Last modified: 2009-12-29 22:55:49 UTC
In the interest of saving time, most especially for the folks at commons, rather than having to download an image from www.example.com/image.jpg to your computer's local hard drive, then in turn, having to reupload the image to the wiki database... could there be a way to directly upload the image from server to server? If you enter "www.example.com/image.jpg" into the "Source filename" field, could it not take the image, effectively skipping the middle man? Since none of the other fields would be adversely affected, the same summary, copyright and licensing information would work. In fact, the automatic parsing of the "Destination filename" already works for remote urls (since a url is still a string, regardless of its location, local or remote). Thoughts?
I suspect this would encourage abuse.
ACK. It's likely the same as the ability to include external images directly into an article.
There's really no reason to be putting images from other websites on Commons. Unless it's a free image repository, but I reckon there's easier ways to go about doing that.
Brion: As per Leon's comment, I think the 'hotlink' capability within the current language markup is easier to implement for a wiki-editor than what I propose. Why upload an offending external image, when you can just hotlink it? (Which most folk would consider even worse, since now you aren't just stealing the image, but bandwidth too.) Edward: Although I mention Commons in my original post, I certainly did not mean for it as an exclusive example. As you know, this software is widely used, including the likes of Wikia (Memory-Alpha, Wookiepedia, et al). Those sites and my own, www.marveldatabase.com, would certainly benefit from such a feature. Conclusion: I would like to reopen this feature request. I believe it has merit, even beyond Commons. Wiki is designed, by definition, to facilitate the linking of several databases (and by extension websites) to produce one 'big-picture' resource of data. I think this feature would actually reduce hotlinking by making it (slightly) easier to upload images in more rapid succession. (Also, in the absence of a working bulk- upload feature... Ahem.) Thank you for reconsidering.
Feel free to write an extension for your own site.
Harsh Brion... harsh. I think there are nicer ways of saying "do it your self".
Wow... I just read this: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/03/upload-by-url-for-testwikipediaorg/ Isn't this exactly what I proposed three years ago? (I can't believe my idea was shot down so handily, only to see it implemented. No credit for the idea even. ;) If this is to be potentially implemented on Wikipedia, and since CURL makes this a possibility now, I am reopening this feature request until it is in place.
We have this feature since r16158 in fact but it is activated only on test.wikipedia.org.
