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Violating image: CSA states evolution delisting

[edit]
Animated map/timeline of the territorial evolution of the Confederate States of America, from first secession to end of Reconstruction. Animation has been turned off as per Wikipedia policy
Reason
Wikipedia used to follow Moore's law and allowed large detailed animated gifs to be uploaded to various wiki projects. However in April of 2010 this Village Pump ruling decreed that large animated gifs will no longer be allowed as some people now view wikipedia on mobile phone browsers that have difficulty looking at images. Since this ruling has taken affect the image is no longer animated on Wikipedia and only shows the first frame. As such since it can't be used on Wikipedia and it should be delisted.
Articles this image appears in

none

Previous nomination/s
Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/CSA states evolution.gif
Nominator
Esemono (talk)

Whoa there I’ve been active on these old, archived Village Pump discussions and am not aware of a “decision” that said animated GIFs over the 12.5 MP limit “will no longer be allowed”. It is a convoluted thread there and a “decision” might be buried in there, but I can’t find it.

As far as I know, this is a temporary bug being worked on. This technical issue with animations is a complex matter pertaining to the way Wikipedia’s server engines scale animations. This particular animation is only 260,560 bytes and has only 42 frames. Note that I didn’t make it, but am expert on animations and see that the author A) did a magnificent job making it compact, and B) had the misfortune of making it higher resolution than would ever be used on a page and, thus, it always needs scaling.

This need for scaling never used to be a problem. However, a developer recently “threw a software switch” to handle this scaling on Wikipedia (instead of offloading the task to browsers). This was because of our category pages, some of which have hundreds of thumbnails. Offloading such a huge number of animations to scale to browsers was burdening them and increasing their RAM requirements. Unfortunately, because of the current (very simplistic) software sever tools being used after the change, scaled versions of otherwise exceedingly compact animations are causing problems for Wikipedia’s servers. We need better software and this sort of stuff comes from volunteer programmers; big updates don’t come fast.

It seems that this Commons category (titled “Animated gifs violating 12.5MP rule”) was created by the nominator here (Esemono). Note the “violating” and “rule” in the title. But, as far as I can tell, the developers working on this problem would call this issue an active “bug”; something they are trying to fix.

I’ve gone to Village Pump, (here, where the issue is still being worked), to clarify this. In the mean time, Esemono, please provide a more specific link or quote a relevant passage from the Village Pump archive that looks like a “ruling”, “decree”, and “will no longer be allowed” and doesn’t instead look like a bunch of efforts to develop a long-term solution. For that matter, would you mind pointing out where, on the current Village Pump discussions, it appears to you that developers are not working hard on this bug. If there was to be a “ruling”, “decision”, or “decree”, I should think there would have been a wider RfC on this issue and I’m not seeing it yet.

In the mean time, I would certainly suggest that the FP community not be voting to delist these otherwise fine animations just because they currently don’t work; not until it is clear that the developers have thrown up their hands and declared defeat. As far as I know, they are actively working hard at a solution to this. Greg L (talk) 13:37, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]


P.S. I can always take this animation, shrink it to the size it is typically used in articles, and create a version that requires no scaling. We can then have a vote here to replace it with the updated version—not delist it as an FP. Before we do that though, I suggest we throttle back, allow our jets to cool, and see where the developers think they are going. Very recently, I suggested they consider biting the bullet and adding the capability of doing what I described here on-the-fly by the server software. Greg L (talk) 14:36, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The size displayed in the thread is the size typically used in articles. These image would never be approved again at thumbnail size as the legends and all labels are unreadable. -- Esemono (talk) 15:18, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EDITED CONVERSATION OF THIS THREAD[1]: The changes were explicitly made to avoid the crashing of the scale routines of the servers. I doubt the deployment of GIF scaling will be reverted yet again. We don't allow PNG images of 12 million pixels, and now we don't allow GIF images of over 12 million pixels either. I suggest we focus on finding ways to better deal with these large GIFs, but honestly, any animated GIF of this size, should probably never be presented to users. (And never have been). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:14, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Never have been? According to whom? My large animated images have been featured for years, and have been located in articles. There is a use, sometimes, for making a large animated image. --Golbez (talk) 03:52, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
For the origin of the 12.5 megapixel limit, see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-October/019681.html -- I guess it's a tradition by now... -- AnonMoos (talk) 20:46, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
Wow. That's 4.5 years ago. From the Moore's Law article it's unclear to me whether that is two or three doublings of RAM memory storage, but that would mean an equivalent limit today should be 50 million to 100 million pixels. This would allow an animation 1.6 to 3.2 times larger than the one in the example above. Wnt (talk) 20:58, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
I doubt my Sony Ericsson phone browser is that smart. And Safari 3 and earlier was terrible with larger animated GIFs. In general, it is good to assume the worst, because browsers have behaved like that. And especially if you have 200 of those full sized images in a Category page, safeguards are probably wise. Hell, ImageMagick doesn't even work frame by frame apparently, so if the problem exists there, it is likely to occur in client implementations. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:04, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
  • Esemono: Are those discussions and musings of individuals what you consider to be a “ruling” or “decree”??? For God’s sake. You created a category titled “Animated gifs violating 12.5MP rule” when in fact, there is no such “rule.” The developers are currently working to fix this problem. Even if they ultimately decide there is no technical fix on the horizon, the better alternative to your nominating individual animations to be stripped of their FP status would be to alert the contributors who made these animations in the first place and ask them to upload a smaller one that requires no scaling. The beauty of that is all these animations would instantly start working again in every article that uses them. Greg L (talk) 15:17, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • User:TheDJ's word is God and is final; nothing can change his mind. I truly hope you're right, and TheDJ can be convinced to reverse his ruling, as alot of the images in the 12.5 violation category are my animated gifs which no longer work. -- Esemono (talk) 15:22, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • You don’t understand what User:TheDJ was saying. As for his “word is God and is final”, even Jimbo, Wikipedia’s founder, has no such powers. I trust you were joking on that bit. As for 250 pixels being the placed size, no. Clearly, this animation works fine at 400 pixels, which happens to be one of the default sizes when making those click-to-play Theora animations. Do you really think the developers (who are volunteers) have the power to tell the community that they will have to just go back and delete a pile of content (all those animations that are currently frozen)?? Because User:TheD says so(?)—which he didn’t. Even if he did say what you think he said, Wikipedia simply does not work that way. Just drop this please; you don’t seem to appreciate what is really going on with this issue. Let the developers do their thing. I expect a fix will come along soon enough. Greg L (talk) 15:29, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think you need to take a big breath and calm down. Who said anything about deleting anything? The users who are voting to delist this animation are doing so because its not used in any article space a requirement for it to remain a featured image. And since User:TheDJ has deemed that, "large GIFs [over 12.5MP] any animated GIF of this size, should probably never be presented to users. (And never have been)" I doubt that is likely. -- Esemono (talk) 04:45, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Update Here is what Happy-melon stated (∆ here), on Village Pump:

This has nothing to do with any discussion, "ruling", "decree" or anything else on this pump or this community. It also has little to do with the developers; this is a sysadmin-level action. Developers are working on improving both the quality and size of the finished thumbnails, and the efficiency of the thumbnailing process. Allowing larger images to be thumbnailed will be a side-effect of that latter work. Happy‑melon 15:47, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

In short, patience. Note that the software changes originally froze all scaled animations, including this animation of mine. I had created it at 280 pixels but found that the dithering in the 256-color pallet looked better if I scaled it slightly to 266 pixels to blend the dithering. Others who later used the animation in their articles simply copied my practice and placed it at 266 pixels. After finding out what was going on and it wasn’t gonna be a one or two-day fix, I went back and re-specified all placed instances to the native, 280-pixel width. When I later saw that it was again functioning on this usertalk page (where these animation issues were also being discussed), I restored the size to the smoother-looking 266-pixel width.

Clearly, not everything is yet working; there is still a subset class of animations that remain frozen: scaled ones in excess of 12.5 MP. But effort is being made in the background to slowly put everything back into order. Programmers and developers don’t expect us to start throwing stuff away. Just be patient, please.

Any content creator who wants to create smaller versions of their animations that require no scaling in articles—as a temporary, interim measure—is perfectly free to do so. That will have the added benefit of having Wikipedia better function as it was intended for our I.P. readership, who are, after all, the individuals we’re really creating content for in the first place. Greg L (talk) 17:02, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • 'comment My words are an attempt at communicating the current opinion of this issue within the developer community. Per request of the system administrators, long ago, all scaling of animated gifs was disabled, because it was crashing the servers. This was highly undesirable because it can put enormous load on client browsers. There were pages over 50MB in size because of this disabling of scaling and this was resulting in browser crashes and many reports on the village pump and bugzilla. So with much effort a workaround was created so that scaling could become safe again. This scaling has limits. We do not allow PNGs over 12.5MP for the exact same reason (PNG and GIF are actually rather similar in this respect). Developers see little possibilities to significantly change those limits in the short future. Ergo this is the new status quo. I understand that people are frustrated, but please also understand that Wikipedia needs to account for many situations and that as a result of that, sometimes new problems arise. So either create a smaller version of the file or convert it to an ogg. There is no reason to delete the image, if someone develops new routines to scale GIF images the images might still become useful. We are working on optimizing the resultant filesize of thumbnails, but I see little indications that we can optimize the scaling software to handle the GIF format any better than now. (For those interested, this technical reason this is difficult is because GIF like PNG does not allow for simple random access of the file) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:19, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I’ve contacted both Happy-melon and TheDJ to clarify. Happy-melon’s post mentions “Allowing larger images to be thumbnailed will be a side-effect of that latter work.” TheDJ’s post ends with …“but I see little indications that we can optimize the scaling software to handle the GIF format any better than now.” The question I have for these two are as follows:
  1. Is it the intention of the developers to get >12.5 MP GIF animations to display when thumbnailed to a non-native size?
  2. If it is the intention, is there a reasonable expectation that a solution will be had within—say—one month?
Greg L (talk) 21:43, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Yes, very much so.
  2. Unlikely, because this is even more difficult than the previous problem and it seems that that took over 2 years to fix. I think it is more likely that at some point the 12.5MP limit will be raised a bit because system resources are available.
—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:48, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have been pondering putting such images behind a play button that loads the full image, but I do not consider it likely that that will become available within at least a few months. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:50, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's important to understand the different levels of work that is going on here. Developers are software coders, who write and improve MediaWiki code, such as our media handling routines. They are the ones who are likely to drive improvements to the gif scaling and processing code. The primary task of the sysadmins is to stop the servers from melting; and to close such huge DoS vectors as a 50MB page which anyone worth their salt can slashdot/4chan to generate huge instantaneous load. The sysadmins are the ones who say "we need this limit on animated gif size to stop the image scalers from dying"; the developers are the ones who experiment and, hopefully, come up with a solution which means the limit can be increased without killing anything. If we are able to improve the efficiency (in terms of memory and CPU usage) of the scaling process, we can safely scale larger images. Equally, we want to improve the quality of the scaling process so it doesn't sometimes increase the size of files when scaling very compressed animations. But of course, "want" is not necessarily the same as "are easily able to". Happy‑melon 03:52, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would suggest that in order to get everyone on the same page (content creators, our I.P. readership, and the developers), that any frozen animations be replaced with a generic gray image with a link to a WP-space page (and associated talk page) explaining 1) why the animation isn’t working, 2) what an interim fix is for content creators, and 3) what the short term, mid-term, and long-term plans are.

    Right now there are Bugzillas (I just e-mailed everyone on that one) and Village Pump conversations and individual discussions on usertalk pages and cluster-pooches like this thread. Right now, we have boat-loads of content creators who are feeling like mushrooms: in the dark and fed the not-so-good stuff. I think it’s time that whoever thinks they have a handle the status quo to step up to the plate and get the pointers automatically being created on the affected animations pointing to a central venue where every confused person can go to. A central repository will be a welcome relief from the current state of affairs and, perhaps more importantly, may also bring more resources (developer-types) to the fold. Greg L (talk) 22:28, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]


    (*sound of crickets chirping*)

  • I would like to thank Greg L for informing me of this discussion, which has apparently been going on for a week; I, as creator of this image, was not notified. I will be able to respond more to the merits of the discussion later, but for the moment I'm merely submitting my annoyance. --Golbez (talk) 03:43, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note Golbez, but you added a comment on a quote from a discussion from this Village pump disscusion I just added the relevant conversation to this article for the benefit of, Greg L. I doubt TheDJ will respond to it unless you move the below and add it to the this Village pump disscusion:

Never have been? According to whom? My large animated images have been featured for years, and have been located in articles. There is a use, sometimes, for making a large animated image. --Golbez (talk) 03:52, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

PS: sorry for the overlook about not notifying you about the delisting, my bad. -- Esemono (talk) 04:45, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Seeing as how I only just learned of this, and I don't know how long FPRCs last, I ask it last at least several more days for me to address the concerns and place it back on the article, which satisfies most of the delist votes. --Golbez (talk) 05:20, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • So according to above it was found to be inaccurate and removed from article mainspace two years ago. So you want to put it back into the same article it was removed in 2008? -- Esemono (talk) 06:36, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, once I can evaluate the issues. I have a lot on my plate and admittedly had stepped away from my animation making for quite a while, but coincidentally I started working on a new one just two days ago (a map of the history of the counties of Utah, for the FLC on that subject) so I'm kind of back in the mood. Should it have been delisted two years ago? Perhaps. But it wasn't, and I request only as much time to repair it as has been given to discussing it without my knowledge. (Also, I'm not sure I agree with the accuracy criticisms, and I'm not even sure I knew it had been removed, but again, two years is a long time, long enough to forget) --Golbez (talk) 16:54, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My opinion here, I'd like to throw in, is that the developer that brought up the 12.5mp limit for png/gif, this was 5 years ago, and even in his example a 200MP image only takes "800 megabytes of working space" in RAM. By today's standards even on home pc's thats trivial. No pc bought within the last couple years should even have to page that out and can easily accommodate 800mb in RAM for a quick operation like creating a thumbnail. As for servers in 2010, they should have up to 20x that much memory (16+gb) so 200MP should CLEARLY not be an issue anymore. Is there any MODERN response from the developers about these limits? Is these limits still in place? Because the reasoning behind them is a bit silly now given we're not in 2005 anymore. Likewise why should we capitulate to some technological limitation/roadblock. Delisting because some developer 5 years ago had an issue with file sizes is hardly something I think we should be doing. While I don't agree with the use of animated gif's anymore (simply because theres FAR better methods now a days for animation, like Flash and eventually HTML5) I think they're still a necessary evil until we're allowed to embed flash... It seems to me a bit crazy we're talking about this, when this shouldn't even be an issue for under 200MP png/gif's now a days. — raeky (talk | edits) 17:02, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes but what about TheDJ assertation that 12.5MP should be banned, "any animated GIF of [over 12.5MP], should probably never be presented to users. (And never have been)" because of new phone browsers. As TheDJ states, "my Sony Ericsson phone browser [can't handle big files] And Safari 3 and earlier was terrible with larger animated GIFs." -- Esemono (talk) 21:27, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Regardless of his assertion, he does not make that decision, and I disagree with his premise, as several of mine have been presented to users. As for his phone and old browser, I'm not sure we should cater to interior or obsolete hardware or programs. --Golbez (talk) 21:40, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I entirely agree with regard to phone browsers; we can’t be degrading an electronic encyclopedia to accommodate the lowest-featured digital devices known to man (phones that fit into one’s pocket).

    When the animations were first frozen, many more were affected than currently are. The proper thing to have done was have an automated banner display in place of an animation frozen in its tracks. It could have been one of those little “dust broom”’ icons saying “work in progress for a few days.” Instead, we had editors re-uploading their animations in a vain attempt to get them working again. After several days, may of the animations suddenly started working. I was unusual in that I was already registered for Bugzilla. So I posted an alert, and had someone point out that there was already a Bugzilla case being worked on it. Only then did I know to wait a few more days. So I rushed around and took care of a few, easy-to-fix, stop-gap repairs in the mean time. But few other wikipedians have such facility with Wikipedia and were nothing but confused. This whole affair has the hallmarks of a cluster-f***. It has been handled like the right foot doesn’t know what the left foot is doing in the rumpus room of a kindergarden.

    It appears to me that what we now have is a volunteer developer (thanks for volunteering) pretending to speak authoritatively on behalf of precious few people on an issue by opining what he intends to do and when. There has been a galactically poor level of discussion where some developers semi-coordinate on a Bugzilla, and semi-coordinate on the Village Pump, and coordinate with each other via e-mail, and the whole time leave content providers in the dark by not doing something as simple as creating a WP-space page that frozen animations could automatically point people to. Such a central venue (a WP-space page with its associated talk page) could likely bring more volunteer developers to bear on this matter. Such simple, common-sense moves. Bafflingly, no decent and proper effort was made to alert the wikipedian community as to why our animations stopped working (as if the typical wikipedian is supposed to figure out on their own to go to Village Pump). It makes me wonder if some developers here prefer not having more chefs in the digital kitchen. That is the worse possible thing; we need to pull out the stops to highlight this issue and bring more volunteer developers into the fold. Greg L (talk) 22:33, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    • Can I just say this ? I have been discussing GIF animations for over 2 months now with various people in various forums. I'm tired of discussing this. I will go a long way in explaining everybody how Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki work, but there are limits on how I am willing to spend my time. Complaints of Wikipedia operations can be filed at the Foundation, complaints of software capabilities can be filed in bugzilla and readily await implementation by a volunteer developer (your comments just lost you a candidate for that). If you want to find developers to fix this, go ahead and get them to join the mediawiki developer IRC channel, people will be more than willing to answer their questions about mediawiki problems. Either start doing something yourself, or stop asking me questions. There have been over 6500 software changes to the software this year, that doesn't include a few thousand changes of LAST year that were only deployed a few weeks ago. Users cannot be expected to be up to date about ALL the changes that occur, unless they subscribe to all development related discussions themselves. At times someone will post some important changes to the Village pump or in the Signpost (as these specific changes were) and that is a service, not a right. Now please leave me alone. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:29, 9 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist as creator; after evaluating it, the effort needed to bring it up to my own now-higher standards, not just the historical less-than-accuracies (now dealt with in my own copy), means I would prefer this to be delisted so I can eventually renominate the new version on its own merits. --Golbez (talk) 19:24, 10 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Motion going forward

[edit]
  • I motion that, in the interim, there be no further FP animations nominated for delisting based on the fact that 120 pixel, gallery-size versions and scaled thumbs of our larger animations are currently frozen. The issues are not straightforward. For instance, this “NURBS” animation of mine recently won FP status. It is used in articles in its native size and works as intended in those articles. But even it doesn’t work when it is one of those little 120-pixels-wide thumbs in galleries. All these issues are being looked at by those who push bits, bytes, and nibble around with keyboards. I propose that all further technical discussions and debate on the technical aspects of this issue go back to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Perhaps in a couple of months, a clearer path forward as to what sort of animations are desirable and will have good support on Wikipedia will become clearer after some of our volunteer developers have more time with their sleeves rolled up. In this particular case, we had editors voting to delist when the contributor who created the CSA states evolution GIF hadn’t even been informed of the nomination. What we certainly need going forward is better communication amongst all concerned. It seems nothing but common sense to table FP delisting for the moment given that stripping FP status from animations isn’t a pressing crisis. Greg L (talk) 17:42, 10 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that delisting animations solely due to the current scaling issues would be counterproductive. On the communication front, I think we should include a notification field in the delist template ({{FPCdel}}), so that it's clearer to everyone who has or hasn't been notified. Something similar is included in the WP:FAR boilerplate, for example. --Avenue (talk) 01:53, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I suggest creating a Wikiproject for animated images. A wikiproject is the traditional way to create a community around a topic. It allows for more timely communication, too. That communication could solve a lot of problems. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:33, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have the time to coordinate this. I can help out now and then. It is not hard to start a Wikiproject. Please see:
Wikipedia:WikiProject#Creating and maintaining a project. See also:
commons:Commons:Animated image resources for workshops, labs, and users that might be interested. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:50, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delisted --Makeemlighter (talk) 19:17, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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