On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:29 PM, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
About purpose-specific forms.
Two of our purpose-specific forms are actually for functions that
probably shouldn't be directly through the upload form.
One is for images from Flickr. If ImportFreeImages was installed on
Commons this could be done away with.
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8854>
(This request has been open for 16 months.)
That looks nice. But if we're rewriting the upload function anyway,
how well would this integrate? Or would it be easier/prettier/more
useful to rewrite that functionality from scratch?
Another, more important, is for transferring images
from another
Wikimedia project to Commons.
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5283>
(This is open over two years.) I don't dare to hope that SUL means
this might be easier! But I'm not sure what makes it a hard problem
now.
As I can tell you from experience[1], correctly transfering the
description does make it hard:
* parsing {{Information}} templates in various languages
* parsing "freestyle text" descriptions for keywords (e.g. "self"),
again in various languages
* for images with multiple versions by different uploaders, figure out
who the original uploader of the current one is
* converting license templates from (you guessed) various languages
* some of these "local" templates have author names included where
Commonjs does not, or vice versa
* similar, various versions of {{self}}, {{self2}}, etc where multiple
licenses have to be moved within the template, or separated
* of course, templates can contain enclosed templates, which makes the
entire parsing operation spin out of control...
In summary, it requires a whole lot of parsing and special cases,
sometimes per-language, which is probably not the right approach for
core code.
But hey, we can just copy over the original description (in a language
spoken by 50 people world-wide) and wait for someone to fix it by hand
;-)
Cheers,
Magnus
[1]
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonshelper.php