robchur wrote:

• Where would the user drop the file to be uploaded?
• Aside from uploading, what other action would be taken?
• What would be the best method to prompt for licencing information (where

enabled), summaries, etc?

webmaster wrote:

• I envision a 'Windows Explorer'-like interface... but if someone has a better

idea, by all means.

What happens is they would visit 'Special:WebDAV' which would load an applet (or
however you want to implement it) in a frame in on the page. It might have a
hierarchical folder structure. The structure could be sorted alphabetically or
by some other metric of choice. In theory, you could call the applet on any
page, but for on-screen real estate reasons, it might be best to have lots of
space.

Drilling down into categories would be done in the same way you do it in
Windows. As an analogy, if Hoboken were a category under New Jersey and New
Jersey under USA, drilling down in the WebDAV browser would be the equivalent of
C:\USA\New Jersey\Hoboken

Where C:\ is the top level folder, if you catch my drift...

• Aside from uploading, this would be a great interface for copy/move/delete

functionality, especially for bulk actions. Dragging overtop 3 or 4 items in the
frame, then hitting delete would allow you to delete them all simultaneously.
Before you click 'yes' to the 'are you sure?' message it would prompt you for a
comment on why you are deleting.

You should be able to do anything to the files you would do in Windows. Delete /
Add / Copy / Move / Rename / etc.

The licensing information could be handled in a few ways, I suppose. You could
switch 'views' from 'category view' into 'licensing view'. In this mode, by
moving a file into a particular license folder, you would modify the license to
match.

That may be pretty complicated to implement, but very easy to use.

An easier implementation might just be the same or similar drop-down we use
today. This of course would be enhanced by the ability to bulk/batch-load files.

I am just thinking out loud here, my ideas are certainly not the limits of what
WebDAV style uploading can provide. I bet you could even do this with AJAX.

Some other links to sites using similar technology:

http://www.box.net/info
http://www.box.net/info/uploading
https://www.DropBoks.com
http://www.openomy.com
http://www.eSnips.com
http://www.MediaMax.com
http://www.OmniDrive.com

webmaster wrote:

Facebook.com uses a similar technology to allow users to upload images.
They use an active x control though...

This is well feasible now with HTML5

UploadWizard does this...

drecodeam wrote:

i have added a patch for this on Gerrit : https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#change,3808 . I have added drag and drop support with a drop container. Please review it .

Still needs some love, but can be temporarily tested here: http://mwreview.wmflabs.org/

Change 3808 had a related patch set uploaded by MarkTraceur:
Add HTML5 drag and drop support

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/3808

I'm not currently sure how I want to approach this particular bug.

The patch that I just abandoned was old, crusty, and frankly a little lackluster.

With the UploadWizard code base looking a lot nicer, hopefully something like this is a little closer on the horizon. We could potentially even use an existing OOUI widget (with some tweaks) to accomplish this with relative ease.

However, that patch really needed to die. I was a little sick of having my name attached to the lowest patch number in Gerrit anyway.