On 09/03/2008, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/03/2008, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
On my own wiki I link external pictures in by simply using a http request. Evidently at one time this was a standard part of the work. Not sure why we don't just do that for the majority of images.
Massive, massive, massive potential for abuse?
How is the potential different for images than text?
Well, first of all you can't remotely link in (transclude) external text; you have to edit it into the wiki.
With regard to the question, though:
Short answer: you can't change local text to "OMG PENISES!!!" without us noticing.
Long answer: we already require local uploading of material, which is a significant hurdle to easy inclusion of material, and still find that casual and trivial image copyright problems are far harder to deal with competently and efficiently than textual copyright problems. If we want to have a way of enforcing image copyrights that works on anything more developed than the honour system, we need local uploads because we need the licensing and source metadata that comes with them.