I just tried (for the first time :-) this Mobile/Web upload myself. (I don't use these newfangled smartphones :-), but it occurred to me that I could try this in my desktop browser, too...) Here's my experiences:
- Just copied a random file from the Internet on my computer.
- Tried Special:Uploads on the mobile site and tried to upload it. Good: it displays below the "Contribute an image" button thumbnails of images I had already uploaded. I like that, but it leaves me perplexed why some users keep uploading images they already had uploaded before. Maybe they don't see the thumbs on a small smartphone screen?
- Since the file did not contain any EXIF, I did indeed get the warning popup "this file looks suspicious...". Good!
- Added a minimal EXIF as it appears to be added by some smartphones: just a EXIF:ColorSpace=sRGB. Nothing else. Tried again.
- This time I got no warning.
- Noticed the "I took this image" line. Hm, that's not true. So even if I wanted to correctly attribute the image, I couldn't.
- There's a link "What does this mean?" below. Clicked on that and got a completely uninformative blue page containing the image https://bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.24wmf13/extensions/MobileFrontend/less/modules/images/uploads/page1.png and the text "Contribute your images. Help Wikimedia Commons come to life! Images on Wikimedia Commons come from Wikimedia Commons". That's all. Huh??? I would have expected some explanation that I must not upload images that I did not take myself, plus a warning that if I upload third-party images, they will be deleted, plus a mention to respect third party copyrights. In fact, there might be space to put such a mention right below that "What does this mean?" link: "Respect third-party copyrights: only upload your own images!". Possibly even "Respect third-party copyrights: only upload your own images! Do not upload images from other websites."
- Entered a description and uploaded. Result: a prototypical bad upload that I then deleted right away.
- Repeat with the same file. This time I entered a single blank as description. Upload button becomes enabled.
- Click the upload button. Whoa! I get no error feedback, but the upload is just not made.
- Created a new user account and went (manually, since I don't get the link) to Special:Uploads. The tutorial shown is the same blue page as in point (7) above. I just hope that works with real smartphones. Somebody please check that the tutorial works. It doesn't for me (FF 30.0 on OS X).
So, three improvements:
- Verify that https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Uploads#/upload-tutorial really works. If it does for you, let's assume this is a quirk on my end.
- Add a short "respect copyrights" after the "What does this mean?" link on the description page, possibly with text as suggested above.
- Do not enable the upload button unless the description contains valid text, or if you do enable it and then can't perform the upload (single blank test above), provide an error message and let the user re-try.
All in all, this looks like a nicely streamlined upload process with only one (big) problem: how to make users understand that they absolutely MUST NOT upload third-party images through it?
(One possibility: run (server-side) a Google image search for each Mobile/Web upload (synchronously) and refuse the upload if it indicates more than one hit. May give a few false positives, but not many.)
Or how to improve or "un-streamline" this so that people like [[User:Qpeezee]], who mostly uploads PD-old images, has a way of saying "no, I didn't take this picture, it's from XYZ, was made by ABC, and is so old that it must be PD-old-100"? With the current process, his uploads end up wrongly labeled as "own work" and then usually get a "no source" tag.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62598