On 7/27/09 10:39 AM, Robert Rohde wrote:
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Aryeh GregorSimetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Robert Rohderarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Forgive me, but that seems like you'd be asking the community to do a huge amount of work (moving images and updating [[File:]] calls) in order to address a problem that could be solved on purely technical grounds.
Well, we could automatically move everything to the new names and leave redirects, and only leave conflicts to be manually resolved.
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.
Image redirects are quite active. Renames were re-disabled due to breakage with images which had missing past versions (eg, a lot in production) -- which I think has been fixed to handle this case cleanly.
Anyway, don't consider that an impediment.
However, if redirects work in the traditional way, then it wouldn't solve my problem. Namely File:Foo.jpg might draw it's content from File:Foo, but it still lives at a url for File:Foo.jpg. In order to avoid the extensions in urls you need to change where the links actually go, which at the present time requires changing each actual call.
You wouldn't care if anybody indexed File:Foo.jpg, since the content would be indexed at File:Foo.
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.
This is hardly an insurmountable problem; automated renames can easily detect the existence of such conflicts and either leave them for eventual manual attention or give them disambiguating suffixes.
They aren't antagonistic proposals though. One could make changes that allow extension agnostic file names, e.g. File:Foo, while also coming up with an automatic way to hide file extensions on existing works regardless of whether they are moved/redirected. Any reason not to allow both?
There's no particular reason to do the latter when its results are equivalent to the former.
-- brion