Jimbo wrote:

And images.wikimedia.org would be a project unto itself, so to speak, where images are collected (perhaps automatically) and copied from the other projects, and given neutral captions, and entered into a big image library. The rules for inclusion in *this* would be very strict, not relying on fair use. All images would have to be public domain or GNU FDL or something compatible.

I like that idea! But just replace "images.wikimedia.org" with either "files.wikimedia.org" or "multimedia.wikimedia.org" (since we want more than just images), and replace "project" with "sub-project" (since its resources would be used by all projects - like meta). This also preserves the per wiki upload utility which would be oddly disabled for Wikimedia projects under my plan but would still be needed by non-Wikimedia projects that use MediaWiki (thus there would be little Wikimedia developer interest to maintain that functionality). But there would need to be a prominent mention and link to the multimedia file database on every Wikimedia project's upload special page. Something like "You can use this page to upload multimedia files from your harddrive. But you may also want to visit [our multimedia file database] to see if a similar file is already there."

Then when the much-talked-about upload form is enacted, the software could automatically copy anything tagged as PD or under a free content license to the Wikimedia database. Anything marked as "fair use" or "special permission" would just reside on the wiki's own upload space.

And then if people needed an image for something, they could just copy it from there.

Why copy when you can export! :) There could be an "Export this <filetype> to the [<language>] [<Wikimedia project>]" as <file name>.<ext>" (it would also be neat if it showed everywhere in Wikimedialand where it is being used). Oh and anything exported to a different file name should not create a copy of the same file at the Wikimedia file database under a different name. Category tags can also be used here as well (that would help with searching).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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