As the deafening silence of this thread probably shows, a discussion is not really possible. The WMF has had 0 interest in making uploads easier in the last few years. 

To be fair, faced with furios opposition from the Commons community for even basic improvements such as allowing imports from other sites except Flickr and requests to stop cross-wiki uploads, this decision does not seem out of place. 

As one of the few people that has enabled UW in another Wikimedia wiki, I would like to encourage you to follow on your plan to improve the wizard as much as possible. Plans at the WMF change often and not necessarily for the better. A responsive design would be awsome news for wikis that need to guide their users through the mess that is freedom of panorama. 

One thing that puzzles me in that ticket is this phrase from Mark Traceur: "It might be better to look at something (slightly) more modern, like the upload dialog in core". Does anyone know what that dialog is? AFAIK the uploader in core (Special:Upload) hasn't changed in decades, except maybe for the look of the buttons. Its usability is rubbish compared to UW. Wikis used to (no, actually they still do) customize it using the uselang param,which messes with the user's settings. I can't really understand how that would be better... 

Andrei

Pe duminică, 31 ianuarie 2021, Ostrzyciel Nożyczek <ostrzycielnozyczek@gmail.com> a scris:

Hi,

I would like to uhhh... start the discussion? ask for opinions? about the future of UploadWizard.

It is a rather special extension, that was from the start made mostly for Commons' very specific needs and getting it to work anywhere else presents some challenges (some of which I attempt to tackle here). Interestingly, it still is used by many third-party wikis and although some of them don't need its full set of capabilities related to describing licenses, authors and sources, there are wikis that do need that. The wiki I maintain, Nonsensopedia, has a Commons-like file description system based on Semantic MediaWiki (see example here) and UploadWizard has been a blessing for us, greatly simplifying the task of file moderation. 

Opinion time: Wikis should be encouraged to properly describe the authorship of files that they use, to meet the licensing requirements. IMO Wikimedia Foundation as the maintainer of MediaWiki and a foundation dedicated to dissemination of free culture should provide a usable tool for properly describing free multimedia. UploadWizard could be just that.

At the same time, the extension has been basically unmaintained since the Multimedia team was dissolved and I've been rather surprised to discover that patches improving third-party support were met with uhm... very limited enthusiasm? There are a few obvious features lacking like mobile support (seriously, try opening https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard on a narrow screen device, it's been like this since.. always) and configurability (you have to jump through some serious hoops to just add a license; customizing the tutorial is similarly hard).

I've been thinking of what to do with the above and I really wouldn't want to embark on something that will be rendered redundant or obsolete in a year, so my question is: are there any plans for UploadWizard? What makes me suspect that things may change is primarily Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons, which in the future will maybe (?) supersede the description system around the {{Information}} template. Are there any rough roadmaps or outlines of anything resembling a plan for that? If Commons was to implement full, structured file descriptions in the upload tool, that code would be probably hardly usable outside Commons, given that Wikibase is not something easy to install or maintain, it is also awfully overkill for the vast majority of applications. In such a situation, would it make sense to consider completely separating the "Wikimedia Commons Shiny Upload Tool" from a more general extension that would be usable for third parties, stripped of any Commons-specific code? A lot of things could be much simplified if the extension was to target just the needs of third parties and not Commons.

I ask about this because I really don't see any sort of interest of the extension's de facto owner (and that is WMF) in developing it, there are also no public plans for it, as far as I know. Yes, I can make a fork anytime, but first I'd prefer to know if I'm not missing something. Well, actually, I already did make a fork of UW over a year ago, but this particular version of it is tailored for a wiki I manage, making it useless for others. At the time that was the only reasonable way we could get a good upload tool that was capable of properly describing licensing information. I probably don't have to tell seasoned open-source developers why this type of approach is not optimal for the future of the project. :)

Any opinions on the topic are very welcome.

--

Ostrzyciel (he/him)

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