Angele Merkel on Tuesdays in the 1990s". - Jmabel ! talk 02:15, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We do seem to have these sort of discussions quite often. Maybe it's time that we create a policy against useless over-specific categories. The only problem is how to define such a policy. How do we prohibit "2 cats and a toaster" in a way that everyone can agree on? Nosferattus (talk) 02:47, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If I had my way the standard would be not having intersectional categories for more then two subjects. Otherwise it obtuse pretty quickly after that. So "2 cats and a toaster" would be out. As would all of these categories. I doubt there's any chance of something like that being approved though. --Adamant1 (talk) 03:42, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see any way to get away from this being a judgement call every time. It's just frustrating when some long-term users don't seem to be able to gauge consensus over time and/or willing to conform to it. - Jmabel ! talk 04:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

E.g. Category:Red fire hydrants in New Hampshire, presumably a perfectly good category, intersects an object type, a color, and a geographic location. - Jmabel ! talk 04:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On the other hand, I've had to reluctantly accept the consensus in favor of Category:Female bass guitarists, which I find a pointless intersection: what does a female bass guitarist do any differently from a male bass guitarist? I get breaking the U.S. down to its states, breaking something down 50 ways can make for more tractable categories in many areas, but breaking it in two seems useless to me. And what about a non-binary bass guitarist? But clearly I am in the minority with this view. - Jmabel ! talk 04:10, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd probably axe most of the gender based categories myself since it's not like we know how people identify in a good percentage of cases anyway. I much rather the categories not exist to begin with then having instances of people being misgendered. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:17, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That cat is partly to include the files/categories in the Category:Female musicians branch. I think the cat is reasonable, maybe useful for some but not very useful. I think the problem rather is that due to COM:OVERCAT it can result in people moving files into by gender subcategories which are then missing at the top level and aren't categorized into far more useful categories such as about the setting or the instrument. Another example is Category:People exercising and its subcategories (esp. this) where people partly categorized by gender and age where it would be far more useful and reasonable to categorize by exercise / type of exercise. Secondly, improved ways to see files across many subcategories are also needed due to how subcategorization works. For example to see a well-sorted scrollable filterable wall of images of any kind of fire hydrants regardless of color and location.

Both of that I think means not the categorization itself is the problem that needs and can be well addressed, but such/potential issues relating to subcategorization. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:18, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe a solution would be to make it so gender based categories can only be added to ones specifically for the people. Instead of there being a situation were images just get dumped in "by gender" categories and not put in better ones like it happens now. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:04, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is an unfortunately common tendency among some editors to split up large categories using criteria which often feel arbitrary, and which act as a barrier to more effective subcategorization - e.g. gender or nationality for categories of people, "by year" categories for photos of locations, etc. Which isn't to say that these properties should never be used for subcategories, but rather that they should be a last resort. Omphalographer (talk) 22:10, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Monuments historiques in France (hospitals) should be renamed in Category:Listed medical buildings in France

What do you think ?

Category:Listed buildings in France should be created Io Herodotus (talk) 17:23, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Comment why "Listed buildings" rather than Monuments historiques? Are there no other designations of listed buildings anywhere in France, so that the terms are equivalent? - Jmabel ! talk 01:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There are other designations, for example Commons has Category:Monuments à l’inventaire, which are monuments of the Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel and are not labeled and protected as Monuments historiques of Category:Monuments historiques in France. Monument historique is a particular legal status and a label. See also on en.wikipedia en:Monument historique and en:Category:Monuments historiques of France. On Commons, both subcategories are grouped in Category:Cultural heritage monuments in France. There are also other labels, such as fr:Catégorie:Édifice labellisé « Patrimoine du XXe siècle » or en:Category:Maisons des Illustres. -- Asclepias (talk) 11:09, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Then "listed" can't be used in this context as a synonym for Monument historique. - Jmabel ! talk 00:00, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Comment The proposal is an approximate translation of the label, does not correspond to any international use of the terms, nor to criteria for moving the category. "Monument historique" is the official designation and the most common used expression and the same used on enwiki. So the renaming suggestion is against the Commons policy:

Category names should generally be in English [...], however, there are exceptions such as:

• some proper names
  [...]
  
• names for which the non-English name is most commonly used in the English language (or there is no evidence of usage of an English-language version)

(from Commons:Categories#Category_names)

--Una tantum (talk) 06:59, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

While it may be tempting to translate this term to improve clarity and ensure content consistency, the suggested equivalent clearly falls short, as it refers to a concept that is legally defined. If an English translation is truly necessary, a more accurate option might be "Buildings legally designated as historical monuments". For the sake of consistency, the article's title "Monument historique" on English Wikipedia, should also be reconsidered. — Baidax ^💬 09:27, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would guess that to the average American, monument historique is actually clearer than "listed building", a British term not widely used in the U.S. - Jmabel ! talk

Could someone help me with my confusion about how a hierarchy of categories should be created? I have read a number of articles on the subject but can't work out the final step(s).

Today I created a Commons category, "South Australian Railways wooden end-loading passenger car".

A hierarchy could be:

1: South Australian Railways
2: South Australian Railways passenger cars
3: South Australian Railways wooden end-loading passenger car.

I'm finding it difficult to know whether, or where, to add the categories above "South Australian Railways wooden end-loading passenger car".

My ignorance is evident in another new category, Category:South Australian Railways Brill railcar. Clearly I have the two levels of "South Australian Railways Brill railcar" wrong. I'd appreciate advice on that too.

Any help would be enormously appreciated. SCHolar44 🇦🇺 💬  at 09:36, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Start from the top - with Category:South Australian Railways and work down! Rathfelder (talk) 20:36, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Rathfelder: It's the process of doing that, not the concept, that I don't understand. Cheers, Simon – SCHolar44 🇦🇺 💬 at 00:20, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you put [[Category:South Australian Railways Brill railcar]] on the page [[:Category:South Australian Railways Brill railcar]], then you are saying it is its own parent. (I've fixed that.) - Jmabel ! talk 00:02, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Rathfelder: Thank you! Now I get that bit! :-) Cheers, Simon – SCHolar44 🇦🇺 💬 at 00:20, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@SCHolar44: Is Category:South Australian Railways Brill railcar about one particular railcar or a type of railcar? - Jmabel ! talk 00:06, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Jmabel: It is a type of railcar. SCHolar44 🇦🇺 💬 at 00:20, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@SCHolar44: then the category name should be plural, I'll fix it. - Jmabel ! talk 04:48, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am not certain this is Bahnhof Bergen auf Rügen. I was taken on route from the File:Rasender Roland 2003 4.jpg to Rostock. I dont know on wich routes the Connex trains ran.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:30, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If it is take at a station where the Rasender Roland stops it could only be Category:Bahnhof Putbus but I think tracks and roof do not match. It could be Bergen if there was once a longer roof at the platform that is now removed. GPSLeo (talk) 12:09, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Back when I was a student at the University of Rostock, there was an InterConnex train line from Rostock-Warnemünde to Leipzig (see InterConnex). After Rostock, it IIRC followed more or less the tracks of the RE5 (Schwaan, Güstrow, Neustrelitz, Waren, Berlin); not getting near Rügen (at least, not with this rolling stock). Your image may have been shot in Rostock Hbf. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 04:54, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Wikipedia article says there was a line to Binz from 2002 to 2006 so the 2003 photo would fall into that time de:InterConnex. GPSLeo (talk) 07:08, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but the Connex to Binz was not serviced with a Bombardier TRAXX (DB BR146) nor with classical coaches, as seen in the picture. Instead, the line used Diesel multiple units from Siemens (Siemens Desiro); that's why I wrote "not getting near Rügen (at least, not with this rolling stock)". Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 15:59, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The roof matchtes the one in Rostock. It was late evening (long days june), so it could be a return to Rostock Connex train.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:40, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently Poland now (since April 17, 2025) “prohibits photographing or filming Polish military facilities and critical infrastructure without authorization”. About 25,000 sites nationwide are concerned, including bridges, tunnels, viaducts, port facilities and the National Bank. Sources: [1], [2], [3]. I'm not sure how that affects already existing photographs taken before April 17, 2025. --Rosenzweig τ 12:47, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not a copyright issue, not our problem Trade (talk) 13:18, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's only "not our problem" if we're okay with Commons being banned in Poland. Robkelk (talk) 15:24, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also understandable, as the Ukrainian war nears. I should always be carefull in photographing militairy transports or anything related. I would not want to inadvertently inform the Russians, as they certainly scan all Commons files.Smiley.toerist (talk) 14:21, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Even the BBC is barely aware the site exists seperately from ENWP. I would not be too worried Trade (talk) 19:01, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware it's not a copyright issue, that's why I posted it here and not at COM:VPC. “not our problem” is a rather shortsighted view however IMO. The ban might very well be or become a problem for anyone taking photographs in Poland, including our users. I think we do have some users living in Poland or visiting there. The German foreign office specifically issued a travel advisory because of this issue. --Rosenzweig τ 15:09, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As someone who photographed and filmed a few bridges last year in Poland when I went there for Wikimania 2024, that might have been a problem if those rules were in effect. I don't know if a footbridge in Katowice or bridges over the Odra river in Wroclaw are part of that list but it certainly could make future trips to Poland an issue since I would want to film landmarks that catch my attention (I would not purposely film military facilities though for the reasons Smiley.toerist gave.) Abzeronow (talk) 18:42, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if these rules will take effect as desired. I assume there will be many tourists who don't know or don't care. Might be hard to control --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:39, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It'll probably be like many other laws which are on the books but only enforced when the authorities wish to do so. --Rosenzweig τ 20:29, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It might at least be worth having a warning template for images like there is for ones containing Nazi symbols. Otherwise it kind of puts re-users at risk. Let alone photographers. --Adamant1 (talk) 20:36, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

At what point were it suggexted that re-users were at risk? Trade (talk) 20:50, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just speculation on my part. Realistically I don't think there's anything that can be done about it on our end outside of that. People obviously can't be stopped from uploading images of Poland to Commons. So it seems like the only options are having a warning or just ignoring it. --Adamant1 (talk) 00:25, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Rosenzweig, you wrote, "The German foreign office specifically issued a travel advisory because of this issue." Can you please provide a link? Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 01:51, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm jumping in: https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/service/laender/polen-node/polensicherheit-199124 . Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 06:53, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In the Cold War, Russian maps of England were more accurate than English maps, because English maps left out details that might help the Russians. It's the 21st century; everyone has access to satellite data, certainly including the Russians, and tiny video cameras in glasses that would have made 20th century spies drool are available to everyday Joe to film YouTube videos in Goodwill. Why do governments continue to make these rules?--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:37, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Security theater. - Jmabel ! talk 04:04, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. Satelite views cannot always replace detailed ground level views. The militairy value of most images, is very time limited. Its no use to to know where your enemy (personel or equipement) was a month ago.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:44, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I know, the Council of Europe use the normal flag of Europe as its official flag. These flags

• 
  Logo of the Council of Europe (green, no lettering).png
• 
  Flag of the Council of Europe.svg

are not a rendition of a real flag but a version of the official logo without lettering:

• 

and thus their names should be changed. Besides, the one with the green letter has a dubious license. -- Carnby (talk) 18:20, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt anyone would support it but I don't think we should allow for "variations" of flags to begin with. Since with how it currently is there's just to much room for people to upload made up flags that purely exist to spread nationalist propaganda. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:24, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think really existing "variations" of flags are OK. For example: Category:Heart-flags of Eurovision. Nakonana (talk) 19:30, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have problem with those kinds of flags per se, which is why I put "variations" in quotes. It's mainly the ones that are clearly created by the uploader or come from other websites that don't have any standards. If I were to guess there's probably an extremely small amount of flags on here that are legitimate, official variations. Most of them are fake. It's not like we couldn't clearly seperate the two and make an exception for legitimate variations of flags if there was ever a policy about it though. --Adamant1 (talk) 19:43, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would rename them "logo flag" or "logo of the Council of Europe (no lettering)" since they're not actual flags of the Council of Europe.-- Carnby (talk) 20:39, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Logo of the Council of Europe (no lettering)" is perfect. It's not used by the Council as a flag - just as part of their logo - so we shouldn't call it a flag. Omphalographer (talk) 20:59, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Done-- Carnby (talk) 11:40, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This arose at Commons:Deletion requests/File:Gatley-WikiBio-P.pdf. We have speedy-deletion criterion Commons:Criteria for speedy deletion#GA2 if someone basically writes an article and puts it in gallery space. Is there any reason we don't have a comparable speedy-deletion criterion if they do the same and upload it as a PDF? Deletion in such a case is pretty much certain, as far as I can tell. Why should we have to leave discussion open for a week (or at least until COM:SNOW)? - Jmabel ! talk 04:20, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No objection from my side to introduce such a criterion. In fact, I looked into COM:CSD at first and was mildly surprised to see that there was no fitting rationale, making me settle for this standard DR. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 05:06, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, a CSD criterion for that would be helpful. It shouldn't be specific to PDF, though; I've occasionally seen people write encyclopedia articles and upload them as images.

It'd also be nice if this could encompass web browser "print to PDF"s of wiki pages. I don't know why people upload these, but they do sometimes, and they're never useful. (Wikibooks shouldn't be affected; I believe they use LaTeX to render their PDF books.) Omphalographer (talk) 17:17, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So does this need to go to Commons:Village pump/Proposals? We're talking about changing a policy page. - Jmabel ! talk 19:35, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've been advised that this is the best venue to raise this. The United Kingdom is mapped by the Ordnance Survey. There is a National Grid Reference system to locate places.

So, my proposal is that we creat a new set of categories to cover the UK by Grid Reference. Heirarchy would be National Grid Reference system > 100 km square (e.g. TQ) > 10 km square (e.g. TQ35 > 1 km square (e.g. TQ 3574). Individual locations are generally expressed in 100m coordinates (TQ 351 749) or 10m coordinates (T3517 7492), but we don't need to go that far. As can be seen, the new categories would cover the whole of England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man. I would suggest that the NR and NW squares only be categorised outside of Northern Ireland, as there is a different system which covers the whole of the island of Ireland and could possibly be a future project. I realise that this would be a big project, which is why I'm bringing it up to see whether there is interest, rather than boldly creating the categories. Mjroots (talk) 06:09, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd worry that this was a case of doing something just because we can. What would be the usefulness of categorizing this way? What would be in the categories? Populated places, structures, geographic features, other? How would this add to what we get by including latitude and longitude? -- Auntof6 (talk) 06:35, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What would be in the categories would be pretty much every image in the area covered. I've recently been doing work on category:Oasts in Kent and its subcategories. Where an individual oast has a category, I've added a description with the grid reference (preferably to 10m squares). This will assist future imports of images from the Geograph website to be correctly identified. Many house converted oasts are given fanciful names which are totally unrelated to their historic farm connections. Mjroots (talk) 06:58, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This seems like pointless duplication. Either that or you'd be categorizing images in ones for the areas of Oasts when their actually outside of them. I don't think most people know or care about the grids anyway. There's plenty of different ways that geographical locations are delineated and it's not worth having specific category systems for all, or most, of them. Otherwise things would just get to convoluted. --Adamant1 (talk) 09:29, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be better to have the geocoordinates of images added in some way that is searchable and filterable. There's for example this wikimap thing where one can see files in a category on a map Category:Drone videos from unidentified countries. Don't think it's a good use-case of categories at first glance but if it is, I think it would need to be set by some bot based on the set coordinates and other categories of the file (like the city) – a flat category system could actually be quite useful because then one could use these category together with deepcategory to filter photos by location which often is not possible with other location-categories because they're so large. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:18, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The reason some files are in unidentified country categories is that they don't have any information that identifies where the subject is. I don't think having the new categories would help that -- if we don't know where the subject is, we can't identify the location, the latitude and longitude, or the grid. -- Auntof6 (talk) 11:32, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Makes sense but I don't know how it relates to my comment – that category is just there for an example of a wikimap (see top right of the category). Prototyperspective (talk) 11:41, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I meant to say that we can't categorize by grid if we don't know the location.

I wonder if Wikidata would be a better place for this data. -- Auntof6 (talk) 12:54, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes but then I don't know why you replied to me and not OP. Even then: these categories would be for files for which we know the location. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:53, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder whether anyone outside of the Ordnance Survey uses this system. Wikivoyage has a good rule of thumb that I recommend using here: ignore what governments do when classifying locations, and use the systems that actual people actually use. If we do this, we don't need to teach every new user how we do things, because we do things the same way that people in real life do things. (For example, is a hypothetical location in SC or NX? Who cares, it's on the Isle of Man.) --Robkelk (talk) 15:18, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Many people in the UK use Ordnance Survey maps. Grid references are used in many articles about UK locations, as a search for {{gbmappingsmall| will show. My proposal is not intended to replace any other method of categorisation, but to be an additional method of categorisation. Mjroots (talk) 08:03, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(Apologies for posting in English)

Hi all! We have good news to share regarding the ongoing problem with graphs and charts affecting all wikis that use them.

As you probably know, the old Graph extension was disabled in 2023 due to security reasons. We’ve worked in these two years to find a solution that could replace the old extension, and provide a safer and better solution to users who wanted to showcase graphs and charts in their articles. We therefore developed the Charts extension, which will be replacing the old Graph extension and potentially also the EasyTimeline extension.

After successfully deploying the extension on Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedia, as well as on MediaWiki.org, as part of a pilot phase, we are now happy to announce that we are moving forward with the next phase of deployment, which will also include your wiki.

The deployment will happen in batches, and will start from May 6. Please, consult our page on MediaWiki.org to discover when the new Charts extension will be deployed on your wiki. You can also consult the documentation about the extension on MediaWiki.org.

If you have questions, need clarifications, or just want to express your opinion about it, please refer to the project’s talk page on Mediawiki.org, or ping me directly under this thread. If you encounter issues using Charts once it gets enabled on your wiki, please report it on the talk page or at Phabricator.

Thank you in advance! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Sannita (WMF) I think this message was mistakenly added here as Charts are already enabled on Commons since they could not work anywhere without Commons. GPSLeo (talk) 17:41, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Argh, I overlooked the presence of Commons in the list. Apologies for that! Sannita (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion about a category was speedy closed, then all the categories manually removed by the user Sbb1413. Some of the files not re-categorized. Finally the main category tagged for speedy deletion. Ping Andy Dingley. Could we please have more opinions? -- Basile Morin (talk) 22:41, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to me to be inappropriate in process terms. Generally, if a category is under discussion, it is OK to work on fixing problems with it in order to keep, but not in destroying it because you think it should go away. - Jmabel ! talk 04:09, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion had 4 participants, 3 of whom argued for deletion (or at the very least questioned the merits of the category existing) and one to keep (not counting the person who closed the discussion, which would make it 4 versus 1). It's hardly unusual to see a discussion be closed under those circumstances, especially if no new comments have been added for more than half a year. ReneeWrites (talk) 21:19, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I count Pigsonthewing (as nominator) and JopkeB and (less clearly) Omphalographer voting to remove, apparently joined by non-admin closer Sbb1413; Dronebogus as saying "keep, but examine contents"; oddly, nothing there from Basile Morin, who came here to object. So, I take back what I said earlier—this wasn't particularly out of process—but I'm still not convinced it was a good decision, and it was definitely not followed through well: there were a lot of subcats that were not ever linked to this discussion, that did not necessarily have the same issues, and that were also implicitly included in the follow-up without much apparent thought being given to what really should happen to their contents. - Jmabel ! talk 19:47, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, over-categorizing hundreds of files by deleting important information in each was out-of-process. Thank you. -- Basile Morin (talk) 03:55, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Wikimedians,

Apologies, as this message is not written in your native language. Please help translate to your language.

The Wikimedia Foundation Web team will be enabling dark mode in this Wiki by 15th May 2025 now that pages have passed our checks for accessibility and other quality checks. Congratulations!

The plan to enable is made possible by the diligent work of editors and other technical contributors in your community who ensured that templates, gadgets, and other parts of pages can be accessible in dark mode. Thank you all for making dark mode available for everybody!

For context, the Web team has concluded work on dark mode. If, on some wikis, the option is not yet available for logged-out users, this is likely because many pages do not yet display well in dark mode. As communities make progress on this work, we enable this feature on additional wikis once per month.

If you notice any issues after enabling dark mode, please create a page: Reading/Web/Accessibility for reading/Reporting/xx.wikipedia.org in MediaWiki (like these pages), and report the issue in the created page.

Thank you!

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Web team.

UOzurumba (WMF) 00:08, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that's great news! However, the dark mode is just black – that may be suitable on mobile but on desktop that's I think not good. Most dark modes are some dark grey for a reason. It's not good to the eyes, not convenient to use basically and many won't use it. Could you please add a dark-grey dark mode like the one that is available in the Wikipedia app (the third of the four in the color schemes settings)? Again, see how the dark mode looks like for most other large websites and desktop apps, most of these are tones of grey. If there already is an issue about this, please link it, thanks. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:06, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I was recently made aware that it is standard practice for Commons admins to upload copyrighted works, delete it and then restore the material once copyright has expired. This seems highly problematic under copyright law, under title 17 only copyright holders have the specific right to distribute or reproduce their work. By copying the works to our servers, we are distributing the work for later use. It's not important whether we are holding onto the work until copyright expires - until this occurs, we may not reproduce or redistribute the material.

Has this practice been vetted by the WMF's legal team? This seems incredibly dangerous from a legal point of view! When did this become Commons policy? - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 01:22, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chris.sherlock2: It is also universal practice that except for CSAM, we never hard-delete anything, and it remains available to admins. Are you also suggesting that Legal is unaware of that? - Jmabel ! talk 04:11, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what legal are or are not aware of. But if we are intentionally uploading images knowing that we are storing them for good and just to restore them when copyright has expired, this appears to violate title 17 of the U.S. Code. Specifically, 17 U.S. Code § 106 which grants copyright owners the exclusive right to "distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending". We are technically distributing the works - notice that it doesn't say anything about publishing a copy of the works.

The bit that will absolutely get us, however, it that we are reproducing the material. Under section (1) we cannot reproduce their work without their permission. We are 100% storing their work on our servers for the purpose of later restoring the material. We have not asked them for their permission to do this.

So, no, on the face of it, we are not allowed to do this. I would be interested in hearing WMF legal counsel's opinion on this. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 06:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This procedure is absolutely legal this is what every library does. We could even make some of the material available under certain conditions but we do not do so because of our own rules not because of legal reasons. GPSLeo (talk) 05:42, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Except we are not a library. You are referring to 17 U.S. Code § 108(d), which specifically allows for digital distribution and reproduction where a user makes a specific request for the item in the collection. We don't have such a mechanism in Commons. In fact, the archive is not being loaned at all, it is being kept in storage and no user has the right to access it till copyright expires. So no, this is not the same situation that covers libraries as we are categorically not a library.

Furthermore, do you think libraries don't have costs? A library relies of first sale doctrine to loan out the item. This means they have purchased the material. Archive.org got into trouble on this matter in Hatchett v Internet Archive. Hatchett got an injunction against IA that required them to remove any commercially produced books. We have not paid for any of the material we have been deleting. We don't have first sale doctrine to fall back on.

If the WMF wants to start a library, then let them start a library. I'm sure they might want to speak to archive.org who are already doing this work. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 06:40, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chris.sherlock2: I don't think the analogy to archive.org works because they weren't privately storing files. They were lending books to people. Know one is being loaned files that get deleted until the copyright expires on here. The files can be accessed by administrators in specific instances, but that's not lending to the public. People are illegally allowed to show copyrighted works to a small group of their friends, family, or coworkers in private. It's not a copyright violation to do so. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:35, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You are correct in that this is quite a different situation. You are also wrong because actually, this makes it worse, we are reproducing copyrighted material without the permission of the original copyright holder. It very much is against the law to copy material without the permission of the owner of the copyrighted work. That's the clear reading of 17 U.S. Code § 106 and to do otherwise is, in fact, a violation of the copyright statute. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 05:15, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes we do not have a procedure to make some media available on request that is why viewing them is entirety limited to admins. The admins could be compared to employees of a library they are also able to view any media they have any time. Like employees signed in their contract admins are bound to the terms of use forbidding them the usage of hidden content. We are not a regular library but as it does not require a permission to run a library there are no special rules (unless for public libraries) they would not apply to us. GPSLeo (talk) 07:05, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I was actually going to ask about or comment on that. I assume admins can't just mass download hidden files or otherwise access them outside of their official duties. Like I have to believe the WMF would take action if an adminstrator downloaded hidden files and uploaded them to another website or something. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:12, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think we're talking past each other a bit. The key issue isn't whether admins can access deleted content (we all know they can), but whether uploading material we know is copyrighted, with the intent to restore it once copyright expires—constitutes a violation of copyright law under U.S. Title 17.

The crucial word here is intent. This isn't a case of uncertainty about copyright status or acting in good faith with incomplete information. This is about knowingly uploading non-free content, knowing it is not permitted under Commons' licensing requirements, and relying on the ability to delete it immediately and retrieve it in the future. That is fundamentally different from cases where material is removed after copyright concerns are discovered. Here, the reproduction is deliberate from the outset.

The "we're like a library" argument doesn't hold up. Libraries operate under very specific exceptions, such as 17 U.S. Code §108, and the first sale doctrine. Commons doesn't purchase the works, doesn't restrict access under lending rules, and doesn't require individual requests. Admins are not staff in any legal sense, and they aren't bound by contracts that legally restrict their access or redistribution of such content.

This raises serious legal questions: Are we okay with deliberately creating a repository of copyrighted works that are, technically, only a deletion away from being public again? How is that different in principle from uploading the full Avengers movie, deleting it, and then saying it's okay because it'll be public domain in 95 years? --Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 07:15, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really see how intent matters here. Libraries obtain inventory through donations all the time. So I don't buy the idea that the first sale doctrine actually matters that much. Look at this way, if I buy a book, I put it my bedroom closet, then take it out to share with my family members once in a while is that a violation of copyright? If not, then does it suddenly become one if someone gives me the book instead of me buying it? --Adamant1 (talk) 07:35, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Because the scenario you give is what is known as an “unpublished” distribution. But this is largely irrelevant because under this scenario, you are not making a copy. The first sake doctrine allows you lend the book to a friend to read it. However, if this was an ebook, the law gets a little more murky but in general it is seen as a problem as you would be making a copy and this violating copyright.

The courts will not consider our intent when it comes to determining whether we violated copyright law or not - except if we argue wheat we are doing is allowable under Fair Use, but even here we will almost certainly hit an uphill battle convincing a bunch of impartial judges that we satisfy this part of the law (see my response to GPSLeo below for why). Intent will not be taken into consideration. Yes, this sucks, but that is the law of the United States. I’m not a U.S. citizen so I cannot change it no matter what I do, but even a U.S. citizen - or a group of citizens - will not change the law around this. We should not tempt the fates, as did archive.org, who partially lost a reasonably similar court case only some time ago. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 15:02, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think making extremely limited copies of something that aren't being shared publicly violates copyright. Otherwise, essentially everything on the internet in general would be illegal. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:43, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, what you think and what is actually allowed are very different things. I can only urge people at the WMF and Commons to look at what the law says and hope they act accordingly. I don’t want to be in a position where things are ignored and we have a serious legal issue. - 20:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC) Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 20:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I do not know the exact definition of libraries and archives in US law. If there is no clear limitation to public archives I would consider Commons an archive. Additionally storing the files only visible to a very limited group of people until the copyright expires should be covered by fair use requirements. And there is no huge difference in accepting terms of use and signing a contract. GPSLeo (talk) 07:38, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’m sorry, but to satisfy fair use doctrine you must pass a four prong test. Firstly, you must satisfy the court as to the purpose and character of the use of the copyrighted work. That we are a not for profit would help, but the purpose would likely not: we are in this case specifically storing a copy of copyrighted works for the specific purpose of waiting out copyright. I doubt a court would look too kindly on this as a reason. We would certainly have no argument we could provide to the court to convince them we are using the material in a transformative manner - it would be literally sitting on our servers and we would have mo arguments the court that we are fairly using the material in a transformative manner.

The court would also look at the nature of the material we are storing, and given the wide variety of material we may choose to store I think we would be on very shaky ground on a fair amount of images. I for one wouldn’t want to have to justify to the court why we are storing an image or video of a fictional character we are storing till copyright is expired.

The third prong is the amount and substantiality of the material being used. In our case, it would be the entire work, and so the court would not in any way look upon this favourably.

The fourth prong is likely the least concerning issue - we could show we did not impinge on the commerciality of the works as nobody had easy access to it.

What you need to understand about Fair Use doctrine is you must satisfy all four prongs. And we could not do so.

of course, the irony here is that you are saying Commons is now explicitly relying on Fair Use to store images, which we are absolutely virulently against, and rightly so. So it’s a nonsense to even try to use this legal doctrine to justify what we are doing here.

I also say, with the greatest of respect, that you do not appear to understand the U.S. copyright laws you are relying upon. It might be unwise to reference and rely on your understanding of these laws without checking what they actually say. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 15:17, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, you might be able to make this argument if not for the fact that we have not legally purchased the copyrighted material. Libraries are actually dealing with some very interesting licensing challenges around loaning out electronic books. With a physical book, CD, DVD or video cassette then first sale doctrine applies - they have purchased the item and they can loan it out to others without any issues. For electoric works, however, you are literally making a copy when you loan it out. Libraries don’t delete the electronic version from their servers when they loan it out. Instead they sign up to licensing arrangements with publishers where they can loan out items under certain terms and conditions. I’m not entirely privy to how they do this - I am not a librarian, but the likelihood of any publisher letting us do this for every item we have deleted is 100% never going to happen.

Of course, this point is moot. We haven’t purchased any of this material. We haven’t been given permission to store it on our servers. If a publisher so wanted, they could easily get a court order through discovery to find out all the work we have in our servers, public facing or otherwise. I doubt this will ever be an issue, but if it became known that we are intentionally storing an electronic copy of their copyrighted material to immediately serve out to anyone once the copyright term has expired, then all they have to do is get a court order to find out when we made the copy of their copyrighted material material and I’d not want to be the WMF lawyer who must convince the court that we don’t owe them damages for the period of time we stored their copyrighted work on our servers whilst copyright had not expired.

And yes, there are a few publishers out there I can think of who might decide this is a valid way of making money. Do you want risk

this with Springer or Elsevier? - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 15:45, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to take a specific example here. Last year in Bucharest I had the opportunity to photograph quite a few works of major Romanian artists who lived past 1954, and whose works are therefore still copyrighted in Romania. I did this at various museums, in all cases with the knowledge and permission of the museum, and in at least one case while walking around with a museum docent. (If we were to take Chris.sherlock2's argument at face value, the moment I took those photos I was harboring an illegal copy of the photo on the SD disk in my camera, and when I copied that to my computer I made another illegal copy, but neither of those involves Commons.)

I am 70 years old. Most of these works will not come out of copyright in the next decade, some of them not until the 2080s. Even for the ones that will emerge as soon as, say, 2040 (picking that year because it is when the works of Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck come out of copyright), it is frankly less than 50% probable that I will be alive at that date and in good enough health to upload them at that time. Plus, I would need to write down the documentation now, and store both photos and documentation in a manner that would make them still available to upload in 2040, possibly finding a successor who could upload them on behalf of my estate, fill out {{Artwork}} templates (or whatever may be their equivalent in 15 years) properly, etc.

So, I uploaded these with full documentation and immediately deleted them so that only admins can see them. The Cuțescu-Storck files are listed at Category:Undelete in 2040, the others in the various analogous locations depending on the date when they become "free".

I am quite confident that almost every archive in the world would consider this "best practice". I am unaware of any case law in any country that has ever deemed this practice to be illegal, and if there is I would like to see it cited here.

This is probably the last I have to say on this topic, unless specific questions are addressed to me. - Jmabel ! talk 17:02, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can only urge Commons to look at U.S. copyright law and clearly established precedents such as Hachette et al. v. Internet Archive . What one would like and what is actually allowed are often at odds. Under U.S. law, your photographs could only be allowed to be uploaded to the Commons servers (located in a U.S. jurisdiction) if you argued you are using them under Fair Use. What happens before the actual upload is unknown, I don’t know Romanian law. But as you are aware, we don’t allow fair use on Commons, and yet that is what you are currently relying upon. Personally, if it were up to me, I would love to be able to give you my personal blessing to continue - if it were allowed it would be a worthy project, but under title 17 of the U.S. Code what os being done in this case is fairly clearly violating the law.

im not going to do anything more than publicly urge the community to see sense, but if I am to be ignore then so be it. I’ve tried and I’m satisfied that I have given appropriate notice and warning to the community that there is a real issue. Time will tell if my warnings are heeded.- Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 20:48, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

When researching something else, I came across a page at the Library of Congress website:

https://guides.loc.gov/fire-insurance-maps/copyright

That page states, "The Geography and Map Division will not scan or reproduce any material that may still be under copyright restriction without either the permission of the copyright holder or proof that the item is no longer protected."

Other details on the page confirm that the division does not scan a map, wait for the copyright to expire, and then publish the map on its website. Glrx (talk) 06:44, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• I think that "pre-uploads" don't violate copyright because deleted files are exist only as a digital code and nobody to see them! Without pre-uploads it is a risk that some unfree files will be lost forever! Юрий Д.К 15:33, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Under title 17 of the U.S. Code, you may not make copies without the express authority of the copyright holder. I’m afraid this is a violation of U.S. copyright law, and the only arguments that might give an exception to this are all made assuming the doctrine of Fair Use would allow this, however such arguments misunderstand the law around Fair Use and are invalid. A court would not find any such argument persuasive and would likely find against us. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 20:40, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• I apologize for returning to this when I said I wouldn't, but I think there is a confusion here of Commons' policy and law. U.S. law allows fair use. It is Commons' policy not to publish files on a "fair use" basis. It is not Commons' policy not to store files on a "fair use" basis. I think there is a pretty clear "fair use" argument for storing a file with the intention of publishing when it falls out of copyright. I'm not even saying that argument would necessarily win the day, or that we could store absolutely anything on that basis, but it is ridiculous to dismiss it out of hand, and I elieve that what we have, in fact, stored on this basis falls well within "fair use." - Jmabel ! talk 20:01, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  And yet, you seem to have completely ignored my explanation as to why Fair Use is not satisfied. I don’t think you understand the law around fair use, and given that Commons never really has to rule on whether something is valid under fair use law I’m not at all surprised your understanding is lacking.

  If you can explain how my reasoning above is incorrect, it would be appreciated. You said you would not be engaging further, but now you are incorrectly saying this is all allowed under fair use. It is not, as I have already explained. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 20:34, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Sorry, but with this argument every cloud storage service would be illegal in the US. GPSLeo (talk) 21:03, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Indeed, if you are storing copyrighted material on a cloud service without permission, then this is indeed copyright infringement. There is no need to be sorry, I don’t like it either, but that’s U.S. copyright law for you. They prosecuted MEGA for it.

  Remember: just because you don’t like a law does not mean you can ignore it. That’s life in society. Don’t rag on me for it, I didn’t draft or vote for the laws, they’ve been around for a long time. Why do you think we need Commons? - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 23:42, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • @Chris.sherlock2: was there anything in Hachette v. Internet Archive that prevented the Internet Archive from retaining copies of these works internally? As far as I can see, the issue was entirely about making them available to the general public. - Jmabel ! talk 01:16, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    Given that Commons administrators are volunteers from the general public, not Wikimedia employees, the boundaries of what exactly we can consider "internal" are a little fuzzy here. Omphalographer (talk) 02:49, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    From Wikipedia:

    Judge John G. Koeltl ruled on March 24, 2023, granting the publishers' request. He held that the Internet Archive's scanning and lending of complete copies constituted copyright infringement and that the Internet Archive's fair use defense failed all four factors of the "fair use test". He rejected the Archive's argument that their use was "transformative" in the sense of copyright law. He further stated that "Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA's reproduction of the Works in Suit".

    I'm not clear if they ordered them to delete the works from their servers. You can, however, see that the court looked at all four factors of a fair use defense and, as you can see from above, a judge looking at our defense of fair use would likely have a similar view. - Chris.sherlock2 (talk) 04:32, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I took a ferry on the 27th may 2003 from Rostock to Tallinn. I cant find any ferry sheduled in 2025, from Rostock to Tallinn. See also: File:Ostseefährlinien.jpg. There does seem to be no ferry from Germany to Tallinn but lots of other Baltic destinations.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

What is the ship and compagny (white and blue stripes)? Is there any websites for historic Ferry shedules?Smiley.toerist (talk) 12:51, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks similar to File:Finnjet_IMO_7359632_F_Travemünde_1987.jpg. Ruslik (talk) 20:19, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

According to this ship spotter site, this ferry was active on the route Rostock - Tallinn - Helsinki from 1999 to 2005 (when it was retired), the images also fit, so I'd say this is it (99% confidence). --rimshot^talk 21:03, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The corresponding Wikilink would be GTS Finnjet. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 21:42, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I assumed the departing port was Rostock as I had an hotel for two days (from there a made a daytrip to visit the narrow gauge railways on Rügen island), but File:Finnjet IMO 7359632 F Travemünde 1987.jpg, lets me think it may be Travemünde. On the other hand File:Rostock Tallinn ferry 2003 1.jpg looks as a temporary terminal to me.Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:46, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Finnjet was sailing from and to Rostock in the early 2000's (cf. GTS Finnjet#1987–2005, between Rostock and Helsinki). The gantry crane in the background of File:Rostock Tallinn ferry 2003 1.jpg looks a lot like the one on the background of File:Neptun Werft new hall III.jpg, the Y-legs are characteristic. You have a vantage point (back towards the sea, looking up the Unterwarnow) towards the the shipyard (Neptun Werft) from the ferry terminal at Rostock-Überseehafen. So, it's safe to say that you were indeed in Rostock. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 11:59, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Smiley.toerist: I agree that it's the Finnjet. Congratulations for having the chance to travel on such a special, historic and, sadly, now scrapped ship! I see that there are extensive articles e.g. in English Wikipedia or in German Wikipedia, but not in Dutch, maybe that's something you could rectify? ;-) Gestumblindi (talk) 09:02, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is it fine the artwork is cropped? --Quick1984 (talk) 06:01, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Quick1984: Yes, CC BY 4.0 allows that.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 16:40, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think the question was about commons guidelines and there the overwrite was definitely not okay. I reverted it to the original version. GPSLeo (talk) 17:34, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. Thank you. Quick1984 (talk) 21:09, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, could active contributors in MediaWiki please request an update to the current media player on the wishlist? It feels like we are in 2010, the player is outdated. Regards Riad Salih (talk) 21:00, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. However, for videos it's almost fine. I don't like that when clicking on play it disables you from continuing to scroll and read the page such as the file description and categories, but I think this could be changed with the current player. Is there something specific you don't like when playing videos with it? I think there are two main issues with the media player and created a Wishlist request for each:

• No support for video chapters (clickable timestamps) – see W:Video & audio chapters (jump to timestamp)
• Totally outdated audio player with e.g. way to small width, 2000s design, and no button to jump back x seconds which is needed for listening to Spoken Wikipedia article podcast audios – see W:A proper audio player

Prototyperspective (talk) 13:23, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Can you please describe what kind of features and behaviors you want, from audio player to thumbnail size, to fullscreen ? That's a lot more actionable. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:16, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Most basic stuff: left right keys to jump, up down keys for volume, remember volume setting. RoyZuo (talk) 19:05, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

btw, if the webm file is directly loaded in the browser, i think these four arrow key functions work for most browsers.

so mediawiki is worse than any browser built-in functions. that is very outdated. RoyZuo (talk) 19:51, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The overall design is outdated and does not meet the expectations for a 2025 user experience. Even when having a strong internet connection, the player suffers from noticeable lag. Navigation between different parts of the video is sluggish, with prolonged loading times. The transition between video quality settings is far from smooth.. and the buttons as mentionned by RoyZuo. Riad Salih (talk) 19:08, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

also dont pop up out of the page. why do that? which website does that?

very often, people play the video and simultaneously scroll down the page to read descriptions, comments (on other video websites) or whatever other stuff there may be. RoyZuo (talk) 19:47, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

When removing ancient bad OCR nonsense ("En ut Simia pafpulos catellosPufert omnibus, omniumque formasDeridet, nequefe videt mifellaNudam podice, dunibufque caham:Nos akerius <videmus omnesLynceis oculis jfuofque talpaGjwfquepr&tcrit) & videre non ^vuk-Quid m tergore Mantiae geratur.") from one image, I have also noted that:

A. Most of the unneeded hrefs there lead to Flickr, e.g. Authors: Schoonhoven, Florens, 1594-1648 Passe, Crispijn van de, d. 1670 -> https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/tags/bookauthorPasse__Crispijn_van_de__d__1670 (of course 404 by now)

Subjects: Emblems -> https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/tags/booksubjectEmblems

We are on Wikimedia Commons, not on a Flicker link farm.

B. Even the presumed author, "Internet Archive Book Images" (which is nonsense in itself), leads to ... Flickr and not to "https://archive.org/details/schoonhoviigouda00scho/page/180/mode/2up" or Wikipedia article about the same author.

-> We need a bot to clear up this mess methinks. Zezen (talk) 11:51, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

See Commons:Bots/Work requests (maybe move this thread there). Prototyperspective (talk) 13:17, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

When I edit File:Newspaper_headings.djvu, it says at the bottom of the page:

Wikidata entities used in this page

• M163430529: Title

But Wikidata complains that the ID is invalid. What's going on? Marnanel (talk) 13:44, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Marnanel: I do not see any Wikidata usages on the file description page. MKFI (talk) 07:25, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging @Tpt as maintainer of https://ia-upload.wmcloud.org/   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 08:25, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

When I edit the page, not on the page itself when you're viewing it. Marnanel (talk) 14:13, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the page ID of the file [4]. That the Commons page ID is listed as usage of a Wikidata item is definitely a bug. Every file page seems to have this. GPSLeo (talk) 14:53, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't show up on all file pages, e.g. File:Pespot na Bellevue - panoramio.jpg (chosen at random) doesn't have it. I think it's being triggered by a template on that page. Omphalographer (talk) 00:09, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's probably just that page needing a linksupdate to record the usage. I agree though that this almost certainly comes from a template. I would assume {{Information}} or something has some fallback code to pull the description from SDC if its not directly specified, or something like that. Bawolff (talk) 09:45, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some people claim that the proposed ones do not meet the requirements of "TOO China", but why are there no problems with other ones such as: File:Guangzhou Metro logo.svg, File:Guangzhou Metro icon.svg, and File:Amoy Metro logo.svg? However, the person who proposed the deletion could not produce any evidence at all（Image Links:File:Fuzhou Metro logo.svg, File:Fuzhou Metro icon.svg）. --御坂雪奈 (talk) 17:27, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@People who have participated in similar discussions:@User:TimWu007 @User:Ankry @User:Liuxinyu970226 @User:Sam_Sailor --御坂雪奈 (talk) 17:27, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@御坂雪奈 You might have more success in asking in COM:VPC. Greetings :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:20, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

thank you!But the discussion has already begun. If you are able, could you please make an evaluation and judgment there?[5] and [6].thank you very much! 御坂雪奈 (talk) 16:14, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, because of the Picture of the day of today, I was searching for the wikidata item of the Ormož Basins nature reserve, Slovenia (Ormož basins nature reserve (Q108138093)), and its commons category, but we have both Category:Naravni rezervat Ormoške lagune and Category:Ormož Basins. It seems the same subject, am I right? In your opinion can we merge categories? I notify also the creators of categories @Sporti and @Yerpo. Una tantum (talk) 07:17, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the wrong place to discuss this, please start a category discussion. Prototyperspective (talk) 08:51, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @Prototyperspective: I am writing here because of the high visibility of POTD, to make the discussion faster than if I posted on the category discussion page. But yes, I will add the discussion in the talks of categories too.--Una tantum (talk) 09:24, 11 May 2025 (UTC)