[Commons-l] On upload forms

[Brianna Laugher]

2008/5/30 Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org>:
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> For a long time we've had to suffer with an image upload form which was
> pretty bare-bones, while attempting to shoehorn more smarts into it
> through templates and JavaScript hacks.

Hooray. This is well overdue.

> I'd appreciate hearing from people interested in helping out in the
> following capacities:
>
> * Designing user interface mockups

Well, you could argue the JavaScript hack-up at the moment is a pretty
fair mock-up of what we can envisage.

> This effort will probably take from a few weeks to a few months to get
> to the point where it's really live; we may even try experiments like
> having the old and new forms available side-by-side on the live site so
> people really have a chance to bang at it in real usage without forcing
> an in-flux test system on everyone.

I think that's a great idea. There's no reason we couldn't have
Special:Bulkupload or Special:Powerupload (for "power users")
permanently, is there?

As Bryan mentioned, we would definitely like the ability to create
purpose-specific forms. Trying to cram all the relevant info on a
single form results in something horribly cluttered, crowded and
ultimately ignored by most users. (This gets a little bit messy when
trying to figure out how fallback language codes should work, IIRC)

Via JavaScript we have now separate template fields into separate form
elements. Ultimately, we'd like those fields to be stored separately
so we can query over them (e.g. date, geotag, license). OK, we have
the world's messiest data at the moment, but we did start from a
single blob rather than separate fields.

There is also, as always, the "multilingual factor" (I am big fan of
the JavaScript-enforced prompting for descriptions in specific
languages). I don't know exactly what problems are in store there, I
just feel certain that there are some. :)

cheers,
Brianna

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