Desilets, Alain wrote:
We're currently working on a grant proposal that is related to the usability for uploading and embedding media files to Wikimedia Commons.
I think this is a good idea. Embedding images and other files into a wiki page is something that most wiki engines don't support in a highly usable way. I observed something like 100 kids working with wikis for 10 hours each, on a task that involved a lot of image uploading. Uploading images was one of the most frequent snags that I observed.
A typical snag looked like this.
- User finds an image he likes on the web, using his browser.
- User saves that image to his file system, using the default location selected by the browser.
- User goes to the wiki page, and clicks on the upload image button.
- The browser starts a file selection dialog, but it starts from a different part of the file system than the part where the user saved the image.
- User doesn't have a clue where he saved the image previously and can't find the image anymore.
MediaWiki supports a upload from URL feature, thus skipping the need to local save. But it's disabled on WMF projects.