Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-12/Op-ed

Op-ed

The tragedy of Wikipedia's commons

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

I'm an admin of 10 years standing on en-wiki, yet I was turned down flat by Commons despite the obvious shortage of admins and constant backlogs there. Perhaps making admins of individual wikipedias automatically commons admins might address several problems in one go, although its closed shop mentality suggests that ain't going to happen voluntarily Jimfbleak - talk to me? 09:15, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with that though is that individual Wikipedias have much different adminship standards. On some Wikipedias RFA is a joke with 8-10 users supporting (or even no users, if you count temporary admins), yet on others it's the hardest thing out there... --Rs chen 7754 09:36, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That would require consensus from the Commons community, and that is unlikely to happen. You may be familiar with English Wikipedia policy, but that doesn't make one familiar with Commons policy. A suggestion such as yours would be potentially destructive to Commons. Russavia (talk) 11:28, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not only does Commons have a shortage of admins, but they are obsessed with maintaining that shortage by forcing less-than-active admins to justify their existence every few months. --Golbez (talk) 13:43, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How terrible. Per published policy, "An inactive admin is one who has made fewer than 5 admin actions on Commons in the past 6 months." To contrast this extremely low threshold, every day about 10000 new images are uploaded to Commons, of which about 20 percent are copyvios, which need to be recognized and deleted. Care to tell me which benefit the project has from admin rights for a user who does less than five admin-actions in six months. :en has a similar policy. --Túrelio (talk) 14:15, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

More benefit than not having an admin at all. --Golbez (talk) 14:44, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. See Wikipedia:INACTIVITY. Wikipedia requires complete inactivity for over a year before being desysopped. This desysopping is not considered permanent. Admin rights can be returned with a simple request. The Commons policy of beating up on admins for periods of inactivity is counterproductive. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:50, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A few thoughts about the proposal for a technical Commons (I am a Commons admin, but have no love of the project). J Milburn (talk) 09:48, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Different Wikimedia projects have different standards of scrutiny. If an image found on Google is uploaded to enwp or Commons with a public domain tag and no justification, it will probably be deleted fairly quickly (enwp faster than Commons, but there are enough crossover editors that it can be dealt with if it's causing a problem here). The same standards may not exist on minor project #356, and so the copyvios sitting around on their site could easily be repeatedly imported to enwp.
The proposal would seemingly cut out the oversight which, in principle, should exist before images are moved from a local project to Commons.
There are literally different policies as to what counts as "free" on different projects. On Commons, material must be PD in the US and the "source country" (a sometimes highly ambiguous term) to be considered PD- on enwp, material needs to only be PD in the US. Freedom of panorama, too, is inconsistent across projects. Enwp literally doesn't have a policy on the matter, just several editors making contradictory templates.

This is an excellent article - I agree that proper curation is the missing element at Commons. While the number of self-portaits of penises which get uploaded is extraordinary, the site also hosts lots of photos taken by creeps of women on beaches (not to mention many photos of strippers - most of whom can be assumed to be unkeen of having their identity splashed on the internet forever). Lots of inoffensive, but useless, content is also being uploaded. Attempts at policy development are shambolic, and tend to get derailed by idiots (some of whom are admins). And I say this as someone who's contributed hundreds of images to Commons and am pretty keen on its underlying concept. The whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen, and I'm surprised that the WMF hasn't cracked down on it. Could this be merged into WikiData? Nick-D (talk) 10:16, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I will paraphrase comments I made to Erik Moeller at Commons:User_talk:Russavia/Archive_11#Evidence_of_consent:

Commons is an amazing project, with amazing people doing a lot of amazing things. Editors on other projects oft don't hear about the fantastic work that our editors do; they often only hear negative things...this project is not perfect, but it is far from "being broken"; that being the popular war chant we hear of on an almost weekly basis, often coming from those who spend absolutely no time on this project....Simply put, it is easy to sit back and do absolutely nothing on this project, and criticise our editors and admins, whilst totally ignoring the massive project we are participating in and the amount of work that editors on this project partake in to keep it running.

This op-ed is no different. Written by an editor with only a few dozen edits to Commons in over 5 years makes such things a bit hard to stomach. Other than that, there is nothing more to say on this op-ed as it is simply yet another "OMG Commons is of broken" negatively spun post. If The Signpost would like me to write an op-ed on how broken English Wikipedia is, by focussing on one issue, get in touch. Russavia (talk) 11:21, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

From your comments below, it's clear you did not read much of the editorial before replying. I do specifically address why the title is "Wikipedia's commons", it's not an error. But to address your comment, yes, part of the point of the editorial is that it is too easy for the encyclopedias to sit back and let commons rot, while a tiny group of admins and contributors at commons are faced with an insurmountable amount of incoming images. My point is not to denigrate those editors at commons who, for the most part, are doing the best they can under the circumstances, it's to highlight a structural problem with the system and offer an alternative. Gigs (talk) 15:00, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's not an error for the English Wikipedia to forget that it's part of larger community, that there's more then just it around? It's not Wikipedia's Commons, any more then you are Wikisource's Wikipedia. Seriously why are you wasting all this space on stuff other then articles about authors and books? That's a complete failure of curation, and Wikipedians refuse to acknowledge that their responsibility is provide articles for Wikisource.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:55, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Both Commons and Wikisource were created primarily as support projects for Wikipedia. I'm not sure how an idea got started that they are somehow peers. Gigs (talk) 08:37, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Somehow peers. Because a collection of transcribed text (like Project Gutenberg) isn't a worthwhile project, as shown by Project Gutenberg's short lifespan, and because volunteers can and should be satisfied working on something solely as a support project for Wikipedia. And because en.wikisource.org and en.wikipedia.org make it entirely clear who the boss is and who the servant is.

Trying to demand that other people's projects subserviate themselves to your projects is rarely a fruitful program; if you do succeed in that goal, in a volunteer project, all that is likely to do is to get that other project to fail as volunteers choose less limited projects.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:53, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't that the crux of the matter? That very few have chosen to work on a subordinate project, and the few who have, have tried to run it as if it were not. I think you hit the nail on the head. Gigs (talk) 04:24, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Very few? See #Commons stats and reach below. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:58, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I hit the nail on the head by pointing out that exiling people to another project and denying them Wikipedia credit, but demanding that they not take any credit for what they're doing, is going to be completely unproductive? That seems to be the opposite of what you're saying. It's our project; we will form the project we want to. You aggrandize your project to be the lord of all; have you ever thought "I'd like to work in a project that's subordinate to Wikipedia"?--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:42, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The first rule of picture libraries is that you can never know what people will find useful. I sometimes follow up a link in an internal discussion like this & so see the penis self-portrait part of Commons, but I also do lots of google image searches that quickly bring me back to Commons, like Flickr, with relevant images, and no silly stuff. Nearly all the time you have to go looking for that to find it. We now have 12 million (or is it more by now) images, and no proposal that involves sorting them between the useful and the not-useful (even on the basis of current WP usage) will work. But there is clearly something wrong with the admin culture at Commons, which may well be putting off more people doing more work there. Johnbod (talk) 11:25, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We have almost 17.5 million files. What exactly is wrong with the admin culture on Commons? Also, quickly, I will also comment on the "choice" title of this op-ed...Wikipedia's commons? Ummm.... Russavia (talk) 11:35, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To be frank: I think you're a good example of the problem with some of the admins on Commons. From what I've seen you apply the same 'battleground' tactics there that have trashed your reputation here (as demonstrated by your response to this article), despite your responsibility to set an example. Nick-D (talk) 12:14, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To be frank, you are talking rubbish. Show me those supposed battleground tactics you talk of. Russavia (talk) 12:42, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I use Commons often (most days, I suppose). This article seems to me somewhat muddled. If there is contentious content on Commons, I would suggest dealing with that as a discrete, separable issue. I mostly upload "PD old" material, and it's fine for that. I also find Geograph images there that are useful to me, which is an indication that the scale of Commons is not too large (Geograph runs to millions). I don't see that the case has been made that Commons is superfluous: the "old days" system of uploads directly to enWP doesn't seem to have been that great. I'm not well up on which old battles this op-ed is refighting, but it has that flavour. I have no idea whether the "admin corps" there needs reform, and I'm aware that there are backlogs. I would suggest distinguishing first problems of success from problems of failure, so we could have a more rational discussion. Charles Matthews (talk) 12:46, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Commons is a sister project, with its own policies and community. These don't match Wikipedia's because it isn't Wikipedia. Just because 'pedia uses some of Commons' stuff, it doesn't give 'pedia any authority. Commons does not exist merely for Wikpedia. It doesn't even exist just for Wikimedia; external users are encouraged to use it too.
I think this op-ed misses a point. The trend at the moment is towards better integration between sister projects. There are plans for Wikisource texts to be partially transcludable to sister projects like Wikipedia et al. These excerpts are likely to function just like Wikimedia Commons media, while being held on an external project that also maintains its own policies and community. Wikidata is obviously another project that already does this, as a separate project etc, with data entries transcluded to its sisters. There might be some petty problems on Commons, I neither know nor care if so, but that's a Commons issue, not Wikipedia's problem. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:30, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Commons is a sister project, with its own policies and community. In which case there is a far bigger problem as most of the image usages are not properly licensed. Take the image on this page there is no attribution to the author at the point of reuse, the author's title for the image is missing at the point of reuse, and there is no link to the license URI for the image anywhere. John lilburne (talk) 10:27, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are undoubtedly a fair number of images on Commons and Wikipedia that need to be weeded out as copyright violations, but I can't really see how File:Her Excellency Ms. Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, Vice-President of the Dominican Republic (8957848699).jpg would be considered in any way illustrative of that problem. The source URI is properly attributed, the source license is correctly identified as CC-BY-SA 2.0, and the most suitable author link is provided. Can you please elaborate? — C M B J 11:10, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Section 4a of the license You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy or phonorecord of the Work You distribute there is URI to the license at all. There is a URI to the deed but that is NOT the license. As it currently stands the CC license is void. Section 4c of the license You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; the attribution is missing on the page where the image is used. In a book or video it might be reasonably to have photo credits in a special section at the back of the book, if an image was being used as a poster it would not be reasonable to have QRcode which lead to some web page with the attribution. Likewise with a webpage the convention is to place the attribution on the page where the image is used, normally like this, but sometimes at the bottom of the article. Suffice to say the WP hiding the attribution behind a link does not do it correctly. John lilburne (talk) 11:54, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note this appears to be a reiteration of the perennially-rejected "require in-page credit in every article where an image is used" proposal. Many disagree with the assertion that hyperlinking to the image description page is not reasonable to the medium of an online encyclopedia. Anomie ⚔ 13:08, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how it isn't reasonable to add attribution to a web page: its not as if the thing is paper. It just show the utter disrespect that wikipedians have for image producers. However, regardless of the attribution issues, the licenses are invalidated anyway as WP is not linking to the license but to the deed. John lilburne (talk) 18:02, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming this to be a genuine problem, it is clearly (from the examples given) a problem with Wikipedia not the Commons. Wikipedia is broken! --Simon Speed (talk) 09:27, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well commons does the self same dumb thing when it reuses images. According to the license the attribution should occur each time a work is displayed, and as far as the Creative Commons is concerned "For images, a CC marker — a graphic or line of text stating the license — should be displayed on or near the image." John lilburne (talk) 20:32, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That link seems to be to advice for authors on how to mark their work as CC licensed. It doen't seem to be part of the license or one of its requirements. I have a nasty feeling we're starting on a discussion that's already been gone over very thoroughly. I can't believe that Wikimedia's standard usages actually break the free licenses legal requirements. --Simon Speed (talk) 21:48, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well you'd be wrong in thinking that. As the quoted text makes no sense when applied to the creator of the image. Creative Commons uses mark to refer to how others should 'mark' the content that they use, they have a different set of instructions for creator. Or here is a HOWTO by CC Australia, you'll notice that no where do they say for web content that it is acceptable to stick the attribution behind some link. In all cases they say something like "next to the photograph, or close by", which is almost like "should be displayed on or near the image" which is where we came in. As for the WMF, they have no interest in how wikipedia editors or the community uses the content on article pages. John lilburne (talk) 22:25, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Right or wrong, its an issue for the WMF not the Commons. Commons contributors and especially admins do their damnedest to enforce legal requirements as WMF lawyers explain them. The Commons should not be used as an easy back door to push policy change on other Wikmedia projects or Wikimedia as a whole.

I make changes every day in Commons, mostly categorizing, geotagging or otherwise curating pictures of local buildings and the like. I have also uploaded a few thousand of my own pix of same, about half of which are used in mostly en Wikipedia. All the problems addressed in this complain exist, but to me they all seem minor. Uselessly redundant photos of naughty body parts? Sure; thousands of them. Do similarly useless arguments for and against same go on all the time? Yes, and easily ignored. Too small a corps of sometimes overworked, sometimes lazy and sometimes arbitrary admins? Yes again, but I haven't seen them making much trouble. Commons is not a very big picture collection compared to Photobucket, Flikr or even Facebook, and certainly it is less well organized than en. To a great degree this is because software and methods designed for an encyclopedia are not a good fit for the job of a photo library, but those same features make a good fit for the primary function as an in-house photo service, so this problem also does not need to be fixed. (When I reveal myself to civilians as a Wikipedian, I usually end up explaining that I work "Wikipedia's picture bureau". Close enough.) So, in all, I don't think pulling the media functions out of Commons and distributing them among the various pedias would make a payoff, much less a profit that would compensate for the hassle of making this kind of change. Merge with Wikidata? or Source? Hmm.... Jim.henderson (talk) 13:35, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am a Commons admin for only a few years, and therefore hope you don't mind if I comment here (please excuse my bad English): I like the proposal of a technical Commons because it would mean that all the conflicts of interests between different cultures and different projects wouldn't take place at Commons anymore; the bigger Wikipediae would likely to be on the forehand — it is important to prioritize — and most of the trash uploaded by the mobile app and by the en.wp upload wizard would have to be examined and deleted by English Wikipedia administrators. And it would also mean that there won't be a huge community any more that gets the MediaWiki test versions first deployed. The first really big one would be the English Wikipedia. And I could spend my time writing articles in the German Wikipedia again. A dreamlike idea. -- Rillke (talk) 14:11, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with this proposal, above all because I agree with the current scope of "educational media content (images, sound and video clips)", where educational means "providing knowledge; instructional or informative". Lots of things can be described as educational, because they are. If some questionable images are believed to be non-educational, then let's discuss them. But that doesn't need a massive project reorientation.

Commons has lots of useful images, and these aren't too hard to find, because categorization is working acceptable (could be much better, I agree, but that requires better software). It's far from a tragedy. --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:40, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

- I would venture to bet that you can't come up with an example piece of media where someone could not argue it was educational in nature. Gigs (talk) 15:00, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I upload images for articles I write (and occasionally for other articles which have image issues). I don't upload for vague "educational purposes" because the only educational purpose I have is writing for Wikipedia, and I do not agree that images are inherently educational. Whatever the intent was back when the mission of commons was changed, it has become apparent that it has become a perversion of the original intent to be a common repository for the various encyclopedia editions, and the defense of the way that this change has worked out in practice has turned into a deliberately perverse amorality about holding these images. Mangoe (talk) 15:27, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have any interest in "low-quality images of nudity and sexual acts," but I don't see how their presence makes Commons any less useful (except possibly making it a bit hard to search for high-quality images of nudity and sexual acts). I have added a lot of images to Commons that are probably not useful to Wikipedia, but which definitely could serve important purposes in the future. For example, Wikipedia has no use of my photo-documenting a political demonstration or taking detail pictures of a historically important building, but these photos are of great likelihood of being useful to some other educational project in the future. In many cases, they are the sort of photos I've spent way too much time trying to track down from other eras. - Jmabel | Talk 15:37, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Gigs, you seem to be proposing a change, and you know exactly how to make a proposal. So why are you whinging in signpost instead? 88.104.16.115 (talk) 15:49, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was invited to turn what was a sort of half-finished essay into this op-ed. To make a concrete proposal on a technical replacement for the interwiki media repository would require a lot more fleshing out of details. Gigs (talk) 16:43, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The idea of elevating en.wiki admins to be automatically Commons admins is intriguing, where they could en proceed to sweep out the trash. The problem is that it is shifting the heavy lifting onto the backs of these admins when the sweeping action should instead be done by the WMF itself. They had to step in to rid the project of Beta M, their hand is sorely needed one more time to fix from without what can no longer be fixed from within. Tarc (talk) 15:53, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Quite frankly this sounds to me to be complaining that the rest of the world isn't exactly like en wikipedia. This seems to be an opinion that gets expressed on en wikipedia about all the sister projects from time to time. At the end of the day, the different Wikimedia projects have different goals and different cultral norms, they are not here just to serve the interests of en wikipedia. I consider this diversity to be a good thing Bawolff (talk) 16:00, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think commons is unique in that it is inherently part of Wikipedia whether either project likes it or not. When you search for media here, you are searching commons. When you click on an image here, you seamlessly go to commons. I'm not opposed to a free image repository project with different goals and policies, but to do that, we need to separate the tightly integrated interwiki media function from the free image gallery project. Gigs (talk) 16:43, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Commons isn't unique because the same is true of Wikidata. If Wikidata doesn't yet have its own culture, and goals, that's probably because it takes time to develop one. As mentioned above, Wikisource and probably other projects are likely to be further integrated into Wikipedia sooner or later (and vice versa). Wikipedia is essentially just a WikiProject in the grand scheme of Wikimedia. It may be the MILHIST of the Wikimedia family but size and age doesn't give it authority over the rest. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 18:14, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If Wikidata ever becomes more than a place to dump interlanguage links, we'll much larger problems. One of the goals of Wikidata is to take over infobox data. I wonder if they have any idea how contentious infobox content can be. Can you imagine what a disaster that would be? We have enough trouble figuring out someone's birthday by applying our own policies here, how could you possibly apply all the policies of every wikiproject regarding the veracity of something like infobox data? Wikisource is more benign, because it doesn't take a big chunk of our content and ship it off to an administrative no-man's land, untouchable by well developed policies of mature wikis the way that Commons and Wikidata intend to do. Gigs (talk) 20:55, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No. With this argument commons is inherently part of all other projects using mw:Manual:$wgInstantCommons. Wikipedia isn't unique with that feature, and certainly not the English one. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:35, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to see the alternative idea fleshed out more... Bennylin (talk)

People are always complaining about exhibitionism, but frankly Commons runs on exhibitionism - people think "I took this photo, I think it's good, I'd like the world to see it so I'll put it on wikipedia", and eventually it makes its way to Commons. In the sexual sense, yes, we probably could do with less penises, and I have taken to nominating low quality nudity images which get uploaded. For my troubles, the same people who complained about there being too much penis complain that, by having a bot create a gallery of new nude uploads for me to check through, that I'm now creating "my own private porn stash". I digress. I won't deny Commons has problems, but not one of them will be solved by what seems to be the standard way of complaining - soapboxing on en.wp. If you want to propose changes to Commons, go to Commons. If you think we have some bad quality images of a subject, go to Commons and nominate them for deletion. We'd all be better off if people followed the simple idea of using the system which is set up to handle it. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:56, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is bending the sense of the word to the breaking point. "Exhibitionism" is not a synonym for "showing off", much less for "having pride in one's work and seeking the approbation of others". Mangoe (talk) 17:06, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

According to wikt:exhibitionism: "1. The practice or character trait of deliberately drawing attention to oneself.". Not a precise synonym for showing off, but not that far off. Bawolff (talk) 19:17, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nonsense. Commons runs on bot milking of graphics tagged as "free images" on other venues. It is a compendium of dubious files, the big majority of which have no valid illustrative function in the encyclopedia. With the penis pictures, etc. defended to the death by The Usual Suspects sputtering the inane mantra, "Commonz Iz Not Cenzored."Carrite (talk) 17:21, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to propose changes to Commons, go to Commons. The same tired old mantra from one of Commons' premier bad actors, whose interests require the quashing of discussion anywhere outside the zone of control where it can be shouted down by the other members of the gang. The Commons admin mindset is reliant on the doublethink that it is not beholden to the wider community, so the very existence of discussions like these is threatening. Unfortunately for mattbuck and the rest of the porn collectors (who wouldn't know what curation is even if it hit them in the face), awareness of the contamination of Commons in the outside world is only going to grow and grow. — Scott • talk 12:58, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The very existence of self-interested discussions by the biggest, most self-centered person on the block is threatening. As a Wikisource admin, I would appreciate the English Wikipedia not assuming that it has the right to dictate to a fellow project, not ignoring the fact that many of the projects that use Commons aren't encyclopedias, not ignoring the fact that the world is not only English.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:50, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This essay is an exactly perfect reflection of my own views, I 100% endorse every word. The clique-rule at commons isn't going to be changed by a "stealth jihad" of sensible people beginning to participate there, it's doing to be changed by administrative fiat. As has been documented in this essay, Commons was created by the Wikimedia Foundation as a means of sharing encyclopedic graphic content between the language Wikipedias. What has been created can as easily be uncreated. Commons should be terminated and the images turned over to the language wikipedias themselves. Rationality in curation will follow and the handful of bad actors at Commons will walk... Carrite (talk) 17:11, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As one of the people gradually beginning to contribute more at Commons, I couldn't disagree with these sentiments more; they're flabbergasting. I can't even hardly believe that we're having a discussion about whether the project's overzealous deletion is sufficiently zealous, and I'm practically at a loss for words over the fact that we're debating whether the world's preeminent free media repository should be dissolved. — C M B J 21:26, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

preeminant? According to this page there are 12 million image files on Commons, a large portion of which come from flickr. As of 2010 flickr had 135 million CC licensed images of which 28 million were either BY or BY-SA. It is by far the greater source of images even when considering the limited application of 'free'. As most re-usages are neither derivative nor commercial most people looking for images will go to flickr. Not only is there more choice the search facilities are far better. John lilburne (talk) 09:57, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Flickr's search is better—I'll give you that—but for every one of its images that could possibly be reused, there are quite a few that are either duplicates or that have no other foreseeable applications. — C M B J 11:57, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

and what do you think is happens on Commons? John lilburne (talk) 12:21, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Policy: give more pennies and get more penises. Pldx1 (talk) 17:21, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I like the fact that Commons has made images readily available to all the different-language Wikipedias; I have seen how that can be beneficial. I have two significant concerns about content quality control at Commons, neither of which seems to have been mentioned here, and both of which could be remedied by giving the Wikipedias greater control over content there:

Sockpuppets of a user who was long ago banned at EN for abuse that included persistent and aggressive addition of copyvio content (including passing off copyrighted images as "own work") found a warm welcome at Commons, where their contributions have generally been accepted as "free", except when a particular specific image can be proven to be a copyvio or when the subject matter in a photo clearly indicates that it's newer than the date claimed. Many of the socks are finally banned at commons and much of their content has been deleted there (leaving "only" a few hundred images), but I think that closer coordination between Commons and EN could have prevented an embarrassing situation (and saved me a lot of work and frustration in playing whack-a-mole with the same targets, both here and at Commons).
User-created maps and diagrams that purport to present factual information, but have been demonstrated here to be original research or even pure hokum, are allowed to remain on Commons (where they continue to be available for insertion into articles in all wikipedias) because Commons is only concerned about whether the image is free. (Pure cr*p is OK at Commons, as long as it's original.) Oversight is needed on the quality of information content provided by "educational images" at Commons, and the encyclopedia projects could provide that. --Orlady (talk) 18:11, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I have found this to be especially disturbing as well, that user-created fake maps are presented alongside legitimate maps and the Commons community insists that they be tagged with {{Inaccurate-map-disputed}} rather than deleting them. I'm not talking about disputed borders, but maps that show objectively false information. If you can't tell which maps on Commons are real and which are fake, the collection becomes worthless. Kaldari (talk) 20:46, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I actually came into this op-ed thinking that the opposite conclusion would be reached: that the "useful for an educational purpose" rule has been shamelessly exploited to exclude and censor valuable content, and frequently to the detriment of Commons, Wikipedia, and other projects. This is the sad reality of what actually transpires at Commons:Deletion requests on a regular basis. — C M B J 20:50, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is not surprising. When a rule is that vague and meaningless, it basically boils down to whether the participants involved like it or not. Arbitrary outcomes on both sides of the fence are inevitable. Gigs (talk) 20:58, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's usually true in principle, but in my experience at Commons, the degree of censorship (and attempted censorship) has been disproportionately greater, by orders of magnitude, than conservation—especially in the wake of nonsensical paranoia and pointiness that followed the Fox News ordeal. I do not see excessive inclusion as being a statistically significant problem by any way of comparison. — C M B J 21:12, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Out of interest, what is the WMF's view on the dubious images hosted on Commons? Sooner or later one of the women who some jerk has posted photos of without her permission (or have been posted on Flickr without her permission under a CC license then harvested by a Commons bot) is going to lodge a lawsuit and/or tip off a reporter. There's going to be hell to pay when that happens, and if that image has survived a deletion discussion or been uploaded by an administrator, as is quite likely under the current policies and mindset, the WMF could potentially be held directly liable. Nick-D (talk) 23:20, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

While I can't speak for them, I'd presume (or at least hope) that their response would reaffirm the community's prerogative to distribute material which doesn't reasonably infringe the rights of others. In the case of identifiable persons, we already have Commons:Photographs of identifiable people in place to protect the privacy of anyone who is in a private place. — C M B J 04:21, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As an addendum to that, and as a side note, if for some reason the media—or anyone else, for that matter—thinks that they can pressure us into kowtowing over a manufactured controversy, then I would expect the WMF, as stewards of our contributions, to represent the community's will in the strongest sense possible. — C M B J 04:29, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd rate the odds of the WMF deciding to argue that creeps have a "right" to post photos of topless women on the beach and strippers at their place of work as about nil, especially when official complaints are registered. And rightly so. Nick-D (talk) 07:00, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Again, existing policy affords protection to those who have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The fact that our sensibilities may be contravened by a few aggravating examples of permissible content does not justify the institution of arbitrary censorship, which is, broadly speaking, the conclusion that the community has reached time and time and time again. However, both the community and the Foundation do respect any individual's request to have media depicting them removed immediately and without question, so the vast majority of scenarios involving complaint or legal action would self-resolve at first notice. — C M B J 09:54, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Warning bad actors at work. Saying that we'll fix the issue when we get a compliant is not good enough, it is like saying t5hat there is a 'DMCA license' where you can use any image up and until the copyright owner complains, then yopu simply move on top some other image. The issue where people need to complain should not arise. Nothing in the CC license gives anyone publication rights over images of identifiable people. John lilburne (talk) 10:50, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's not a fair analogy because we don't deliberately infringe anyone's rights under current policy. If, however, someone tells us that they're uncomfortable with their depiction for any reason, we nonetheless react (and always should react, even in the case of 100% kosher BLP portraits) as a matter of compassion. — C M B J 11:30, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Tis so a fair analogy. Complaints are often ignored on Commons and are subjected to a week or more of trolling of the unfortunate subject of the photo, by for example the likes of mattbuck and a child porn distributor dis with some kids tit, and where a threat of banning if he doesn't STFU. 3 months later it got deleted after another bout of trolling. John lilburne (talk) 12:15, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A belief that complainants can be quickly satisfied and all bad PR will disappear is totally untenable. What of the rights of people who have their privacy violated but never see the image, or choose to not complain? Moreover, if an upset person goes to the media first, and/or doesn't regard the removal of the image alone as satisfactory (eg, they might want damages to compensate them for however long its been available and any use in Wikipedia articles) then Commons is in a lot of trouble. Nick-D (talk) 23:20, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is some degree of inherent risk associated with content in all areas of potential infringement, and again, existing Commons policy does not permit willfully violating reasonable expectations of privacy. I am not going to further debate that point here but I have created two proposals to help ensure that no one is ever again subjected to friction, as was Joshb, in trying to get distressing pictures of themselves removed. This problem is not limited to nude beaches and people can very easily have their identities irreparably damaged by the dissemination of media that is not even remotely controversial in public opinion or under privacy laws. — C M B J 01:01, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This essay seems to be very misleading, since there is support on the part of quite a number of active individuals on Commons for commons:Template:Nopenis, and the following are quotes from official Commons policies:
"Commons has a large quantity of images relating to human genitalia. New images of low resolution or poor quality, which provide little descriptive information, of a subject we already have images of, may be nominated for deletion, citing appropriate rationale(s)";

"The subject's consent is usually needed for publishing a photograph of an identifiable individual taken in a private place, and Commons expects this even if local laws do not require it. ... Images must not unfairly ridicule or demean the subject. ... The provenance of an image may taint its use irredeemably." ... -- AnonMoos (talk) 02:09, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

An opinion piece devoid of balance; spoken by a truly blinkered Wikipedian, unaware of, or blind to, all sister sites, their contributions to and use of Commons, and much of the work that is taking place at Commons; please refer to Commons:Project scope. The referred to maintenance aspect would the same, wherever it is hosted. Your diversified holdings approach doesn't lead to a better set of holdings, it leads to spread, disorganised mess. To the remainder, it really just isn't worth wasting one's breath to address it, I don't find it a valuable opinion. No it is not perfect at Commons, and let me say, neither is this place. Commons is not the encyclopaedia, stop thinking of its sole purpose to serve Wikipedia, accordingly its holdings will be different. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:16, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- That is precisely the problem. Gigs (talk) 08:33, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I only recently, by doing some tedious digging through page history, discovered the 2008 change to Commons' project scope as referred to by Gigs in this piece. The discussion for it, which is not directly linked from any project page, is here. As can be seen, it barely involved any participants at all. Perhaps if more people had been involved, the incredible blunder of changing the scope to "educational" (a meaningless label) material could have been avoided. It's not too late to undo the error, but more people need to be involved to do so. — Scott • talk 13:10, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Sorry for making you duplicate the tedious effort I went through tracking down the discussion that lead to that change. I should have linked to it, since I was being generous saying that 5 or 6 people were involved. It was more of a unilateral change where 5 or 6 people made minor comments that weren't in opposition. This isn't unusual for policy changes really, but it is somewhat unusual for one that fundamentally changes the scope of a Wikiproject and has ripple effects on every other project.
- I'm not sure if Commons' scope needs to be changed back though necessarily. If something like my proposal could be done, we could let Commons have whatever policy they would like to develop, since it would no longer have further reaching effects, as well as mitigating those who would abuse Commons to further an abusive goal toward a higher profile project (see reply to Jarekt below). Gigs (talk) 08:33, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have participated in more than one deletion discussion this year where being "out of scope" was the suggested reason for the deletion. Most of these were promotional images that would not realistically be used in a Wikipedia article. In most if not all cases that I remember, either the image was deleted or the image was used in a Wikipedia article before the deletion discussion ended. See Commons:Scope#Must be realistically useful for an educational purpose and its sub-sections for more details. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 17:26, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am an admin on Commons and I do agree with a lot of criticism: Commons do not have many policies, there is not enough admins willing to spend time everyday trying to figure out legal status of images from every part of the world. Since many images, like photographs of sculptures have to have multiple licenses for each author, like sculptor and the photographer, and we need licenses for country of origin and the US, many images ends up needing several separate licenses. We definitely need more admins familiar with copyright issues to help with the volume of incoming images and changing standards requiring reevaluation of old images. We do have many out of scope images, but verifying usability of images is so subjective that images are deleted only in very clear cut cases. I also think we should be deleting maps and diagrams with clearly wrong data. "Out of scope" deletion reason is often used for those. I also agree that closer integration of policies would be useful, for example different username policies create situation where active users on Commons are not allowed to edit on EN Wikipedia, because they picked wrong username (User:BrooklynMuseum comes to mind). What I do not agree with are conclusions. Admins from other projects which are clueless about Commons policies are much harder to stop when they have full administrative powers. Once I was dealing with an other project admin who also become Commons admin who was insisting that all changes to commons categories related to his sister project have to be approved on his project by requesting the change in the local language, and was using admin rights to make category pages editable by admins only. Also if you think, Commons have problems due to not enough people helping out there, please come and help. --Jarekt (talk) 05:29, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank you for your thoughtful engagement with this. It seems to me that you may agree with my conclusion more than you think. I am not proposing to give local wiki admins power on commons, but rather to make interwiki media sharing a technical feature without separate administration. The free media repository project (which could remain named Commons, or be renamed), could then operate independently, without the barrage of images incoming from people with questionable motives who usually want to corrupt Wikipedia, and are only abusing Commons as a means to that end. It would free Commons from serving the needs of the other projects such as the request you dealt with, while at the same time, freeing the other projects from being subject to decisions made at Commons. Gigs (talk) 08:24, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  - Regarding the possible deletion of invalid maps and diagrams for being "out of scope", perhaps a Commons administrator can advise on the best procedure for renominating File:Map on Dialects Of Punjabi Language.jpg (failed deletion request at |Commons:Deletion requests/File:Map on Dialects Of Punjabi Language.jpg) for deletion. The creator, who is in the EN-wiki category Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of LanguageXpert, has contributed other maps to Commons, as have several other users in that sockpuppet group. ----

I invite all those who believe that scope and COM:IDENT are sufficient to deal with the Commons community's flagrant disregard for privacy to read the GenderGap list's May discussion "Topless image retention -don't give up" Danger ^{High voltage!} 10:40, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- - Nevertheless, the said (flagrant) community overwhelmingly supported the rfa of SarahStierch on Commons. --Túrelio (talk) 12:24, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Those links don't work I'm afraid. Is http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2013-May/thread.html the right/useful link? Nick-D (talk) 11:55, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed the 2 links. I hope User:Danger does not mind. :) --Timeshifter (talk) 11:59, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Since my earlier comment got no response: I'd really appreciate a clarification of whether the objection here is specifically to Commons containing more nudity/sexual content than the author of this piece wishes, or whether the objection is that many images on Commons, while arguably educational, are not useful to Wikipedia as such. For example I took a group of photos some time back of what I considered the rather interesting interior of a bar that was about to be demolished. Certainly there will never be an encyclopedia article on that bar, but quite likely someone in the future writing a book or making a documentary film about Seattle would find one or more of these useful. Is the author of this piece objecting to Commons including images like this, or is the objection specifically about nudity/sexual imagery? - Jmabel | Talk 15:49, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There comes a point when any subject matter is exhausted. I take 1000s of dragonfly and damselfly photos each year, a few 100 I consider worth keeping, perhaps I'll upload to the web a handful of images. However, I could add 50 or 60 images of the same species each year, but to what point? What if there were a 1000 of your bar images, would another 100 make the collection more complete? The thing with your bar images is that they are located in time and we have all the information that we need about them. With my Ischnura elegans images there is a whole load of data missing such as the age the specimen or its dimensions. The same is true with the penis images and when they are kept because it is "photographed from a specific angle" or because the colour of the pubic hairs then we've truly jumped the shark. John lilburne (talk) 18:07, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

or articles on video bars, bar culture, Bar design in the 2000s, furniture for bars, 2000s hairstyles, Men wearing pink or a host of other subjects one should not try to guess. My point above. It is often the things that no-one thinks worth keeping that become hard to find. If a particular species of insect is covered from all angles, at all life stages, in all environments, by images of the same rough level of quality, then maybe there is no point adding more, though I suppose that there might be (for example) information on different races etc lost if your metadata includes locations. In someways it's simpler with the natural world. Johnbod (talk) 18:22, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed it is often the family holiday snaps that are more important to historians than those of the art and fashion photographer. But that does presuppose that the metadata is intact. Often times it is missing, there is a large box of images in the local village hall from the 50s, 60s and 70s which no one knows who is featured in them. Indeed I have stuff from the 80s where I can't recall who the people were, and in some case not even the year they were taken. On commons there is a scraping of content and removal of metadata such that one large German institution has stopped donating any more images. What I am pretty sure of though is that photos of male and female genitalia aren't about to disappear, and a closeup shot does not impart any supplementary information. John lilburne (talk) 20:21, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but this signpost rant is pretty stupid. I have contributed tens of thousands of photos to the Commons and think it is even insulting. Written by someone who doesn't like some penis pictures and obviously cannot see beyond that. The Commons are, e. g., the best and most up-to-date free image database of pre-modern art, of historical views, of heraldry, and especially of the built cultural heritage of many countries, and in many cases the best such database including all commercial competition (that is true for Germany, I think). Granted, Commons administrators are largely a bunch of idiots, and Commons policy is idiotic (e. g. the foundation's view that the stupid US URAA laws are to be enforced – we sorely need more projects like a EU Commons for that reason). But the Commons are by no means whatsoever a failed project (such as Wikispecies or Wikinews are IMHO). What the Commons need is half a dozen of paid full-time editors/administrators. That would do the trick very nicely, I think. --AndreasPraefcke (talk) 10:34, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fairly neutral toward penis pictures. I think the excessive penis pictures are more a symptom than a problem by themselves. Gigs (talk) 16:21, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Commons has it problems, but the author seems to forget that poor curation, large administrative backlogs, and poor policy development could apply just as much to enwiki. I'm a contributor to (and admin on) both projects and I love both but I'm not naive enough to believe that either is perfect. Commons is dominated by a small number of admins who do most of the work and thousands of people who work quietly in the background without attracting attention. That's about the same on enwiki, except that we have a greater number of admins here and there are a lot of admins who chip in occasionally, which gives the impression that everything is tickety-boo. The central thesis of the piece is correct—Commons suffers from a lack of participation and this sometimes has adverse effects on the running of the project—but it seems to have been written to justify the conclusion that we need to abandon it altogether rather than the conclusion being drawn from the argument. But the idea that Commons conflicts with its sister projects because it has a broader scope than just images for Wikipedia is nonsensical—if a Commons image is being used in a Wikipedia article, it's inherently in-scope and, barring licensing/copyright problems, won't be deleted. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:10, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I subscribe these last two comments. As a sysop in ptwiki with more or less a couple thousand of images uploaded to Commons being used everywhere on wikimedia projects, I can't fathom this negative feeling expressed here. I do know a dozen Commons' sysops and those guys seems to be a bunch of very stand up guys (and girls) IMHO. My homewiki is much, much more troublesome than Commons and that's, again IMHO, a sure sign of the ever present "enwiki bias" of this whole shenanigan... José Luiz ^talk 02:55, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What a bunch of crap. Commons already has a function as "Wikigallery", or whatever the writer would care to rename it, and that's already valuable in its own right as probably the web's premier gallery of freely licensed imagery. That, of itself, is just as valid and valuable a goal as being an encyclopedia.

Commons should not ever become merely "the media vault for *.wp". If the writer wishes to find a non-wp project to pick on, they'd do far better to look at Wikiversity, the home-from-Usenet for unchecked k00kscience. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:47, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm bit shocked that somebody would propose to relocalize the file management on the individual projects. Not only would that be a technical nightmare but it would also not solve the problem because then people would just upload their low quality penis pics on the 300+ local wikis thus making quality control even more difficult.

It is also funny that you would bring up the example of White noise. The article is illustrated with three images. Despite that do you really consider it not worthwhile to have some files in the repository illustrating white noise?

Lastly your piece is pretty offensive towards the thousands of contributors at commons that invest time and effort into curation. The lingua franca on commons is English and with SUL it's just a mouse click away. Implicitly you are arguing that this mouse click is one to many for most contributors on en wiki to be bothered to go to commons and engage thus I really can't take you seriously. --Cwbm (commons) (talk) 06:36, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Commons stats and reach

I have tens of thousands of edits on Wikipedia, Commons, Wikia, Shoutwiki, etc.. On none of those wikis do I have less than ten thousand edits. So I am talking from lots of experience on the Commons and elsewhere.

The Commons is a sister project nowadays, no matter what its original founders had in mind. Commons has a huge number of active editors (registered users who have performed an action in the last 30 days). Compare the number to English Wikipedia:

commons:Special:Statistics - over 30,000 active registered users on the Commons in the last month. 272 administrators.
en:Special:Statistics - over 124,000 active registered users on English Wikipedia in the last month. 1,446 administrators.

There is no way the Commons could or should be devolved back to the individual Wikipedias. It is not technically possible, and even if partially possible technically, it makes no sense. Images are chosen and then removed constantly from pages on the Wikipedias. There is no way an image can be owned, even temporarily, by individual Wikipedias. It goes far beyond the many Wikipedias anyway.

The reach of the Commons is vast. The Commons is far better categorized than Flickr. Google image searches frequently put Commons images near the top of search results. Websites the world over copy and use Commons images. The Commons is used by non-Wikimedia wikis all over the world. Wikis can even use Commons images directly without having to copy the images over to their wikis.

Commons admins have less systemic bias overall than English Wikipedia admins. Commons admins are exemplary overall in how they deal with people from all over the world speaking many languages. No other image repository has this vast reach and multicultural understanding and access. The Commons can always use more admins. But it should not be automatically given to admins from other Wikipedias. Categorization is what the Commons is mainly about. Many Wikipedia admins and editors deal poorly with categorization in my experience. It takes practice on the Commons. It is not intuitive to many people. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:30, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Jimmy Wales portrait on Commons

I'm taking no position on this, but it does seem to be related to the discussions above: Commons is currently debating whether to delete a portrait of Jimmy Wales that was created by Pricasso, who paints with his penis, and a related video on how it was made. The cumulative !votes at this point seem (to me) to be leaning slightly towards deleting them. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 00:41, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

For further information on the artist see User:Russavia/Pricasso. Note that the userspace draft has been protected by an admin in the version he repeatedly reverted it to, and would otherwise probably be an article already, since even opponents seem to acknowledge his notability. Wnt (talk) 17:45, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wnt, the userspace draft is not protected. I will be working completing the article in the next 48 hours, and will get it into mainspace asap. Ed, note that discussions on Commons are not votes like here on English Wikipedia, so counting of votes is actually quite pointless when it comes to Commons discussions such as this one; discussions on Commons are based upon Commons policy and guidelines only. Russavia (talk) 18:34, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: this user draft is now in main space at Pricasso. Dcoetzee 06:11, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Opposition to Commons is being spearheaded by outside pressure groups seeking censorship

Those who have followed the discussion on Jimbo's talk page should recognize that an endless series of anti-Commons diatribes have originated from a few dozen members of a site Wikipediocracy run by an editor who sought to do paid editing on Wikipedia and was banned for it. If you allow your support for Wikimedia's free art gallery to be eroded by the steadfast politicking of a small group, do you think they will simply give up and go away after that? They have other causes besides that one.

We do need to find a way to get independent servers and organizations to systematically back up Commons' collection. Wikipedia is one of the world's most popular websites, worth billions of dollars as a commercial entity. Control over the traffic is worth that; and to control the traffic someone must control the content. Spreading the content dilutes that value, and with it, Wikipedia's "resource curse". If we fail to do so - if we allow censors to start taking over Commons, here is what will happen: the moment they start to smell victory, they will start fighting "second revolutions". They don't like our content, they don't value our content, nor longstanding contributors; the fact that someone writes an article weighs nothing compared to the fact it includes something someone doesn't like. Being oriented toward one thing - purges - there is only one thing the would-be new order can do to one another, given the chance. There will be no honor among thieves, just a game of Survivor, until one group has sufficient control to begin instituting harsher measures. At that point it will be too late to back up the collection because they will presumably set strict limits on downloads to prevent people from doing so, and play games with concealing the authorship/edit history to try to turn the CC-license into a commercial asset they can resell under copyright. The degradation in the site's reputation will continue until it begins to resemble one of "America's worst charities" and no longer has anything to lose by including malware ads in its servers. (The last steps in that are speculative - there are some contender organizations like the Unification Church which are more sophisticated in infiltrating resources and holding them; but in any case it is not good)

The question is not whether we can stop this progression - we can't; Wikipedia is mortal. The question is whether we can slow it down and improve our personal skills with coding, while relying on improvements in computing storage and power to make things easier, and develop a decentralized Internet "virtual" server of free articles by free editors that link to one another according to individual evaluations of each others' worth, and get readers to move over to the new network before the old one is utterly compromised. Wnt (talk) 17:33, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I and many others have complained, over and over, about how you and others misrepresent the objections to the way commons is being run. If it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, it's even more so the encyclopedia that anyone can criticize. After that, I find the remainder of your response to be a paranoid rant, and particularly ironic seeing how, given your references to Survivor, you essentially want to claim that Kohs and company have been voted off the island and can be considered silenced. Mangoe (talk) 10:48, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wnt's arguments about anything Commons/Wikipediocracy-related jumped the shark quite a long time ago. Tarc (talk) 12:35, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipediocracy is a small group. Though it evidences the underlying counterproductivity of trying to ban people on an encyclopedia anyone can edit, we should not forget their origins. The problem is, there are many outside interests with an interest to put pressure on Wikipedia to advertise what they want and omit what they find inconvenient. If we don't stand up clearly for our right to cover everything impartially against even a small and unsubtle group like this, where does that place us with the others? Wnt (talk) 16:33, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is vacuous. I, rather obviously, am not banned, nor are the other people who have complained here. Yor "guilt by association" attack on our complaints is as faulty as your restatements of our objections. This really isn't about the right to cover anything at all, impartially or otherwise: it's about the transformation of Commons from a unified repository into an indiscriminate web host. Wikipedia could (and does) cover pretty much anything; Commons is overrun by junk, and I'm given to understand that just keeping up with the blatant copyright violations is a problem. If it were up to me, the Commons version of Wikipedia:REICHSTAG would be "No uploading pictures of yourself climbing the Reichstag building dressed as Spiderman and then stripping naked to make a point." Mangoe (talk) 21:04, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ordinarily I would agree that guilt by association is a lousy tactic. The problem is that Wikipedia tries to uphold an impossible policy, WP:CANVASS, while this group of people are free to ignore it entirely offsite. We have a policy situation that has given these people unreasonable impact here. Wnt (talk) 00:45, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"Spearheaded" eh, Wnt? :) To be honest, if you think that Wikipedia is on an inevitable decline, you sound more like the most cynical Wikipediocracy members. I'm not that. I'm trying to make things better. If that sometimes means that I need to point out the same absurdity that Wikipediocracy is pointing at, then I'll do that. Gigs (talk) 16:27, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal

~~I've brought up a slightly more concrete proposal at Commons:Village_pump#June_18. Gigs (talk) 16:23, 18 June 2013 (UTC)~~[reply]

I've retracted that discussion for now in order to better explain what is meant and to flesh out some technical details. Gigs (talk) 14:48, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Gigs, I appreciate this sincere critique of the state of Commons. I learned some history, and realized that I have assumed that Wikimedia Commons was intended as a free media repository for general use, not just for the Wikipedias. Your assessment of the closed-shop culture among the admins is strengthened by comments offered by two editors (Wnt and Russavia) who seem to regard themselves as vanguardists bearing WP:The Truth.

However you article would have been stronger had you refrained from describing your opponents as "delusional." Overuse of the verb "spew" also gives a strong impression that you judge some content and some positions by the people who hold them — in other words, as has been said already, that you are refighting old battles. Personally, I take issue with your insistence that Wikipedias are the firstborn creations to which all other Wikimedia projects must defer. That seems to conflict with the missions of those projects and the general philosophy of Wikimedia.

As a frequent user and small-time contributor to Commons, I have been more impressed by the rigorous efforts to abide by copyright laws and other use restrictions, and sometimes ingenious work to determine the origin of a media file. I've noticed the way Commons has attracted donations of vast numbers of media files, such as the more than 5,300 Swiss images donated by photographer Roland Zumbühl, only a fraction of which will ever appear in a Wikipedia article in any language. Hundreds of the files are still imperfectly documented, lacking the neat {{Information}} templates developed by admins since the photos were donated, and most are still only captioned in German. But I can’t help thinking it is worthwhile to improve this collection and keep it together, as part of Commons. I'm one of the editors who chips away at those files at an admittedly glacial pace.

"PIcswiss" is just one example of many. I know Commons admins did not organize the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest, but it does serve as the repository of all the entries, from the sublime to the unlovely. Some of my own contributions were unbecoming mobile-phone snaps of a rather hideous abandoned brick edifice. Nevertheless, the images have some merit as historical documents, perhaps useful in the future in ways we cannot now anticipate. To purge Commons on the basis of present-day encyclopedic merit would be to purge one of the Web's more valuable archives.

As to the obscene and self-indulgent material you describe, in six years of frequent use I have encountered almost none of it. As already noted by others, users don't usually find that stuff unless they go looking for it. I am bored by provocateurs, and you and I probably agree on the alleged artistic value of work by anyone who would think it witty to call himself "Pricasso." But in the long run such people are harmless, except where they attract enough hostile attention to occupy time and energy that could be more contructively used. The problem, then, is how best to reform the vanguardist culture of Commons' austere gatekeepers, and how to ensure the site has enough resources.

Your proposal to turn Commons into "a feature of Mediawiki" subservient to the needs of Wikipedias seems to take too uncharitable a view of what Commons is achieving, despite its current admin culture; not to mention the site's inestimable archival value. You admit that the proposal is not thoroughly fleshed out, and it seems that not enough thought has been given to undesired consequences of the change. I would also be interested to know what should become, in your view, of the thousands of Picswiss files.

Perhaps the essay you pay homage to in your title has given you an overly pessimistic view of the project's future. Do we really need to destroy the Commons in order to save it? — ℜob C. alias ÀLAROB 17:50, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

With respect to obscene material, there may be orders of magnitude more photos of buildings and birds, but even a single nude teenager or a non-consensual sexual photo is anything but harmless. Danger ^{High voltage!} 20:03, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Alarob, It is entirely possible to stumble upon it if you do many media searches. If I had it to do over again, I would rephrase it to make clear that I'm not proposing to eliminate the free media project, in a lot of ways what I'm proposing is to make it an actual peer, by removing the interwiki sharing function from it. This would free it from the requirements to serve the other projects, and allow it to assert real autonomy. Gigs (talk) 21:02, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That still doesn't make any sense. Where do you upload a revision to a figure if Commons doesn't have a sharing function? Every one of the individual-language projects? How do you find a new figure to use for an article? Check all those projects again? Wnt (talk) 21:07, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It would help if you read at least a little of what I've proposed. There would be an inter-wiki sharing function. Commons would just be another project that would be a part of it, without any special standing in it. Gigs (talk) 21:23, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) Trying to parlay such cases into a general prohibition of nudity, or to destroy Commons as we know it, is not valid. Commons admins do the work day after day of actually hunting for such cases - only to be derided on third-party sites for keeping "galleries of sexual material", i.e. the pages they scan for such problems. People uploading illegal material with bad intentions can hide it in a hundred ways - wrapping it in a few minutes of bird-watching video, coding it with steganography, etc. - so you can't prevent that by banning things that are "sort of like the material we don't want". It would be even more counterproductive to abolish Commons, to replace one central repository with hundreds of projects many of which have very few admins watching what is happening. What Commons has right now works - it works so well that the people going after it have to make up elaborate theories of how something is bad because of the uploader's intention, or whether he talked to the artist! Whereas the alternatives would not work. P.S. I might have misunderstood something above, but I should note I'm not a Commons insider - I actually don't do much over there, and certainly have no aspirations of adminning there, mostly because categorizing images is something I generally find so dull that if I didn't have a bot nagging me every time I wouldn't do it even with my own. Wnt (talk) 21:04, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Gigs, I wish you would respond to my specific question about what would become of a file collection like Picswiss under your proposal. Please be specific in your answer.

Danger, are you implying that there is some reform we could carry out that would prevent "even a single nude teenager or a non-consensual sexual photo" from ever appearing even temporarily in a Wikimedia project? — ℜob C. alias ÀLAROB 11:53, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

File:Eakins, Thomas (1844-1916) - 1883 - Eakin's art studens bathing 1.jpg (photo); File:Swimming_hole.jpg (painting): and would someone be suggesting deleting things like this because some of Eakins' students might have been underage? - Jmabel | Talk 16:58, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Of course not, but the status quo is that no attempt is made to ensure that models in sexual and nude images are over the age of majority. And as to consent, well, there's active resistance to the idea that consent of the photographed to have an image of them available for commercial use is relevant as long as the file had, at some point, been apparently released under a compatible license. Would you suggest that we give up on checking for copyright compatibility, since there will always be non-free content on Wikimedia projects? Jmabel, everyone in that photograph is dead and is rather beyond harm. Danger ^{High voltage!} 01:36, 23 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

no attempt is made — well, that's not totally correct. Even with images of totally clothed, identifiable living persons we try to apply Country specific consent requirements. However, I agree there is indeed enough room/need for improvement. --Túrelio (talk) 07:36, 23 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK, something more contemporary. Today I photographed the Fremont Solstice Parade, which always has a large number of mostly naked, mostly body-painted cyclists. Consent for photographs is clear, because in the U.S. simply being in a parade constitutes implicit consent to be photographed and to have those photographs used for almost any purpose (about the only exception is to advertise a product). In theory, the people who are naked in the parade are all 18 or older, by policy of the Fremont Arts Council but it's not like I can prove anything: the parade is not tightly controlled, and essentially anyone can join in by showing up and following the parade route, as long as they are appropriately costumed or, in this case, appropriately uncostumed. I have good reason to assume that virtually all of the naked cyclists I've photographed are of age, but I would also guess that out of 200 people, at least one person who was a year or two younger than they are supposed to be snuck in. It would be absolutely impractical to track down parade participants one by one to establish if some one person might be merely 17 rather than 18. Would you want to reject all such pictures on the basis that some one person might be underage? And, if not, how would you want to handle this? (By the way, tens of thousands of people, among them many thousands of children, watch this parade. By local standards, the whole thing is considered good clean fun, but I imagine that in many other American cities it would be considered rather shocking.) - Jmabel | Talk 08:09, 23 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is your problem/risk should you wish to publish the images. It is not something that you should be expecting other people to share in. Particularly as you do not have to upload every image you can restrict yourself to just those images of people that are clearly +18. John lilburne (talk) 11:37, 23 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm perfectly willing to be responsible for myself. But unless I misunderstand, the proposal here could demand overt documentation that each individual in such a photograph is over 18, which would make it impossible for any such images to be on Commons. Is that the intent, or am I misunderstanding? - Jmabel | Talk 02:04, 24 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Intent? Jimbo's "clean-up" squad deleted images in use on sexuality and art related articles on this and other Wikipedias, censoring them via the back door. When this fact was raised on his Commons talk page he stated that it was no accident and that this was very much his intent. --Simon Speed (talk) 10:32, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Confused

So mostly, the issue is that Commons accepts too many files. How can that be a problem ? I guess because:

it makes interesting content hard to find
some of the content infringes privacy or other rights.

Compared to other websites, I think Commons actually does a tolerably good job on these difficult issues, but clearly there is still much room for improvement.

Then, there is a solution proposed: devolve maintenance back to individual projects. I have really no idea how it would make things better and more usable:

not all wikiprojects are better maintained than Commons
individual projects can set their own policy
most project are monolingual and that would kill the substantial internationalization efforts understaken for file descriptions.
it would break categorization system. Commons categorization system is clearly insufficient, but nonetheless useful, certainly better than fragment it into 100s of different local systems.

This proposal is bundled with another: that only files used in Wikipedia should be searchable by default. That could be implemented as easily on Commons, but that seems to me like a very bad idea as file quality is only loosely correlated with current use.

And of course there is the more specific penis issue. We actually have three possibilities:

Ban them all. I do not think many people would support that, and unless all wikiprojects support that, it cannot be enforced through the proposal.
Accept them all. That is not what Commons does.
Accept only those that for some reason are considered valuable. That is what is currently done. And really unless you look them, you are not flooded by penises on Commons. So unless, you are really anti-penis, I do not see any major problem in this respect.

Finally, there is the "fair use" issue that has been alluded to above. I would personnally support looking for a way to pool fair-use files. But doing it on individual wikis and then filtering transclusion by licence seems an unnecessarily complicated solution to me. --Superzoulou (talk) 10:43, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bad title in many ways

The author shows both his ignorance of Commons in both the historical and Wikimedia sense, firstly in describing Common's as belonging to Wikipedia. Commons is a Wikimedia project not a Wikipedia one, as a sister project Commons serves as an archive of educational material, an educational remit that is equal but different from wikipedia's, these sometimes intersect, but Commons serves a purpose in and of itself, one of our scope guidlines is "Commons is not an encyclopedia", just as wikinews, wiktionary, wikibooks, wikisource etc sometimes hosts material which intersects that of wikipedia but in a manner consistent with their own scope, and which are not subservient to it.

Part of my antipathy to this article is based on my antipathy to the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" which was an invention of those with a vested interest in the enclosure of common land, the theft of a resourse that belonged to everyone for their own purposes and profit. Some of that avarice I see here in the attitudes of the respondents to this oped which can be summed up as, "how can I reform Commons in such a way that I recieve the respect and privileges I think are my due." The issue of penis picks and exhibitionism is really a non issue such files are a very small part of Commons just as the salacious and contentious articles on Wikipedia are not the entirity of Wikipedia.--KTo288 (talk) 00:14, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep up with The Signpost on Twitter, Facebook or Mastodon.

Home

About