[Wikipedia-l] please support offsite imags

[Brion Vibber]

On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Hunter Peress wrote:
> Over these last few months, it has been frustrating when GFDL righteous wikipedians nix each
> others images because of fear of copyright violation. This respect for the GFDL which is extremely
> vigorous, but I feel it is also very harmful to wikipedia.

Riiiight.

> To alleviate some of this, we should allow the inclusion of offsite images. This is perfectley
> acceptable.

No, that's not acceptable at all. If you want something to appear inline,
mixed into the page in Wikipedia, it should be *part* of Wikipedia. That
means it should be hosted on the Wikipedia server, and be easily packaged
with backups, distributions, and alternative published formats.

If you'd like to *link* to external images, just like any other external
resource, that's A-OK, fine and dandy.

> Take http://news.google.com for example, which is greatly improved by the addition of
> any image seen fit, also note that not a single image there is hosted on google. I emailed them,
> and they  said that what they do eg:  <img src="http://anotherserver/file.jpg"/>  is completely
> within the realm of copyright policy.

Copyright is an unrelated side issue here.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)