[Wikipedia-l] image namespace

[Brion L. VIBBER]

On lun, 2002-05-20 at 12:17, Chuck Smith wrote:
> I remember there being talk some time ago about
> creating an Image namespace which I think would solve
> this problem nicely... this could also eliminate
> having to type
> http://www.wikipedia.com/upload/blah_blah_blah.png,

I like that; in [[Germany]] for instance there could be:

  [[image:de-flag.jpg]]

which would be the equal, after rendering, of

  http://www.wikipedia.com/upload/de-flag.jpg

We could also use the name-piping feature to add alt text (short
descriptions of the image for text-mode and speech browsers):

  [[image:de-flag.jpg|German flag]]

It might be desireable also to make the images themselves link to an
information page, which could include the list of articles that use the
image, when it was uploaded (and by whom), etc.

> which is not very user friendly.  But make sure doing
> this doesn't break the non-English wikipedias!

I can't think of any reason to gratuitously break the old syntax -- we
might still want to be able to link to external images (with
permission), and I'd prefer not to break the zillions of existing pages
using full URLs! (They could be auto-corrected by a script, though.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)