2008/8/1 Cary Bass cbass@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.