[WikiEN-l] Images on user pages

Wed Sep 14 21:27:18 UTC 2005

On 14/09/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The only issue as I see it, is that we don't give reusers the option to not
> download user pages and other Wikipedia-specific pages. But that is a current
> technical problem; not a valid reason to forever forbid NC and special use
> images in the user or Wikipedia namespaces.

Actually, http://download.wikimedia.org *does* now carry filtered
dumps which don't carry User: and Wikipedia: pages. But this doesn't
solve the problem in hand, because we don't currently filter the
*image* dumps in any way. This is actually a big problem for all sorts
of licensing issues, because all the hard work of permission tagging
is likely to be lost in transmission.

But one very relevant implication is that images will be redistributed
even if they're not used *anywhere*, let alone if they're only used on
user pages. Remember: images are not attached to pages, they are just
referenced from them.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]