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Enable uploading playlists and a user's videos/audios via video2commons
Open, In Progress, MediumPublicFeature

Description

Context: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist/W443

This is mostly done, but there are some loose ends - particularly checking yt-dlp if we can filter by CCBY because those are the videos we want in commons. Some pending discussions on the talk page.

Event Timeline

mikez-WMF changed the task status from Open to In Progress.Feb 13 2026, 10:06 AM
mikez-WMF assigned this task to Amdrel.
mikez-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.
mikez-WMF moved this task from Backlog to In Progress on the Community-Wishlist board.

This seems to be about video2commons - please add codebase project tags so tasks can be found. Thanks!

Ah yes sorry, I forgot! Thank you for adding.

@Prototyperspective points out that checking for CCBY should be possible with yt-dlp command parameters like:

--match-filters "license=Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)" --parse-metadata "CC-BY-4.0:%(meta_license)s"

Maybe we have a spinoff wish/ticket for the part of the wish about all videos depending on the effort required - @Prototyperspective also points out downloading all videos should be possible with yt-dlp with command parameters as such:

--download-archive "~/listoffilesdownloaded.txt" --match-filter '!is_live'

Hiding non CC-BY videos from the upload list could result in issues uploading public domain content that we have the right to upload. An example of this I came across is government works, which depending on the laws of the country are often public domain, though not always. Videos uploaded by the U.S. federal government often don't have public domain labels on YouTube even though they may be fine to upload (e.g. videos on the White House channel). I think we should instead inform the user about the license of each video in the playlist and preselect any videos that have valid licenses. Here is an example of what this would look like:

A playlist full of videos with CC-By-4.0 videos:

Screenshot 2026-02-16 at 2.55.36 PM.png (1×1 px, 256 KB)

A playlist containing government works produced by the HHS:

Screenshot 2026-02-16 at 3.06.46 PM.png (908×1 px, 123 KB)

If needed, we can also add a warning that asks the user to confirm that the videos they're uploading are freely licensed or public domain whenever ambiguously licensed content is selected from the playlist.

@Amdrel Yes, that's a good point. I was aware of this caveat but thought this would be best addressed later on separately. Usually, it's most useful to exclude the videos that are not CCBY videos from the multiselect. Sometimes as with your examples that's different. As a solution I'd propose to exclude them by default but somewhere in the UI there include a toggle button eg 'Show non CCBY' which also shows these (maybe unselected by default with the rest being selected by default). Or something similar to this. I think this would be much better than showing all videos of the channel excluding only the ones already uploaded by somebody to Commons. With such a toggle option one can use the appropriate approach per channel. The warning message box would be useful.

I will quickly ask the UX designer who originally helped with the mocks last quarter, while I also think about these other implications and who to loop in.

We can show the non CCBY video rows on the table in disabled/greyed out state and include a toggle button at the page level to show hide them. Like file browsers where unsupported files are shown but are greyed out and can't be selected.