Hi,
At first let me point out that I appreciate the hard work of people that want
to improve our projects. Please let us acknowledge the work of Erik, even if
you think like me that his proposal is _definitely_ not the way to go. It's
all about AGF. ;-) So please let us brainstorm how to turn this into a good
opportunity for all of us without sacrificing parts of our goals and
independence.
Two different things were not made clear in Eriks proposal and consequently
were mixed in follow up mails:
a) Allowed media formats for _uploading_ files.
b) Provided media formats for _downloading_ files.
Allowing Flash Video for _upload_ is not acceptable in our projects for the
named reasons of patent problems and (at least partly) proprietary software.
Providing Flash Video additionally for _download_ does not conflict with the
GFDL or whatever (as you provide along side this copy as well a free format
copy of the same content). This is as well the reason why e.g. providing
TomeRaider _downloads_ of Wikipedia is in agreement with our understanding of
digital freedom.
As pointed out by various people providing Flash Video for download means
transcoding. As all relevant video formats are lossy you cannot transcode
Ogg-Theora to let's say Mpeg (or any other particular codec used by Flash
Video) without quality loss.
So Flash Video is a nice to have _second class_ alternative - a mere
convenience for our users. But who wants to get the best quality will always
use the original OGG-Theora files.
Philosophy aside here an analysis of current technical problems:
1. Wikimedia Commons badly needs a download service for the whole media file
repository.
2. The media repository of Comons is so overwhelmingly large that it would
need a lot of bandwith and download time even with broad band internet
access.
3. Audio and Video streaming requires a lot of bandwith but it doesn't require
sophisticated CPU intensive database queries and special designed software
(aka MediaWiki).
4. Many organisations especially universities (I could name you at least one
concrete example) want to support us with technical infrastructure but it is
very complicated to integrate these kind donations into our technical
infrastructure. Thus we are wasting a lot of donation potential beside money.
Proposed solution:
1. We provide an Rsync download of our media files for selected third party
mirror servers. Rsync is specifically designed for such a purpose and is
exeptionally bandwith saving on mirroring files where parts are constantly
changing.
2. These selected third party mirrors are collected in a Round-Robin-Queue.
Everytime a user directly wants to download the original file (and not a
thumbnail, preview or the image page in the wiki) in Wikipedia (or another
Wikimedia project) he is being redirected to this very file on a mirror out
of this queue and downloads it there as usual via HTTP (just the download
link changes, he even won't realise in most cases that he has been redirected
for this download).
3. In case mirrors don't want to host the whole database we could provide them
some filters for mirroring, e.g. Ogg files only. Ogg mirroring would make the
most benefit for our infrastructure and audio/video streaming, as full images
are downloaded relatively seldom.
This would make all these things possible:
* Download of Wikimedia Commons media database via mirrors.
* Saves us quite some bandwith especially at audio and video (you need to
download the real file for streaming).
* Easy drop in and drop out of single third party supporters.
* Not dependent from one exclusive partner. We maintain our independence and
increase technical failure resitance by reducing the single point of failure
problem.
In case you fear the problem of license issues (providing the copyright infos
alongside the files) this can be solved without troubles, too. There is
static.wikipedia.org Just transfer the static html image wiki pages of
Commons as well to the single mirrors and we're perfectly done (and third
party mirrors can create their own software interface around that thing if
they want).
Cheers, Arnomane