Dear all,
Wikimedia Commons has a feature called "sideloading" or "copy upload".
It means that you can provide Wikimedia Commons with a link to a media
file and the wiki would download it from there and import it into
Commons, just like a regular upload.
This is especially useful for bigger files as it allow much bigger files
(1 GB at the moment). Until today this could only be used via the API,
so an external tool was neccessary to trigger such a sideloading process.
Now you can use this feature right from the upload form
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload
Note there are still some hurdles:
* sideloading is only allowed for users of the groups "Image Reviewer"
or "GW Toolset User" - experienced Commoners uploading regularly it
shouldn't be a problem to get that
* sideloading is only allowed from certain domains - as a security
feature - if you want to use your own server regularly you need to
report a bug to get your domain activated as well
* sideloading takes some time - dependant on the bandwidth between the
two servers. After one minute any request to Wikimedia Commons will be
aborted. If the download has not finished within that minute, the upload
fails. There is a experimental feature which allows such processes to
run in the background and I am working to get that activated on Commons
as well:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72531
If you want a simple script to do "chunked uploads" up to 1 GB you can
use my php library:
* https://github.com/masterssystems/phpapibot
check examples/upload for a ready to use script
Regards,
Manuel
--
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Lausanne, +41 (21) 34066-22 - www.wikimedia.ch