Let's say we have a picture on wikipedia, let's say it's a photo of an elephant at the San Diego zoo. It's used on wikipedia as an illustration for the San Diego zoo article.
I am writing my 3rd grade science textbook, and I link to that same picture. In the text, I write about that picture. "As you can see from the photo, elephants love to throw dirt on their backs with their trunks."
But later someone comes along and changes the photo in the San Diego zoo article. It's still an elephant at the San Diego zoo, but a different one. And no dirt is being thrown.
That's why I'd look at all of the articles linking to a picture before changing it. I see no reason why your argument doesn't mean that multiple pages within the same wiki shouldn't be able to link to the same picture.
So, I think that when different articles or different books use the same images, they *each* need to make a local copy.
So, for images, I think it makes a lot of sense to have images.wikipedia.org images.wikibooks.org
and so on.
The same problem exists for various languages, of course.
I'm just saying that "available for use by any Wikimedia project" doesn't necessarily imply that the images need to be all put onto one big server.
Actually, a very sensible thing to do, I should think, would be to eventually have images.wikipedia.org, for live images used on the encyclopedia, images.wikibooks.org, etc. but ALSO to have images.wikimedia.org.
And images.wikimedia.org would be a project unto itself, so to speak, where images are collected (perhaps automatically) and copied from the other projects, and given neutral captions, and entered into a big image library. The rules for inclusion in *this* would be very strict, not relying on fair use. All images would have to be public domain or GNU FDL or something compatible.
And then if people needed an image for something, they could just copy it from there.
--Jimbo
That's a good idea for a project. I wonder if it would need new software specially made for collecting an image library, or if we'd just have normal wiki pages for purposes such as categorization. In a collection like that, it would make sense to have a policy against uploading a picture that is completely different from the one that was already there; it should instead be uploaded to a new name. (but a picture edited slightly to make it look better could still be uploaded to the same name.) This could make it so that anyone could link to it without having to worry about the picture being replaced, and at the same time have a more perminant image archive.
I have some other name ideas for the image collection: clipart.wikimedia.org or wikiart.org. Would those be good? LDan
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/