The wordpress (3.3.1+dfsg-1) package in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installs a script called /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql. Since setting up the wordpress mysql database isn't trivial, lots of tutorial recommend using it (e.g., http://ubuntuserverguide.com/2012/05/how-to-install-latest-wordpress-in-ubuntu-server-12-04-lts.html). I assume the user is using wordpress with a standard LAMP stack (e.g., the one installed by tasksel, which includes apache and mysql). Most tutorials write that you only need to do two things after installing theese packages: you need to link /usr/share/wordpress to a directory that Apache sees (I did 'sudo ln -s /usr/share/wordpress /var/www/wordpress'), and you need to run this setup-mysql script (which appears to ultimately come from Debian, not wordpress itself).
However, that produced a broken installation on my system, when I issued 'sudo bash /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n wordpress localhost'. I expected this to produce a working install when I went to localhost/wordpress in a browser, but uploading was broken in two ways. First, it created a directory /srv/www/wp-uploads/$DOMAIN (don't ask me why it creates a new root-level directory: shouldn't this be in /var?), but assigned the wrong permissions to this directory. Consequently, uploads fail, producing a php error that you can see in the browser. Secondly, it creates a wordpress config file /etc/wordpress/config-$DOMAIN.php that pointed to a different directory than the above-mentioned /srv/www/wp-uploads/$DOMAIN, so that no uploaded image links work. Inspection of /var/log/apache2/error.log showed that it was looking for these files in the wrong place. I solved this by putting wp-uploads with the rest of the wordpress stuff (/var/www/wordpress/) and telling the /etc/wordpress/config-$DOMAIN.php what I had done.
Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.