User:Marc Kupper/Archive

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[edit] Archive of background notes

I accumulate random notes/links as part of working on projects and archive them here.

[edit] U.S. Army officer rank insignia

[edit] Summary

As part of the General of the Armies project I ran into that the insignia image was up for deletion which lead to that all of the images on United States Army officer rank insignia had been marked. Research found that the images had most likely been taken from http://www.uniforminsignia.net/index.php?p=show&id=65&sid=1271 and they should be deleted as they were copyvio. Public Domain replacement images were found at http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/insignias/officers.html but some of these needed to be rotated to fit the vertical format already used on many wiki pages and "shoulder loop" style backgrounds were added for all of the images. Marc Kupper (talk) (contribs) 20:42, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] User Talk with Zscout370

From http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Zscout370#Rank_insignia_reversions

I had not been paying attention and did not realize I was signed in as an IP address. I'm curious on if you reverted my edits to the following pages solely because I was logged in as an IP address or if you feel I chose the wrong tag for the images. The existing tag being used on all of these pages is deprecated and have been proposed for deletion. Hence I updated the pages with what I feel is the correct tag. My immediate interest is to prevent the images from just being deleted simply because they are not tagged or that someone can't figure out the source in 48 hours. These images are of U.S. Military insignia. See Shoulder Marks as shown in http://www.army.mil/symbols/Downloads/r670_1.pdf (page 204) which are nearly identical to these images and thus should qualify as {{PD-USGov-Military-Badge}}. I don't think these particular images are shoulder marks (which seem have black background and not green) but am looking around to see what these are called. Regardless of what they are called I'm pretty comfortable with that they are US Army Officer insignia and thus PD as they are works of the U.S. government. (BTW - if you want to move what I wrote from your talk page to some other place such as Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:Military_Insignia, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:US_Army_OF11.gif#Move_image_to_Wikipedia_Commons.3F then that's fine with me.

Marc Kupper 05:24, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Marc, I am looking at the PDF file now. While I do know it is US military insignia, the problem is that the website source of the information isn't listed at all. So, unless we know the website where the images came from, we cannot just claim PD on the image. There will be someone from en.wikipedia that will upload the drawings from DefenseLink.mil soon, so just leave these images to be deleted. User:Zscout370 (Return fire) 05:55, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
Thank you. I'm looking at one of the .mil PDFs trying to figure out just what the images on Wikipedia were supposed to be and am getting the impression they may well be complete fiction. The insignia itself is correct but not how it's presented in the image and so I'd agree with you your conclusion that we can't claim PD on these. Marc Kupper 08:03, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
I think the major problem is the website I know where the insignia came from, I think it is dead. So, we have a lot of insignia images from a possible dead website. However, someone will be uploading images from the defenselink.mil website soon (but if that proves to be hard, I maybe can give it a shot with a few). User:Zscout370 (Return fire) 09:29, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
What web site do you think they came from? I found http://www.uniforminsignia.net/index.php?p=show&id=65&sid=1271 which has the files as GIFs (and calls them Officers Class A shoulder rank insignia) but it's not clear who took the images from who though the uniforminsignia files are dated Oct. 24, 2004 and they showed up on Wikipedia in 2005. They are the same images as Wikipedia as both sets have the same out-of registration issues (Image:US-Army-OF1b.gif is tilted a little to the left compared to the other images for example and they all shift around from one to the next) The uniforminsignia site also has shoulder marks.
I woke up with a couple of thoughts in mind. 1) The images are very nice and one would have thought that since they are nice that they would be commonly used within the .mil sites. 2) These images seem to be scanned from printed material because if you pull them up within their own windows or tabs and shift from one to another the images shift around implying they were scanned and then cropped. Had this been a photoshop job the images would be perfectly registered and would not shift around from one to the next. Marc Kupper 18:08, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
Ok, now we know where the images comes from, and I thank you for bringing the site to my attention (I thought it was gone forever). However, here is the problem: "Copyright © 2000-2006 WORLD INSIGNIA COLLECTORS UNION. The information on this page may not be reproduced, republished or mirrored on another webpage or website without written permission from the editors." That means we cannot use their images until we get their permission. If the permission comes after the images are deleted, we can always restore them. User:Zscout370 (Return fire) 19:53, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I'm now fully in agreement with that the images should be deleted. Even if we got permission from www.uniforminsignia.net I'd still not be comfortable with using them as I have not seen a citation back to a dot mil/gov or something in National Archives that supports that these particular "shoulder insignia" are in use.
FWIW - I also downloaded the set of images from both Commons and uniforminsignia, compared them, and they are byte-for-byte identical files except the ones on Wikimedia Commons each have two extra bytes added. It's not clear if the extra bytes are something added during the upload (they looked like a counter/serial # as they are in sequence) or that someone loaded the images up in an editor that appends the stuff before then uploading to Wikipedia. Anyway, delete them or replace the files with known PD such as from DefenseLink.mil. You had indicated someone else will be doing the upload from DefenseLink.mil and so I'll just wait for that to happen rather than adding myself as yet-another-cook. Marc Kupper 20:27, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
If the person doesn't get started, I will let you know. User:Zscout370 (Return fire) 20:53, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
I went ahead with fixing these last night by downloading the PD images and adding backgrounds to them to match the usage of the original copyvio images. Marc Kupper 20:30, 2 July 2007 (UTC)