[Foundation-l] discussion about banning external hotlinking

[Chad]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> 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.
>

I agree. The old idea of InstantCommons (oldest idea short of SUL, and now
that's done :-) has been on my mind recently, so that's why I've been doing
work with Brion in regards to the ForeignApiRepo code. While not as polished
yet as I'd like, it's definitely coming along nicely. Hopefully we can
get it ironed
out before 1.14 is out, so we can ship MediaWiki with InstantCommons as an
advertised feature.

Not to mention, it's designed to hook into _any_ MediaWiki install, enabling
the sharing of images and other media between other wikis than just
commons.

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

I would love to see Drupal, phpNuke, Wordpress, and other blogging/CMS
platforms be able to use the MW api to use freely licensed media.

-Chad