Hi,

situation today: a Wikipedian at a meetup shows me a collection of at least 100 beautiful high-resolution photos from Ecuador. Unfortunately, only a couple of them are on the German Wikipedia, and none are on the Commons. He's perfectly willing to make them GFDL, though. I offered to do the uploading for him, but it occurred to me that a more general solution might be in order.

Hence, I've just launched an experimental file upload service for the Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_upload_service (please translate!)

The idea is that people who are not comfortable using the Commons directly (such as non-Wikimedians), or who want to upload a large number of files, can contact a registered helper who will batch-upload them.

I can obviously only handle a limited number of such requests, so I encourage anyone familiar with handling an upload bot to add themselves to the list of helpers. If you can't handle large email attachments, let me know, and I can give you an account on my FTP space.

Note that this is really a workaround for the Commons not being as user-friendly as it should be (no single login, no easy upload form, no batch upload support, categorization requires wiki knowledge). Eventually, I'd like this to become obsolete.

I'm posting this announcement to foundation-l, wikipedia-l, wikinews-l, and commons-l, since all these projects are affected. Please forward/translate the message for other affected projects.

All best,

Erik