[Wikitech-l] Uploads on small wikis

Hello all, together with Frank Schulenburg and Naoko Komura, I just participated in a video-conference with the winners of the Google Kiswahili Wikipedia challenge ( http://www.google.com/events/kiswahili-wiki/ ), and we talked about some of the challenges they encountered when contributing to the Swahili Wikipedia. One of the issues was that it was very hard for them to upload files. Specifically, when you're a new user on a small wiki like sw.wp, you _cannot upload_ locally due to a restriction of uploads to autoconfirmed users. The upload link isn't even visible in the sidebar until you're autoconfirmed, and you get a confusing error message if you happen to call up Special:Upload. For the immediate future, I suggest lifting this restriction for wikis between 1,000 and 50,000 articles in size (large enough to have a few active users, small enough to not yet have lots of policy around these issues). Ultimately we'll want to integrate Commons better into the user experience, but until then, IMO we should eliminate artificial impediments like this which prevent people from growing their communities and frustrate them -- unless there's a proven issue of large scale abuse. Does that make sense? Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate