On Nov 26, 2003, at 06:15, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
I fully agree the deactivation of external pictures
for articles, but
it was
very useful especially for talk pages to show a picture and discuss
it. The
fact only local pictures can be rendering stimulate people to copy non
encyclopaedic pictures on the servers. This is a problem for me.
If you don't reactivate external pictures, please give the reason.
Well, I'll just point out that you can _link_ to a picture just fine.
People can click the link and look at it, so I don't think it really
harms _discussion_.
On the other hand, we do end up with people uploading pictures of their
cats/buddies/etc to stick on their user pages, which clutters things
up. On the other other hand, many people don't have (or don't know how
to use) a web-accessible space where they can upload pictures and then
link to them, and they'd likely continue using the wiki's upload space
for this stuff.
Enabling external pictures pose the slight privacy risk of exposing
people to 'web bugs' so an external site can track which IP addresses
have visited a certain page, though perhaps this is minor.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)