On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
It seems to me from following the upload queue that it is being deliberately abused to store distinctly non-encyclopedia and copyright-infringing material on a disconcertingly large scale.
I agree 100% that this is a problem. Last night I deleted several dozen files that someone had overwritten as being (obviously) inappropriate for Wikipedia articles. I was a little concerned from the beginning that having virtually no restrictions on the upload function would have this effect, so it's not too surprising that this is happening.
I would assume that this would be of direct financial concern to Bomis, both for the potential of large bandwidth costs and the potential for being sued, and to the rest of the project because of the risk of being shut down by a lawsuit.
Although not a huge financial concern, but I'd agree the risk is there...
Are we just going to attempt to keep this under control by the vigilance of a few dedicated Wikipedians, or might, in this case, some technical measures to discourage abuse be appropriate?
For instance, it might be feasible to restrict uploads to registered users, limiting the size and number of files that a user can upload in a day, perhaps even restricting the types of files that can be uploaded by checking with the "file" file type checking utility - that would at least prevent the uploading of executables).
I like all of these ideas. Certainly in any case only registered users should be able to upload files. This seems a reasonable thing to ask, given the potential for abuse that the file uploader represents. Right now, I can't even spot a miscreant's IP address by looking at the log.
I would be prepared to help implement some of the above. I'm a decent programmer, though I don't have any experience with PHP so it'd take me some time to get up to speed.
Obviously, I think technical measures to slow things is justified in this case, otherwise I suspect too much time will be wasted weeding out rather noxious material.
I don't think that the technical measures you propose will slow very much at all down. The only person who might upload beyond a given size limit would be Magnus. :-) I imagine that there is hardly anyone who (1) refuses to sign in but who (2) wants to upload a useful file (e.g., a public domain photo for a biography).
I don't know if the specific proposals you make are the best, but I agree that something along these lines should be done.
Larry