Bad experience of the new upload form

[Chris McKenna]

I've just spent over 30 minutes uploading a file to Wikimedia Commons. The
excessive time was due to the new upload form.

The image in question is
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stratford_station_360_-_August_2008.jpg
I filled out all the sections of the form as it asked me to, but no matter
what I tried it would not let me upload the file, giving only the
unhelpful error "You must give the original source of the file, the author
of the work, and a license."
I say unhelpful because I had filled in all of the noted fields - even
changing them from the default to see if that mad a difference, but nope.
the only thing I can think of is that I hadn't selected a license from the
dropdown list, as I wanted to use my own custom tag
(user:Thryduulf/cc-by-sa-all) which wraps the standard cc template with a
note about my personal relicencing policy and categorises it in my user
category.
If the permission box is set to check if the licence included in there is
one of a known set, then if it doesn't match say so in the error message.
If the "none selected" license option doesn't let you upload the file then
you need to change the wording on it so that it doesn't imply you can and
give an option that says "I have added a license tag in the permissions
field above" that will let it upload.

When I found the link to the old-style basic upload form (and remembered
how to use it) everything went swimmingly. I used the same information in
the manual form as I was trying to upload using the pretty form.

I am using the latest version of Firefox 2 on 64-bit Kubuntu Linux.

Chris

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but with the heart

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[Sandahl]

I had the same problems with my last upload. I finally picked the
closest license from the drop down. When the upload finished I changed it
to the correct one manually.  It also told me to provide the original
source which I had already done.  Finally it allowed the upload. FireFox
2 and Vista upgrade here but  it should not matter what operating system
we use, the drop down should  have an option like Chris says.
Sandahl


Chris McKenna wrote:

> I've just spent over 30 minutes uploading a file to Wikimedia Commons. The
> excessive time was due to the new upload form.
>
> The image in question is
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stratford_station_360_-_August_2008.jpg
> I filled out all the sections of the form as it asked me to, but no matter
> what I tried it would not let me upload the file, giving only the
> unhelpful error "You must give the original source of the file, the author
> of the work, and a license."
> I say unhelpful because I had filled in all of the noted fields - even
> changing them from the default to see if that mad a difference, but nope.
> the only thing I can think of is that I hadn't selected a license from the
> dropdown list, as I wanted to use my own custom tag
> (user:Thryduulf/cc-by-sa-all) which wraps the standard cc template with a
> note about my personal relicencing policy and categorises it in my user
> category.
> If the permission box is set to check if the licence included in there is
> one of a known set, then if it doesn't match say so in the error message.
> If the "none selected" license option doesn't let you upload the file then
> you need to change the wording on it so that it doesn't imply you can and
> give an option that says "I have added a license tag in the permissions
> field above" that will let it upload.
>
> When I found the link to the old-style basic upload form (and remembered
> how to use it) everything went swimmingly. I used the same information in
> the manual form as I was trying to upload using the pretty form.
>
> I am using the latest version of Firefox 2 on 64-bit Kubuntu Linux.
>
> Chris
>
>  

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[geni]

2008/8/20 Sandahl <sandahlb@...>:
> I had the same problems with my last upload. I finally picked the
> closest license from the drop down. When the upload finished I changed it
> to the correct one manually.  It also told me to provide the original
> source which I had already done.  Finally it allowed the upload. FireFox
> 2 and Vista upgrade here but  it should not matter what operating system
> we use, the drop down should  have an option like Chris says.
> Sandahl
>
>

It would be possible to add something like "I have a custom license"
to the end of the drop down box.


--
geni

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[Patricia Rodrigues]

Hello,

You can go to Your preferences -> Gadgets  and then tick the first line ("Use the old-style upload form layout."), that way you shouldn't have any problem. You can direct any bug reports and suggestions to Lupo (<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Lupo>), who has worked very hard to make the form work smoothly and continues to patiently tweak it everytime someone complains about it :).
Cheers,
Patrícia

--- On Wed, 20/8/08, geni <geniice@...> wrote:

From: geni <geniice@...>
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Bad experience of the new upload form
To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l@...>
Date: Wednesday, 20 August, 2008, 7:59 AM

2008/8/20 Sandahl <sandahlb@...>:
> I had the same problems with my last upload. I finally picked the
> closest license from the drop down. When the upload finished I changed it
> to the correct one manually.  It also told me to provide the original
> source which I had already done.  Finally it allowed the upload. FireFox
> 2 and Vista upgrade here but  it should not matter what operating system
> we use, the drop down should  have an option like Chris says.
> Sandahl
>
>

It would be possible to add something like "I have a custom license"
to the end of the drop down box.


-- 
geni

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[Yann Forget-2]

Patricia Rodrigues wrote:
> Hello,
>
> You can go to Your preferences -> Gadgets  and then tick the first line
> ("Use the old-style upload form layout."), that way you shouldn't have
> any problem. You can direct any bug reports and suggestions to Lupo
> (<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Lupo>), who has worked
> very hard to make the form work smoothly and continues to patiently
> tweak it everytime someone complains about it :).

The new upload form is quite good if you have files which match one of
the proposed licenses (no custom licenses), so I would not disable it
completely. I just want to have the choice.
I had the same problem which Chris had for uploading {{PD-India}} images.

> Cheers,
> Patrícia

Regards,

Yann
--
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http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres

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[Sandahl]

Thank you very much! The new upload form is better in most ways but the
old one is quicker for the some less common license tags like
{{PD-USGov-FWS}} such as the one I used. I like the larger description
box on the new one much better.

Patricia Rodrigues wrote:

> Hello,
>
> You can go to Your preferences -> Gadgets  and then tick the first
> line ("Use the old-style upload form layout."), that way you shouldn't
> have any problem. You can direct any bug reports and suggestions to
> Lupo (<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Lupo>), who has
> worked very hard to make the form work smoothly and continues to
> patiently tweak it everytime someone complains about it :).
> Cheers,
> Patrícia
>
> --- On *Wed, 20/8/08, geni /<geniice@...>/* wrote:
>
>     From: geni <geniice@...>
>     Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Bad experience of the new upload form
>     To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List"
>     <commons-l@...>
>     Date: Wednesday, 20 August, 2008, 7:59 AM
>
>     2008/8/20 Sandahl <sandahlb@...>:
>     > I had the same problems with my last upload. I finally picked the
>     > closest license from the drop down. When the upload finished I changed it
>     > to the correct one manually.  It also told me to provide the original
>     > source which I had already done.  Finally it allowed the upload. FireFox
>     > 2 and Vista upgrade here but  it should not matter what operating system
>     > we use, the drop down should  have an option like Chris says.
>     > Sandahl
>     >
>     >
>
>     It would be possible to add something like "I have a custom license"
>     to the end of the drop down box.
>
>
>     --
>     geni
>
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>              
>
>
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[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 9:33 PM, Chris McKenna <cmckenna@...> wrote:
[snip]
> the only thing I can think of is that I hadn't selected a license from the
> dropdown list, as I wanted to use my own custom tag
> (user:Thryduulf/cc-by-sa-all) which wraps the standard cc template with a
> note about my personal relicencing policy and categorises it in my user
> category.
[snip]

It's no excuse for the unhelpful upload form (nor do I know if it was
the cause of your problems) but you must subst user license templates,
for reasons unrelated to the requirements of the upload form. There
are two primary reasons for this:

1) The use of personal license templates on the image page will
greatly frustrate the efforts of reusers pulling data from the commons
XML dumps. If standard templates are used they can just regexp match
against the image page page text. If personal wrappers are used they
must implement an entire mediawiki parser, which is often an
unreasonable requirement.

2) Such templates make it possible for the user to change the
licensing of potentially thousands of images in an almost invisible
manner by editing a single obscure user subpage. The change will not
be visible in the history of the image page itself.  Consider all the
problems we've had with flickr users changing their licensing for an
example of the sort of problems it could create for our users. If you
need to make some change to your licensing in the future there are
many commons users who are willing to run a bot to perform apropreiate
mass changes.

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[geni]

2008/8/20 Chris McKenna <cmckenna@...>:

> I've just spent over 30 minutes uploading a file to Wikimedia Commons. The
> excessive time was due to the new upload form.
>
> The image in question is
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stratford_station_360_-_August_2008.jpg
> I filled out all the sections of the form as it asked me to, but no matter
> what I tried it would not let me upload the file, giving only the
> unhelpful error "You must give the original source of the file, the author
> of the work, and a license."
> I say unhelpful because I had filled in all of the noted fields - even
> changing them from the default to see if that mad a difference, but nope.
> the only thing I can think of is that I hadn't selected a license from the
> dropdown list, as I wanted to use my own custom tag
> (user:Thryduulf/cc-by-sa-all) which wraps the standard cc template with a
> note about my personal relicencing policy and categorises it in my user
> category.
> If the permission box is set to check if the licence included in there is
> one of a known set, then if it doesn't match say so in the error message.
> If the "none selected" license option doesn't let you upload the file then
> you need to change the wording on it so that it doesn't imply you can and
> give an option that says "I have added a license tag in the permissions
> field above" that will let it upload.
>
> When I found the link to the old-style basic upload form (and remembered
> how to use it) everything went swimmingly. I used the same information in
> the manual form as I was trying to upload using the pretty form.
>
> I am using the latest version of Firefox 2 on 64-bit Kubuntu Linux.
>
> Chris

Okey I've put in a sort of fix. You can now select "I have a custom
license" in the license options (wording needs improving) and that
drops in a temporary template which can then be removed once the
upload is complete. system still needs some polishing mind.


--
geni

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[geni]

Okey now I have a complaint the javascript appears to get in the way
of uploading .ogv files and I have no idea how to fix that.
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[Sandahl]

geni wrote:

> 2008/8/20 Chris McKenna <cmckenna@...>:
>  
>> I've just spent over 30 minutes uploading a file to Wikimedia Commons. The
>> excessive time was due to the new upload form.
>>
>> The image in question is
>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stratford_station_360_-_August_2008.jpg
>> I filled out all the sections of the form as it asked me to, but no matter
>> what I tried it would not let me upload the file, giving only the
>> unhelpful error "You must give the original source of the file, the author
>> of the work, and a license."
>> I say unhelpful because I had filled in all of the noted fields - even
>> changing them from the default to see if that mad a difference, but nope.
>> the only thing I can think of is that I hadn't selected a license from the
>> dropdown list, as I wanted to use my own custom tag
>> (user:Thryduulf/cc-by-sa-all) which wraps the standard cc template with a
>> note about my personal relicencing policy and categorises it in my user
>> category.
>> If the permission box is set to check if the licence included in there is
>> one of a known set, then if it doesn't match say so in the error message.
>> If the "none selected" license option doesn't let you upload the file then
>> you need to change the wording on it so that it doesn't imply you can and
>> give an option that says "I have added a license tag in the permissions
>> field above" that will let it upload.
>>
>> When I found the link to the old-style basic upload form (and remembered
>> how to use it) everything went swimmingly. I used the same information in
>> the manual form as I was trying to upload using the pretty form.
>>
>> I am using the latest version of Firefox 2 on 64-bit Kubuntu Linux.
>>
>> Chris
>>    
>
> Okey I've put in a sort of fix. You can now select "I have a custom
> license" in the license options (wording needs improving) and that
> drops in a temporary template which can then be removed once the
> upload is complete. system still needs some polishing mind.
>
> Thank you Geni!
>  

Sandahl


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[Charlotte Webb]

On 8/19/08, Chris McKenna <cmckenna@...> wrote:
> I've just spent over 30 minutes uploading a file to Wikimedia Commons. The
> excessive time was due to the new upload form.

My personal solution has been to disable javascript when uploading.
There are various Firefox plug-ins which allow you to blacklist
specific pages and sites from executing scripts.

—C.W.

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[Michael Maggs]

[[Commons:Project scope/Proposal]]

I have made some further revisions based on the suggestions made on the
talk page, and think (hope) we may now be ready to go live with
something like this text.  The main changes are:

*Copyedits as proposed by various users

*Make it clear that pdf and Djvu files are always in scope if another
WMF project such as Wikisource or Wikibooks finds it useful for Commons
to host them on their behalf.  That means keeping an eye on the scope of
other projects, which perhaps makes our own rules a little more fuzzy
but which ensures we are always here to support the other projects. If
their rules change and evolve, ours should too.

Is there a consensus that we can now go live with essentially this
text?  Also, given the length of this page now, would it be useful for
me to divide it up into separate sub-pages dealing with different aspects?

Michael Maggs


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[Sandahl]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=&cat=1%2C12  and search
My favorite--Flashblock-I hate flash , this extension stops it from
executing as soon as you hit the page, just click the center button if
you want to see the flash. It also speeds up page loads such as YouTube.
I like these too:
 Redirect Remover
 BlockSite
 Adblock Plus removes offensive images
Nuke anything enhanced
Remove it permanetly an a few others
Control the web don't it let control you.

Sandahl
Charlotte Webb wrote:

> On 8/19/08, Chris McKenna <cmckenna@...> wrote:
>  
>> I've just spent over 30 minutes uploading a file to Wikimedia Commons. The
>> excessive time was due to the new upload form.
>>    
>
> My personal solution has been to disable javascript when uploading.
> There are various Firefox plug-ins which allow you to blacklist
> specific pages and sites from executing scripts.
>
> —C.W.
>
>  

> _______________________________________________
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>
>  



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[Daniel Schwen-2]

> My favorite--Flashblock-I hate flash , this extension stops it from
> executing as soon as you hit the page, just click the center button if
> you want to see the flash. It also speeds up page loads such as YouTube.
And without flash you do _what_ on youtube? *shakes head in disbelief*

> Nuke anything enhanced
Uhm, sorry, but that sounds like (turn on heavy southern accent) "I don't want
none of dem fancy automobiles"

> > My personal solution has been to disable javascript when uploading.
There is reason for the upload form design. It has been discussed extensively.
If you find a bug, report it.
General Javscript bashing is just plain unhelpful.

Now if you don't want the form holding your hands you can always activate the
basic form in your prefs.
--
[[en:User:Dschwen]]
[[de:Benutzer:Dschwen]]
[[commons:User:Dschwen]]

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[Sandahl]

Daniel Schwen wrote:
>> My favorite--Flashblock-I hate flash , this extension stops it from
>> executing as soon as you hit the page, just click the center button if
>> you want to see the flash. It also speeds up page loads such as YouTube.
>>    
> And without flash you do _what_ on youtube? *shakes head in disbelief*
>  

> There is a button in the center you push which allows you to see it :)
>  
>> Nuke anything enhanced
>>    
> Uhm, sorry, but that sounds like (turn on heavy southern accent) "I don't want
> none of dem fancy automobiles"
>  

> Excuse me?
>  
>>> My personal solution has been to disable javascript when uploading.
>>>      
> There is reason for the upload form design. It has been discussed extensively.
> If you find a bug, report it.
> General Javscript bashing is just plain unhelpful.
>
> Now if you don't want the form holding your hands you can always activate the
> basic form in your prefs.
>  

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[Charlotte Webb]

On 8/20/08, Daniel Schwen <lists@...> wrote:
> General Javscript bashing is just plain unhelpful.

Don't get me wrong I love javascript, but I do believe obtrusive
interface changes (like this one) should be made only on an opt-in
basis. However it has been my experience that most of commons
disagrees.

—C.W.

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[Daniel Schwen-2]

> Don't get me wrong I love javascript, but I do believe obtrusive
> interface changes (like this one) should be made only on an opt-in
> basis. However it has been my experience that most of commons
> disagrees.

No, it would be wrong to imply that "most of commons thinks 'obtrusive
interface changes' should be shoved down everyones throat". What kind of
monsters do you think those commoners are? ;-)

The key mistake is reducing the new upload form to one single
adjective: "obtrusive" (that makes my stomach cramp up).

The new upload form was not invented to torture people, it was invented to
guide newbies (who will certainly not know how to opt-in anywhere!) through
the upload process and make them provide the necessary information that had
been omitted so often in a structured way (which burdened commons with lots
of cleanup and avoidable deletions).

The basic assumption was that the pro's (like you (no I'm not being ironic
here)) will certainly know how to opt-out.
--
[[en:User:Dschwen]]
[[de:Benutzer:Dschwen]]
[[commons:User:Dschwen]]

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[Charlotte Webb]

On 8/20/08, Daniel Schwen <lists@...> wrote:
> The basic assumption was that the pro'