On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/22/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
A great many users, including some of our most prolific editors, have no clue about image copyright law or policy. The ability to block them from uploading images would be quite useful.
What would be even more useful would be for image uploading to be a privilege, not a right: you don't get the ability to upload images simply by registering an account.
A proper experiment on this would be a good thing. Measure the number of "good", "bad" and "borderline" images before and after the implementation of such a privilege system.
Well, the "before" results certainly aren't encouraging: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-March/041534.html Roughly 50% of all uploads have incorrect license tags. Roughly 35% of all fair-use claims are immediately obvious as invalid, and I expect at least another 25% to be found invalid on further inspection.
Preliminary results on who's doing the uploading indicate that about 35% of all uploads are by users with fewer than 50 edits; 15% are by users with fewer than ten. Less than a quarter are by users with a thousand or more edits. I don't have precise statistics, but in general, the bad images I've seen go by tend to have been uploaded by users with redlinked userpages.
In the past six months, OrphanBot has handed out 37,000 notices to 24,000 users. 200 users have received ten or more notices, with one user receiving 53 notices. For the majority of these users, the only things on the user's talk page are a welcome notice and notifications from OrphanBot.
How would you work out who to give initial priveleges to? Is there enough history to determine which editors have uploaded more problem images than good ones?
I'd start by letting anyone with at least five hundred edits upload images. They may not be any better at uploading good images, but at least they've got enough invested in Wikipedia that they'll stick around to learn about the image use policy.