[Commons-l] Towards a Commons API

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/17/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> some minor comments.
> Instead of offering 6 choices, just offer one.  200px or 250px.

The full option is useful to users who don't want to do HTML, but just want the full image. I hope we keep that. It's much more user friendly than the normal link (and should be made so by just making it say 'Full Size') and will reduce a lot of confusion that we see today.

I agree that we don't need six options, we should just make sure the HTML is easily changed by anyone with half a clue.

> Change
> those six links to just be a single option "Use this image on your
> webpage outside Wikimedia

I think we need to draw the line at being bold when we get to the point of spending the Foundation's money, or more clearly our donors' money.

A quick 'within an order of magnitude' back of the napkin calculation indicates that each 250px thumbnail image view would cost the foundation about  1/2054 cents US in bandwidth.  If we're successful it would add up to real amounts of money fairly quickly.

It might well be the cheapest and best advertising Wikimedia and Commons could ever get. ...But because endorsing this activity has a clear risk of costing real money, we should make sure that the right people are involved.  Once we've endorsed this behavior it will be hard to turn it off without making people angry and taking bad PR.

I also think we should make an effort to maximize the value of our expenditure if we do this. For example, we should require sites using our HTML to preserve the author's name and the link back to Commons. .. We could enforce this too, by watching referer logs, and blocking sites that deep link the image without a proper link back.

We should also advise users to seek legal advice before embedding copylefted images into non-free works, as it may violate the terms of the licenses depending on their use; we could even customize this message by license tag.

(I for one am tired of seeing my images show up on other sites without the smallest effort at following the license ... Commons should do what it can to improve this situation).


My other worry:

A huge part of the reason people embed Flickr images is because Flickr is cheap/free image hosting for blogs, forums, and other websites. In many cases they are not using Flickr's library of existing images as much as uploading their own images.   (What Web 2.0 profit dreams Flickr has for this is anyone's guess ;) ).   I'm not sure what percentage of external Flickr use is the existing repository vs images uploaded for pure hosting purposes, but I do know that we shouldn't be encouraging that sort of use unless we are to abandon the "useful" part of our mission. (And abandoning that would put us outside of the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation)

I suppose we can deal with this one as it comes... but we need to be careful to not confuse popularity with success. 

> Make sure the link has a nice mouseover so it's not scary (if you can
> do this with JS... btw this function strikes me as a perfect little MW
> extension).

He should use an onclick. Set href="#". Javascript URLs are Evil(tm).