Commons:Village pump/Archive/2026/06

Wiki Indaba 2026 – Scholarships & Program Call now open | Abidjan, November 13–15

Dear Wikimedians,

The call for applications for scholarships and the program of Wiki Indaba 2026 is now open.

This year, the conference will be held in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, from November 13 to 15, 2026, under the theme “Africa’s Future: Knowledge Equity and Innovation”.

Wiki Indaba is the premier gathering of Wikimedians from the African continent and the diaspora. If you have a project, an experience, or an idea to share with the community, now is the time to submit your proposal.

Two applications are available: • Scholarship application → bit.ly/INDABA26_SCHOLARSHIP • Program proposal → bit.ly/INDABA26_PROGRAM

⏳ Deadline: June 30, 2026 at 11:59 PM GMT (for both)

We look forward to welcoming you to Abidjan! Abiba Pauline (talk) 21:36, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

1 petabyte of freely usable media files

Commons is close to 1 petabyte. Currently, the Special:MediaStatistics reads: "Total file size for all 142,471,025 files: 1,085,665,611,155,968 bytes (987.41 TB)". Congrats. emijrp (talk) 16:52, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

• Let me add a hint: You talk about pebibytes. A pebibyte is equal to 2⁴⁰ bytes or approx. 1.099 petabytes and a petabyte are 1,000 terabytes :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:04, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

  Not really. I meant 1024 TB = 1 PB, thats why I said "is close to". We are not there yet, but will soon. Regards. emijrp (talk) 17:10, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

  That would be 1024 TiB = 1 PiB ;). Prefixes like k, M, G, T and P are SI prefixes with base 1000. The IEC prefixes like ki, Mi, Gi, Ti and Pi are IEC prefixes with base 1024. We cannot confuse the prefixes where a terabyte would be 1024 gigabytes but a teragram would be 1000 gigagram. 🙃 --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 18:41, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

  Apparently Special:MediaStatistics has no problem with it, it uses TB, though you can report a bug if you want. emijrp (talk) 18:57, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

It would be great if Arch Mission Foundation could use several of these disks to store that petabyte in this facility, as they did with (the then current content of) English Wikipedia in 2024. Not because I fear a big apocalyptic event happening anytime soon, but as a last safeguard against other things that can (and, sadly, often do) happen. MGeog2022 (talk) 12:05, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

The demands for digital storage will increase fast. So this would be a good thing --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:04, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

Less than 4000 media needing categories as of 2021

By now, less than 4000 media needing categories as of 2021, but we got stuck at the letter N and still have to categorize some difficult-to-categorise files in foreign languages. Do you want to contribute, to categorize the reminder, please? NearEMPTiness (talk) 05:11, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

The categorisation of the all media needing categories as of 2021 is nearing completion due to the work of @User:Stefan Kühn, @User:Prototyperspective, @User:Gbawden, @User:ProtoplasmaKid, @User:Krok6kola, @User:Jochen Burghardt and many other non-disclosed contributors. Now, we need to team-up once again, to categorize the media described in foreign languages, please. Should we then tackle all media needing categories as of 2022 or take a break? NearEMPTiness (talk) 04:11, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

I think we’re on the right track. If you look at the statistics, we’ve tagged about 120,000 files in four months. So we’ve reduced the large pile of uncategorized files by an average of about 7,000 files per week. If we all keep this up and don’t lose sight of the goal, we should have only a few files left by the summer of 2027. @NearEMPTiness: Thanks for always being so active in promoting this work. --sk (talk) 07:56, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

@NearEMPTiness (ping) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:11, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

We slowly reached the letter S. More help is required, please, to keep the ball rolling. NearEMPTiness (talk) 00:51, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

• I just handled a couple of images with Persian names (and Iranian subjects) but that had been held in Uncategorized media with description in Arabic language. There are probably more, because the scripts are nearly indistinguishable to non-readers; just a heads-up to any FA speakers to have a look in that category as well. (And possibly vice versa, not to mention the other languages with similar writing.)—Odysseus1479 (talk) 02:52, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Resolved: All media of 2021 have been categorized. Thank you very much for your contributions. NearEMPTiness (talk) 05:28, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. NearEMPTiness (talk) 05:28, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Key for categories of Stolpersteine in Milan, Venice and probably in other cities too

Is it really useful to sort the Stolpersteine by the victim's last name? Because in my opionion it's a mess to leave some stumbling blocks sorted by the victim's last name while others (for example, photos with multiple Stolpersteine) aren't. Andrek02 (talk) 15:21, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

If it can be done consistently, it is presumably useful to bring multiple images of the same stone near each other, and also stones for multiple members of the same family. - Jmabel ! talk 22:28, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

Accidentally overwrote a crop

At File:Lorenzo and Henrietta Music.jpg, I was trying to crop the image and accidentally overwrote instead of uploading the cropped version separately. Can someone please fix this? TenPoundHammer (talk) 15:49, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: That's not difficult. Simply revert to the starting point (I did this already) and redo the crop. Please mind using the CropTool's Lossless mode to avoid a en:generation loss. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 16:23, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

Clarifying the closing time zone for Photo Challenge submissions and voting

I would like to raise a question regarding the closing time zone used for the Photo Challenge.

Recently, while handling the vote counting process, I noticed an inconsistency between the actual submission deadline and the wording currently used in the challenge pages. In practice, the submission period appears to close at 00:00 AoE on the 1st day of each month. However, the written description in recent months has stated the deadline as 00:00 UTC on the 1st day of each month.

There was also previous advice from experienced Wikimedians suggesting that the voting period should preferably end using AoE time, as this gives contributors around the world a more inclusive and predictable deadline. Nevertheless, the wording used in recent months has mainly referred to UTC.

This creates a potential ambiguity: contributors may understand the deadline differently depending on whether they rely on the actual timing, the page wording, or past practice.

I would therefore like to ask the community to clarify which time zone should be used as the standard closing time for the Photo Challenge:

• Option A: Use 00:00 AoE on the 1st day of each month as the standard closing time.
• Option B: Use 00:00 UTC on the 1st day of each month as the standard closing time.

My own view is that whichever option is chosen, the most important point is that the submission and voting pages should use consistent wording, and that the actual closing mechanism should match the stated deadline. This would help avoid confusion for participants and make future vote counting easier to manage.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, especially from users who have previously helped maintain or close the Photo Challenge pages. This is Taiwania Justo speaking (Reception Room) 13:29, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

how about for simplicity sake just set the deadline to UTC 00:00 2nd of each month? so every contest is always open exactly from 00:00 1st day of current month to 00:00 2nd day of next month UTC? RoyZuo (talk) 15:04, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, I think this is a reasonable simplification, and it would certainly be easier to describe and implement than using AoE explicitly.

However, I think the effect is not exactly the same as AoE. Setting the deadline to 00:00 UTC on the 2nd would give some regions additional time beyond the end of the 1st in their local time zone, while AoE is specifically intended to close the contest only after the last time zone has passed the deadline.

Therefore, I would still slightly prefer using AoE if the goal is to handle global time zones fairly. That said, if the community prefers a simpler fixed UTC-based rule, then 00:00 UTC on the 2nd could be a workable compromise. The most important point is that the wording and the actual closing mechanism should be consistent. This is Taiwania Justo speaking (Reception Room) 04:08, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

everything utc would be actually fairer since everyone has the exact same period of time (1 month + 1 day) to submit. RoyZuo (talk) 08:11, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

 Support I don't know as I have an especially strong opinion as long as it's clear, but UTC is the de facto Internet Time Zone (and is generally when things on the front page of Wikimedia sites update), and being open from 0:00 UTC on the 1st day to 0:00 UTC on the 2nd day of the following month is unambiguous and easy to understand. — PeterCooperJr (talk) 20:10, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

@Jarekt: Since you have been involved in maintaining the Photo Challenge, I would appreciate your opinion on this issue, especially on the proposed UTC-based compromise. This is Taiwania Justo speaking (Reception Room) 05:59, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

User:Taiwania Justo, I do not have much of an opinion, I only know that original approach of advertising and enforcing 00:00 UTC resulted with a lot of unhappiness from people (mostly in the US) who think that deadline is at midnight but forget that it is midnight in London and they missed the deadline. I was rejecting large number of entries from last minute submitters and they were not happy. Quietly moving the real deadline by 12 hours, removed most late entries. So in Template:Photo challenge rules I would replace UTC with AoE. --Jarekt (talk) 14:47, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

Hmmm, here's my opinion: If the deadline is AoE, the period will be 1 month + 12 hours (current AoE = UTC-12), and 2nd day of the month UTC will be 1 month + 1 day. These options are ok for me. This is Taiwania Justo speaking (Reception Room) 11:18, 7 June 2026 (UTC)