"Robert Rohde" rarohde@gmail.com wrote in message news:b4da1c6e0907200746v26a1b024naeb43c2228b80837@mail.gmail.com...
On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 6:55 AM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. How much hacking would MediaWiki on Wikimedia need for _jpg to be the default image page name and .jpg an alias for backward compatibility? That'd be really helpful in all sorts of ways
- on pretty much any website *not* running MediaWiki, something ending
".jpg" is going to be the image, not a text page.
[SNIP]
As long as one requires files have explicit type suffixes (e.g. ".jpg", ".svg", etc), one can use the allowed list to determine what file names to translate without generating conflicts. I believe all Wikimedia sites require such suffixes, but Mediawiki can be configured to remove that requirement which would need to be considered for a general application (i.e. what to do if the configuration allows separate files named "Foo_jpg" and "Foo.jpg")
How about making the type a prefix? E.g. Image:jpg:Foo (or File:jpg:Foo). It would be a bit more work I suspect, but would retain the information that the extension gives as well as resolving the indexing problem which started this thread.
It would also be theoretically possible to use a one-to-many mapping here (so uploading Foo.jpg or Foo.jpeg result in the same File:jpg:Foo - though there might be an issue with naming conflicts here). Or go even more general, e.g. File:Image:Foo, File:Video:Foo, etc. All the name-conflict problems that would occur in any attempt to resolve the "changing image file format" problem would obviously apply here, but that might be better than dropping the type information given by an extension altogether.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)