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.
If that could be resolved then yes, the file's type information would not be required (either as a file extension, or elsewhere). In this case though, my second suggstion ("File:Video:Foo", "File:Image:Bar") might be useful, as we probably still want to know what type of file we are embedding, even if we don't need to know the exact file format.
Maybe, but there are potentially a lot of very specific formats. Like Djvu, PDF, document formats, spreadsheets, . . . It might be simplest to just drop the format info totally and assume it won't cause big problems if the format isn't obvious from the name.