[Wikipedia-l] please support offsite imags

[Vicki Rosenzweig]

At 04:47 PM 4/9/03 -0700, you wrote:
>Over these last few months, it has been frustrating when GFDL righteous 
>wikipedians nix each
>others images because of fear of copyright violation. This respect for the 
>GFDL which is extremely
>vigorous, but I feel it is also very harmful to wikipedia.
>
>To alleviate some of this, we should allow the inclusion of offsite 
>images. This is perfectley
>acceptable. Take http://news.google.com for example, which is greatly 
>improved by the addition of
>any image seen fit, also note that not a single image there is hosted on 
>google. I emailed them,
>and they  said that what they do eg:  <img 
>src="http://anotherserver/file.jpg"/>  is completely
>within the realm of copyright policy.

The major problem with offsite images isn't netiquette or copyright: it's 
that the
image (whether of a news event or an animal) that you link now may disappear
without notice, or be replaced by something different. An article on the 
fall of
Baghdad shouldn't suddenly be illustrated by a picture of a baby panda, or
the president of Congo, or whatever else gets dropped into that slot by the
external news source.




-- 
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org