[Foundation-l] discussion about banning external hotlinking

[Erik Moeller]

2008/7/28 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
> Rather, I think we should encourage it... but we should encourage
> doing it right by promoting extensions that provide links back to the
> image pages, and by having mediawiki provide example HTML copy and
> past which does the right thing.

A lot of copy & pasting does include links to the image description
page on our servers, which I agree should be good enough for third
parties if it's good enough for us. But I like the idea of easy HTML
snippets for embedding.

What I'd also love to see is a reference implementation in MediaWiki
of what we consider the ideal use scenario of free media from Commons
in third party wikis: searching an image, embedding it, and making the
metadata accessible. With the recently added foreign file repository
support, any MediaWiki installation can now easily access images from
Commons. It seems like the next logical step would be a cross-wiki
search interface, perhaps similar to the one that Wikia has designed
for its image search.

We could then encourage makers of other content management systems to
implement a similar mechanism to add free media to content.

The best way to get people to do the right thing is to make it easier
than doing the wrong thing. ;-) Fortunately, downloading and
re-uploading an image into a CMS is more effort than having a direct
web interface to acquire it, which should theoretically make it
possible to pass along any metadata whenever the image is used.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate