This is phase one of a plan to make uploaded media from WMF projects
accessible for download in bulk. It, like many other things lately, is
experimental and subject to breakage, change, etc.
First, a big thanks to Kevin Day from
Your.org who offered us the space
and worked with us many hours to sort out networking issues, try
different NAS setups, and generally do what was needed to get this
going.
Rsync url: ftpmirror.your.org::wikimedia-images/projectname/languagecode
For example:
rsync -a ftpmirror.yours.org::wikimedia-images/wikipedia/commons /my/dir
would get you all of commons including archived versions (no deleted
images of course).
Folks who are trying to download media for a specific project should
bear in mind that they will need the files not only from that project
but also those which are hosted on commons and used on the local
project. I'm looking into producing lists of those files for easy use
by rsyncers.
I would suggest rather than everyone downloading a zillion copies of
commons at once, that folks coordinate a little bit, or just get the
pieces they need :-D
The data that is there now is probably about 15-20 days old. It will
likely be a little while before I get the media rsync going on a regular
basis, I'm juggling a lot of pieces right now.
Ariel
P.S. This is not an April fools joke, it's April 2 here already :-P