Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-758892-20130405133135

Hi admins,

I've finally started transferring some of our pages to the german wiki. Unfortunately it's not only the text that needs to be transferred, but also the images (the german image database is meager to the extreme with only 74 pictures in it).

Now I read somewhere, that is is possible to have something like an interwiki media database. I asked some members of the german wikia staff, how this would work and this is in short is what they said:

We cannot create such a media link ourselves, but it can be requested via the Special:Contact form. The two databases would then be linked and all images are available for both wikis.

The local image DB always has priority. If you use an image name, that exists in both wikis, the local version is displayed. But if you use an image name, that does not exist locally, the system queries the "partner wiki" and displays the image from the remote DB (if it exists there).

So you can have a kind of "master DB" (the english DB in our case) and store only images in the "partner DB" that are exclusively used there. Apparently the only drawback is, that you cannot search for images in the remote DB (you have to know the name) and that the images from remote DBs are not shown in the local wiki statistics. I think, neither of those "problems" would be a showstopper in our case.

So, should we request a media link between the two wikis? What's your opinion?  