Proposal talk:Image API

I want it :) --Liangent 11:16, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Server load

This may create additional load to the server, as the images are bulky and now lots of the software will be using them. Also, one group of applications will likely be bulky downloaders for creating local archives. It may be important to weight the costs of the increased server load. Audriusa 17:45, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. It would be worth considering how Flickr handles such issues. One thing that's of interest is that their image API doesn't allow the largest image sizes (the original images) to be spidered, only certain limited sizes. The original can be retrieved over the web (just as any image can be retrieved from Wikimedia projects now), but not through remote requests. As for archiving large numbers of images, users who abuse the service should be blocked, and redirected to resources that are intended for remote archiving -- perhaps a separate torrent of images? Babbage 07:59, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:10, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Non-editors will benefit from increased exposure to content which is under a free license. This increased exposure is in keeping with the Wikimedia foundation's goals of promoting free content. Additionally, allowing developers to build applications around an image API would allow for innovative approaches to annotating existing Wikimedia images with useful metadata, especially categories. I for one, even as a seasoned contributor, find the current interface for editing image metadata unintuitive at best. For new users, I would imagine that it wouldn't even be obvious that it's possible to say, add categories to an image. Thus, we're missing out on a lot of community expertise that might be tapped into in some other interface. In my opinion, it doesn't matter what particular interface editing of Wikipedia content is done in; what matters is that it's as accessible as possible. It seems to me that an image API would increase the number of "end users" overall, without affecting the current working habits of users who work on the traditional interface. 71.132.222.81 23:42, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Oops, that was me, I forgot to log in. Babbage 08:52, 6 November 2009 (UTC)