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June 19
Audio contributed by non-native or non-fluent speakers
Latest comment:6 days ago15 comments8 people in discussion
what's the community's view on audio files (such as pronunciation) contributed by users who are not native or even not fluent at all in a language?RoyZuo (talk)12:51, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
In my opinion, this isn’t great. At the very least, a person should be able to pronounce words correctly. For major languages, mispronunciation isn’t such a big deal — they can handle it without much harm. But for smaller languages spoken by fewer than 50,000 people, it can be a serious issue. In those cases, incorrect pronunciation can actually distort the language and harm its preservation.Incalltalk18:46, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
"Not native" isn't inherently bad; there is in fact potential value in recordings of people speaking a language with a foreign accent. But those recordings should be tagged clearly to make it clear that they're atypical and shouldn't be used as pronunciation audio (e.g. on Wiktionary). That being said, "not fluent" is a more serious problem. Outside of special cases like recordings of language instruction, users should probably not be contributing audio recordings in languages that they cannot speak well.Omphalographer (talk)19:29, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
It's complicated. There are no "native speakers" of Latin: all we have is a variety of non-natives. And fluency is less the issue than good pronunciation: I've known trained opera singers whose pronunciation is impeccable in a language in which they could not order a drink or carry on chit-chat. Also, for world languages like English, Spanish or French, it is less important that someone is "native" than it is clear where they are from. Québécois French is a very different thing than Metropolitan French; Rioplatense, Mexican Spanish, and Castillian are sometimes barely mutually comprehensible; "correct" English in Mumbai is a very different thing from "correct" English in Nashville, Tennessee. And surely the fluent or near-fluent non-native English of an immigrant to the U.S. from Shanghai or from Oaxaca is a thing well worth documenting, as long as it is clear what the recording represents. -Jmabel !talk20:19, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
I'd say "it depends", very much. A selection of files containing examples like "German with a French accent" or "Italian as spoken by an American" certainly has its potential educational use. And for major languages, if the aim is for example just to have a Wikipedia article spoken by a human, some accent will not be an issue as long as it's spoken clearly enough. On the other hand, we certainly don't want audio files of small languages where native speakers exist - like Romansh or Greenlandic - with bad non-native pronunciation or grammar as examplesfor that language (and not as examples of "Greenlandic mispronounced by someone from Japan"). For the latter case, I think deletion could be in order.Gestumblindi (talk)20:14, 24 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
The French one inFile:Fr-mourir2.ogg is garbage, I nominated it for deletion. Addendum: I'm not a native from France, but sufficiently fluent in the language nevertheless, having lived in theDépartement Moselle between 1993 and 2001. Regards,Grand-Duc (talk)22:31, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don’t speak French, but based on the sound, I can tell it’s definitely not proper French, no one speaks it with such a terrible accent.Incalltalk22:39, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yes. This person is less qualified to provide French pronunciation than I am, and I am unqualified to provide French pronunciation. -Jmabel !talk00:53, 20 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
On a second thought, I'll nominate it. The audio file is of mediocre quality, that only adds to many poor quality and mediocre files that exist on Commons. Ymblanteralready mentioned something about a stereotype from some Wiki users in other projects that we tend to host assorted media files of low quality and dubious usability.JWilz12345(Talk|Contributions)09:08, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't know as I'd necessarily call that "spam", as there's no commercial or promotional intent, but it's certainly unhelpful and inappropriate.Omphalographer (talk)05:32, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
June 28
What is wrong with women and men?
Latest comment:6 days ago9 comments7 people in discussion
If we want a consistent naming across all age classes we should adult male person instead of men. As there are many age classes without gender specific terms. But it is also possible to define that for Commons categories men is a synonym for male people independent of their age.GPSLeo (talk)15:06, 28 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
The problem is "men" is the simple intuitive term and "male people" is the more exact term, so we will always have people using both and it will always be confusing. My advice is to delete all gender categories as they are mostly useless anyway except for sports.Nosferattus (talk)05:38, 30 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
That's my opinion also. Gender based categories are totally pointless in most, if not all, instances anyway and "male people" just sounds needlessly clunky. Know one looks for images of men that way. The same goes for most of the age based categories. --Adamant1 (talk)05:46, 30 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
"woke" my goodness, I am over half a century old, and male and female are very accurate labels ever since I walk around this planet. One can disagree with certain synonymical choices without making it about "woke" as an argument against something (to obfuscate it is actually about personal preference).Labrang (talk)09:47, 2 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps I’m not understanding, what’s the difference between an icon ripped from video games and a regular video game icon?Tvpuppy (talk)02:28, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Trade: what exactly is the definition for "ripped from"? Directly copied from game assets, taken from marketing resources, screenshots, something else?MKFI (talk)06:49, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Which makes them likely copyright violations. Indeed, both of the contents of that new category are almost certainly copyright violations. The James Bond "007 and gun" logo is copyrighted. -The Bushranger (talk)01:20, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:6 days ago13 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
Latest comment:6 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I read "Commons:Rename a category" and not sure how to accomplish this myself so here I am... I previously posted a query about this issue at ”Commons:Village pump/Technical“.To me the Commons "Category:Wilmington insurrection of 1898" is mis-named, it should be "Category:Wilmington massacre". There isn't more than one event of this type on more than one date that happened in Wilmington, NC and to call it an insurrection mischaracterizes the mass murders and toppling of a municipal government that happened there on November 10, 1898. See the Wikipedia article "Wilmington massacre". (And I really would do the linking thing but cannot figure out how to do it over here on Commons...) –Shearonink (talk)14:32, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): you wererecently warned by a Wikidata admin that you may not make proxy requests for edits to Wikidata, and that anyone who edits Wikidata on your behalf there is subject to having their account blocked. Please do not put other people at that risk.
I would truly hate to have to block you here for importing problems from another wiki and placing others at risk, but if you continue to use Commons as a forum to request proxy edits against the policy of a sister wiki, you would put us (Commons admins) in a position where we have no other reasonable choice. -Jmabel !talk19:03, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Just saw that now, that is why a bot should do it. Just as we have bots perform other routine maintenance. --RAN (talk)20:34, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Maybe he is suggesting that a bot should automatically add images to Wikidata items when an image has depicts set to that Wikidata item.
Anyway, this is a truly brilliant situation where no one can add this image now. So if someone wants something tonot ever be done on Wikidata all they have to do is get blocked and then ask other people to do it, then no one can ever do it.REAL💬⬆02:02, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I've added the image (applying the spirit of en.Wikipedia's "ignore all rules"), since Wikidata, the wider Wikimedia movement, and the open web at large are all better with it there than without.
"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
Copyright of audio works that are only partially generated by AI
Latest comment:6 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello! I found on Pixabay,this music that claims to be AI-generated. However, going to the artist's YouTube channel, it seems like the Roneat ek (which I would say is the main instrument in the music),is in fact not AI-generated.
If this is uploadable to Commons, what license would this go under? I know that {{Pixabay}} wouldn't be applicable since this was uploaded to Pixabay this year, way after Pixabay stopped licensing their media under CC0.COM:AI only mentions a case in which people modified AI work that was a visual work, which are treated differently than audio works in the US.TansoShoshen (talk)19:13, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
FileExporter/FileImporter is a tool that easily transfers local filesnot tagged with "do not move to Commons" templates from Wikipedias to Commons. I have been using this to transfer eligible enwiki images ofPatrickroque01 (that don't show recent public buildings and monuments). However, there is a tendency for inappropriate local wiki files to be transferred to Commons using this tool, and there has been some cases of supposedly "safe" enwiki files becoming tagged as problematic once on Commons (like copyrighted artworks), and at least there's one instance of an enwiki file that was flagged for DMCA take down (though it was transferred to Commons using different tool).JWilz12345(Talk|Contributions)01:43, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
@JWilz12345: "false and erring metadata" and "We should not rely on EXIF metadata claims in some instances, since some may have been added by the erring uploaders, to avoid being suspected of."? Well, while it's technically possible to fake EXIF, you would need some not-so-easily accessible tools for that (like EXIFTool and possibly a GUI for it, too, cf.Commons:EXIF). Yourexample looks different: it's more likely a photograph from a screen or print, where the uploader may have used a software to remove privacy-relevant data (GPS or the like), only somehow keeping the model and make of a smartphone. But that's still enough to raise suspicion: you don't have ISO values, no focal length, no exposure duration, no aperture value, no camera software... So, it's clearly a malformed dataset, which makes for a stark reduced value as evidence for being a legitimate photo. It's rather becoming the opposite. Regards,Grand-Duc (talk)01:59, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Grand-Duc no, it is a straight copyvio - a photo grabbed from the Facebook page of Pinoy content creator The Island Nomad, and the uploader purposely removed FB metadata and added bogus Huawei exif metadata to remove suspicions on copyright status. The Island Nomad post predates the upload here. I'm not convinced thatMarmar0222 (talk·contribs) is the same person behind the Pinoy content creator. Marmar0222 also grabbed an image from aw:en:Rappler contributor's Facebook post and did the same fabrication of metadata (see Marmar0222's talk page). The Huawei metadata in these low-resolution images (that are post-2020) are bogus and fabricated.JWilz12345(Talk|Contributions)03:08, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Are we certain it was deliberately "purposely removed", or simply remvoed as an artifact of cutting and pasting the images? If they were lifted from FB, yeah, that's copyvio, but simply right-click-saving an image and then editing it in an editorcan result in that editor's metadata overwriting any original ones. -The Bushranger (talk)03:24, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Problem with Template pages
Latest comment:4 days ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hmmm...
So, just noticed that whenever I'm on a "Template:" space page, the tabs at the top kind of...shift down when the page completely loads, so that they're half hidden by the bar at the top of the page. On Firefox, latest version, with Monobook. -The Bushranger (talk)01:14, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:5 days ago8 comments5 people in discussion
Category:Files from 500px.com with bad file names still has over 18,000 files, which means few people are working on the problem. A fair number of the files have enough information either in categories or descriptions that it should be fairly easy to propose reasonable file names. Obviously, help from people with filemover privileges would be especially useful, but even without that you can use{{Rename}} and someone else can follow up the actual move.
If moving:
Please do not delete the redirect, these have been here for quite some time and someone may be relying on the link.
I added the above bullet points to the category page description, since I think they are quite helpful for people to know.Tvpuppy (talk)20:02, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Pi.1415926535: As I understand it, there are people here who seem to find those useful for detecting duplicates. Not my issue, but I was chewed out for not doing so in the past. -Jmabel !talk00:30, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
That was always a silly excuse - no one was actually using them to detect duplicates when uploading - and it's completely irrelevant here because all the files are already uploaded. I've removed it from the category.Pi.1415926535 (talk)01:28, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't know how it works with 500px.com but at least Flickr2Commons checks for duplicates during imports using the numbers. So they serve a purpose there. It might be different with 500px.com but they aren't totally pointless in general. Probably it depends on the site and how the images are being uploaded. --Adamant1 (talk)01:46, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:2 days ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Where can I bring up migrating the Wikipedia inflation calculator template to a WMF site so that it can be used universally by all projects? I tried migrating it to Commons but it was too difficult, it involved dozens of subroutines that have to be migrated for each currency. It would be awesome in Commons space so we can have a note where we know what $500 in 1880 is worth today from historical news articles. It would be helpful in Wikisource too.RAN (talk)19:20, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:2 days ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Most, but not all, of the images inhttps://www.istoria-artei.ro/resources/files/SCIAAP_2013_Art_01_Serbanescu.pdf are in the public domain and would be worth having; theIosif Iser works are 3-1/2 years from being in the public domain (a good reminder, by the way, that some 120-year old work is still copyrighted). Ideally, extraction & upload should be done by someone who knows enough Romanian to provide decent descriptions, etc. I'd do this myself, but I have way too much else on my plate. -Jmabel !talk18:49, 6 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Extracting the images as such is pretty trivial, but the weird thing is that the images are cut apart into different files. E.g. that first image with soldiers walking is not a single image file but two: one that ends around their knees and a second that starts around the dogs' heads. Very bizarre. Plus, out of 139 images, almost all are JPEG, but a handful are PNG. Do you want me to reassemble the component files into a single image when they are split up like this? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯20:53, 6 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Sounds like it might be disproportionate to the effort involved.
There are early works of a few important artists there, though, and quite a few interesting commentaries on Romanian politics. It would almost certainly be worth capturing the works by Nicolae Petrescu-Găină, which all should be PD. Some of the others of importance are still in copyright in Romania: Iosif Iser, probably the most important artist represented here, in 1958, so as noted above his early work will soon be out of copyright; Ary Murnu and Iosef Franz Steurer, the latter also a pretty important artist, in 1971. Nicolae Mantu is probably one step down; he died in 1957, so his work will be OK in 2028.)So maybe other than Nicolae Petrescu-Găină it's not worth doing at this time, but certainly 3-1/2 years from now those early works by Iser would be very worth having. (For a "Western" comparison, it would be as if someone like Andrew Wyeth had early work as a political cartoonist.) -Jmabel !talk18:49, 7 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't know...Ostra Studio andStudio Biederer andBiederer Studio refer to the same set since there seems to be no way to definitively separate them, but some items have metadata that claims one of the three. So now I wonder if there could be a superset that would contain all three. I don't comprehend the full consequences of { {Cat redirect} }
Latest comment:8 hours 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:15 hours 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:1 day 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:6 hours ago8 comments4 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+.
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
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)
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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
