This is a VERY relevant question - I am also very interested to hear other experiences in using MediaWiki as a media repository.
Our wiki is an information system, as it is now, on cultural people and projects - one of my primary ambitions is to combine the knowledge base with a filesharing system in the not-so-far-away future. My idea is to combine MediaWiki with a Bittorrent tracker, so that users can upload and share torrents - keeping large video files etc. on their own computers. I would still like the wiki to contain images, documents, zips and other small files.
Does this idea sound feasible? Anyone who has similar plans or experiences to share? More specifically, what is the best way to go around customizing the Image-namespace - or alternatively, how to make such files go into the Media- or a new customized File-namespace?
Best wishes, Morten :-)
-- Crews Cut Production Morten Blaabjerg Danmarksgade 97 - DK-5000 Odense C Tlf. 65 90 60 88 / 51 80 91 55 http://morten.crewscut.com morten@crewscut.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jason Young" jason.young@eXtension.org To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:04 PM Subject: [Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki as a media repository
One of our MediaWiki installs is for faculty to collaboratively build content, tagged with additional dublin-core (or whatever that IEEE metadata standard is, I forget which) metadata, gone through a bit of peer analysis and review, and be exported out to a more "public" web site.
One of the things that those that are shepherding this use have been needing is to do media uploads (as opposed to just images) - so that they can collaboratively view/evaluate the media for future export. Mainly flash files and mpeg4 movies. Some of which could be 50-100MB, maybe even more. The total number of these flash/movie files will probably stay under a few hundred for the next year, year and a half.
Because MediaWiki comes "out of the box" supporting only image extensions, and because the default upload file size on most PHP installations is so low, I've avoided letting them use Mediawiki for this. I did open up the extensions, but never really let files > 4MB be uploaded. In earlier 1.5.x MediaWiki releases, the Gallery of New Files would often blow up, as MediaWiki ran out of memory (I assume) trying render thumbnails for the PDF, flash, (and powerpoint sadly, but that's another story) files. That has abated, due to increases in PHP memory available to that mediawiki site, and maybe even fixed by later 1.5.x releases, I haven't gone through all the change notes.
But, despite that, I need to do something quick, and we'ved managed to get older faculty, some of who can be pretty obstinate about learning new technologies, working in a wiki. They are beginning to understand the wiki way (even if they insist on subverting it a bit with this validation/peer review process before things are deemed "public"), use the history, use metadata, etc. I like the idea of opening up the limits a bit on the mediawiki install so they can upload their multi-tens-of-megabytes media, because we have the history, categories, other metadata right there in a somewhat familar interface.
All this is a rambly introduction to a question of:
Are others using MediaWiki as a media repository of sorts? What kinds of things do I need to watch out for? What are some of the best practices/settings/etc. for this? Thoughts from my fellow MW admins
Thanks, Jason --
Jason Young -- Systems Engineer, eXtension http://about.extension.org/wiki/Jason_Young ______________________________________ _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l