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July 03
So, is emptying categories just untracable?
Latest comment:4 days ago14 comments5 people in discussion
I've had times where i perfectly remember a category being full on images only to later discover it has been nominated (and deleted) for Speedy Deletion for being empty
Common sense would suggest to bring the issue up with the deleting admin and whoever moved the files out of the category. But as far as i can tell there is no way of seeing who moved the images out of the category unless you have memorized the name of the images in the category
So it seems like anyone can just empty categories whenever they please with little risk of anyone being able to find out they did it?Trade (talk)00:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
You can still search for the images that used to be in that deleted category, and you will be able to see who removed the category in the file history. It is possible that all the images within the category were deleted, hence the category was empty and subsequently also deleted.Tvpuppy (talk)00:59, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
It's not the best solution but I follow a couple of main categories just so I can keep track of whats added or removed from them. That's the only way I can think of to do it though and there should be a better alternative if there isn't one I'm not aware of. --Adamant1 (talk)01:37, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I would but I think they require a new account and that your email address be publicly viewable to create one. Totally agree about the UI to. It's not super user friendly to say the least. --Adamant1 (talk)02:22, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yes, it's close to untraceable. Certainly it is usually good practice to build some sort of consensus or at least to make some sort of comment (e.g. on the category talk) that gives people a chance to work out who was doing this. Also, leave edit summaries that let people concerned with certain files see readily that categories are being removed. Also, when deleting a category because you've merged it's content elsewhere, it's areally good idea for the deletion comment to explain where the content has been moved.
Do you believe there is any responsibility on the deleting admin to check if the category is actually empty? Or just emptied? Before any deletionTrade (talk)02:11, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
The deleting admin should evaluate before deleting. Otherwise, we'd just let everyone make deletions themselves. But everybody is going to make occasional mistakes, because sometimes the diligence required is disproportionate to the effect. For example, there are certainly users who I trust enough to follow through on their requests without much checking of my own. If one of them screws up despite a long, good track record, I might not spot it. And I would have to guess that the admins who do the most deletions are most likely to fail to notice one that isn't correct, because they would not have time for as much diligence per deletion as those of us who are less confident of knowing what is likely to be abuse. -Jmabel !talk03:36, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Fully agreed. Trade, you may be encountering this because of your habit of creating excessively intricate category trees that are not useful. I just deleted a dozen categories you created which collectively contained exactly one file.Pi.1415926535 (talk)21:40, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
We have been keeping video game screenshots seperate from the games they came from for more than a decade now. Lashing out at me for following the decade long precedent does little to change thatTrade (talk)19:34, 10 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
"Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features"
Latest comment:4 days ago9 comments4 people in discussion
"The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice."
"The changes to Danish copyright law will, once approved, theoretically give people in Denmark the right to demand that online platforms remove such content if it is shared without consent."
"It will also cover “realistic, digitally generated imitations” of an artist’s performance without consent. Violation of the proposed rules could result in compensation for those affected."
What would the consequences for Commons be for AI files that were generated by individuals residing in Denmark?Trade (talk)17:52, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't know, but it's odd if they are handling this through copyright law rather than personality rights. The article isvery vague on exactly what rights this would grant or limit. -Jmabel !talk19:07, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
The original article in Danish explicitly mentions that this would affect ophavsretsloven ("the copyright law"). From my limited understanding copyright law and personality rights law is treated as being interchangable
In short if someone makes a deepfake (image, video or voice) of a Dane without their consent and said Dane demands for it to be taken down Commons will (supposedly) be legally obligated to do so or risk facing legal consequences (more likely Wikimedia Denmark will be the victims but still)Trade (talk)21:07, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Personality rights is already a thing in Denmark but some politicians feel like it does not offer sufficient protection against deepfakes. Hence this law proposalTrade (talk)21:08, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I assume they would have to prove its a deepfake in the first place. I wonder how they would do that, especially as AI images get more realistic or would it just apply to any image of a person that they don't like or want on the internet regardless? --Adamant1 (talk)21:57, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
"Would a hypothetical person reasonable believe this photo to be a real photograph of X absence of any evidence to the contrary" It's not that complicated. Courts and lawyers have been doing hyphotheticals about how a reasonable person would act or believe for years.
"I assume they would have to prove its a deepfake in the first place." Deepfake is essentially just a synonym for the hypothetical i just described
"or would it just apply to any image of a person that they don't like or want on the internet regardless?" The whole point of the law is to make the personal rights of defendants equivalent to the way copyright works with audiovisual materials (my assumption).Trade (talk)23:23, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
That's fair. I was thinking more about claims made to Commons then actual court cases but I guess it wouldn't be that different. It's at least hard for me to imagine anyone nominating a deep fake for deletion just because it depicts a celebrity or something. Like probably the project should wait until there's some actual court cases or the WMF takes a stance on it before nominating deepfakes for deletion based on copyright. Especially since they still aren't copyrighted in the United States anyway. That's all. --Adamant1 (talk)01:35, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
It doesnt matter that they aren't copyrighted in the United States. All files have to be free in both the US AND the host country (Denmark)
"Like probably the project should wait until there's some actual court cases or the WMF takes a stance on it" The WMF likely wont take a stance unless the Commons community prompts them to do so. Hence this discussionTrade (talk)01:50, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Flagging that I started a discussion over at theTalk page for Denmark's copyright rules (didn't notice this discussion at first as I only checked the copyright VP, apologies for starting an additional thread). There were a few comments over there in response.19h00s (talk)19:52, 10 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
July 07
Lossless AV1: Yay or Nay?
Latest comment:5 days ago6 comments5 people in discussion
So I've noticed that bothSVT-AV1 andlibaom, encoders for theAV1 video codec, support lossless encoding.
I encoded the first 10 seconds of the Sintel Trailer with SVT-AV1 with the lossless option enabled, and uploaded it to Commons onFile:Example.webm, just to test how well Commons handles these types of files.
The output video is, as expected, large, although not as large as the trailer's collection of frames stored as PNGs (~900 MB compared to ~300 MB) Fortunately, this is still underthe Commons maximum file size limit, however I can imagine this being an issue on longer run times/FPS.
My laptop (Intel Core i3-6006U CPU, no hardware AV1 decoding available) struggles to play back the video with libdav1d, and combine that with the streaming of a very large file with bad internet download speeds, and it's pretty much unwatchable. However, Commons automatically re-encodes the video under more simpler to play formats, like VP9.
For such big file sizes, I don't think it's really that big of a deal, since I've seenextremely large in dimensions PNG files before, which Commons also automatically downscales them.
I couldn't do FLAC for audio since it isn't supported in WebM for some reason, so I chose 320Kbps Opus as the next best thing.
No, Lossless AV1 should not be preferred. The Wikimedia eco system is not mature enough to handle people uploading a large amount of video data in lossless, and then having to software decode it and re-encode it to lossy version. Doing so at scale, would likely result in lossless being forbidden as an ingestion format. Use it where it makes sense, but not all the time. —TheDJ (talk •contribs)07:44, 7 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't know what's acceptable and what's not (though the license text says that one can edit files as one pleases, so do as you want?), but I can say that the last method (=pdf) is hardest to read on mobile. (I'm accessing Commons via a browser app on mobile.) Personally, I'd prefer the second method because all the info is in one place, but method one and three are truer to the source which might be relevant if someone wants to quote the newspaper, for example, in a research paper where you also have to mention the page from which you are citing.Nakonana (talk)18:43, 7 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
My view, as a reader on desktop and phone, is that your example could have another format, thecolumn 2 belowcolumn 1 for scrolling simplicity, clearly displaying that the image has two non-contiguous regions, so as to not obscure the documents provenance.
+1. PDF files aren't great for something like this. Probably having the section combined into one image but with space around each segment is the best way to go. That's how I've seen a couple of archives do it. Although you could just do all three formats but that seems like pointless overkill. --Adamant1 (talk)03:13, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I am not a fan of the pdf version, but it keeps the two files together. We have several halves of news articles, and I cannot tell if we once hosted the second half. It may have been deleted or a name change made it no longer findable, or it was never added to the category. So many things can cause separation. Sometimes "pointless overkill" is worth it, if the document is important enough. Is there an easy one step software package for converting files to the djvu format? I would love to start using it. --RAN (talk)01:21, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
It's totally tangential but I'm always surprised that Commons supports either format. Neither one works great on here. There really isn't reallu any reason for using them over image files in most, if not all, instances I've seen either. --Adamant1 (talk)20:57, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
PDF is very well suited for use cases like scanned books (with or without text layers) - uploading these as collections of single-page images is much less convenient. DjVu was at one point considered a more Free alternative to PDF, but they're both open standards nowadays.Omphalographer (talk)21:03, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't think there are many reasons to recommend DjVu over PDF these days, other than some rarely-used features around text structure representation. And yeah, if all that's in a PDF is images, they could be uploaded separately (personally I more often do that, and then add a{{G}} in the|other versions= parameter to show all the parts if there are few, or add them all to a category if there are many).SamWilson02:46, 10 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Categories that are vulnerable to selfie spam and self-advertisement
Latest comment:5 days ago12 comments8 people in discussion
As you might have noticed there are certain categories that are receives an disproportionate amount of selfie spam and self-advertisement. Would it be useful to list these categories somewhere? That way it could encourage other editors to take a look at them from time to time to clean them up
At least withCategory:Celebrities, there was a discussion and attempts to get rid of it last year but the category was never fully emptied. So it's still around. That's probably the best way to do deal with it though. "Celebrities" is to ambagious to be useful anyway. Hence why it gets turned into a dump for random selfie spam. The same goes for the other categories IMO. Although I'm not going to advocate for getting rid of them without proper discussion first. But all of them are ambagious to the point of being meaningless. --Adamant1 (talk)03:19, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Clearly someone are teaching people to advertise in that particular category. Otherwise so many people wouldn't do itTrade (talk)08:03, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
It's the exact same problem I've pointed out repeatedly: editors go through uncategorized files, tack on some random, inconsequential category and walk away, all for the sake of being able to claim the file has now been "categorized". More often than not, it makes spam and copyvios harder to catch. RadioKAOS/ Talk to me, Billy/ Transmissions03:54, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
One idea I've had is a technical solution where certain categories can be designed as not for files. That could be done with an edit filter, but it would be clunky - we'd have to edit the filter for each individual category, and it would only be able to warn or disallow the edit entirely. More elegant solutions are possible but might require software changes.
On the other hand, these categories do make it easy to detect a lot of spam. Perhaps its best to keep them as honeypots until something else (like automated upload filtering) reduces the amount we get.Pi.1415926535 (talk)05:28, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Do we have a maintenance category specific to categories which frequently attract selfies and self-promotion? If not: should we? It could be useful for coordinating periodic cleanup of these categories.Omphalographer (talk)20:52, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
@RadioKAOS Ennnhhh I don't know if I agree with this. The people who make this stuff hard to find are the people who put a lot of effort into categorization and track down the really granular and deeply nested categories that no one is checking. The people who just tack on something likeCategory:Business are actually doing copyvio hunters a favor. (The main exception is people-related categories likeCategory:People, but the problem there isn't that spam is hard to find, it's that there's so much of it.)
As with every single maintenance backlog (and old spam is a backlog), the thing that will improve matters more than anything is just having more people do it.Gnomingstuff (talk)13:00, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Hm, some good observations. However, alternatively, rather than label them "Categories that are vulnerable to selfie spam and self-advertisement", perhaps think of them as "Categories where much selfie spam and self-advertisement can be found and deleted". The project is going to get spam regardless of the existence of such categories; having places where the glurge tends to gather thus can more easily be found and cleaned out would seem to be of some use. --Infrogmation of New Orleans (talk)22:48, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
July 08
Request to sort out categories of railway images in Category:Upper Arley, etc..
Latest comment:6 days ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I have been categorizing and sorting images of the UK for about a year and a half now. The continuing influx of new images from Geograph makes it too hard to keep up. Also, since the talk pages ofCategory:Rail transport in Great Britain andCategory:Rail transport in the United Kingdom are more-or-less dormant (and not followed), I thought it was best to make a request here.
The images mainly concern heritage and preserved railway vehicles, stations and events on the Severn Valley Railway from 2023 and 2024.Categories that are affected and should be checked are:
I rather want to concentrate on current railway photography, heritage railways are not as interesting to me. --Btrs (talk)16:49, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think I recognise the problem, areas with a nearby heritage railway receive many images of said heritage railway, what I usually do is cat-a-lot those images over to the local heritage railway stationOxyman (talk)21:47, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Two Vietnam-related issues that have come to my attention recently.
Latest comment:4 hours ago15 comments5 people in discussion
Two different but important Vietnam-related issues have come to my attention recently.
The first is Vietnam's recent provincial reorganization which had 63 provinces reorganized so that there are now only 34 provinces. Obviously location maps will have to be moved so it's known that these are now historic maps. And the new location maps will have be organized in such a way that these reflect the provincial reorganization. And so I raise the issue here rather than at the thread inCOM:OWRhttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Overwriting_existing_files/Requests#c-Chemistry(NuTech)-20250708060800-Abzeronow-20250707233500 because this should not be done on anad hoc basis. Apparently Viwiki has been notified, but enwiki and other wikis should be notified of this as well.
The second matter isFile:Flag of Vietnam.svg as there is apparently some debate about what the official color scheme of the flag is (and whether or not there is a standardization of the flag or not)File talk:Flag of Vietnam.svg. I have per consensus on Talk Page reverted to the previous version, but since there was a source raised in the discussion that points to a revision being "official", I thought bringing that up here might get more knowledgeable people about Vietnam to settle this matter or to at least provide more insight into the matter.Abzeronow (talk)23:53, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Re: point 1. Not only provincial reorganization but a massive overhaul of all local government units.The entire district-level division has been nuked, but that also means majority of Vietnam's cities as well as all of their towns are officially no more (or at least, the likes ofNha Trang,Vinh, andDienbienphua now exist as nominal, geographical features since they no longer have valid city governments). All of Vietnam's towns and provincial cities lie within this recently-abolished level. Additionally, massive mergers of Vietnam's communes (which I treat as equivalent to Philippinebarangays or administrative villages that serve as divisions of Philippine cities and towns).
Some questions:
Should the categories of recently-abolished Vietnamese cities and towns continue to exist?
Should a massive recategorization of Vietnamese communes take place, too?
Categories for longstanding historical stuff should continue to exist, but should have parent cats that make it clear they are historical. -Jmabel !talk03:25, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps like,Category:Former cities in Vietnam, following the convention of the likes ofCategory:Former cities in New Zealand andCategory:Former cities in Nova Scotia. The last cities of Nova Scotia province (Canada) – Dartmouth, Halifax, and Sydney – ended up the same fate as Vietnamese cities (except six "special" ones that are independent of any Vietnamese province), but in different ways. The three Canadian cities were abolished and replaced with higher-tier regional municipalities, making them permanently nominal and geographical. In the case of Vietnam's provincial cities, all were axed and their functions distributed to either the provinces or the enlargedcommunes (or Vietnam's version of Philippine administrative villages orw:en:Barangays). "Enlarged" in the sense, like Vietnam's provinces, mergers to reduce 10,000+ communes to slightly over 3,000+.
@Abzeronow I think we don't need the opinion of Vietnamese Wikimedians.This article by Vietnam.net clearly states that all provincial cities have been nuked and wiped off of the world map. No legacy titles will be retained too, because it "would lead to inconsistency in the administrative structure and cause public confusion - questioning why district names persist if the level is officially removed." We must treat the 85 cities of Vietnam in the same manner as we treat the three former cities of Canada's Nova Scotia province.
Yes, no more provincial cities or municipal cities. No more Thủ Đức City, no more Nha Trang City, and Phú Quốc is now also a commune-level "special zone". The territories of the old Thủ Đức district, the old Thủ Đức City and the today's Thủ Đức ward are all different, same thing with Nha Trang and most other cases
Yes, only communes or wards below cities/provinces
So yes, I strongly support the recatogization of Vietnamese entities, especially placing many of them into the "former" categories. Please be distinguish between existing subjects and the abolished ones. And it would be even better if the new categories would follow a standardized naming convention, as I tried to discussin WikiProject VN.Hwi.padam (talk)22:54, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
There is a CfD below relating to the now abolished districts. I would definitely also support a standardized naming convention for the new categories. (And yes, we'd want to make sure that the difference between the existing and the abolished subjects is very clear).Abzeronow (talk)23:49, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Hwi.padam@Abzeronow overhaul of Vietnam-related content here will not end at simply recategorizations of the now-abolished cities and towns of Vietnam (the district level). Images of legitimate sites and places within those former settlements — likeFile:Bùng binh Hùng Vương-Hoàng Diệu - panoramio.jpg of the former city of Ba Ria andFile:Mô hình cột mốc chủ quyền ở Viện Hải dương học.jpg of the former city of Nha Trang — will end up in the "former" categories, making them not readily accessible for most common users.
This means the categories of new wards and communes must be created, so the images of legitimate sites will be transferred from those of former cities and towns to those of the current communes and wards. The categories of former cities and towns must be cleaned up to only focus on media related to their former statuses, like their flags, locator maps, and government icons or insignia. The categories of wards and communesmay be categorized under the former cities and towns "if" their communal jurisdictions lie within the boundaries of the former cities and towns.
The creation the categories of the new 3K+ communes and wards needs guidance in the form of a list of all commune-level divisions of Vietnam, which is the job of English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. I have already did my part on enwiki by taggingw:en:List of cities in Vietnam with an "update" template, which should imply the need to create a "List of communes and wards in Vietnam" article.JWilz12345(Talk|Contributions)01:01, 15 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Back to the original questions re: Vietnam, I'd only comment on the first one.
Support moving the impacted map files (of Vietnamese provinces) to their new file names that reflect on their historical statuses. Original names (base names) should reflect the maps that show the current provincial boundaries (since 2025).JWilz12345(Talk|Contributions)04:24, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Regarding the flag of Vietnam:
Only the dimensional designs of the flag are codified, not the colors
A majority of Vietnamese governmental website has been using Wikipedia's illustration as the existing standard file for the Vietnamese flag, with some messing around with the colors due to cosmetic reasons (to make it sensical to the website's design, for example).
The "official" renders coming from theGovernment of Vietnam and/orCommunist Party of Vietnam are largely unreliable due to poor file quality (.gif) or resulting from scanning physical images that do not present the accurate colors. Some of them even nominate renders that violate the codified dimensions and ratios of the flags, so as I've written in theFlag of Vietnam, the Vietnamese people largely don't care about this as along as the overall symbolism is maintained and recognized.
After all, there was never a codified shades of colors for the Vietnamese flag, having them only described as "fresh red" (màu đỏ tươi) and yellow/gold (vàng), and most specific formal requirements that I could find is "the color of the threads being used should be consistent with the cloth", according to the Vietnamese Standards (TCVN), and this detail most certainly confirms that they know there's no codified colors for the Vietnamese flag. Again, most Vietnamese official narratives are using our Wikipedia's version as the standard flag of Vietnam, which is not helpful. Talking about real life representations, the Vietnamese government has produced flags having the same shades of colors withthe red in Russian flag,the red in US flag, as well as the red/yellow with theflag of PRC andflag of Germany, even though none of those foreign flags are nominated in the same color shades. So, it's your choice talking about the Vietnamese flag colors ;)
Thank you for making the Village pump posting @Ziv. Like I mentioned on her talk page, I tagged a file as a duplicate of another depicting a group of people in Persia making butter. As an Assyrian, I typically categorize and upload Assyrian-related images here on Commons, so I'm familiar with the terminology and background of these topics. Based on the general use of the image, upload dates, and a version having the words "Christian family...", my instinct was to assume that the ethnic identity of these figures was Assyrian (in Persia and the Middle East, Assyrians are almost unanimously Christian while Kurds are Sunni Muslims). It's possible that as we move the discussion along, we could find many reliable sources pertaining to the image that prioritize a certain description over another, but this is just an idea.Surayeproject3 (talk)20:24, 10 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
+1 to Omphalographer's comment. Admittedly I didn't look into it that extensively but from what I can tell the template is totally pointless and should be deleted as such. --Adamant1 (talk)04:55, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:2 days ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hi guys! I am very active on the Afrikaans Wikipedia but not too familiar with Commons. Please take note that the speciesAloe suzannae has been renamed toAloestrela suzannae. SeePOWO. Can somebody fix it please and update Wikidata as well?
@Oesjaar: I processed your renaming request as far as I could (and I hope without mistakes), there were some Wiki editions that didn't allow me moving the relevant page. Regards,Grand-Duc (talk)22:24, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:2 days ago4 comments2 people in discussion
I followed instructions for this photo, and the 3rd party has 30 days, so the license is pending. I marked in the instructions what license I needed. The upload program should tag what I check. If it doesn't, that is a problem with the program. Bots should not be checking this and threatening deletion. I think the tag is{{Cc-by-4.0}}, but I have no idea how to insert it except under the picture, which I just did, but I think this tag needs the approval as it is 3rd party, which will come with the submission of the letter by the author of the photo. It already has this tag for{{Permission pending}} under the photo, which should be good for 30 days.
I see two images that clearly seem like they should have history merges
Latest comment:1 day ago2 comments2 people in discussion
ThisFile:Motoise-gegu01.png and thisFile:Motoise-gegu02.png seem like they are clearly just the first one has an error so the second one was uploaded. I think they should be history merged with the first version being treated as an older version of the file.
Latest comment:1 day ago6 comments3 people in discussion
{{PD-India}} opens with"This work is in the public domain in India because its term of copyright has expired.", but is used on works that are not copyright expired, but which meet the criterion in the template's final bullet point,"Text of laws, judicial opinions, and other government reports are free from copyright."
The former wording therefore needs to be improved, perhaps to "This work is in the public domain in India because its term of copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright."
That text has been in{{PD-India/en}} since its creation in 2010; and you did not comment on it when you edited the template in September 2012, September 2014 and July 2018. To revert User:999real's edit (which I requested) now, with no edit summary, is unacceptable. I have restored it.Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing);Talk to Andy;Andy's edits19:40, 13 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 day ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Hi all - I posted about this herea while back, but I have an unfortunate follow up. You can read that old post for more context, but: several users requested images (1,2,3) of a public figure, artist Cameron Rowland, be removed, saying they violated an agreement between Rowland and the host of the event, Columbia University; the images were kept because they did not seem to be sourced from the event host but made by an attendee (at an event with no photo restrictions, open to the public in the U.S.). I wanted to get to the bottom of it after I posted the previous thread, so I sent an email to Rowland's gallery (Maxwell Graham Gallery in New York) asking if there was something we were missing. They got back to me a little while ago to clarify.
Turns out the account that uploaded the images (@GSAPPstudent) is not a student or member of the public, but was run by one or several Columbia administrators or faculty. Columbia did indeed sign an agreement with Rowland saying they would not release photos, the user(s) behind that account were both representatives of Columbia and aware of the agreement; they violated the agreement, Rowland called their attention to it, they deleted the image from other platforms. But GSAPPstudent never clarified that they were actually a Columbia rep, so the images have been kept on Commons after every request.
I directed Rowland's rep to the info-commons@wikimedia.org help email, this seems like a different issue than licensing/copyright. But obviously it seems these images need to be deleted now, they do in fact violate an agreement between Rowland and the institution that released the image.
But this would also seem to call into question other images published here by the GSAPPstudent account. As far as I know, it's not appropriate for an institution (in this case Columbia's GSAPP) to use an account in this way. All of their images are "own work", credited to "GSAPPstudent", which could also be wildly inaccurate/incomplete (correct me if that's a reach). Any ideas on how to handle this/what needs to happen here? Thanks!19h00s (talk)00:45, 14 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
It's to bad there's no way to edit EXIF information on here. Otherwise I'd totally axe most of that. Really, I'm kind of tempted to nominate the images for deletion just because of how needlessly obtuse the whole thing is but I doubt anyone would vote delete purely because of the walls of nonsense. Or alternatively someone could download the images, edit the EXIF information, and reupload without any of the garbage. Then have the old files redirected or something. I don't know but something should be done to clean them up. --Adamant1 (talk)21:41, 14 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Remedy for erroneously identified images
Latest comment:11 hours ago3 comments3 people in discussion
This recently exposed hoax makes me wonder how to remedy the harm caused by such commons uploads. even though those files may be deleted or their descriptions may be rectified, they have often spread to other websites due to wikipedia and will continue to pollute the information and knowledge of the world. worse still, they may get reposted and end up on commons again after some years.
not xx
i can think of an idea. someone should run a blog that publishes those images crossed out and with detailed explanation that "this image doesnt show xx. it shows yy. it was uploaded to <commons url> and misidentified."RoyZuo (talk)10:50, 14 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Man that sucks. I didn't interact with Tulsi much but he seemed nice from what little I had to do with with him. It's never good to lose admins on here. Especially over something like that. --Adamant1 (talk)12:56, 14 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --Tvpuppy (talk) 22:58, 4 July 2025 (UTC)_in_The_Jersey_Journal_of_Jersey_City%2c_New_Jersey_on_December_9%2c_1930.jpg)
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Support moving the impacted map files (of Vietnamese provinces) to their new file names that reflect on their historical statuses. Original names (base names) should reflect the maps that show the current provincial boundaries (since 2025).JWilz12345(Talk|Contributions)04:24, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
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