Hi Nemo,
the link to the Commons page was the first one in the email, and
that's what the "accordingly" referred to.
So I guess you're asking to add <td> id
attributes and <span
class="licensetpl_XXX"> markers to all the information and license
templates?
Yes, adding the same markers as in the Commons templates, e.g. a <span
class="licensetpl_short"> to wrap the short name of the license,
should have the same effect on a local upload being as it does on the
Commons version of the file.
By the way, this implies changing tens of thousands of
templates across all
wikis, often protected or very esoteric...
I'd guess there would be some quick wins on the most commonly used
templates. In cases where it fails, the media viewer will just add an
explicit link to the file description page, so it's not the end of the
world.
It would be about time we
recognise that local uploads are too big an effort we ask to most "small"
local communities, even just for licensing policy compliance, and we start
disabling them, centralising this burden on Commons.
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Local_uploads_policy>
Perhaps so, but that's a bigger discussion for another place and another time.
I hope Commons multilingualism is on the radar: having
ignored it for 9
years is one of the reasons we now have an explosive technical debt hitting
us every time we try to do even "simple" things.
The hardest problems take the longest to solve, and in a context where
for most of the 9 years, we've been technically very
resource-constrained (we exceeded 10 full-time MediaWiki developers
only in 2010), it's no surprise that implementing a multilingual
tagging system and other fundamental improvements to multi-language
support in a single wiki installation have not been done yet, nor
ought it be cause for complaint or concern.
That is especially so given that throughout that history, many people
(yours truly included) have already done a significant amount of
thinking about the nature of some of the necessary technical
improvements. Daniel Kinzler's WikiWord [1], back in 2008,
demonstrated that a lot of the necessary information for building a
multilingual tagging system exists in the form of interlanguage links,
a fact that influenced the design of Wikidata and the initial focus on
language links, since this would enable the quick evolution of a
multilingual corpus of concepts.
Prior to Wikidata, OmegaWiki demonstrated that concepts annotated and
edited in a wiki-style fashion could potentially be used to describe
images and other media in a multilingual manner. The first proposal
for this was written by GerardM in 2005, something that he, Kipcool
and others continued to pursue in OmegaWiki for years to come (OW now
supports Commons media). [2] [3]
The Wikimedia community, too, has made many improvements to language
support in Commons itself, from the language selection features that
predated ULS (and are still the only mechanism for anonymous user
language selection) to localization of templates. The Language
Engineering team contributed massive improvements to the Translate
extension (active on Commons) and ULS which, while it still has its
kinks, provides many important features that improve multilingual
collaboration.
It is true that a lot of these mechanisms are hackish, but again,
we're solving hard problems, which frankly haven't been solved well by
others yet. Rather than complaining about technical debt, I think we
ought to celebrate how much work has already been done.
These foundations help us see a clearer picture of how to actually
implement something like a tagging system (although many important
questions have yet to be answered). Then, still, we will not be
satisfied until we have better multilingual discussion, or open source
machine translation, or ... Iterative progress is to be expected.
The Wikidata team sees multilanguage support for Commons as a
potential near-term frontier, and I think that's the right group of
people to think about the problem. Daniel has written up an initial
metadata proposal back in June, here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikidata_for_media_info
There's still lots of work on the core of Wikidata before we can
really expect them to take this one, but I for one am optimistic, and
proud that so much good work has already been done.
Erik
[1]
http://brightbyte.de/page/WikiWord
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_OmegaWiki_for_Commons
[3]
http://omegawiki.blogspot.com/search/label/Commons
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation