On 10/4/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Some other appearance suggestions:
- Rename the links that appear next to the image. I suggest making the image
itself a link to the flickr page (and hence unlinking the title), then having wording like: Upload with [[Bryan]] / [[flinfo]]. Actually I don't really understand how flinfo works, so perhaps you could just decide which is the better method and only link to that.
- Show the flickr tags for each image. That would help a lot in determining
if the thing in question is referring to the actual subject. I'm looking at suburbs, and very often there's a place in the US or UK with the same name...the tags would help here.
Both done. :-)
I do note though, that it's still a *lot* of steps. Most if it's pretty obvious and just a question of clicking the right link, but I wonder if you can streamline it still further.
Let's see, once you've done your search, it's: 1.Middle click the title of an image to view it in another tab. Decide whether it's appropriate.
You can actually use the left button, it will open in a new window/tab, depending on your browser settings. Do you have a better way to preview the image? Maybe some JavaScript expansion thing within the tool page itself?
2.Return to main tab (if it's not, close the tab) 3. Open the "Brian's Upload Tool" link in a new tab 4. Click the Continue button 5. Type categories, adjust description and filename if necessary. (sometimes this page displays wrongly in my browser) [most of this step seems redundant, as you can change all the information except the filename on the next page anyway] 6. Click Continue 7. Click Save Page 8. Click "Flickr Uploader" link. 9. Click "Comment" link 10. Type a comment, usually referring to the page you'll be adding the image to. Tense can be complicated as the image isn't actually visible *yet*. 11. Close the tab and return to your main tab. 12. Click the Edit link next to the original article, opening in a new tab. 13. Type the name of the image somewhere, either as part of an infobox, or an [[image:...]] link. Usually involves flipping back somewhere to get the exact image name. 14. Type an edit summary (usually "Add image") 15. Click save. 16. Check that everything looks ok. 17. Close the tab.
So, just to clarify, steps 4-17 are actually the upload tool :-)
And that's basically the shortest possible version. Going further would include making a proper category on Commons (which is itself a subcategory of something), possibly making an "article" on Commons, then linking to either the category or the article page from the Wikipedia article via the {{commons}} or {{commonscat}} templates. You could also go through the other language editions, adding the image there too.
Conclusion: It's still a lot of clicking and typing, and feels very "manual". How could this be better? How could *Media*Wiki better integrate images and text?
Let me dream a moment:
- Somehow, categories on all the wikipedias and commons are linked.
Hmm. Categories on wikipedia are about articles, categories on commons are about images. Even if we could somehow link the two, most images in the commons category would only apply to few articles in the wikipedia category.
Note that it might be easy to semi-automatically link categories between wikipedias: * Get all articles in a category on xx.wikipedia * For each of these, find the language link to yy.wikipedia, and list the categories of that article * sort categories at yy.wikipedia by number of occurrence * the most occurring category is most likely to be the same as the original one on xx.wikipedia If this is desparately wanted, I might write Yet Another Tool ;-)
- By default, articles display up to N images from the appropriate Commons
category, without being explicitly told which images or which category. Say N=10. Images are tagged so that MediaWiki can choose which image should be the "main" image, and which should be shown in a Gallery section.
So, which category to chose for [[en:Horse-ripping]]? [[Category:Horses]]? That would be linked to commons [[Category:Horses]]. I don't see any images of ripped horses there (and I'm rather glad about that:), just images of horses, and showing 11 images of plain horses is rather pointless in [[en:Horse-ripping]]. Even a single image of a horse does not really make a lot of sense there, IMHO.
- With a single click, the flickr image is prepared for upload to Commons
with appropriate categories. You simply tweak image name and description, then press save.
So the commons categories that match the (say) en categories of the article for which flickr images were found are added to the uploaded flickr image? Sounds good. But isn't that what CommonSense [1] does?
- The Wikipedia page (or pages) is then shown with the new image for
approval. Since this is automatic, you simply have to check that there aren't any special issues to know about.
That would be the end point of any (manual or automated) upload process anyway, right?
Counter-suggestion: Have a commons upload tool that will 1. Take the flickr URL and optionally a new filename 2. Check if the flickr image has a suitable license 3. Run CommonSense (or the like) to find appropriate categories on commons 4. Upload the image to commons under the appropriate bot name, using the new filename, flickr template, and categories 5. Open the final image page and present it to the user (the other steps are "invisible")
Alternatively, if my "upload from URL" extension were enabled on commons, it could fill in the entire upload form. The user could check the wikitext before uploading, and upload under his own name with a single click.
Cheers, Magnus
[1] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CommonSense.php