On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Daniel Kinzler
<daniel(a)brightbyte.de> wrote:
A mediawiki upload should be specific and
provide
more functionality besides picking multiple files and uploading them. Most
importantly, it has to provide a way to provide the basic information about
license, source and authorship. Programs for this exist, I was just thinking
that a firefox ad-on would be simpler to deploy and maintain that a standalone
program, and people would be more likely to iunstall and use it.
If a MediaWiki-specific workaround would exist, it would presumably be
a Java applet that wouldn't require separate installation. You're
right that such an applet could be written to do way more than just
show upload progress. On the other hand, I'm wary about having to
maintain multiple sets of functionality for clients with different
capabilities. It would be best to keep as many features as possible
in universally-accessible HTML-based upload pages, and only use Java
or JavaScript where something is not possible in HTML (like selection
of multiple files at once for upload, or progress indicators).
For my CommonsHelper [1] and flickr2commons [2] tools I have
implemented a universal Commons user verification for the toolserver
called TUSC [3] some time ago. All tools can use this to verify that
someone using a tool does have a Commons (or any wikipedia) user
login, and that account isn't blocked. We could offer mass-uploads
via toolserver that way.
Advantages:
* Seperate from MediaWiki code
* Quickly adaptable
* Potentially many ways to upload (Perl, Java, ...)
Drawbacks:
* Additional one-time TUSC signup required (quick but potentially annoying)
* Files would be uploaded under a bot name
Or, we could enable my option in MediaWiki to "upload" by giving a
URL; me could support multiple URLs that way. That would require
people to upload their files on some public FTP or HTTP server, and
then transfer them to Commons.
My 2 pence,
Magnus
[1]
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonshelper.php
[2]
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/flickr2commons.php
[3]
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/tusc.php