On 04/05/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
(Fwding to Commons list as well)
Hmm... as a Commons admin I find this very interesting. Does it imply that the universal login is really in sight? We can only hope! :)
Ask the mage Vibber, for he shall cast the glorious charm of single sign-on and bring joy to our fingertips and hope to our hearts. Or something equally soppy.
I hope that the universal login does bring with it some kind of universal talk page "you have new messages...somewhere" notice. Most Commons users don't check their Commons talk pages with any regularity and thus don't receive their image warnings, and feel quite slighted when their copyvios/unsourced images are deleted. Any opportunity to reduce that would be welcome.
That isn't in the current plans as far as I know, although it would be damn useful. (See http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/CentralAuth/evil-plans.txt for those, to some extent.)
I guess I would say that it's a good idea, except it would very welcome if en.wp (and any other projects that do this) would consider "donating" a few admins/keen users to help us out on copyvio patrol. For non-English projects this is especially essential - it is just so fantastic to have a native speaker around to be able to ask/tell them, "you deal with this person, please" :)
Also Commons is, I think, a little more stringent in its application of free image requirements (that is, when we notice).
Last concern is that Commons really requires uploaders to categorise their images, something that is not so necessary on en.wp. Luckily there are a couple of tools to help with this, perhaps one of these could be worked into the interface somehow. See the recent commons-l archive for links.
A limited list of categories *could* be provided in a drop-down box. It wouldn't be feasible to load all categories, for performance reasons, but the main ones could be defined in a message somewhere and used to build a nice list, as with the licence selector.
Rob Church