[Wikipedia-l] please support offsite imags

[Erik Moeller]

> 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.

You seem to be alone in this regard.

1) You do not just want to "link" to a picture on another site, you can  
already do this now - you want to embed it and present it as if it were  
your own. news.google.com at least auto-rescales the photos and hosts them  
on its own servers. Not doing this wastes other people's bandwidth (costs  
them money, which can get us into trouble) and makes us dependent on their  
servers' reliability. As the number of offsite images grows, this means  
Wikipedia becomes increasingly fragmented and unreliable.

2) You call the respect for the GFDL "very harmful to Wikipedia". Well,  
perhaps you do not understand that Wikipedia is an open content project  
and intends to stay that way. The more non-free images we include, the  
harder it will become to distribute and re-use Wikipedia articles.  
Building an encyclopedia is only half of our mission -- our encyclopedia  
needs to be freely usable by everyone.

3) Offsite images invite photo vandals who post such nice pictures as  
http://goatse.cx -- that was one of the reasons they were turned off in  
the first place.

Regards,

Erik