Commons:Village pump/Archive/2026/04
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How many people categories is too much?
If we had the image of a historical list with 1,000 people, that we also had wikidata entries for, would we create 1,000 categories for that list? RAN (talk) 04:49, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- Yes, everything that has a Wikidata item should also have a category. GPSLeo (talk) 06:02, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- No. If something has a valid wikidata item, then that's a justification for having it here too, against any questions of 'notability' [sic]. However it's not a requirement to have one, if it's not considered useful to Commons' own goals. Two obvious examples of this might be a highly notable topic where we just don't have any Commons content for it. Another one (which we've encountered previously) was for team photos, where the team had a wikidata item, as did each individual, but the only Commons content was a single photo of the entire team.
- We certainly should not bulk auto-create a bunch of empty Commons categories (that are likely to stay empty) from a script run over Wikidata. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:05, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- No, a photo of some list with people's names on it shouldn't be in the categories of all those people but instead a broader category/ies like 'group xy', and/or 'zy lists of people', or 'characteristics zv', etc. Or if you want to categorize lists with merely people's names on it, there's no need to discuss hypotheticals here. There's more than enough challenges and backlogs without discussing hypotheticals and I consider this thread solved. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:02, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- +1. The fact that a name appears in a document is not, in and of itself, a good reason to create a category representing that name. Omphalographer (talk) 18:26, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- How is it solved with two contradictory replies? Is the assumption that your answer is correct, and the other answer is incorrect? --RAN (talk) 15:12, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- Maybe I misunderstood your question as to be about which categories to set on an image of a list while you're asking about whether we should create categories for wikidata items. If the latter is the case, then categories still should not be empty. In either way, this seems to be about hypotheticals and there's more than enough nonhypothetical things to discuss. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:48, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- And if this is not hypothetical, it would be useful to have a concrete example. But I will venture slightly into hypotheticals. If we had a photo of the entire U.S. Senate of the moment, I would oppose adding a category to that photo for each individual Senator. If we had a picture of a list of 1000 names of individuals, I would certainly not add categories for the all people named in the list, any more than I would add, for a PDF of a book, a category for every place mentioned in the book. - Jmabel ! talk 18:55, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- Maybe I misunderstood your question as to be about which categories to set on an image of a list while you're asking about whether we should create categories for wikidata items. If the latter is the case, then categories still should not be empty. In either way, this seems to be about hypotheticals and there's more than enough nonhypothetical things to discuss. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:48, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- Maybe not places, but what about people? In that book pdf, there might be mentioned "Jim Smith" that we have a category already as "James H. Smith". How would someone refind it once the connection has been made? People have synonyms and researchers need a way to aggregate all the information on a person. I can see not needing to index every mention of George Washington in a book, but some people are more obscure. --RAN (talk) 21:12, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- If the book has substantial coverage of the person, sure, but (for example) I would not want to tag a history of European art with the categories for 583 artists. If anything, flooding the category with content like this makes it harder to find actually relevant material. - Jmabel ! talk 21:25, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- How would it make info more difficult to find? If I have no interest in the index of a book, I don't look at it. If I need to find someone, I use the index. Text searching has made most indexes redundant, but as pointed out people have synonyms. --RAN (talk) 02:01, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
- +1, I think this issue is covered by Commons:Overcat, is it not? My favorite example (not with people, but locations) is that a world map should not be categorized into all hundreds or thousands of location-categories of the places that are shown and/or labelled in that map. Just because one dot in this map is labelled "Lhasa", does not turn that map into a "map of Lhasa", at least in my opinion. The same logic goes for the hypothetical group photos of large-crows, for long name lists, or bound collections of short-bios. There are reasonable exceptions, but I think that most files with way over 10 categories are cases of overcat/miscat. --Enyavar (talk) 22:05, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- Commons:Overcat deals with redundant categories such as adding Category:Albert Einstein and Category:Physicists from Germany to an image of Einstein, not about properly identifying everyone in an image (or I assume list). --RAN (talk) 01:38, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
- If that is so, then I think we should add a point to the Categories' policy about not adding hundreds/thousands of categories to files. Even if we could identify each of the people in this painting by name, I argue that we should only do so in respective crop-outs where those are needed... but not in the larger picture. --Enyavar (talk) 11:52, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
- Commons:Overcat deals with redundant categories such as adding Category:Albert Einstein and Category:Physicists from Germany to an image of Einstein, not about properly identifying everyone in an image (or I assume list). --RAN (talk) 01:38, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
- @Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): flooding a category with tangentially relevant files makes genuinely relevant files harder to find. - Jmabel ! talk 20:18, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
- +1, I think this issue is covered by Commons:Overcat, is it not? My favorite example (not with people, but locations) is that a world map should not be categorized into all hundreds or thousands of location-categories of the places that are shown and/or labelled in that map. Just because one dot in this map is labelled "Lhasa", does not turn that map into a "map of Lhasa", at least in my opinion. The same logic goes for the hypothetical group photos of large-crows, for long name lists, or bound collections of short-bios. There are reasonable exceptions, but I think that most files with way over 10 categories are cases of overcat/miscat. --Enyavar (talk) 22:05, 1 April 2026 (UTC)
- How would it make info more difficult to find? If I have no interest in the index of a book, I don't look at it. If I need to find someone, I use the index. Text searching has made most indexes redundant, but as pointed out people have synonyms. --RAN (talk) 02:01, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
_and_Lhasa_(Lassa)_in_1839,_equatorial_projection,_from_Mitchell%27s_School_Atlas_LOC_2007633727-4_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
Notification of DMCA takedown demand — Brixton riots, 1981 (enwiki)
In compliance with the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and at the instruction of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal counsel, one or more files have been deleted from Commons. Please note that this is an official action of the Wikimedia Foundation office which should not be undone. If you have valid grounds for a counter-claim under the DMCA, please contact me.
The takedown can be read here.
Affected file:
To discuss this DMCA takedown, please go to COM:DMCA#Brixton riots, 1981 (enwiki). Thank you! Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 12:37, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
Notification of DMCA takedown demand — Dragon Bravo Fire Pyrocumulus
In compliance with the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and at the instruction of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal counsel, one or more files have been deleted from Commons. Please note that this is an official action of the Wikimedia Foundation office which should not be undone. If you have valid grounds for a counter-claim under the DMCA, please contact me.
The takedown can be read here.
Affected file:
To discuss this DMCA takedown, please go to COM:DMCA#Dragon Bravo Fire Pyrocumulus. Thank you! Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 12:48, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
Broken Wikimedia image (sizes)
This semester and last the embedded Commons images I've long used have been broken. I was fixing them ad hoc, but today tried to figure out what was going on. It appears that a lot of the sizes that used to be served offsite no longer are?
I have a python script, which might've fixed most of the issues, but though I looked I can not find the discussion of what changed and why.
❯ wikipedia-image-embeds-fix.py talks/
Updated 1 links in talks/180-privacy.md
1024px to 960px : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/CPT-Proxy.svg/960px-CPT-Proxy.svg.png
Updated 1 links in talks/056-brown-learning.md
1024px to 960px : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fc/Laurentius_de_Voltolina_001.jpg/960px-Laurentius_de_Voltolina_001.jpg
Updated 5 links in talks/075-darknet.md
512px to 500px : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Digital_signature_schema.png/500px-Digital_signature_schema.png
512px to 500px : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Bitcoin_Block_Data.svg/500px-Bitcoin_Block_Data.svg.png
512px to 500px : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Onion_diagram.svg/500px-Onion_diagram.svg.png
1024px to 960px : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Iceberg_of_Webs.svg/960px-Iceberg_of_Webs.svg.png
128px to 330px : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Iceberg_of_Webs.svg/330px-Iceberg_of_Webs.svg.png
Reagle (talk) 20:22, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
- Custom thumbnail sizes got entirely removed because of massive crawler traffic. See mw:Common thumbnail sizes for the available sizes. GPSLeo (talk) 20:38, 2 April 2026 (UTC)
Proposing the removal of the previous version of a file
Shortly after uploading a picture, I noticed a visibile license plate in it and so I uploaded a new version with said license plate blurred. Is there a way to propose the deletion of the precious version?
If not, what is the correct method to solve this sort of issue?
I suppose something like:
- Ask for deletion first;
- wait for the file to be removed;
- Upload the file with license plate blurred.
Thanks in advance,
--Marco (talk) 06:54, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
- Yes, see COM:REVDEL. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:42, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:42, 8 April 2026 (UTC)