<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">> Ariel:</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">>> Providing multiple terabyte sized files for download doesn't make any kind of sense to me.</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">>> However, if we get concrete proposals for categories of Commons</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">images people really want</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">>> and would use, we can put those together. I think this has been said before on wikitech-l if not here.</span><div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">The Picture of the Year (POTY) collections are truly stunning! I am not very interested in having terabytes of random snapshots on my computer, instead I find smaller collections of "best of the best" much more suiting for the public. This way, it will be accessible to those with smaller amounts of diskspace and they'll be equally impressed. </span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I doubt there are many people interested in the image tarballs at all, they're just going for the principle of accessibility. Presumably wikipedia has plenty of back-up capabilities and there are enough gurus doing everything to prevent possible data loss. Offering public back-ups has no additional value in this perspective. Most of us probably use the wikipedia XML's for offline usage or research. I have not yet come across image research projects requiring tens of terabytes of images to be successful! </span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#333333" face="arial, sans-serif">I say, if the POTY downloads are popular according to statistics, why not compile a couple more years? The thing I'm talking about is hosted at </font></span><a href="http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/poty/">http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/poty/</a> . </div>