Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:54 UTC
[[Special:Upload]] of MediaWiki incorporates [[MediaWiki:Edittools]] like any edit of a normal page. In contrast to normal text pages Special:Upload is concentrated on uploading of files and that the uploader does the licensing issue well and not on editing texts. So using proper special characters in the upload summary is a very very low priority, as people need actively being educated writing any plain text summary at all and you can always edit the image page later in the usual way and enter nice special characters and such in case you haven't the desired ones on your keyboard (which is very unlikely as you will most times enter the description either in english or in your native language). Currently (after a larger size reduction) MediaWiki:Edittools of Wikimedia Commons is ~2cm high [1]. So a removal of MediaWiki:Edittools from Special:Upload only would save quite some screen space at the upload form (the upload page of Wikimedia Commons [2] would easily fit in average font size on a 1152 x 864 pixel screen without MediaWiki:Edittools). A further advantage would be that the browser would not display scrollbars which additionally saves screen space and makes the interface visually more comprehensible with one view. So this would make the upload form looking less complex and people will visually concentrate better on the real important licensing things at upload. Pages at Commons: [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload
Hi Daniel! Your request about emoval of [[MediaWiki:Edittools]] from [[Special:Upload]] conflicts with Bug 4100: Make CharInsert available on [[Special:Upload]] regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]
Especially code stuff like [[Category:]], [[]] or ~~~ within MediaWiki:Edittools is widely used for uploads since existance, not only on Commons. Special characters are also needed quite often, just imagine all the people on holidays who want to upload their brilliant photos of interesting locations realtime, but who sit in front of a keyboard with a different layout (this is not as rare as you may think). So better consider reducing the nearly unsorted mass of special characters in edittools and consider adding a selector model like the one from http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Onlyifediting.js (like on de.wikipedia; only the first line is displayed) A complete removal _could_ make sense for Commons (the request is mainly thought for this project afaik), but not in general for all projects or for the distribution. Changed "product" to Wikimedia therefore.
Well I have reduced http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools already; I removed the legal disclaimer and corrected the code ([[Category:]] and such did not really work before, there is another MediaWiki parser bug) as there is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning perfectly serving that purpose. But it is still quite large. I'm aware of http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Onlyifediting.js and will definitely adapt it for Wikimedia Commons, which saves ~1cm of screen space height on all edits and will allow much more special characters sorted in a nice way. My main concern is that people are very lazy with their image descriptions and making the upload form more streamlined but yet giving them the important information and warnings did lead me to the conclusion that Edittools at the upload form are only useful for a very narrow group of people (that know most times their way around) and does has negative effects on the quality of the contributions of average uploaders. So my aim is making this a good upload form for the average. So maybe it would be a good idea if we can modify the inclusion of appearance of MediaWiki:Editttools in Special:Upload via a MediaWiki page? Like MediaWiki:Upload-helpers that could be either a different page like MediaWiki:Edittools or does incorporate just a pagename (usually MediaWiki:Edittools) or nothing if unused. That way all projects could decide easily on their own without imposing a decission of them.
I'd like if you can provide some brief rationale why you think this is a WONTFIX. Please read my last comment *how* we can make this bug *not conflicting* with #4100.
