Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-25/Technology report


 * OAuth seems like a good excuse for someone to do a complete overhaul of the transfer-files-to-Commons tool Commonshelper. Commonshelpler, which has gone through a number of iterations and had several bots (the bot is what does the upload with the information you provide), has always had a number of rather serious problems. The two largest are that 1) it uses a license whitelist that's not comprehensive, meaning that the tool won't recognize as free, and thus won't transfer, files with uncommon free licenses, and 2) the output that the bot leaves on the Commons page after the upload (upload history and information from Template:Information from the original project) tend to come out either really messy, or plain incomplete. I personally use For the Common Good, which is the only good transfer tool that I know of, but it only works on Microsoft and Linux systems. Considering that there's something on the order of 400,000 images that are freely licensed and are on English Wikipedia, there is a need for a good transfer tool that doesn't require downloading and isn't OS specific. A rewrite of Commonshelper using OAuth would make sense.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  17:12, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * What Sven says, but for Commonist. I keep saying that hosting a java program on some random server, and linking to it from an unprotected page, is a double security risk. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:18, 1 January 2014 (UTC)