On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 10:47:19 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
I see merit in both positions. By taking a stand for
OGG over MP3, we
are inconveniencing people in the name of free content. We have an
obligation to minimize that inconvenience, and this might be in part
be resolved by hosting some GPL software and very user-friendly
instructions for installing it. We can decide on a case by case basis.
A lot of GPL software is hosted on nerdy websites that would simply
frighten inexperienced users. When that's the case, it would be nice
if we used our public communication skills to help out.
This is one of the things I was trying to work on with the ideas I was
putting on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia I'm going to
have a go at drafting my suggested Help: page now, complete with the
links to various means of listening to ogg vorbis files. (And now I
think, perhaps some instructions, too) Note that most of these are
plugins for whatever media player you already have, not a whole new
piece of software.
But perhaps it *would* be nice to have a "wiki-player" that just read
in an ogg, and played it, and nothing else, for people who don't have
a media player at all. It could actually be considered, in a vague
kind of way, to be part of the site software: if playing oggs is part
of using the wiki, then an ogg player is part of the interface.
Of course, what would be *really* nice, would be if we could *embed*
the player, but that might be a bit awkward.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]