On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:32 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Although, as it stands right now we're really encouraging unattributed use. ... Our thumbnailing even strips EXIF copyright information. :(
Well, that at least could probably be fixed easily enough. Of course, even if they just hotlink the thumbnail with no comment, you can still look at the URL and track down its contributors, if you know how. Rather like how in Wikipedia articles, the images are used without clear attribution, and you have to know to click the image to track down the contributors . . . although there's a difference of degree here, it's true.
One click vs.. I don't agree that it's at all comparable .
Which is kind of like saying that if an overwhelming majority of third-party reusers of Wikipedia dumps are not following the rules, we should stop providing the dumps. Wikimedia needs to stay within what is legal and moral itself. It doesn't need to punish legitimate reusers because of a majority's illegal or immoral actions. If contributors want to DMCA hotlinkers who don't provide attribution, that sounds like a good idea to me.
But see in the hotlinking case we're an active participant. It doesn't continue without our help. Besides, as I pointed out.. there are clear actions which we can take to mitigate the harm: good linking instructions, offering extensions to popular blogging platforms, and preserving/filling out image metadata. We can do these things, I don't think anyone would disagree that they'd help a lot.. and since we're an active (and now knowing) participant to the bad behaviour I'd argue that we must.
But ... I don't think we should limit hotlinking.
Rather, I think we should encourage it... but we should encourage doing it right by promoting extensions that provide links back to the image pages, and by having mediawiki provide example HTML copy and past which does the right thing.
Now there's a good idea. Every other image-upload software package does that. Let me see if I can't code that up right now.
Cool. 'nuff. You might want to hunt down mangus little JS example. I can't find it at the moment, but the user interface was pretty reasonable as I recall.