Rowan Collins wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
On 03/07/05, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
load licensing information directly from the Commons when viewing a local image description page.
This is, probably, an improvement, but an imperfect solution - as pointed out at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2689, it places the commons text directly *before* any locally-entered text with no visual separation (sub-headers would be nice).
this is fixed now. MediaWiki:Shareddescriptionfollows is displayed before the commons text.
And as I point out there, it makes more urgent the need to work out how to make the Commons truly language-independent: neither descriptions only in English, nor a huge list of translations, are really practicable for including on other projects like this.
this is a separate bug. :)
i think the best way to solve both of these is to first implement localised image description pages on Commons itself (e.g. "Image:An_image.jpeg/de") based on user's selected interface language, then implement a general URL parameter "&uselang=de" (or whatever) which can be used to change the language of the interface without needing to log in. we can then simply fetch http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Foo.jpeg&action=ren... and display it.
for cases where a user would prefer either de or fr over English, this won't work, but i think the interface language mechanism has to be improved before that can be solved here.
if no-one has any other suggestions i may have a look at doing this...
kate.