[Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Commons request for input: policy on automatic image replacement

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 2/19/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Here are some main ones I know of:
> * Art. IMO no art "near-duplicates" should be deleted unless they are
> TRUE duplicates (eg by hash). Colour differences are too subjective to
> rule which one is the most accurate, so best idea is to keep them all
> and let local projects decide which to use.

I don't think we should make it a policy to always keep extra images,
we should do so only when there is an honest and reasonable
disagreement over which image is better. Many times there is no
disagreement, and we shouldn't keep around many useless near
duplicates just because.

So, for example, if a version is unused on other projects there should
be no problem. And in other cases we should make sure we have a nice
long tagged VFD cycle so everyone who cares can see it on
commonsticker.

> * Small size PNGs used as icons - may be hand-optimised for rendering
> in IE, which SVGs will still suffer from (as they thumbnail to PNG but
> without special treatment).

If the small PNG is not index colors then it hasn't been hacked to
work around IE's bugs. Like above we shouldn't keep an image unless it
is actually serving a purpose. Working around IE bugs is a purpose,
but only if they are actually being used for that.

I'm almost tempted to say that IE bug workarounds should be removed
from commons. Perhaps some projects would choose not to work around IE
bugs, and yet we are shoving these workaround images on them?