On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Aryeh
Gregor<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Mark Clements
(HappyDog)<gmane(a)kennel17.co.uk> wrote:
There is a separate issue of whether this
information should be removed
altogether, which in theory is a good idea, but leads to a practical problem
of naming conflicts which has not yet been addressed to my knowledge (e.g.
when "File:Foo.jpg" and "File:Foo.gif" both exist).
We'd have to keep the existing page names working anyway to avoid
breaking everything, so we could just use the new convention for new
uploads. Then old files could be moved to appropriate names manually
over time, with conflicts resolved manually.
<snip>
Forgive me, but that seems like you'd be asking the community to do a
huge amount of work (moving images and updating [[File:]] calls) in
order to address a problem that could be solved on purely technical
grounds.
At least, that is, if we agree that the problem is principally having
"misleading" file extensions in urls for HTML content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Foo.jpg could be translated into any
number of things through a completely unambiguous one-to-one mapping
that would remove or mask the ".jpg" extension. That is something I
would like to see and encourage.
However, if the "solution" is to manually rename everything to
extension-less structure then I would be opposed to that. It is more
trouble than it is worth, and does little to benefit the existing
wikis owned by Wikimedia or those controlled by third parties.
Personally, I think it is actually a good thing that files have
file-like nomenclature in general. It seems less confusing for
uploaders that way. I'd prefer the current nomenclature be preserved
but some addition system of naming, minus the confusing extensions, be
placed on top as the default.
-Robert Rohde