I agree with Mark on this. Turning off external linking, if such a thing could be made possible, would be much more helpful than disabling images. Having all non-fair-use images go to commons would be great, but I'd rather wait until Single Login was implemented before enforcing this.

I've included Mark's post below since it was sent only to wikitech and this thread should be kept on foundation-l.

Angela.

On 8/22/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

I agree with what you said about the German Wikipedia, however:

I sharply disagree with what you said about "all the smaller wikis which are not constantly watched"... which Wikis are you talking about? The Small Wikis Monitoring Team (SWMT) closely watches all recent changes on all inactive / low activity Wikimedia wikis (excluding inactive Wikinewses) -- Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikiquotes, Wikibookses... -- and this includes image uploads.

So far, there have been no such abuses of image uploads on any of these wikis. There has been uploading of porn images (all of which Angela or someone else has expressly deleted), and to strange images (for example of a frog wearing a hat, for a spam page on the Gothic Wikipedia), but these are relatively infrequent, especially compared to linkspam (largely from China, Russia, Germany, and also pharmaceutical and porn linkspam in English).

Besides, "small wikis" is a very imprecise term. What do you define as "small"? Does it need more than 10.000 articles? More than 1.000? More than 100? More than 10? More than 1? "Small" is a relative term. A user of the Sicilian Wikipedia may not nessecarily think of theirs as a small Wikipedia, with nearly 2.000 articles now, but they would probably consider the Friulian Wikipedia to be small, with nearly 90 articles. German Wikipedians might consider the Chinese Wikipedia to be small, with under 30.000 articles. It's a matter of perspective -- many English Wikipedians seem to think that the English Wikipedia is THE Wikipedia, and that it is somehow entitled to better treatment or that it is much more important or something, as one can see from some of the complaints lodged by English Wikipedians against the transition to the international portal, and the incessant whinging that followed for a number of weeks. Yes, the English Wikipedia is the largest, but it did certainly get a head-start because it was started earlier than all other Wikipedias. The German Wikipedia, for example, is doing quite well considering it was founded well after the English Wikipedia.

Mark