Commons talk:Featured picture candidates/Archive 1

Categories suggested

Hi,

I think in the long term, it may make sense to separate this page into four categories:

• public domain paintings, drawings and illustrations
• public domain photos
• photos taken by Wikimedians
• paintings, illustrations, 3D art etc. created by Wikimedians

I know that some Wikimedians, including myself, put their content in the public domain. In this context, I am referring primarily to US government materials, and content whose copyright has expired.--Eloquence

Tone of judgment

Personally, given the tone of some comments, I would never dare to nominate one of my pictures :( Pethan 11:32, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Please do dare:) Offensive or humiliating comments will be removed. There were too many of them in the past, completely irrelevant in the context of peaceful relationships. villy 12:52, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Voting instructions

"To vote or to nominate a picture, edit here" (under Nominations) is OK, though easily overlooked. (I'm thinking there should be a horizontal bar after as well as before?)

However, when I follow the link, I get to an edit page that seems suitable for adding new nominees, but does not suggest any obvious mechanism for voting. I am led to assume that voting does not take place via this mechanism, but rather by editing sections of the real thing and appending one's vote after the other votes.

Am I right? If so, then I would like to change the wording to say "To nominate a picture" in the aforementioned instructions and add a similar brief section on voting that explicitly states the method, even if it is simply the obvious one. (Perhaps also a pointer on things not to do?) JMCorey 03:44, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Is there an Audit Trail?

I submitted an image, and initially had one vote of Support. This was removed (possibly by accident or by the voter themselves) and I currently have two votes that Oppose only. LoopZilla 08:22, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I realise that there is a trail of changes (the history), but I felt that I should not start messing around! LoopZilla 23:20, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

time span

de: Einge Abstimmungen endeten schon vor 7 Tagen, dazu eine Frage: Ab wann ist ein Bild exzellent? Benötigt es eine 2/3 Mehrheit? Einfache Mehrheit? Das erste Bild z.B. hat 10:6 stimmen, "featured" oder nicht? Ich würde mich als neuer Admin ja sehr gerne darum kümmern, aber keiner kann mir sagen, wie das hier geregelt ist? --Roger Zenner -!- 17:32, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

en: Some of the votings ended 7 days ago, therefore a question: What are the criteria for a featured image? 2/3 majority? simple majority? e.g. the first picture: 10:6 votes - featured or not? As new sysop, I'd do the job, but noone can answer my questions - anyone here? --Roger Zenner -!- 17:32, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'd say you probably want at least 75% support, but to use your judgement about the votes (if the objections are for silly reasons, for example). In the case of 10:6, I would say not to promote.

HTH.

James F. (talk) 13:42, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That was/is my problem, too. Because of that, i suggest to pass kind of guidelines. I make a proposal here and would like like to hear your opinion to that. Feel free to edit. Kind regards, norro 11:16, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Split please

Could we split the candidates page in some way or another? I believe that many potential voters lack the patience to load a page with 80 candidates.. I am not sure how to do this best though.

I'd suggest that we split the page by week of nomination. This way it would also become more apparent when the voting is due to be closed.

Please comment. -- Ravn 13:26, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Categorizing images

I would like to point out that it would be important to always supply full information for featured pictures, and also for the candidates. Besides the info suggested by Template:Information, images should always be categoriezd and/or used on a gallery page, so they can be found by people searching the commons by topic. This is quite often not the case yet.

This would be especially important for featured pictures and candidates for several reasons:

1. It would be a shame if featured pictures could not be found by topic - images listed here tend to be quite good...
2. those images are particularly exposed and should serve as an example how to use images on the commons
3. because those images are linked to here, they do not show up on automated listings of orphaned images, even though they can not be found by topic. Thus, they are often missed by cleanup sweeps.

Please help to improve the structure of the commons! Thanks -- Duesentrieb 10:49, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. I will help working on that. Regards, norro 15:51, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I like the idea, but I am too busy making and cleaning up interwiki-links on a handful of wikipedias at the moment to put a lot of time into this. Regars, Quistnix 09:30, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

descriptions

I think we should require that the photo be properly described. Ideally this would be several sentences in each of several different languages, but it wouldn't be right to require that. For many things, a set of accurate keywords would do, especially if they have Wikipedia articles. If you know the French, English, and scientific (Latin) names for something, there is no excuse for not putting all 3 on the description page. I wouldn't want to make people try to look these up though; I just expect people to supply everything they already know. AlbertCahalan 17:20, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

Templates

To make this mechanism more international and easier to use for non-English speakers I have created four templates: {{Support}}, {{Oppose}}, {{Nominate}} and {{Neutral}} which contain "Support", etc. When voting please use these templates (once others see you using them, when they edit a nomination they will too. Next, German speakers will create the templates {{Pro}}, {{Contra}}, etc. - these will simply include the English templates, so the only content of {{Pro}} is "{{Support}}", thus typing {{Pro}} produces "'''Support'''". The real advantage of this is realised in non-Latin alphabet languages - Russian, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese who's users may have trouble both understanding what the respective English terms mean, but also may have trouble inputting them. Some of you may now be asking "But how is the word 'Support' [which these templates will produce] international - isn't there a better, more readable term we can use?" Well, there isn't really a term that will bridge the alphabet gaps - but a symbol could do it. After we are presented with a series of proposals for symbols (ticks and crosses have been suggested, as have green and red blocks, etc.) the content of {{Support}} will simply be changed to that symbol - thus every languages' support template will produce this. The result: easy to do international input, easy to read international output. Once this is implemented it will be no harder for a resident of Tokyo to partake, than for a resident of London to do so. --Oldak Quill 11:19, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

{{subst:Support}}

:-)

James F. (talk) 11:24, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

These templates are completely useless. Just write in whatever language you want, but don't use a template when it is not needed. It takes valuable server resources and makes things uselessly complicated. Yann 12:10, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

please let us stop the template race. Agreed with Yann+ templates are user unfriendly (if you don't know how they work and absolutely not necessary. See the vote on stewards on meta to see that yes/no can be written in many language. Please, please, please. notafish }<';> 12:25, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Support this idea. I do not understand the chinese, the finnish or the usbek word for support. Who wants to count the votes, to determine the result, if we open the commons for all languages. And that's the intention, isn't it? Regards, norro 13:58, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I think that using yes, no, neutral, and nominate in the dozens of different languages on commons will be a recipe for disaster, if people actually start using their own languages. For example, if someone writes, "neutral" in Thai, I would have no way of distinguishing this from "no" in Thai. It will scare away more people than it attracts, in my opinion, if it actually does, as we hope, encourage people to use their own languages.

So, I think we should either stick to English, or use templates. Templates are not overly difficult, and would make it quite easy to accomodate any number of languages and character sets. Peregrine981 04:21, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Languages: a plea for a single standard.

The word "Neh" in Greek means yes (compare with No, Nein, Non etc). I am sure that there are many other languages that the word used could cause confusion! There may be languages were the word is exactly the opposite meaning to another languge.

Vote in your language:

    * Yes, Ya, Oui, Si, ...
    * No, Nein, Non, ....

• 標準に賛成 Fg2 22:05, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Eloquent and pithy... LoopZilla 21:16, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

I think "Vote in your language" is completely nonsense. Who is able to count the result, if there are votes like "Kyllä", "Apoio", "Zustimmung" and "標準に賛成"? I think, the way of using templates (i. e. Template:Pro - german) in the different languages is very clever. Regards, norro 16:43, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

The standard doesn't have to be a word. We can allow symbols such as +, 0, and -. Or we can allow graphics such as thumb up, thumb sideways, and thumb down. A template can insert the graphic, I suppose. Fg2 20:50, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

Neutral votes

How are neutral votes considered in the voting proccess? Should they be included when totaling up the votes (so, if a photo has 7 support, 3 oppose, 2 neutral, should the total be 10 (featured) or 12 (not featured)) or should/are they handled simply as comments? -- Joolz 21:45, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I like to count them as comments - if someone dislike a picture to be featured, (s)he is able to vote oppose. --Avatar 22:14, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I think, we should count the neutral-votes too, because in case of political elections the abstentions are always counted. Are there any disadvantages, when counting them? Regards, norro 16:44, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

But in this case neutral is counted like oppose, isn't it? --Avatar 17:11, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

The disadvantage of that is they a neutral vote would indeed be an oppose vote. Also, I don't think abstentions have an effect on political elections (i.e., suppose Candidate A gets 50 votes, Candidate B gets 25 votes, and 200 people abstain/spoil their ballot paper - Candidate A would still win) -- Joolz 00:03, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Ack. Abstentions don't have any effect on political elections. But why do you say, neutral votes on FPC are "indeed [...] oppose vote[s]"? IMHO they doesn't effect this vote, too. Regards, norro 17:01, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think there may be a mis-understanding, when you said "we should count the neutral-votes too" what I first thought you meant was that neutral-votes should have an effect on the outcome of the vote (and therefore they would automatically be the same as an oppose vote) however I think what you meant was that we should count how many there are when making a decision, which I agree to to as well -- Joolz 19:05, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

new nominations

Shouldn't we put new nominations at the top to give the photos with less votes more exposure? It works very well on en FPCs. ed g2s • talk 11:43, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I like this idea and would support the change --Quasipalm 16:55, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. Done, yesterday. villy ♦ ✎ 05:29, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Requirement for oppose votes

I've noticed that a very large number of oppose votes - nearly all, indeed - are content free. They don't say what they don't like about the image, whether or not their issue with it is significant, nor for that matter if it is fixable. Though this is better than before, when people would bitch to hell and back (:-)), at least then there was some feedback.

Should we require (or strongly encourage) people to actually say why they oppose?

James F. (talk) 19:42, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Before I saw your post I was going to start one about the exact same topic, I think it should be a strict requirement, if photographers don't know why their work isn't liked how are they going to make better images that can pass FPC? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:16, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hi, i don't like this idea very much. for those reasons:

1. I think, the only statement of my vote is, whether i think it is excellent or it is not. That's the only reason of the FPC.
2. Sometimes there are no clear reasons.
3. I think, even users, who don't have the knowledge or vocabulary to explain exactly what they don't like, should be able to vote.
4. What to do with chinese comments, if i don't speak chinese and the voter doesn't speak english?

Regards, norro 09:20, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I think a oppose vote needs some explanation. If you have to write a reason as to why you don't like a picture, you go through a thought process. Just putting Oppose without some explantion is just too easy, I think it's lazy and discourteous to the artist/photographer. Also the explanation should be a sentence, and not a one word answer. Pixel8 13:09, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In elections, the outcome is usually a secret until the polls have closed. In FPC votes, the  Oppose comments are usually followed by a chain of "agree with above". Once some brave soul has been negative, it is easier for others to follow. The same is true for  Support but in a less pertinent way. All elections should be held with secret ballots. The voting in FPC is not voting. It is a sort of consensus, and should be recognised as such. Here we all vote and discuss just like a committee does in real life, and we all know what that means. LoopZilla 17:59, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

New nominations

The voting page is quite long now. I think it would be a good idea to remove candidates earlier if the result is clear. For example, the metronom image has 10 oppose votings and no supporting vote (beside the voting of the one who nominated the image). And vice versa, the "misty morning" image has countless support votings and no opposing vote. In both cases the result is clear and most likely won't change until the end of the voting period. In the German Wikipedia we remove candidats if they get 10 support votings with no oppose voice or 5 oppose votings with no support voice after one week. -- aka 14:23, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

•  Support :) norro 20:30, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

(Note: moved from Template talk:Featured pictures candidates -- Joolz 02:22, 14 July 2005 (UTC))

There are lots of candidates, this is due to two things - a backlog, some of the ones which are holder than 14 days haven't been proccessed yet, I've cleared most of it, there's 6 left which need doing (I should do it tommorrow), the second factor is simply a lot of nominations - an easier approach to fixing this is to reduce the voting time, say, from 14 down to 12 days, this would remove another 7, bring the total on there currently to 53. -- Joolz 02:26, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

WikiMania and most popular FPCs

There was a brief mention on the Village Pump, but as part of WikiMania there will be a competition for the best content created by Wikipedians across all Wikimedia projects — Wikimania:Competitions.

For the media categories, it would be a good idea if someone went through the Commons FPC archive and nominated some of the most popular images created by Wikipedians. The images themselves should be added to the galleries at Wikimania Media Competition. -- Solipsist 08:41, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Criteria

It seems to me that a lot of people are voting for these pics based in large part for their usefulness for wikipedia. I don't really think this should be a criteria as the commons is supposed to be more than simply the wikipedia pictures database. Its used for all current and future wikimedia projects, and as a repository for freely available pictures. I think this needs to be made explicitely clear on the voting page, since many people seem to be using pictures' usefulness as a primary criteria. What do people think?Peregrine981 14:13, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

• Agree absolutely, especially since "usefulness for Wikipedia" is not a well defined criteria, but very subjective, depending on the broad or narrow mind of the voter. Apart from strict technical aspects (like blurred, over-/underexposed, dull, already seen a thousand times etc.), this is about striking pictures and visions, and this is already sufficiently subjective. --wpopp 15:10, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

• Also agreed. Now that we have Commons, one of the principle criteria for FPC on the En Wikipedia is that an image should be a good illustration for an article on Wikipedia. In fact we explicitly direct contextless images to FPC on Commons. -- Solipsist 17:46, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Unable to nominate a picture

Hello!

I tried to submit three pictures but the links won't appear properly. I think the filenames are too long. Here are the free pictures I try to submit: <removed>

Please help.--Cutter 03:06, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

You simply haven't created those pages yet. Try clicking on one of the red links. dbenbenn | talk 02:31, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

I get it. Thanks.--Cutter 03:06, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Displaying resolution info on candidates

I propose that we display resolution info on nominees in the heading besides the name, e.g.:

Image:Snow crystals 2b.png (2400x3600)

This would make it easier for voters to make an informed decision on whether to vote support or oppose based on the resolution of the image. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:08, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

• Excellent idea! - gobeirne 04:38, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
• I agree, it is a great idea. Pixel8 16:55, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
• I agree. I could even do the job for the current candidates... --Gloumouth1 19:16, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

FP status from other wikimedia projects?

If a picture gains Featured status on another wikimedia project (eg en:w:), should that automatically "carry over" to commons? Do we trust their judgement? :)

For example w:Image:Yarra_river_near_city_medium.jpg is featured, but Image:Yarra river near city medium.jpg doesn't even mention it. This is a case where the image was first uploaded to en, and then uploaded to commons.

Sometimes it happens to images that were only ever uploaded to commons, for example en:Image:Melbourne yarra twilight.jpg. The image description page even incorrectly gives the impression that the image was featured at commons, when it hasn't been -- only at en.

Thoughts? pfctdayelise 01:58, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, this is going to be a messy problem as we approach the goal of shifting all free images from WPs to commons. I would characterize it as being per-language - "Featured on en:w:", "Featured on ja:w:", etc. It's almost certain that some images will resonate strongly for a particular language group (an image of Ataturk for tr:, perhaps) and be considered outstanding by those speakers, and nobody else will get it. One could still have the "featured on commons", so in theory the best of the best could be "featured" here as well as in a dozen different language-specific projects. To reduce confusion due to mirroring trickery, it would be helpful if all the "featured" notes were recorded here rather than in the projects. Stan Shebs 13:50, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Well it needn't be that messy. If an image is hosted on Commons, its still possible to put independant tags Featured tags on each language Wiki. See for example w:Image:Taj Mahal in March 2004.jpg which has a {FeaturedPicture} tag on the En page (check the 'edit page' there to see how this works) and a Commons {FeaturedPicture} tag on the Commons page. When viewing the image description page on En, both tags are visible, but on Commons, only the Commons tag is visible.

Ideally pictures on Commons get featured solely on consideration of the picture itself. When used on each language Wiki, they get featured on the basis of the picture and consideration of how well the picture illustrates an article in that language space. -- Solipsist 22:32, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeaaaaaah, that's the theory...but I sincerely doubt the results (of voting at en, and voting at commons) would be much different. There are plenty of good pictures that have been FPed by en and not commons. Does that mean we should put them all through FPC, again? It just seems like an unnecessary doubling of resources. But, meh. Maybe it's not important anyway. pfctdayelise 23:23, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Edited local copy is exactly the mirroring bit I don't care for - for one thing, it's somewhat convoluted to get to it from here, and you won't see it unless you know to go look for it explicitly. It would be helpful if people in different projects saw which pictures were featured, so they can consider adopting them too. Stan Shebs 01:44, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

I created the Template {{Featured picture on}} for pictures featured on other projects, what do you think about it? Should we also create a different category for these pictures? -- Gorgo 17:46, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Pictures of art

I'm outta here

What do people think about nominating pieces of art? I think this piece is pretty cool, but it's more a reflection on the art than the image itself, right? ...and I guess a similar reasoning applies to things like maps, yeah? pfctdayelise 12:07, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm, this is a tricky question. It's hard to see a digitized image of a famous painting being a work of art in a way a digitized photograph is. I'd vote against including images of paintings in featured pictures. --Lumijaguaari (моє обговорення) 03:19, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm in favor of it, as long as the digital images are very high quality. The whole point of Wikimedia is make freely available material that would otherwise be hard (or harder) to find, and the point of featuring content is to identify the best, most interesting such material. Featured Pictures is not a photography contest; it's for featuring the best images, period.--Ragesoss 17:10, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

OK - it's just that I fear that the featured pictures category will be cluttered with too many images of paintings, as much as I do love them. --Lumijaguaari (моє обговорення) 05:31, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Why dont we subdivide featured pictures into categories? Personally I am only interested in works created by wikipedians, not free content downloaded from elsewhere. While US government pictures or Rembrandt self portraits may be great, highlighting these serves a different purpose than highlighting the things that have been created as part of the wikipedia processes. Justinc 22:27, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

FPs are divided into categories (see COM:FP), just not by source. IMO it's a false distinction and I don't know that Commoners would appreciate the extra hassle. I think people should just nominate whatever they want. If you want to nominate art, go ahead (I notice Shizhao nominated The Last Supper). If people think it's a good idea, they'll support it. If not, they'll keep voting oppose. Consensus in action! pfctdayelise (translate?) 02:42, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Justinc. It would be nice to be able to see featured pictures that are original to Wikimedia, separate from other featured pictures. Maybe we could have a new category, Category:Featured pictures original to Wikimedia. Of course, the place to discuss it would be Commons talk:Featured pictures, not here. User:dbenbenn 08:36, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the FPs are already divided by general subject - which is good. I don't share the opinion about the distinction Justinc mentioned - I don't care where the pics come from. But like I said, there's so much beautiful art (like this lovely painting) that they'd soon make up a significant percentage of featured pics. Well of course what it depends on is what people nominate - perchance my fear is in vain. It seems that people want to not change any policies - OK, let's keep this but let's at least create a new subcat under FP. --Lumijaguaari (моє обговорення) 07:47, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Link from individual templates back to COM:FPC

I find it really annoying that there's no link back to COM:FPC after you've voted for one picture. I think people often like to vote for several at a time. I'm not sure how the template system works, but is it possible we could insert such a link automatically on all the individual nomination templates? Thanks. pfctdayelise 12:44, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Why don't you use new windows or tabbed browsing? Or just the back-button? --SehLax 13:00, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

I use tabbed browsing, and the back button. But is it hard to insert a link? pfctdayelise 13:10, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

One easy way to fix this would be to make candidate subpages be Commons:Featured picture candidates/Image:FOO instead of Template:Featured pictures candidates/Image:FOO. See Commons:Featured pictures/Animals, for example, which has a small link to the parent page Commons:Featured pictures at the top. Apparently MediaWiki automatically makes this link for Commons namespace pages, but not Template pages. User:dbenbenn 19:34, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

I always wondered why we set them up as templates rather than anything else. w:Wikipedia:Transclusion costs and benefits doesn't seem to indicate that transcluding templates is any better or worse than transcluding regular pages. So what if we set up COM:FPC to get rid of the strange Template:Featured pictures candidates, and just had nominations at COM:FPC/Imagename that were directly transcluded onto COM:FPC? Is there any benefit to the current system that I'm not aware of? pfctdayelise 23:10, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

You need Template:Featured pictures candidates because it is used by all the different language versions of FPC, such as Commons:Propositions d'images remarquables. User:dbenbenn 00:54, 10 January 2006 (UTC)