Commons:Village pump/Technical

Shortcuts: COM:VP/T • COM:VPT

We at Wiki Project Med have build a gadget that allows visualization of multiple SVG heatmaps and country graphs on Commons. The gadget is currently active on EU and UK Wikipedia, for example on UK WP.[1]

We would like to request activation of this gadget on Commons. We are gradually uploading interactive graphs and listing them at Commons:List_of_interactive_graphs per discussion at Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#OWID_visualizations.

Steps to activate this are:

• copy MDWiki:MediaWiki:Gadget-owidslider.js
• copy MDWiki:MediaWiki:Gadget-owidslider.css
• copy MDWiki:Template:Owidslider and modify it to include a tracking category
• copy MDWiki:Module:Owidslider
• create tracking category Category:Pages using gadget owidslider
• add owidslider [ResourceLoader|default|categories=Pages using gadget owidslider]|owidslider.js|owidslider.css to MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition, which will create a mw:Template gadget
• copy MDWiki:Template:ImageStackPopup

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:51, 29 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

The gadget is now fully live on English Wikipedia, as well as Basque and Ukrainian. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:33, 2 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Support Sohom (talk) 12:54, 30 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

Support but I don't think there need to be or should be two requests / discussions. There already is unanimous substantial support so far at the VP/P discussion. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:09, 30 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

That was just for keeping a list of templates here, this is for activation of the gadget itself... Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:12, 30 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

Support The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 17:51, 30 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Doc James: It's been a month since anyone responded and the support is unanimous. I'd say go ahead and move forward. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 20:27, 1 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Since recently, videos often take long to start and then load very slowly. Since 2 days or so sometimes images and maybe just the site also take long to load. Is anybody else having similar issues? During these times, other sites like YouTube videos still load quickly. Didn't have this before and at other times like right now, Commons videos load as quick as ever. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:08, 30 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

Really nobody else is having such issues? Sometimes, things load quick and at other times it's not even just videos but also images or even just pages like category pages that take very long to load, basically making the site near-unusable. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:55, 6 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I did encounter some loading issues these couple weeks, but I assumed it was just part of the Wikimedia site-wide issues (see the error spikes/reports at https://www.wikimediastatus.net/#month, or the 2 threads directly below this one). I didn’t pay attention to it since it is something above Commons and usually the problem resolves soon after. Other than that, the site is running fine for me. Tvpuppy (talk) 21:52, 6 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I hoped that was the case but I still have these problems and also have them at times that aren't these spikes or the most recent incident. I had them until some minutes or maybe an hour ago and had it for several hours today. I try to get some more clues regarding potential causes or factors and if somebody else is having the same issues that could help a lot. Don't know if you have the same problem...maybe you could more often try to play some videos (20MB+ ones) to check whether the issue is currently there and how severe it is. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:17, 6 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I had this issue, too --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 18:56, 9 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

The videos only load fast if I do not exclude the IP of upload.wikimedia.org from my VPN via routes (which may compromise my privacy). If I use Commons without VPN (I can't edit if I don't exclude the site from the VPN), then often videos load so slow one can't realistically watch any of them during these times.
I don't live in an authoritarian country (and not the US if you already consider it to be such), but I still have this issue. Is this caused by the ISP or something on the Wikimedia end? I created an issue but it was basically closed because things seemed normal and I didn't want to disclose my IP etc. @PantheraLeo1359531: do the videos also often load so slow that you can't really watch them at all or do they just load slower than they used to? If you also have this problem and it's severe, maybe either of you two could create the issue for it with more details. From site reliability engineering team I heard that things seem normal and should be normal in regards to video load speed on Commons so creating an issue with details on this would be important if I'm not the only one having this. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:44, 10 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I opened one and the start has been played, but when I jumped to the middle of the video, nothing loaded :( --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:48, 10 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Sounds similar to the issues I'm having and would be good to create an issue on phabricator. For me, the video iirc usually loads when clicking at the middle but it just takes very long as in it could take a minute or more; when the start does play it still loads quite slowly. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:14, 10 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Sounds, familiar, yes :). A task could be useful, and a technician should run a analysing tool to check when streams are loaded and what (not) :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 20:18, 10 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

All the media files have been loading quick since I'm not excepting all of Commons from my VPN. So it seems like my ISP (a large one in a developed non-authoritarian country) is intentionally slowing down Commons media but that doesn't seem very plausible. I don't know how else this could be caused. I mean the videos do load and sometimes they did load fairly quickly when not using a VPN. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:28, 29 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I created an issue but it was basically closed because things seemed normal and I didn't want to disclose my IP etc. @Prototyperspective, disclaimer that I am not a networks engineer, but (in case it's helpful for you and/or anyone else looking at this thread) I'll try and explain my (albeit very limited) understanding of why the SREs request this information (e.g. IP address, traceroutes, etc.) in order to try and debug a connectivity issue.

For some personal context, I previously had an issue where downloading the MediaWiki codebase to my computer was much slower than it should've been, given my personal internet speeds. After doing some troubleshooting, I found that turning on a VPN actually increased the speed when downloading MediaWiki; which sorta indicated that -- when I wasn't using a VPN -- there might be something along the network path that was causing the speed to be throttled somehow.

To me, this seems like the type of thing that could potentially be investigated by SREs; however, as the issue seemed like it was specific to something along the network path between my computer and the WMF's servers, if I reported it without providing any information about my IP address / that network path, I imagine that the SREs wouldn't know where to start looking into it from.

So while -- to be clear -- it's a completely reasonable decision to (e.g.) not want to share your own personal IP/network information in a security-protected Phabricator task (and to be clear, it's your own decision to make, and I don't want to pressure you at all into changing your mind!), without that sort of information, I imagine that it might be difficult for the Wikimedia SREs to be able to investigate the issues that you're personally facing here.

it seems like my ISP (a large one in a developed non-authoritarian country) is intentionally slowing down Commons media but that doesn't seem very plausible. FWIW, while I don't know what's happening in your case, in general I presume that network slowdowns can probably happen unintentionally (without there necessarily needing to be any malicious intent on the part of an ISP / Wikimedia).

I hope this potentially helps to explain things somewhat, even if my own knowledge about this is... very patchy! Please feel free to ping me if you have any questions about anything I've said, though I can't guarantee that I'll necessarily be able to answer them (lol) :) Best, ‍—‍a smart kitten _[meow] 18:40, 1 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Thanks. I just find it quite strange that all sites load fast with VPN and Wikimedia sites did so too without the VPN and then just some Wikimedia sites quite suddenly load super slow unless VPN is enabled too. Since Wikimedia made the debatable decision to ban VPNs from editing even if they have an account, this can be problematic. In my case, I just started to use the VPN for Commons media (but not the rest of the Commons site) and so far there are no issues except possibly reduced privacy protection. I won't put more effort onto this but hope that if more people have this problem, they do disclose their IP etc so it can be investigated better. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:44, 1 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

At Commons:Village_pump/Proposals/Archive/2025/02#Add_an_outcome_of_LicenseReview there is a discussion about to modify Template:LicenseReview so it is possible to mark files with some sort of "review impossible". I tried to fix the template per Template_talk:LicenseReview#Outcome but it did not work as planned. And there is no reason to modify MediaWiki:Gadget-LicenseReview.js untill we have a working review template. Can someone fix? MGA73 (talk) 10:26, 12 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Moved this to a new template request on this new page: Commons:Template requests#Parameter for "review impossible" for LicenseReview template. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:28, 2 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

How can one rename many categories at once? This would be similar to VisualFileChange or massrename but for categories, not files. For example, all categories starting with something / that are in the search results of some search query. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:40, 13 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

This really isn't possible?

Is it possible to edit the content of many categories at once similar to how VisualFileChange can be used to edit many file pages?
See MediaWiki talk:Gadget-VisualFileChange.js#VisualFileChange for category text content changes?.
Prototyperspective (talk) 23:51, 3 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

I am also curious if you find out something here. I'm less interested in mass-renaming of categories, but if there is a better way to mass-categorize many categories (like Cat-a-lot?), I am still unaware of possibilities. The only way I know is HotCat and Edit. --Enyavar (talk) 09:54, 4 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

but if there is a better way to mass-categorize many categories (like Cat-a-lot?) you can use cat-a-lot for that. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:57, 4 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

The Unsupported Tools Working Group have chosen Video2Commons (V2C) (the video upload tool) as the first unsupported tool to focus on for its pilot cycle. The Unsupported Tools Working Group is a group of volunteers and staff created by the WMF that will look at wishes in the Community Wishlist and other places and prioritize them into technical tasks that WMF teams (or contractors hired by the WMF) can take on. Feel free to comment on this thread with any bugs or feature requests you'd like to see addressed in the tool! Sohom (talk) 16:48, 13 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Sohom Datta I'm not a Commons regular (or a regular v2c-user); but from watching Phabricator, something you/the UTWG may wish to be aware of re. v2c is that (IIUC) it sometimes directs users to request a server-side upload in Phabricator. However, the server-side upload queue is currently without a maintainer/steward :P This therefore occasionally results in folks filing tasks to request server-side uploads from v2c, which in most cases recently haven't been actioned prior to the files in question being deleted from v2c. (See also phab:T391469.) Best, ‍—‍a smart kitten _[meow] 19:39, 13 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

As far as I'm aware, there's three main problems with video uploading right now: 1. v2c doesn't always run the newest yt-dlp, which means it hits YouTube anti-downloading measures; 2. Even with current yt-dlp, v2c gets IP-blocked by YouTube; and 3. Uploading large files is still unreliable, with WMF support for media infrastructure being extremely limited. AntiCompositeNumber (they/them) (talk) 19:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

As a side note, video2commons is the perfect example of a tool that should not exist. It would be much better for UploadWizard to have full support for uploading video and transcoding it to a free format. AntiCompositeNumber (they/them) (talk) 19:58, 13 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@AntiCompositeNumber, I agree wrt to transcoding issues, but I don't think the WMF can officially host a tool with yt-dlp (I think). Video2Commons has a place (V2C allow yt downloads and uploads by being unofficial), but I agree it probably should not have as much of a bottleneck as it currently is. Sohom (talk) 21:46, 13 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Indeed. I upload the files (after download with YT-DLP) manually, because V2C is sometimes too buggy. But a fully supportive video upload included in the UploadWizard is needed, for non-Commons-experts --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 13:55, 14 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

It would be great if v2c could at least do one retry of the upload before suggesting that people file a task. Bawolff (talk) 18:38, 15 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

(FWIW there's also phab:T393851, which seems to result in v2c sometimes telling folks to file a task for a server-side-upload-request, even though their file actually does end up being uploaded successfully through v2c.) ‍—‍a smart kitten _[meow] 19:02, 1 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

This should be less frequent now that we have optimized encoding size and switched to AV1. Generated files are a lot smaller now. vip (talk) 19:24, 1 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

That's great news; I had speculated and hoped the tool selected would be video2commons. First of all, the tool needs changes to work again since currently it's broken for YouTube videos And when they do, I think there are still a few errors that occur. Then I think preventing duplicate uploads like the UploadWizard does would be very important. Enabling upload of playlists and channels would also be of high priority – explained it at W443: Enable uploading playlists and a user's videos/audios via video2commons. Maybe more important than that for now would be re-enabling import of subtitles – they're in the YT video but not on Commons. See W392: Make video2commons subtitle import work again & add subtitles to earlier video imports. Importing chapters would also be good since that could later be used if the media player gets a chapters feature and often has much information about the video's contents. All of these things already are issues in the GitHub project where there also are more issues to fix. It's important!

Regarding video upload from the UploadWizard: assuming that is feasible, maybe v2c could be integrated there so improvements to it could then be used by UW if it ever gets built into it. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:43, 14 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Are the subtitles on YouTube under the same license as the video? GPSLeo (talk) 06:39, 15 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Yes of course. Another important thing would be to make sure it always imports at full resolution and not a lower-quality video (see the video2commons talk page; seems like this wasn't fully fixed). Also especially for enabling uploading of videos or audios from a channel/user/playlist but not only for that, it needs the check for whether the video is already on Commons (youtube ID elsewhere in source field or the structured data), like the UploadWizard does it for images. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:23, 15 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Sohom Datta here's my 2 cents:

1. there're technically 3 different purposes realised by v2c:
   1. convert videos in any format (file extensions) to formats accepted by commons and then upload
   2. import youtube videos to commons
   3. import any videos, from a direct link to the video or the website url containing the videos, to commons (same thing as youtube but youtube is most popular and has its special problems so i single it out.)
2. 1.1 should ideally be realised within uploadwizard, or another upload tool maintained by wmf, instead of using v2c that uses external tech (yt-dlp for now, yt-dl in the past) and is run by volunteers.
3. v2c does 1.3 quite well.
4. youtube upload frequently has all sorts of problems, as other users have mentioned and filed in github issues. but a most important improvement, i believe, is to form some kind of cooperation with youtube, so they let wikimedia users upload more easily, instead of causing all the throttles, ip blocks, etc.

RoyZuo (talk) 15:03, 18 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@RoyZuo and @Prototyperspective I'm unsure about 1.1 on the upload-wizard side of things, I think the Wikiproject Med Foundation is looking at some of that. The focus will probably be on 2 and 3 and fixing bugs in and around uploading (I think Bawolff's suggestion of retrying uploads was something we discussed). To ground expectation a little bit, I am not sure the WMF can work out a special deal with youtube (though I will try to figure out if that is possible), but the focus of the group will be more towards improving the infrastructure to have less bugs and be more maintainable overall.

Also @Prototyperspective, you mentioned the issues on Github, are you aware of any effort(s) to prioritize these tasks/collate these tasks/rank them based on severity/which would the highest impact to solve? cc @Don-vip and @DaxServer who are much more involved on that side as well -- would be interested in hearing y'all thoughts as well! Sohom (talk) 05:13, 19 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I agree with Roy, in the long term 1.1 should be an official WMF-supported service, either as part of UploadWizard or mediawiki itself, but not a Toolforge project. Considering WMF has already a video transcoding infrastructure that converts videos to lower resolutions, I guess it would be feasible to integrate the mp4->webm conversion in it. Then v2c could be reduced to the non-official features like the youtube imports. But I also agree we would need some sort of collaboration between WMF and YouTube to have less restrictions. Currently it's a nightmare to keep these things working. Anyway I'm super happy to see that v2c is receiving this much needed support from WMF through this user group, many thanks to everyone involved <3 vip (talk) 20:21, 19 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Doc James, (also cc @Bawolff) I remember you telling me that the Wikiproject Med Foundation was working on patches for 1.1, could you comment on how far y'all are and whether you need any reviewing/Foundation help wrt to it (also if there is a phab/gerrit patches feel free to link to it). Sohom (talk) 21:07, 19 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Im about to make the next patch soon Bawolff (talk) 21:42, 19 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Agree that 1.1 would best be part of UploadWizard basically. Regarding prioritization, I think threads & replies in this thread as well as the v2c talk page and the github issues are one type of measure. Another is the number of files affected. I think everyone would agree getting it to work would be top-priority; I currently can't upload any videos from YT because I keep getting error Error: An exception occurred: DownloadError: b'ERROR: [youtube] hVD_vky7sCM: Requested format is not available. Use --list-formats for a list of available formats' as documented on the v2c talk page and there's a few more errors. I don't think we should rely on YT partnership to fix the issues and think they can be fixed without that. In the case of the error, it seems to be because the file needs to be converted to webm on the server. In regards to the number of files affected, enabling users to upload whole channels/user/playlists would enable much more uploads and more complete sets. Starting with the YT account of Wikimedia Foundation or as recently on the v2c talk page a set of drone videos or a channel in my todos in which ancient technology is recreated. For this, checking whether the video has already been uploaded is a requirement and that's also very useful either way and not without reason part of the UploadWizard for images. Regarding subtitles, these have been often asked about in the talk page, affect many videos which now miss subtitles and would be part of movement goals of making knowledge accessible (here to those not speaking whatever the video language happens to be for translated subtitles as well as people who can't always turn on audio or are deaf). Subtitles are useful also for translating them into new subtitles. Video imported at lower resolution also affects many videos (large fraction of past uploaded videos plus upcoming videos) – details at W447: Fix video2commons so it imports videos at max resolution & fix videos imported with low quality. There is not formal prioritization of issues yet. I think it could make sense to for example survey Commons users which v2c things they think are most pressing but that's needed (or even adequate and worth the effort) only if these issues / issues like these have already been addressed. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:20, 20 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Hi, It is great that V2C is being taken care of. Thanks to all for that. One important issue is that V2C doesn't check if the file name exists or not. So the video is uploaded, converted, and then V2C fails because the name is already taken (for a long video―old films I used to import―it could take hours). So a big waste of time and resources. V2C also fails if the file was deleted before. This is the most urgent bug to be fixed. Regards, Yann (talk) 18:44, 20 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I am trying to decode how this is happening, but I'm at a loss: categories such as Category:Construction in Guam which feature {{Topic in country}} have some nonsense code linking to the redlink Template:Byby, but it's only a little over 600 out of the 17,700 transclusions. I don't know why. Can someone smarter than me fix this? Thanks in advance. —Justin (koavf) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:38, 14 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I tried, but I couldn’t figure what exactly causing it, I think it maybe has something to do with the fact that it is Guam. I mean finding the source of a problem related to {{Topic by country}} is always like going down a rabbit hole. There are just so many different templates and parameters to analyze. So, I will greatly appreciate if someone more familiar with these templates can figure out the problem. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 02:35, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Moved to this new page for template requests: Commons:Template requests#Fix Topic in country template linking to the redlink Template:Byby. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:31, 2 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Thanks. —Justin (koavf) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:02, 2 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

I have this issue "The file you submitted was empty.", How to fix? 6D (talk) 07:15, 15 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Does Anyone else have this issue? 6D (talk) 09:13, 16 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Not recently, no. I don’t know the cause of it, but I remember when I had this issue, I just kept resubmitting the files until they went through. Tvpuppy (talk) 02:28, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

And the Flickr2Commons are struck at Running....., may be the F2C API key got ratelimited. 6D (talk) 15:21, 22 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

And it now working again!!!’ 6D (talk) 23:53, 22 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

So are your two issues both solved now? Prototyperspective (talk) 10:23, 29 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

The Flickr2Commons are struck at Running..... is fixed, but Flickr2commons "The file you submitted was empty." is not fixed, when I moved about ~600-800 images, this issue pop up for 30 Minutes-1 Hour. 6D (talk) 02:50, 30 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Just a heads up, we updated the filter that checks SVGs when you upload them to make sure they are not malicious. For the most part you should hopefully not notice anything different. The main difference is that the new version is more likely to reject files that have invalid CSS. Its also more liberal with files that have embedded fonts in them. I suspect nobody will notice the difference, but if it causes any problems please let me know. Bawolff (talk) 17:40, 16 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Bawolff, this is an issue with OWID SVG files, which are quite common. I think they call an external font, and it's a pain to fix that by hand. JayCubby (talk) 23:03, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

External fonts are different from embedded fonts. We are intentionally blocking external fonts both before and after this change as they are a privacy risk to users. If you are uploading OWID files via https://owidimporter.toolforge.org/ then i believe it strips the font for you. Bawolff (talk) 23:42, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

That's a truly wonderful resource. Thanks a ton! JayCubby (talk) 23:45, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Commons contains a sizable fraction of free-licensed audiobooks. However, many are split into multiple parts. This makes it cumbersome to download them and to listen to them conveniently and without interruptions.

It's also not well-suited for adding the file to Wikidata items or Wikipedia articles or Wikisource pages if it's split up into many parts. There also are further issues.

Is there any way that many or all of the multi-part audiobooks could be feasibly bundled up into one file each?

For example, there's many in Category:LibriVox recordings and I just merged one of them with 8 parts (just 45 min; 83 MB) using one ffmpeg command. But it can't be done manually for all the audios there. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:01, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Created Commons:Bots/Work requests#Merging audio files of audiobooks. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:42, 6 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

I noted Kesäperuna recently reuploaded this old video that was recently featured on the frontpage where I remember I was a bit surprised about the sometimes blurry resolution: File:Measuring Elevation Changes on the Greenland Ice Sheet.webm (thanks for that!)

When going to the video source (the sourced linked in the first link is 404 by now so the source of the webm reupload) and clicking on the Download button, the only webm available there is 62 MB, not 110 MB like in the new file uploaded to Commons.

So it seems like sometimes or often NASA doesn't make videos available in full resolution as webms and it's been these videos that have been imported here. Kesäperuna probably downloaded another file and then converted it.

I then also noticed the new video File:At Land's Edge - Tracking Coastal Ecosystem with Landsat (SVS14903).webm imported by OptimusPrimeBot operated by Don-vip looks quite blurry and tested whether I'd get a better version if I download the mp4 file and convert it to webm locally on my machine using ffmpeg. As you can see in the File history of that file, the new video is of much better resolution and about 5 times the size (click on the prior version to see the difference). Thus, I think many NASA or even PD-US-gov videos may have been imported at submax resolution.

I think many of these videos are some of the most educational, most useful and partly most-used videos we have on Commons, so I think they should probably be on Commons at full resolution where if necessary and as adequate only the default playback quality is changed but not the max-resolution kept low. At the very least the fraction of NASA videos that are featured in MOTD or in use on any other Wikimedia project like Wikidata or Wikipedia (but probably all of them).

How do you think would be the best way to fix the low-resolution of these videos? That would be a two-step process of 1. identifying which videos have been imported at submax resolution and 2. importing a higher-resolution video (directly if available or via downloading the maxres video and converting it to webm locally. Could somebody implement this?

I don't know if the max-resolution video is by now usually available as mp4 but if so it may also make sense to wait until mp4 files get accepted on Commons if that's just a few more years(?) If somebody could import highres versions of these files, that would be great either way! Prototyperspective (talk) 17:55, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Yes, this is a problem. The original WebM file is remarkably small. Then there is a standard quality version in an unfree codec, and a MOV (ProRes 444 or so) file with astronomical file size. If it is a managable amount of files, I can help converting and reuploading, as my machine can roar like a lion :) (works very fast). As we don't have videos beyond 8192 pixels wide or tall, this is no problem :) --19:05, 17 October 2025 (UTC) PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:05, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

For the encoding from other formats, video2commons should now (since yesterday) be able to upload videos with a good size/quality ratio (thanks to Amdrel contribution). To identify the videos that need a reupload however, I have no idea. vip (talk) 22:42, 17 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Good that you noticed and started this thread, better to have more eyes on this issue.

Firstly, NASA svs website changed url format from https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?4022 to https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4022.

I did couple more videos that were used in articles with most views in category Videos from NASA, that were in poor quality and had better versions available.

Highest quality "master" format in NASA website is very varied, sometimes it's mp4 file, mpeg2 file, or prores mov, I used best version available and encoded to AV1/Opus format with reasonable settings(depending on video in question, as most videos have visible mpeg2 artifacts in prores master files for some reason) to keep file sizes smallish.

What should be done to videos uploaded in different format such as ogv that are promoted to MOTD or have other "awards" associated with them, can they be just redirected to better webm version? Kesäperuna (talk) 00:01, 18 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

I think, yes. OGV is outdated, probably not the most suitable codec for UHD content, and WebM (with AV1) is state-of-the-art. I can imagine there is a "replace" voting system for featured media, too. --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:36, 18 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Thanks for the info. It may be useful if somebody replaced all those links with the new format using VisualFileChange. Good idea to replace the ones with most views first and right away. I think the old file can simply be deleted and redirect to the new webm file per F8. Twinkle has something about the file format but the actual policy doesn't require it to be it of the same file format. However, I'm not sure if it can technically be done currently – maybe it's only possible for files of the same file format. I'll tag the low-res file at a later point – would like to have it stay as is for a while so people can still see the file in the context of this issue/thread. I think many files are affected by this so I think it was best if this wasn't done manually but via some script or so. One of the difficulties with that though is that it doesn't seem like one can download the highest quality file with some standardized url like e.g. appending ?dl=hd https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4022?dl=hd. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:11, 20 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

F8 says "exact or scaled-down duplicate of an older existing file". If the scaled-down duplicate is the older one, it does not apply; the OGVs should not be deleted in order not to break external usage (which we cannot track down and fix). Please add {{Superseded}} to the description pages of the OGVs instead of getting them deleted. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 16:08, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Thanks; maybe that phrase should be changed then: the old file could be turned into a redirect to the higher-quality file so the uses would not break. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:40, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Some of them do break: hotlinking to the https://upload.wikimedia.org files doesn’t follow redirects, so it’s the external, non-wiki usage (i.e. usage that doesn’t come from first- or third-party MediaWiki installs) that suffers the most. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:15, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Hi. There are some translations missing and interface admin assistance is required. Not sure what are procedures on commons, but reported here: translating talk page. Nux (talk··dyskusja) 14:22, 20 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 20 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

When loading the page, I received this error message: [f0ec4299-7dbf-46d8-8cb7-7b477b40a419] 2025年10月22日 20:11:08: Fatal exception of type "InvalidArgumentException". What's happening to the Watchlist? George Ho (talk) 20:13, 22 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

For reference, the full error message is:

Unknown filter module "latest"

from /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/recentchanges/ChangesListQuery/ChangesListQuery.php(1158) #0 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/recentchanges/ChangesListQuery/ChangesListQuery.php(220): MediaWiki\RecentChanges\ChangesListQuery\ChangesListQuery->getFilter(string) #1 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/recentchanges/ChangesListFilterGroup.php(473): MediaWiki\RecentChanges\ChangesListQuery\ChangesListQuery->applyAction(string, string) #2 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/recentchanges/ChangesListFilterGroupContainer.php(257): MediaWiki\RecentChanges\ChangesListFilterGroup->modifyChangesListQuery(MediaWiki\RecentChanges\ChangesListQuery\ChangesListQuery, MediaWiki\Html\FormOptions, bool) #3 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/specialpage/ChangesListSpecialPage.php(1230): MediaWiki\RecentChanges\ChangesListFilterGroupContainer->modifyChangesListQuery(MediaWiki\RecentChanges\ChangesListQuery\ChangesListQuery, MediaWiki\Html\FormOptions, bool) #4 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/specialpage/ChangesListSpecialPage.php(805): MediaWiki\SpecialPage\ChangesListSpecialPage->buildQuery(MediaWiki\Html\FormOptions) #5 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/specialpage/ChangesListSpecialPage.php(483): MediaWiki\SpecialPage\ChangesListSpecialPage->getQueryResult() #6 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/specials/SpecialWatchlist.php(151): MediaWiki\SpecialPage\ChangesListSpecialPage->execute(null) #7 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/specialpage/SpecialPage.php(711): MediaWiki\Specials\SpecialWatchlist->execute(null) #8 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/specialpage/SpecialPageFactory.php(1735): MediaWiki\SpecialPage\SpecialPage->run(null) #9 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/actions/ActionEntryPoint.php(499): MediaWiki\SpecialPage\SpecialPageFactory->executePath(string, MediaWiki\Context\RequestContext) #10 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/actions/ActionEntryPoint.php(143): MediaWiki\Actions\ActionEntryPoint->performRequest() #11 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/includes/MediaWikiEntryPoint.php(184): MediaWiki\Actions\ActionEntryPoint->execute() #12 /srv/mediawiki/php-1.45.0-wmf.24/index.php(44): MediaWiki\MediaWikiEntryPoint->run() #13 /srv/mediawiki/w/index.php(3): require(string) #14 {main} Bawolff (talk) 03:39, 23 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

The nuke tag in Special:Tags doesn't seem to be working. There have been vastly more than 951 files deleted with Special:Nuke and my recent ones aren't there. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 01:27, 26 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@The Squirrel Conspiracy This is a known issue - T402228. Unfortunately file deletions with Nuke aren't currently tagged due to MediaWiki file deletion not really supporting tags in the codebase right now. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:12, 27 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Thanks. Good to know. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 17:18, 27 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T402228

Prototyperspective (talk) 10:19, 29 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

When you take a photograph using a Canon camera, the lens used to take the picture is recorded as the "Lens used" standard EXIF field, as one would expect. This displays correctly in the "Metadata" section on any file description on Wikimedia Commons (as an example, see today's POTD), and this displays correctly in the "Details" tab in the file properties in Microsoft Windows. Annoyingly, and I want to figuratively strangle Sony for doing this, Sony cameras do not use this standard field, and instead use an EXIF field called "Exif.Photo.LensModel", which is not the same field as "Lens used", does not display correctly in the properties dialog in Microsoft Windows, and does not display correctly on Wikimedia Commons. It does display in the EXIF viewer in GIMP, see this screenshot, which is this file opened in GIMP.

My question is, would there be any chance that the Metadata table for image files on Commons be modified to also display such non-standard EXIF attributes? --benlisquare _{Talk•Contribs} 14:41, 26 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Benlisquare Please file a ticket in Phabricator, requesting support for this EXIF tag. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:50, 29 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Done, created T408763. Thanks. --benlisquare _{Talk•Contribs} 23:45, 29 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 19:27, 27 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

The {{Shortcut}} box isn't showing on any of the pages it's being used. Could somebody please fix this? Prototyperspective (talk) 13:52, 29 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

Moved to this new page for template requests: Commons:Template requests#Make template Shortcut show again. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:34, 2 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Sometimes when I moving images from Flickr, the FlickreviewR 2 can take up to ~30 Minutes to review the license, see this [8]. 6D (talk) 02:44, 30 October 2025 (UTC) Reply

@6D: It appears that the problem occurs occassionally. Using this file as an example, it takes around 1 hours and 15 minutes for the bot to review my file. At the time of my upload, there were around 200 backlog for the bot, though they are all resolved now.廣九直通車 (talk) 13:07, 1 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Noting here that due to a toolforge outage, the bot will take longer than normal to review files for a few hours once back online. The maintainers are aware, and Chuckbot is on standby if needed. All the Best -- Chuck ^Talk 05:45, 5 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

I successfully uploaded some hundreds of files by F2C today, but then the infamous empty file error started to appear (The file you submitted was empty.) [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ] I know that {{Magnus is not here}}, but Magnus Manske isn't anywhere, not at his talkpage, not at bitbucket... Does anyone know, what can I do to make F2C to upload photos. (Logging off/clearing the cache didn't help.) Otherwise I think, that in these case someone (?some WM branch/WMF) should intervene, as the maintainer isn't willing to maintain his own tools (same for U2C, WikiShootMe...). — Draceane ^talk _contrib. 14:30, 3 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Οἶδα, 6D, Karl Gruber, and Thyj: FYI. — Draceane ^talk _contrib. 14:31, 3 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Here, it also affect the FlickreviewR 2 bot. 6D (talk) 15:21, 3 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

So, some API problem at Flickr side? (Commons_talk:Flickypedia#Cannot_login) — Draceane ^talk _contrib. 17:22, 3 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

I wish I knew the workaround to this recurring issue. The only solution that has ever worked for me is to wait it out, and occasionally wait much longer I would like. Οἶδα (talk) 23:16, 3 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

It is not only affect you, it is everyone who use Flickr2commons bot. 6D (talk) 06:27, 9 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 19:30, 3 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

At Special:ListFiles/Distribution Wissen SRF you can see that the same 15 useful explainer videos were uploaded in German, French, and Italian. However, they don't link to each other in file description in the other_versions field of {{Information}}. Is there a way to add this to many files at once or have it somehow be automatically added?

See also {{Otherversion}} and this idea for UploadWizard. Is the only way to add it by manually going through each file to add the interlinking? This is of course not the only case of files in multiple languages not linking to each other. If a person not understanding language X well or at all doesn't see it linked at the file but would understand language Y well, they likely won't notice/learn that this video also exists. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:34, 6 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Many data graphics like charts or choropleth map get updated via new revisions. However, the value in the date field usually stays the same.

This is problematic to users who look at the file information template and then see another date than the year the data graphic was released. This is confusing and especially so if the date there is not before the latest data point (which would make that date impossible). Apps and tools could also use this false information and display (or otherwise use) it, for example the Commons app, scrapers, or Web search engines. The structured data would also still have the false data.

Is there a way to display for example a warning next to the value in the date field when the file has multiple revisions and that date wasn't changed?

Maybe one could also prompt the user whether the date changed after a new revision was uploaded to reduce the number of these cases in the future? Another way would be to identify the files with a likely false date due to new revision uploads and correct these. But even if that was done, having a small warning display next to the date would be good: for example, a warning icon that when hovered over says "A new revision of the file was uploaded, this date may be outdated" (and it would be best if users could make the warning go away if the date is still correct or was updated).

Many and ultimately most of the files affected by this may be in Category:Charts by year of latest data and Category:Maps by year (the corresponding subcat is changed when a new revision has newer data).

It may be best and easiest to understand this with some examples:

• File:Mean-seawater-ph.png was updated in 2023 with data for 2021 but it still has the date of the release of the chart of the first revision, 2019
• File:Chick culling laws world map.svg has 2020 in the date field but the latest revision is from 2025, including probably legal changes made after 2020
• File:World laws pertaining to homosexual relationships and expression.svg gets frequently updated via new revisions and has it solved by appending (upload date) to the date in the date field. Similar for this.

Prototyperspective (talk) 00:19, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Could someone take a look at Commons:Copyright rules by territory/Belgium? It looks like there's a level-2 section heading (==Copyright tags==) in Commons:Copyright rules by territory/Belgium#General rules that's not displaying properly. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:30, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

@Marchjuly, I think I fixed it, just need to wait for a TA to mark this for translation, so it updates the other language versions as well. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 12:58, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Thank you for doing that Tvpuppy. I didn't catch it was an added line break causing the problem. -- Marchjuly (talk) 20:33, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

For many files, a new version has been uploaded as a separate file. It usually is of substantially higher resolution, more translatable / editable, and of the better filetype SVG. However, often the Wikipedia articles that use the old file have not been edited. In addition, some users may still use of the now legacy file because a note about it was missing earlier or they didn't/couldn't read it.

Here's an example:

• New SVG version with high resolution and very translatable
  New SVG version with high resolution and very translatable
• Old version still used in 9(!) mainspace Wikipedia articles
  Old version still used in 9(!) mainspace Wikipedia articles

Usually, one could do a scan of uses of files in a category with the glamorgan or glamorous tools. It would be very useful for Category:Superseded or Category:Vector version available which are added to files like the second one above via a template.

However, for these two categories where either tool would be most useful, they don't work.

Does somebody know why or how to get either or both to work for a report of file uses of superseded files?

--Prototyperspective (talk) 23:39, 7 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

What's going on with deepcat search recently? It stops showing the results when scrolling with "Deep category search SPARQL query failed" message under the search box. Qbli2mHd (talk) 10:36, 8 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Could you give some example category/ies? See also phab:T395348. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:42, 8 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

It's any scrollable search really, like [17]. The behaviour is unpredictable, you could manage to have the results loaded several times or get an error on the next screen. Qbli2mHd (talk) 02:19, 9 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Could you create an issue on phabricator? I could scroll down and it did load more images and I could click on the Load more button but eventually after scrolling just a bit it shows "No more results found" at the bottom and the error message you wrote at the top (it didn't show when only the first set of images showed) before the 1,842 files of that example deepcat search were shown. Thanks for reporting this problem here. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:58, 9 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

For some reason, the Flickr2Commons have been struck for few hours now. 6D (talk) 10:57, 10 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Resumed, and then got stuck again. Zhuyifei1999, who runs this bot, has not been heard from in months. Is there anyone who can restart the bot? - Jmabel ! talk 06:06, 12 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

And now it is running again. - Jmabel ! talk 06:32, 12 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

And it is struck again!!!!!!!! 6D (talk) 06:30, 13 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Do you mean stuck or struck? If the latter, what do you mean. Misspelling makes it difficult for others to quickly understand what you mean and this is also in the title. In any case this seems like something to report at Commons talk:Flickr2Commons. The recent threads that could be about this there describe the problem as it showing The file you submitted was empty. – is this a new separate problem or the same problem? The issue tracker seems to be https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/flickr2commons If nothing helps, a wish in the m:Community Wishlist could be created if this is deemed important to fix and nothing much is happening already to solve this. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:41, 13 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 20:35, 10 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

I think the automatic protection icon feature can be useful here in Commons. This means we don't have to manually place {{Protected}} in protected pages anymore. Tvpuppy (talk) 22:46, 10 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Palacios en la Comunidad de Madrid has no images - what's wrong? --~2025-33091-77 (talk) 15:56, 12 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

I think I fixed the first image but I do not have time to fix all of them now. Ymblanter (talk) 16:22, 12 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

As the page says This list is periodically updated by a bot. Manual changes to the list will be removed on the next update! so please don't manually edit the contents. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:11, 13 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

My edits were indeed overwritten by a bot, so that I am not going to edit it again.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:42, 13 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

Tracked in GitHub
magnusmanske/listeria_rs/issues/82

This is the problem described at /Archive/2025/03#Can the Listeriabot be fixed? which was just archived without being solved.

The outcome of that discussion so far mostly is that this is caused by bug https://github.com/magnusmanske/listeria_rs/issues/82 [...] reported in 2021. ListeriaBot does not produce correct wikitext when row_template is used. Since this depends on somebody fixing this in the listeria code, the route to get it solved may be devs here doing so or asking Manske about it and/or supporting wish m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Continue development of the Listeria bot that creates dynamic tables using Wikidata (0 supporters so far, thanks).

Looks like 45 galleries are affected by this in the same way. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:21, 13 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

There used to be a page in the special name space called OAuthConsumerRegistration/propose. It no longer exists, as OAuth Consumer Registration proposals are now dealt with on Media Wiki for all Wikimedia projects. The current version of Open Refine isn't up-to-date, and it points to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:OAuthConsumerRegistration/propose. That's not helpful, as you get told that "you have requested an invalid special page". What would be more useful is for there to be a redirect that points to the relevant page on Media Wiki instead, which is here. I wonder whether admins, or whoever else has the right privileges, could edit the Special:OAuthConsumerRegistration/propose page and set up a redirect that points to the right spot on Media Wiki. Schwede 66 00:39, 16 November 2025 (UTC) Reply

• Commons maintenance
• Commons centralized discussion