On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 9:29 PM, Bryan Tong Minh
<bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
As most of you probably know, I wrote Flickr upload bot back in May
2007 because there was a lot demand for uploading free images from
Flickr to Commons. And apparently people find it useful, since as of
September 2010, over 80k images have been uploaded via this bot. In
addition over 50k images have been uploaded via a similar bot by
Magnus Manske.
Unfortunately as you may know, every other day those tools break (mine
more than Magnus'). Both have an annoying authentication mechanism,
which requires you to do extra stuff to be able to upload (either post
a token to a file page, or use TUSC). Both problems would be solved if
there was a MediaWiki extension to handle this task.
I eventually plan to write a MediaWiki extension that does such a
thing and get it enabled on Commons. Therefore, I need to know what
you like and dislike about those tools, so that I can take this
feedback into account when writing this extension. Don't expect to see
something in the short term though, but I hope that in the mid-long
term we will have such an extension on Commons.
An excellent idea. I would like to add two suggestions, since they are
within the scope of such a framework, and I would really like to see
these done in a single, elegant extension.
First, there are other sites besides flickr that have
license-compatible files we can use. Flickr may be the largest today,
but there are many specialized ones like geograph.org.uk (pictures of
places) and GIMP-SAVVY, and general ones like Picasa, Ipernity, and
pictures owned by the Brazilian government. I am supporting search for
those and more at [1] (>670K uses), but upload for most of them is
currently manual (download, upload). It should be comparatively simple
to write a more generic "transfer" parent class, which then would have
derived classes for each of these sites; a simple method (e.g. for an
image page on flickr, give me the URL of the most high-res file) might
be sufficient for specialization.
Second, the special case of transfering from other MediaWiki sites.
This includes all Wiki(m|p)edia projects, as I do in [2] with >400K
uses (and [3], when it works), but also WikiTravel, and basically any
other MediaWiki installation where a license can be determined. While
it might seem to be easy to implement this, as we are more familiar
with the site behaviour, there is no API for image metadata in
MediaWiki, and transcoding the wikitext correctly, from all projects
and languages, can be a real b***h, as countless more-or-less botched
transfers from my bot show. Alternatives would be parsing the HTML
(lossy), or putting more weight on the user to check for correctness.
Even if you do not chose to implement any of these transfer options
initially, I believe you should code with these as further additions
in mind. IMHO it would be a real shame to "waste" such an opportunity
on flickr alone.
Cheers,
Magnus
[1]
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/fist.php
[2]
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonshelper.php
[3]
http://toolserver.org/~commonshelper2/?language=en&project=wikipedia&am…