On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)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.