[WikiEN-l] Big picture issues (was: cluster and images)

[Daniel Mayer]

Jimbo wrote:

>And images.wikimedia.org would be a project 
>unto itself, so to speak, where images are 
>collected (perhaps automatically) and copied 
>from the other projects, and given neutral 
>captions, and entered into a big image library.  
>The rules for inclusion in *this* would be very
>strict, not relying on fair use.  All images 
>would have to be public domain or GNU FDL or 
>something compatible.

I like that idea! But just replace
"images.wikimedia.org" with either
"files.wikimedia.org" or "multimedia.wikimedia.org"
(since we want more than just images), and replace
"project" with "sub-project" (since its resources
would be used by all projects - like meta). This also
preserves the per wiki upload utility which would be
oddly disabled for Wikimedia projects under my plan
but would still be needed by non-Wikimedia projects
that use MediaWiki (thus there would be little
Wikimedia developer interest to maintain that
functionality). But there would need to be a prominent
mention and link to the multimedia file database on
every Wikimedia project's upload special page.
Something like "You can use this page to upload
multimedia files from your harddrive. But you may also
want to visit [our multimedia file database] to see if
a similar file is already there." 

Then when the much-talked-about upload form is
enacted, the software could automatically copy
anything tagged as PD or under a free content license
to the Wikimedia database. Anything marked as "fair
use" or "special permission" would just reside on the
wiki's own upload space. 

>And then if people needed an image for something, 
>they could just copy it from there.

Why copy when you can export! :) There could be an
"Export this <filetype> to the [<language>]
[<Wikimedia project>]" as <file name>.<ext>" (it would
also be neat if it showed everywhere in Wikimedialand
where it is being used). Oh and anything exported to a
different file name should not create a copy of the
same file at the Wikimedia file database under a
different name. Category tags can also be used here as
well (that would help with searching). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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