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_.
I can't imagine the logo contest discussion we had on the French Wikipedia
without the possibility to show pictures on discuss pages (unless copying
all files on server).
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.
So what to do?
If copying non encyclopedic pictures on the server is not a problem we
effectively don't need to be able to show external pictures on
talk/user/meta pages. In fact, I suppose it is not really difficult to only
add to a static version (ex: DVD) only files linked in articles.
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.
Good point. Personally I don't care to be tracked, but if you think it's
important, I agree.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)
Thank to your answer.