On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote: With an offline submission queue? Not yet implemented. :) Nope. Here's the situation: the use of full URLs to images creating tags to embed/inline the external image directly into the wiki page has been disabled on the English Wikipedia since some months ago. This was done for three reasons: 1) We have support for uploading images directly, making the use of external images redundant. The vast majority of images used on Wikipedia at that time were in fact those uploaded to meta.wikipedia.com, and which had been automatically transferred into the upload area and turned into inline image links ([[image:foobar.jpg]]). 2) Concerns about continued availability of third-party resources. Links die on a regular basis through moving or disappearance of the linked page. The same happens with images; I at least would prefer that things we embed directly into our pages should be available as long as our pages are. 3) Somebody was inserting a lot of URLs to goatse.cx images, which we would prefer to discourage. ;) It's harder to hide an image upload, which goes into a big shiny log page, and quicker to remove the resulting file and squash all uses of it. Hfastedge's complaint, meanwhile, seems to be brought on by my deletion of the Tibetmap.jpg which he had uploaded and inserted into [[Tibet]]. It was a modified (removal of text) version of an image taken from a copyrighted site, which itself was a modified (removal of logo and copyright notice) version of an image taken from a copyrighted site which had a copyright notice directly in the original image. *Links* to images on external sites are absolutely okay and wonderful, just as are links to text on external sites. But *links* do not embed external resources directly into our pages as though we were publishing them ourselves, but without all the benefits of maintainability. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Zoe wrote: It might come as a surprise to you, but some contributors actually prefer to write new contents rather than *actively* monitoring the Recent Changes page for possible copyright infringements. Lacking a scientific census or poll, I would rank user activity by descending size: 1) Reading, 2) writing, 3) policing, and 4) vandalizing. We're very happy that activity (3) is bigger than activity (4), but I also assume that activity (2) is bigger than activity (3). I could be wrong, and it would be very interesting to see actual numbers if anybody has tried to measure this. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/

Lars Aronsson wrote: *PREFER*, yes. But SOMEONE has to monitor RC for copyright & junk edits.