On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
A mediawiki upload should be specific and provide more functionality besides picking multiple files and uploading them. Most importantly, it has to provide a way to provide the basic information about license, source and authorship. Programs for this exist, I was just thinking that a firefox ad-on would be simpler to deploy and maintain that a standalone program, and people would be more likely to iunstall and use it.
If a MediaWiki-specific workaround would exist, it would presumably be a Java applet that wouldn't require separate installation. You're right that such an applet could be written to do way more than just show upload progress. On the other hand, I'm wary about having to maintain multiple sets of functionality for clients with different capabilities. It would be best to keep as many features as possible in universally-accessible HTML-based upload pages, and only use Java or JavaScript where something is not possible in HTML (like selection of multiple files at once for upload, or progress indicators).
For my CommonsHelper [1] and flickr2commons [2] tools I have implemented a universal Commons user verification for the toolserver called TUSC [3] some time ago. All tools can use this to verify that someone using a tool does have a Commons (or any wikipedia) user login, and that account isn't blocked. We could offer mass-uploads via toolserver that way.
Advantages: * Seperate from MediaWiki code * Quickly adaptable * Potentially many ways to upload (Perl, Java, ...)
Drawbacks: * Additional one-time TUSC signup required (quick but potentially annoying) * Files would be uploaded under a bot name
Or, we could enable my option in MediaWiki to "upload" by giving a URL; me could support multiple URLs that way. That would require people to upload their files on some public FTP or HTTP server, and then transfer them to Commons.
My 2 pence, Magnus
[1] http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonshelper.php [2] http://toolserver.org/~magnus/flickr2commons.php [3] http://toolserver.org/~magnus/tusc.php