User talk:W.carter

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Apollo images

Hi, Could you please give your opinion about delist and replace of Apollo images? Yann (talk) 13:57, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Yann, sorry no. I have other matters in my private life that needs my attention for now. I'll get back to being more active here when I can. --Cart (talk) 14:00, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Yann, I've had a look at the photos and answered on the talk page. Funny, as soon as you think you can take some personal time of from Commons, questions and emails start pouring in. Commons users have a sixth sense for these things. ;-) --Cart (talk) 13:54, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

More fun with the bot … continued

Dear Cart, huh, I just stumbled over these FP nominations:

• Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Pez anémona ensillado (Amphiprion polymnus) en una anémona alfombra de Mertens (Stichodactyla mertensii), Anilao, Filipinas, 2023-08-23, DD 108.jpg
• Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Peacock butterfly (Aglais io) on cherry blossom.png

The fun is in the history. In both cases the bot did append , featured resp. , not featured a second time to the heading. Cool! Yet another crazy little bug.

If you ever stumble over such peculiar stuff, you do not need to repair it, just forward it to me. ;–) Such little, local bugs are like brain-teasers or chewing gum: I can look into the source code, wonder why I do not see the reason immediately, chew on the problem for a while and (hopefully) come up with a (hopefully) simple solution.

No need to answer this! Relax and all the best, – Aristeas (talk) 14:32, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Aristeas, are you sure you don't want to use this icon for the FPC Bot? ;-) --Cart (talk) 14:40, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

An intriguing idea, Cart ;–). – Have found the reason for this little problem (it always happens if there is “something”, e.g. an empty line, before the heading of the nomination; the bot searches only at the very beginning of the nomination subpage). Will fix this soon. Best, – Aristeas (talk) 15:41, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

 Done For the record: the issue should be fixed with this commit. It also enables the bot to ask for help if a nomination subpage does not start with the usual heading (this happens from time to time due to accidental errors during the voting). Best, – Aristeas (talk) 14:01, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Fix inbound links to delete page

Hi, kindly fix the inbound links to the page you deleted Commons:Featured pictures/Animals/Arthropods/Lepidoptera/Mounted. Thanks Waddie96 (talk) 17:57, 3 August 2025 (UTC)

Hi Waddie96, I assume you have come across the red link at the bottom of one of the gallery pages, to deliver this message. The page was deleted at the request from the Lepidoptera users, they wanted the photos mixed with the other Lepidoptera images, and the images were moved and that page removed from the gallery section. If you look at the source of that template, Template:Commons FP galleries, you will see that the page is no longer present on the template and all other links to that page have been fixed or removed. However, that template is translated to other languages, and until the translation team has come around to fix this in the translate network, that page will be transcluded to the gallery pages as a red link via the template. That process will happen when the people marking pages for translation get around to the template. This is out of my hands and may take some time. This is not the first time we've had a red link linger on a template like this, but it will be fixed.

I see that you are mostly on the en-Wikipedia, a single-language site. Commons is a multi-language site, so you are probably not used to how things work on a site that handles multiple languages with translation tags and all the complications that brings. Just be patient and the red link will disappear in time. Best, --Cart (talk) 18:22, 3 August 2025 (UTC)

👍 Waddie96 (talk) 18:27, 3 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining this, Cart! Much appreciated … – Aristeas (talk) 08:28, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Aristeas, after this I went and asked one of the users from the translating team who have helped me before. This red link had been showing up a long time, so I thought I'd ask nicely, and now it's fixed. I've been trying to learn more about how these translation tags work, but it seems you need some tools I don't have. Anyway, it looks better now. Best, --Cart (talk) 13:22, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

IMHO this newfangled Wiki markup for multilingual pages which requires the help of the translation wizards “to be marked for translation” and cannot be fully edited by normal humans is the contrary of the Wiki idea. It prevents any effective editing of the affected pages. IMHO Commons would do much better without it. But the train cannot be stopped anymore. — Aristeas (talk) 17:09, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Cicada animated GIF

Dear Cart, you rightly removed File:Cicada molting animated-2.gif from Commons:Featured pictures/Animals/Arthropods, thank you! Stupid question: Should it be added to Commons:Featured media/Animals then? Or is that page only for videos? (If the latter is true, should we then add the poor cicada to our legacy Commons:Featured pictures/Animated#Gifs gallery? Or to both pages?) Just asking … Whatever is the answer, I can do it, I just do not really understand featured media ;–). All the best, – Aristeas (talk) 08:33, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Aristeas, thanks for noticing this. I had some sort of brain glitch and placed the cicada in the 'Nature' gallery. I've now moved it to the 'Animals' gallery, which I think is the best for it, since that's where people come to look for it. Some of the galleries do have mixed file types, like Commons:Featured media/Music. --Cart (talk) 13:28, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Aristeas, on second thought, it seems like the whole Commons:Featured pictures/Animated#Gifs gallery is a bit of a mess. That page is an archive, but the files should be made easy to access for users in the now used FM galleries, so they should really be in both. I'll get on sorting this out right away, so that the files are properly displayed. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. --Cart (talk) 13:37, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for taking care for this, Cart! – Aristeas (talk) 19:01, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Aristeas, as usual when you go to fix "one little thing", you step into a bog of things that needs fixing. ;-) I haven't been this deep into the FMC system before, and Eatcha sure left a lot of things half-made.

All the files from the old 'Animated' archive page are now in the FM gallery. Since the FM galleries are fairly new, they were all sort of chronological, and I kept that order when I copied the files to the new galleries. However, this made me have a better look at these galleries. I have now introduced the novelty of 'sections' to keep them more orderly. New are also a Category:Featured media galleries and Category:Featured media templates. The FP star, , was still used in templates and pages and it's now replaced with the FM symbol, . I hope I've found them all. There were no special headings on the gallery pages (now fixed) other than Eatcha's usual oversized and redundant buttons back to the FM main page. Also taken care of some of Eatcha's passion for oversized fonts.

A couple of galleries were redundant and a new was needed. The odd Commons:Featured media/Short held a few files that were actually longer than some in other galleries and hard to define, so I let that one go. Commons:Featured media/Trailers had one file that wasn't a trailer at all, just a short film, so now decommissioned. What was needed was a general Commons:Featured media/Science, now added.

Starting gallery pages at === === seemed a very odd choice, leaving very little room for expanding a page into sections. I've re-set them all at = = per the usual Commons standard. It will probably not be compatible with some of Eatcha's old Bots, but I don't give a rat's ass about them since they don't function anyway. If ever a Bot is designed for FM, it will need to be written from scratch.

Found some of my own old bloopers from when I tried to work with Eatcha, a very (very!) different experience than working with you. Have fixed them now. Also weeded out some vandalism no one had noticed.

Mended some links on the main page, [1], and re-set some of the gallery sections on that page. Another users had some time ago misunderstood the purpose of the files displayed on the FM main. He didn't know they were the latest promoted, but thought they were just examples of what was in the galleries, and promptly replaced all the files with such that he thought would "represent" the galleries better. (The ideas people get...) ;-)

With the new sections on the gallery pages also come new sorting order on some of them. I will get on sorting the rest in reverse order later today (the fixes mentioned above took the whole of yesterday) so that the order matches the new placing of new files in the FP galleries. I think it's best we use the same system on both projects.

I might have missed mentioning some things, but they are all in my contribs for yesterday if there is anything you want to check. I also came across a nice-looking and interesting page: Commons:Simple media reuse guide that is mentioned in passing on both COM:FP and COM:FEM. I'm not sure how much use it gets, not much looking at its 'History', but I added FM to it and updated some of the WLM and WLE links. Perhaps you know of some other Wiki Loves that should be added to it; or even other pages where it can be used.

I think that's all for now. I'll probably remember something as soon as I hit "Save"... ;-) Best, --Cart (talk) 11:28, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

FM is not my world, but your summary sounds very solid and promising, and I can only thank you for all the work! Even simple things like properly starting with level 2 headings are important – not even to mention all the bigger tasks you have tackled.

Maybe some day in the future I could think about writing a simple bot which manages at least central parts of the FM. But first I would need to get acquainted with FM very well, else I would not find a good solution. Second, I would want to follow the model of FPCBot; that makes sense only if and when FPCBot has completely up-to-date, well-structured, and clean code … and we are still far away from that goal. (I have to rewrite some parts three times or more because every time I learn more and recognize other problems and other possible improvements.)

For now, do you have any comrade-in-arms for FM? If not, it would be great if we could find somebody who is interested in videos etc., is well-organized, friendly, and would be willing to help you with managing FM, at least from time to time, so that the FM galleries etc. do not go wild whenever you need a break. Well, at least one user comes into my mind. But would you be interested in any help at all, or would that be rather confusing?

Thank you again and all the best, – Aristeas (talk) 19:36, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Aristeas, thanks for your comments and concern. I'm not that into videos either, I'm just helping out since it's a sister project to FPC that (now) runs along the same guidelines as FPC. I mainly made these comments to have a transparent place to mark what I was doing. I'm sure there are more people than you who might be interested in that project working too.

There are a few users who help out from time to time, but taking care of the day-to-day maintenance is far from taxing. There are only 284 FM so far and the FMC generates about 2-3 FMs/month. Commons isn't exactly TikTok. ;-) yet The voting period is 4 weeks, and even so it's often hard for a nomination to scrape up the 5 support votes needed for a promotion. So a very relaxed little project that I have no problem maintaining. Although I have noticed a slight increase in nominations since I started to care for the thing. People seem to like projects that work. ;-) The biggest job now was to get the setup organized in a way so that anyone can find things and see what's going on. Eatcha was all about big gestures and not so much about making the FM/FMC an integrated part of Commons.

So as you can see from the numbers above, there is absolutely no hurry in getting a Bot up and running for the FMC. You just focus on your job with FPC Bot. I just like to compare notes and borrow ideas between the two projects. --Cart (talk) 20:14, 6 August 2025 (UTC)