[Wikipedia-l] Re: please support offsite imags

[Brion Vibber]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Chuck Smith wrote:
> > Another point that seems to be forgotten is how people
> > who are reading Wikipedia offline will be able to see
> > the offsite pictures...
>
> Maybe just the same way they submit changes to the article.

With an offline submission queue? Not yet implemented. :)

> If the original problem here was that selfappointed license policemen
> are erasing (URLs to) external images,

Nope.

Here's the situation: the use of full URLs to images creating tags to
embed/inline the external image directly into the wiki page has been
disabled on the English Wikipedia since some months ago.

This was done for three reasons:

1) We have support for uploading images directly, making the use of
external images redundant. The vast majority of images used on Wikipedia
at that time were in fact those uploaded to meta.wikipedia.com, and which
had been automatically transferred into the upload area and turned into
inline image links ([[image:foobar.jpg]]).

2) Concerns about continued availability of third-party resources. Links
die on a regular basis through moving or disappearance of the linked page.
The same happens with images; I at least would prefer that things we
embed directly into our pages should be available as long as our pages
are.

3) Somebody was inserting a lot of URLs to goatse.cx images, which we
would prefer to discourage. ;) It's harder to hide an image upload, which
goes into a big shiny log page, and quicker to remove the resulting file
and squash all uses of it.

Hfastedge's complaint, meanwhile, seems to be brought on by my deletion of
the Tibetmap.jpg which he had uploaded and inserted into [[Tibet]]. It was
a modified (removal of text) version of an image taken from a copyrighted
site, which itself was a modified (removal of logo and copyright notice)
version of an image taken from a copyrighted site which had a copyright
notice directly in the original image.

*Links* to images on external sites are absolutely okay and wonderful,
just as are links to text on external sites. But *links* do not embed
external resources directly into our pages as though we were publishing
them ourselves, but without all the benefits of maintainability.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)