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.
From a user experience standpoint, this is
horrible.
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
I do hope the concerns that led to this being implemented[1] will be
taken into consideration before it is undone.
[1]
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Forum&oldid=931972#Set_upload_to_autoconfirmed_Wikimedia-wide>
--
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)