User:Chmod007/Alternate version proposal

Proposal
The number of images in Wikipedia is growing faster than ever before, and that is great! Now that images can be automatically scaled to thumbnails by the software, people tend to upload high-resolution versions of images too. For the future, it is important to further encourage people to make high quality versions of images available. Resolutions of displays are increasing, and slowly but surely vectorised formats such as PDF and SVG are getting web browser support. In the future, we may be able to embed fully scalable graphics in articles. A print edition of Wikipedia is being discussed, and images used for printing should be of higher resolutions than what is typical for most online graphics.

While most text on Wikipedia can be easily edited by anyone, it is often difficult to make minor adjustments to images without degrading quality (multiple compressions of the same JPEG, for example, is very bad) or redoing lots of work. Access to the original source documents makes this a lot easier and encourages wiki-like collaboration. It is virtually impossible to tweak a detail in a 3D projection without access to the 3D models / source used to generate it.

I propose that we add information on how editors best can make high-quality versions and source documents for images and other media available. This may include:


 * losslessly compressed digital photos (PNGs)
 * TIFF should be avoided where possible as most browsers cannot render it.
 * vector files (PDF, SVG)
 * WAV/AIFF/FLAC uncompressed/multi-channel audio files
 * other source documents used to generate an image for Wikipedia
 * layered Adobe Photoshop psd files
 * Microsoft Visio / ConceptDraw / Dia / OmniGraffle / Adobe Illustrator diagram documents
 * Mathematica / MATLAB / GraphViz text source code for generating graphs and diagrams
 * C source code for generating complicated diagrams algorithmically
 * 3D documents or source code used to generate a 2D image (e.g. POV-Ray source).

At present, the mediawiki software makes it difficult or impossible to upload files that do not have the recommended image and media file extensions. This must be fixed but unfortunately there are security issues with doing so (mostly related to internet explorers mime time autodetection and cross site scripting).

Templates
It would also be nice to have a uniform way of associating images with their source documents. This could be done using a few templates.



The templates could put documents with vector versions in a category, and files with source documents in another.

As a nice side-effect, we will be creating a GFDL / PD repository of a variety of useful document types.

Free vs. unfree
Wikipedia strongly prefers the use of open and unrestricted formats, that can be read and edited by free tools. PNG is prefered over GIF and OGG over MP3. Free and open formats should be preferred over proprietary for alternate versions too, but there should be no hard rule.

Professionals choose their tools, not based on freeness, but on how efficiently they can work with them. Proprietary formats can have better features than free formats, and therefore be preferable for source material that is intended to be edited.

In some cases it may be wise to upload several versions. For example for a graph made with microsoft excel one may want to upload the excel workbook, a raw version of the data used for generation, a vector form and a png to be used for actual display.

Conclusion
To ensure that Wikipedia keeps as many migration paths as possible, and to ensure that media content can be edited as easily as text in the wiki, it is necessary to make it easier to upload source material, and to create policies for how the material should be organized.