Re: [Tagging] tag proposal "image=http:/... .jpg"

[Steve Bennett]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:38 AM, Tobias Knerr <o...@tobias-knerr.de> wrote:
> Wikipedia is clearly different from OSM in that there is exactly one
> relevant way of viewing a Wikipedia entry: Visiting the page on
> wikipedia.org. Everything else is an afterthought, used by a small
> minority of Wikipedia visitors.

You're wrong. Wikipedia is a project to build an encyclopaedia in
exactly the same way OSM is a project to build a geographic database.
Both have web sites that function as their primary portals. Wikipedia
does spend more time, effort, money, hardware etc maintaining its, but
that's perhaps because it's so ridiculously popular.

There are plenty of other websites that also serve up Wikipedia
content, and there are big plans to print and distribute Wikipedia
content on paper, some of which have already been realised.

> Therefore, every article on Wikipedia is optimized for presentation on
> that web site:

Not really. "Optimised for" sounds like some sort of deliberate
attempt to prioritise the website over other forms of content.
Whereas:

> If the "OpenStreetMap" Wikipedia page should display a
> logo at 64px width, then you'll find the file name and the "64px"
> directly in the source code.

This is just a historical artefact. If the non-existent MediaWiki
wikitext design committee had sat down and thought about it, they
probably wouldn't have chosen pixels as a measurement unit.

Anyway, the central point that we can't readily choose *one* single
image of an object is pretty indisputable. Various presentation layers
can indeed find images to serve up. I would suggest a good one to
choose is whatever Wikipedia (ironically enough) chooses as its
primary image for the topic, where known.

Steve

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