Changing this would be easy, except that there's probably no limit that makes sense for all languages, and compiling a list of limits that do make sense per language seems not feasible.
And even so, this limit was added to prevent spam (T234756) to some extent - just because Chinese can have meaningful content in 1 character, doesn't make it any more immune from spam.
And there is an (even more strict - 9 characters) abuse filter that will prevent this kind of input, even if we were to lower the character count.

So, realistically, keeping the character limit (so that it continues to block some of the unwanted content) and leaning on our users to come up with clever tricks around it (for when it does prevent meaningful contributions; e.g. by adding whitespace as above) is not a bad option, IMO.

The only other thing I can think of doing would be to soften the character limit. E.g.:

• only require X number of characters for anonymous users - logged in accounts can add any amount of characters
• instead of blocking submission of short content in UW, it could just show a warning

It'd slightly open the door for more garbage content, but not too much, IMO - accounts are easily banned and likely won't abuse this.

Thoughts?

I think for languages like Chinese and Japanese, although the caption CAN be shorter than alphabetic languages, it doesn't hurt much to ask for a slightly longer sentence. Essentially what we're requesting the user to do is just provide a little more detail in the caption, which isn't a bad thing regardless of the language. Since community has already set up AbuseFilter rules to combat spam by utilizing rulesets that are even stricter than ours, as Matthias mentioned above, I think we should be encouraging longer captions in general so I'd be inclined to leave things as they are.

In T244953#5892050, @matthiasmullie wrote:

So, realistically, keeping the character limit (so that it continues to block some of the unwanted content) and leaning on our users to come up with clever tricks around it (for when it does prevent meaningful contributions; e.g. by adding whitespace as above) is not a bad option, IMO.

I should note this was inconsistent, I think; I think I tried the whitespace trick here and it didn't work, but I tried it again after giving up here on a different screen and it did work. (but maybe I only did it for one field and that was why?)

The only other thing I can think of doing would be to soften the character limit. E.g.:

• only require X number of characters for anonymous users - logged in accounts can add any amount of characters

I'd personally be happy with this or limiting it to autoconfirmed users

• instead of blocking submission of short content in UW, it could just show a warning

I'd be happy with this too.

It'd slightly open the door for more garbage content, but not too much, IMO - accounts are easily banned and likely won't abuse this.

Thoughts?

I do not believe this is an issue and the limit should not be changed. For example, the three character caption only mention the name and nothing else. Such caption is bad and meaningless as it does not provide any information at all, like is it a portrait, a photograph, a drawing?

In T244953#5892050, @matthiasmullie wrote:

It'd slightly open the door for more garbage content,

Exactly, opening the door for more bad and meaningless caption just like the one in the description.

If I am tasked to write a caption, I would put something like “李文亮的石墨肖像画”, which stand for a graphite portrait of Li Wenliang. Even a rough translation of the image title can exceed five character. So, no and NO for lowering the limit for CJK languages.

Adding a codebase/project related project tag as folks had unfortunately only added a tag of some everchanging internal team.