I wrote most of UploadWizard. I agree with all of your critiques.
I think the idea of adding images to a new-images section makes sense, especially if we're talking about adding images from say a mobile device. It's unlikely that we'll have an appropriate way to place images on the page anytime soon.
And, as others point out, Add Media Wizard was a lot more focused on what the average Wikipedian really wants, which is to add media to a page.
UploadWizard did not really consider Wikipedia as a use case. Instead it was an attempt to make Wikimedia Commons easier to use in a very general case: uploading any number of images with any kind of characteristics (even if they all had different licensing characteristics, which is an extremely unusual use case).
This is hard already. And unfortunately MediaWiki is almost perversely unsuited to the needs of the Commons community. So every time we made things easier, unless we took elaborate precautions (enforced in an ever-increasing pile of scripting hacks), we also made it easier to screw everything up. Right now it's starting to become more stable, assuming no other new features are demanded.
AMW focused on areas where there were big wins to be had: - importing images from systems where the licenses and metadata were already guaranteed to be good for us - uploading a single new image, with no choice about license, etc, and a simple check for title uniqueness.
Neither tool has figured out an easy way to deal with fair-use images, but I presume we would just use Commons and the default target and make the upload target dependent on license. But that ruins the existing UploadWizard flow (upload-then-annotate), but that is arguably wrong for other reasons -- it's unsuitable for very large files.
All in all I think we need to start over with uploading tools appropriate for mobile and the new Visual Editor. A lot of the libraries in UW will be useful but it has to be rethought.
On 12/18/11 5:22 AM, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
The improvements to the Upload Wizard are very welcome, but socially, I think it is still broken. Please correct me if I overlook something or overlook another extension.
Socially, I believe many mediawiki extensions need a way to ask for images on a topic page, provide an upload wizard AND display the results on the topic page. Presently, even if the image is added to the wiki or a commons repository, it simply disappears in a black hole from the perspective of the contributing image author.
I believe it is possible to have a wizard option which does the following:
- store the page context from which it was called.
- upload images to local wiki or a repository
- open the page context in edit mode
- search for some form of new-images-section
** a possible implementation of this could be a div with id=newimages containing a gallery tag
- if new-images-section exists: add images, if not create with new images.
- Save context page.
Presently, WMF is possibly the biggest driver of open content (CC BY/CC BY-SA) but is able to collect images only from the small population that is the intersection of the population or people able to edit mediawiki and the huge population able to provide quality images.
The new-images-section solution would probably not directly work for wikipedia itself; here some more complex review mechanism (new images gallery would be shown only to some users, including image uploader, or so) would be needed, perhaps in combination with flagged rev. I view this feature however potentially as a two step process: implement with direct addition to page, modify to optimize for flagged revs.
However, I think something the described feature would be needed; presently all these crowdsourcing images are mostly collected by projects that either use no open content license at all, or the NC license at best. WMF is not able to exert its potential pull towards open content in this area.
Also reported as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33234
Gregor
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