I just thought I'd give an update on the sound list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list). Since I last posted here about it, there have been some very interesting developments.

When I posted about 6 weeks ago with a link to that list. I'll bet most of you who clicked on the link got a time-out error. Why? Because, it turns out, Mediawiki was building media: links HORRIBLY ineffeciently. If you had a page with 10 linked ogg files, the squid would download all 10 files before serving up the page; if you had a page with 200, the squid would time out before downloading all of them. Understandably, this error went unnoticed until we had 200 oggs to put on a single page ;) Tim Starling fixed this, and all pages with media: links now load faster because of it.

Dysprosia and I created a sleak looking set of templates for putting sound files on a page. You can see the result on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_van_Beethoven and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart as well as a variety of other pages. I could also use some help linking to the songs from articles. Right now, most of the songs on the list linked to only from their composer's article, if at all. (And while I'm giving credit, Fennec gave me a shell account on his computer, which, with it's very fast internet connection, has been indispensable. When Eloquence changed the upload form (breaking the bash script I was using to upload), Avar rewrote it so that it works again.)

One thing I've noticed is that none of the sister projects or other language Wikipedias seem to have noticed the songs. I'd appreciate it if you guys could put in a good word at the other wikis and projects about them.

Now to brag a little. The list passed 300 songs tonight, and probably well over a gigabyte of music by now :)

--Mark (Raul654)