[Commons-l] Good words for upload form from formerly frustrated prospective user

[geni]

2008/8/1 Cary Bass <cbass at wikimedia.org>:
> See, at one time, when there were many fewer uploads, and many fewer
> admins, we looked at new people's uploads and helped them out with
> understanding what they were doing wrong, why something is not free,
> what they need to say while uploading, maybe show them a bit of template
> magic, while we're at it.  We'd do this by going to their talk page, and
> ~ leaving a few kind words.  If it was evident it was a language we
> didn't understand, we'd find a nice admin in their language who would
> also help them.

Commons was once a small project yes. Some things don't scale too
well. the upload forms are more targeted at accidental copyvios rather
than deliberate (en takes a more extreme version of this of course).
In order to keep the post upload situation manageable we need to use
the pre-upload experience to try and make sure people know what they
are doing to an extent. At the same time we have to come up with a
mechanism that doesn't drag you through an already done tutorial a
second time around. The result is always going to be a compromise that
isn't optimized for any one thing.

Remember we pretty much have 4 levels of user.

Complete newbies
newbies
regular users
Power users.

Power users are not really a problem it is fairly easy to set them up
with their own upload tools but splitting up the other three is much
harder.

-- 
geni