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Upload Wizard should display standard abbreviations for Creative Commons Licenses
Closed, ResolvedPublicFeature

Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where): In the rebuild of the upload wizard, the license selector did a much better job describing the CC licenses with text, making clearer explanation of what the user is giving away when licensing their content. However, most communication of the CC licenses outside of the selector (including our license templates, but also according to the Creative Commons itself: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/ ) use the abbreviations (i.e. CC-BY-SA 4.0, CC-BY 4.0, CC-0, etc). This is how the vast majority of license users "speak" about the licenses when training others, participating in professional events, and give attribution to the license in captions and metadata.

image.png (720×281 px, 72 KB)

Requested change: add the abbreviations to the licenses to the text so that users who learned about Wikipedia's use of cc licenses will understand the relation between the common shorthand, and the options we are offering.

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):

  • When a Wikimedia Commons trainer is showing others the upload wizard, the most common language for license choices is visible in the interface.
  • When uploaders have never seen the full title of a cc licenses, they understand the meaning of the full title.

Benefits (why should this be implemented?): Users will be able to more easily explain the license selector to others when using upload wizard.

Event Timeline

Adding a mock with abbreviations for reference.

License naming in UW.png (2,410×812 px, 185 KB)

@Sneha I would put the abbreviations in parenthesis personally to distinguish it from the, and code it as an untranslatable string

I left them out of parentheses since “learn more” and the copy below is already in parentheses... it felt cleaner to avoid having so many parenthesis in the same area. Is it possible to distinguish them in the backend?

Change #1189955 had a related patch set uploaded (by Sohom Datta; author: Sohom Datta):

[mediawiki/extensions/UploadWizard@master] Add standard abbreviations of licenses to selection menu

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1189955

@Sneha @Sadads I've opted to do something like this:

Screenshot from 2025-09-20 14-46-09.png (800×308 px, 50 KB)

as a middle ground where the license abbreviations are parenthesised but the learn more link is not.

Change #1189955 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/UploadWizard@master] Add standard abbreviations of licenses to selection menu

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1189955

Change #1224026 had a related patch set uploaded (by Lucas Werkmeister (WMDE); author: Lucas Werkmeister (WMDE)):

[mediawiki/extensions/UploadWizard@master] Correct Creative Commons license abbreviations

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1224026

Change #1224026 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/UploadWizard@master] Correct Creative Commons license abbreviations

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1224026

Aklapper assigned this task to Soda.

Patch merged half a year ago, assuming this is resolved. If not, please reopen. Thanks!