Wikimedia Commons

Commons:The Commoner

The Wikimedia Commons community newspaper (in the making).
Monday
24
August
2026

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August 2026



Picture of the day
Stipa – the symbol of the Tarutyns'kyj steppe. Today is the Independence Day of Ukraine.
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Global Replace

The procedure of replacing one file name where the file is used with another file name across all Wikimedia Projects is called Global Replace. There are various reasons for replacing usage globally. One of them and probably the most important one is to keep articles updated when files have been renamed, until the server software, MediaWiki, which powers Wikimedia Commons and all its sister projects is able to accomplish this task on its own. Almost all gadgets and scripts at Wikimedia Commons use an open-source JavaScript library for globally replacing files, MediaWiki:Gadget-libGlobalReplace.js. For the curious, there are a Java-Tool source code and a bot source code, written in PHP, too.

The JavaScript library has been recently updated to support replacements at Wikidata. —R 09:50, 8 June 2015 (UTC)reply

Support for Chemical table files

Soon, provided that there are no objections, you will be able to upload this kind of file in real chemistry notation formats allowing re-mixing and a lot more.

Support for Chemical table files is being developed under the name MolHandler. This includes upload verifications, metadata extraction, rendering and eventually a web-based editor. Metadata could be molar mass, SMILES, reactant count, …

We are currently looking for features you would find helpful as well as your opinion what is needed to deploy MolHandler to Wikimedia Commons and therefore created a test wiki at which you can create user accounts for free. —R 10:13, 8 July 2014 (UTC)reply

User statistics for everyone

We love statistics because

  • it is essential to know the evidence base for making decision
  • they’re short bits of information we can memorize to throw in someones face at a later date
  • they look clean
  • we love baseball
  • …I have no idea

okay, to be frank I cheated and googled. Perhaps you have no idea (like me) and therefore you like to show your upload, edit, adminstrator statistics somewhere?

Upload and edit statistics

As an experienced user as you are, you know that a file revision can have 3 states, each of them stored in a different table by MediaWiki — because moving files around and updating different tables is so incredibly efficient: We distinguish top revisions [saved in a table called image for what’s worth], old revisions [visible on file description pages but no way including them in articles — old_image table] and archived files [deleted files — filearchive table]. Users interested in showing how much they have uploaded may create a subpage in their user namespace;Tuvalkin created User:Tuvalkin/top uploads, for example. On this page, one of the {{UploadStats/...}} templates can be placed:

If one of the above templates is placed as the only content on a subpage in the user namespace, UploadStatsBot will visit this page every day and update these statistics. To show these statistics on a user page, after the bot came to your page the first time, users just have to include or (technical term) transclude the formerly created page into their user page, e.g. doing this.

Administrator statistics

To quote from {{Adminstats}}: This template is for admins and account creators only; the bot will not process updates for non-admins. Place the template on either your userpage or user subpage, like so: {{adminstats|USERNAME}}. Within 24 hours, the bot will create your stats page and update it every 24 hours.

The template can be customized. If not customized, it looks like this table Admin statistics.

External tools

Contributors can get more detailed statistics by consulting external tools like DEep WiKi INspector and Supercount.

Why setting one's sights that low?

Bah, a single user, boring. Watch the-really-big-data! —R 16:51, 18 June 2014 (UTC)reply

What's patrolling?

The idea

Basically it's looking through the recent changes to our content and identifying unconstructive edits. However, to make it more efficient there is a variety of tools out there. First, one can filter the list of recent changes to exclusively display unpatrolled edits, i.e. those that haven't been “approved” by a trusted user, yet.

Advanced tools
Real Time Recent Changes

However, this is not the end of the road. Krinkle, now a MediaWiki developer, was formerly a passionate patroller and provided us with RTRC. This tool updates the list of recent changes with a customizable interval and allows you patrolling these changes. Give it a shot! If you like it, enable the gadget and bookmark User:Krinkle/RTRC.

A more exhaustive list of useful tools is located at COM:CVU. COM:PATROL describes the procedure in detail.

Users doing constructive edits

Why patrol them? Just ask an administrator to give them auto-patrolled, so you and other patrollers don't have to bother with this user's contributions again.

Unconstructive edits

Should be undone, this is obvious but also consider reporting unconstructive editing (and uploading) to the Administrators' noticeboard. Usually, our AbuseFilter logs are worth a visit.

What about files?

Spotting copyright violations is also important. Often, picking one recent species of the Media needing categories category is more efficient than looking at the new files. To quickly check whether a newly uploaded image may already have been published elsewhere on the web, activate the Tineye and/or Google image search tabs in your preferences under "Maintenance tools". Familiarize yourself with the speedy-deletion criteria and our deletion procedure. Then, nominate files for deletion or tag them for speedy-deletion, if appropriate. Do not forget to check your watchlist to see replies by notified users or other people commenting in the deletion request you've started.

A patroller's story

[write something!]

Becoming patroller

If you feel ready, please ask an administrator at the requests for rights page.

So, become a patroller today. Pressing a [mark as patrolled] link now and then is not painful. —R 16:51, 18 June 2014 (UTC)reply

Lookup files by SHA1

Spicy: Drop files into the SHA1 calculator like this pepper into the water

Attention administrators and patrollers!

You were wondering whether a file has been previously uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? Looking this up was either impossible or required a lot of efforts. Good news: It is as easy as never before to find out whether Commons has seen a file before. COM:SHA1 accepts file input (from your file system), SHA1 in Hex format and Commons file names. It can also tell you the SHA1 – a “number” that is almost unique for every file – of old and deleted file revisions if you fill-in a file name. Feedback can be provided on the tool's talk page.—R 16:51, 18 June 2014 (UTC)reply


  Photo challenge

 Check out this month's challenges

Challenges open for voting:

July 2026

See also: Previous Photo challenges.
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