Let me retitle one of the topics nobody seems to touch.
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 13:44, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
> * media files -- these are freely copiable but I'm not sure the state of
> easily obtaing them in bulk. As the data set moved into TB it became
> impractical to just build .tar dumps. There are batch downloader tools
> available, and the metadata's all in dumps and api.
Right now it is basically locked: there is no way to bulk copy the
media files, including doing simply a backup of one wikipedia, or
commons. I've tried, I've asked, and the answer was basically to
contact a dev and arrange it, which obviously could be done (I know
many of the folks) but that isn't the point.
Some explanations were mentioned, mostly mentioning that media and its
metadata is quite detached, and thus it's hard to enforce licensing
quirks like attribution, special licenses and such. I can guess this
is a relevant comment since the text corpus is uniformly licensed
under CC/GFDL while the media files are at best non-homogeneous (like
commons, where everything's free in a way) and completely chaos at its
worst (individual wikipedias, where there may be anything from
leftover fair use to copyrighted by various entities to images to be
deleted "soon").
Still, I do not believe it's a good method to make it close to
impossible to bulk copy the data. I am not sure which technical means
is best, as there are many competing ones.
We could, for example, open up an API which would serve media file
with its metadata together, possibly supporting mass operations.
Still, it's pretty ineffective.
Or we could support zsync, rsync and such (and I again recommend
examining zsync's several interesting abilities to offload the work to
the client), but there ought to be some pointers to image metadata, at
least an oneliner file with every image linking to the license page.
Or we could connect the bulk way to established editor accounts, so we
could have at least a bit of an assurance that s/he knows what s/he's
doing.
--
byte-byte,
grin