On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Aryeh GregorSimetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog)gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
There is a separate issue of whether this information should be removed altogether, which in theory is a good idea, but leads to a practical problem of naming conflicts which has not yet been addressed to my knowledge (e.g. when "File:Foo.jpg" and "File:Foo.gif" both exist).
We'd have to keep the existing page names working anyway to avoid breaking everything, so we could just use the new convention for new uploads. Then old files could be moved to appropriate names manually over time, with conflicts resolved manually.
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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.
At least, that is, if we agree that the problem is principally having "misleading" file extensions in urls for HTML content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Foo.jpg could be translated into any number of things through a completely unambiguous one-to-one mapping that would remove or mask the ".jpg" extension. That is something I would like to see and encourage.
However, if the "solution" is to manually rename everything to extension-less structure then I would be opposed to that. It is more trouble than it is worth, and does little to benefit the existing wikis owned by Wikimedia or those controlled by third parties. Personally, I think it is actually a good thing that files have file-like nomenclature in general. It seems less confusing for uploaders that way. I'd prefer the current nomenclature be preserved but some addition system of naming, minus the confusing extensions, be placed on top as the default.
-Robert Rohde