--- Angela <beesley(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is great news! I'm pretty sure the plan was to keep the domain name exactly like it is now since it is a *common* resource for all Wikimedia projects (just like Meta). Hm. Lot's of images to transfer. Could the transwiki function be tweaked in order to do this? -- mav __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

Ashar- Hmmm, kind of a bad naming choice for the software then ;-) Each of these features must be judged on its merits. As you pointed out on wikitech-l, the template system provides us with a direct path towards metadata. An existing gallery system is not an option as this is not what we are trying to create here. Users are encouraged, for example, to edit captions as they see fit, or to replace images with higher quality versions. We want to use all the cool features a wiki gives us - recent changes, diffs, page histories, and so on. Wikis are something fundamentally new. Old software concepts do not apply. We need to instead think about how we transfer the benefits of the wiki to different applications. For example, there's no reason not to have a specific editing template associated with a namespace, so that all pages within that namespace have certain defined fields, and still allow diffs and versioning. As for galleries, a <gallery> tag that accepts a list of images seems like the best solution. For the actual gallery generation we may be able to use some existing code. MediaWiki, in my vision of it, should eventually be capable of intelligently dealing with a wide range of media and enable massive online collaboration on them (it could interface with network-enabled purpose- specific applications like Inkscape or the GIMP to allow several people to work on the same image at the same time). The fundamental core idea of the wiki is not just "a page that anyone can edit", but "a way for people to collaborate on content without barriers." There's indeed no need to hurry. While I find the early launch of the Commons somewhat suboptimal, I am sure that it will evolve together with the software. Regards, Erik

Erik Moeller wrote: I don't think that's really true: A wiki is just something you can edit from a web browser. Most of what it does is does in clunkier form elsewhere (editing the pages with emacs and diff'ing using CVS is a trivial example), but wikis make it easier for a non-technical user. This gallery really should have the benefits of both editability and strong database support. Whether it's better to start from an existing gallery system and add editability to it, or start from a wiki and add metadata/EXIF/etc. to it is largely a matter of preference and ease of technical implementation. -Mark