[Commons-l] Bad experience of the new upload form

[Chris McKenna]

I've just spent over 30 minutes uploading a file to Wikimedia Commons. The 
excessive time was due to the new upload form.

The image in question is 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stratford_station_360_-_August_2008.jpg
I filled out all the sections of the form as it asked me to, but no matter 
what I tried it would not let me upload the file, giving only the 
unhelpful error "You must give the original source of the file, the author 
of the work, and a license."
I say unhelpful because I had filled in all of the noted fields - even 
changing them from the default to see if that mad a difference, but nope.
the only thing I can think of is that I hadn't selected a license from the 
dropdown list, as I wanted to use my own custom tag 
(user:Thryduulf/cc-by-sa-all) which wraps the standard cc template with a 
note about my personal relicencing policy and categorises it in my user 
category.
If the permission box is set to check if the licence included in there is 
one of a known set, then if it doesn't match say so in the error message.
If the "none selected" license option doesn't let you upload the file then 
you need to change the wording on it so that it doesn't imply you can and 
give an option that says "I have added a license tag in the permissions 
field above" that will let it upload.

When I found the link to the old-style basic upload form (and remembered 
how to use it) everything went swimmingly. I used the same information in 
the manual form as I was trying to upload using the pretty form.

I am using the latest version of Firefox 2 on 64-bit Kubuntu Linux.

Chris

-- 
Chris McKenna

cmckenna at sucs.org
www.sucs.org/~cmckenna


The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes,
but with the heart

Antoine de Saint Exupery