User talk:Fæ

for older archives, see User talk:Fæ/2021, User talk:Fæ/2020, User talk:Fæ/2019, et seq.

Old projects

• Exemplars for historical documents and maps projects
• 
  Scan released last year at the Internet Archive
• 
  New upload of 1887 address book for Riga, Latvia. (800mb).
• 
  Example map, (created 1774) high resolution map of Africa, approx 373 megapixels in size, similar to a 5 foot square printed poster.

I had a look back at the IA upload project and realized that none of these scripts run because of Python, Pywikibot and internetarchive changes. It turns out I find it quite difficult to remember almost anything about these projects too. So don't be surprised if I'm testing it out and there are flaws. I'll do my best to repair any oddities. I'm seeing '+99' notices from my account which doesn't clear, could be a wm bug for big numbers, so I might not notice changes. It's not deliberate. For the moment please don't ask me to take on large projects, I'd rather pace myself at 'slow'. Fæ (talk) 13:07, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, and welcome back!   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 08:11, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

Another new "feature" of the Wikimedia API is ratelimiting. Added a couple of slow down precautions including slapping down multiprocessing, but it's definitely dogging uploads despite being visible to the API as an established user. It may be necessary to revisit the throttling system rather than bumping into it. It's sad this creates extra work for volunteers.

For the first time the queries found restricted items at Internet Archive like 1826histoirenumismatiquedelare, where the Washington University appears to be claiming copyright in a 200 year old publication. Good grief, I hope this is not a trend that IA is tolerating. --Fæ (talk) 07:09, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

I have updated a process for finding the text of Google cover pages in the recent uploads. The 'pending' queue is at Category:OCR detected cover page. Yet to update the page removal process. There's no hurry and I will get to this slowly. --Fæ (talk) 06:29, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Note that larger files, like the 800mb PDF transcluded, are now possible thanks to limits changing. The larger files might cause things to break, sometimes in predictable ways like the SHA check from mediawiki taking some time to process and be available on the system. Behind the scenes, these uploads do not behave well and invariably fail to report back that they are successfully uploaded. Fæ (talk) 14:26, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Extra note about maps - though there is a fairly quick upload of jpegs of maps to Category:David_Rumsey_Historical_Map_Collection, which may take a couple of days, there is a much, much slower process to recover high resolution versions. A rough estimate is that this could take 2 or perhaps 4 months, partly due to the new WMF API throttling limits more than processing time. --Fæ (talk) 12:44, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

@Fæ: Couldn't you technically request permission for the upscale to run on Faebot so it is exempt from the API rate limits? --Nintendofan885^{T&Cs apply} 13:30, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

From what is available to easily read about it, probably not. Faebot has a bot flag, but a brief experiment shows that the API throttle is using IP address. Consequently the map uploads being mentioned here are being forced to sleep 90s before the upload is allowed to complete and then there's another 90s for the filepage to be updated with formatting or a category. These events are in a multiprocessing queue but it makes no difference for the API whether it's a bot or not, or whether Pywikibot can set a bot flag for the action.

Keep in mind, I'm trying not to spend hours at a keyboard, so not looking for complex extra volunteer work or phabricator requests for a fairly modest 50,000 files. Fæ (talk) 13:41, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Faebot has got running on the somewhat revised toolforge, so the mass link fixing has been moved to the WMF servers and that at least is 6x faster as a result and reduced local processing by about 7%. Other stuff might move there eventually. Fæ (talk) 14:50, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Fresh eye this morning, and the map upgrading is running around 4x faster locally and probably is obeying the new WMF API throttling rules. The run might be 6 weeks rather than 4 months, which is fine. Fæ (talk) 06:39, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Welcome back

As you probably have worked out, I've been following this talk page, checking whether DRs of your uploads are valid or not, and responding to the DR with a rationale if I think something should be kept. May I assume you are sufficiently "back" that I can let go of monitoring that?

Welcome back, in any case. - Jmabel ! talk 14:06, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

If you wish, though I'll probably continue to ignore most DRs and let others chip in. After your first million images, the DRs that matter are ones that are a meaningful case study for thousands of others and could be collated with some automated method.

I have noticed your patient work and very much appreciate it! Fæ (talk) 15:21, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

• Yes, welcome back! So glad to see this. Krok6kola (talk) 16:06, 3 June 2026 (UTC)
• It's been almost 5 years. I hope you had a good time! Welcome back. - Alexis Jazz ^{ping plz} 10:03, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

@Fæ Yes, happy to see you here again :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 09:32, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Good to see you again, also from me. -- Deadstar (msg) 10:27, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

Marvellous to see you editing again. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:15, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

File:Hurricane Ivan, Natural Hazards DVIDS726877.jpg

Duplicate File:Hurricane Ivan, Natural Hazards DVIDS726877.jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) 2003 LN6 23:49, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Duplicate but with a different DVIDS ID. Not sure how we should best handle the merge. - Jmabel ! talk 00:46, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Category:Faebot identified duplicates

Category:Images from DoD uploaded by Fæ (duplicate)

Unfortunately it is a rabbit hole. As the SHA values do not match, there's no mediawiki way to find these 'almost but not quite' digitally identical copies. A lot of time was spent automating image hashing, but it is an expensive process and does not eliminate human intervention to decide the best way to merge.

Yes, the backlog really is over 20,000 files and 9 years old. However it remains a low priority issue compared to other enigmatic Commons puzzles.

WRT this example, they were released by the military one week apart according to the metadata. Picking the first one officially released on their system seems a fine choice considering neither is currently in use. Fæ (talk) 02:00, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Semi-related: do you know about Commons:International Standard Content Code? Might be relevant for some of the work you do. - Jmabel ! talk 19:05, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

This is interesting, thank you. As it seems to work as a Hamming space, so gives "distance", this is presumably a type of image hash but seems to be used as a fingerprint, which may not be guaranteed with other methods. Looking at the database website though, it might be on an indefinite beta status, but worth a bit of research and reading for my education. Fæ (talk) 08:13, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

Thank you

I just wanted to say, "Thank you," for all of the images you have made accessible. I count on them to complete family history books for my clients and each time I see "Fæ" pop up, I send a bit of gratitude your way. With full attribution to you, your time and effort show up in the analog world, too. ~2026-35350-40 (talk) 14:31, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

File:Arthur and Fritz Kahn Collection 1889-1932 (20345633841).jpg

File:Arthur and Fritz Kahn Collection 1889-1932 (20345633841).jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
Commons:Deletion requests/File:Arthur and Fritz Kahn Collection 1889-1932 (20345633841).jpg Lx 121 (talk) 20:47, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Welcome back!

Russian Empire 1883 genealogy interest, 1.16gb, mediawiki struggles at this size.

Looks like you were gone for a bit. Are you working on any new large chunks of uploads? RAN (talk) 21:44, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Slightly updated the internetarchive PDF uploading, so these are being refreshed:

Category:Scans from University of Toronto

Category:Old books from American Libraries - this in particular needs contributors to surf the content and imagine categories which can better break up the 150,000 books.

Category:David Rumsey Historical Map Collection - new content but a few thousand jpegs of interesting maps. Some review will be needed as the source library curators may have presumed their collections are public domain by age when it can be more complicated.

Category:Images dezoomed by Fæ is being ever so slowly populated by overwriting the small versions from IA. This is probably why this was not done years ago. Hopefully the maps will not be moved before this dezooming task finishes in several days time.

Category:Books in the Prelinger Library

Category:Genealogy books from the Internet Archive modest number of IA books under this collection but some are eye wateringly large, one has been having an upload attempt of over an hour for a 1,781.2 MB PDF; it may continue to fail though several that succeeded are at the 1gb size.

Quietly restarted the slow job of trimming Google cover pages off pdfs which is harder and slower on local processing. Also been experimenting with nccommons, behind the scenes that's been the ghastly issue of getting timedtext to work on videos and battling anti-bot tools for a site that in theory wants you to take their publications.

There is plenty of gnomic work, so for the moment not looking for anything controversial or technically too challenging. Little projects that do not mean sitting at a keyboard for more than an hour at a time are best. Fæ (talk) 05:20, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

• Are we ever going to get something like "search inside this book" when you are at the pdf page, like we get at Google Books? The only time is see the ASCII text is when I do a general search for all of Commons and I see a snippet, or when the book is transcribed at Wikisource. --RAN (talk) 18:59, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

  The search can be used to find PDF contents matches and is a quick way to find prospective matches if doing copyright or cover page statement testing. For example ("This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations" filetype:pdf intitle:IA) will find PDFs with google cover pages. However there's no way of using the mediawiki to tell you what pages the text is on, or do anything else really smart with it. Well no easy designed way; vaguely remember doing something smarter but can't remember how that worked.

A solution for the IA uploads alone would be to navigate from the commons IA upload, back to IA and then interrogate either the djvu.txt file there, or the xml version. If one needed to filter through, say, 100,000 files, that would be way more efficient than having to download each one and run it through another OCR. Fæ (talk) 19:13, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

File:Acts of Assembly, passed in the island of Jamaica; from 1681, to 1737, inclusive. Fleuron T144016-27.png

File:Acts of Assembly, passed in the island of Jamaica; from 1681, to 1737, inclusive. Fleuron T144016-27.png (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
Commons:Deletion requests/File:Acts of Assembly, passed in the island of Jamaica; from 1681, to 1737, inclusive. Fleuron T144016-27.png ~2026-35527-52 (talk) 00:10, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

File:Amber Cousino won a rice cooker during the raffle at the Live, Laugh and Learn event at the Del Mar Beach Resort, Camp Pendleton, Calif., April 19, 2013 130419-M-LD192-226.jpg

File:Amber Cousino won a rice cooker during the raffle at the Live, Laugh and Learn event at the Del Mar Beach Resort, Camp Pendleton, Calif., April 19, 2013 130419-M-LD192-226.jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
Commons:Deletion requests/File:Amber Cousino won a rice cooker during the raffle at the Live, Laugh and Learn event at the Del Mar Beach Resort, Camp Pendleton, Calif., April 19, 2013 130419-M-LD192-226.jpg - Alexis Jazz ^{ping plz} 09:59, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

File:The art of midwifery improv'd Fleuron T115049-2.png

File:The art of midwifery improv'd Fleuron T115049-2.png (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
Commons:Deletion requests/File:The art of midwifery improv'd Fleuron T115049-2.png Jmabel ! talk 23:58, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

File:Mapillary 20H15M52S000 Collier County us (gAS1T8MW4tmO7uqzG6kKvr, 1165545434717956) (cubanoboi) 2024-08-10.jpg

This seems to be a part of a mass upload of Mapillary images.

As these were being uploaded I'd been adding | other_fields = {{information field|Academic context|Geospatial street-level imagery from external site.}}, so these were not seen as random indiscriminaate uploads of 'random' locations and verges.

However the uploads seem to be faster than I can cope with manually. Any chance of seeing if something like Faebot is able to do the additions as the files are uploaded? Thanks. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 20:00, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

@DaxServer: Would this be a suitable minor addition to the curator, or is it left for others to tack it on if wanted? Fæ (talk) 20:24, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

@Fæ @ShakespeareFan00  Done File:Mapillary (792440271635475, tulzukst7vufhdo1e4z60f) (b4sti4n) 2017-06-24 13H44M25S000.jpg Thanks! -- DaxServer (talk) 11:55, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

for this upload- Thanks. The hope was that the addition could made to related uploads. These are in scope, but given some patrollers... I felt it was reasonable to indicate why they were in fact not just random verge-side images. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:25, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

File:100th Anniversary PNE Parade (4913329591).jpg

File:100th Anniversary PNE Parade (4913329591).jpg (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
Commons:Deletion requests/File:100th Anniversary PNE Parade (4913329591).jpg A1Cafel (talk) 17:44, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

File:The story of the Malakand field force - an episode of frontier war (IA storyofmalakandf00chur).pdf

File:The story of the Malakand field force - an episode of frontier war (IA storyofmalakandf00chur).pdf (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
Commons:Deletion requests/File:The story of the Malakand field force - an episode of frontier war (IA storyofmalakandf00chur).pdf Nighfidelity (talk) 12:51, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

File:The book of knowledge; treating of the wisdom of the ancients Fleuron T083875-5.png

Speedy notice removed.

File:The book of knowledge; treating of the wisdom of the ancients Fleuron T083875-5.png (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) Not a fleuron, bad scan of a bit of text.

Action created by Deadstar (talk · contribs · logs · block log) 08:06, 25 June 2026 (UTC)