On 5 May 2014 15:51, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 3:41 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I would also recommend that we optimize for option 2 and use canonical
> (English) namespace name for all files hosted on Commons, which is the
> primary use case.

Doesn't it matter more where the file is _displayed_ rather than where
it's hosted?

As a user, if I'm displaying a file in its German Wikipedia context,
chances are pretty good I'll want to embed it in a German Wikipedia
article, irrespective of whether the file is hosted on Commons. And
there, people will be annoyed if I embed it as [[File:]] rather than
[[Datei:]].

In any case, this seems like a case where whatever the community
preference is should just win (with the possible exception of the
newbie-unfrlendly option 3) from a product perspective.

If I'm looking at an image hosted on Commons on the German Wikipedia and copy the wikitext to paste it into an article on the Spanish Wikipedia (which is quite likely – say I'm helping improve the Spanish article based on the existing excellent German one, and am hoping to re-use some of the images), then (a) it won't work if you use "Datei:", and (b) I don't think the Spanish community would be particularly happy that the wishes of the German community were respected over the wishes of the Spanish community for the wikitext to actually work. :-)

As a user, the most important thing is that it works correctly. Everything else is a bonus.

--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester