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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 9:33 PM, Chris McKenna <cmckenna at sucs.org> wrote:
[snip]
> 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.
[snip]

It's no excuse for the unhelpful upload form (nor do I know if it was
the cause of your problems) but you must subst user license templates,
for reasons unrelated to the requirements of the upload form. There
are two primary reasons for this:

1) The use of personal license templates on the image page will
greatly frustrate the efforts of reusers pulling data from the commons
XML dumps. If standard templates are used they can just regexp match
against the image page page text. If personal wrappers are used they
must implement an entire mediawiki parser, which is often an
unreasonable requirement.

2) Such templates make it possible for the user to change the
licensing of potentially thousands of images in an almost invisible
manner by editing a single obscure user subpage. The change will not
be visible in the history of the image page itself.  Consider all the
problems we've had with flickr users changing their licensing for an
example of the sort of problems it could create for our users. If you
need to make some change to your licensing in the future there are
many commons users who are willing to run a bot to perform apropreiate
mass changes.