Wouldn't they purge the entire User: namespace
anyway? We're not so
interesting as for our user pages be republished in an actual
encyclopedia.
Yeah, but the images are not stored in the User: namespace. Currently
there is no way to selectively download images that are just used in
articles (unless you use a spider to grab content instead of the
database dumps, wich realy is not a good idea as it kills our servers).
Now granted our image dump already contains a *lot* of copyright
problems (like our 30.000+ untagged images), so orphanded fair use
parody images from userpages might not be the biggest problem for
re-users at the moment, but at least we are working toward the goal
of cleaning up that mess. However if we allowed fair use on user
pages those would never be cleaned up on our end (unless a better
image dump system gets developed), meaning we would basicaly force
reusers to download a bunch of files they can't use and have to
delete just because some Wikipedia users wanted to have something
funny on theyr userpage. Personaly I don't think can rely be justified.
Perhaps in addition to the Image: namespace, each page could have an
additional image page much like the talk page, where images intended
for use only on that page (i.e. fair use in articles, but also userpage
images) could be uploaded. I have no idea how this would work with
respect to our db and image dumps but it might be a partial solution.
IIRC there's a way to Base64 encode images so that they can be pasted as
text onto a webpage; loading them as a URL displays the image in question.
(Someone help me out here? What's this called again?)
--
Alphax -
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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