[Mediawiki-l] [WikiEN-l] Upload by default to Commons?

[Brianna Laugher]

> > I hope that the universal login does bring with it some kind of
> > universal talk page "you have new messages...somewhere" notice. Most
> > Commons users don't check their Commons talk pages with any regularity
> > and thus don't receive their image warnings, and feel quite slighted
> > when their copyvios/unsourced images are deleted. Any opportunity to
> > reduce that would be welcome.
>
> That isn't in the current plans as far as I know, although it would be
> damn useful. (See
> http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/CentralAuth/evil-plans.txt
> for those, to some extent.)

Hm, I will post something at en.wp's VP (Technical) and hopefully
someone will be inspired to make up somethingorother. Or should I make
a rather hopeful bug report? :)

> > Last concern is that Commons really requires uploaders to categorise
> > their images, something that is not so necessary on en.wp.  Luckily
> > there are a couple of tools to help with this, perhaps one of these
> > could be worked into the interface somehow. See the recent commons-l
> > archive for links.
>
> A limited list of categories *could* be provided in a drop-down box.
> It wouldn't be feasible to load all categories, for performance
> reasons, but the main ones could be defined in a message somewhere and
> used to build a nice list, as with the licence selector.

I mean categories that describe the content (categories that describe
the license status are included as part of the license templates, of
course), so I don't think this is appropriate. The best way would be
to integrate the CommonSense tool (
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CommonSense.php ) by
getting people to suggest keywords or something similar.

The thing is, it's actually not always easy to find the most
appropriate image. CommonSense certainly won't do that for you, but it
will provide some potentially useful higher-level categories which you
can use to manually explore to find a good category. Now, training
people to do that is pretty freaking hard any time of the day.

A crap, general category (eg "Clothes", instead of "1920s Womens
Fashion"or whatever) is better than no category at all, though.

Brianna