User talk:DPeterson (WMF)

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, DPeterson (WMF)!

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-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 20:48, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Interview for Wikimedia Blog

Hi Donna,

you sent me the following message. To answer your question: Yes, I'm interested in a short interview.

Greetings

Arcalino

Hi Arcalino,

My name is Donna and I'm a communications volunteer with the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. I hope sending this message in English is okay, but let me know if you would prefer another language. We have a feature on the Wikimedia blog [1] to profile the photographers behind the beautiful photos that become Picture of the Day (POTD) on Wikimedia Commons. You can see some of our past POTD posts here: https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/communications/picture-of-the-day/ Given that your photo "Bruegge, View from Rozenhoedkaai, blue hour" is scheduled for 25 June, we'd love to do a short interview with you by email to discuss your photography and your POTD. Please let me know if you would be interested! You can email me DPetersonwikimedia.org or respond on my talk page.

Thanks,

DPeterson (WMF) (talk) 23:58, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Interview for Wikimedia Blog

Hi,

Of course ! Yo can send me an email with this link Special:EmailUser/Ludo29. Ludo (talk) 06:54, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Interview for Wikimedia Blog

Dear Donna,

here are the answers of your questions:

• Where are you from? Have you always lived there?

I am from Wiesbaden, Germany, living around this area for more than fifty years.

• How old are you? (Optional)

see above…

• Do you have a family?

Yes, I am married and I have 5 wonderful daughters.

• Are you a professional photographer or do you consider it to be more of a hobby?

Photographing is one of my favorite hobbies.

• If it is a hobby what else do you do outside of Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons?

I work as a doctor in private practice, which helps financing the hobby ☺

• How long have you been a photographer? How did you first get started?

I am taking pictures for more than 35 years. I startet with a Canon A1 in the 70th, last century.

• Are there particular types of photos that you specialize in, or especially enjoy taking (i.e. specific subject matter, landscapes, portraits, black-and-white, etc.)?

Not really, a lot of pictures are family images, besides that architecture, natur, landscapes and of course „blue hour shots“.

• Why do you contribute to Commons?

It is wonderful to contribute to a very useful project.

• How long have you been contributing, and how did you first get started?

I just started this year contributing to commons.

• How has your experience on Commons been?

... I learn a lot...

• Can you tell us a little more about your featured picture? Is there a story behind it?
• What were you doing when you came across the shot?

I spent a few days with my family in the wonderful city of Bruges in Belgium, walking around, sightseeing, taking a lot of pictures. The combination of a very nice old town, canals, wonderful weather inspired me to try a set of „blue hour shots“.

• Was there anything tricky/interesting about the composition of the shot or the situation you were in?

I had to use the tripod, a shutter speed of 25 seconds, half an hour after sunset and I took a number of pictures. The featured picture ist my favorite one.

• What do you hope the picture will communicate to viewers?

A sense of calm...

• How do you feel about having your photo featured on Commons and in the Wikimedia projects?

I am proud that my second upload became a featured picture. It is the only one so far.

Arcalino (talk) 15:04, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Interview for Wikimedia blog

Sure, I'll do an interview.—Love, Kelvinsong talk 17:51, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Interview for blog

Dear Donna,

I got your message about the VipsScaler, and, while I don't know exactly what you need, but I can give some general thoughts, and will gladly answer any questions you have.

I've been editing Wikipedia since about early 2006, and started doing image work on a large scale about 2007. My restoration works currently make up about 4% of all [[:en:WP:FP|featured pictures on English Wikipedia. So, I'm probably a bit more passionate about images than most people.

One issue, however, that I had for many years is that large PNGs could not be displayed. To understand why this is a problem, you need to understand the common image types. JPEG, probably the most common image type on the internet, uses lossy compression. If the JPEG is saved at too low of "quality" settings, it will appear to be made up of little squares. Worse, saving JPEGs repeatedly also degrades their quality. This means that if you edit a JPEG image and save it again, the quality of the image gets reduced, and, if many people edit a JPEG image, it can degrade immensely. Have a look at File:Dred_Scott_photograph_(circa_1857).jpg at full resolution. After 8 people edited it, a lot of artefacting is visible, which wasn't in the original.

A way around this is to use a lossless filetype, such as TIFF or PNG. Of these two, TIFF is much harder to support, as it can use a wide range of compression algorithyms, and, perhaps worse, it tends to have around twice the file size of the equivalent PNG. Commons has a file size limit of about 100 megabytes last I checked. TIFF can easily go above that, whilst not being particularly large.

However, for many years, PNG files over a certain size could not be displayed on Wikipedia. They could be downloaded, but gave an error when thumbnailed, and on their file page, making it appear that the file was corrupt. This was, as you can image, a strong discouragement from uploading PNGs, and it wasn't particularly uncommon for a PNG file to be marked for deletion, simply because it could not display.

And now, finally, we get to VipsScaler. VipsScaler allows PNGs to be thumbnailed even for images of quite large sizes. For example, File:Gustave Doré - Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote - Part 1 - Chapter 1 - Plate 1 "A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination".png is 99.15 megabytes, but thumbnails fine. As the upload limit is around 100 megabytes last I checked, this means that almost all PNGs should display without problem, a great boon to people who work with images.

Now, is the situation perfect? ...Not entirely. Sharpening is applied to JPEG images, but not to PNG images, meaning that, in many cases, if you upload both a PNG and a JPEG, the JPEG will look better on Wikipedia. I understand there are arguments for why a certain class of images - diagrams - might benefit from not being sharpened, but this doesn't really justify crippling an entire file format, it seems, instead, a reason to allow the amount of sharpening to be defined for a specific file. But that is a relatively minor issue compared to the old situation where PNGs might be accidentally deleted.

Adam Cuerden (talk) 22:07, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Interview request

Donna,

Received your request for short email interview. Am available for same. Please advise. Thank you. KDS444 (talk) 01:16, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Hmmmm... Short attention span? KDS444 (talk) 14:03, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Draft post

I don't suppose it would be possible to lose the Battle of Belmont? I messed up the colours so badly on that one, and have been planning to redo it for a bit. Heh...

But, that said, it looks pretty good. The only comments I'd make to the actual text is that A. "He points to this 72 megapixel image restored by Adam Cuerden as an example of an image that previously wouldn't have been able to be rendered:" - I presume that's meant to refer to the Abraham Lincoln picture? It's not entirely clear.

And, finally, B. Be careful encouraging WLM to use TIFFs. Remember that PNGs are half the file size of TIFFs; the thing is, when faced with an inability to upload a file, due to hitting the size limit, the natural tendency of most people is to scale it down until it's under the size limit.

You can see how this is a problem if they're using an inefficient file format. Adam Cuerden (talk) 18:47, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

User_talk:Jorgeroyan#Proposal_at_FP

So you really think it´s a good idea to promote a photgrapher who takes hidden pictures of minors in public transport? See Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Berlin-_Teenage_passengers_in_the_U-bahn_-_2863.jpg. Or of a bunch of young folks in a public pool and upload the pictures without any hint that they consented to that? Very strange behaviour of the WMF here. Weissbier (talk) 07:29, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Weissbier, thank you for bringing this to our attention. I should have been more vigilant in reviewing this and appreciate that you have flagged the issue. Matthew (WMF) (talk) 19:32, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Just trying to help. Weissbier (talk) 06:17, 11 October 2013 (UTC)