Commons talk:Village pump

SpBot archives all sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=~~~~}} after 30 days. For the archive overview, see Archive/. The latest archive is located at Archive/2020.

First section header

Does anyone know why the first section header currently says 24 August? None of its subsections were written before October. --HyperGaruda (talk) 08:34, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Appears to have been this edit by ArchiverBot. No idea why. I've attempted to fix it. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 09:29, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@-revi, Whym: Why did that happen? What can be done to prevent it happening in the future?   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 10:57, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

AFAIK ArchiverBot does not touch/care about that. — regards, Revi 10:59, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

By that, ArchiverBot does not care about any section header that is above section level 2 == section ==. — regards, Revi 11:03, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@-revi: I request a feature to reasonably archive this VP and other pages similarly constructed.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 11:30, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Actually, I thought the job to clean up the daily tags lies on Hazard-Bot since it puts the daily section 1 header? I think I saw the daily headers automatically(?) changing to Oldies or sorta. — regards, Revi 11:33, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@-revi: Per Commons:Bots/Requests/Hazard-Bot 6, it only adds.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 11:49, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

I've been digging through VP's revision history and it looks like the issue has always been there ever since the start of bot-assisted archiving of the page. Once in a while, the date would be manually updated. Still seems silly that a bot cannot do this. --HyperGaruda (talk) 19:48, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Well, I probably need comment from Whym as well, but I don't intend to support archiving that daily section lv.1 header. We only support lv.2 and there's some upstream ticket to support other level header (couldn't find it), but it probably won't support archiving multiple section header level at the same time. (If we archive section lv.1, it will only probably look for that section level and for lv2, it will just look for lv2.) — regards, Revi 08:11, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

@-revi: Daily section lv.1 headers are being archived currently (see for example these edits), just badly and never the first one. Do we really need them?   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 08:51, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

We can't support people using bots in unsupported ways (this is such case, because our bot only works with ==section==). I don't know why that was being added after all <_< — regards, Revi 08:54, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ, EugeneZelenko, Dschwen: You participated in Commons:Bots/Requests/Hazard-Bot 6, what do you think?   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 09:26, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, perhaps a practical solution might be to stop writing daily headings. And maybe, there could be a JavaScript gadget to insert pseudo headings to separate days dynamically without adding them in wikitext, instead? People wouldn't miss the edit link in "October 28 [edit]" and the ability to edit a day's worth of sections at the same time too much if it won't be available, would they? --whym (talk) 12:40, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

w:d:Wikidata:Project chat is also huge and don't use date-based headers. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:29, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Re: modifying the archive bot to support it - the short answer is, the problem is recognized (phab:T119791) but difficult to solve. The reason many (but not all) 1st level headings went to the archives here was because they were 'ignored' - they were treated like any other potion of the text, and were moved together with the comments directly above them. If the solution above (of not using daily headings) works instead, that would be great. whym (talk) 12:40, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Removing daily headers

I think now is the time to remove the existing day section headers and have Hazard-Bot stop adding today's section header, given User talk:ArchiverBot#Bot screwed up indentation.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 15:23, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Pinging @HyperGaruda, Pi.1415926535, -revi, Hazard-SJ, EugeneZelenko, Dschwen, EugeneZelenko.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 11:18, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

If an Admin closes this in the affirmative, User:Hazard-Bot/DoTask/Villagepump may be modified in accordance with User:Hazard-Bot/DoTask, as Hazard-SJ has not edited any project in over 24 days. I have just notified Hazard-SJ of this discussion via user talk page and email.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 18:35, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

 Support (I added a new section header above.) Per my comment above. Since discussion pages with the single "=" (H1) heading is a rare exception, it tends to confuse bots. Getting rid of it will make ArchiverBot's life easier. whym (talk) 13:02, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

•  Oppose I like the headers and I’d rather have ArchiverBot fixed to cover justifiable exceptions such as this. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 23:20, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Oppose They make the page far easier to read. Jheald (talk) 23:47, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

If the header prevents automated archiving for the moment, then it should go. But how about indenting dates with == too? Until the bot developers find a solution for =.--Roy17 (talk) 23:53, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

@Roy17: If the dates were at level 2, they would never get archived.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 11:10, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

•  Support The less cluttered, the more readable. 4nn1l2 (talk) 11:35, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
• I have no interest in making ArchiverBot recognize = header, and thus support removal. If whym wants to do that, that's fine to me though. — regards, Revi 12:01, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
  • I just saw whym's comment above, and seems he doesn't intend to do this either. — regards, Revi 12:04, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
• I would say that daily headers make table of content more organized. Is it too hard to improve bot? --EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:16, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

  @EugeneZelenko: Given that neither maintainer is willing to make such an improvement, it's a fair bet that such an improvement will not happen in the foreseeable future.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 17:31, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

•  Support some may think it gives more structure, but I find it clutters both the ToC and the myriad of headers. Besides, there is no relevance of the daily headers to the content of VP. --HyperGaruda (talk) 18:43, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

{{contra}}  Info I suggest a different approach: We do not need the ArchiverBot at all. SpBot can do the task alone. The Archiverbot is better for talk pages with less traffic, if you want to ensure that there will always be at least one thread left, this won’t work with the SpBot. — Speravir – 01:45, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Speravir: So we would have to start closing VP discussions? How would SpBot deal with the daily headers?   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 02:41, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Aargh, Jeff, topic missed by me. As far as I know the SpBot does not deal at all with them. So either the Hazard-Bot has to be stopped as you intend or to be rewritten, so that it deletes empty date sections. — Speravir – 02:59, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Speravir: I don't think we want to have to manually close VP discussions, in any case. Also, empty date sections seems to only be a small part of the problem as I understand it: excluding the recent issue of ArchiverBot changing all level 2 headings to level 1 headings, ArchiverBot would have archived non-empty level 1 headings that came immediately after a level 2 heading that was being archived (which also results in the level 2 heading that follows possibly being under the wrong date heading). As I mentioned below, though, I'm happy to either work together to make this work (if the community wants to maintain the current - corrected - behavior), or to stop my bot from adding the headings if that's what we need/want to happen. I think we all agree that having the archiving process work properly is important. Hazard SJ 04:26, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ – regarding your first sentence: The SpBot is already made active in the VP, so we can manually close discussions and this is frequently done. But with a small enhancement of the template code in the page head it additionally can archive based on time span. Tis was the intention of my post above. The issue I forgot is that it does not care about level 1 headings, if level 2 and below are archived. So, empty level 1 sections would have been to be deleted (they should be detectable with regex). — Speravir – 23:25, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the clarification! Hazard SJ 17:28, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

•  Comment Apologies for my non-presence on this thread, I've been missing on-wiki notifications (I just enabled email notifications for mentions to hopefully improve that). I'm happy to have my bot not add the headings as long as either that is needed to allow proper archival of the page, or that is what the community prefers: even if the latter seems to be unclear, the former seems to be the case here. Worst case, if we stop adding headings now, then are able to have ArchiverBot properly support them, then we can re-add them in the future. @Whym: I did a bit of looking around in the code, and also came across gerrit:505365. If my understanding of the code is correct, I have an alternative change in mind that might allow both to continue co-existing. Rather than also treating level 1 headings "like any other portion of the text", continue to allow level 1 and level 2 headings to be identified as headings (i.e. the current behavior). In addition to that, provide additional information to the DiscussionThread class telling it what heading level it is (so that it can add the correct number of = characters when reformatting the heading in to_text, and explicitly have should_be_archived return False if the level is 1. If that is done, you might also want to add some logic to analyze_page to ignore level 1 headings from the count checks against minthreadsleft. You're a lot more familiar with the implications of doing so than I am, but if you think that is reasonable, I think it could also be a step towards achieving at least a simplified version of phab:T119791. At that point (assuming my thought process was correct), ArchiverBot would be able to effectively leave all the level 1 headings on the page (which might then start to get left at the top of the page), and we can separately remove those headings without ArchiverBot needing to support that as a feature. That would then bring us back to the question of whether or not people actually prefer to have the dates or not; I personally think the date headings are nice to have (provided that they fulfill their intended purpose and don't interfere with the bots being able to do their jobs), but that they are something that we can live without (refer to EugeneZelenko's comment about Wikidata above). Hazard SJ 04:14, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
  • @-revi: please chime in if you have any thoughts on this. Hazard SJ 17:32, 28 April 2019 (UTC)
  • @Hazard-SJ: Thank you for the advice. What you described makes sense, and if I was to write the Pywikibot script I use in a clean state, I would probably do that. My issue is that whether I should introduce the change into the default behavior (which might break some use cases where the current 'broken' behavior somehow helped), or add it as an optional feature (safer, but more compilicated). Please feel free to submit a Phabricator task, by the way. :) whym (talk) 23:59, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

 Info I just now activated autoarchiving with the SpBot in the Village Pump. Should the issues with the ArchiverBot get solved we can switch back to the old routine. — Speravir – 19:05, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

@Speravir: To clarify, does that result in the level 1 headings being left behind or removed as of now? Hazard SJ 17:32, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: left behind for humans to clean up. Such a shame.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 17:37, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ:, like Jeff wrote: They are left behind. On the VP page I mentioned this. Today AnonMoos did this job. — Speravir – 18:05, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

I could try going through the approval process to have my bot also remove empty headings (I've partially written code to support that). Of course, if I handle that, there will be times when there are empty sections on the page, though I could try to reduce that by (in addition to the current time) running at one or more additional times per day (e.g. 30-60 minutes after anticipated archival time). I know that's not ideal, but let me know if I should pursue that, or if someone has an alternative in mind. Hazard SJ 22:51, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Hazard, SpBot runs some minutes after 3.00 UTC if I do not mix this up. Then a bot removing these empty headings should run shortly after this. (Is it possible to check, whether SpBot already was active on a date?) So, these empty headings would not last long. How did the ArchiverBot do this – by moving to a second level heading which caused the problems? — Speravir – 01:09, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Speravir: When it is behaving, ArchiverBot considers L1 headers to be cruft that gets archived with the previous L2 section, so it never archives the first L1 header. Also, the order is inconsistent because VP sections are ordered by start date but archive sections are ordered by archived date, which can be many weeks later for active sections, so the archived L1 headers end up ordered approximately, making them approximately useless.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 01:35, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) @Speravir: Regarding ArchiverBot, not quite. The issue of all level 1 headings being changed into level 2 headings is likely caused by a recent change (which is now or will soon be fixed per phab:T221445). The older behavior was to treat level 1 headings just like any other text (e.g. a paragraph), so they were not being handled properly then either (just that nobody had noticed). HyperGaruda's comment above suggests that might have been the case ever since ArchiverBot started archiving the page. See Jeff G.'s example above of the behavior prior to that (removal from VP and addition to archive) - note that the date heading was unexpectedly removed despite there being more November 1 subsections in that example. My suggestion above could (unless I missed something) could allow ArchiverBot (and any other bot using that code) to treat level 1 headings as distinct sections (rather than merely parts of a section that suffer the same fate as whatever level 2 section is immediately before it), but explicitly as sections that will never get archived. Hazard SJ 01:36, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: If an archiving bot can truly ignore the L1 headers in the VP (letting the empty ones build up rather than archiving them) and the same or another bot on a later pass could remove the empty ones, that would work for archiving but still leave the structure some like at the VP.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 01:47, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Jeff G., Hazard-SJ: Thank you both. Now I also understand, why there have been for years an “Old entries” or similar as very first section heading. — Speravir – 18:28, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Speravir: You're welcome.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 23:05, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Not archiving daily headers

This has become increasingly apparent as the way to go per the archival bot devs above. Can we at least agree on this?   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 23:08, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

SpBot (which is currently in use) doesn't archive them, but leaves them behind even when they are empty (which in my opinion is better than incorrectly archiving them). However, as long as any bot archives and leaves the section empty (without removing the heading), that heading will still need to be removed. That's currently being done entirely by humans, so I just created Commons:Bots/Requests/Hazard-Bot 17 to get approval to have my bot also help with removals.  Hazard SJ  21:36, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Innovations in Uploading

Am I the only one who's not impressed by the latest innovations in the uploading process? First, I keep getting a message saying "There was an error in your submission." It's always untrue and irrelevant and does nothing but slow me down. Then there's "Caption" followed by "Description," creating an unnecessary complication. Do they really think I'm going to write an elaborate caption on top of a description? A plain old description is all that's needed. And then we have the best of all, the "Skip this/Publish data" innovation. I choose "Skip this" every time and the process proceeds as per usual, except that it's taken longer than it used to. These things do nothing but slow us down. Get rid of them. Sardaka (talk) 09:04, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

• @Sardaka: Ever tried Special:Upload? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 10:19, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
  • I generally find the upload wizard easier to use, but the latest innovations aren't helping one bit. Who drteams up these brilliant ideas? Sardaka (talk) 08:04, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

More work to do. Just what we need. There should be an "opt-out" button for captions and Wikidata properties. Let someone who cares, and has the time, do all that. Rodhullandemu (talk) 09:14, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

• Maybe this should be moved to the Village pump page itself,, instead of being here in the talk page? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 18:41, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Sort archives in descending order?

I think Commons:Village pump/Archive should be inverted. For example, a person in 2030 is more likely looking for a 2020s discussion rather than a 2010s discussion, so I believe sorting in descending order is better for quicker manoeuvre.--Roy17 (talk) 11:22, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

•  Oppose @Roy17: Chronological sorting makes good sense, and besides Special:PrefixIndex/Commons_talk:Village_pump/Archive/ can't be sorted, unless you change MediaWiki.   — Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me} 12:30, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

@Jeff G.: dude, I'm talking about Commons:Village pump/Archive. Descending is chronological too.--Roy17 (talk) 12:34, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

I like the suggestion and if we were to start from scratch, I would go for descending (latest first), but I fear that we have too many archive indexes in the ascending order, like Commons:Administrators/Archive/Successful requests for de-adminship. If the order is to be changed here, I would do the same to most if not all of those archives for consistency. Alternatively, just adding the 'Jump to the bottom (latest)' link somewhere around the top might suffice. whym (talk) 12:25, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

HEIC files

Hello Village pump gatherers. I have attempted to upload photos and discovered that HEIC files are not accepted. Is this condition being addressed so that HEIC files may be uploaded? I am interested to hear from any who know. Most kind regards.Hu Nhu (talk) 04:01, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

@Hu Nhu: I believe you have placed this question in the wrong part of the Village pump. This is the talk/discussion page to discuss policy, editing and administrative type questions and proposals specifically about the Village pump.

You want to post this question here: Commons:Village_pump, which is the 'project page'.--The Navigators (talk) 06:08, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you @The Navigators:. I will do so immediately.Hu Nhu (talk) 23:04, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Sandbox Giuseppe Pauri

Hello, I would kindly need to know how to connect the Wikimediacommons to Giuseppe Pauri's Sandbox, having to insert a gallery of photos taken by me, such as other painters for example. thank you --La più bella fontana del villaggio (talk) 09:58, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

@La più bella fontana del villaggio: Please post this question on the Village pump itself. - dcljr (talk) 00:23, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Help:Contents

I suggest include very visible a link to Help:Contents. This is the basic startpoint for newbies. --BoldLuis (talk) 14:55, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

@BoldLuis: Hi, it is currently linked in the sidebar (i.e. the "Help center" link).  Hazard SJ  01:54, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Village pumps for other languages

Why are we hiding "Village pumps for other languages" behind a link? If someone doesn't speak English, they will probably never notice that, and might not understand it if the did, but would certainly recognize the name of their own language if it were directly visible. Also, the current way, the language names aren't searchable. - Jmabel ! talk 17:43, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

When you change your language, you get a second link with this language. For me it looks like this:

Deutsch · English · 🌐

--Redrobsche (talk) 15:34, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

For me it's just that same symbol plus a "Village pumps for other languages" link. But in any case: why not just show all the languages? We get a detectable number of people here who are looking for help and who aren't logged in at all or who are beginners who wouldn't have known to set a language, and they are exactly the ones who most need to see something letting them know that there might be a better place to go to ask a question in, say, Turkish. - Jmabel ! talk 17:56, 17 May 2020 (UTC)