[Wikipedia-l] Storing "source code" for diagrams in the Wikipedia?

[Jens Frank]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 11:18:33PM +1000, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> I've been working on creating diagrams for the playing arenas of various
> sports (for instance see 
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football), using sodipodi
> (an SVG editor) and then exporting to PNG.  
> 
> It seems to me that it would be useful for the purposes of future editing
> if people had access to my SVG files.  At the moment, if people want 
> to change the diagram they either have to ask me to make the changes, mail
> me for a copy of the SVG, or try the hack of modifying the exported bitmap
> on the site.
> 
> Obviously, I could upload the SVG source, but is this appropriate (we don't do
> this for any other type of file because of the bandwidth and storage issues)
> but where would be an appropriate place to put it?  
> 
> So, basically, I'm raising the topic of whether and how we should handle 
> "source files" for media we place in the Wikipedia.

Actually, I upload "source files" to wikipedia and link them from the
generated PNG's. I think this matches the WikiWay best and is best in 
the spirit of the GFDL.

Bandwidth usage will not be very high. Not many people will download the source.
Storage might become an issue, but SVGs can be stored gzipped and are not very
big when compressed.

And of course, sometimes in the future, we will support SVG natively without
having to convert to PNG first. Would be a pity not to have your files at
hands, wouldn't it?



Regards,

	JeLuF