On 4/14/05, greg whittier <gregwh(a)gmail.com> wrote: I do find it hard to believe that the current method is difficult. It's as point and click as you can get. If your users find this hard, man wait till you tell them what a wiki is.

On 14 Apr 2005, at 19:15, greg whittier wrote: I like this! it's the WikiWay -- link first, author second. So the MediaWikiWay would be [[Image:ImageName.jpg|thumb|right|whatever blah blah blah]] which would show up as either an broken image icon, or a textual link to be clicked, which would cause an upload dialog. :::: Nature must, in the not too distant future, institute bankruptcy proceedings against industrial civilization. -- William Catton :::: Jan Steinman <http://www.Bytesmiths.com/Van>

On 4/15/05, Benjamin FrantzDale &lt;frantzdale3i(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think you've just hit the nail on the head as to why this *would* be difficult. Since (like many webforms) the upload system isn't coded to rename the upload (see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1105) and because (as Brion points out) files are attached to the whole wiki, not one page, the name of the upload tends to be the last, rather than first, thing you know. Letting the user type an empty tag and then filling it in for them would require the user to click the link, the software to "remember" which page to change when they get back (using a URL parameter, presumably), and then find the tag to change (presuming nobody's got rid of it in the meantime, or fixed it by hand) and make the change (marked, presumably, as made by the user who performed the upload). Seems like a lot of work to code, and still pretty confusing to the user, if you ask me - they have to remember the syntax for a non-existent image, and remember to save the article (click it in a preview, and the software won't be able to fill it in, and you'll just lose your changes, which might not be what you'd expect). But, y'know, I could be wrong. Perhaps the best we could do is have the upload success screen have nice clear instructions with copy-and-pastable syntax, such as: * If this is an image, you can display it using "[[Image:Example.jpeg|Your caption here]]" * To link directly to this file, use "[[Media:example.jpeg|text of link here]]" * To link to the description page, use "[[:Image:Example.jpeg|text of link here]]" Only with "example.jpeg" being filled in with the actual filename. Coupled with a "return to..." link, that's pretty simple - you click "upload file", upload it, and get instructions on how to reference it in a page. (We could even have an extra "return to" link offering to *edit* the last page visitted, to cut out one further step) -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

Dori wrote: There are actually a few difficulties, which potentially could be improved: * The info text is too long: no human will ever read it, and it obscures the functional controls. (This was the unfortunate result of being fed up with complaints about insufficient explanation of uploading policies on the page.) * Some of the warnings are not really relevant. (It changed my spaces to underscores? Horror of horrors!) * After a successful upload, it's unclear what to do. There's a blobby paragraph but no link back to the page you came from. We've gotten a number of suggestions that after upload you should be able to easily return to the page you were on when you hit the upload link (similar to the login and logout operations). I think this might be a good idea at the least. Potentially it could take you straight to the edit page and give you an opportunity to cut-n-paste the sample link. I'm less sure about that. One thing that's maybe not obvious to people is that uploads in MediaWiki are *not* attachments to particular articles. They may be used in many pages, or in none, and they live existences independent of any page they may be linked from. This means the interface has to be different from adding an attachment to a webmail message, because it _is_ different, and this does complicate things. Exactly how complicated they have to be is a matter for balance. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Sam Rowe wrote: No, that doesn't make a lot of sense. You'd see stuff like this: [[Image:SumatraMap.jpg|Map of [[Sumatra]], version as of 2005-04-11. Taken from http://foo.bar.baz/maps/asia/, marked as public domain. {{Public domain image}} I modified the legend to make it more legible and remove the scanning errors, and did a threshold to reduce the number of colors for better compression. TODO: Replace with cleaned-up SVG version.]] The description is for the description page. It's *not* generally suitable for inline alternate text rendering for browsers that can't display images (which will always be context-dependent). -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 10:58:25AM -0700, Benjamin FrantzDale wrote: I think Brion understood.. I'll modify your example: # I don't think Sam is suggesting that the description be put in the # example caption. I think he means instead of this: # ------------------------------------------------------------------ # Successful upload # # File foo.png uploaded successfully. Please follow this link: # Image:foo.png to the description page and fill in information about # the file, such as where it came from, when it was created and by whom, # and anything else you may know about it. If this is an image, you can # insert it like this: [[Image:foo.png|thumb|Description]] # ------------------------------------------------------------------ # # the success page could look more like this: # # # ------------------------------------------------------------------ Successful upload File foo.png uploaded successfully! My amazing picture of foo {{GFDL}} To show it on a page, write: [[Image:foo.png|thumb|A picture of Foo!]] Or follow this link: Image:foo.png to the description page and fill in information about the file, such as where it came from, when it was created and by whom, and anything else you may know about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ -Sam

Sam Rowe wrote: It has been. 1.4.1 coming soon... -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On 4/15/05, Sam Rowe &lt;mediawiki(a)samrowe.com&gt; wrote: Erm, looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload (which I haven't for a while) it *is* a text area. Maybe you are using an out-of-date version of MediaWiki? -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]