On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Robert Rohde<rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Last I checked image moves weren't actually
working and I thought
image redirects were disabled as well, though I could be mistaken.
Those are technical issues that it would be good to solve for their
own reasons though.
Well, I was actually thinking that in this case we could do a proper
301 if you try directly visiting the page, and actually change all
generated links. Since upload of new files under names with
extensions would be forbidden, the redirect would be immutable and
there would be no need to support the redirect notice.
Beyond that, it strikes me that it would be very hard
to do the kind
of automatic resolution you have in mind without breaking things. You
can arguably do it on a single wiki, but with Commons in the mix it
gets considerably harder. If Commons has Foo.jpg and Enwiki has
Foo.gif, then who gets to live at File:Foo? Either you have to check
for conflicts across all wikis or you are likely to end up with at
least some wikis with unexpected links.
We'd have to check for conflicts across wikis, sure.
From my point of view that's a much less annoying
bug than the link
formatting one.
My opinion is the opposite. The issue with indexing isn't a bug on
our side at all, it's a deficiency with how Google indexes pages. If
Google doesn't want to needlessly retrieve zillions of images and
needs a hint that we're linking to an HTML page, then the correct fix
on our side would be to do
<a href="/wiki/File:WTM_sheila_0015.jpg" class="image"
title="The Beth
Hamedrash Hagadol congregation building" type="text/html">
and then find some Googlers to poke with pointy sticks if they don't
respect the type="" attribute. We could do that immediately, in fact.
I'm sure they'd be happy to remove their special-case code. (I
really wish they'd talk to us about things like this instead of trying
to hack around our less-than-ideal behavior . . .)
On the other hand, having the file format be part of the page name is
a pain in the neck.
Not to mention that there are cases when it is
beneficial to explicitly provide different file formats for the same
material (for example if an SVG renders poorly on the WMF system).
Then they could just be at different names, so nothing's lost. On the
other hand it's very common for people to upload things that should be
PNG as JPEG, or things that should be SVG as PNG/JPEG, and currently
we have to rename. Plus we can currently have Foo.jpg and Foo.jpeg
and Foo.JPG and Foo.JPEG and Foo.png and Foo.PNG and Foo.svg and
Foo.SVG, or whatever, which is unreasonable.
