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Which language should be used for categories for parties

The categories for political parties sometimes use the original name and sometimes an English translation of the name. To avoid disputes and category moves we should get a simple guideline on this.

There are three options:

1. Categories for political parties should always be in English with redirects from the original name(s).
   •  Support Most categories are in English. (?)
   •  Support We do not have to decide which name to use if the region is multilingual.
   •  Oppose Most users search for the party will use the original name as they are from this region.
   •  Oppose We have to find a proper translation.
2. Categories for political parties should always use the original name of the party. In multilingual regions the most common name for the party is used with redirects from the other official names. There can be redirects from the English translation and transliterations.
   •  Support We do not have to find a proper translation.
   •  Support Most users looking for the party will use the original name as they are from this region.
   •  Support Categories about proper names are not required to be in English.
   •  Oppose Most categories are in English. (?)
   •  Oppose We have to decide which name to use if the region is multilingual.
3. Categories should be in English if there is significant coverage about the party in English. For only locally known parties the original name should be used.
   •  Support De facto standard for most categories also in other fields.
   •  Oppose Also if parties have broad international coverage most people who search for this party are locals.
   •  Oppose Leads to multilingual category structures and uncertainty for casual users.
   •  Oppose Lengthy CfD debates will be needed for each single case.

GPSLeo (talk) 17:02, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Voting

English translation

1.  Support in case of countries with non-Latin script, or where the local community chose to adopt the English translations. --Enyavar (talk) 10:12, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
2.  Support That would probably be the most consistent solution to the issue. Abzeronow (talk) 17:33, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
3.  Oppose The English names may be unknown to those interested in the party, and can be hard to figure out where several translations and several similarly-named parties exist. –LPfi (talk) 08:16, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Why do most countries, outside of a few in Europe, have their party names in English regardless of what the dominate language in those places is then? It's absurd to act like people who are interested in those parties can't find them when it's clearly not an issue for most of the world outside of like 3 countries in Europe. --Adamant1 (talk) 17:52, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Original name

1.  Support in case of countries with Latin script, where the local community chose to uses native names. --Enyavar (talk) 10:12, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
2.  Support as per the general rule in Commons:Categories#Category names: "Category names should generally be in English. However, there are exceptions such as some proper names..." Party names are proper names and qualify for the exception. --Rudolph Buch (talk) 10:29, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
3.  Support as per Rudolph Buch above. –LPfi (talk) 08:16, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
4.  Support per above. Keep their original name but otherwise transliterate to Latin script. — Huntster (t @ c) 16:49, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
5.  Support for both European parties and organizations and non-Latin script using parties and organizations. This would still be better than status quo. Abzeronow (talk) 18:31, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
6.  Oppose Per my comments in the discussion about why this is a completely untenable way to do things. --Adamant1 (talk) 12:38, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

English name or original name depending on coverage

1.  Support This seems like the most reasonable option and not far from what we already do. Nosferattus (talk) 19:53, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
2.  Oppose This leads to mish-mash category structures like we see in Hungary or Colombia - partly native, partly English, depending either on the whim of category creators or on long boring discussions for each single case. --Enyavar (talk) 10:12, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

   What long boring discussions have there been about how to name categories outside of this one? --Adamant1 (talk) 10:37, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

   Maybe you underestimate German pain tolerance when principles are on the line: Magadan's list of unbelievably snoozy discussions has of course a category subsection #;-D But I maintain the belief that net-nerds are net-nerds anywhere in the world. On this specific topic, I thankfully remember no boring discussions on Commons, and this one is still rather tame. --Enyavar (talk) 13:25, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

3.  Support Jmabel ! talk 18:47, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
4.  Oppose "Widespread coverage" in the English-speaking world does not equate the English name being well-known in the country concerned, which would be the relevant metric. –LPfi (talk) 08:16, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Jmabel's solution of 17:57, 27 March 2023 (UTC) below

1.  Support  — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 19:27, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

King of ♥'s solution of 07:30, 29 March 2023 (UTC) below

1.  Support  — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 19:29, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Keep the status quo

(Status quo can be checked here: Category:Political parties by country. For non-English native countries we see the followng pattern: most European and some South American countries use native language names; all countries with non-latin alphabets and several with latin alphabets use English names; a few countries use mixed languages)

1.  Support  — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 19:31, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
2.  Comment I would probably support if I knew what the status quo is. –LPfi (talk) 08:16, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
3.  Support - oh, a new option that I also support, per my votes on options 1+2. --Enyavar (talk) 08:42, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
4.  Support This is the only option that allows the people who are actually creating the categories and organizing the media in the to determine the names of categories. Instead of making it so an extremely small minority of nationalist POV pushers can dictate how everyone else has to do things when they aren't even involved in the area or organizing media related to political parties. Although I'm still of the belief that this proposal should null and void whenever it's concluded because you can't create a single exception to a wider policy based a false premise that there's only two options for how to name political parties. At the end of the day this should have been a proposal to change the rule, not make an exception to it for one topic area. --Adamant1 (talk) 17:55, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

I believe the two choices given constitute a false dichotomy. I would propose the following:

1. If the official party name is in English, obviously use English. Note that even here we often need to add country name to disambiguate, e.g. Category:Democratic Party (United States)
2. If the party has official names in multiple languages, one of which is English, we use English. E.g. Category:Liberal Party of Canada, known equally as Parti libéral du Canada (French)
3. If the official party name is in a different language, but the party itself routinely uses a consistent English-language name to refer to itself in English-language communications, use that English-language name. E.g. Category:Justice and Development Party (Turkey), known in Turkish as Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, commonly abbreviated as AKP, and consistently refers to itself in English as the "AK Party" should probably be moved to Category:AK Party (which, remarkably, isn't even a redirect at time of writing). Also, this is presumably why we favor Category:Communist Party of China over Category:Chinese Communist Party (the latter being a soft redirect).
4. If the party itself does not consistently use a particular English-language name (e.g. if they do not routinely translate documents into English), but there is a consistent or predominant name used in English-language publications, we should use that. E.g. Category:Iron Guard for the interwar and WWII-era Romanian party officially known as the Garda de Fier and before that as the Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail ("Legion of the Archangel Michael").
5. If none of these apply, and English-language sources do not translate the party name, we should use the name as normally printed in English-language sources; in particular, we should use Latin alphabet. E.g. Category:Likud, Category:Bharatiya Janata Party.

Naturally, soft redirects (using {{Category redirect}}) should be provided from other reasonable names. - Jmabel ! talk 17:57, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

There is another potential option: use the common abbreviation if it is better known than the actual name. Probably not for the top level category, but using "SPD" in the subcategories of Category:Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands makes a lot of sense. El Grafo (talk) 07:05, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Further note: if there is no evidence of any significant number of mentions of a party in English, or little consistency in how it is referred to in English, then we should probably use the untranslated name, probably transliterated into the Latin alphabet. - Jmabel ! talk 18:00, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

To clarify with redirects a meant {{Category redirect}}. You describe the current situation which results in inconstancy or if me make this an official guideline a very complex rule with many unclear cases. I would really dislike if we get categories with subcategories where all huge parties are translated and all small parties are not. GPSLeo (talk) 18:08, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

•  Comment What is this, like the 4th place now the topic is being discussed? Either way, it would have been good to alert the people in the CfD about the discussion. Otherwise, it just comes off like yet another attempt to do a run around. Especially since this was started after Ricky81682's keep vote. Seriously, where's it going to go next once this inevitably doesn't turn out how you want it to?

As to the proposal, I agree with Jmabel that it's a false dichotomy. There simply can't be a hard and fast rule about how to name categories that applies to every situation, because that's just not how this works. As Jmabel has pointed out, if there is no evidence of any significant number of mentions of a party in English then there's no point in translating it. In situations where such evidence exists though, then I think Jmabel's alternative proposal is a perfectly reasonable compromise. Not that there needed to a proposal here for that, since it essentially follows how we are already doing things, but whatever. However this turns out I hope it will be the last discussion about it and the "losing" side won't just try to take their personal grievances about this to yet another forum. Either way, the proposal as currently framed by GPSLeo is clearly untenable. So I can't personally support it. Although I think Jmabel's idea is good, if not semi-redundant. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:56, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I created this proposal because this is the place to define policies. General policies should not be defined at Categories for Discussion or Deletion request pages. GPSLeo (talk) 16:32, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

That's just disingenuous. If this was about the general policy then you wouldn't have made the scope of the proposal just about political parties, but every category for subjects where the names are commonly used in English. Also, if this was about the general policy, there would be an option in the proposal to maintain the status quo. Or there'd at least be an option to use the English name when it's common, but not when it isn't. Your clearly don't want to do either one of those because it wouldn't turn out in your favor. It probably still wont, but whatever. All your doing is rehashing the CfD. Except doing in it way that's extremely bad faithed and unfair to the other participants. You can't create a side proposal for something that's already being discussed somewhere else just because you don't like how the conversation is going. --Adamant1 (talk) 16:47, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

• For context, I assume this is because of Commons:Categories for discussion/2023/03/Category:Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany where I must have given a good opinion since the only response is a wholesale re-write of policies lol. Yes, terrible false dilemma and I support Jmabel's analysis/proposal. We have Category:Schmalhorststraße 1 because it is the name of an office building and I don't think anyone cares enough to come up with an English language name for this. When we have some sort of English-language name, we use that. Again, if you want to change the overall consensus for English for category names, start at the top and see if people have changed their views but it seems utterly bizarre that we must keep Category:Mumbai rather than a redirect to non-English text because people have an absolute obsession over German political parties not having their name in English. I don't think political parties need a carve-out. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 19:21, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

• Also, what is "sufficient coverage"? I'd say a Wikidata item and an English-language article is enough. I don't think Commons needs to be debating whether the English-language "coverage" is "sufficient" enough to figure out whether this political party category should in English when it is only to store images that relate to a political party. Different if we had various translations or Romanizations like I see over Japanese language stuff. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 19:27, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Fully agreed on the false dichotomy. Consensus doesn't come from a few users dictating for everyone how to use Commons. It seems this movement is a hot topic for a few German users who want everyone in the world to use English party names? Or something? Yeah, big nope on that. Names are Names, we don't necessarily translate them, and doing so can be confusing. The Partido Revolucionista Institutional (PRI) gets a changed word order in English - is it IRP or RIP? Same happens with most French parties? So: every country's users should find their own consensus on how they prefer the category names, within some parameters: Full name and no abbreviations for the main category; the category should correspond either to English Wikipedia or the native language's WP, and (sorry Russia/Armenia/Thailand/Egypt) the latin alphabet should be enforced for the category names. And that's it. For people who don't speak Italian, Spanish and German, we create Redirects from the English language to the chosen name. "Category:Austrian People's Party? Yup, leads to the correct place, if Austrians has found a consensus to translate into English. Category:Bündnis 90/Die Grünen? Same, if Germans appear to have found a consensus to not translate to English. In that case however, we need a redirect from Category:Green Party (Germany) and maybe some other variants, so that people can find the correct category more intuitively. Another simple way is checking Category:Green parties, where I find a simple majority of English category names, but a plethora of non-English ones as well. --Enyavar (talk) 01:22, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

@Enyvar: Unless I'm missing something, you seem to have flipped to everyone else. The issue is a dispute over a few titles for German political parties where we have an English-language name and people wanting those pages to be kept in the German name. For the most part, we use an English-language name just for consistency and then would have a redirect from the German to the English (as I note, Mumbai is the category name). The PRI (in Mexico) is at Category:Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and has changed word order which is not a surprise; many languages use a different word order from English. As I noted, the office building that the Marxist-Leninist party is on has not article in English so we just use the German name because we need a name since this is all about organizing media anyways. This is the few users who are demanding that German political parties (and nothing else from what I can tell) be in German while languages with a non-Latin script be translated. Of course, this is the fourth separate discussion had on the subject which seems to go into the same arguments. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 07:13, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Ah, didn't check on the PRI, and sorry for getting a few things backwards. Yet I know that all parties in France are also listed here in the native tongue, and I can imagine the French might be similarly on the barricades once you start to change hundreds of categories because of a previously ignored rule. And if we only rename the main category while leaving the lower nodes on the category tree untouched, this will cause further claims of being wholly inconsistent: Would we rename all sub-categories as well? Where do we stop? Also note that we use stuff like Landkreis Nordsachsen instead of "Rural district of North Saxony". Other countries are fully committed to translate (Category:Lower Silesian Voivodeship instead of "Województwo dolnośląskie"). We can translate all kind of official names, but should we enforce communities to do it? Parties in France and Germany have official names, all I propose is we continue to use them. --Enyavar (talk) 11:12, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Parties in...Germany have official names, all I propose is we continue to use them. Not to answer for Ricky81682, but at least with the German political party that the original discussion was about the English name is official. Plus from what I can tell the English name is more widely used the German. The same also seems to be the case for a lot of other political parties. For instance the Communist Party of China is rarely if ever referred to as gongchandang or whatever the translation would be in none Chinese characters. So it's not as cut and dry as just going with whatever the political party is called in the original language "because communities" or whatever. Also, most countries don't really care about this. It's only a problem in a few European countries, including France and Germany, but they aren't the only countries out there. Plenty of "communities" either don't care or are already following the guideline as is, which is to have the category name in English if it's common. Not do whatever a "community" wants because "community." Again, at least in this case the political party already officially uses the English translation and it's more widely adopted then the German name. So it would be ridiculous to not go with English just because a few German users think the current policy is imperialistic or some nonsense. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:45, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Written like someone who never had to look up foreign-language categories for stuff they want to upload. The people who are involved in this discussion are not the entire community, but just a select few power-users in Commons who are on top fluent in English. People from the communities DO care once the disaster has been carried out (just like with the new interface that was brought upon us in January), people just don't participate in discussions beforehand because they weren't notified something might even become an issue. Aside from the fringe MLPD (0.1% and below), I can't even find any other party in Germany where the category name is in English. I find just the same scene for France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia - basically for most countries in Europe the general rule is "native party names". A few indeed, and among them some of the most populated political categories outside the Anglosphere. Well: Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Switzerland are the ones where I just checked and found a significant mixture of languages; and Romania, Finland, Slovenia, Baltics and Turkey go all-English apparently. Some more don't even count here, as they don't use the Latin alphabet. --Enyavar (talk) 16:32, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Written like someone who never had to look up foreign-language categories for stuff they want to upload. Sure, but I've looked at many foreign-language categories when organizing files or creating child categories. Like with Category:Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany I created two of the child categories that are in it and organized images having to do with the party by putting them into the categories, which I probably wouldn't have done if the whole thing was in German. In fact I probably spend more organizing images having to do with non-English speaking countries then I do the reverse. Even if that weren't the case, there's clearly many more benefits to having categories in English then there is having in the "native language." So your comment is rather vacuous. I definitely don't think category names should be in the "native language" if the people who speak that language aren't even the users who are organizing files related to the topic. Like with Category:Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany the only involvement the person who instigated this whole thing had with the categories or the files was him throwing a fit over the category being in English. Same goes for GPSLeo. I probably wouldn't have an issue with someone who has done a lot of work in a specific area saying a specific category should be in their "native language" because it makes their work easier. But in this case it just seems to social justice warriors who aren't involved in organizing images related to the categories that they are throwing the fit about.

Basically for most countries in Europe the general rule is "native party names". Sure, but for most of the rest of the world the rule is to have the names of the parties in English. This proposal also isn't just about creating a policy specifically for political parties in Europe either. It's possible I'm just missing your point, but I saying something should be done a specific way because it's being done a specific seems like a non sequitur. True, that aren't any other parties in Germany where the category name is in English. But so what? Are you saying that if X policy is being ignored, that's it fine because X policy is being ignored? If so, that's not really an argument. "Vandalism is fine because it's vandalism." Uh, OK? Right. --Adamant1 (talk) 18:01, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Please refer to Commons:IAR and read that essay careful: When ignoring a policy makes sense, I would rather ignore the policy than follow its letter through to the end, with potentially nonsensical results (like renaming 19th-century defunct parties). Also, please just don't bring up "vandalism" when talking about "using native language names". It's not the same.

That said, I see the big advantages in the English category system as well, especially with overarching category structures. We have "Members of the German Bundestag", "Members of Polish Sejm" and "Members of the Knesset". Going native would lead towards "Mitglieder des Bundestags", "Posłowie na Sejm" and "Knesset seated members" (as an example for a random structure that uses latin characters but doesn't follow conventions). So yes, we don't want total native structures, we want "Members of <parliament>". Notice how the parliament names don't get translated. For categorization, it is GREAT to be able to rely on categories always looking like "Political parties in <country>", "Politics of <city>" and "Election maps of <province>". Each city has "Buildings in...", because on a structural level, all cities have buildings, they are similar in that way. We need to keep all-English structures.

Party names are not part of this overarching structure. Similar party names do not imply similarities. "Die Republikaner" are not the German equivalent to "Les Républicains" in France or the "Parti républicain" of Tunisia. "Republicans" are positioned anywhere from the extreme left (Jacobin republican movement during the French revolution) over the center-liberal branches up to the extreme right (currently in the US). Translating the names, at best, helps an international reader understand the name of the party, but that can also be done via the description. The people who upload and categorize their own pictures, are predominantly not international and they understand their own language better than English. A person on the ground, seeing that an already complicated official party name is preferred in its English translation, might just give up. Why even bother categorizing anything anymore? Let the "imperialists" (your words) do that work, if they want that so desperately. To make it clear, that's not how I'd react, but I know some people who rather break than bend. I noticed that non-English countries with English party names seem to have less content in their political categories, and seem to have more badly categorized images, but I don't have a full overview and other factors might be at play.

So please see it this way: The more Commons prescribes English as the working language (and it prescribes a lot already!) the fewer people will be willing to work with it on a local level, and the more work people like you have to do: It shifts more and more work on the English-speaking part of the community because locals stop to be willing to use foreign-language category structures. As a correlating observation: The more local we get, the more native language tends to seep in. "Cemeteries in Paris"... and the names are all French. "Public baths in Hannover"... and the names are all German. "Festivals in Salvador"... and the names are all Portuguese. My argument is that this is okay+tolerable, and not in violation of the rules, especially not in violation of CC-CN. --Enyavar (talk) 09:45, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

With potentially nonsensical results (like renaming 19th-century defunct parties) I doubt that would be an issue because whatever sources are talking about them mostly already been written. It's pretty unlikely that the name of a 19th-century defunct party would ever change on Wikipedia or Wikidatas side either. There's no reason it would. So that's really a nonissue.

I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of what you said in theory, but it doesn't extend outside of political parties. For instance there's plenty of companies in none English speaking countries where their names are exclusively in English. It would be completely ridiculous in those cases to translate the names to German, Polish, or whatever the "native language" is just because that's how a few people from the local community want it. So it doesn't scale, which then goes back to question of why create a special cut out in the guideline for political parties? Personally, I see no reason to and in the grand scheme of things it's not at all useful to have the categories for one subject follow a specific rule, but not every thing else. It also imposes the preferences of Europeans on everyone else in the world. So you, I, Jmabel, and a few Germans vote on this. Then 99% of the rest of us who are fine with their countries parties being in English regardless of what language they speak have to just suck it up and rename the categories? How is that at all fair?

Like you said you don't want long boring discussions for each single case, which I sort of agree of with (although I think it's solved by just going with how Wikipedia/Wikidata has the name), but there's going to be way more long boring discussions if we try to force everyone else to change the name of the categories to the "native languages" when it's not their preference then there ever will by just telling the few Germans who have an issue with this to suck it up. There would have been zero discussion here if Chaddy hadn't of made it into an issue. It's ridiculous to overturn the whole system just because of one stubborn user who doesn't want to follow the policy. Also, I disagree with your statement that having category names in the "native language" will encourage more contributors. All it does is create ownership silos where only a few people can edit or find anything related to that topic. Some one in Poland should be able to find categories related to Germany if they want to just as much as the reverse. Your just creating a precedent where no one except an extremely small group of people can function anywhere in the project outside topics related to like North America and the UK. Including Germans. This actually screws them and other European editors over in the long run way more then any other group of editors. --Adamant1 (talk) 10:49, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

You claim it doesn't scale, but it does: We either rename none or we rename all: That is this proposal in a nutshell. The proposal essentially aims to change all parties' names to English, no matter how insignificant they are in today's media coverage, because at some point in the past their name has been translated to English. Even long defunct parties like Grütliverein have an English translation as "Grütli Union". I was reading the other discussions yesterday: This began with the MLPD. Your original attempt was to rename one of the most ignored parties of Germany (even nationally), and that tells of the far-reaching intentions here: rename EACH AND ALL parties in France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Peru... . This can potentially make your work in categorization a tad easier, it will also certainly make others people's work more difficult. It's ridiculous to overturn the whole system just because of one stubborn user who doesn't want to follow the policy. Exactly, so please give up on your idea to convert other countries' party names to an English variant. This is in essence an argument about whether or not proper names should get translated: Is “Gartenfriedhof in H.” okay or must it be “Garden cemetery in H.” for the sake of fairness to English speakers from other continents? I say don't mess with it, it's a local name! The editors from all the countries mentioned above chose at some time in the previous years to use their native language names, and that is still fine. Nobody gets excluded from any "ownership silo", as long as editors properly maintain Commons' structures: Politicians of character-string or Members of character-string is perfectly understandable even for people not from Italy or Czechia: See, this is a category about the members of the "character-string" political party. Easy concept, and there cannot even be confusion about whether or not you found the correct party, because the proper name has been given. Which one is the "Italian Social-Democrat Party": "Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano" or "Socialisti Democratici Italiani"? Sure, meaningful distinctions can be made even in translation, but now everyone gets to be equally confused: Foreigners still have no idea which party is which; regular Italians won't know which of their parties is which in translation; and only an extremely small group of people can function anywhere in the project, namely English-speaking content categorization specialists. Apparently just like you, I have categorized stuff all over the world, but rarely found problems with local idioms. A bit of a problem persists when an English translation gets used but all you ever heard of is the party's acronym: Which political party of Turkey is the famous "AKP"? Click all the categories to find out! But it shall be the decision of editors from Turkey how they spell their party names. Not editors from Germany or US. --Enyavar (talk) 13:05, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

so please give up on your idea to convert other countries' party names to an English variant. If you read all the other discussions you should know that's not "my idea." I never claimed other countries' party names should be in an English variant. I've actually been pretty consistent that I think it should depend on if the name is commonly in English or not. No one, including me, is forcing anyone from any country to do it that or doing it for them. Like you said, there's already plenty of countries where the party names are in the "native language." No one is saying that should change. The only reason it's came up to the degree that it has is because GPSLeo including changing all the party names to English as an option to the proposal. That's not on me though. If people in Turkey what their political parties in Turkish, cool. I could really care less. That's why people, including me, have said the proposal is a false dichotomy, because there no reason it has to be an all or nothing choice between every category being in English or the "native language." It only is because you and GPSLeo are making it one.

In the specific case of Category:Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany, the reason I changed the name to English originally was because I had already created to sub categories in English, was organizing images related to party, and it was just easier to do that if the main category was English. I would have been fine putting it back into German if Chaddy had of just asked me nicely to change it back on my talk page instead of being extremely aggressive about it and accusing me of edit warring/vandalism. Otherwise, I wouldn't have really cared. The idea that I'm trying to convert other countries parties to the English variant is just ridiculous though. To the degree that it became an issue was 100% on Chaddy for turning it into one. Although at the end of the day I think the name of the category should be determined by who ever is organizing the images in the categories. I could really care less if that person speaks Turkish, German, English, or some other language. English just happens to be a good bridge language that allows most of us to work together organizing images in a fairly sane way.

If some German speaker comes along and wants a category to be in German simply because they trying to push a German-centric nationalist POV, not because they are even working in the area at question, but an English speaker is then I'm going to go with the English speaker. Like I've said a bunch of times now we're here to organize files. Not just arbitrarily name categories after the whims of whomever wants to do POV editing at the time by having the name in "their" native language. That's not a functional way to do this. At the end of the day I could really give a crap what language the categories are in. Except, again, I was organizing files related to the party and it was easier to do if the category was in English. That's it. I'm not the one who escalated this or tried to make it about more then that specific category. The suggestion that we should just defer to the opinions of someone who isn't even working in the area at question just because of their race or cultural background is just ridiculous though. -Adamant1 (talk) 13:38, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I would simplify Jmabel's rules a bit, because to me being "in English" does not necessarily mean "composed of English words", but rather "commonly found in English sources" (in line with w:WP:NCUE). So I would suggest instead:

1. Use the name most commonly found in English-language sources. The title of its English Wikipedia article, if it exists, will generally meet this criterion.
2. If not commonly found in English-language sources, then use the name most commonly found in original-language sources. If the original language does not use the Latin alphabet, it should be transcribed in line with accepted romanization standards for that language on English Wikipedia.

King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 07:30, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

That would mean that you need to individually showcase whether or not to use English or the native language, which is hardly practical and possible to flip-flop whenever a scandal blows over to the English media sphere (or not, which means to revert to the native language when a party name has not been used for a decade or so). --Enyavar (talk) 11:12, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

I think that's essentially the system that Wikipedia/Wikidata uses and it seems to work fine in both cases. From what I've see are pretty strick about it to. Especially Wikidata. On our end the simpliest thing would be to just defer to how both of them have the name in the english fields/article title and just call it good there. The only probably might be someone arbitrarily changing the name on Wikidatas end, but then we can just refer to the title of the English Wikipedia article since they tend to be a lot more stable. --Adamant1 (talk) 09:11, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

The most commonly used name in English sources makes very much sense for Wikipedia in English, but for a multilingual project less so. It is absurd for me as Swedish speaking to have to figure out the most commonly used English name for a party in Chile, Finland or Iraq. This is especially difficult with more or less generic names, where small differences in the name, often not surviving the translation, may separate several existing or historic parties. Are the Finns and the True Finns the same or different parties? They are consistently Perussuomalaiset in Finland, while the Finnish Party is the historic Suomalainen puolue. Those uploading or using media about a party usually have access to the native name, but there is no reason they would know the English translation, other than by chance. –LPfi (talk) 08:07, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

You say that, but then it seems to not be an issue essentially everywhere in the world except for a few places in Europe since most countries use English regardless of what the dominate language there is. No one is having an issue finding categories for political parties regardless though. It's a totally made up problem. Otherwise be my guest and point out discussions before this one where people are saying they can't find categories for political parties. Hell, any discussion even slightly related to it being an issue. It's totally rediclious to act like this is an issue when no one has an issue with it and it clearly works perfectly fine most or all of the time in essentially every country in the world outside of like 4 places in Europe. Tell that to users in the rest of the world who clearly have no problem with the current way of doing things. Or does the fact that it works perfectly fine for them just not matter and the only thing that does instead is the opinion of an extremely small minority of European users? --Adamant1 (talk) 17:31, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Please just stop belittling the issues. First, it is NOT "like 4 places in Europe" but the clear majority of Europe's nations, plus about half of Latin America. I have mentioned this often enough that this piece of information should have penetrated already, but you keep bringing up your fake old argument. Unless you changed some hundred party names over Easter, the majority of Europe's party names are still not English. Second, the "current way of doing things" is NOT all-English. When we go to the local level, people tend to use local names. Native names. Look here, look closely, check some sub-category tree branches. Lots of English... and lots of Portuguese. Guess why? Back to politics, it is also NOT a made-up problem that many users barely know enough English to categorize stuff as "party", "vote" and "democracy". But you expect everyone to know how their local parties are most commonly translated in English media? Today I sorted a lot of "election apportionment diagrams" (a word I first learned here, about a year ago). Regular users called these diagrams "2019 Sabor results", or similarly. Guess why?

Commons has a whole lot of category trees that are hard enough. LPfi is totally right. Please come off your high horse, there are tens of thousands of regular users who are NOT "perfectly fine" with a purity-purist English platform. We who argue here with you, are the great exception among non-native-English participants. I repeat myself when I agree whole-heartedly that our category tree needs to be made straight out of English wood, we want organized branches. But the leaves, bark, moss or Xmas ornaments should be allowed to remain in the languages users find practical. --Enyavar (talk) 21:25, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

it is NOT "like 4 places in Europe" but the clear majority of Europe's nations @Enyavar: Admittedly I only counted to F, but the numbers at least to there are 12 countries in English, 2 in the "native" language, 2 are mixed. So at least to F English is clearly the majority language and it's "like 4 places in Europe" that aren't English. At least solely. Maybe the amount of countries that are in the "native" language changes from there, but I doubt it would be enough to equal the ones in English. Let alone make them the majority. Be my guest and count what languages the rest are in though. If it's drastically different, cool, but at least from what I've seen the clear majority of categories are in English.

it is also NOT a made-up problem that many users barely know enough English to categorize stuff. It 100% is a made up issue in Germany. Since like I said they are extremely proficient in English there. Is it a problem in say a place like Cambodia where only 15% of the population speaks English? Sure, but I don't see any Cambodian users clambering to have the rule changed. What I do see though is a small group of Germans who can speak English perfectly fine acting like it's a problem that affects them it clearly doesn't and that's all I was saying. The fact is, it's not a problem to the people who are making an issue out of it, period. --Adamant1 (talk) 19:57, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

1. parties are not any different from other organisations. a general rule for organisations is sufficient.
2. non-english latin-alphabet languages are not any more special than non-latin-alphabet languages.--RZuo (talk) 19:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

@RZuo: w:WP:NCUE disagrees with you: "Names not originally in a Latin alphabet, as with Greek, Chinese, or Russian, must be transliterated into characters generally intelligible to literate speakers of English." (Of course, you can feel free to argue that we shouldn't use English Wikipedia rules for titles, but I'm just saying that this is how it's actually done on the biggest Wikimedia project and seems to work fine.) -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 22:29, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

enwp is english. commons is multilingual. what're you quoting? is that even relevant? or are you literally saying non-latin-alphabet languages are not equal to latin-alphabet languages on commons?--RZuo (talk) 22:50, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

One valid position to hold is to keep everything related to a particular country in the local language even if there is a well-known English translation, e.g. Category:España, Category:北京, etc. (There are certainly some problems with that, e.g. which language should Category:Belgium be in?) But if we don't do that, then we are deciding to use English for all categories, and therefore we should defer to the standards already adopted by an English wiki community when faced with a topic with zero coverage in English sources: copy Latin titles verbatim, transcribe non-Latin titles. Essentially, this is our best guess as to how English sources would write the title if they existed, and running English text pretty much never keeps non-Latin characters as-is. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 06:32, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

There are many compromises between the two. When using an English name for something, the name used in Wikipedia in English should probably be the a priori suggestion. However, that has little relevance on whether to use English at all. There is no reason to use the title English sources might use, when the actual sources use other languages. Now, the questions to be asked are whether there are technical or practical issues in using non-Latin characters (I guess there may very well be), and how far down the category tree it is essential that people without a local interest can decipher the category names. The ultimate solution, of course, would be to have category names work multilingually (which isn't easy, but ultimately necessary, I think). –LPfi (talk) 10:12, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

There is no a prior suggestion. This is a wiki. If there is a change in views, it can change. People create all sorts of things that get moved around. If people actually believe that things should reflect endonyms in the names of categories (we permit that for pages), then I suggest they start at the top with a move of France, Germany, big obvious stuff and get an actual broad spectrum of views rather than starting with a weird point about political parties (and not say organizations, churches, schools) that literally you will have three people who care. You want a broad change, then be bold and make the suggestion and own the fight. Don't quibble and make weird rules from bottom up and see how far it goes until you hit the actual top and then we have to reverse it all because it was actually unpopular when people think about it. I don't even know how we would resolve regional Indian political parties that could have their name in multiple languages other than a weekly CFD that no one will have any real care about. Ricky81682 (talk) 02:08, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

I said a priori, and I meant that the name used in the Wikipedia in English should be considered if we believe a category should have a name according to sources in English.

For the big stuff, there is much more international interest. Apart from more people discussing, there will be more non-local people using those categories. Having a party name in Meitei script is less of a problem (for e.g. me) than having to access all categories about Manipuri using that script. I wouldn't suggest moving Germany to Deutchland.

–LPfi (talk) 21:10, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Where are the guidelines?

For future reference: Where are 'guidelines' like this one here enshrined? This survey doesn't seem likely to attract more than a few dozen users, which is far from the hundreds of contributors who are later expected to follow it. Just so that future editors can be referenced to this survey, or that they can challenge it? All I know is Commons:Categories#Category_names, which is very general. Yet this whole thing including voting, implies that there have been previous rulechanges about proper naming of categories. I'd like to be made aware of the list where this rule will be added after the current survey has been archived. --Enyavar (talk) 10:12, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

solution for german cats

whenever argument arises, rename the category to "Category:Kategorie:<whatever name germans want>". we the rest of the world carry on and dont need to bother.--RZuo (talk) 19:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

this suggestion is as serious as it's joking, because if all the germans' opinions were set aside, there's no argument about the functioning practices and conventions.

so, move anything that they want to argue about to their own category tree, signified by the "Kategorie:" prefix. in their lilliput there they can argue as much as they want among themselves. whatever they want to fight over, doesnt spill over to subcats of Category:France, Category:Thailand, Category:Ethiopia, Category:Brazil, Category:Canada, Category:Fiji, etc.

you want your special treatment? you have it, your own category tree, unique in the world. might also consider building a Wikimedien Gemeinsamkeit or something like that.--RZuo (talk) 22:50, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I seem to need keeping repeating: The proper names of Brazilian parties were probably not created by Germans. This concerns over 30 countries, why are y'all so focused on Germans? If Adamant had started this thing by renaming Category:Bloc Québécois into "Quebec Block (party)", I guess there'd be a whole different Résistance against English name translations. The convention is that proper names may be used as long as it's latin alphabets, and the categories of Brazil, France and even Canada show that the locals use their proper names. Best, --Enyavar (talk) 07:38, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

@Enyavar: Just an FYI but I've renamed categories to English before and there was never an issue when I did. Except for now with Germans for some reason. That's why I'm focused on Germans, because their the only ones who have had a problem with it. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:51, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

That's fine in theory. What led to this is that I was organizing images related to German political parties and it was just easier at the time to have the categories in English since I don't speak German. Plus, German's call the party by the English name anyway. So the question is what do in those situations. It would be completely ridiculous to have the parties name in German when the party itself uses English and the German's who want the category to be renamed aren't even involved in organizing images related to it. Political parties, there's plenty of countries were people don't predominantly speak English, but that's the language the name of companies in those countries are in. Thailand being one example of many. At the end of the day it shouldn't really matter if someone from Thailand thinks Five Star Production should called be called "Kār p̄hlit radạb h̄̂ā dāw" or whatever just because they speak the language and what to push a nationalist agenda by renaming it. That would be a ridiculously unworkable way to do things. So why should German's be an exception, instead of them just sucking it up and accepting that's not how we do things? --Adamant1 (talk) 19:56, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I am pretty sure the German names are those normally used, and that the English names see use mostly when having conversations in English with foreigners. Is trying to keep this project multilingual "pushing a nationalistic agenda"? I assume that we have a pretty tiny percentage of people from countries where English isn't widely known participating – those who are comfortable using English. You say the name of companies in Thailand are in English; for the example company, the English name isn't even mentioned in the Thai Wikipedia article (other than in the internet references). –LPfi (talk) 20:18, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

the English names see use mostly when having conversations in English with foreigners. So the evidence says otherwise. Germany is one of the most fluent English speaking countries in the world, with up to 50% or more of the population using it daily. In conversations with each other, not just to foreigners. In the case of the party that led to this, Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany, they routinely use the English name. Including in their own documents and website. Neither one has anything to do with "conversations with English speaking foreigners."

the English name isn't even mentioned in the Thai Wikipedia article (other than in the internet references). The logo for their Tahi Wikipedia article is in English. So are their social media accounts, name on their website (even the one in Thai) and the URL name, as well as the internet references. So it's ridiculous to act like they don't go by "Five Star Production" just because some random Wikipedia editor decided not to use that name in the body of a Wikipedia article. Obviously that's not authoritative. Nor should it be.

As a side to that, in your edit comment you said "English when talking English is pretty natural." Nowhere did I claim the only reason I used English for the name of the category is because I speak English. Sure, that was one factor. But there were multiple reasons I went with English besides just that I speak it. Honestly, I probably would have just gone with German if it wasn't the case that the party uses that language in their literature and there's a high percentage of English speaking German's. It's a distinction without a purpose if more then half the country is fluent in English and uses it daily though. --Adamant1 (talk) 21:40, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Look at the URLs of the pages you link: "mlpd.de/english". Those are pages targeted at the English-speaking. Their front page is indeed in German, and I would be very surprised if Die Zeit used "Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany" when discussing the party. I cannot believe you are serious when saying "50% of [Germans are using English] daily. In conversations with each other". From where do you get that? Can some Germans confirm? (Using English when talking English referred to things like the /english web pages, not you.)

Anyway, as I am not German, I can only confirm that in Finland, also with high proficiency in English, parties aren't discussed by their English names. In fact, the only Finnish party name I know in English is the (True) Finns, which I gave as example (I still assume all major parties have quite some material in English).

–LPfi (talk) 09:21, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Those are pages targeted at the English-speaking. @LPfi: Yeah, obviously. English speaking Germans though. Like someone else said it's extremely small niche party even Germany. So who else would be targeting? As to the states, do a Google search for "How many Germans speak English." The numbers are extremely easy to find. Here's one from Wikipedia. According to that 56% of the population speak English as a second language. There's plenty of other websites out there with similar stats that you could have easily found yourself if you bothered to take time to research this stuff before having an opinion about it. --Adamant1 (talk) 20:16, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

That table gives 75% for Finland. Still, I don't use English when talking to Finnish or Swedish speakers (other than at the universities). I doubt any German party's English pages are targeted at German speakers and I have a difficult time believing that you'd think so. (I don't know why I should search for those figures when I know the situation from before. The point is not whether people understand English, but whether it is practical to use the language – I gave myself as example: I don't think my English is bad, but still I don't know these translations.) –LPfi (talk) 19:46, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Who are they targeted to then? As to your last point, come on. Are you seriously going to argue that German users aren't going to know that the English word for "Kommunistische" is "communist" or "political" is English for "Partei."? I don't speak any German but it's still extremely obvious to me what Kommunistische or Partei mean just by looking at the words and sounding them out. --Adamant1 (talk) 21:18, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

You clearly don't know what Partei means, because it means party, not political. I seriously suspect that many Germans don't know what federal means, because the "Federal" level of the German government is the governments of the states, where as the federal level of the US government is the government of the nation as a whole. Besides, which, that's cherry picking; try Brandenburger Vereinigte Bürgerbewegungen / Freie Wähler or Bürger in Wut, or, as I mention below, Aufbruch C.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:01, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

"Partei" is almost exclusively used for political organizations, Prosfilaes, to the point that we usually don't add "politisch" to clarify. There are some figures of speech where "Partei" stands for "faction", but that's it. This is different from English where "party" has multiple more meanings, like "festivity".

Anyway, to answer Adamant's question: Multilanguage sections are pretty standard on many European websites, and English is in fact the first that gets done. In this case, they are obviously targeting an international communist audience. They can do little in politics other than networking; and communists are of course big on international worker solidarity. Just so you know, the MLPD has founded ICOR as an international organization to maintain "connections" to 700 parties and organizations world-wide. Or so they claim. Commons has files for some member parties of ICOR: Seven categories, all in their native tongues, except for MLPD ;-). Anyway, check out the official ICOR zombie website for some short amusement if you can still find it online - they have little to offer except "solidarity adresses" and "protocols" of their conspiratorial meetings. I know this because the ICOR article was rightfully deleted on de-WP about two years ago as unsourced self-promotion. Soooo... yeah, of course they have a prominent English language section. --Enyavar (talk) 22:42, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I disagree with your usage of the word "targeting" there. It's not targeting an international audience, but an English speaking one. They aren't mutually exclusive. The same way it wouldn't be "targeting" an international (or really regional) audience for a political party in France to have their website in French when upwards of 25% of Canadians speak the language. It would be rediclious to claim that the website for Mouvement Démocrate was written in French for French Canadians or visa versa. Again, it's not mutual exclusive and a French language site is for whomever speaks the language and wants to read it in that language. Including the 18% of people in Germany who speak French BTW. Like anyone from Germany who speaks isn't going to just read the website in French even though they speak the language "because German" or whatever. Right. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:24, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Veillez-vous croyez que le Parti Leniniste-Marxiste d'Allemagne a aussi une version français? Multi. Lingual. Boxhe moy, +Русский!! --Enyavar (talk) 23:46, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

And your point is what exactly? --Adamant1 (talk) 23:47, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

That you might have misunderstood the intention of that specific party (international networking in nine languages) to be their approach of communicating the party program to Germans, as evidenced by your exasperated question above Who are they targeted to then? --Enyavar (talk) 23:59, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

That wasn't exasperation. I was genuinely carious who LPfi thought the party was targeting. It seems like all three of us agree they are targeting English speakers. My only quibble is the suggest that "English speakers" somehow equates to "non-Germans." Since like I've said about 15 times now, they aren't mutually exclusive. I don't see anywhere that the English part of the MLPD website says "this page isn't for Germans who speak English" either. So your suggestion that they are specifically targeting non-Germans and not just people who speak English (German or otherwise) is clearly vacuous. --Adamant1 (talk) 00:12, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

What is vacuous is the suggestion of what you believe I suggested. We are talking here about a party with 3000 (claimed) members in total, which includes also a few Germans and non-Germans who don't speak German but prefer English over their native tongues, or who speak yet another language like Portuguese or Greek, which is not catered for. Yes, sure, the MLPD is big about inclusivity. Still, we're talking about a fringe group in a fringe group, and you are using it to argument for your all-English standards. I also see that you are once again stressing the absence of evidence to prove a technicality. --Enyavar (talk) 07:10, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

You are using it to argument for your all-English standards. Must have been why I voted to maintain the status quo, which allows for "most European and some South American countries use native language names" lol. It seems like you can't go more then a few messages without saying something patiently false about me or my position. Same goes for the claim that I'm some how "once again" stressing the absence of evidence to prove a technicality because of a year-old closed DR. But sure, whatever you say since you clearly know what your talking about. Most European and some South American countries using native language names is "all-English" LMAO. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:53, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I rarely participate in controversial discussions here on commons, and I'm not really great with names. Yet, each that I can distinctly remember from the last year somehow involved you, where you fiercely defended your hill. Dix was the first, and there was also Czechia, the korean fakemap DR and now this. But I can say I'm glad that my arguments (or those of others) were convincing this time around :-) So, all the best, --Enyavar (talk) 22:15, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

RZuo is essentially right: Political parties of France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Peru and all the other concerned places should be allowed to keep their proper names, and "we the rest of the w..." (=America?) stops meddling. LPfi's again right: Commons (and Wikimedia in total) has the most support from English-speaking nations, followed by strong support from Latin-writing nations, who share the alphabet. The less people are literate in English and/or Latin script, the less uploads. Yes, we are a Western dominated platform, and yes, we alienate a lot of people in Thailand, Ukraine, Morocco and Pakistan by our insistence to have all category names in "universally readable" Latin script. For a full global platform this is a reasonable policy which then basically means these users have to either phonetically transcribe (the above example by Adamant, which neither most normal Thai people nor most Westerners can read) or 'simply' translate into English. The result of the policy is that Wikimedia is not nearly as big a hitter in many nations as it possibly could be. We see this by the content we get: Every cobblestone in London is documented, while vast landscapes in Laos are missing. A tech gap is not the only reason this is so. <sarcasm>But fear not, the solution is obvious: Because regular folks in Cambodia and Tunisia are already alienated, it logically follows that therefore Commons needs to alienate Europeans just as much! Equal unfairness for everyone, maybe the Italians, Germans and French can be frustrated so much that they also upload less.</sarcasm> --Enyavar (talk) 21:25, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Look into the stats for how many people in Germany speak English. They are as or more fluent at speaking the language then people in some places in the United States are. If Germans are so frustrated by a category being in a language that they speak fine that they upload less then that's on them. Global policies shouldn't be based on or changed due to the preferences of a small minority of people who are just being nitpicky for no reason. Your analogy to Cambodia is completely ridiculous because only like 15% of the population speak English there. that's not at all comparable to Germany, where more then 50% of the population speaks it fluently, daily, and in the course of normal conversations with other Germans. --Adamant1 (talk) 21:50, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Amazing! I learn totally new stuff on commons these days. Germans are as fluent in English as Americans are (orly!), Germans talk English half their day (!!), Germans always call the MLPD by an English name (last time I saw their posters, I must have missed that); and Germans are suddenly the only minority who will be affected by a policy that is about to change the way we spell the parties of thirty-plus countries. Adamant, please share more of your insights with the world. Why have French, Italians and Brazilians really turned into Germans? Too many pretzels with sausage? Enyavar (talk) 05:41, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Germans are as fluent in English as Americans are (orly!) I know your just being smarmy because you don't have an actual argument, but that's actually not to far off from the truth considering 21% of adults in the US are illiterate. So Germans probably are as, if not more, fluent in English then people in the United States are.

Germans always call the MLPD by an English name Where did I at all insinuate they always call the MLPD by the English name?

Germans are suddenly the only minority who will be affected by a policy No, most everyone will be effected by it. Including the majority of people in the world who don't really care if the names of categories are in English. Including most European. But hey, F everyone else as long as a small minority of German users get what they want right? SMH. --Adamant1 (talk) 20:04, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Literacy is not a measurement of fluency; every person of normal mental development will achieve fluency in their native tongue. As for 21% of adults in the US being illiterate, that would be 21% being at level one or lower in literacy proficiency [1], and in Germany the number is ... 17.5% at level one or lower. Nothing to pat ourselves on the back for, but not all that different.

I don't know why you think most people in the world won't care if the names of categories are in English, that this is a issue of Germans alone. But go ahead, curse some more, that will impress us of your argument.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:33, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Literacy is not a measurement of fluency Sure, but it's a good indicator. The idea that every person of normal mental development will achieve fluency in their native tongue is just ridiculous. You clearly haven't spent time in any slightly low income area of the United States. 54% of adults in the country have a literacy level below sixth-grade. No one is going to argue that much of the population of the United States is mentally stunted.

I don't know why you think most people in the world won't care if the names of categories are in English. Because it's currently the status quo to have the names of categories in English depending on if it's common or not. So clearly most people don't care. That's what makes it the status quo. As to why it's a German issue alone, because Germans are the one who instigated this and making a fuss about it. Otherwise, be my guest and point out the Brazilian users who are involved in this discussion and think the current policy should be changed. Does anyone from an Asian country even care? Hell, confine it just to Europe. where's all the French or Italian users that have an issue with the status quo? Anyone from Bulgaria have a problem with it? What about Armenians? Any Albanians? People from Cyprus maybe? Czechoslovakia? Where are Belgian users clamoring for the policy to be changed? What about users from African countries where they don't predominantly speak English? Where's the Setswana language speakers that have an issue with the current policy? does anyone from the Middle East think how we currently do things is a problem? --Adamant1 (talk) 20:50, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

No, literacy is not a measurement of fluency. That you dismiss the conclusion of linguists who have spent their life studying language, often among illiterate peoples, as ridiculous shows how little your claims mean. Again, illiteracy levels in the US and Germany are roughly comparable. Nobody cares because it's the status quo is clearly illogical. You've made the argument that Germans all speak English; why would it surprise you that a conversation that's 10,000 words long in English would be discussed by people who speak English and not people who have trouble with English?--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:13, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

That you dismiss the conclusion of linguists When did anyone say anything about linguists? I know I didn't. Anyway, I never said "all Germans speak English" . What I did say is that "enough" Germans speak English good enough that the effects of having the categories for German political parties in that language would be minimal. Which I haven't seen anyone present any counter argument for. You clearly don't have one either since all you seem to be capable of doing is miss-construing my position by claiming I said "all" German's speak English when that's not my argument or by making this about linguists when they are clearly irrelevant to the discussion.

Again, "enough" Germans speak English good enough that the effects of having the categories for German political parties in the English language would be minimal. If not non-exiting. Otherwise, be my guest and provide some evidence that I'm wrong. 10 bucks says you can't though. Just like you couldn't provide any evidence that this whole thing has anything to do with anyone in the world except Germans. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:33, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Why is this relevant? The issue is whether or not users of Commons can find the German political party images. The internalization isn't perfect so a search by the name (in German or in English) won't get all the hits so a category is needed. I again point out that we have Category:Mumbai but the page is at मुंबई. We can have a German page and an English-language category to be consistent. Keep a redirect from the German to the English name since that's a likely search term. Unless someone explains how it will be helpful for everyone to have to learn every potential script to figure out the name of every possible permutation of every political party in every language (without having fights over the script of choice) just so I can add an image to an article about a particular political party (or more likely a politician). Again, we have Category:Schmalhorststraße 1 with Category:ß (which notably redirects to Category:Sharp s) because we have an English-language preference for categories (not a mandate but a preference for convenience). This is all about figuring out a better way to organize images not a personal annoyance by certain people that their language isn't so dominant that Commons uses it. If someone searches in German, they should be able to find the category and thus the images. Go ahead and waste everyone's time demanding that Category:Germany be renamed to Category:Deutschland (as opposed to Deutschland the page) if you are actually serious about demanding this rather than starting with weird middling nonsense about political parties. Ricky81682 (talk) 01:57, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

I cannot see that it is difficult to find the native name of the party if you are editing the article about it – it should be there right in the lead and in the infobox (and the category linked in the main menu), and most OSes allow you to copy and paste that name regardless of script. If there are several native names or scripts, then I hope we have redirects, so that won't cause confusion. And we should probably have redirects also from English.

People interested in Thai (or whatever) parties shouldn't get irritated by having the name in Thai. We live in a multilingual world after all. It is a lot more irritating to have the name of your own party written in a script or language you don't fully master (or don't grasp at all).

–LPfi (talk) 20:02, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

This is about Commons. What articles are you editing here? Ricky81682 (talk) 20:36, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

are you aware of something like Á́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́ ก็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็  ? it's fairly easy to mess up scripts in which you are illiterate while copypasting. for thai in particular, it's easy to miss those special characters. my examples are exaggerated, but in real life it's painstaking to make sure nothing is left out, because they dont appear as single letters but only additions to letters.

here's an example, not with thai but with hebrew script which is rtl: Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2023/03#A_question_about_facsimiles.

i, being a native user of the chinese script, am used to ideographs, but i still have big trouble verifying japanese kana when i have to copy them. i cant imagine how hard it would be for people who have rarely handled ideographs.

any of these latin-centric-thinking users actually care about other languages? actually worked with other languages, cultures, and countries?

i have one problem for these latin-centric users to solve. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12854 the tibetan part of the title doesnt match the tibetan wikipedia article title. anyone knows why? if anything should be fixed? RZuo (talk) 20:38, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

It's not about the category title Germany versus Deutschland. It's about the names of groups and things that only really exist in one language. It's about "Aufbruch C", a German political party that the English Wikipedia labels "Waying C". Did they ever use that English name? I can find no evidence of it being used besides on Wikipedia. Dict.cc offers "waying" as a translation of "Aufbruch", but that's not really an word in modern English, so it's a bad translation. I don't see any English name on their website ( https://www.aufbruch-c.de/ ), so, do we go with "Waying C", or provide a better translation of, say, "Departure C", and how are we to assume that anyone will recognize these names?--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:02, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

i dont think anyone has a problem with Category:Aufbruch C, but these users have problems with Category:Social Democratic Party of Germany.

no one is suggesting everything be translated to english, but these users are insisting that titles, for which official and commonly used english names exist, can only stay in the original languages (but for latin-alphabet languages only). when it comes to languages in other scripts, then these users flip flop to demand translation or the even less practical transliteration to latin. RZuo (talk) 22:54, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Ah, but are they really that commonly used in English? I just checked a random article in the Guardian, which has one instance of "Justice and Development Party (AKP)" and then continues to only use "AKP" throughout the article. The name that would get used in German newspapers is "Partei für Gerechtigkeit und Entwicklung (AKP)", but it's the AKP part that everyone remembers, not some foreign abbreviations like JDP. The same essentially applies for all parties that get abbreviated; I want to see the English media that constantly spells out "Party for Labour, Rule of Law, Animal Protection, Promotion of Elites and Grassroots Democratic Initiative" instead of going with "PARTEI". Just because the most prominent German party names have the same abbreviations in English, the many smaller ones don't. Your argument is that party names of Germany should get translated (or not) arbitrarily by whether or not they get mentioned often enough in some media, resulting in a wild mixture of translated and untranslated party names. Frankly, that is promoting chaos.

Also RZuo, what you describe as "flip-flopping" are the basic rules for categories, laid out in Commons:Categories#Category_names. Yes, this means the Latin-script languages are getting a preferential status based on the arbitrary global domination of the ASCII code. You see this as discriminating against you, apparently. But ASCII has more global compatibility than Bopomofo or Hebraic letters, so Latin script it is, which is admittably convenient for all other non-English languages with Latin script. MUST we really tear them all down as well just so that everyone has to be miserable? --Enyavar (talk) 23:37, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Nobody has a problem with Category:Aufbruch C? It's translated on the English Wikipedia page. I'm just more comfortable extending that upwards to all party names, than making an arbitrary line about well-known. I might accept an argument that English versions used by the parties should be used if they exist, but I don't think accepting some "normal" translation is good or clear line.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:22, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

But why political parties? Why not the nations? Why not churches? Why not schools? A person is much more likely to come here speaking only Marathi who has a picture of Mumbai but only knows it by the Marathi name versus someone actually caring enough to get hot and bothered that typing in "Marxistisch-Leninistische Partei Deutschlands" as a category goes to Category:Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany. I don't think a single political party category has a subcategory so it's not like this creates layers of complex mess like if you tried to make मुंबई by year categories. If you seriously believed that everything should be that way, then we should start with renaming Germany and then the category for politics of Germany, political parties of Germany and then the German party names. Not "we should keep the term 'political parties of Germany' but the names of the parties should be in German because that is special." Ricky81682 (talk) 19:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand your position fully, and don't agree with the argument that we should use native country names, that sounds disingenious to me, like a strange joke. Party names are not any more special than street names, cemetary names, regional district names and band names. Most of these don't get translated, but they are low level stuff. Countries are top-level stuff in the category tree. But while parties are low in the cat tree, they are usually not leave nodes. Political parties almost always have subcats for members. All bigger ones also have buildings, posters, events, history, party archives, foundations, logos, party programs, scandals and election maps. Best --Enyavar (talk) 22:00, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

ISO 3166 means that we always have English names for nations and first-level divisions of nations. We don't have English names for all political parties, and given that they can pop up with e.g. 10,000 affidavits in Nevada, I don't see any way we ever could. Small organizations in one country like churches and non-university schools should be in local languages as well. Universities? They are physically local, but university professors publish in English and universities often get foreign students, so they're more likely to have an English name. It's complex.

I think India is a bad example; if Wikipedia had been created in India, was founded there and a plurality of users were Indian, I think Commons would still be English-centric. India has 23 official languages including English, and Marathi is only spoken in Mumbai (natively I presume, though Wikipedia is unclear) by 35% of the population, with Hindi getting 25% and Gujarati by 20%. Brazil, as a country that doesn't speak English, but almost universally speaks Portuguese, or China, which also doesn't speak English and also doesn't use the Latin alphabet, are probably better examples, though I think we should separate the Latin alphabet issues from the foreign language issues.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:29, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

These are Commons categories. We don't follow IS0 3166 for the pages so why would we for country names? India is a fine example because it is a country with multiple languages that are concurrent. If you actual want localized names to be in whatever language, then you will be wasting incredible time for local parties in India because there is no set localized name. en:Marathi language is officially spoken in the state of Maharashtra not a city and the point is whether en:Mumbai#Etymology the category should follow the state's official language, the historical Gujarati language name, one official national language being Hindi or the language of English is precisely the kind of argument I could make about anything. There is a prolific vandal who is just fighting over the various versions of Hindi scripts and this adds more unnecessary drama. There are fights over the Romanization of mountains in Japan right now. My point is, if you all truly believed that things should be their local language, why this precise fixation on political parties? No one has explained that other than hand-waving that "its too small or its big" to question anything else. Ricky81682 (talk) 07:34, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

If you say "Look into the stats for how many people in Germany speak English. They are as or more fluent at speaking the language then people in some places in the United States are.", I assume that we're communicating using English and thus the concept of language fluency is studied and basically defined by linguists. If you mean some definition of fluent that's only clear to yourself, your arguments are just wasting our time.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:04, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, language fluency is studied and basically defined by linguists. No one is arguing it isn't. But who cames up with the statistics has nothing to do with the merits of the point I was making. Your retort to me saying 56% of the population of Germany speaks English perfectly fine was literally just "linguists study languages." Cool, that has absolutely nothing to with how many Germans speak English or if having the categories in English would cause them problems though. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:14, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

German cats? What about German dogs? --Rosenzweig τ 05:59, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Ich hingegen suche gerade den nennenswerten Anteil der deutschen Bevölkerung, die untereinander regelmäßig englisch spricht. Erst recht die 50%, die /flüssig/ englisch sprechen würde. Woher kommen diese albernen Zahlen? --Smial (talk) 09:59, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Do a Google Search for how many people in Germany speak English. It's not that difficult. Here's one for you in the meantime. According to that 58% of German's speak English either quite good or very good. Only 12% have poor English skills or don't speak it all. So at least according to that site the number of German's who speak English reasonable well is actually upwards of 88%. Although, I'm willing to just say it's 58% so people like Prosfilaes don't get triggered over semantic. Either way, the majority of people in Germany speak English good enough for this to essentially be a non-issue there. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:07, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I think this source checks out: Among the 14 non-native speaker countries with the highest English proficiency, Germany is not the best but the largest. Overall Germany was placed in the proficiency band "very high", meaning that the average German tested had an English standard equal to a B2 level in the CEFR. Now: This B2 grade is good, but not great: Meet a random German and on average you can expect that "spontaneous interaction is quite possible" in English. My wider family runs the whole gamut from A0 to C2, I'll add. --Enyavar (talk) 23:22, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

For Germany or Finland the issue isn't how well people speak (or, in this case: read) English, but whether they are hampered by having to use English names for their parties. Whether parties translate the name in their English web pages is largely immaterial, as long as the bulk of the population does not read about them (on their pages or in media) in English.

If I guess that Perussuomalaiset gets translated as the Finnish Party and use that, then the media I categorise gets into the category of the historic party and I get frustrated by there being few photos from later years. Those that don't speak Finnish has the same problem the other way round. The party name being made up of international words (Liberals, Democrats, whatever) doesn't help if there are similarly named other parties, such as in the True Finns example.

I think the question is whether it is more important that locals recognise the party names or that the international audience does, and whether either being alienated is worse. The answer may be different for countries that have many users at Commons, such as Finland or Germany (the Latin-1 world?) and for countries with few users and non-Latin scripts.

–LPfi (talk) 09:52, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Finland and Germany aside, the problem with that is it assume the locals are the ones viewing the categories or organizing the images. I can guarantee that most of the time they aren't. If only locals could determine the names of categories it would alienate the people who aren't but are doing the work and files wouldn't get organized, because no one would be local or want to deal with it. I know I'd be less inclined to work in areas outside of the United States. Why would I want to deal with the constant drama by non-contributing, nationalist concern trolls that it would probably lead to? At the end of the day what matters is which option leads to the most images getting organized. I think it's clear from years of the current policy leading to images being categorized perfectly fine that it's the best option. Sure, we could change that to deferring to locals when it comes to what language category names should be in, but I think it's important to consider the effects that will have though. I can almost guarantee it will be a net negative on the project. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:36, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

"non-contributing, nationalist concern trolls" sounds like an "ugly American" phrase. There doesn't seem to be any reason to think there aren't enough contributors from most areas of the world versus the number of political party files uploaded for that part of the word to categorize them.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:31, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't really feel like getting in the mud about which country popularized the phrase "nationalism", but this is a direct quote from someone on the German village pump "You started the nationalistic edit war." Are you really going to argue in the meantime that comments like "stick to postcards and keep out of other countries parties" or "why don't you write in German about German issues" have nothing to do with nationalism? As to the rest of what you said, it depends on the country. Even if I agree though, there shouldn't be gate keepers or people we have to consult before making edits. Someone should be able to create a category for a subject if they want to regardless of if there are already local people working in the area. Although I disagree that there are in most cases. It doesn't even address the issue of how to name regional political parties either. Like Ricky81682 brought up with regional Indian political parties that could have their name in multiple languages. What then? Weekly CFDs between people arguing about who is more "local" that make zero difference and no one really cares about? --Adamant1 (talk) 01:39, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

This "issue" is not about nationalism, but about stylistic uniformity in the category tree, and about pragmatic names for users (by which I don't mean us powerusers). Yes, you've renamed categories to English before and there was never an issue (well so did I, by the way) but at some point bold changes are going to run into long-standing conventions among people who think otherwise. The result is either a quiet reversal; a CfD discussion; or a multi-page talking mess with discussion hills to die on. I would have preferred the first option here, as it appears we will eventually go with it anyway. --Enyavar (talk) 09:44, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

This "issue" is not about nationalism You can say that and I agree it isn't to a point, but people making nationalist comments like the ones I quoted was a large of part what led to this proposal. It isn't some random one off proposal that was created by GPSLeo simply because they were and had nothing better to do that day or some nonsense. The context matters.

at some point bold changes are going to run into long-standing conventions Sure, but that proves my point since the long standing convention is that names of categories are in English if it's commons. That's why it's policy. I wasn't the one who turned it into an issue or a multi-page discussion hill to die on. The concern trolling editors who made the nationalist comments that I've quoted from did. It isn't and wasn't an actual issue outside of that though. Like I said, I've changed category names to English before and it's never been a problem. I can guarantee you that if Chaddy had of just dropped it when I reverted him originally that this wouldn't even be a thing right now though. It should have been a quiet reversal that followed conventions, but it wasn't because he didn't allow it to be one. --Adamant1 (talk) 11:15, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Argumentum ad nauseam, shall we: long standing convention is that names of categories are in English with some exceptions for proper names, as per C:C-CN. The policy explicitly says so. Best, --Enyavar (talk) 12:08, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Only because you keep going around in circles about it. Your correct that the guideline says that, but your leaving out the part where it says "Proper nouns which do not have an established English variant are not translated ad hoc but use the original form." So there isn't an exception for all proper names like your acting. Just ones that don't have an established English variant. "Mistakes" like that are exactly why this discussion is argumentum ad nauseam BTW, because I have to repeatedly correct the blatantly false miss-leading information people like you and Prosfilaes keep spreading. If you don't like arguing about this though, cool. There'd be no reason to cover the same points multiple times if you didn't repeatedly miss-construe the same things over and over. It's not that difficult. --Adamant1 (talk) 12:31, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

The wording of the policy allows for agreed-upon exceptions for certain proper names (biological taxa are even specifically spelled out), and that is the point. Before you came along, native party names were a decade-long consensus here (be it in German, Spanish, French or Portuguese) and somehow we all managed. Thousands of non-political "local"/"native" organizations are also untranslated. Nobody really has a problem with that.

But now something else, which is the established English form for a party? Yes, Social Democratic Party of Germany is an official English moniker. However, the established variants I find in the media are shorthands like "Germany's Social Democratic party (SPD)", "(Scholz’s) Social Democratic Party", "Social Democrats", "Germany's Social Democrats" and "Social Democrats (SPD)". Similar shorthands exist in German, too. But the most common denominator is that most English texts give one of the mentioned long variants first and then switch to "SPD". So from observation, the most established English name for the party is SPD, notably the untranslated German abbreviation. Your next argument is now that the English and German names are so similar that Germans can easily cope, to which my argument is that English speakers can just as easily cope with the original German name... Yes, we are in a circular argument, but I find the arguments for the Status Quo more compelling. --Enyavar (talk) 16:53, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

i've never seen any native-language cat names for any topics of east asia. where is that consensus fabricated from?

and the only two other only-german-speaking countries in the world Category:Political parties in Austria Category:Political parties in Liechtenstein certainly dont follow that nonexistent consensus. that's 2:1 in germanosphere, 3:1 if multilingual switzerland is also considered. RZuo (talk) 21:09, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, and that's the reason why this is not a "german" problem, as some people insinuated all over this debate. For the first question: I keep forgetting which countries of East Asia use Latin script for the native language. Does Indonesia count? I see three native party names there, and three English ones. --Enyavar (talk) 07:28, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

It's a "germen" problem in that the only people who seem to have any issue with it are Germans and it's purely in relation to German political parties. At least from what I can tell and no one has provided any evidence to contradict me either outside of vague handwaving. It's not because of anything having to do with the German language per say though. I'm sure you get the difference between Germans, German political parties, and the German language. I'm not talking about the last one when I say it's a purely a German issue. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:43, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps that's because of Germans' English proficiency. The Vietnamese won't be here arguing. Even the French aren't, but their parties' categories are indeed in French (with some odd exception). And why am I classified as German? Aha! Because I have an issue with the categories using translated names. Bingo, the circle is closed. –LPfi (talk) 08:12, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Supposedly they aren't that proficient in English. Apparently they are when it works in their favor and not when it doesn't though. Either way, it's not like people don't participate in forum discussions using their native language. So I assume that if this was really an issue for Vietnamese people they would be participating in the discussion regardless of if they speak English or not. I'm going to assume they don't have a problem with it in absence of actual evidence that they do though and frankly, it's a little cringe that your acting like their representative in the conversation. Honestly, I probably wouldn't participate in a discussion involving English speaking Europeans arguing about what my position on something is or otherwise speaking on my behalf either. Regardless of if I spoke English. --Adamant1 (talk) 09:01, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Limit audio and video uploads under time restrictions for new users without (auto)confirmed/patrolled rights

During the ongoing sockpuppet cases, I'm filing this as similar to that topic dating back to 2017 here. Many times ago, I saw recent changes and the abuse filter log to find them. They made throwaway accounts as sockpuppets to evade blocks using proxies or VPNs and uploaded files containing copyrighted (non-libre) works that don't belong to what they claimed as their own. I and a few others tagged those files as copyright infringement to notify them as warnings. What's worse, they ignored multiple warnings and did it again.

The goal is to make an abuse filter to prevent new users from uploading audio and videos for more than 30 seconds or one minute. - The Harvett Vault | he/him | user | talk - 03:26, 8 April 2023 (UTC); edited: 04:44, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

We may consider this in light of meta:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. One feature set being clamored for there consists of a wider set of browser fingerprinting that can differentiate and uniquely identify users/devices. Browser fingerprints and other technical aspects of the editing sessions are currently used by CheckUsers. Elizium23 (talk) 23:55, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

How much risk the said copyright violations pose to us? I do think they should be deleted as soon as possible and prevented as much as possible. What I don't understand is the degree of urgency. whym (talk) 11:57, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

The copyright risk is on the uploader and possible reusers, not on us, but we want to avoid copyright violations sitting around. If they aren't found promptly, they may stay for a long time. But aren't abuse filters 180 and 192 working? Do you want to have the upload blocked, to avoid having to look in the logs? –LPfi (talk) 17:47, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

•  Comment, I think that the negatives outweigh the benefits. Imagine if there are users that only want to upload audio and / or video files and then never edit again, some of the most common users here only upload one (1) or a handful of images and then never edit again. Imagine someone is very active at the Wiktionary or just someone that wants to add the pronunciation for a missing word but then find out that they can't upload it because they didn't have enough edits to autoconfirmed. The higher you raise the bar to entry the less people you'll have contributing.

I think that the costs are much higher than the benefits and we shouldn't let a few bad apples ruin it for everyone, that or we must include a guide for uploading audio and video files for excluded users, if such a restriction were to be implemented.

Alternatively, we could simply automatically tag all audio and video files by new users to be manually reviewed by humans, this would allow us to catch those sockpuppets more easily and it wouldn't exclude anyone. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 15:16, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This sounds like a bad idea just going by gut instinct. Stripping new users of random rights is rarely helpful. Dronebogus (talk) 17:31, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

@The Harvett Vault, please don't change the substance of your comments after people have replied to them. You're changing the context for the entire conversation. Elizium23 (talk) 04:43, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I apologize to you and everyone, as I didn't mention limiting time restrictions for this. - The Harvett Vault | he/him | user | talk - 04:55, 13 April 2023 (UTC); edited: 04:59, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

No worries; you can always just post a followup comment, in the thread chronology, to say you want to add more information. Elizium23 (talk) 18:57, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

audio files are harder to check, so definitely yes for some restrictions on uploading them.

videos are a little easier, so i dont have an opinion.--RZuo (talk) 19:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

You can use reverse audio search like Google, Shazam, etc., to find it before being identified. - The Harvett Vault | he/him | user | talk - 00:23, 18 April 2023 (UTC); edited: 00:27, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

At least I, hence, got a partial victory because Krd blocked a few IP ranges located in Honduras to prevent them from doing so for six months. - The Harvett Vault | he/him | user | talk - 23:35, 26 April 2023 (UTC); edited: 23:37, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose - Ludicrous idea - I'm all for preventing socks from doing things but not at a cost to new/1-time-uploaders, Why should new people suffer because of a few idiots ?.

Here's a much better proposal: Going to WMF, airing your concerns and gain traction for much better CU tools. (CU can only do so much and imho the device fingerprint is a fantastic idea but will that be implemented here ? ... Probably not). –Davey2010^Talk 18:32, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Male humans with helmets and Male humans with M16 rifle categories

I came here rather than CFD based on the advice of User:Explicit who described CFD on Commons as a ghost town. This obviously can be moved to CFD if anyone objects.

The category Category:Male humans with helmets was previously Category:Males with helmets. I regard this as a completely useless generic category that should be deleted. The majority of military photos since World War 1 would fall into this category, because unsurprisingly soldiers wear helmets. If thoroughly applied, we would have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of photos categorised this way, not just soldiers but also motorbike riders, construction workers, astronauts, divers, etc. etc. How is that useful to anyone? The recent change from Males to Male humans just makes the category seem even more ridiculous, what other males could we possibly be talking about? Dogs? Cats?

Similarly the category Category:Male humans with M16 rifle was previously Category:Males with M16 rifle. Again this is a completely useless generic category that should be deleted. The M16 type rifle entered widespread use in the early 1960s and by the mid-1960s had become the standard U.S. service rifle as well as entering service with numerous U.S. allies. So if this category was thoroughly applied, we would have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos categorised this way for the U.S. military alone. How is that useful to anyone? There are specific categories that can be used e.g. Category:M16 rifle by country of service, but do we really need to also add a category to distinguish by sex? The recent change from Males to Male humans just makes the category seem even more ridiculous, Category:Male dogs with M16 rifle anyone? Mztourist (talk) 06:37, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

For some context, Commons:Categories for discussion/2019/12/Category:Male humans determined that all subcategories of Category:Male humans should match the parent category and use "male humans" instead of "males". As I mentioned on my talk page, I have seen a recent push crop up on my watchlist to reflect this result, which created inconsistency within the trees. This became inconvenient when I created categories, as some subcategories concurrently used both "males" and "male humans" in the same parent category. I decided to just synchronize the sets to match the consensus at CFD. I recently moved Category:Males with helmets to Category:Male humans with helmets, along with dozens of other subcategories (I finished at the Category:Male humans with objects level, but subcategories further up the tree remain untouched, like Category:Males with microphones by country). I'm guessing at least one of the affected files caught Mztourist's attention. While I do share their sentiment, the decision was made and I'm simply putting in the work to reflect that outcome.

I don't quite understand the gripe with Category:Male humans with helmets, though. All categories have potential to contain thousands upon thousands of files. Most files are undercategorized and there is potential to split them if they become too large. I also don't see what is being proposed in either case.

Pinging Joshbaumgartner and Shāntián Tàiláng (who is currently blocked), as they are two of the users I saw on my watchlist implementing these changes and may be interested in this thread. ✗plicit 07:21, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm proposing that the categories are deleted. Categories with thousands of images aren't in any way useful or educational. I don't see how you would split down Category:Male humans with helmets, Category:Male human soldiers with helmets just pushes the same problem to a lower level. Soldiers wear helmets, lets just take that as a given, without the need to add a helmet category to every picture of a soldier wearing a helmet. Mztourist (talk) 07:29, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

If I really need to search for 'male humans' with helmets, my first attempt is the category "Men with helmets". We have "People with helmets", and subgroups of "People" are by Common's standards "Children", "Men" and "Women". Everyone in the world who knows basic English words should be able to understand our category system. We're using "Men at work in Iran", not "Male humans performing their labour duties in modern Persia".
As for the question whether or not we need the categories? No idea, but when in doubt I'd want to keep them. Are they possibly useful to someone? Yes. We also have "Portraits of men with moustaches" and "Portrait paintings of women with hats". Some people like to categorize images that way: let them. --Enyavar (talk) 14:20, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

+1 to Enyavar's comment. Adding the word "human" to a category name where it's assumed the images in the category is of humans is needlessly redundant and not how English works. Although that's not to negate the fact that there are images like this one of non-humans wearing helmets, but then is anyone going to argue there's a way to determine the gender or sex of that chicken and does anyone really care what it is anyway? I assume the both of those questions are no. Category:Male chickens wearing helmets would be a totally useless category regardless though. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:08, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

I agree that the categories seem very odd. I don't think that "Some people like to categorize images that way" is enough reason to keep a category tree. There needs to be some use except the joy of the categoriser, especially if their labour makes files more difficult to find for real-world users. "Male humans with helmets" is too broad a category to be useful on its own, it needs to be subdivided, and the question is how to do that sensibly, and how useful the subcategories become.

Now, Category:Men wearing helmets by country‎, the by-country subcategory, covers only four countries, not including Category:Male humans with helmets in Taiwan (as there might be children in that category, I suppose. The subcategory Category:Military men wearing helmets has only 69 files and Category:Paratroopers at the Western Wall‎ (where one image has a helmet only on a poster in the background). Category:Male humans with sport helmets seems possibly useful, most of the rest should seemingly go into Category:Men with hard hats, which mainly isn't subdivided‎: no subcategories by profession or situation (or even posture).

So, in this case, you'll get a more or less random (although not random by any stricts definition) assortment of a thousand plus a thousand photos. If those who "like to categorise in this way" don't have enough will, skill or time to get to a coherent useful category scheme, then they shouldn't create this kind of categories at all, at least not without discussing it.

In most any category about people wearing helmets (or hard hats), I assume you will find many "male humans" – much easier than in this category if you want some specifics.

–LPfi (talk) 07:17, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

I was rather flummoxed by the overcat on File:Meeting with Benedict XVI on 10 August 2019.jpg as well as its companion, File:Georg Ratzinger (2019).tiff (to a lesser extent.) AFAIK, this is pathological and not normal; I mean how does it help users navigate? Is there really someone who's going to enjoy all the photos with "coffee tables" or "open books"? And who's going to exhaustively categorize every single photo that contains every single element listed here? It's absurd and unmanageable. It's tech debt, that's what it is. enwiki has a very pragmatic restriction on categorization called WP:DEFINING. If a quality does not define the subject then it cannot be categorized that way. I think this is a good concept to import. Elizium23 (talk) 07:25, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

It is not that simple. You might want a photo with an open book or coffee table, to illustrate, say, en:Book or en:Coffee table (cf stock photos). For that you don't need the category to be complete (which seldom is true on Commons for any category) – but if you want an image of a coffee table, you hardly want an image of a meeting with the pope, and if you want a "man smiling while sitting", you hardly want a recognisable celebrity. For "male humans with helmets" you probably want a soldier, a miner or something else specific and, regardless, you will easily find helmeted persons in such categories. –LPfi (talk) 07:55, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

With things like "coffee tables" or "open books", I think the problem is that some people see categories and depicts either as a way of training AI about the content in an image, or [my girlfriend's theory] as a way of getting a dopamine hit by adding categories. - Jmabel ! talk 16:02, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

If it weren't for dopamine addiction, Wikimedia wouldn't exist, am I right? Elizium23 (talk) 00:22, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

@Elizium23: Yes you are right. Krok6kola (talk) 02:13, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Every cult/religion provides it's adherents with menial and arbitrary tasks in order to keep them hooked in to the system. So it comes with the turf and the dopamine hit is just a side benefit of the person racking up edits so they can get a special place at the right hand of Jimmy Wales in Wikimedia heaven or whatever. That doesn't make the whole thing any less pathological or abnormal though. Not to mention completely unhelpful. Really, there should be a guideline not to add more then X number of categories to an image. Otherwise your just increasingly getting diminishing returns. Personally I like Elizium23's idea that if a quality does not define the subject then it shouldn't be categorized that way. Or you run into issues like this one and the huge mess with File:Meeting with Benedict XVI on 10 August 2019.jpg. The fact that there's like 5 categories just for the door is totally ridiculous. Especially since it's mostly hidden behind the Popes hommies. There's really no excuse for something like that. Dopamine hits be damned! --Adamant1 (talk) 02:50, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I completely agree with Elizium23's comment on pathological overcategorisation. One of my major focuses is the Vietnam War and some Users insist on adding the category Category:Men at work in Vietnam to soldiers in the war. I regard this as completely ridiculous, do we tag WW1 and WW2 photos of the war in France with Category:Men at work in France? I also agree with Adamant1's suggestion that "there should be a guideline not to add more than X number of categories to an image." to limit this useless nonsense. Mztourist (talk) 04:12, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikivoyage has an interesting policy: Whatever you do on the project, the traveller comes first. A lot of what is going on here on Commons is the complete opposite of that. There's a nice German compound noun for that: Selbstzweck. It's all a matter of perspective: If you want to describe the contents of an image, adding those coffee table categories makes sense. But if you're actually looking for good image of a coffee table, they are horribly counter productive.

I don't think we'll be able to solve the problem of people adding categories or depicts statements for mostly irrelevant things in an image by setting up arbitrary limitations on the number of categories or statements. They don't see the re-users perspective and this whole dopamine thing is just way too strong. But maybe we can instead use it to the project's advantage:

For depicts (P180), statements marked as "prominent" will make files score higher when matched in search. Why not do the opposite for coffee tables? Allow adding a depicts statement, but encourage people to mark them as "incidental" or "in the background". Allow to filter for that in MediaSearch and other kinds of query. Instead of having two competing views on how to do things, the main problem would now be to actually do all the tagging - another great dopamine mine for all kinds of people to obsess about together!

As for Categories, maybe it's time to give up on the idea that they could ever be convenient for re-users or clean enough for computers to query them. They are and will always be a hot mess - and maybe that's OK. El Grafo (talk) 09:39, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

@El Grafo: Selbstzweck ohne Zweck. - Jmabel ! talk 17:09, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

No, no, it has a Zweck: doing it. And in the bigger picture, it keeps people engaged with Commons - hopefully also doing some more useful categorization work along the way. There's a lot of energy in that, we "just" need to channel it into a more useful direction. El Grafo (talk) 07:42, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

@El Grafo: that was sort of a paraphrase of Kant: "Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck". - Jmabel ! talk 15:00, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Dang it, I knew there was a joke I wasn't getting! El Grafo (talk) 15:10, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

@El Grafo: I had suggested the "incidental" back when SDC was first proposed, but for some reason it wasn't adopted.

FWIW, there is nothing wrong with creating a subcat specific to incidental inclusion of something in an image. I'd never bother adding an incidentally included chair or stoplight, but I did create Category:Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition logo (incidental) and certainly have been the one who used it the vast majority of times it's been used. It seemed to me like it was worth noting the presence of that logo even when it was incidental, but separating these out not to be in the way for anyone who actually wanted a good image of the logo. - Jmabel ! talk 17:15, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jmabel Maybe they thought "prominent" and "regular" would be enough. Now that we've spent some time with SDC, I think we can conclude that it's not. I think we should push to reconsider that.

Category:Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition logo (incidental) on its own makes a lot of sense, but if we were to apply that method consistently, it would basically mean duplicating large parts of the category tree thicket. It's probably better used sparsely. El Grafo (talk) 07:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

The first thing about SDC would be to consider what kind of depicts we want. As the developers seem to find adding "tree" as a depicts statement unproblematic, I regard the SDC as a lost case. –LPfi (talk) 09:53, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

That's indeed one of the most important unresolved conflicts around SDC, and it's not as simple as developers vs. Commons community. But imho that should not keep us from considering other problems. We, the community, need to step up and finally get into the SDC driver's seat. If there's something we can all agree upon, then we should push for the developers to implement it. El Grafo (talk) 14:49, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Regarding Category:Male humans, I wonder if there would be enough support to reverse the result of the CFD I linked above. That is, keep Category:Male humans as it is, but all of its subcategories should simply use "males" instead of "male humans" and "females" instead of "female humans". The closure cites the "universality principle" as its justification, but I don't see sufficient evidence to conclude that Commons follows this practice. It certainly doesn't exist in categories about animals (see Category:Panthera leo and its subcategories like Category:Lions in logos, for example). I find it highly unlikely that other animals would fit in most of the human categories. In the odd situation where there's a possibility, like in Category:Clothed animals, for instance, there is no split by gender at all and I doubt there's any demand for it. It would also be incredibly difficult to in most cases anyway. There really isn't much to justify using "[gender] humans" other than seeking uniformity; its application is not really helpful or useful to anyone.

As far as imposing restrictions for the dopamine-seeking overcategorization goes, I think the category system is too far gone for that. ✗plicit 11:10, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

@Explicit: Yes, we can't underestimate the power of dopamine, and it's a legal pleasure enhancer! Krok6kola (talk) 17:14, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

@El Grafo: I completely agree that "incidental" categories should not be used for most things. - Jmabel ! talk 15:06, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I initially did not weigh in on this because my only role on these categories was in implementing the 'male human' standard, and per the original post, this proposal was to delete the categories in question. However, it has drifted to cover a wide-ranging discussion on the retention, structure, naming, and content of the originally nominated categories and others at large. So here is where I am at on a couple of the issues at hand:

1. I oppose deleting the specific categories. This is mainly because I in general oppose sniping individual categories on claims of uselessness or clutter without taking the system those categories exist within into account. Without a comprehensive plan for what to do with the consequences of a deletion, I cannot support it. It's all well and good to delete a category, but what do you do with its contents? Do they just upmerge into the various parent categories? How does that solve anything? If you punch a hole in an existing schema by sniping a couple of categories without regard to this, then best case is that some well-meaning editor re-creates the same category to fill the obvious hole in the schema and we are back to square one, except that now a bunch of images are adrift and have to be re-sorted. At worst, you have orphaned images and categories and a mess that remains in place for who knows how long until someone can clean it up. The fact is that the nominated categories are consistent with categorization policies and do no harm, so deletion on the basis of 'I think they're useless' just isn't good enough, especially without demonstrating understanding of the bigger schema and a plan to handle the contents?
2. I oppose mixing "males" and "male humans" within the same tree. Universality Principle exists for a reason. Using a consistent reference to a given topic throughout the tree makes it far easier to avoid duplication and red links, employ templates and other automation, provide reliable search results for both human and machine interface, amonst other benefits. Deleting "human" from some categories and not others means that we need some sort of criteria for when "human" is or is not included. Is it a category exclusive to humans? If not, would those portions relevant to non-humans be reasonably or likely divided by gender? Does it sound better one way or the other? Is it worth changing an existing category name or should it just be applied to new categories? These criteria not only need to be defined and understood by those in this discussion, but ultimately by every user of this category tree or else there will be confusion and frustration by file uploaders, template writers, users looking for images, machine interfaces, category discussers, and so on. Even if widely understood, there will still be borderline cases that lead to wasting time and energy on back-and-forth debates. Yes, in many cases, a category may well be exclusive to humans, but even there, the harm of including "human" is negligible if even measurable. The harm of a mixed bag of different names within the tree is significant, as noted above. Thus my opposition to the mixed bag approach to this.
3. CFD is the right forum for this discussion, but the train has left the station, so I don't propose moving it there. If one feels that there is not enough participation there for a proposal, it is always a good idea to post on VP and other relevant forums to solicit participation. The CfD format and process provides a well-tracked and published record of all proceedings, making it easy for future users to read all prior discussions and see the results and why categories may have been changed or set up the way they are. Most importantly, it makes it clear to all users travelling to a category that the category is under discussion, and with a simple glance at the talk page, the history of that category's discussions are easily shown. VP can be searched of course, but the biggest issue is even knowing that a discussion has taken place in the first place. Once this discussion is archived, it will be hit and miss for people to find it even if they know it took place. If you link to it now, that link will not work once it is archived. This makes it labor-intensive to reference old discussions. For CfDs, whenever you link to them, that link is permanent regardless of where or how the discussion is archived. The reality is that category changes often have a lot of ramifications for the system that aren't readily apparent when a change is proposed, and those need to be dug into and addressed to make sure a change really does do good and doesn't create more problems than it purported to solve. Not everyone is up for that, I get it, but it doesn't mean we should do an end run around that process.

Josh (talk) 02:52, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

The discussion has moved away from my original proposal. In relation to the comment immediately above "The fact is that the nominated categories are consistent with categorization policies and do no harm, so deletion on the basis of 'I think they're useless' just isn't good enough." is not a valid argument for keeping these generic categories. Everything here on Commons is supposed to have a useful educational purpose. Having over-generic categories being filled with tens or hundreds of thousands of images just because some User gets a dopamine hit from doing so, doesn't serve any useful educational purpose. Mztourist (talk) 08:28, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

New UI for User Uploads Page

Hello, Is there a way to make a user Uploads page look like a standard category page without having to manually input every image into a self-made user category? While the current UI is alright, for someone with a lot of upload of images, it can be cumbersome to find a specific one, even while viewing 500 at a time. I believe that a lot of space is wasted on image specifications because all the data can found on its file page. I'm not saying to permanently update and change the page, but rather have it as an alternative option which can be activate and deactivated in the "Preferences" tab (like how Wikipedia Skins are). Thank you for your time and have a good day! DiscoA340 (talk) 22:46, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

You can create a user cat for your uploads. You can also create a user license template that uses the cc-template and contains you user cat. then you can go to upload wizard and choose "not my own work". Additional input fields will show up. Enter your user license template into the license input field. Upload wizard will remember this preference and offer it as preferred choice in the future. Your uploads will automagically categorized in your user cat. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 07:40, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Rewrite MediaWiki:Signupstart

Your username will be public.

You should make your username an anonymous username, not your real name.

If you use your real name as your username, your real name will not be private and will not be able to be made private later.

i think the whole text can be improved. for example, "will not be able to be" sounds a bit redundant. simply "cannot be" will do? RZuo (talk) 11:36, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

(Substituted text, as the text above this one is subject to change.)

Your username will be public.

You should make your username an anonymous username, not your real name.

If you use your real name as your username, your real name will not be private and will not be able to be made private later.

The above text was written during a different time, before, it was a common (and also commonly written) rule to never use your real name on the internet, that strangers on the internet shouldn't know who you are, that you should never deliberately post pictures of yourself or anything private relating to you online and it was kind of expected that websites should warn users against ever using their real names.

Internet culture has changed, this shift started around 2008~2010 and the popularity of websites like Meta's Facebook, Microsoft's LinkedIn, and X' Twitter have made using your real name online no longer taboo. Should we still warn people against using their real names online? There is not a simple answer for that question, people should still be aware that all their contributions here could and will be linked to their public persona (their real life identity), on the other hand the internet has evolved in such a way that it's really rare for a person to not post their real names and identities and selfies online, this isn't the internet of 2004 anymore (when this website was created), the internet of 2004 is a vastly different place from today's internet and the culture and social expectations of 2023 aren't remotely similar to the internet we had back in the day. Technical limitations (such as the inability to rename Wikimedia Single Unified Long-In accounts) have been solved, but any archived versions of pages that use their actual names are still available.

The above text is largely a relic of a different time, if we should re-write it then I believe that it would substantially be re-written to explain the differences between using a pseudonym and using your real name and how the MediaWiki software deals with renaming. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 12:22, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

I totally agree we should write the text to something like "you can decide whether you want to use a pseudonymous name or your real name". I would not mention account renaming there to keep the workload of the account renamers low. If someone wants the the name removed from the logs it is ever more problematic. GPSLeo (talk) 12:57, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

It definitely needs a rewrite, but we should not drop the discouragement for real names completely. As a global renamer myself, I have seen many cases where people who had created accounts with their real names when they were young/teen, come to request rename after realising the risks or facing abuse later in their wiki-life, and as you know it's not possible/easy to completely hide out the previous name. Other large wikis still have similar warnings, see enwiki's for example, also see en:WP:REALNAME. -- CptViraj (talk) 03:50, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

I think Commons is a bit different on that point as most photographers want their photos published under their real name or have them under their real name on other sites anyway. GPSLeo (talk) 06:32, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. But I believe we should still give a lightweight info about the potential consequence and not completely de-mention it. Thanks! -- CptViraj (talk) 06:50, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

I've seen a couple regulars around who use a nick for their account but put their real name into the author field of the file page templates (usually linked to the user page). Might be a good idea to setup a help page (essay?) discussing the pros and cons of the different options and link it from there. El Grafo (talk) 11:25, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Your username will be public.

You can use an anonymous username, or your real name.

If you use your real name as your username, it will not be private and cannot be made private later.

how about this?--RZuo (talk) 15:20, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Fountain.ogv

File:Fountain.ogv is not worthy of motd. do you agree?

i propose to remove it from Template:Motd/2023-05-29. --RZuo (talk) 15:20, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Actually I really like it (more than some POTD). It is nice and sweet and contemplative. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 11:16, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Amend COM:PORN to require that sexually explicit media is (sub)categorized into subcats of "Nudity or partial nudity"

Previous discussion took place

• here
• and here (recommended reading)

Policy in question: COM:PORN

Rationale (partly copying from the discussion):

Just because somewhere in a pornographic picture there is a bottle in the background does not mean it needs to be categorized with a cat of that drink. Just because there is the name of a children's game written on the body of naked woman presenting her asshole, does not mean it needs to be categorized into that children's game. At the very least such media shouldn't be put into that cat directly but I also question the potential educational value of having (non-isolated) subcats like this (category and/or image-location). If food is put on the body of a naked woman, that image does not need to be in the cat for that food, if there is a plant container near a woman masturbating it does not need to be in cat "Planters" and if a software logo is drawn onto an person's asshole that image does not need to be in the software's category. And so on (mostly examples from the Panteleev Geekography cat).

There was support and further rationale for putting them in separate categories at the first discussion because the user does not expect them there per w:WP:ASTONISH.

I don't care about these images being on Commons and it's not the topic of the debates. From the first discussion I took that large amounts of pornographic images could be argued to have potential educational value for showing diversity of or diverse human genitals / breasts and nude humans and there seem to be further issues or theoretical arguments with varying degrees of "realistically".

Moreover, these substantially distracting images are not what the user searches for in these cats or finds useful there. And they are NSFW (not safe for work with no search filter toggle).

Instead of putting bodytext-porn and similar images all over the place, making them show up under all kinds of searches (and in categories) to which they're irrelevant, I suggest they are put in separate categories where they're expected and possibly theoretically useful.

This is already applied in many cases (e.g. this is not in cat "Vases") but very often it's not, especially in the case of the ~600 non-amateur images of the example linked above. Hence a codified policy concerning their categories is proposed.

I propose something like this is added, phrasing could vary:

Please only use subcategories of Category:Nudity or partial nudity to categorize sexually explicit images.

So if you think a category for women using vases as dildos is useful you could create a subcategory for that and add Category:Vases to that category, but again I question the educational value of the latter and would suggest a broader Category:Vaginal use of objects suffices. If it does not suffice and there are many such images prompting a subcat, Category:Vases still doesn't need to be added at least as long as there is no "Category:Human uses of vases" for example.

There obviously could be exceptions, albeit even this nearly meets this criteria so these would be few, but this would be the default/standard principle.

People could create categories like "Nude women with food" or "Nude women with food on their body" or "Nude women holding objects" (instead of Cat:{Object}) or "Nude women with code written on their body" or "Nude women with logos of software drawn on their body". These images would still be findable when you search for "nude {name of food/software/...}" for example regardless if it's in that specific category due to the file's title, description (and its depicts structured data) Prototyperspective (talk) 23:13, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

I understand where you're coming from, but the definition of "sexual" images includes all forms of nudity and partial nudity, that is exposed genitals, and in the case of women's bodies things that are considered to be "non-sexual" in males (buttocks and nipples) are considered to be "sexual" in females. This proposed policy would mean that images from cultures where topless women aren't seen as sexual would have to exclusively be added to categories related to breasts, I'm not sure if that's a wise decision.

The definition of what is and isn't "sexual" is also different in different cultures and in different time period, in Islamist countries (like the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan for example) female hair or exposed female abdomen are considered to be "sexual", the definition of "nudity" has becoming more narrow in Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa over the past few centuries but have gotten way more wide in other cultures which have been in contact with cultures belonging to the European civilisation. This means that an indigenous American woman from Central America only wearing something to cover her genitals may not consider herself to be "nude" by her culture's standards but she would be considered "nude" by European standards. As far as I know the Wikimedia Commons uses Eurocentric standards due to the sensibilities of a Western audience.

WP:ASTONISH doesn't really apply here, doesn't WP:ASTONISH mean only using modern names for something, even if it's in a historical context (for example if the Empire State Building would be renamed the "Lady Gaga Building" we'd have to say "People were climbing the Lady Gaga Building in the 1930's"? Anyhow, I don't see how citing English-language Wikipedia policy would be handy either. My main issue with this proposal is that it would make these images less discoverable, if you want to filter them out of main categories the best thing you can do in the example of "a children's game written on the body of naked woman presenting her asshole" would be by adding that image to "Scrabble related images containing nudity" so people wouldn't find that image unless they're explicitly looking for it, but this would still show up in any search 🔎 results. (As far as I know there's no SafeSearch filter).

I think that there should be other ways to filter out unwanted nudity, we could try to develop an "Exclude images of nudity for safe searches" and then tag any image containing nudity, this way people who don't want to see nudity won't see nudity, this could be easily solved by creating a template that would make these images "disappear" for anyone who has the filter enabled. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 07:26, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Personally I like the idea of just having a setting to blur out NSFW images like reddit does. Then it wouldn't really matter if they are in a category, come up in search, or whatever. Plus that way the user could view them on a per image basis if they wanted to. Instead of filtering out a bunch of images that they might want to look at after reading the file name or whatever, but wouldn't know because they don't show up in the results or category. --Adamant1 (talk) 07:39, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Create a list using Petscan and update this list every day and then build a simple Javascript tool to replace all photos of this list with some other photo would be very easy to implement. GPSLeo (talk) 07:51, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

GPSLeo, Yes, that's an even better idea than what I suggested as a better solution than removing categories. But, should this "Wikimedia Commons for Kids" be the default or should people enable it? Would users without a Wikimedia SUL Account automatically have the filter on or off? -- — Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 08:34, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

No this definitely needs to be an opt-in Gadget. It could be possible to make this also available to not loggend in users but we would need some kind of new interface for this. I think Commons is no place for kids anyway, we are not even a platform for any casual users. GPSLeo (talk) 08:42, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Consider Picsome with any "solutions" you discuss. picsome is definitly supposed to become a place for kids (a general stock foto repository that could for example be used in schools or by NGOs like StopCoal or FridaysForFuture). C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 09:21, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Picsome is the same like Wikipedia. These are end user platforms. We are not an end user platform. We are a platform for other creators. Picsome can filter whatever they want, but this has nothing to do with what we do here as we do not decide which photos to use in Wikipedia articles. GPSLeo (talk) 10:36, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

• Yes, that's what I meant. It's a very good point that "images from cultures where topless women aren't seen as sexual" should be exempt. I expected people would raise exceptions – it's a quite simple solution that reasonable exceptions are made and we don't need to debate each exception (it would be just the "the default/standard principle").
• Concerning discoverability I raised several points. They are useless and irrelevant in these categories. Usually the suggested more adequate categories like "Nude or partially nude women with company logos drawn onto them" or "Nude or partially nude women with names of people written on them" would be the starting point, not the cat of that company or person. Also they can still be found by searching as I have clarified.
  The latter may pose similar problems, but I suggest we just focus on at least the category issue at first which could also be useful for any NSFW-blurring or -toggle-filters, because the categorization could be used for setting the tag/metacat.
  Concerning your example, I think it would be sufficient and better to create e.g. a "Computer games related images containing nudity" (or "Nude women with food on their body") because that would be the starting point if not the search engine.

Prototyperspective (talk) 11:50, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

• How long before some right wing nut tries to ban wikipedia in some certain states in the US claiming it be be less educational and more of a porn site which trust me, can happen, if they can get books from libraries which are barely pornographic in nature banned, they can get a whole site censored in a state...wikipedia is very much a book so we need to think long term, personally I'm for some sort of reddit type Blurring which takes into effect if the IP that clicked on that image is from the US, the reason i said US, cause i'm pretty sure no other country cares but a large percentage of enwiki readers are from the US, the blurring thing can be initiated by a "hidden cat" on that image..maybe a few other countries might opt-in in the future cause we know a few certain countries like China, Iran, Myanmar and Pakistan have banned/or censored wikipedia before...again, only a logged out option so logged in users who can tick an option in preference that they are over 16 will not be blocked from viewing them.. I have been pro-this idea for a long time cause we may be housing more porn/soft-core porn images than most porn sites :P but mediawiki technology then was not good enough to make it happen, they can now..--Stemoc 12:10, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

  It doesn't matter what we do, or Commons does, or Wikipedia does, or the WMF does: unless all Wikipedia projects declare abortion the devil's work, some US states will definitely ban the use of Wikipedia and Commons, at least in schools. Either that, or the GOP implodes because of Trump or some other reason. To make or break anything here because of "some right wing nut"s is utter nonsense. The GOP's demands are inherently contradictory and therefore unfulfillable.

  Nudity has nothing to do with sexuality and sexuality has nothing to do with nudity. Often the two come together. But an image can be completely naked without having anything to do with sexuality. Or it may be completely sexualised and contain no nudity.

  If sexuality is to be warned against: Then warn against sexuality. And if nudity is to be warned against, then warn against nudity. And if sexual nudity is to be warned against, then warn against sexual nudity.

  But to warn against sexuality with a reference to nudity: that is nonsense.

  And put these warnings in SDC: depict-nude, depict-sex, whatever. On the basis of these SDC-depicts programmers can then program whatever: Filters, pixelations, preferences. For the registered, for the anonymous, for minors, for strict believers. The tools WMF gives us are SDC and depicts. Everything else is a diversion that only makes it more difficult. SDC and depicts can be evaluated by Commons, by picsome, by Wikipedia, by Wikidata, by all API users, by all search engines. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 20:07, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

  • I would agree that nudity and sexuality are different issues (although to say they are unrelated seems a bit extreme) and, yes, some sort of tagging that would allow choices of filters would ultimately be the right way to do this. - Jmabel ! talk 00:59, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

  Commons is not censored. I support an opt-in gadget for utilitarian purposes only, not because right-wingers and the PRC already hate us for completely unrelated reasons like respecting science and information freedom and not giving validity to baseless conspiracy theories and authoritarian propaganda. Dronebogus (talk) 01:07, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Oppose I support an opt-in gadget for people who need things censored to be work-safe. We don’t need more weird micro-categories, let alone a requirement for them. Dronebogus (talk) 01:03, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

 Oppose per Dronebogus. I encourage users in pro-censorship workplaces, states, regimes, parties, schools, etc. to not use Commons while there, as Commons is not censored.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 05:31, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

These are oppose votes concerning a voluntary search filter toggle button, not this proposal which is about categorization of images and videos, especially pornographic ones. This isn't censorship.

Concerning "micro-categories", a category like "Nude women with logos of companies drawn on them" is not a micro-category and that's where the user would search for / start at when looking for an image of the Apple logo drawn onto an asshole. I'm not even debating whether these images are "realistically" educationally useful - just that pictures like this aren't put all over Commons. Prototyperspective (talk) 08:02, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Prototyperspective, Concerning this edit on that page you probably could have changed it to "Apple Inc. logos in pornographic art" so people wouldn't see it in the main category without removing the discoverability. — Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 17:05, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

 Comment It seems this proposal has failed, by being derailed into the expected can of worms. However, no policy change is needed for categorising sexually explicit media in suitable categories and removing them from categories where they are not relevant, and moving them to subcategories where they are relevant but not expected (such as sexually explicit parodies of persons not usually sexualised). I think this is mostly common sense, although it seems clear that there is a gray zone on what is "sexually explicit" (such as topless women and nude persons in non-erotic settings), and what media may be relevant for a a certain category (should calligraphy on some body parts be put in a separate general category?).

The filtering issue is different and should be treated separately. I hope those who want to make any actual proposal study the discussion on the WMF filter proposal and address all objections raised. There are real issues and we are not served by a heated discussion that does not address them.

–LPfi (talk) 08:33, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, creating a subcategory Category:Nude people standing next to Fagus sylvatica in Category:Fagus sylvatica and move files in that category would be perfectly in the current guideline and best practice. But this proposal would remove the photo from the Category:Fagus sylvatica by country category if there is no Category:Nude people standing next to Fagus sylvatica by country category. And therefore this would result in an information loss. GPSLeo (talk) 10:00, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

It would not result in an information loss because it can still be in the description and/or title and/or depicts structured data and because it's overcategorization as we don't need to add categories for every single thing visible in an image. There are further issues with your assumptions.

Moreover, this proposal would not require it to be removed from there.

The educationally valuable image of an Apple logo drawn onto an asshole may be valuable to "Category:Nude women with logos of companies drawn on them"/"Category:Nude women with logos of companies"/... but not "Category:Apple Inc." and polluting all of Commons and this is just one example. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:11, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

The term "overcategorization" has a specific meaning in Commons (see COM:OVERCAT), and that is not the meaning you used it for above — which is something like «More categories than I’d like»: something totally subjective and not at all a policy (and I would add, based on the example you give, totally wrong). I suggest you use instead words like "polluting", which make it clear what you stance on categorization. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 12:13, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying, yes I didn't mean overcategorization as per that policy but overcategorization in general. Not everything in a photo needs to be or should be added as a category. As I stated "we don't need to add categories for every single thing visible in an image" – if that's too difficult to understand as written I'll make it clearer: in an image where a person masturbates in a garden, we don't need to add categories for every single plant in the image from grass to 20 different kinds of flowers, category:Tables and whatnot. The rest of your comment makes it clear you failed to understand or address my point.

________

I don't think having there-unexpected, -useless, -irrelevant, -NSFW animations of beheadings or sexual intercourse in a category about all of the specific plants that happen to be visible somewhere in the background would be a good thing.

I don't know why this is so difficult to understand given that all other sites implement this. On reddit you can't just post slightly-humorous porn to r/funny and even at the subsites where it's appropriate it's tagged as NSFW (and yes obviously you still can post nude uncontacted tribes videos there). It's the same for basically all other sites including flickr, with WMC being the only big exception where you can't just see all of this without any warning, tags or checks (okay with that), you get it thrown at you at totally unexpected places such as categories for children's games.

It's absolutely not reasonable and completely out of touch with common sense. My policy-proposal is not the solution, but it does address this problem; I fail to see sufficient rationale for opposition in all arguments made so far which I think have addressed. I still want to be able to find these media when I look for it and where it's relevant (such as "Nude people cycling" in "Cat:People cycling") and you still can but don't have to make such subcats.

And what many here misunderstood: you could create a category per this policy-amendment like "Outdoor beheading on ground" or "Outdoor sexual intercourse next to Fagus sylvatica", I just simply don't think that would be constructive and a category like "Outdoor sexual intercourse" or "Outdoor sexual intercourse in a garden" suffices, especially when this data is already in the depicts metadata. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:11, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Among my uploads are pictures of naked women vaping. Of course, these pictures are relevant in the category "vaping". Because the manufacturer of these e-cigarettes has made the conscious decision to advertise their product in a sexual environment. Philosophical considerations about various plants in the background of a picture that has nothing to do with botany do not change this. This is not reddit or a funny website. The comparison with flickr is misleading because flickr does not have any categories at all; instead, flickr users assign tags of their own choosing that are not systematised by anyone. The argument "especially if the depict already says so" - well, it would be nice, but Commons consists to a large extent of files without depicts and to another large extent without meaningful depicts and to a small extent of completely nonsensical depicts. The attempt to somehow mark pornographic images with "naked" eats up resources. Resources that could be put into setting depicts, for example. If a file has meaningful depicts (e.g. for all 20 plants in it and also for nudity and sexuality), then it can be used as a basis for any kind of filtering in categories and or searches and or galleries, etc. Directly one below, a corresponding and sensible proposal has been made ("Implement a gadget for image thumbnail blocking"). C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 14:16, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I did not say it wouldn't be relevant in category vaping (in a subcategory there). I did not suggest it's like reddit but said all other websites have various measures while WMC not only doesn't have any but throws such images at you directly at totally unexpected inappropriate places. You can't even see these Geekography images (some of the examples) on Flickr when not logged in. If you want to reduce the need for resources and work, make it a policy so that people who upload do this on their own. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:21, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Add: And of course the image of the beheading belongs in the flower category. It is the only depiction of the flower in question. Someone who needs a picture of this flower and will make a crop without the beheading in the crop. -- But only if them finds this beheading picture in the first place, which would not be possible if any reference to the flower was deleted (and you would need to delete any mention ot the flower. as commons media search in either case searches Categories and depicts and description text and filenames). C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 14:25, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I addressed your points, imo completely based on misunderstandings or misinterpretations of my points above. For the rare flower: again, I'm not saying that can't be in the category for the flower – but not only are there hundreds of images in many of the example categories referred to here, the main point of my whole proposal is that such are placed into subcategories if the image is indeed relevant/sufficiently relevant to the category. Another unaddressed thing to repeat: do we categorize images with every single plant visible in any way in an image? Anyway, people seemingly since a while ago mostly just clutter this page with walls of text instead of focusing on addressing actual points (mainly based on non-existing/hypothetical exotic examples that ignore my point about possibility for exceptions) so it seems futile to continue to debate. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:32, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

If this proposal only means that it is recommended to use subcategories, then this is not needed as a guideline. You and every one else are is already free to do this. GPSLeo (talk) 15:00, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

There are differences between 1) can; 2) is recommend to; 3) should; 4) must with exceptions; and 5) must.

My proposal is placing this somewhere between 3) and 4) so uploaders do and can be expected to mostly do this on their own once they learn about the policy. Policies are not always "must"s. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:07, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

An excellent example , thank you. This clearly illustrates how this whole proposal is a non-starter. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 12:14, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

• I created a script to demonstrate that it is quite simple to block these files User:GPSLeo/blockfile.js. We only need a way to make this work with 400.000 files and then we can create an opt-in Gadget to allow ever user to hide such files without any change in the categorization system. --GPSLeo (talk) 12:00, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

  I don't think that makes much sense. For example this is not so much about not seeing porn on Commons but only seeing it when searching for that in specific. Just like I don't want to have a Beheading.gif in Category:Knives or a pic of a masturbating woman with some food on her body in the cat of the specific food. That's not where the user looks for it or where it's potentially useful and relevant.

  Can we please discuss the actual policy proposal again? This has been derailed to a discussion of a potential voluntary/opt-in search filter toggle (based on this categorization principle or not based on it). Prototyperspective (talk) 13:17, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

  If the tool has a button visible on every page it would be no problem to switch it on and of. I want to give a constructive solution. I could just say I totally oppose you proposal and I also see no urgent need to do anything in this field, but I give an alternative solution. GPSLeo (talk) 13:50, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

This would essentially create another category tree in parallel - total overkill for the intended result. The much more straight-forward way of handling this would be a simple "contains nudity" switch (probably by means of a SDC statement) that works with a user setting:

Do you want see images that contain nudity?
[x] always
[ ] replace images with placeholder "you chose not to see this"
[ ] replace thumbnails with a placeholder but let me see the actual image when I click on it

Sounds familiar? Kind of: That's what WMF should have done back when they were trying to establish image filters. --El Grafo (talk) 13:39, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Again, we're discussing all sorts of things but the actual proposal.

As I already clarified, I'd like to be able to see porn, nude people, people drinking piss, genitals and gore and people dying...just not all across WMCommons in all sorts of categories where such isn't expected, searched for, useful and relevant.

And if there is a visible button for this on all pages it's ineffective because you don't think of toggling it on a page about fried eggs or may arrive on a category page directly from a search engine.

I intentionally clarified that the WMC search engine results and/or filters is a separate issue, let's deal with this proposal first/only here. I had hoped for a discussion that considers common sense, the concept of reasonable exceptions and is in touch with reality and pragmatism, but that's not even needed to stay on-topic. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:38, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

The problem is, as GPSLeo says above, that your proposal would either need a parallel category tree for sexually explicit media, or make that content not findable through the normal categories (as that tree image wouldn't be in Category:Fagus sylvatica in Halmstad but in Category:Nude people standing next to Fagus sylvatica). This also shows the wider problem: why is a nudist in the wood treated as "sexually explicit media"? For the proposal to work without hiding away a lot of media, there needs to be some way to avoid having some people remove categories from images that happen to show some bare skin. Yes, the images may still be findable through a search, but that is no reason not to have them findable through the category structure. –LPfi (talk) 15:00, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

I addressed all of these things earlier. Briefly again:

"Category:Nude women with logos of companies drawn on them" is a bit broader than "Category:Nude women with the Apple logo drawn on them" and wouldn't show up in the Category:Apple Inc. That's fine.

The same goes for whatever examples you picked. Is every plant seen in an image for which there are already hundreds of photos required to be added as a cat to porn and nude people photos (especially if the depicts structured data already has that info)? Your argument displays being out of touch with reality at "happen to show some bare skin".

Concerning cases like the good point raised by Donald Trung earlier: again, there can be reasonable exceptions. They are still findable through the category structure, namely at places where they're expected, searched for, useful and relevant. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:13, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

•  Support Does anyone looking into Fagus sylvatica in Halmstad really want to see Nude people standing next to Fagus sylvatica? Virtually any use for the purpose of showing Fagus sylvatica is invalidated by adding a nude person to the photo. Even in a world where nudity is generally acceptable (which this is not), they would not be the best photos of Fagus sylvatica. Moreover, this started with the Panteleev Geekography files, which are educationally useless, offensive even in a world where nudity was generally acceptable, and should be deleted; if not, at least segregating these images with nude women would be better. Do we want File:Fruit ninja game depiction with painted fruit on a naked female.jpg in the Category:Fruit Ninja? Finding File:Erlang (9690003046).jpg in a directory for Erlang programming language might make some users feel that programming and/or Wikimedia is not a welcoming place for them. Also, the examples of computer games generally considered for all audiences on naked women include File:Lemmings (52033926537).jpg, File:Kirby (51605556030).jpg, File:Pokémon GO (28653034981).jpg, File:Wanna et ur cherry lik im pcman (14608437023).jpg and File:Fruit ninja game depiction with painted fruit on a naked female.jpg.--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:32, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
  • Finding an image of two men kissing, or a woman with her head uncovered, or Winnie The Pooh, in a directory for [thing] might make some users feel that [thing] and/or Wikimedia is not a welcoming place for them. The problem with these interminable, seemingly reasonable and very Anglocentric proposals is not where they start, but where they end; in other words, whose standards we apply. Only once you solve that problem [Hint: it's insoluble] will they become workable. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:02, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

    This discussion is not about media of two men kissing in a directory for [thing]. Hypothetical scaremongering that does not really address or make any points. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:30, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

    My post is not "hypothetical scaremongering" and the point, which you utterly fail to address, is the problem of "whose standards we apply". Do let us know when you have a solution for that. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:05, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

•  Oppose proposal as written, i.e. requiring sexually explicit images only be categorized under the Category:Nudity or partial nudity category tree. However, I would  Support requiring that sexually explicit images be categorized under that category tree, so long as they can have other categories too. —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 20:39, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

  That is just… the status quo. Basically. Dronebogus (talk) 23:20, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

  Then I guess I support codifying the status quo. —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 23:29, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

  +1 Me too. Mirer (talk) 00:35, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

  If that’s needed, me too. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 12:16, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

 Support: We don't censor, period. But that does not mean we must accept that fully-animated masturbation GIFs and the like can dominate the search results: Create that category for nudity and then apply blur-filters on search results until users specifically want to see the picture by clicking on it, or unless they generally opted in for nudity in search results. That is just common sense for a free media library where kids will search for harmless terms and names like "finger" or "Albert" (as has been demonstrated in earlier discussions). --Enyavar (talk) 20:45, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

If we’re going to go down that route, shouldn’t we apply this to images of gore, obscene gestures, feces, sexual themes without “nudity”, hate speech…? These are not random nonsense hypotheticals like “I’m offended by images of hamburgers because I’m vegan”; these are all things many people don’t want to see or expose kids to. Dronebogus (talk) 23:30, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, we should. And we should apply it to potential triggers like images of spiders too. But we don't need to do all of that at once. We can start with nudity, but do it in a way that allows us to add more things in the future. And we should do that in a way that allows users to choose what the y do or do not want to see. But that is not something we as the community can do alone. If we want to do it right, we need mediawiki developers for that. WMF tried something similar a couple of years ago, but they got it all backwards and had to cancel the whole thing after the community (rightfully) began to riot. El Grafo (talk) 10:36, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Also, this is not about "search results"! This is about categories, which are separate from search. —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 23:37, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Again: "that route" is not really relevant to this discussion, but if we allowed an open-ended tagging system (probably via SDC) and allowed creation of filters based on that tagging system, all such considerations could readily be accommodated. - Jmabel ! talk 00:21, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

That's a major problem of the proposal. We need ONE solution that works the same way everywhere, whether you're searching or on a category page or viewing an image inside an article on Wikipedia. El Grafo (talk) 10:44, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Yesterday WMDE sent out its regular newsletter. One of the topics in it is the EU's DSA. WM has been classified under the DSA as a large online service subject to certain obligations under the DSA. This makes this proposal obsolete. Either it is not far-reaching enough. Or changes will be made to WM that make the proposal superfluous. Or an implementation of the proposal would lead to effort, and at the same time the effort to implement the DSA would increase, because the respective measures complicate or contradict each other. The WMDE newsletter says that WMF has to clarify which measures are necessary and that the result may also be that the community of (not only) commnons has to take action. Instead of discussing this proposal further, I therefore think it would make sense for interested community members to contact WMDE and WMF and get involved in the discussion on the implementation of the DSA. Otherwise, WMF will give us something and we will have to implement it, no matter how badly it works in practice and how much unnecessary effort a bad solution causes. --C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 06:55, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi, any consideration for those who are not in the loop, providing a link to a newsletter you debate about? --Enyavar (talk) 11:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Does the DSA have implications for our category system? Without having checked what it really says, I would assume it would rather be about what media to serve to unsuspecting users, which is more about the filtering issues. Anyway, we need an analysis from WMF Legal. –LPfi (talk) 08:52, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Under DSA people can make complaints to the owner of a website and the owner has to act on the complaint. A possible complaint would be the complaint, that started this very conflict: "If I view the category of han characters, I do not want to see a Geekography han character on a nude body". So I would assume DSA has implications on the category system in some way. - In every case: the ~90 million files on Commons will need to be assessed for things like nudity or sexual content. It may be done after a complaint was made or before. This may be easy for BSicon.svg files, and more complicated for a video file with 2 hours running time or a djvu with 1800 pages. This may be done by "AI" software or by the WMF or by users. Also possible: The "Facebook approach": Ignore all laws, move fast, break things. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 09:26, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Wouldn't a fully compliant answer to that complaint be that Commons is a non-censored media repository, which cannot accommodate individual users' desires on what a category should or should not contain? Chapter II, Article 8 explicitly says that "No general obligation to monitor the information which providers of intermediary services transmit or store, nor actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity shall be imposed on those providers." I assume this lack of obligation of monitoring would very much apply to content that isn't illegal but only unwelcome to some users. –LPfi (talk) 09:52, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

A quick reading of the regulation does not reveal any obligation on hiding explicitly sexual content from all or any of the site's users. –LPfi (talk) 09:54, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

While Commons may be exempt from some requirements: Every item on Commons can be hotlinked from not only all WM sites, and all sites that use InstantCommons, and every other site (commons does not block hot linking). Sites like lb.wiktionary.org may not have the ressources to assess the files hot linked from commons themselves. External sites may just stop to use contnet form Commons at all, if the cannot pull an assessment via API from Commnons. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 10:37, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Good point. Hotlinking straight to image files is something I had not considered before. In any case, if WMF/WMDE is doing anything in that direction, we need to make sure that the Commons community is part of the process. That "image filters" fustercluck could have been prevented ... El Grafo (talk) 10:51, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

• The same issue exists when linking to categories such as a Category:Knives linked from Wikipedia:Knife despite containing the autoplaying 01_beheading.gif at the top. (Let's just deal with porn and nudity first.) I don't know why this is so difficult to understand and deal with when the policy proposal is quite clear and simple.
• If you want to make sure the Community is part of the process or even better: have it decide on how to deal with these issues and come up with good solutions, then it would be best not to provide actual semi-valid reasons for censorship and/or bad indexing by search engines and/or external regulation from outside policymakers.
  • I had hoped the Community itself can develop policy but while policy-making works quite well the wiki-way in general, it depends on a lot more participation (including from the general public and especially valuable input relating to common sense, the concept of reasonable exceptions and closeness to reality and pragmatism) due to which this may fail and require outside regulators to make requirements.
    Yes, we should discuss image filters (some categories [like "Beheadings with knives"] should be hidden in that case too btw) but apparently it's even difficult to just get porn not to be displayed in irrelevant categories for, for example, children's games so let's discuss and solve that one issue first and with one step at a time. It's not censorship (as said if you care about that you would be pro this proposal not scaremonger about this being or leading to censorship). It's a simple guideline-policy and more than overdue and fully/overtly beneficial. With the walls of text here now because people discussed all sorts of things but the actual proposal it's quite likely many don't participate because they think they'd need to read that first which they won't.

Prototyperspective (talk) 14:04, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Alright, alright, before we all drive Prototyperspective into madness, I'll get back to the actual proposal. Sorry for that. Let's agree that the proposal is not going to resolve "the issue" with nudity on Commons as a whole - nor does it attempt to do that. Let's maybe even pretend for a moment that it's not about nudity at all. In a way, this is nothing more than an attempt to make Categories useful again for finding the things you're looking for. I sympathize with that. I think tucking away unexpected non-standard uses of objects (Category:Electric toothbrushes probably being the most prominent case) in subcategories can by now be considered normal on Commons. Now, what exactly would we achieve by turning this into a "must" via policy? Are we going to start blocking people for negligent categorization? Despite their importance, Categories have always been optional. We don't normally tell people they have to categorize their uploads in a certain way. There's been no need, because sooner or later someone will come along and fix it. On the other hand, "we've always done it like this" makes for a terrible argument. Bottom line: I'm not against categorizing like this, I'm just not convinced we need to cast this into policy. What I'm certain about though, is that COM:PORN would be the wrong place for it. Should it be implemented, it should go to Commons:Nudity instead. --El Grafo (talk) 15:34, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Definitely if the issue is nudity, that should not be confused with porn. I personally have several hundred nude images I've photographed that are on Commons. I'm pretty comfortable in saying that only an arch-prude would consider any of them porn. Most of them were at the Fremont Solstice Parade in Seattle, which by local standards is considered a child-friendly event (though I'll admit it probably "wouldn't play in Peoria"). - Jmabel ! talk 18:33, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Agree this is unenforceable. If someone wants to jigger out a universal opt-in content filter that hides a given category/keyword/custom tag of content that’s a technical issue, not a content issue. Dronebogus (talk) 19:11, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Just a small clarification again: the purpose of this limited-scope proposal – which is not about any filter/s – is that NSFW-type content (porn, general nudity with few exceptions; not gore) is shown in categories only where it's expected, theoretically potentially useful, relevant, and searched for.

I still want to be able to see genitalia/intercourse/dicks with company logos drawn onto them/whatever without having to toggle any kind of filter and for example without being required by external policymakers to age-verify (removing anonymity; and this may become especially relevant once more porn videos' copyright expire). The key is that I only want to see that when I look for that in specific / in these places, not otherwise when I/readers of all kinds for example just look for pics of a specific food or a specific knife or a children's game or vases.

Good points by El Grafo but it could be more of a "should" than a "must" (we can't easily go through all the relevant media to check the cats anyway plus there can be exceptions) and e.g. the problem "because sooner or later someone will come along and fix it" is that it's an issue that's kind of addressed in reverse to that, on reddit for example you can't simply post NSFW videos to large-audience r/funny, the default is that you aren't allowed to do so and if you do anyway only then sooner or later a mod will come along and fix it. Having this be a policy doesn't mean that people are blocked when they don't apply it, just that, with exception, we generally expect them to. Prototyperspective (talk) 08:47, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective If it's intended as advice on best practice for categorizing certain types of files, then maybe Commons:Categories might be another place to consider ... --El Grafo (talk) 08:11, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

I generally don't vote on WM ballots. I will not vote on this particular proposal. But if I did, my vote would be a quadruple-super-saiyan-ultra-strong-oppose. What the proposal wants to achieve, it cannot achieve. Trying to implement it ties up resources that are not available. Adopting the proposal raises expectations that cannot be met. This is detrimental to the project. I have given reasons before. They did not convince everyone. Even repeating or expanding the reasons will not change that. Wanting something good is not enough to achieve something good. Unfortunately, some people don't see that. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 13:40, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Just an aside here: another value of separating out the categories having to do with nudity is that it underlines things like that in a category like Category:Women with bicycle helmets we have almost no examples of images of clothed women with bicycle helmets, which I would think was, on the whole, a more useful image related to bicycle helmets than the 20 nude or partially nude images in the corresponding subcat I just created. - Jmabel ! talk 00:53, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jmabel Actually from File:Purple Ride IWD 2022 Berlin 01 part 1 of 13.webm-13 alone about a hundred images of Women with bicycle helmets could be extracted (and the very very few topfree women in the video actually do not wear a bicycle helmet). There are also thousends of images and videos from Critical Mass, FFF bicycle demos and other bicycle demos which depict women with bicycle helmets. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 11:09, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

@C.Suthorn: I'm sure Jmabel meant there weren't many currently in the category. Besides the things you mentioned, there may also be images from cycling competitions that could be added. I added a few that I found just by looking higher in the category tree. -- Auntof6 (talk) 12:25, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but there's the rub: a lot of files are very poorly described. They may be in a category to which they belong, but not in others to which they belong. WMF and its developers recognised years ago that the category system is insufficient and introduced structured data as a solution. First in WikiData, then also as a successor to the categories in Commons. Building something new based on the category system is not sustainable. Especially when the WMF has to conjure up a solution for DSA out of a hat. And it is practically impossible that this will be based on categories, but pretty sure that it will use SDC. But even so, SDC are made for algorithmic evaluation. Categories can actually only be used by humans and only if they know the respective language (mostly English for categories). C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 13:25, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Just so this doesn't get lost, another example of where an amended policy would help is in Category:Male humans wearing black clothing. There are a number of images of men dressed all in black along with naked, bound women. Although I may move these to Category:Men wearing black clothing. Or maybe a new category called "Black-clad men with naked females"? --Auntof6 (talk) 08:56, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Implement a gadget for image thumbnail blocking

Following the discussion above I propose that we request the WMF with their Commons:Product and technical support for Commons 2022-23 program to create a gadget to replace thumbnails on pages. If it is not possible to do this in this program we just show that we need such a tool. --GPSLeo (talk) 15:19, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Suggested features

• The gadget should be Opt-in.
• The tool should hide the thumbnails on category and gallery pages and in the search results.
• The file page should still be linked and on the file page nothing should be hidden by this tool.
• Files become hidden based on their categories (of course recursive).
• Some standard filters should be available like Category:Nude or partially nude people. These filters can be switched on and of like in the preferences of cat-a-lot.
• It should be possible to add any category to the filter in the personal preferences.

Voting

Cautiously support I’ve wanted this kind of thing for a long time simply because of its realistic utility (I want to be able to look for innocuous files in the presence of others) but I’m concerned about the technical aspects making it unfeasible. Dronebogus (talk) 19:17, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

•  Support in principle,  Disagree with some of the proposed details. But let's get this rolling and figure out who we need to talk to at WMF (legal, tech, ...) --El Grafo (talk) 08:03, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
•  Support in principe, but the details will need to be worked out. If the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) agrees to adopt this they should bring it up to the community for discussion to pan out all the details. But children use this website and pornography (and even nudity) is banned in a fair number of countries so having the software lying around would be good, but how it will be implemented is something that we'll need to work out later. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 21:21, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

I thinks it's been firmly established that categories can be a bit of a nightmare for software so interact with, especially going down the tree of subcategories (that's what you mean by "recursive", right?). I suspect that a (set of) yet-to-be-defined SDC tag(s) might work better for this. How about we keep those two as potential options and flesh that out in detail at a later stage, together with the developers? --El Grafo (talk) 15:45, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Recursive search through categories works using Petscan. For recursive search though SDC statements there is still no possibility in the Queryservice or any other tool. GPSLeo (talk) 15:50, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

True, but on the other hand a single "contains nudity" SDC tag directly applied to an image file could replace an entire tree of Category:Nude or partially nude people, as there would be no need crawl through through hundreds of branches like ... > Nude or partially nude people by color > Nude or partially nude blue-colored people > Nude or partially nude blue women > Category:Nude blue women to actually reach an image file. I'm not saying that's the one an only way to do this. I'm not even saying we need to discuss this now. Quite the opposite: I'm saying we should keep our options open and discuss details like this later with the people who build the thing. Focus on defining the destination, discuss route options once you have fond a driver. El Grafo (talk) 16:16, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Then you would need to create a bot to add this tag to the 400.000 files. If you have a list of a bot to add this tag the tool could also use the list directly. GPSLeo (talk) 16:28, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

For the existing files, that hypothetical bot would need to run only once, though, instead of crawling the tree on the fly. Again: we don't need to solve this here and now. Let's not wliminate options before talking to the people who are going to implement it. We will have to communicate with them a lot anyway in order to get a system that works in a way the community approves of. El Grafo (talk) 08:42, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

With a SDC tag added you only can filter for that tag. If you want to create an new filter for arachnophobia or epilepsy you would need to create and ad a new tag and add it to all files. Self defined filter would be even harder. GPSLeo (talk) 09:15, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Can we maybe just agree to disagree on this one for the moment and leave the technical details for later? That's all I've been asking for the whole time. And it's not even an either/or situation, it may well turn out that using the two in parallel levels out some of the different problems in either of them. El Grafo (talk) 07:50, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Main issues I see with this proposal:

• • it's nearly useless when opt-in only (people land on WMC category pages from search engines or WP pages' links)
  • I'd still like to see images of nude people, porn, sexual intercourse, gore, decapitations, people drinking piss, and whatnot when I deliberately search/browse for that where it's expected without having to toggle some filter on or off but only there (search with related terms in search engine or browse into subcategories).

The lack of support for this search filter along with a lack of proposed alternatives even after all these years clearly shows how far off people here in specific are from common sense and reasonable self-governance. All other large general-media websites have such filters and (NSFW/NSFL) tags except WMC apparently. If you want to make sure WMC develops its own policies and stays free of censorship and real name requirements then make reasonable policy yourself instead of scaremongering or bickering about exotic rare hypotheticals. It's just completely absurd and irresponsible and nobody in touch with common sense and sensibility would defend such fundamentalist ignorance without raising any real issues with or alternatives to such. Mainly due to the second issue I have with such filters, I instead support my policy above for subcategorization-requirement (with exceptions) of porn&nude people content, some well-thought-out sensible kind of blurring/filters/similar could come later on. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:57, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Please check the issues that made the WMF proposal a few years ago a disaster. If those issues were addressed in the proposal, we would avoid a kilometre of flames on each of them, or at least have a structured discussion on whether the analysis on a certain issue was inadequate, and whether there are ways around the problems not properly handled in the analysis. Otherwise we risk just repeating those kilometre-long discussions. –LPfi (talk) 16:25, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

• Nothing can go wrong with this proposal. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:38, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
  • Pigsonthewing, this is why the tool is opt-in and not opt-out, it's so the Conservative puritans won't have to throw a hissy fit. Schools can choose to enable this feature by default on their computers as well, I remember reading about some teachers in the Netherlands describing Wikipedia as "a porn site" in a newspaper over a decade ago. I don't like the censorship either, but the Wikimedia Commons has been controversial because of it's pornography since day 1 (one), so an opt-in system would be an easy way to appease the prudes without having to change the content itself. Now implementation is something else. — Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 16:59, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
    • Like I said, Nothing can go wrong with the proposed system. (Well, apart from all the things that have been pointed out in previous discussions, which this proposal does not address. But apart from those...) Perhaps you can tell us how schools can choose to enable this feature by default on their computers, since that is not something mentioned in anything posted above? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:12, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

 Question Will login be mandatory in order to enable the filter? If that's the case then that will probably severely limit the usefulness. --Trade (talk) 00:37, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Most customization is login-only on WM. I know nothing about coding this stuff so I have no idea if that’s just built-in. Dronebogus (talk) 11:59, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I assume that it'll have to be like that in the beginning. But if it proves successful, WMF might consider enabling it for anonymous users a well. That would probably require a change in cookie policy, though. El Grafo (talk) 08:48, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

El Grafo, it could be enabled by default for anonymous users and then if a user clicks on a blurred image they get the question "This is a sexually explicit image - Are you older than 18?" and if they click "Yes, I am older than 18" they will receive a cookie that disables it, kind of like how it has already run for a large number of websites since the 1990's. — Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 21:19, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Those are so unbelievably stupid. “Oh yes I’m definitely over 18” says Horny 15 Yr Old Bobby Dronebogus (talk) 21:22, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Dronebogus, I know, I've been clicking those away since I was 9 (nine) if not younger, but it is a system that in theory makes the child responsible for their own actions, they didn't find pornography at the Wikimedia Commons by accident, a curious child will circumvent this system but a child that has no desire to see nudity and doesn't want to click on it won't be exposed to it without their consent. -- — Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 21:26, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Then we don’t need a “r u 18??” Fake age-gate unless it will somehow help us legalistically (which is why those things exist in the first place I’m pretty sure). We should just say “do you want to see this?” And leave it at that. Dronebogus (talk) 21:32, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

• A gadget is a good idea
• Doing this with SDC is a good idea.
• A bot run that tags 400000 files that are already tagged in some way (by category, template, super category, ...) with the SDC tag is harmless and easy to implement
• A gadget can also be configured by non-logged-in users via a cookie (opt-in or opt-out).

--C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 13:45, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Help creating a tag for CC 4.0 content from Portuguese public archives

Hi!

According to the information on the website of Portugal's Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries (DGLAB - Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas, the official Portuguese entity in charge of the country's public libraries and archives), "the contents of the DGLAB network archives are published under the Creative Commons - Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International - CC BY-SA 4.0 license".

These archives host Portugal's oldest public records and are an important source of information for most researchers.

Creating a tag specifically for this kind of content would help, promote and facilitate the importation of such content for the project.

Since I'm not as active in Wikimedia Commons as I am in Wikipedia, in your opinion, would this be a good idea or not? Thanks! JonJon86 (talk) 11:47, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

@JonJon86: How are Portugal's oldest public records not simply in the public domain? - Jmabel ! talk 18:32, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jmabel I don't know, but I'm pretty the whole collection isn't. Each archive has specific documents from each district, and the dates vary greatly, so not all documents are in the PD yet.

This suggestion was made with the intent of providing a way to import and use those documents (as they're published under the CC 4.0 license), regardless of them being in the PD or not. JonJon86 (talk) 19:45, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

{{Cc-by-sa-4.0|attribution=[https://dglab.gov.pt/ Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries (Portugal) - DGLAB - ''Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas (Portugal)]}} would produce:

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Attribution: Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries (Portugal) - DGLAB - Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas (Portugal)

You are free:

• to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to remix – to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 truetrue

Do we need anything more than that? If so, what? We could create a template that would provide a shorthand for that, if you like. - Jmabel ! talk 20:24, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jmabel that's great! Thank You! The only thing I'd add is the list of Archives to whom this license applies (a few Portuguese public archives are not managed by DGLAB). The archives under DGLAB management are:

National Archives:

• National Archive of the Tower of Tombo
• Portuguese Center of Photography
• Overseas Historical Archive

District Archives:

• Aveiro District Archive
• Beja District Archive
• Bragança District Archive
• Castelo Branco District Archive
• Évora District Archive
• Faro District Archive
• Guarda District Archive
• Leiria District Archive
• Portalegre District Archive
• Porto District Archive
• Santarém District Archive
• Setúbal District Archive
• Viana do Castelo District Archive
• Vila Real District Archive
• Viseu District Archive

Can you create the template please? Thank you very much! JonJon86 (talk) 21:33, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

@JonJon86: I think the list belongs just in a "noinclude" element on the template page, not every time we show the template. And, yes, I'll create this at {{Cc-by-sa-4.0-DGLAB}}. Jmabel ! talk 22:01, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

That's perfect!! Thank you very much! JonJon86 (talk) 22:48, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Offer „Use this file“ in local language

I would like to see „Use this file“ offered in the set local language and not only in the English language.

• Example:
  • English (original): [[File:Logo Renewable Energy by Melanie Maecker-Tursun V1 4c.svg|thumb|Logo Renewable Energy by Melanie Maecker-Tursun V1 4c]]
• my wish:
  • Dutch: [[Archivo:Logo Renewable Energy by Melanie Maecker-Tursun V1 4c.svg|thumb|Logo Renewable Energy by Melanie Maecker-Tursun V1 4c]]
  • German: [[Datei:Logo Renewable Energy by Melanie Maecker-Tursun V1 4c.svg|mini|Logo Renewable Energy by Melanie Maecker-Tursun V1 4c]]

Molgreen (talk) 05:06, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Molgreen, Isn't this already the case? Whenever I enter the Wikimedia Commons from a language other than English all categories and files are in that language, for Dutch it becomes "Bestand:" for example. Such a change could be based on the standard language of the user in question. -- — Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 05:30, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Donald Trung, Thank you the feedback. I can't say if there is already a disposing ticket. I imagine the implementation exactly as described by you. Molgreen (talk) 17:48, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Restricting uploads and/or expanding speedy deletion criteria for PDF files

PDF uploads on Commons typically fall into one of a few categories:

• Scans of public-domain books, government publications, published papers, and other historical documents for Wikisource.
• Attempts to create wiki pages by uploading a PDF, and/or PDF exports of existing pages.
• Textual content created for school projects such as essays, notes, and homework assignments.
• Single bitmap images which are, unaccountably, represented as a single-page PDF. (These images can usually be extracted using tools like pdfcpu, but this is rarely done.)
• Other out-of-scope textual content, such as resumes, advertisements, and the like.

Of these, only the first is within scope, and most of the PDF uploads in this category are uploaded in bulk by a small number of established users. There are very few appropriate uploads of PDF content from new users. I've proposed dozens of unsuitable PDF files for deletion, and essentially every one of them has been deleted with little to no discussion.

1. Would it be appropriate to establish abuse filters to discourage and/or prevent new users from uploading PDF files? I believe there are abuse filters in place which restrict uploads of other questionable file types like MP3s.
2. Would it be appropriate to introduce new speedy deletion criteria, or expand existing criteria, to allow for the speedy deletion of more out-of-scope PDF files? For example, the current GA2 criterion ("user intended to create encyclopedic content") is only applicable to gallery pages, but expanding it to also apply to files would make a substantial number of unsuitable PDF uploads eligible for speedy deletion.

Omphalographer (talk) 00:51, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Omphalographer, not every PDF has to be linked to a Wikisource page, that would make uploading books here an enormous hassle. I'm not sure if the current deletion system fails to take care of those, if a user who is not well versed in English uploads a "Single bitmap images which are, unaccountably, represented as a single-page PDF. (These images can usually be extracted using tools like pdfcpu, but this is rarely done." It would be way better to tag it with a template that would allow people extract it, a fairly large number of government libraries only allow people to download files as PDF's and this includes such images, speedy deleting them simply because of the format would cause a fair number of such works to be deleted without anyone extracting the images, at least with regular deletion requests there is time for others who are technically versed to extract them.
As for the other criteria you listed, there are already speedy deletion criteria for them G10, in fact I often see such files speedied under that criterion. I don't see how the current system falls short in this regard, there's no hurry to delete most of those files, IMO speedy deletion should be reserved for blatant copyright ©️ violations and out of scope pages, a file which would be in scope if it was a different format shouldn't fall under this.
Likewise, limiting new uploads would just prevent people who just want to upload a single book or something for Wikisource from becoming content creators here. Filters don't just filter out content, they filter out people and if someone doesn't know how to start at Wikisource by uploading a public domain book here they might never join. -- — Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 05:28, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

To be clear: scans are fine. I don't have a problem with those. The problem is other inappropriate uses of PDF uploads. Here are a couple of examples that are currently nominated for deletion:

• File:LA WIKI ESPISTEMOLOGIA Y PEDAGOGIA.pdf
• File:ENSAYO ACTIVIDAD UNIDAD 3 (1).pdf
• File:Violence in slaves' narratives during the 19th century and the struggles in the contemporary society.pdf
• File:TEXTURES OF MATTANCHERRY.pdf
• File:Lamborghini Automobili.pdf

All of these files are clearly out of scope for Commons, and will undoubtedly be deleted when the deletion discussions are closed, but there's no fast path to deleting them. (G10 only applies to advertisements, which these aren't.)

Re. "limiting new uploads" - my understanding is that uploading scanned books to Wikisource is a fairly demanding process, and requiring users to click through a confirmation or request clearance before uploading would probably not be a big deal. I'm not terribly familiar with the project, though, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Moreover, getting some sort of confirmation in front of users before they upload a PDF might give us a chance to point them in the right direction (e.g. uploading images in a more appropriate format, or creating a wiki page for text instead of uploading as a PDF). Omphalographer (talk) 06:22, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

The file "File:Violence in slaves' narratives during the 19th century and the struggles in the contemporary society.pdf" seems like a research paper and is by all intents and purposes an educational media file, however these things are usually regarded as out of scope unless they were first published elsewhere, that is in an academic journal or at a university, then they become "in scope". If it turns out to be a work published by an established researcher and published elsewhere it likely has to go through the VRT, the current system is already exclusive enough to exclude large groups of educational content that would otherwise be within scope. Per "COM:SCOPE": "A PDF or DjVu file of a published and peer-reviewed work would be in scope on Wikisource and is therefore also in scope on Commons. Examples of in-scope documents include published books (but not vanity publishing), peer-reviewed academic papers, etc., university theses and dissertations., however the current wording would also mean that historical documents like "File:Vorläufiger fremdenpass.jpg" are "out of scope" because it's a document that doesn't fall in any of the listed exemptions, so in some ways "COM:SCOPE" already fails to document the practice of what is and isn't seen as in scope by excluding otherwise educational content (but that's another discussion). Regarding "File:Violence in slaves' narratives during the 19th century and the struggles in the contemporary society.pdf" the main culprit here is its lack of being peer-reviewed, if a user is the original author and had submitted it for peer review elsewhere then they should be instructed to go through the VTRS and a speedy deletion would discourage it as all they'd learn is "these files are not allowed here" while if this same PDF met some other critèria it would have very well been an uncontroversial educational document, so expanding speedy deletion would only discourage those with good intentions by basically excluding them from the WikiDeletion process, it is by having new users be engaged with the deletion process and learn what they did wrong that they learn, speedy deletions more often than not come across as warnings for something a user did wrong while only vaguely telling them what they did was wrong. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 07:51, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

The filter cannot distinguish between the different categories. Newbies can very well upload scans of PD documents and photos, which should be welcome in many cases. The filter can give a more complicated warning including advice for different scenarios, but many people would just notice that it is a warning and give up without reading the wall-of-text advice. –LPfi (talk) 07:58, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Please don't forget about all the presentation slides from Wiki-meetings which are clearly educational and in scope and often uploaded as PDF. Restricting uploads of PDF would make sharing presentations a lot more difficult for many users. --Kritzolina (talk) 08:08, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

The mediawiki software does scan files during the upload process for metadata and malicious content (like embedded code). For PDFs, that actually consist only of an image (jpeg, png, webp, gif, tif) it would be the natural solution, that the mediawiki softwaere extracts this image on the fly and publishes the image togethere with a category or SDC, saying that it was auto extracted from PDF. The number of active users at commons is small and this issue of single image as PDF can be solved programmaticaly. --C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm) (talk) 08:17, 22 May 2023 (UTC)