Robert Scott Horning wrote:

Anthere wrote:

...

ChitChat with David over whether there is a meta community ... or not... is nice, but let's get back to real business for a while :-)

There is a proposal on meta : InstantCommons http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InstantCommons

I would be happy if some of you could have a look at it (if not at the technical details, at least to the general concept - it will not take you much time) and give a feedback about it (here or on meta or on irc).

I am not looking for a comment by those who proposed the project... but by the others ;-)

Thanks for your feedback.

Anthere Special Project Committee http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_committee

I think Instant Commons is an incredible concept. I don't see how it will directly help individual Wikimedia projects, but it is something that is going to be beneficial in terms of having goodwill to other MediaWiki website administrators and perhaps other individuals who are sucking bandwidth out of the Wikimedia Commons image archive.

Are there any statistics available to show how much bandwidth is going to serving images to non-Wikimedia projects who are using HTML markup links to commons images? I'm especially talking about site mirrors (who may not mirror the images), but other projects as well.

I am interested in this reasoning: "

* It does not respect the license terms of the image, and does not allow for other metadata to be reliably transported * It does not give credit to Wikimedia * It consumes Wikimedia bandwidth on every pageview (unless the image has been cached on the client side or through a proxy)"

Has any consideration been given to allowing a pass through type of feature where the Wiki Media Commons becomes more of a registry and published online backup rather than a centralized master archive?

For example: If NASA could publish some of the famous Apollo photographs or Mars data documenting water erosion in partnership with another entity under a GPL (this is already done by for profit entities who attempt to enforce copyright so there should be no problems using GPL on public domain NASA data) by submitting the photographs, detailed information and the master URLs where they keep the masters.

Under this scenario, perhaps the NASA site could be the primary URL with Wikimedia Commons used as a secondary accessed when the original is not available. Rather than becoming the primary source for the data, Wikimedia Commons serves more as a catalogue of GPL'ed data available elsewhere on the web.

Rather than acting as a centralized single massive server Wiki Commons might save substantial bandwidth by only providing data when the primary source is not available when an update to local caches is initiated.

This might also encourage other smaller sites to collaborate with Wiki Commons as they would receive exposure and traffic in exchange for publishing their content under the GPL via the Wiki Commons registry. Wikimedia Foundation thus becomes a welcome large partner or umbrella resource improving wiki technology and available FDL'ed content rather than the 800 pound competitor avoiding exposure of Achilles tendons.

The technical developers responsible for the Wikimedia Commons might wish to also look this over: http://dijjer.org/

It is a caching technology being designed for web browsers to cooperate in reducing the load on central resources using a peer to peer transport similar in some ways to bittorrent. I am trying it out at the moment but I am uncertain whether it will catch on widely. Bit Torrent provides the luxury of supporting transmission of specific files the individual users chooses. This dijjer.org project appears to place all control in the hands of web publishers and thus I think it becomes vulnerable to unaccountable freeloaders. If this is true, it will probably not prosper or be an influential technology in the long run.

regards, lazyquasar