[Commons-l] Commons search engine ranking, Was: Killing the main namespace?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 1/31/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/01/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Problem with search engines is that they are being too inteligent.
> > Posible solutions:
> > *Use <a type="text/html" href=".../Image:Foo.png">
> > **I wasn't expecting it, but the a element *supports* the type attribute.
> > **Validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional
> > **Search engines probably don't support it, but we are providing the tags.
> Run it past someone suitable at Google, Yahoo and MSN, let Slashdot
> know so everyone else knows?
>
> The image search engines would undoubtedly want to index our image
> pages; if we can distinguish image pages ending in .jpg from actual
> JPEGs in a proper and conformant way, that should I expect be just
> what they would need to work with.

Cute. I like, but it may be akin to moving the earth.

Alternatively, we could also just find some character that we don't
accept in file names, but which is valid in URLs, and make it a
synonym for . in image page names.. then change our software to link
to that form.

I would suggest "/" as a character that we will not be permitting in
file names.. (probably not even after the filesystem decoupling of the
names)

So http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Ferrofluid_large_spikes.jpg
 would also be http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Ferrofluid_large_spikes/jpg

I suspect this could be done with a very minor change to mediawiki.
(If it's image namespace convert all / to . ... and in image page
links convert . to /) ... The question is if we, and more importantly,
Brion, think it's just too ugly. :)