Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2011/December

Al Jazeera images and video
As mailing list followers will already know, Al Jazeera now offer many/most of their images and videos under Commons-compatible licenses.

The primary links from Al-J are:
 * http://www.flickr.com/photos/aljazeeraenglish/sets/
 * http://cc.aljazeera.net/

Bawolff highlighted that a lot of this is already being sucked into Commons, but it'll never really be in a timely enough manner for Wikinews. That means, if you see something that'll dramatically improve a Wikinews article in the two prior links, but not on the following Commons link, shout!
 * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_Al_Jazeera

There are a few Wikinewsies, including myself, who know a little bit of video-fu. First, any footage we wish to use needs transcoded to Theora (.ogv format). If you wish to embed a thumbnail into a Wikinews article, then it needs recoded to the appropriate dimensions. Thumbnailing video does not work like images! ''If you specify then an original 800x600 video will be streamed for the client to resize! Resizing to the used thumbnail size vastly improves user experience and saves bandwidth!''

So, enjoy Al Jazeera's generosity, never forget to credit them appropriately if you use their material. I suspect making it reusable for Wikipiedia will work in their favour in the medium term, but the universal reuseability will better secure them a place in history books. --Brian McNeil / talk 20:56, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Secure access
Since the WMF have finally got all the relevant https:// domains working, and you can now use https://en.wikinews.org, there is one little problem. Special:UserLogin trips the phishing warning on https://en.wikinews.org whereas it shouldn't.

Is this something we can fix ourselves, or should it be brought up on meta? I suspect we're far from the only wiki where this problem pops up. --Brian McNeil / talk 23:41, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
 * ✅. This issue has already came up on both meta and commons, but was fixed much quicker (like a couple months ago) Bawolff ☺☻ 23:50, 22 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Wikinews is included along with all the Wikimedia sites in HTTPS Everywhere. After getting adminship on WP, I'm now using HTTPS exclusively on all WMF sites. If you've got any advanced permissions (admin, bureaucrat, CU/OS etc., and on WN, I'd include reviewer too) on any WMF site, please, for the sake of everyone's sanity, use HTTPS especially if you use public wifi, shared computers etc. —Tom Morris (talk) 00:18, 23 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Since we no longer use a separate domain for the secure server, afaik Facebook share-this-link now always produces an insecure link. --Pi zero (talk) 00:37, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I've edited Social bookmarks to by-default share secure links.
 * I agree that Tom's remark is pretty important - we should all be using the https:// interface. Sadly, there's a lot of people with admin privileges simply don't think about that. At GLAMsterdam, with an unencrypted wifi network, I saw numerous people likely with admin privs logging on via the plain link. I believe that at Wikimania there have been password captures run and the 'guilty' administrators subsequently emailed over their indiscretion. --Brian McNeil / talk 01:03, 23 December 2011 (UTC)