Commons talk:WMF support for Commons/Upload Wizard Improvements

Your Feedback Needed

Hello everyone! We are delighted to share with you our current designs for improving UploadWizard. Current designs for the “release rights” part include:

• Choosing the “own work” vs “not own work” step
• Specifying release right information for both “own work” and “not own work”

You can see the screenshots and the working prototype in the main project page.

These changes will try to make the upload process more intentional, so that it could prevent upload of content not intended for Commons and could decrease future burdens for administrators.

Our designs are based on the feedback we received from uploaders and moderators on Commons that we interviewed from July to September 2023. You can learn more about this by reading our initial report on uploader research and the summary of the administrator interviews (a full report on our investigations will be shared at a later time).

We are looking for your feedback about these designs for the “release rights” step improvement, that we have validated with several user tests.

In addition to the general question about what do you think about our proposal, we have some more specific questions to ask you:

Questions about “Own work” flow

1. Do you think that re-ordering licenses from most free to least free (i.e. CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) would improve understanding of the licenses from users? What are your thoughts on the order of licenses?
2. Is there a recommended license uploaders should select for their own work?
3. In these designs there is no default select option, in order to encourage more intentionality in choosing the license from uploaders. What do you think about it?
4. We added an option for those who realized a media with the help of an AI tool. Do you think it’s necessary or helpful to add this information or not? How should this info be made clear (template, tag, …)?

Questions about “Not own work” flow

1. Are there any situations where the uploader doesn’t need to enter “author” information other than the ones captured in the designs?

Thanks in advance! - Udehb-WMF (talk) 10:12, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi, File:Upload Wizard improvements - Own work.png and File:Upload Wizard improvements - Not own work.png are quite an improvement, but be aware "works in public place" is not sufficient in many countries, where there is no freedom of panorama. What is bulletproof copyright-wise are pictures of people, nature, plants, events, vehicles, etc. Yann (talk) 10:17, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

First, it is an improvement, but it adds quite a number of extra clicks for own work - four or five. This is quite a lot. We can consider giving some trusted users a right to skip this part (either by assigning a new user right, or in some other way), or pre-filling the defaults. In any case, CC-BY-SA 4.0 is the default version and should be the first in the list. We should also realize that many users do not understand the difference between these licenses very well, and should either add some text, or remove the box anyway (e.g. by pre-filling cc-by-sa 4.0 and leaving and option open for changing the license).--Ymblanter (talk) 10:25, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

• There is disparity between the wording "anyone is free to use it" and "is free to share". The two should be made consistent.
• The wording "Do you know what Creative Commons licence this was published under" is inappropriate; there are many acceptable licences that are not by CC.
• The wording "the author is now unknown" is problematic, as it does not differentiate between "not known [to the uploader]" and "cannot be determined"
• The wording "Please confirm... does not include any copyright material" excludes de minimis cases
• The wording "photos of myself, my family..." is problematic because we often ask article subjects or their relatives to donate photos; and allow Wikimedians to upload a selfie for their user page

Has any A-B testing of the above, and other new wording, vs. alternatives, been done? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:46, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your detailed feedback, Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing). We appreciate your insights on the wording and its implications.To address your question about A-B testing, we've conducted user tests and iterations for these specific improvements. These changes are thought-through from both a design and legal perspective. That said, community feedback like yours is crucial to us. We're actively collecting responses to understand how we can further improve the workflow. Your points will be considered as we continue to refine the current improvements to Upload Wizard. Udehb-WMF (talk) 17:08, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

The 50 files limitation

New users have a 50 files limitation. When they try to upload more than 50 files the upload wizzard simply crashes and no files get uploaded. It is convenient that this happens after the user has completed all the work in naming the file, giving the description and searched for categories and put in a lot of work and effort, which is then gone in a second without a warning or explanation. The program should either block the upload of more than 50 files or inform the user about this limitations. This bug has created a lot of frustrations to new user and they have no clue what went wrong. This is an effective procedure to keep new users frustrated and deter them forever from contributing to Commons ever again. Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 14:25, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

The wrong orientation bug

The preview shows uploaded pictures without regards of the orientation. This affects pictures in portrait mode. The preview shows them tilted sideways in 90° angle. New Users that do not know about this bug often delete it and try it a second time or even multiple times before they give up. But they simply keep showing up in the wrong direction each time. They think they have done something wrong, or something is wrong with the camera or the picture. Others report on the user forum and ask about pictures that got uploaded in the wrong orientation. We even had cases where the picture was rotated by another user and then were upside down, all the while the uploaded picture does not even need rotation, it is just that the user got tricked into believing that the picture was uploaded in the wrong orientation. This annoying bug is a good way to introduce new users into a world with half-baked software designed to make beginners life harder and create confusion and make them doubt their choices in life. To contribute to commons for example. Soooo, please admit to the bug and tell the user ahead that in preview some pictures might appear in wrong orientation, ooooor fix it, that the user can see the true orientation of the picture. But long time users are no longer in panic, but annoyed by this bug too. Imagine you made a series of portraits and want to choose the best of the files. It is very hard to determine that you have picked the perfect file when you see it in the wrong orientation in preview. Our brains are not used to see and process portraits rotated at a 90° angle, and you no longer can see if the face shows the desired expression or emotion or the small differences between different versions. So please FIX it. Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 14:48, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Dropdown list for less common licenses and "license builder" for beginners

I think it would be nice to have a drop down menu for licenses like "PD-scan", "PD-EU-anon", GNU GPL, Apache etc, maybe also grouped by Copyleft licenses, by Public Domain licenses, Software licenses etc.

Also it would be good if there is a guide that provides the best license. Questions could be: What kind of file is this? (Photo, Screenshot, Video), Is it your own work?, Is it a derivative work and by whom? Do you want to assure that your work must be always under the same license, when edited? ...

Greetings --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:09, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Create new commonscats when uploading

I am one of the busiest Wikipedia photographers in Germany and use the Upload Wizard all the time because it's quick and easy. I would like to create new commonscats in one go when uploading, but if you want to specify a commonscat that does not yet exist in the upload form, the technology of the upload form is inconvenient. Can you do something about that? Greatings Ricardalovesmonuments (talk) 15:37, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

I am also thinking about creating a customized commonscat for myself with predefined categories (I am uploading about 10 images per day on average), but it would take more than 10 minutes, and I just can not find time to write it. Ymblanter (talk) 16:25, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

When I go on vacation or long weekends in places and/or areas with a rich collection of art and architectural historical buildings, I often take 100 to 175 pictures per day. Since I always start the next tour right after breakfast, it is necessary to have the photos uploaded before I go to sleep. greetings Ricardalovesmonuments (talk) 16:33, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, I still post-process all the photos, I typically upload them many months after they were taken. Anyway, interests of mass-uploaders (minimizing the number of actions) should be taken into account. Ymblanter (talk) 17:03, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

+1, sometimes, the upload limit of 500 uploads is not enough :D --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:10, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

@PantheraLeo1359531 The upload restrictions can be overcome when you run several instances of the Upload Wizard. Just a suggestion. But it will consume your bandwith as well and will not save you time. I use that to upload pictures of different scope in order to be able to use the copy function. I use the time as one windows loads up to fill in the descriptions of the other windows. Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 22:45, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank your for the suggestion, I sometimes try a similar strategy, but it depends on the browser stability and sometimes some processes are lagging temporarily, like publishing :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:04, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

If creation of categories is added, it should also create the wikidata item for the new category (and insert the "wikidata infobox" template into the category description). This way the depict statement of the upload image can be made the new wikidata item. C.Suthorn (@Life_is@no-pony.farm - p7.ee/p) (talk) 16:36, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

I am a bit confused by this request. The main work of creating new categories is not in technically creating it, but in choosing under which categories it should be sitting and in possibly moving existing images from those top categories there. I usually do this before I start my uploads. Others do this before they even start their photowalks, while choosing the route.

Upload wizard of course could create pages that look like categories, perhaps it could suggest top categories for certain kinds of categories, but only for very limited cases like putting a new "Interior of xyz building" under "xyz building". But I see no way the work of friendly users like Luftschiffhafen, who is doing a lot of this work for you, could be done by a tool like the upload wizard. How do you imagine this to work? What kind of input would you think the upload wizard would need and how would giving this input easier then creating the Categories before uploading? Kritzolina (talk) 15:47, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

@Kritzolina the point is precisely that if I want to upload pictures of Chapel YXZ (of which there is no Commonscat yet) and want to enter the exact category name of the chapel in the category field of the Upload Wizard and the upload technique does not want an existing cat instead, and accepted my input. As a result of uploading and sending images, the new category is displayed as if you were moving images into a new category, which you then created by adding main categories. This is exactly how it should work. It's a mystery to me why you didn't understand that for God's sake, you actually seem obtuse to me. Greetings Ricardalovesmonuments (talk) 18:29, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, always happy to have my intelligence judged by people who don't know me. Perhaps try to explain what you want again in German in very simple words even an obtuse person can understand? Your English seems a bit confusing to me, sorry. Kritzolina (talk) 18:52, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Ich bin einer der meistbeschäftigten Wikipedia-Fotografen in Deutschland und nutze den Upload-Assistenten ständig, weil er schnell und einfach ist. Ich würde beim Hochladen gerne auf einmal neue Commonscats erstellen, aber wenn man im Upload-Formular einen Commonscat angeben möchte, der noch nicht existiert, ist die Technologie des Upload-Formulars unpraktisch. Können Sie etwas dagegen tun? Der Punkt ist genau der, wenn ich Bilder von Chapel YXZ hochladen möchte (von denen es noch keinen Commonscat gibt) und den genauen Kategorienamen der Kapelle in das Kategoriefeld des Upload-Assistenten eingeben möchte und die Upload-Technik dies nicht möchte stattdessen die vorhandene Katze und akzeptierte meine Eingabe. Durch das Hochladen und Senden von Bildern wird die neue Kategorie so angezeigt, als würden Sie Bilder in eine neue Kategorie verschieben, die Sie dann durch Hinzufügen von Hauptkategorien erstellt haben. Genau so sollte es funktionieren. Ich benutze den Google Übersetzer, mein eigenes Englisch reicht für sowas nicht aus. --Ricardalovesmonuments (talk) 19:10, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Also das klingt jetzt so, als wolltest du etwas, was schon exisitiert. Der Uploadwizard akzeptiert durchaus Kategoriennamen, die noch nicht existieren. Er schlägt zwar andere vor, aber wenn man auf der neuen Kategorie besteht, ordnet er die neuen Bilder dort auch ein. Diese wird dann allerdings rot und nicht blau angezigt. Wenn man anschließend auf die dann immer noch rot angezeigte Kategorie geht, findet man dort die Bilder und kann Top-Kategorien hinzufügen. Und andere Bilder aus den Top-Kategorien hinzufügen.

Ohne das Selbstlob am Anfang, geht das alles übrigens auch ... ^^ Kritzolina (talk) 19:18, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Examples given in the mock-ups

First of all, thanks for working on this. These will be important improvements, once they really work. Still I have some critical points about the examples given in the mock-ups. My first impression - the examples given are way to vague to be useful. The list given further up by Yann is already more useful than the list on the mock-up, even though it still has issues. Please try and put time into choosing really good examples. The only place where the mock-ups give examples, they are not on point. When you list picutres of oneself, family and friends it misses the points, that these people a) might be notable for Wikipedia, or b) might be photographed in a way to illustrate something educational, like doing a ritual or tradition that is immaterial UNESCO-heritage, or to show symptoms of a disease, or taking part in a notable event. Please also remove the word "encyclopedic" from the scope explanation, Commons is not only useful for illustrating Wikipedias, but used as an educational resource with a much wider scope. Kritzolina (talk) 08:13, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, please replace "encyclopedic" by "educational" and make sure to link COM:SCOPE. El Grafo (talk) 09:29, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

@Kritzolina @El Grafo Thanks for your feedback! Also, we already are working on a different wording for the "encyclopedic" part, since this piece of feedback was already shared by another user yesterday on Telegram. We are thinking of rewording it linking directly to Commons' guidelines, but we are still defining the new message. We'll get back at you when we're ready. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 11:53, 11 October 2023 (UTC)