[I'm a bit late in the thread ...]
Stephen Gilbert sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca writes:
Until then, is there any reason why we couldn't use FTP to upload images? An anonymous FTP account allowing us to upload to, say, www.wikipedia.com/images would do the trick, and we could simply link the pictures from there.
Opening Wikipedia up to unchecked binary upload would also allow a lot of things in that we'd rather not have. Remember that when ftp was most popular, /incoming direcories where invariably (ab)used for illegal exchange of copyrighted material. This has mostly been mitigated by removing read access to the upload directory to the public. Probably also by the prolification of gratis web hosters, where warez can still easily be stored for a few days as well. So I don't know if this would become a problem.
In true WikiWiki spirit, people should be able to delete/modify uploaded material as well. This could keep us abreast of the warez problem, since our editorial staff (aka everybody) could wipe out any occurance of these. On the other hand, to prevent mischief, we would probably want to keep past revisions of binaries as well, so that people could undo changes, or merge them. Unfortunately, here the warez pop up again.
Binaries, even when they replace a thousand words, usually take more space than a thousand words. Therefore, resources may also pose a problem: disk space, access speed, network bandwidth.
While I recognize the fact that images (maybe sounds, much less animations), genuinely complement some entries (hey, one of the two pictures in /images/ came from me!), I argue for a very sparing use of these. The encyclopedias I knew and loved all had only few images. I know that these are becoming more, and the "multimedia encylopedia" is the current craze. Call me old-fashioned in that repect, but I think the advantages of these are by far over-hyped.
As an afterthought, I would want Wikipedia to stay as useful as possible to people who can't view pretty pictures (because their hardware won't show them properly, because they lack eye-sight). Add pictures if you want, but don't replace explanatory text with them.
To wrap up, these concerns make me belief that the current state of affairs with images trickling in slowly (actually, the installing of my image was not slow!) is fine. Optimisations of the process, like setting up a write-only ftp area for people to use instead of mail, are of course good.
Implementing unchecked binary upload, and keeping it until it becomes a nuisance, is also an option. You will surely survive any potentially "I told you so" calls by me. The main loss will be the implementor's time, then.