On 19 February 2015 at 14:37, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I personally think we must give a lot more thought to the broad strategy being used here. For example, if you want to upload millions of files, why not put them on a hard drive and ship them? It will be dramatically faster and a lot less wasteful of bandwidth and time. In my opinion, we need to
Agree 100%, but there is no working procedure for doing this. Unfortunately when I attempted to get an important upload of 100,000 image on to Commons this way, timed to be just before last year's Wikimania in London, I failed dismally. The first disk was "lost" at the goods-in stage, the second disk was never acted on. After 3 months of going back and forth, I gave up and just uploaded the 300GB of files over my home broadband connection (which took around another 10 weeks, relied on my home-cooked upload scripts and made it darn hard to watch any on-line video streaming at home!)
The results are great[1] however by the end of the process, I felt like a schoolboy being patted on the head and given platitudes but otherwise ignored. One of our most important GLAM partners is no doubt carefully considering the risks of working in the future with the somewhat unreliable Wikimedia community.
P.S. The GWT does not do direct disk uploads, it is one of the things that needs a better solution and has been discussed several times, however my understanding is that it is not part of the current proposed project and most often we suggest uploading to an intermediary site or server without recommending any particular workflow.
Links: 1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/20/wellcome-library-donation/