[Wikipedia-l] External pictures

[Guillaume Blanchard]

> Well, I'll just point out that you can _link_ to a picture just fine.
> People can click the link and look at it, so I don't think it really
> harms _discussion_.



I can't imagine the logo contest discussion we had on the French Wikipedia
without the possibility to show pictures on discuss pages (unless copying
all files on server).



> On the other hand, we do end up with people uploading pictures of their
> cats/buddies/etc to stick on their user pages, which clutters things
> up. On the other other hand, many people don't have (or don't know how
> to use) a web-accessible space where they can upload pictures and then
> link to them, and they'd likely continue using the wiki's upload space
> for this stuff.



So what to do?

If copying non encyclopedic pictures on the server is not a problem we
effectively don't need to be able to show external pictures on
talk/user/meta pages. In fact, I suppose it is not really difficult to only
add to a static version (ex: DVD) only files linked in articles.



> Enabling external pictures pose the slight privacy risk of exposing
> people to 'web bugs' so an external site can track which IP addresses
> have visited a certain page, though perhaps this is minor.



Good point. Personally I don't care to be tracked, but if you think it's
important, I agree.



> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)



Thank to your answer.