Fremantle
· Wikimedia · websites · MediaWiki · InstantCommons ·
I've written before about websites as collecting endeavours. That there's some good aspects to features like MediaWiki's insistence on not being able to embed foreign images. Keeping things together within one place, and pulling in things that we find elsewhere, can build a more coherent and resilient website. Having copies/duplicates/multiples of things, spread out and maintained by completely separate people or organisations, increases the chances that things will survive. The web is an ephemeral place.
Some sites, such as many of those on the fediverse, don't like archiving. They have very clever systems of interchange that does result in multiple copies being hosted in different places, but they also have good systems of those copies being strongly linked — so they can all be deleted if the original is. In the more disperse indieweb world that's not really how it's done: some RSS feed readers, for example, will keep all copies (following some retention policy perhaps, but that might be "keep forever" — that's certainly how I do it for a bunch of sites I follow).
MediaWiki does allow embedding foreign images in one specific way: if they come from Wikimedia Commons. This is called InstantCommons, and it's a very cool feature. It pulls in the image and its metadata, and links to the thumbnail hosted on Wikimedia's servers. This has a few issues, such as the image being able to be changed at any point without the local wiki knowing, and the fact that it makes the local wiki's collection dependent on an external service. It also puts quite a lot of load on the Wikimedia servers, which is probably fine if it's for a purpose that's aligned with that of Commons (that's a tricky thing to figure out of course).
A better system would download the thumbnail to the wiki's own storage, and serve it from there. But I also have been wondering about a system of copying the image (and its metadata) into the local wiki, to remove any dependency on the external service. That uses even fewer of Wikimedia's resources, and makes the wiki self-contained. The trick to it I think would be to make it quick and easy to pull the image in (and perhaps it could work with any website), and also maybe to view any changes that had been made since it'd been pulled in.
Then the site would be more of a standalone collection — perhaps annoyingly indivisible.
My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss
(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au or leave a comment below…