Commons:Village pump/Technical

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This page is used for technical questions relating to the tools, gadgets, or other technical issues about Commons; it is distinguished from the main Village pump, which handles community-wide discussion of all kinds. The page may also be used to advertise significant discussions taking place elsewhere, such as on the talk page of a Commons policy. Recent sections with no replies for 30 days and sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=--~~~~}} may be archived; for old discussions, see the archives; recent archives: /Archive/2025/09 /Archive/2025/10.

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Mobile browser not showing subscribe button

As of today my Firefox mobile browser has stopped displaying the subscribe button for discussion topics (e.g. on this page) while I'm seeing the page in mobile view. When I switch into desktop mode in the Firefox app, the subscribe is being displayed. I've tried on two different phones (two different brands). If I use a no-name Chromium-based mobile browser, I can also see the subscribe button when in mobile view. Nakonana (talk) 15:19, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, wait, no, it's not the browser that makes the difference, it's the page. I can see the subscribe button here on Village pump/Technical but I can't see it on the normal Village pump page. Nakonana (talk) 15:22, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Also take a look at other pages to see how it works and tell me, maybe then I will understand the reason. Incall ^talk 18:36, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it.

It looks like the regular Village Pump is the only affected page. Maybe it's due to how the sub-headings are? VP has headings for each day and then there are several threads per day.

• File:Mobile browser showing subscribe button below last comment.png — this is how it's supposed to be. Showing VP/Technical.
• File:Mobile browser not showing subscribe button below last comment on Village Pump.png — this is the issue. Showing regular VP.
• File:Mobile browser in desktop view showing subscribe button below last comment.png — the subscribe button is there on the regular VP if I switch to desktop view. Note: the file name is wrong, the subscribe button is on the right of each thread.

Nakonana (talk) 19:40, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps this problem comes from the JavaScript in your browser. May I suggest you try using a Convenient Discussions? Incall ^talk 07:05, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

It's browser-independent. The problem is present in mobile Firefox and a mobile Chromium based browser, and in both browsers the problem only appears on the regular VP page. It wasn't there in the past, so I'm not sure what happened. I don't know how influential JavaScript is on mobile (I think I am using Convenient Discussions on desktop, but I'm not seeing it on mobile). Nakonana (talk) 15:39, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

It seems the issue is not with the browser itself, but with the way the regular Village Pump page is structured. That page uses a special layout with daily subheadings and several threads under each section. On the mobile version of MediaWiki, this may interfere with how the «Subscribe» button is displayed, because the script does not recognize such “nested” discussions as separate topics.

To verify this, you could check other large pages with a similar structure and see if the same problem occurs there. If it does, then it’s likely a bug in the DiscussionTools extension for the mobile interface.

If you need the subscribe button all the time, you can temporarily use «Convenient Discussions» or switch to desktop mode. But ideally, it would be good to file a bug report on Phabricator so that the developers can fix the behavior in the mobile version. Incall ^talk 16:03, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Do you know any pages that use a similar structure as the regular Village Pump by any chance? I can't think of any page of the top of my head. Nakonana (talk) 07:10, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

Do other users also have this problem? Probably something should be done about this. and since it's not necessarily a technical issue, a phab issue may not be good to create instead of editing the VP page / its templates. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:07, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

If you don't mind testing it, just open Commons on your phone in a mobile browser app of your choice, log in and go to the VP page. Can you see the subscribe buttons below the heading and the "Latest comment" note like in File:Mobile browser showing subscribe button below last comment.png or is the button missing like in File:Mobile browser not showing subscribe button below last comment on Village Pump.png? If you can see the button, which mobile browser app did you use? Sometodark mode may also affect the display, but I have tried switching into light mode and the issue still persists. I'm also guessing that it's something about templates or the page layout that's causing the problem. And it might have been introduced by a rather recent change, iirc. Nakonana (talk) 08:25, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

Idea for mass DRs - make it easier to view all files

VisualFileChange is extremely helpful for putting together large DRs containing many files. However, one challenge of this is that it's difficult for readers of the DR to assess each item in the DR - today I have to click each one to open them. Am I missing some really helpful tool (that's available to non-admins), or does everyone else struggle with this?

Recently I've been playing around with a few tricks to try to help with this by using {{Search link}} and and a unique string that was applied to each file in the {{Delete}} template:

• In this DR, after submitting the DR, I used {{Search link}} on a unique string in the DR statement to generate a search link to see all the files in that individual DR ({{search link|"The descriptions do mention the artist John Ehn"}} resulting in the link "The descriptions do mention the artist John Ehn") which shows all nominated files in Search; I added this link to the bottom of the nominating statement in the DR page
• In Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Langsa Putra I added a timestamp to the DR nomination, and a search for the DR page title and timestamp identifies the files ("Files uploaded by Langsa Putra" "22:48, 10 September 2025 (UTC)") which I added to the DR page

Is it worth considering implementing something like this in VisualFileChange, for it to apply a unique code when adding {{Delete}} to files (just a timestamp might be unique enough, when used in conjunction with the page name of the DR) and automatically add a search link to view those files? Are there other options that should be considered, like this unique code being built right into {{Delete}}, or categories, or something else? I'm asking here on the technical page since at this point it seems to be more of a technical question than an actual proposal. -Consigned (talk) 08:55, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

great work.

i've considered this problem and potential solutions too:

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Deletion_requests_September_2025&from=08%23Files%20in%20Category:Old%20Trapper%27s%20Lodge for your example. the point to jump is constructed by dd (date of request made) + %23 + DR subpage title.
2. make a gadget that, when you click it, displays all the [[:File:...]] links on a page in a gallery style.

RoyZuo (talk) 14:15, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

here's a maybe more precise search method based on your idea.

hastemplate:delete insource:"DR subpage title"

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=hastemplate:delete+insource:%22Files+in+Category:Old+Trapper's+Lodge%22&title=Special:MediaSearch for your example. RoyZuo (talk) 14:23, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Wouldn't the solution be as simple as to include a gallery, maybe in a collapsible box, above the itemised list of files in the DR? That way, anyone who parses the DR and encounter a mass DR will be able to get a visual display of the nominated files at will, and having code that wraps these files into {{collapse |title= Gallery of nominated files |1= <gallery>FILES NOMINATED</gallery>}} shouldn't be difficult to implement into the VFC, I think. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 14:33, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Including a gallery in the DR - even in a collapsed box - will cause all of the images to be loaded when someone views the daily DR page. This isn't great from a server load perspective, as daily DR pages can contain a lot of files; it also means that, if an image containing illegal content like CSAM is DRed (which it shouldn't be, but it happens sometimes), users will end up loading thumbnails of that image. A better solution will probably be to create a Javascript gadget to view DR images, or to <noinclude> the gallery so that it only appears on the individual DR page. Omphalographer (talk) 18:48, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Option 1 is interesting, never seen that functionality; that it continues after the DR is a bit annoying. -Consigned (talk) 09:06, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

• RoyZuo's more precise search is helpful but hits another issue (admittedly an edge case) - when multiple DRs are open as sections in the same DR page. For example, Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Caterpillar84 by Grand-Duc had multiple DRs opened at the same time (which was helpful by putting all discussions in one place and at the same time splitting into smaller groups to be more easily discussed). But the {{Delete}} on each file just points to the top of the page (e.g. File:Sculpture 4 amelia.jpg) which was tricky when multiple big DRs were open at the same time, and even pointing to section titles usually wouldn't help because section titles are almost always identical (though in this case, helpfully, they are not). It would be nice if each individual DR (section) had a unique identifier that could be used for matching both the file's {{Delete}} to the correct section and also back from the DR to the file via a gallery or search link (though I would not want to add any extra steps or complication/confusion for users who are creating DRs manually - 99%+ of the time linking to the page name rather than section is perfectly usable). -Consigned (talk) 09:14, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

  Today I learned that section headings with identical titles are numbered and can be linked to that way, this can be seen when navigating to that section via the table of contents. It would be cool if when one of our tools creates a DR as a new section to an existing page, the {{Delete}} tag would be linked to that section heading (e.g. if the {{Delete}} tag on File:Coldingham.png linked to Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Kellycrak88#Files uploaded by Kellycrak88 (talk · contribs) 3 rather than just the overall page). Consigned (talk) 20:01, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Audio files embed code needs updating

I recently used the embed code for an audio file with closed captions (via clicking the "🌎 Use this file" button; you can test yourself by pasting code like <iframe src="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maryana_Iskander_self-narrated_biography.ogg?embedplayer=yes" width="300" height="20" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" allow="autoplay; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> into a code sandbox). There are several issues with it that should be fixed:

• The current code uses a height of 20px, which cuts off half the bar. This can be fixed by changing the code generated, but we should be generating the correct code by default.
• When larger heights are used, such as 150px, there is room to include the closed captions, but these are displayed in a miniscule font size, since I think they're set to take up a percentage of the available space, rather than rendering at a reasonable size, filling up however much room is available.
• Even when larger heights are used, the file name is never put anywhere, so e.g. if you're embedding a song there's nowhere in the embed that gives the title of the song.

I'm not sure exactly how the embeds are currently generated, and I don't know how to fix these things myself, so would appreciate help! Sdkb ^talk 18:20, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

For reference, this comes from MediaWiki:Gadget-Stockphoto.js Bawolff (talk) 05:06, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Good find; could you create the issue(s) on phabricator? Another case of low support for audio and outdated audio player; relevant: m:Community_Wishlist/Wishes/A_proper_audio_player. I think one can also not see the subtitles with audios embedded the normal way in articles and so far I haven't found a way to show the file titles of audios embedded in Music genres. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:32, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T404934

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T404935

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T404937

@Prototyperspective, sure, created Phabricator tasks:

phab:T404934 (Audio files embedding cuts off half the bar)

phab:T404935 (Audio files embedding results in miniscule closed captions)

phab:T404937 (Embedded audio files should include a title)

Cheers, Sdkb ^talk 02:42, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! I don't understand why issue "Audio files embedding cuts off half the bar" was closed for being caused by the gadget – the "🌎 Use this file" button is displayed by default also for logged-out users so I think such issues also be tracked there and fixed by devs even if it's from a gadget (and as is the case for some other gadgets). Krinkle is the current developer/maintainer of that gadget – could you please fix the issues that can be solved within the gadget code? Prototyperspective (talk) 09:22, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

The gadget is unmaintained. While Krinkle was the last person to touch it, it's unlikely that he is going to look into this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:18, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-38

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• References lists that are made using the <references/> tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [1]
• Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
• Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
  • for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [2]
  • for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [3]
• When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [4]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
• Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [6]
• The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
• Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
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• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:02, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Something not mentioned here that might be of interest to commons. Starting Wednesday, newly uploaded png files will have embedded exif data extracted (provided it is embedded using the official eXIf chunk). Previously only XMP and png textual data was extracted. Bawolff (talk) 17:16, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

Wishful thinking: will this display the metadata which identifies ChatGPT-generated PNG images? Omphalographer (talk) 16:58, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I believe chatgpt uses C2PA metadata which we currently don't support. Bawolff (talk) 20:02, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Oh, that's unfortunate. Hopefully that data can be surfaced in some way - even without full C2PA verification, just knowing that the claims exist would be incredibly helpful in identifying images which are likely to be AI-generated. Omphalographer (talk) 23:06, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

For reference, this is phab:T387075 Bawolff (talk) 00:37, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I did just take a gander through Category:PD-algorithm and the majority do not seem to have C2PA metadata (I tried about 10 recent ones at random, only File:GPT-4o Studio Ghibli portrait of Donald Trump.png had it). So i guess its just ChatGPT and not other AI providers. XMP (IPTCExt) also has a property called DigitalSourceType [7] which can be used to mark images as AI generated. This would be easier to extract since we already have support for other IPTC metadata so we just have to add an extra property not a whole new metadata format. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like that property is used very much in the wild. Bawolff (talk) 02:20, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Which files did you look at? A couple of recent AI-generated uploads which do have C2PA metadata include:

• File:AI generated Woman in Welcome pose.png
• File:File 00000000ccbc61f6804586ff8eb8fa34.png
• File:SKYGOSPEL.png
• File:Blason Famille Abzac (d').png (not ChatGPT, interestingly)

Omphalographer (talk) 02:38, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I picked about 10 at random from the list at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:PD-algorithm&cmsort=timestamp&cmlimit=max&formatversion=2 . Maybe my random picks just weren't very good. The File:Blason Famille Abzac (d').png is interesting. All it seems to say is its signed by "Galaxy S24 FE c2pa-rs/0.37.0", so maybe its not AI at all but just an image editor that actually supports c2pa. The signature was untrusted when I tried with https://contentcredentials.org/verify and gave errors when i tried with exiftool, so perhaps it was someone testing things (Edit: After reading more, it looks like the timestamp signature is invalid but the main one isn't. The main signature is associated with com.samsung.android.visual.cloudcore, and all the C2PA data says is that the provenance of the original file is unknown. So I guess all that means is it was edited on a phone). Interestingly, a lot of the chatgpt files give invalid when i use the web app or c2patool (error: first action must be created or opened), but work fine with exiftool. Bawolff (talk) 03:26, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Just as an update, starting next week we will show if files have an XMP Iptc4xmpExt:DigitalSourceType property, which is officially how you are supposed to store if an image is AI generated in XMP. Unfortunately i don't think any AI image generators actually add that, but who knows, maybe some images will have it. Bawolff (talk) 13:57, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-39

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.

Updates for editors

• Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
• A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [8]
• Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
• Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:51, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Page protection setting interfering with edit gadget

BEGIN moved from Commons:Help desk - Jmabel ! talk 06:07, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Hello, as I asked on VPT with Commons:Village pump/Technical#Deletion request shortlink not working on autopatrol-protected page(s), I observed a short while ago the phenomenon that the "nominate for deletion" gadget is not working on protected page (protection level "autopatrol") - it simply isn't shown in the toolbar menu. This holds true for QuickDelete too, BTW. The reason cannot be that I do not have sufficient rights, as license reviewer and patroller, I'm certainly able to edit file with such a protection level (evidence).
Sadly, I did not get answers yet, hence my reposting here.
As a workaround: can some admin explicitly (temporarily) grant me "autopatrol" to test whether the issue can be solved that way? Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 00:07, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

OK, Rosenzweig gave me Autopatrol to test the gadget, to no avail. Is that worth a bugreport on Phabricator? Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 00:51, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Actual example: File:Matsushima 1913.png, I wanted to submit a DR with the rationale: COM:NOTUSED, too small, usable alternative available with File:Letzel 1913.png. But I could currently do so only manually (or using VisualFileChange), not with the tool. Grand-Duc (talk) 01:30, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Same problem for me too.  Question to admins, are you able to see the “nominate for deletion” link for autopatrol-protected files? Just checking if the problem affects everyone or not. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 01:09, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Nope, I don't see it either. - Jmabel ! talk 02:29, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

I tried to debug the error and I think the problem is coming from MediaWiki:Gadget-AjaxQuickDelete.js (the code for the gadget). In line 118-122 (see below), this is where it checks for edit protections of the page, and it will only display the gadget link in the toolbox if the user has the corresponding right as the protection level.

Line 118-122:

// Check edit restrictions and do not install anything if protected
	if ( conf.wgRestrictionEdit && conf.wgRestrictionEdit.length &&
		conf.wgUserGroups.indexOf( conf.wgRestrictionEdit[ 0 ] ) === -1 ) {
		return;
	}

I will break down what each component in the above section is returning for me when I visit File:Matsushima 1913.png:

• conf.wgRestrictionEdit : ["editautopatrolprotected"]
• conf.wgRestrictionEdit.length: 1
• conf.wgUserGroups: ['image-reviewer', 'rollbacker', '*', 'user', 'autoconfirmed']
• conf.wgRestrictionEdit[ 0 ]: "editautopatrolprotected"
• conf.wgUserGroups.indexOf( conf.wgRestrictionEdit[ 0 ] ): -1

So, combining them:

• conf.wgRestrictionEdit && conf.wgRestrictionEdit.length && conf.wgUserGroups.indexOf( conf.wgRestrictionEdit[ 0 ] ) === -1 : true

So per above, I think the problem is the code is trying to use the protection level name ("editautopatrolprotected") as the name of an user group. This means it will only display the gadget link to users in the user group "editautopatrolprotected". Obviously, there is no user group by that name, so the code will not display the gadget link to anyone.

However, I don’t know how to fix this problem, so perhaps someone more knowledgeable with this code can help solve it. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 05:08, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

• @Tvpuppy: would you mind if I move this whole discussion to COM:VPT? - Jmabel ! talk 05:47, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

  @Jmabel No problem. I agree the discussion is more suitable over there. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 05:52, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

END moved from Commons:Help desk - Jmabel ! talk 06:07, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

@PerfektesChaos, @Wurgl: you came into my mind as colleagues with a good understanding of code. Do you have some ideas for debugging the thing? Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 06:14, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, I do not have any experiance with groups an restrictions. However, it seems that in MediaWiki:Gadget-ImageAnnotator.js (no line numbers, search for "wgUserGroups") there is some dfferent solution, seems to be added by inactive User:Lupo --Wurgl (talk) 08:39, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

The naming of protection levels is individual per project; I am not involved in Commons.

• However, you got the right conclusion already: The code is nonsense, might work for sysop only.

You need to introduce some numeric levels for protection levels, perhaps something like (no idea of keywords):

• 0 – [no protection]
• 1 – confirmed
• 2 – editautopatrolprotected
• 3 – template editor
• 4 – sysop

Next step is to walk through wgUserGroups elements. Each membership needs to get assigned to a level:

{ "*":              0,
  "user":           0,
  "autoconfirmed":  1,
  "confirmed":      1,
  "image-reviewer": 2,
  "rollbacker":     2,
  "sysop":          4 }

You need to go through local groups and rights and check which membership is allowed to do what.

• For each wgUserGroups element the level is to be retrieved from the map above, and if higher then lift up the permission.
• Finally, compare highest permission with required protection for greater or equal.

Enjoy --PerfektesChaos (talk) 19:55, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

If I understand the systems correctly, fixing such a gadget is a task also assigned for interface admins. Asking some that come into my mind: @GPSLeo, @Raymond, @Ruthven, could you do something about this issue? Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 23:53, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

The most simple solution would be to keep the gadget simple and remove this button hiding part. Most gadgets show buttons also if they can not be used. GPSLeo (talk) 04:28, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

My opinion is that anybody who uses gadgets should be able to cope with non-functional buttons, especially if that's related to user rights restrictions. Mind trying the quick-and-dirty fix of deleting (or maybe rather commenting out) the part, GPSLeo? Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 04:29, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

My opinion is that anybody who uses gadgets should be able to cope with non-functional buttons – I think that’s generally a reasonable position, but not if it’s a default gadget, which is the case here. We can’t assume that the user enabled the gadget and therefore knows what they’re doing, since it’s enabled for everyone (even anons). Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 19:12, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

I filed an edit request. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 05:17, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

Cut out object in TIF file

To me it seems the actual object is cut out in File:Guinea Coast, Ghana, Asante, 19th century - Soul Disk Pendant - 1944.290 - Cleveland Museum of Art.tif and best solution would be upload of a new version. I ask here to confirm: The issue is with the file, not some kind of presentation issue of Commons, right? Thanks in advance, --Marsupium (talk) 09:24, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

@Marsupium Something is weird about that file. Some programs I open it in show the expected image, while others don't have the pin. "Thousands of Incompatible File Formats" strikes again. The current file available at https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1944.290 seems to be more normal, so I've overwritten the file. AntiCompositeNumber (they/them) (talk) 15:46, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for testing and thanks for re-uploading! --Marsupium (talk) 15:49, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Upload to WLM 2025

Hi! I tried to upload a File to WLM. The upload itself went ok, as before with others, but somehow it failed to reach WLM. How can I move the file to the WLM contingent by now? Foeniz (talk) 16:56, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

I have added the template, thanks for uploading. Ymblanter (talk) 17:39, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Foeniz (talk) 18:40, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-40

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [9]

Updates for editors

• The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
• As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
• The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
• On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [10]
• The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
• The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
• There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [11]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [12]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [13]

Updates for technical contributors

• Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
• A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

Add OWID visualization gadget to Commons

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.[14]

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)

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)

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

 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)

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)

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

Videos loading slow?

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

Odd upload issue

At File:Yuen Chin performing home energy audit for Seattle City Light, 1993 (50166856626).jpg I don't seem to be able to see the thumbnail for the new high-res version even if I purge everything I can think of. Any thoughts? Is it just "caching problem, will resolve itself"? - Jmabel ! talk 01:05, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Similar issues at File:Seattle - Boating at Seward Park, 1930 (42952454160).jpg, File:Seattle - Regrading work at 6th and Columbia, 1914 (46800556422).jpg.

Weirdly, it does not seem to affect use of the images elsewhere, just on the file pages. - Jmabel ! talk 03:01, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

It looks like something went wrong with thumbnailing servers and they became overloaded. hnowlan is currently investigating/fixing it. Bawolff (talk) 12:12, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Could you please post once this has been fixed? I was just starting some uploads so would be great to know. wuppertaler _Post um 12:36, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

From what I've heard, i think its fixed now. Bawolff (talk) 14:00, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

There was a problem with thumbnailing (and spill-over into swift itself), but we did publish a status update about the incident - https://www.wikimediastatus.net/incidents/cll27hvs2wj5. It is worth checking the status page if something seems amiss... MVernon (WMF) (talk) 12:52, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Upload problem

Right now all my attempts to upload an image fail with the error message An unknown error occurred in storage backend "local-swift-codfw". We had the very same problem before. According to the T396186, this happened due to some filtering to address abuse. Is anyone else experiencing this? --AFBorchert (talk) 12:33, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

There was an open incident (see [15] ). MVernon (WMF) (talk) 12:48, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Thank you, User talk:MVernon (WMF), for the quick response. This issue appears to have been resolved now. --AFBorchert (talk) 13:21, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Renaming a file

File:Renoir A Waitress at Duval's Restaurant.jpg (1875) was uploaded in 2014 from a collection at the Met. At the time the painting was titled A Waitress at Duval's Restaurant. The Met has since done further research and determined this title is incorrect. They now call it "Young Woman (La Servante)" because the artist never named it, and the painting has no connection to Duval's Restaurant, and what her profession depicts is unknown (housemaid, waitress, etc..). I added some notes, but don't know what else should be done or how to do it. Is the page renamed? What about existing links on Commons and other wikis? I leave it for anyone who wants to help. -- GreenC (talk) 21:08, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

More copies erroneously titled and described: Category:A Waitress at Duval's Restaurant (c. 1875) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- GreenC (talk) 21:18, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Possible new file name File:Pierre-Auguste Renoir's untitled young woman aka La Servante or A Waitress at Duval's Restaurant.jpg .. then for each file copy tag a number like " (copy 2)" etc.. and include a note in the metadata about the naming ambiguity. -- GreenC (talk) 21:27, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

@GreenC: You can use {{Rename}}. Yann (talk) 15:53, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-41

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.

Updates for editors

• Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more. [16]
• New date filters, creationdate: and lasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g. >2024) and relative dates (e.g. today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges. [17]
• Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team. [18]
• An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog. [19]
• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved. [20]

Updates for technical contributors

• The field rev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor of content_sha1 in the content database table. See the announcement for more information.
• The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement. [21]
• Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the rest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. [22]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:18, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Missing licences in recent uploads

Hello, I noticed that none of my uploads of the last days (at least since October 2) have had their licences added, which was usually done by SchlurcherBot within minutes or hours after the upload. Is this related to the recent upload error (on October 1, see discussion above), or is it an issue with the bot? See for example this file or this file. Kind regards wuppertaler _Post um 15:08, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi, I don't see any issue. Please see [23] or [24] for the result just after their upload. Yann (talk) 15:51, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Hello, yes, but there are hidden categories saying that SDC statuses are missing. Sorry if I explained it in the wrong way, I assumed it was the same thing. I just noticed that SDC were always added shortly after the upload and since the recent upload issues, this has not happened anymore. wuppertaler _Post um 18:48, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Some of those were added by bots of Multichill which are currently blocked. Ymblanter (talk) 07:24, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Add an outcome of LicenseReview

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)

Help to migrate a video

Can someone help me to migrate this video to Commons? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-hrW3bTSnqs Victorgrigas (talk) 13:22, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

You can try toolforge:video2commons or Commons:YouTube files/Downloading. Nemoralis (talk) 13:48, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

How to move (rename) many categories?

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)

Unsupported Tools Working Group is focussing on Video2Commons

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)

@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)

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)

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)

@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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

@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)

@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)

Tech News: 2025-42

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.

Updates for editors

• Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage. [25]
• This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change. [26]
• Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account. [27][28]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see. [29]

Updates for technical contributors

• The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:55, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Great news for Video2Commons, hopefully they can find a reliable method for YouTube uploads to work. Tvpuppy (talk) 19:07, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I just noticed there was an announcement thread right above this. Tvpuppy (talk) 20:46, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Broken template

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)

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)

Flickr2commons “The file you submitted was empty.”

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

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

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)

How can I turn a category into a disambiguation?

The category Category:Sarı Köşk currently redirects to the category Category:Yellow Pavilion (Üsküdar), but 'Sarı Köşk' literally means Yellow Pavilion and theres more than one, how could I disambiguate the category so that it specifies there are multiple? Many thanks Eticangaaa (talk) 07:12, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Pick a random disambiguation category like Category:Abandoned houses in Georgia, click edit and copy its contents. Then you can edit the category to make it a disambig page too. Important is to add {{Disambiguation}} at the bottom of the page. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:24, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Update to the SVG filter

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)

@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)

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)

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

Path to merging multi-part audiobooks?

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)

NASA videos imported at low quality

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)