On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 01:53:32 +0200, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
<snip>
It's been said before, but further study of upload patterns bears it out - a large percentage of bad uploads could be prevented by disallowing image upload until a new user has been around for at least a week, and by blocking persistent copyviolaters.
Many of the uploaders are so new they haven't even figured out how to get images displayed in an article. The contributions list shows edits to topic X, then upload of X-copyvio.jpg, then maybe another couple of edits, and then that's it - the image, good or bad, is an orphan. The especially sad cases are when they upload pictures of themselves, but never edit their user page.
Stan
I agree. We already restrict uploading to logged-in users only, since allowing IP-only uploads was a disaster; increasing that restriction to allow only logged-in users whose accounts are not recently created, using the same criteria used in the semi-protection mechanism, seems eminently reasonable to me.
Yeah I do think that would be a very good idea. Users who are too fresh to move pages or edit semi protected pages rely should not be uploading images. Granted there are people who have been editing for years who probably should not be uploading images either, but all in all brand new acounts acount for the bulk of the problem images.
If we required users to "age" for a bit before they are allowed to upload images it would have seleval benefits. First of all they might just end up reading a policy page or two before they upload stuff, and secondly they are somewhat more likely to remain active, so that they can actualy go back and fix problems that are pointed out to them. Currently I'm under the impression that most of the "bad" uploads are made by "disposable" acounts where someone just register an acount purely for the ability to upload images, do a few uploads and then never log in again. This is bad in so many ways, firstly the images never get fixed, secondly it means image taggers start getting used to uploaders beeing non-responsive so they stop notifying them and then they upset the few active uploaders who suddenly find theyr images deleted without a word of warning (forgetting for a moment the dire warnings on the upload page itself) and so on. I guess there is a danger of simply moving the problem to commons if users find themselves uneable to upload to Wikipedia imedeately after registering, but I think it would at the very least would be worth trying out for a month or two and see what happens.