On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Hunter Peress wrote: Riiiight. No, that's not acceptable at all. If you want something to appear inline, mixed into the page in Wikipedia, it should be *part* of Wikipedia. That means it should be hosted on the Wikipedia server, and be easily packaged with backups, distributions, and alternative published formats. If you'd like to *link* to external images, just like any other external resource, that's A-OK, fine and dandy. Copyright is an unrelated side issue here. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 19:47, Hunter Peress wrote: What you don't seem to understand is that adherence to the GFDL is intrinsic to the existence of Wikipedia. To be more specific, the principles of Wikipedia aren't tied to the GFDL per se, but to the idea of a permanently free resource defended by copyright, rather than threatened by it. It is not fear of copyright violation that propels us to shun using unprotected (in the Wikipedia sense) resources, but the principled stand that Wikipedia will be freely usable, undegraded, by all--and that includes not just people who go to wikipedia.org to view entries, but to people who may have some idea about how to reuse or refactor the content, and to the future generations of people who will benefit from this resource. It is this long view that puts into relief the unnecessary folly of using external images. Another way to put it: Wikipedia is an experiment, with the premise that a world-class resource can be created without relying on proprietary resources and methods. Relying on external, copyrighted images signals a failure of that experiment.

You seem to be alone in this regard. 1) You do not just want to "link" to a picture on another site, you can already do this now - you want to embed it and present it as if it were your own. news.google.com at least auto-rescales the photos and hosts them on its own servers. Not doing this wastes other people's bandwidth (costs them money, which can get us into trouble) and makes us dependent on their servers' reliability. As the number of offsite images grows, this means Wikipedia becomes increasingly fragmented and unreliable. 2) You call the respect for the GFDL "very harmful to Wikipedia". Well, perhaps you do not understand that Wikipedia is an open content project and intends to stay that way. The more non-free images we include, the harder it will become to distribute and re-use Wikipedia articles. Building an encyclopedia is only half of our mission -- our encyclopedia needs to be freely usable by everyone. 3) Offsite images invite photo vandals who post such nice pictures as http://goatse.cx -- that was one of the reasons they were turned off in the first place. Regards, Erik