"JW" == Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
JW> The problem is possibly with the attribution and history JW> requirements of the license and so on. It's too early in the JW> morning for me to really consider what would be involved JW> exactly, but we all know the drill.
So, this is an issue on my personal radar screen, and I think it might be nice to start concentrating on how to redistribute MediaWiki sites as a whole.
As a quick fix, it might be reasonable to include database dumps of all the Image: pages, as well as the image tables, to get history and rights info. It's not particularly usable, but it would be there.
A more automated solution might be to include some kind of metadata files in the image dump. Either plain text files like:
Name: this.jpg License: GFDL Author: Evan Prodromou Contributor: Jimmy Wales
...or RDF files. It's debatable whether to make one file per image, or one big listing file.
~ESP