On 01/05/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If Commons is to be an effective service project, it needs the infrastructure. A kludged-together usage detector that misses en:wp is not a substitute for something showing right there in the image page if the file is in use.
I'm in 100% agreement with this one, and have been thinking on solutions to provide that information right there in the page. A brief discussion with Brion confirmed the need for a centralised Commons image link table of some sort, which can be updated by all client wikis upon image use.
The trickier issues, as I see them, are detecting image links to shared images (MediaWiki treats them the same, more or less), and producing a list of additions and deletions in a timely fashion. Fortunately, the LinksUpdate code contains quite a bit of this logic which might well be adaptable.
Rob Church