[Mediawiki-l] process for uploading/linking to files is difficult

[Brion Vibber]

Dori wrote:
> On 4/14/05, greg whittier wrote:
>>Believe it or not, the current method has a high enough barrier to
>>entry that few of my potential users will bother with it. Basically,
>>I'm looking for a point and click (no typing or cut and pasting
>>filenames) way to do this. I don't need them to upload lots of file.
>>Just one.
>
> I do find it hard to believe that the current method is difficult. It's as
> point and click as you can get. If your users find this hard, man wait till
> you tell them what a wiki is.

There are actually a few difficulties, which potentially could be improved:

* The info text is too long: no human will ever read it, and it obscures
the functional controls. (This was the unfortunate result of being fed
up with complaints about insufficient explanation of uploading policies
on the page.)

* Some of the warnings are not really relevant. (It changed my spaces to
underscores? Horror of horrors!)

* After a successful upload, it's unclear what to do. There's a blobby
paragraph but no link back to the page you came from.

We've gotten a number of suggestions that after upload you should be
able to easily return to the page you were on when you hit the upload
link (similar to the login and logout operations). I think this might be
a good idea at the least.

Potentially it could take you straight to the edit page and give you an
opportunity to cut-n-paste the sample link. I'm less sure about that.

One thing that's maybe not obvious to people is that uploads in
MediaWiki are *not* attachments to particular articles. They may be used
in many pages, or in none, and they live existences independent of any
page they may be linked from. This means the interface has to be
different from adding an attachment to a webmail message, because it
_is_ different, and this does complicate things.

Exactly how complicated they have to be is a matter for balance.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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