Last modified: 2011-05-15 17:43:46 UTC
Saving the URL and displaying it after an upload-by-url would be a nice feature, as it simplifies the search for the source if no source is explicitly specified.
It would probably be good in general to have an additional structured metadata area for this sort of thing... and license info... :P
I think we should just stick to using the the page info template. (it would not "hurt" to have this feature but its lower priority I think) Often you don't want to link exactly to the http://myCDN.com/hashed/path/oFtHeImAge.JPG rather you want to link to the source "page" or source assets page of the image. This can be managed with add_media_wizards to be integrated with the page asset description template. URL uploads should be more and more managed by add media wizards that structure the template for remote asset inclusion. Expert users should know to have a source url for the asset. This is not to say this info would not be useful to query at in a structured way. Just that it will be of higher quality if we leave it to the |Source tag in the image desc for now. Getting at this data would ofcourse be nice... We have lots of structured data problems and I would group source assets resource page linkback into part of that problem set.
I believe that it is important that we store a canonical source, where it is guaranteed by the software that this *really* is the source, something we can not guarantee with placing it into the wikitext. I propose to add to column to the image, oldimage and filearchive table, img_source_type and img_source. source_type would be something like 'url' or 'file' and if source_type is 'url', img_source would be the url that was used to fetch it. This would also be very useful if we for example have specialized uploaders in the future for for example Flickr.
It might be nice if details of the upload process (including source url) were stored in the log_params field of the relevant log entry for the upload as well (perhaps in addition to a new field in the image tables).
