On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Tim Starling<tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip] > Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having > Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries.
So there have been a number of statements against doing something like this, but (unsurprisingly) I don't think they have been strong enough stated or hit all the arguments that I think are important. So please humour me for a moment. I think hotlinking images is something we ought not to do for several independent reasons. (1) There is no reason to do so. The so far cited reasons for GLAM interest in this are Branding and Statistics. Hotlinking or caching would do nothing to improve branding— Most of the time a hot linked image looks just like a local one to users. Whatever branding we'd find acceptable could be accomplished as well or better locally. Statistics gathering is something that is interesting to many of our contributors, we cand should have good statistics for everything (and caching would be useless for statistics), so hotlinking should create no improvement. GLAMS have spent money building their own databases, yes. But ours are an additional copy, our problem, and not a significant cost. The only other reason I can see for hotlinking would be collecting resellable marketing data on Wikipedia viewers, and I do not believe that this would be a use we'd wish to support. (I'm not making a value judgement here— If that is indeed someone's goal thats fine— only that it's not one WMF would intentionally support). See below for more… (2) Hotlinking has enormous privacy problems When the rubber hits the road NDAs are ineffective: People make mistakes. Governments and ISPs snoop. Privacy polices are often bad and allow things which would horrify people. Hotlinking would greatly increase readers exposure to information leaks. Some random museum has no business knowing that I loaded the pederasty article just because some art was placed in it. Wikimedia's handling of reader privacy ought to be leading-edge trend-setting stuff. That would be an nearly impossible goal if media were inlined from many third party sites. (3) It significantly reduces the atomicity of the Wikimedia projects. Today are *things*, objects you can obtain (± temporary problems with the dump system), archive, data-mine, etc. I have complete (though not current right now) copies of Wikipedia in all languages along with all images and other media, as well as the core software. Not just partial bits and pieces, but the whole thing. External links are a clear boundary between what is in Wikipedia and what isn't. ... and the stuff *in* wikipedia is all freely licensed and available for download. They are now all tracked with a common revision control system, have common (if bad…) metadata. External dependency would lower reliability and make the generally less tractable. It would become more difficult to retain backups and historical records. Perhaps some day Wikipedia will be too big to maintain any singular copy of for purely technical reasons, but we are a long long way away from that now! So basically I think there are a bunch of practical and principled problems with hotlinking, but that hot-linking isn't actually needed. Really good upload systems that preserve metadata and provide good links to external resources? Statistics collection? These are good an uncontroversial things. They don't require hotlinking. Cheers— _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l