This same discussion is going on at meta, so I'll probably have to
repeat everything I say here over there. The page is:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiImages.org
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Images should be a resource that are easily usable
by
all Wikimedia projects and language versions. All one
should have to do is upload an image once and then
link to it from any Wikimedia project or language
version. That is why
images.wikimedia.org makes sense.
Yes, perhaps. I agree with the spirit of what you're saying here, but
I think that there's a bit of complexity, too.
Let's say we have a picture on wikipedia, let's say it's a photo of an
elephant at the San Diego zoo. It's used on wikipedia as an
illustration for the San Diego zoo article.
I am writing my 3rd grade science textbook, and I link to that same
picture. In the text, I write about that picture. "As you can see
from the photo, elephants love to throw dirt on their backs with their
trunks."
But later someone comes along and changes the photo in the San Diego
zoo article. It's still an elephant at the San Diego zoo, but a
different one. And no dirt is being thrown.
So, I think that when different articles or different books use the
same images, they *each* need to make a local copy.
I disagree. I think the elephant throwing dirt on its back should be
called [[Image:Elephant throwing dirt on its back.jpg]], and that the
elephant doing nothing should be called [[Image:Elephant doing
nothing.jpg]]. Of course that means it takes longer to type the names,
but I think there's other advantages to this proposal that outweigh this
disadvantage.
If the image namespaces are merged (the terminology I favoured on meta
since it ignores storage details), then the following policy should be
put in place. In improving an image, only scaling, compression, contrast
adjustment, etc. should be allowed. One name equals one click of the
shutter button. If a new, better photo comes along, it should be given a
different name, and the articles which refer to it should be updated
appropriately. Diagrams are a bit more murky, but the policy should be
that diagrams should not be changed significantly.
So, for images, I think it makes a lot of sense to
have
images.wikipedia.org
images.wikibooks.org
and so on.
The same problem exists for various languages, of course.
I'm just saying that "available for use by any Wikimedia project"
doesn't necessarily imply that the images need to be all put onto one
big server.
Actually, a very sensible thing to do, I should think, would be
to eventually have
images.wikipedia.org, for live images used
on the encyclopedia,
images.wikibooks.org, etc. but ALSO to have
images.wikimedia.org.
And
images.wikimedia.org would be a project unto itself, so to speak,
where images are collected (perhaps automatically) and copied from the
other projects, and given neutral captions, and entered into a big
image library. The rules for inclusion in *this* would be very
strict, not relying on fair use. All images would have to be public
domain or GNU FDL or something compatible.
And then if people needed an image for something, they could just copy
it from there.
The main problem is the difficulty (with the current software) of
handling large numbers of images, multiplied by large numbers of
languages. If a better UI can be designed, allowing images to be copied
in bulk to a large number of languages, then perhaps this would be ideal.
I have also suggested that perhaps images shouldn't be copied from
language to language, they should be "symlinked", to use the unix term.
But that scheme isn't ideal either, for the reasons listed on meta. So I
don't know what the best way is.
-- Tim Starling.