On 11 Mar 2010 at 11:06, Erik Moeller wrote:
Hello all,
together with Frank Schulenburg and Naoko Komura, I just participated in a video-conference with the winners of the Google Kiswahili Wikipedia challenge ( http://www.google.com/events/kiswahili-wiki/ ), and we talked about some of the challenges they encountered when contributing to the Swahili Wikipedia.
One of the issues was that it was very hard for them to upload files. Specifically, when you're a new user on a small wiki like sw.wp, you _cannot upload_ locally due to a restriction of uploads to autoconfirmed users. The upload link isn't even visible in the sidebar until you're autoconfirmed, and you get a confusing error message if you happen to call up Special:Upload.
From a user experience standpoint, this is horrible.
For the immediate future, I suggest lifting this restriction for wikis between 1,000 and 50,000 articles in size (large enough to have a few active users, small enough to not yet have lots of policy around these issues). Ultimately we'll want to integrate Commons better into the user experience, but until then, IMO we should eliminate artificial impediments like this which prevent people from growing their communities and frustrate them -- unless there's a proven issue of large scale abuse. Does that make sense?
Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Erik, [2c opinion] To me it doesn't make sense. Commons is the home for files that are in the public domain, as that enables crosswiki use. Why would we want to change that message, and in fact work against that message? Some could argue that we would be starting to embed a counter- culture that we know that some will be resistant to change.
To me it would seem far more practicable to put efforts into having images seamlessly be able to be uploaded to Commons, and provide the interface at the wiki, or direct them to those resources at Commons. Alternatively if you do allow uploads for all, and then have an automated process in place to move the images to Commons.
The maintenance task of moving images to Commons from the wikis is quite significant, and I am not sure why we would be wanting to add to that. If administrators have time, it should be for valued tasks, not for "make work", for decisions that seem not to pay heed to our own history, and current events.
In fact, it would be interesting to see some of the data of images on small and large wikis, including the numbers transferred from each to Commons, and who undertook such actions (local vs Commons users).
Regards, Andrew