On 22 June 2015 at 18:32, Gergo Tisza <gtisza@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 6:06 PM, James Forrester <jforrester@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 22 June 2015 at 16:25, Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:

Where in this new process could someone hook in a widget that catches attempts to upload proprietary formats, and sends the file behind the scenes to Internet Archive for transcoding?

​Ha. Well, that's an awkward policy question (and so my responsibility) wrapped inside a technical one (and so Mark's). :-)

I'm sure that such a hook could already be written for UploadWizard, though ideally it'd be done properly with a type handler; the transcoding effort, however, would mean that we would not store the original, so there'd need to be a challenging community discussion about whether retaining the original was important. It'd also be a pretty fragile system compared to doing the transcoding ourselves, without significant moral, ethical or legal gains as far as I can see, so I'd need to be convinced that it was worth spending so much effort on. But "inside it somewhere" isn't a great answer, I'm afraid.

That discussion already happened, see Commons:Project_scope#Must_be_an_allowable_free_file_format and Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video - there are strong objections to storing or transcoding originals files which have a proprietary format, at least in the current legal and policy landscape.

​Exactly my point.