I am pretty sure the file storage transition thing will also allow image renaming as a consequence.
The limited details I have found about it are at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap ("Expand FileStore to all image storage for filename reform, better cache/mirroring ability") and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FileStore .
I wouldn't expect it before a year after SUL...
It's in the long term plans for mediawiki to support filenames which are unrelated to the file type.... but even using that will require massive renames on commons. Does anyone have any suggestions? There are a lot of possibilities.
I would imagine some renaming thing would be part of the transition, don't you? Even if it was just Foo.jpg to Foo-jpg or 'Foo jpg'.
I don't see why 'massive renames' would be needed (ie. people renaming images). The software treating Image:Foo as the former Image:Foo.png wouldn't be *so* difficult. The script would only have problems with Image:Foo.png and Image:Foo.jpg
Problem with search engines is that they are being too inteligent. Posible solutions:
*Use <a type="text/html" href=".../Image:Foo.png"> **I wasn't expecting it, but the a element *supports* the type attribute. **Validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional **Search engines probably don't support it, but we are providing the tags.
*Append .html to image pages. **URLs will look ugly /wiki/Image:Foo.png.html
*Use index.php URLs **Either ***/w/index.php?title=Image:Foo.png ***/w/index.php/Image:Foo.png **Not-so-nice urls. **/w/ URLs are currently blocked on robots.txt **Squids would cache less.
Platonides