The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
1 - Bug or feature ? It is a bug. 2 - The human bug 3 - The technical bug 4 - Unexhaustive list of related talks 1 - Bug or feature ? It is a bug. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arameans&oldid=463282677 : both pictures File:Aramean funeral stele Louvre AO3026.jpg and File:Si Gabbor funeral stele Louvre AO3027.jpg are tilted. It is somehow intentional, because it seems that the devs have suddenly decided that the exif orientation tag should be taken into account, while in the past users used had to use other ways to define image orientation. But even if it is intentional, we should call it a bug, because it is annoying to a lot of readers and uploaders whose pictures have been OK sometimes for years, and without warning they must suddenly change the orientation of their uploaded pictures. What about the pictures whose uploaders are no longer active ? So I hope everybody agrees that it is a bug. 2 - The human bug I think the Wikimedia Foundation should present officially its excuses to the readers and active users annoyed by the bug. The excuses could be linked from the rotatebot template, so that the concerned users could read them. The devs should find out what went wrong in the decision process to implement the 1.18 version, and try to find preventive measures so that big problems of this size do not occur again when a version upgrade is done. Is it really OK not to consult the Commons community before changing a picture-related feature ? 3 - The technical bug : deadline A lot of people should be thanked for having spared no energy to find the first steps toward solutions to the bug. A lot has been done. In particular a lot has been done to provide users easy access to a bot, called "rotatebot" which rotates pictures when needed. A lot of users have spent time tagging pictures with a "rotate" template, which calls the bot for help. Really a lot of people. The bot is busy, and the bot should be thanked, if it had brains to understand what "thank you" means. Despite all of that, despite the fact that the bot's speed was lately increased, we are still lacking a systematic solution which would correct all wrongly rotated pictures and a deadline. Let us stop asking users to individually tag every wrong picture! Let us have some developers create a tool to find wrong pictures and rotate them back to their original orientation! We need a deadline. We need to be able to say, In X month's time, all pictures will be back to normal. 4 - Unexhaustive list of related talks http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Autorotation_using_EXIF_tag_with_MW_1.18 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Autorotation_using_EXIF_tag_with_MW_1.18_.28old.29 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Rotatelink_on_filedescription-pages http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#problem_with_rotation http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/10#Rotation_error http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/11#New_autorotation_based_on_EXIF_data_problem http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/11#Wrong_rotation_of_image_when_used_in_Wikipedia http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/11#.22Request_rotation.22_link http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/12#Direction_issue_with_File:Cyril_and_Methodius_monument_Sofia.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bistro#Monast.C3.A8re_Andronikov_:_image_.C3.A0_redresser http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bistro#Monde_.C3.A0_l.27envers http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Le_Bistro/5_d%C3%A9cembre_2011#Pourquoi_certaines_images_ont_subi_des_rotations_sans_modification_apparente http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Image_rotation_-_I_am_desperate http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Maintenance_category_for_files_with_EXIF_rotation_other_than_0_degrees http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Rotation http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rotatebot#Rotation_on_Wikipedia It is unexhaustive because I did not check Commons' help desk, nor every Wikipedia language version. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
