Wikipedia talk:Image use policy/Archive 1

What is PNG format? I never heard of it. -- Zoe

See PNG. Basically, kinda like GIF but more capable and not subject to certain patent pitfalls. Just about all graphics software these days supports it. --Brion VIBBER


 * A good way to do this is to put a link to the larger image on the description page of the smaller one, after the description text, and preferably with a image:... link rather than [[image:...]] (note the extra colon at the beginning) to produce a link to the larger description page rather than including it inline so that users aren't forced to download the large image just to see the description text.

Doing what's suggested above makes all the larger images orphans. --KQ 09:46 Aug 6, 2002 (PDT)

Hmm. That's a good point. If we ever get the international wikis all set up with the new software and appropriately separated, it is my hope that the orphaned image page will become useful again. I'll have to make sure that an image:xxx... link is counted as a link from the software's point of view.

Where can I find the CIA Factbook PDF's?--branko

I only saw them available for a few "reference" maps, not for the individual country maps. That's too bad, because most of the maps and flags there are incorrectly encoded as JPEG. --LDC


 * The rule to not re-encode JPEGs to PNGs seems to refer to the Factbook JPEGs of maps and flags. Do you know why this is? Experimentation seems to point out that not much detail will be lost (none that I can see), whereas the file size gains are tremendous. (The map for the Netherlands Antilles went from 72 to 9 kB by reducing the colors and saving as PNG&mdash;there was no JPEG-artefacting in the original worth mentioning.)--branko

I notice that use of sound is also on this page. Maybe a name change is in order. Multimedia use policy, perhaps? --Stephen Gilbert

Images without descriptions may be summarily deleted! That's just plain silly. A picture is worth a thousand words. An image explains itself. Why should I HAVE to describe it? -- Zoe

The main point of descriptions is to state where the image came from and give some info on copyright status. So without that info the image may be deleted. We are not saying that a picture which is obviously of a whale has to say this. --mav 19:46 Aug 19, 2002 (PDT)

Could we add to item (1) on the main page something about "make filenames descriptive too"? -- Tarquin


 * Sounds like a good idea to me -- as it is that is what I do already. --mav

I propose adding the sentence "Please write your description of the image in a language understood by many Wikipedians, in enough words that we can recognize the language.". Several days ago someone uploaded a picture of a horse with a one-word description: "Kon". It took me a couple of days to figure out that "Kon" is Polish for "horse". The missing diacritic didn't help. -phma

Eventually, all of the foreign wikis will have their own upload space, but until then it's probably not a bad idea to say something. --LDC

Are all the foreign wikis going to have their own admins too? I'm sure there is a lot of cleaning up to do in the more active wikis. --mav


 * Surely there will be a lot of duplication if each language has upload space. A picture of a horse should be good for all languages. Of course, we may want pictures for different breeds... but the same principle applies. -- Tarquin


 * Harddrive space is ultra cheap. There is also nothing stopping any language user to search the image database of any other languge for images to use and upload to their own language wikipedia. --mav

The current recommendation: "Do convert GIF images to PNG, except for "animated" GIFs" should be amended "except for animated GIFs, which should be converted to MNG".

The MNG format is essentially a container for multiple PNG images, allowing animation. All major browsers understand the MNG format (MIME type "video/x-mng"), and many image conversion programs can convert multi-image GIF to MNG.

I'd like to know what others think about this before changing the FAQ though, hence this Talk entry.

-- Bignose

Judging from the WWW site that you linked, Internet Explorer requires the (admittedly free) ActiveX control MNG4IE to read MNGs.

&mdash; Toby 05:34 Nov 30, 2002 (UTC)

In my experience using images, a lawyer talked about the 'seven edits' rule, which says basically that any image is usable provided there have been at least seven steps of alteration from its original state. In other words, enough differentiation to render an image distinct from the original, so, a rezise, a crop, a color adjustment or two, etc... a despeckle filter, and a couple of rubber stamp erasures or spots... Any comments on this? &#35918&#30505sv

See also: Image pages, for discussion on having new markup for images and image description pages.


 * The CIA factbook now has maps as GIFs, not JPGs. I'm going to update the relevant section...