Last modified: 2014-10-07 03:50:34 UTC
Wikipedia's upload page seems to have a SpecialUpload.php hack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload) which contains a dropdown for licensing information. It would be extremely helpful to bring that functionality to the core for all other MediaWiki users as well. What I propose is two drop downs, enabled/disabled in localSettings.php, for categorization and licensing tags. The localSettings.php entries would have an array() which would contain the data for each of the customizable dropdowns. eg. $wgLicenseArray('Fair Use', '{{fairuse}}'); eg. $wgCategoryArray('Images of People', '{{peopleimages}}'); I believe even Wikipedia could benefit by soft-coding the customizable dropdowns, instead of using a hard-coded SpecialUpload.php hack.
Well this bug report is nice and quick to resolve. The functionality described does indeed exist in MediaWiki; version 1.6. See, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses to see how it's set up using templates and licence descriptors.
Hey Rob! Thanks for the info, I didn't know about that. I have a quick question for you... Does it also allow for a second/third/etc dropdown? As I mentioned, I was hoping for not only a license dropdown, but one for image categorization, too...
I have re-opened the enhancement request... I changed the title to reflect that the license dropdown already exists, but the opportunity for a 2nd/3rd/etc dropdown on the upload page should be considered a seperate request. I envision it for categorization of the images, such as: Animals, People, Buildings, Landscapes, etc. This would be extremely useful, especially for the creative commons folk. We could implement it the same was as the license dropdown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses), or less user-friendly, but we could look at my earlier suggestion in the first post.
Problem is, that's a lot of categories, which would be one hell of a performance killer.
No no... I don't think an auto-generated list of categories would ever work... Even on a small wiki, there can be dozens of categories. Which I agree would generate an extremely ugly dropdown and a massive SQL query. I am thinking more about a manually edited list of categories, possibly populated by an array in LocalSettings.php. Small wikis could choose their top 10 categories, as I listed above. The larger wikis such as commons, could use the list to divide and prioritize image uploads into more general topics. Such topics could be: Persons, Places, Things, High-Importance, Low-Importance, etc. These 'generalized' categories would at least give the creative-commons maintenance folk something to work with. As well, it would drastically cut-down on the number of images that are completely uncategorized. Brand-new images may not be categorized into the most specific area, but at least they could be found and used almost immediately. I contend that this feature would be extensively used by all WikiMedia projects and by a great portion of non-WikiMedia projects as well. The license dropdown surely can attest to the success of such a software convenience. Speaking for our 2 projects alone, this would be an invaluable addition.
Hey Brion, Rob has some interesting thoughts on this... I don't suppose you have any ideas how this could be made to work, do you? Again, I am not referring to any massive list of categories here, but rather sort of a quick-and-dirty way of organising images into more general categories, based on a list like the Licenses. I really think the Commons admins would love this feature... Thanks!
Commons dealt with this issue by abusing the ?uselang= parameter (see http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=ownwork, http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=fromflickr, http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=fromwikimedia and http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=fromgov).
That should definitely work nicely. Thanks Titoxd! This functionality might still be useful for someone else, but I believe Titoxd's solution should work for me. I would be fine if the powers-that-be wanted to close this as wontfix... Cheers!
No, that abuse is hacky and unacceptable as a fix for this from a software perspective. I can't blame them for using it for lack of alternatives, though.
Agreed, a dropdown or some other option-selector device would be more ideal, long-term. Keep it open. ;)
I was wrong, that solution wasn't what I was expecting. There definitely needs to be a more proper solution for this scenario. Clearly, Commons needs it as much as I do...
Using javascript (AJAX, whatever), multiple dropdowns/listboxes could be created starting with the root/top-level categories and working their way down relative to what's selected. CategoryTree could also be integrated into the upload and edit pages to select categories for things (but it should show # of subcats too). Also, looking at the database tables, there is a LOT of repeated info in the "categorylinks" table with category/article names instead of their numeric (less bytes) IDs.
UploadWizard allows licenses and categorisation. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UploadWizard HotCat can categorise files on upload https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:HotCat Is this enhancement request still necessary? If so, it probably should be part of bug 167 / bug 27312 (with one of them as a dependency for this bug).
