[Kde-imaging] [Bug 206842] Export to Wikimedia Commons

Guillaume Paumier guillom.pom at gmail.com
Wed May 11 21:16:14 CEST 2011


https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206842





--- Comment #11 from Guillaume Paumier <guillom pom gmail com>  2011-05-11 21:16:11 ---
(In reply to comment #10)
> 
> It work (just tested) but it use a non standard way... Right ?

Not exactly. The protocol used is fine. The main problem is with missing
information.

When you upload to Wikimedia Commons, the following information is mandatory
for each upload:
1. Description of the topic of the picture (what is it about?) (and ideally,
the language in which the description is provided)
2. Author and license (copyright information)
3. Categories (i.e. classification)

Point 2. is the most important, and is implemented almost perfectly. No work is
needed for now.

Point 1. is implemented half-way: The user is able to provide a description
when they open the export window to Commons, but it's not practical when you're
uploading multiple images. If you want to provide a different description for
each image (which is usually the case), you need to upload them one by one,
which kind of defeats the purpose of a mass uploader plugin.

So what is needed for point 1. is the ability to automatically pull the
description from the digikam database or the file metadata. Digikam provides a
very good interface to add descriptions to a picture, and in several languages
(which is ideal for Wikimedia Commons). So we just need to pull that
information and use it when we build the image description page for Commons.
Although this is not a blocker, it doesn't really make sense to release without
this feature imho.

The real blocker is point 3.: the plugin currently offers no way for the user
to provide categories for the images they upload. If we release the tool as is
and people start uploading their images without categories, they'll get a lot
of hostile messages from the Commons community who'll have to clean up their
uploads. The digikam / kipi people will get blamed because the plugin simply
doesn't allow the users to add categories.

There are two ways to fix this issue.
* One way is to do something similar to what we have for the description: add a
field in the window of the uploader, and apply the categories in that field to
all the uploads. This solution suffers from the same flaws as explained for the
descriptions: usually, the files you upload need different categories. Which
leads me to the other solution...
* Use special tags as categories. The solution is not ideal but it's the best
possible if we want to release the plugin soon (and I think it's good enough
for now). Digikam has an awesome built-in tagging interface. Let the user use
it to indicate the Commons categories they want for each picture. All you need
to do is make these category-tags special in some way. For example, you (as
developers) can decide that Commons categories will be the tags that have the
"Category:" prefix. Or that they're the tags that have the "Wikimedia Commons
categories" parent tag. In any case, the user can add these tags to their
images (using the names of existing Commons categories that they'll find on
Commons), and when they upload the files, you simply read the special tags
assigned to each image. Done.

Also, each picture that is missing either a description, or an author, or a
license, or at least one category shouldn't be uploaded. I realize this is a
bit cumbersome, but it's the way things work for now on Commons. Maybe in a
future evolution of the plugin, we can offer a better interface to explain this
and encourage the user to provide the information.

Another point: the plugin is technically able to upload to any
MediaWiki-powered site, but the interface doesn't provide a way to specify that
wiki. I recommend to advertise the plugin as a "Wikimedia Commons export
plugin" for now, and rename the appropriate files/folders. I completely agree
that it'd be nice to provide a generic export plugin to any MediaWiki site, but
for now we don't have that.

For the same reason, I recommend to remove the drop-down menu in the export
window that lets the user choose between the test Wikipedia, the French
Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia as target for the upload. Those were fine
for testing, but for production use, we should only upload to Wikimedia
Commons, not to any of the three wikis currently in the drop-down menu.

There are other things that should be improved, but the list above summarizes
the most important items. For me, it was easier to list everything here, but
feel free to break the list into several bugs if you find it more convenient. 

Last, here's a list of easy things to fix for which I can provide patches in
the next few days:
* The description page that is generated has a few issues, mostly due to extra
spaces.
* We should add a tracking category to know which images were upload with the
kipi plugin.

If something is unclear in what I listed here, please let me know in the
follow-up comments. I'll do my best to answer in a timely manner.

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