[Wikipedia-l] Upload issue

[Magnus Manske]

This might be the time for a new idea (beware!;)

As you can see on the upload page, it gets quite crowded and loads very
slow. And we only have a few images up there.

So, there are some mechanisms we could try to clean this up and fix the
unwanted uploads issue:
1. Create subdirectories for categories ("biology" etc.)
2. Create SourceForge-style subdirectories, by the first and the first two
letters. "foobar.jpg" would go to "f/fo/foobar.jpg".
3. Create a binary namespace.

Personally, I'd vote for #2. We won't have to create a category scheme (as
in #1), and the tech would be easy (in contrast to #2). It would also group
images quite efficiently.

Now, what I had in mind was this: The current way of linking to images is
fine (just type in the URL!), but *additionally*, we could have another
scheme for linking wikipedia-internal images. Example: "{{IMG:foobar.jpg}}".
Now, the software could automatically determine the correct URL, based on
the storage scheme. It would also enable us to find unlinked images quite
easily.

An additional advantage could be tha ability to cope with new data types. I
think of SVG, as an example. The code for including such a file is quite
different, but for the user, it would be the same as a jpg
("{{IMG:foobar.svg}}").

Just dumping my random thoughts on you,
Magnus