On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
What I'd also love to see is a reference implementation in MediaWiki of what we consider the ideal use scenario of free media from Commons in third party wikis: searching an image, embedding it, and making the metadata accessible. With the recently added foreign file repository support, any MediaWiki installation can now easily access images from Commons. It seems like the next logical step would be a cross-wiki search interface, perhaps similar to the one that Wikia has designed for its image search.
I agree. The old idea of InstantCommons (oldest idea short of SUL, and now that's done :-) has been on my mind recently, so that's why I've been doing work with Brion in regards to the ForeignApiRepo code. While not as polished yet as I'd like, it's definitely coming along nicely. Hopefully we can get it ironed out before 1.14 is out, so we can ship MediaWiki with InstantCommons as an advertised feature.
Not to mention, it's designed to hook into _any_ MediaWiki install, enabling the sharing of images and other media between other wikis than just commons.
We could then encourage makers of other content management systems to implement a similar mechanism to add free media to content.
I would love to see Drupal, phpNuke, Wordpress, and other blogging/CMS platforms be able to use the MW api to use freely licensed media.
-Chad