Commons:Upload Wizard feedback/Archive/2016/02

Wizard not working

Have tried the upload wizard both in Chrome and Safari and after selecting the media files I wanted to share (10 or so) I am unable to proceed at all. It shows the names of the files and the ability to delete them, but there are literally no other options for proceeding forward other than trying to select more files. Have tried adding them one by one and as a group and nothing is working. I've uploaded before on here without issues. A little help?

Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by ADPartners (talk • contribs) 19:39, 1 February 2016‎ (UTC)

The Upload Wizard is pretty much in a perpetual state of brokenness. It isn't broken for everyone all the time (it seems to be working for me at the moment), but I don't recall a time since it was introduced that we went more than a few days without people reporting enigmatic problems with indefinitely spinning wheels, freezing browsers, unhelpful error messages, or simply no way to move forward. Have you tried Commons:Upload? It tends to be much more reliable. Note that despite the name of this page, entries on this page are not likely to be read or responded to by anyone making changes to the Upload Wizard. —LX (talk, contribs) 20:26, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Negative attitude threatens project viability.

A sort of stop-all-bad-uploads unlogic is clearly what motivates the UW to be as fucked up as it is. The mindset seems to be make uploading hard to figure out. If that requires that we screw the "smart but naive first time user wanting to upload the example image", so be it. When by making it hard to figure out, we cause legitimate uploads to appear illegitimate and end up banning uploaders of good content and causing them to retire, we make the project less viable, not more viable. How is the stupidity of the idea of assuming laziness/bad faith lost on volunteers that we assume good faith toward? Do they not see their own hypocrisy? --Elvey (talk) 20:28, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Determining whether or not a work is free is a somewhat complicated problem domain. If anything, the Upload Wizard oversimplifies. It doesn't make uploading hard at all, but I do agree that it makes it harder to do things right. The old Commons:Upload provides more instructions, but that of course requires uploaders to take a moment to read up on what this project is all about. The Upload Wizard, by contrast, seems to be based on the attention deficit embracing philosophy that instructions make things harder, which is of course completely ass backwards. —LX (talk, contribs) 21:03, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Meh

Just wanted to share my frustration as I have so many pics to upload from wikimedian events and UW just won't do. Selected a first batch (<50 pics), icons kept spinning but no progress was visible after several minutes (it said only 1 of them had been uploaded). I don't really feel like learning again how to set up Commonist, so I guess I'll just dump everything on some other platform and people will get them there if they really want to. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:59, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, Elitre (WMF). I think some key Upload Wizard (UW) decision-makers seem to be unable to put themselves in the shoes of users attempting to do anything but the most basic common scenarios. I've mentioned a couple problematic cases recently; working on 'em. Join us.--Elvey (talk) 01:02, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

To be fair, I know that the multimedia team is actually working on improving upload tools. I believe my feedback above is not really actionable as it lacks some details, and I'll pay more attention in the future to write more informative and useful reports. Also, I had Internet connection issues then, so it's totally possible that that played a role. FWIW, I believe I remember having a better interaction when uploading on Facebook because the waiting time seems less (but that's because they downscale the quality, so things aren't really comparable...). Putting the content I had tried to upload here on Flickr wasn't painless: the progress bar there was also useless, but they do have a tab icon which fills up in time, and that provides a more accurate estimation of how long before it's done. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:51, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

As I now uploaded a bunch of new pics, I used UW to observe what I had missed the other time. So the progress bar told me I had to wait 25 minutes. It was still showing 25/26 some minutes later. Anyway, after several minutes, all the pics icons were still spinning and nothing seemed to happen. The green checkmarks started to appear slowly, and here's what was puzzling me the first time: even after the checkmark appeared, no thumbnail was shown. In fact, I could click on a link "show preview" for those images which were still being uploaded (and I definitely wouldn't do that, for fear of compromising the entire operation). Even after all the pics were uploaded, there were no thumbnails in sight, until I moved to the following step. I think I also found a bug, now reported here. Best, --Elitre (talk) 18:28, 28 February 2016 (UTC)