On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Robert Rohderarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Last I checked image moves weren't actually working and I thought image redirects were disabled as well, though I could be mistaken. Those are technical issues that it would be good to solve for their own reasons though.
Well, I was actually thinking that in this case we could do a proper 301 if you try directly visiting the page, and actually change all generated links. Since upload of new files under names with extensions would be forbidden, the redirect would be immutable and there would be no need to support the redirect notice.
Beyond that, it strikes me that it would be very hard to do the kind of automatic resolution you have in mind without breaking things. You can arguably do it on a single wiki, but with Commons in the mix it gets considerably harder. If Commons has Foo.jpg and Enwiki has Foo.gif, then who gets to live at File:Foo? Either you have to check for conflicts across all wikis or you are likely to end up with at least some wikis with unexpected links.
We'd have to check for conflicts across wikis, sure.
From my point of view that's a much less annoying bug than the link formatting one.
My opinion is the opposite. The issue with indexing isn't a bug on our side at all, it's a deficiency with how Google indexes pages. If Google doesn't want to needlessly retrieve zillions of images and needs a hint that we're linking to an HTML page, then the correct fix on our side would be to do
<a href="/wiki/File:WTM_sheila_0015.jpg" class="image" title="The Beth Hamedrash Hagadol congregation building" type="text/html">
and then find some Googlers to poke with pointy sticks if they don't respect the type="" attribute. We could do that immediately, in fact. I'm sure they'd be happy to remove their special-case code. (I really wish they'd talk to us about things like this instead of trying to hack around our less-than-ideal behavior . . .)
On the other hand, having the file format be part of the page name is a pain in the neck.
Not to mention that there are cases when it is beneficial to explicitly provide different file formats for the same material (for example if an SVG renders poorly on the WMF system).
Then they could just be at different names, so nothing's lost. On the other hand it's very common for people to upload things that should be PNG as JPEG, or things that should be SVG as PNG/JPEG, and currently we have to rename. Plus we can currently have Foo.jpg and Foo.jpeg and Foo.JPG and Foo.JPEG and Foo.png and Foo.PNG and Foo.svg and Foo.SVG, or whatever, which is unreasonable.