Philip Welch wrote:
Wouldn't they purge the entire User: namespace anyway? We're not so interesting as for our user pages be republished in an actual encyclopedia.
Yeah, but the images are not stored in the User: namespace. Currently there is no way to selectively download images that are just used in articles (unless you use a spider to grab content instead of the database dumps, wich realy is not a good idea as it kills our servers).
Now granted our image dump already contains a *lot* of copyright problems (like our 30.000+ untagged images), so orphanded fair use parody images from userpages might not be the biggest problem for re-users at the moment, but at least we are working toward the goal of cleaning up that mess. However if we allowed fair use on user pages those would never be cleaned up on our end (unless a better image dump system gets developed), meaning we would basicaly force reusers to download a bunch of files they can't use and have to delete just because some Wikipedia users wanted to have something funny on theyr userpage. Personaly I don't think can rely be justified.
Perhaps in addition to the Image: namespace, each page could have an additional image page much like the talk page, where images intended for use only on that page (i.e. fair use in articles, but also userpage images) could be uploaded. I have no idea how this would work with respect to our db and image dumps but it might be a partial solution.
IIRC there's a way to Base64 encode images so that they can be pasted as text onto a webpage; loading them as a URL displays the image in question.
(Someone help me out here? What's this called again?)
