On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm sorry for being behind the curve on this, but could someone point me to a discussion or policy explaining when & why the requirement to be autoconfirmed in order to upload files was created? Doesn't this just shift whatever problem it tries to solve to Commons, which doesn't have that restriction?
I don't know and can not find where it was decided to include upload in auto-confirmed, but I do remember complaining about it previously when the criteria for auto-confirmed status was extended.
Search for 'upload': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_Proposal/Poll2
At the time new users got a completely unhelpful permission denied response from the software, at least now you get a wall of text which somewhere has a link to commons.
The benefit that some people tried to convince me of is that this policy effectively restricts the addition of images which are not freely licensed to established users. I'm not convinced that this is especially beneficial, and I suspect the added complexity of uploading to commons probably costs us contributions enough to offset whatever benefit the current behaviour brings.
I'd rather see a more nuanced quarantine and approval process to deal with the low quality of submissions by new users. .. or, at least make the upload button go straight to commons for users who can't use it locally to cut out the extra chances for confusion.