Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2016/May

Regarding uploading images

Apologies in advance, I'm still fairly new to this whole thing. Can I upload pictures I found on the internet if I reference them properly or get permission from the photographer who took them? Like a picture of a recent sporting event for example. How does one go about getting these permissions?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Handraulic (talk • contribs)

@Handraulic: Well, you can not upload any photos you find on the internet. Also getting permission is not easy. And even if you get, there is a chance that they are not the ones who own the photo. A good way to search would be using filters on Google images for labeled for reuse with modifications in the Usage Rights or Commercial use & mods allowed on Flickr.
14.139.242.195 (talk) 17:40, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

@Handraulic: Wikinews has a fair-use policy that specifically excludes images under copyright by other news orgs. We had an incident a few years ago where someone found an image they really liked on the internet, asked the site owner if they could use it, and the site owner said something like 'sure, go ahead'; and it later turned out that the site owner had grabbed the image from a news site. The point being, we have to be really, really cautious about images lying around on the internet. We almost always stick to stuff that's on Commons. --Pi zero (talk) 17:49, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Thanks for clearing that up. I am in the process of trying to get a reply from someone regarding an image I would like to use, but I'll be sure to start using those filters you mentioned on Google and check out Flickr. I should also probably try making more of my own pictures through Paint and GIMP for articles. --Handraulic (talk) 18:05, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

@Handraulic: By the way, the photo you used for UCL semi-final was not necessary. Instead, you can see the templates available or create one.
14.139.242.195 (talk) 19:11, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

@14.139.242.195: Serious? I'm sorry to sound like a complete novice, but where do I see that/create one? That will sure help for the next time! --Handraulic (talk) 20:50, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

@Handraulic: Well, till the end of May, 14.139.242.195, Agastya Chandrakant, and acagastya; all three accounts are handled by me to avoid confusion. You know, I have just completed a year on Wikinews. I would suggest you to see some news articles previously published so that you can understand how and when are they used. You will find all the sports template here Category:Sports templates. We did not have a tennis scorecard and so I created the template at Template:Tennis scorecard. It was tricky to make, you should know Wiki Markup Language for it, and if you want it to be visually appealing, you should know CSS. And you would eventually learn both. And you can always ask me (on my talk page). Just to begin with, {{footballbox}}, {{yel}}, {{goal}}, {{sent off}}, {{penmiss}}, {{pengoal}}, {{suboff}} and {{subon}} is what you would require for football match reports.
And one more thing: {{ping}} won't work for IP editors.
acagastya ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 21:20, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

One more thing: you can visit my talk page archive: I was working with few templates on my talk page.
acagastya ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 21:47, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Regarding Categories

Hello. How does one create a new category? I would like to update and add in some new teams to the existing Category:Football (soccer) clubs page, but I don't exactly know how to create one. --Handraulic (talk) 10:42, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Handraulic. Adding categories isn't easy to do atm (pending long-term semi-automation improvements, of course).

You'd want to

(1) be sure the new category fits into our category system; some cats would be appropriate for an encyclopedia (for example) but not for a news site, or somewhat different names would be used here. There should be at least three published articles ready to go in the category; we don't usually create cats smaller than that (except by accident, and many of those we delete).

(2) Make a list of articles in our archives that should go into the new category. Put the list on some water cooler with an {{editprotected}} tag (with links to the articles); the request will have to be handled by an admin, and this should be an easier way to handle things than putting requests on the talk pages of all the individual articles — that was done with a massive request some months ago and we still haven't got the editprotected queue unclogged from it.

(3) The category page itself should eventually get a {{topic cat}} template, but doing that can be complicated, so alternatively you can temporarily just have the category page with its parent categories (as long as we're not talking about a whole lot of categories all at once). Eventually of course we want a semi-automated assistant for things like setting up {{topic cat}} (and other parts of this process).

There are probably hundreds of categories we could create because we have at least three published articles for each and no one of them would be controversial, but we can't do them all at once. Some of them would be quite difficult to figure out how to handle. We've been working for several years on improving things, and things have improved, a great deal. Everything became infinitely easier once we started using the {{w}} template (which I've been slowly retrofitting to our archived articles, working backward in time from when we started using the template). When we first created {{w}}, there'd be just a few local links in a typical article, now it's common for most of the links to be local. A particular notable step forward was when Blood Red Sandman created and populated a set of categories about nuclear technology (before which we only had one related category, on nuclear proliferation).

--Pi zero (talk) 11:44, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

OK. Copy that. Thanks for the reply. It all sounds quite complex, but I'll try to remember that for next time. I think I'll hang back a bit on the cats and just concentrate on updating the sport articles for the time being. --Handraulic (talk) 12:17, 6 May 2016 (UTC)