As an engineer implementing a feature that pulls images from Wikipedia or Commons, I require the ability to use either non-free images or only free images, as determined by my needs and how they correspond to community policy.
More specifically, the pageimages API should return eligible free images and non-free images. Either:
- either 1 of each for a call
- 1 category depending on a call parameter (freeness=free-only)
In the case of the former, the 'free-ness' of the image should be included in the return so that the client feature can decide which to pull.
Context:
[[ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124225 | The current API change that prevents returning images ]] that are non-free was the easiest and most pragmatic solution to an immediate concern. However, this blanket solution prevents the community from creating or applying policy with nuance, because it mandates a specific policy across all use cases, projects, and 3rd party re-use clients. This is already an issue, as the english language community decided that non-free images were allowable on hovercards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content#Hovercards
It is time to revisit this issue and apply a more flexible approach.