Commons:Village pump/Technical

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This page is used for technical questions relating to the tools, gadgets, or other technical issues about Commons; it is distinguished from the main Village pump, which handles community-wide discussion of all kinds. The page may also be used to advertise significant discussions taking place elsewhere, such as on the talk page of a Commons policy. Recent sections with no replies for 30 days and sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=--~~~~}} may be archived; for old discussions, see the archives; recent archives: /Archive/2025/07 /Archive/2025/08.

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How to search for text "404" / {{Dead link}} in the Source field?

There was a recent discussion on VP Do we do anything when the source is no longer available? – when I come across a dead or 404 page link in the source field of a file's {{Information}} template, I usually append (404) or (404) next to the link (some examples are in that VP thread). I think some users may have been adding {{Dead link}}.

It would be great if at some point there was a bot that checked links for 404 links. Regardless of whether or not that is being done:

Is there a way to see all files with such links via searching the Information template? Then maybe a bot could go through these and try to add an archived version of the site and human users go through the remaining files to look for an archived or new location of the site or to tag the file somehow.
Relevant once again: How to search the fields of the File information template on Commons?.
Prototyperspective (talk) 14:52, 25 May 2025 (UTC)

I think it could be done somehow using regex and the insource: search operator. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:46, 18 June 2025 (UTC)

This is already done by User:InternetArchiveBot. Wikiwerner (talk) 18:56, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the info! Do you or somebody else know why it doesn't tag many links that are offline - does it have a list of already-checked files and quickly go through new files to check for external links in the source field? In any case, this is just about links that are dead but not websites that are still online but whose contents have disappeared (404) like the examples here (which could be found via some insource search). Prototyperspective (talk) 23:44, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

Be patient ... Wikiwerner (talk) 09:02, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

This bot does not seem to recognize links that are 404 but still online. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:48, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

The examples you supply yield true 404s. Have you got other examples, so I may better understand it? Wikiwerner (talk) 11:23, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

The first example has a 404 page instead of being an offline link. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:19, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Ah, but if I check the HTTP status code, it is 404. IABot does the same thing. Wikiwerner (talk) 16:51, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

<inputbox> is directing search queries to Special:MediaSearch

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T378756

I noticed <inputbox> is directing search queries to Special:MediaSearch rather than Special:Search. This means users much change the "Special:MediaSearch" to "Special:Search" in the URL to do a text search. Can someone please look into this? Ixfd64 (talk) 04:47, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

@Ixfd64 This is a fix to how InputBox works, for this wish. It makes InputBox honour the "Choose your search interface" preference. If you want to use Special:Search, you can change that preference. It defaults to MediaSearch because that's the default for Commons. Sam Wilson 05:05, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

Is there an attribute for <inputbox> to force the use of Special:Search in specific cases?

<inputbox> is currently being used to search archives on pages such as Commons:Administrators' noticeboard and Commons:Village pump. Ixfd64 (talk) 06:01, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

@Ixfd64: I'm afraid I'd not actually taken in that prefix searches don't work in MediaSearch! Sorry, that's quite annoying isn't it. There was a discussion to add a searchengine=Search|MediaSearch parameter, but I argued that it was redundant to the preference, but it sounds like it's really not (or at least, not yet). I've got a patch for that, so will get it back up to date. Sam Wilson 06:50, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. This will be very helpful! Ixfd64 (talk) 15:59, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

I see it's merged - should someone add the searchengine=Search parameters now, or is it better to wait until the code is live? Mathnerd314159 (talk) 05:02, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

@Mathnerd314159: Perhaps best to wait till later this week when the new param is available. Just in case there's any issue! Sam Wilson 07:01, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

No signature at COM:QIC

Hi!

For some weeks, the automatic signature is not added when I enter the for ~. When I do this in other pages, etc. the automatic input works. How to fix that? Thanks PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 18:21, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

I didn’t quite understand what you meant, could you explain in more detail? Incall ^talk 20:57, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

If you enter --~~~~ and publish, the tildes will be replaced by Name and timestamp. But in my case, the tildes persist :( --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:08, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

I can assume that the problem is with the keyboard characters. Incall ^talk 19:26, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

It could also be a Javascript issue from your browser. Perhaps try making sure Javascript is enabled or maybe try to see if the problem is still there with a different browser. Tvpuppy (talk) 19:49, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, probably this could be one way ro go :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 20:00, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

wrong target name at file rename request displayed

On the file page File:Exobasidium giseckiae.jpeg, there is displayed File:Exobasidium gisekiae.jpeg as the rename target, but I put into the template the name File:Exobasidium gisekiae.jpg, as you can see only in the source text. Why is this so? Isn’t it possible to rename a .jpeg file to a .jpg name? (There also is a misspelling in the file name now, it’s not only the extension.) I tried already to put the template new onto the page, then I purged the page and tried a null edit, but nothing works. Therefore I wrote the problem into the template instead. What kind of problem is this? I think that a normal ".jpg" extension would be better, because the file name will be named exactly as the category (it is named this way already except that typo) and to prevent two different files only with the difference ".jpg" vs. ".jpeg" in the extensions in the future. What do others think about that? —176.1.5.162 18:41, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

Looks like they are different formats. Maybe you need to upload a new version? Henrydat (talk) 11:38, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

I don’t think that this can be the reason here. The file had been displayed correctly with .jpeg and now, that it has been renamed correctly by Inertia6084 to the .jpg name, the file still displays correctly on the page. And I can’t see that the renaming user had any problem with renaming it from .jpeg to .jpg. Then it should also be possible that this file name displays correctly on the file page before renaming it. Thus, a new upload wasn’t needed for it.

Ok, it has been renamed, and I still would like to know, why displaying the correct name has been a problem, if anyone has any idea about that. But I think that .jpeg and .jpg are the same format as also .JPG or .JPEG would be, and maybe also .Jpg or .Jpeg or other spellings. If noone has another idea, what can be done in such a case, then this can be archieved after a while, because now after renaming the wrong display of the template can’t be seen anymore. In that case, if noone has another idea, I’ll try that again next time like now with writing the problem into the template. —176.1.3.87 12:52, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

Or if anyone wants to report the problem on Phabricator, then just go ahead. But the problem with that would be to reproduce this error. I don’t know, if the display is a problem every time, someone wants to rename something from .jpeg to .jpg or maybe other extensions. Perhaps it’s better to watch that for a while, if it will occur again. —176.1.3.87 12:59, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

Commons has preferred file name extensions. If you rename to .jpeg, it will automatically use .jpg as the suggested target. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:26, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

That’s good. Then I don’t have to write this into the template anymore. @TheDJ: Thanks for the information. Then the display problem is not so important, but noone will see before renaming on the file page, if the target already exists. What does the software, when such a target name with .jpg already exists and a user hasn’t noticed that before renaming, perhaps because of the display problem? Is the rename then done to another .jpeg name, as the template says? Or does the renaming user get an error message then and the rename isn’t done?

And is this the same when renaming a .JPG or .JPEG file that they both will automatically get .jpg then? .JPG is quite often used, I don’t know what kind of software creates such names. Are there other such combinations and can all preferred file name extensions be read anywhere on Commons? —176.1.19.92 16:20, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Info: I’ve had some file renames from .JPG to .jpg in the last days. In those cases, the .jpg target was correctly displayed. Perhaps only .jpeg to .jpg or .JPEG to .jpg may be problematic then for the display in the template. Maybe that could be written into the doc page for the template?

@TheDJ: And where can these preferred file name extensions be found? Does there exist any page for it on Commons or elsewhere? —176.1.5.189 18:10, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

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• Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [1][2]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [3]

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:05, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

RotateBot not working

The bot has stopped working since June 30, and the backlog in Category:Images requiring rotation by bot is continuing to grow. I left a message at the talk page of @Steinsplitter (owner of the bot), see User talk:Steinsplitter#RotateBot, but it appears they haven't been active since June 25. Is there anything we can do, or do we have to wait for Steinsplitter to fix it? Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 00:53, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Looks like this is resolved now. Nemoralis (talk) 01:31, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Aircraft cat

Hi there. For some reason, {{Aircraft cat}} is self-categorizing lots of categories. Category:Aircraft of Senegal is an example. Could someone with more knowledge than I have solve it, please? Thanks in advance, Alavense (talk) 15:57, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Error 4914820

Hi! I've used a Python application to upload images for years, and now the API returns the following message:

If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.

Request served via cp6016 cp6016, Varnish XID 578202189

Upstream caches: cp6016 int

Error: 429, 4914820 at Fri, 18 Jul 2025 13:45:23 GMT

I've tried multiple times for the past few days. Any help appreciated. Thanks, Romainbehar (talk) 19:26, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

I've also been using a Python application for Wikipedia for quite a while without problem until the past few days, where I've also been getting the 4914820 error. What I've noticed is that if I open the URL in my browser, I get the correct results and am not given an error. Panamitsu (talk) 05:50, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Someone else created a Phabricator ticket for the same issue. API seems to require a user agent now. Romainbehar (talk) 06:49, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Confirmed! Using Python requests, it works again after adding second line below:

• session = requests.Session()
• session.headers['User-Agent'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'

Romainbehar (talk) 18:47, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

It always required a user agent, it's been policy for years. It's just that now there is so much abusive load by AI bots etc, that you are more likely to end up in a rate limit if you didn't specify one. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:24, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Abkhazia technical puzzler

Abkhazia
Countries of Europe Abkhazia Albania Andorra Armenia Austria Azerbaijan Belarus Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kazakhstan Kosovo Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Moldova Monaco Montenegro Netherlands North Macedonia Northern Cyprus Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia South Ossetia Spain Sweden Switzerland Transnistria Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom Vatican City Constituent countries Denmark (DK) England (UK) Faroe Islands (DK) Netherlands (NL) Northern Ireland (UK) Scotland (UK) Wales (UK)
Countries of Asia Abkhazia Afghanistan Armenia Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Bhutan Brunei Cambodia China Cyprus East Timor Egypt Georgia India Indonesia Iran Iraq Israel Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Lebanon Malaysia Maldives Mongolia Myanmar Nepal North Korea Oman Pakistan Palestine Philippines Qatar Russia Saudi Arabia Singapore South Korea South Ossetia Sri Lanka Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Thailand Turkey Turkmenistan United Arab Emirates Uzbekistan Vietnam Yemen
Main topics related to Abkhazia activities architecture culture economy geography history nature objects people politics science society time views

Selected maps are included in the  Wikimedia Atlas of Abkhazia.

I was trying to debug {{Country category}} and {{Country label}} templates, used by 780k pages and typically maintained by @Joshbaumgartner and Sbb1413: , since those templates seem to be throwing Lua errors in all categories related to Abkhazia. See Category:Abkhazia by topic and Category:Pages with script errors. I see the same errors when running {{Country category |1=Abkhazia}}:

I think the issue is with Wikidata Abkhazia (Q23334) item which for country (P17) lists both Georgia (Q230) and Republic of Abkhazia (Q31354462), and the error states that your template is requesting date from Wikidata item "Q230 and Q31354462". However none of those items changed lately. Some page was changed within the last week to cause all those errors, however I can not find which one. Anyone wants to look at this? Jarekt (talk) 00:45, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Maybe it’s due to {{Country navbox}}, which has recently been changed? Tvpuppy (talk) 00:34, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

@Tvpuppy: You are right, after undoing changes to {{Country navbox}} template made by User:Verdy p to restore version from 14 April 2025, all errors were resolved. @Verdy p: , I am not sure what issues were being addressed by your changes. Feel free to try again but please test on Category:Abkhazia by topic and similar categories. --Jarekt (talk) 03:53, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

I made a sandbox and tested it, you've removed the support for loading the sandbox (notably in subtemplates)... Basically there are errors that were solved elsewhere (notably loading flag images and other subtemplates), there was no change in structure (just made the code clearer, removed unnecessary HTML comments to hide newlines that are stripped automatically make the editing much easier and clearer; and used rank="best" in queries (instead of two successive tests on "rank=prefered", whcih fails, then without it which loads the incorrect image...), and I added some basic translation. verdy_p (talk) 07:23, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

The obvious error is effectively in Wikidata: Abkhazia is listed has having in TWO *preferred" values for its countries property: itself, and Georgia (this is an error in all cases in the Wikidata item for Abkhazia). After editing the Wikidata item to have only ONE preferred solves the problem. So the real change was not mine in the template, but in the Wikidata item for Abkhazia. If in some corner cases you need to have two preferred values for the same property in the same Wikidata element, my edit or the existing code was not ready for that situation, and the Country box should use smarter queries to avoid such unexpected errors coming from unexpected property values from Wikidata. Your basic revert did not help at all and just broke what was solved elsewhere, because you did not know at all the effective reason. verdy_p (talk) 07:30, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Wouldn’t it be more suitable to have Republic of Abkhazia (Q31354462) as its preferred value? Since currently it’s displaying the flag of Georgia. Tvpuppy (talk) 09:39, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

The fix I made to add the missing (but required) "numval=1" fixed the issue with categorys related to Abkhazia. However if in some cases you may want to display alternate flags (de facto and de jur), you need further edits to the template (or related modules). For now, the "numval=1" filter is needed (even with the "rank=best" filter), as nothing is ready to accept a (comma-separated) list a values when there are two preferred values returned by the data query. I know no cases where the same item may have two property values with the "rank=preferred" to get an alternate "de facto" flag also displayed in the "Country template" (in addition of the "de jure" which should be the default as it is recognized by hundreds of countries, whereas the regional flag is not recognized as being "national" except by Russia), you need an additional query. Before my change that fixed other cases, there were two successive queries, one using the "rank=preferred" (which could still return two values), and if there was none, a 2nd query without this filter (any values would be returned at any rank, so there was more... including other historical flags).

I've not broken anything in my edit the "Country navbox" template: the bug was already present (since long in Wikidata) even if it was not visible (because pages were not refreshed when the Wikidata item was updated to have two "preferred" values). I have secured the template to make sure the queries returned only one 1 value at most (and not a list), as currently expected. verdy_p (talk) 09:55, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

verdy_p, I do not know much about geography of Abkhazia, but the item Abkhazia (Q23334) is for the territory of Abkhazia, which is split into or claimed by 2 countries, so the Wikidata value was probably correct. Also country (P17) does not have uniqueness constraint, so multiple values there are allowed and our software should not crash because of this. Quite likely at some point someone will notice your "fix" of Q23334 and revert it and than we will be here in the same situation. We had the same issue with {{Wikidata Infobox}} where errors caused by correct but inconvenient Wikidata statements were being fixed by deleting them from Wikidata, which was latter reversed causing recuring problems here, see Template_talk:Wikidata_Infobox#Lua_error. --Jarekt (talk) 13:31, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

There was nothing wrong at all in the template that you reverted. In fact all effectively came from the fact that the template was alling Wikidata which returned a couple of values. This was not detected before, just because the change had occured in Wikidata and was not detected by this wiki that did not update the page (so the bug could have occured at any time, without me changing anything. Now that I've secured the template to make sure that it returns ONLY a single value (and not two in a list),nothing bad can really happen. Still, I have NOT deleted the two values in Wikidata , but only 1 is marked as "preferred" (as needed in Wikidata rules: this was already a violation of Wikidata, and was already reported there); if someone reverts that status in Wikidata, it will still not break this wiki, only one will be used. If one wants to display the two flags (1 for "de jure", the other for "de facto"), we'll still need to change the template to make that correctly without crashing and even if this case we'll still need the "numval=1" filter in addition to the standard "rank=best" filter, by adding another filter to detect "de facto" values and conditionally display this secondary flag and your revert was simply just non-sense: you had not understood the real issue. verdy_p (talk) 13:48, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Apart from the main topic, disputed territories shouldn't be on the country navigational list (same for South Ossetia, Transnitria, Kosovo). We should treat them separately (as disputed territories in the same template?), otherwise we inherently come to the mentioned conflicts with P17 and other stuff on WD. — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 14:07, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

verdy_p, It looks like you changed {{Country navbox}} again, and we have bunch of new Lua errors, in categories like Category:Adolescent girls of Ireland or Category:Polynesia by topic. Can you fix the template to accommodate those or revert the changes? --Jarekt (talk) 00:42, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

What? I've not changed anything since the messages above. These are however the same symptoms: the template automatically gets several QIDs instead of just one. This looks like this comes from somewhere, where an expectation was changed in a higher-level template or module not using the restriction, or because data in Wikidata was changed so that multiple elements are now qualifying (possibly multiple ones with the "preferred" value, even if there are queries with "rank=best" filter and a filter to return just one value). verdy_p (talk) 03:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

"Q27 and Q145" means that the template is unable to choose between two candidate "countries" (the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom), in a query that looks for a country and not the binational "region" of Ireland. I've not changed any query at all. So these cataoies related to that region may have been changed by including the two countries with equal ranks (even if the United Kingdom is too large and is not fully included in the region). That's an initial design issue in how these "new" templates basd on "Country navbox" have been introduced "by force" without correct testing for such corner cases, with just bad and untested assumptions. The same applies to the international "region" of Polynesia: why are there "country" countries to select the qualifying QID? None of the queries used in these templates will work if several QId are matching, because the automatic QID query will return a formatted list (with commas or "and"). Who designed these damn templates? And more importantly who applied them blindly without any test, in categories that are NOT for individual countries? verdy_p (talk) 03:40, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Also I note that there has been several deletion request made on several specialized templates like "Adolescent by country" (applied by user "Aunt6") and redirects recently made, using again similar assumptions, that these replaced templates were only used for individual countries and not for international regions. I'm not at all responsible of this nightmare: these "country navbox" introduced everywhere without thoughts are the main cause of the problem, they were absolutely never tested to support something else than pure countries. Ihave not changed any wikidata request but seriously the best to do for categories that are NOT for countries is to remove the use of these ill-designed "country navbox" templates and revert them to what they were before (with much simpler administration and maintainability). verdy_p (talk) 03:50, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

I've looked at the effective history: before the right-side "country navbox" was used, there were other templates that properly looked for the correct names in the top navbox of "countries in Europe". This was taking into account a progressive evolution of the naming scheme, so that for example "Category:XXX of Ireland" was first looking for the country "Republic of Ireland" first, then used a fallback to the shorter name "Ireland". This was intended to look for the country and not the region. When the newer "country navbox" was used to replace it, it was unable to use this fallback and only looked up for the country: now it detects two countries matching the region, by assuming from the category name that it refers only to "Ireland" (the binational island). This does not work. A simple workaround, given that "country navbox" is unable to determine the correct wikidata item QID to use (and the fact that it returns two QIDs), is to add the explicit "qid=" parameter to the navbox (and no longer expect that "GetQID" returns only one QID when in fact it can return multiple ones, as it has no correct filters to limit its results). verdy_p (talk) 05:08, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-30

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• The Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [4]
• Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
• The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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• WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [5]

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Techniques for YouTube screenshots of people?

Hi all, feel free to tell me to ask this elsewhere! Was wondering if anyone had advice/tips for getting the highest quality screenshots of freely licensed/PD material from YouTube videos, in particular from videos of people speaking/moving. I downloaded and grabbed a screenshot from this video released by the State Department's Art in Embassies program (PD US Gov) to serve as a close-up image of American artist Sam Gilliam. I think I got as high quality a version of the image as I could, but please correct me if you think it could be better. The bigger issue is just capturing a moment where he's not mid-speech or moving his face. I did the tried-and-true quick-unpause-pause method, but I'm not sure I got the best moment. Any tips for this kind of thing?

As an aside, there are a number of very notable artists pictured in this video, could be useful to also have additional images of them on Commons.

Thanks! 19h00s (talk) 15:34, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

I use LosslessCut for downloaded YouTube videos, where you can go frame by frame. In general, images where the motiv is not moving is better, because of less motion blur and potential less compression artifacts :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:36, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

You can step through YouTube videos frame-by-frame using the . and , keys. Omphalographer (talk) 19:41, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

The main problem is that stills from videos are never even close to the quality of real photos. The problem is the long exposure time usually used in video recording. This can not be eliminated when extracting from the original file. Stills from videos should only be used if there is no photo available and it is impossible to take on. GPSLeo (talk) 21:16, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Well-heard, I definitely agree that high quality still photos are always preferable to video screenshots. Unfortunately this is the best free image I've found so far of Gilliam - we have a very low quality user-sourced image of him on Commons plus two high quality pictures from the State Department where he's either turned away from camera or has his eyes closed. And sadly Gilliam passed away a few years ago so the only photos we have are what's already been created.

Thanks all for the advice! 19h00s (talk) 00:14, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.

Updates for editors

• The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [6]
• On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [7]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
  • Temporary Accounts: Enhancing privacy for our unregistered editors
  • Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors
  • A dozen visions for wikitext!
  • Coordinate Across Stakeholders with the Product and Technology Advisory Council
• The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:22, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Separating maps from other files in a template's categorization

Could somebody make it so that maps are put in a separate category instead of Category:Information graphics without data source by Template:Datasource missing? This would allow excluding these in the GLamorous & Glamorgan scans for file uses which would be very helpful in checking uses of files without datasources – see the links in Help:Misinformation (and one probably needs to check those links first to see why this would be very useful). Maybe this could be done via checking if there is a category containing "maps " on the file or if necessary by splitting the template and doing a VisualFileChange on all the files in it that are maps. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:06, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

File:Khazar University flag.jpg

Hello. The file has a display error. It's clickable and will be displayed as such. In this context, I saved the file to my computer, removed a small white border, and re-uploaded it in the hope that this would fix the problem. Perhaps it would be better to create an SVG version of it anyway. Greetings, זיו「Ziv」 • For love letters and other notes 15:01, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

PDF files don't show

I noticed that some pdf files don't show up, there's just a logo in the upper left, no preview. One of the files: File:Nn07-2025.pdf. Any idea what's wrong? --Hedwig in Washington ^(mail?) 17:50, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

File:Nn07-2025.pdf --Hedwig in Washington ^(mail?) 17:50, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

The file in question does for me, but not File:Nn06-2025.pdf... --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:06, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Also see Category:Nezboryma Natsia, 2025

Strange. I just tried a few other categories with pdf files, no problems whatsoever. Could it be that the servers just don't provide the previews right after upload? I have never noticed that, tho. --Hedwig in Washington ^(mail?) 19:12, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

previews are always created asynchronously. Especially for PDFs, which can be quite large, it can take a while for the thumbnail preview to become available. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:26, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Thx for the information! --Hedwig in Washington ^(mail?) 14:27, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

URL2Commons is down again D:

I experienced the error since yesterday --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:09, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, the heritage tool ist broken also. :( --Hedwig in Washington ^(mail?) 19:13, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Hochlade-Formular

Sehr geehrte Wiki Commons Gemeinde, beim hochladen von Dateien (Fotos) erscheint:Wähle zwischen den folgenden Varianten eine Datei hochzuladen aus. Dabei wird auch das Hochlade-Formular angeboten. Nur ist es mir bis jetzt nicht gelungen, an dieses Formular heranzukommem. Dort gibt es ein Eingabefeld Urheber in das ich gern meinen Namen eintragen würde. In der Möglichkeit des Hochlade-Assistenten habe ich diese Möglichkeit nicht gefunden. Mir ist aber dieser Punkt sehr wichtig! Beim hochladen in Wikipedia habe ich diese Möglichkeit, nur wird es aber lieber gesehen, Fotos in Wiki Commons hochzuladen. Wie kann ich dort meinen Namen als Urheber eintragen? Vielen Dank und herzliche Grüße Throttle lever Throttle lever (talk) 06:23, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

@Throttle lever Hi, I've moved your question to the German-speaking Village Pump (Commons:Forum), where more people can see and answer your question (in German). Cheers, --Jcornelius (talk) 15:47, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

Thank you very much for that, I am delighted Throttle lever (talk) 20:03, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-32

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Editors can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences. [8]
• Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page. [9]
• Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available. [10]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons. [11][12]
• Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet. [13]
• Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
• Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [14]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
  • Wikimedia’s knowledge infrastructure in a changing internet: Establishing sustainable pathways for content reuse
  • Wikifunctions is coming soon to a wiki near you!
  • Shaping the Future of Wikipedia’s Reader Experience
  • Making Wikipedia More Readable: What Comes Next

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 03:36, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Video2Commons

Is there anything weird going on with the queue for Video2Commons? I've had a file "pending" for about 3 hours. - Jmabel ! talk 04:49, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Commons:Video2commons/status. Nemoralis (talk) 21:26, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Subcat does not appear in mothercat

I have Category:2015 photographs of Hof (Saale), which is automatically categorized in Category:2015 photographs of Hofer Land, but it doesn't appear there. What can be done about this? --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 18:13, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

File:Logo Corpoven (filial de Petroleos de Venezuela) 1978-1997.png

Buenas, que paso con el bot de Wikimedia, puse {{PD-VenezuelaGov}} pero sin {{PD-textlogo}} ,al agregar PD-VenezuelaGov después el bot automáticamente agregó en la parte User:Minorax/PD textlogo/2025 July 20 pero sin el Template PD-TEXTLOGO,si yo pongo PD-textlogo el bot agrega User:Minorax/PD textlogo/2025 July 20 pero porque el bot agregó User:Minorax/PD textlogo/2025 July 20 si no puse PD-TEXTLOGO?? AbchyZa22 (talk) 13:10, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

This sounds like a case for COM:VPC --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:59, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

@PantheraLeo1359531:I asked in Commons:Help desk#File:Logo Corpoven (filial de Petroleos de Venezuela) 1978-1997.png but User Asclepias says:Probably because the file is categorized in "category:C in logos", which is in "Category:Letters in logos", which is in "Category:Text logos". AbchyZa22 (talk) 09:22, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, okay, that's interesting :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 10:05, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

How to change coordinates of the point of view in SDC of picture?

I loaded a picture with wrong coordinates. After I fix the coordinates the followed message appears: "There is a discrepancy of 61644 meters between the above coordinates and the ones stored at SDC". I try to change coordinates of the point of view in SDC, but after editing coordinates value the button "Publish changes" does nothing and nothing changes in SDC. I tried logging into Wikidata before make changes in SDC and changing the language in my user settings to English, removimg statement from SDC and create it again, but it didn't help. What am I doing wrong? Vsatinet (talk) 10:44, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

The easiest is to revert the bot edit which introduced the sdc coordinates; the bot will eventually come back. Ymblanter (talk) 20:15, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

Спасибо, Ярослав. Очень неочевидный путь. Я попробовал отменить правку бота, но это вызвало срабатывание фильтра. Отписался на странице обсуждения фильтра.
Thank you. I tried to do it. As a result I see warning from abuse filter. I report this issue on Abuse Filter talk page. Vsatinet (talk) 21:21, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

As it was explained to me on Abuse filter talk page it's impossible to do anything with SDC without COM:AP status. So the issue is closed. Vsatinet (talk) 14:24, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

Why is Category:Broken category redirects not fully populated?

One example I expect to be there is Category:Valea Crişului, Covasna, but I can't see it neither on UI nor through Petscan.

It would be useful for me to be able to find categories like Valea Crişului so as to clean them up – either fix the redirect or request speedy deletion. Gikü (talk) 11:23, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-33

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• The WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature. [15]
• The Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on this talk page.
• The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text. [16]
• Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for. [17]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage. [18]
• Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the mw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected. [19]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:25, 11 August 2025 (UTC)