At 04:47 PM 4/9/03 -0700, you wrote:
Over these last few months, it has been frustrating when GFDL righteous wikipedians nix each others images because of fear of copyright violation. This respect for the GFDL which is extremely vigorous, but I feel it is also very harmful to wikipedia.
To alleviate some of this, we should allow the inclusion of offsite images. This is perfectley acceptable. Take http://news.google.com for example, which is greatly improved by the addition of any image seen fit, also note that not a single image there is hosted on google. I emailed them, and they said that what they do eg: <img src="http://anotherserver/file.jpg"/> is completely within the realm of copyright policy.
The major problem with offsite images isn't netiquette or copyright: it's that the image (whether of a news event or an animal) that you link now may disappear without notice, or be replaced by something different. An article on the fall of Baghdad shouldn't suddenly be illustrated by a picture of a baby panda, or the president of Congo, or whatever else gets dropped into that slot by the external news source.