As a proponent of agile development, I would actually suggest not worrying about non-Flickr transfers for a first iteration. Most of the non-Flickr cases can be adequately supported by bots and manual uploading in the meantime. If we could get a working Flickr-transfer extension enabled on Commons, that would be a huge step forward and then it could be refactored to support interwiki or generalized file transfer (and to address feedback from the initial version).
To answer your question, the things I like best about the current tools are: * Automatic license verification * Being able to use a variety of different URLs and the tool being smart enough to pull the maximum resolution version regardless * Automatically pulling descriptions/metadata
It would also be nice to be able to pull an entire set/feed/pool in one go, but that should be for version 2.
Ryan Kaldari
On 10/30/10 1:29 PM, Bryan Tong Minh 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.
-- Bryan
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