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.
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.
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.
At least, that is, if we agree that the problem is principally having "misleading" file extensions in urls for HTML content.
I don't think that's the only problem we should be solving here. We should also allow an image in one format to be replaced by an image in another format without changing the name. That requires getting rid of the extensions entirely. (Allowing an image to be replaced by a video or such, however, wouldn't make much sense.)
From my point of view that's a much less annoying bug than the link
formatting one. 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).
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? As mentioned earlier in the thread, I've been patching my own wikis to mask extensions for years.
-Robert Rohde