Public Domain tags

[Former user]

the PD0 public domain tags are apparently not permitted on Commons. Despite this, Flickr-to-Commons always shows up with a green tick and permits upload.

I have fallen foul of this several times and had good-faith uploads summarily deleted. Please can Flick-to-commons be fixed so that PD0 tags are not allowed through?

thanks

[Alex Cohn]

Public domain/PD0 images are allowed on Commons. The issue is that Flickr’s PD tag doesn’t provide sufficient information about why a given image is in the public domain - it could be old enough to be out of copyright, the work of a US Government employee, consist only of simple geometric shapes, etc.

Flickr2commons doesn’t call attention to this issue or let you provide a reason why a given image is in the public domain, which is in my opinion a bug. For example, take one of the albums uploaded by one of the USDA Forest Service accounts: https://flickr.com/people/forestservicenw/ and try to upload it - every image will be tagged with the “delete in 7 days” template. There’s no way to tell Flickr2commons to add the {{PD-USGov-USDA-FS}} tag in place of the “does not have sufficient information on its copyright status” template - even adding the correct license template as an “append everywhere” doesn’t fix the problem.

If you’re uploading a handful of images, this isn’t hard to fix. If you’re uploading hundreds, it’s more of a problem.

[Jeff G.]

What is needed is a whitelist of verified Public Domain flickrfeeds so that edits like https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:20191006_Tracy_Hill_Firewood_Event_02_USDA_photo_by_by_Roland_Rose_(48919082793).jpg&diff=next&oldid=376858254 don’t have to be performed manually.