On 10/11/06, bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com> wrote: Waiting... for.. SingleUserLogin... :/ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_login_specifications says "a final push to implement this is underway"... in mid-July. Well. I personally feel that getting information out of developers is like wringing water from a stone, and I have no feeling that any of the problems of Commons are anything like a priority, ever, for the developers. Look at the single most useful tool on Commons - CheckUsage. Is it part of MediaWiki? No. Or the extremely useful, but not so important, Gallery tool. Is it part of MediaWiki? No. Or how about CommonsTicker? Also no. There is talk recently about "rewriting the whole backend for images", which might allow image renaming/moving... or it might be something like SUL, and I look forward to hearing about it in 2009. The category limitations are probably the most restrictive, for simple day to day requirements. (Most images don't need to be renamed.) Our mulitlingual support is ultimately pretty poor, when we have to require categories to be in English because category redirects don't work, or there is no way to alias a category. Let alone plural/singular, capitalisation, common name/Latin name for species is still a big problem. There are two problems. One is the technical thing of how we index descriptive information about files. The second is how we encourage/enforce people to actually DO this. Contributors (and I say this in my capital C meaning) are typically focused on their page at hand in another wiki. So to them it is immediately obvious what the purpose of this file is, and how it is useful. They're not at all concerned about making sure other people will be able to use it, first and foremost by being able to *find* it. People often make comments, when they see their Gallery for the first time, like "Oh, that's wrong, I /know/ that file's not an orphan." They know because they inserted it in a Wikipedia article elsewhere. It is still an orphan on Commons, which is precisely the problem for anyone else who the file might be relevant to. cheers, Brianna

Anthony wrote: It's enabled on meta. Then again, meta doesn't get it's own server to index searches... -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

Platonides wrote: There are actually not that many messages to be sent: Yesterday there were 246 changes on user talk pages. Some of them were edited several times, some were edited by the users themselves. So it might be about 150 messages - a surprisingly low number, I think. But compared to single user login (SUL), email notification is ready to use (according to Enotif on meta). Who knows when SUL is going to be implemented? Until then it is useful to reach users of other Wikipedias that only come to commons only to upload an image every once in a while. Cheers Matthias user:matt314

On 11/10/06, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote: Email notification is done *today*. Someone just has to flip the switch. Single user login has been talked about literally for years, and still isn't done. If the only problem with flipping the switch is that "a lot of emails [will be] sent", then someone should probably do it. That's why I was hoping someone could be specific. How many additional servers would it take to support it? Or are there problems that throwing servers at a solution will not fix? Yes, this doesn't even require single login to implement. All it needs is some way to link up the accounts. But it isn't here, whereas email notification is. Anthony

Florian Straub wrote: I think "require valid email before allowing uploads" is one of those proposals which everyone but the people with the power to make it happen thought was a good idea. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 11/10/06, bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com> wrote: could set up welcome notices which include asking people to provide a link to thier home project in a certian format. -- geni

Won't work. You find there's no user page, probably a new user on commons, and you don't even have babel templates. If they don't read their talk page, they won't also read that they are asked to provide their project. This restrictions (like providing an email) were talked to add as restrictions to create the account. Otherwise, they're quite useless.