On 14/09/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
The only issue as I see it, is that we don't give reusers the option to not download user pages and other Wikipedia-specific pages. But that is a current technical problem; not a valid reason to forever forbid NC and special use images in the user or Wikipedia namespaces.
Actually, http://download.wikimedia.org *does* now carry filtered dumps which don't carry User: and Wikipedia: pages. But this doesn't solve the problem in hand, because we don't currently filter the *image* dumps in any way. This is actually a big problem for all sorts of licensing issues, because all the hard work of permission tagging is likely to be lost in transmission.
But one very relevant implication is that images will be redistributed even if they're not used *anywhere*, let alone if they're only used on user pages. Remember: images are not attached to pages, they are just referenced from them.