On 5/3/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote: ....
Now for the relevant bit. It's been discussed before, a little, and I touched upon it in a recent discussion sparked off from the newbie's questions...but it could be feasible for us to replace our Special:Upload pages with something a bit more intelligent. Making use of the licencing dropdowns, we could, I think, redirect free images to Commons in a seamless fashion (after checking existence and providing a courteous note to the user, of course).
This has advantages and disadvantages. The user's upload experience is simple, and the image can be used as before without trouble. On the other hand, deliberate or accidental mis-selection of the licence [cw]ould result in an influx of non-free materials arriving on the Commons.
Nevertheless, I think the idea has potential, and it's something I might be interested in helping to hack together in the future. I'll throw it out here and see what people think. And since I'm at it, I'll cross-post to mediawiki-l and wikitech-l, too.
Rob Church
I like this idea. I don't think there would be very many bad uploads, since only free licensed-images would go onto Commons, and if you are clueless, then you'll either not provide any sort of license or just pick a random one, and it's not like Commons isn't trigger happy, so even with an epidemic....
This would provide some nice symmetry. It's already seamless one way (using Commons pics on en) so why not be seamless the other way? We can perhaps make some headway on moving over all Free images and media over to Commons (leaving fair use and such on en) if we did this.
~maru