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Make it clearer that you can use a free-form date in UploadWizard by clicking the button next to the date input
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Description

I understand the requirement for the Special uploader to require a date field to be completed to progress, however, the recent imposition of the sole requirement for an exact date to the day is an overreaction, and simply wrong. For works that were published years ago, and are now out of copyright, there is generally only the ability to specify a year, and for some photographs published in books or from archives there may only be the capacity to presume a decade. So now we are forcing an exact and not necessarily accurate date.

Possible solutions

  • rollback and not force a specific date
  • have radio buttons that allow for alternates to exact dates, eg. year only, that takes YYYY; and a circa dropdown that allows one of the existing categories, eg. year, decade, century. Flag those if you really wish to monitor

Either way, forcing people to put in incorrect data is not a solution that should be chased.

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Jdforrester-WMF renamed this task from Commons special upload requires a date but will not take a year alone to Make it clearer that you can use a free-form date in UploadWizard by clicking the button next to the date input.Aug 24 2015, 2:56 PM
Jdforrester-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.

You can click the cog icon next to the field to switch to a freeform text field.

oYLzXDL.png (107×481 px, 6 KB)

Clearly this is not obvious enough :) We could try changing it to a different icon, or just make it textual. I fear that we'll end up with something where the switcher is more prominent than the date field.

Why not detect if somebody begins a date with {{? This was a really confusing situation the first time I've experienced it.

Maybe just using "tipsy" for the tooltip (like for the [?] icons, also visible in the screenshot), which is immediate, instead of browser native tooltips (which have a delay), would help?

Ideas welcome. I'll be happy to implement a solution as soon as we come up with something sensible.

Hmm I did click an icon, not that it was intuitive (or resolved my issue).

Not in front of the uploader and don't have something to upload, but will
see what I can do to reproduce, and review.

Even the help text/refusal message could be guiding. Rather than a flat
"need date!" it could say "full date OR configure date field by... "

Change 233772 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński):
Redesign switcher between calendar and freeform date inputs

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/233772

How about this:

pasted_file (304×393 px, 25 KB)
pasted_file (108×393 px, 6 KB)

Instead of a single icon to the right we have two icon buttons, with icons (hopefully better ones) and tooltips. Thoughts?

Why not detect if somebody begins a date with {{?

Hmm, interesting, this could work well for power-users.

We can also make the option "No specific month/day" an option on the date picker.

Photo Aug 25, 12 32 59 PM.jpg (2×2 px, 568 KB)

That works for me AND it has portability for the whole system, which has
advantages.

@Billinghurst which solution did you mean works for you?

Was talking to Matma's contribution. Was via email so apologies if not in context.

Change 235052 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński):
Help users trying to input a template as upload date

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/235052

Change 233772 merged by jenkins-bot:
Redesign switcher between calendar and freeform date inputs

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/233772

MarkTraceur claimed this task.

Merged redesign, marking as resolved, this should go out to testwikis tomorrow, and Commons on Wednesday.

Change 235052 merged by jenkins-bot:
Help users trying to input a template as upload date

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/235052