Guillaume Paumier wrote:
I don't think there is an official Board resolution about the use of proprietary technologies on Wikimedia projects. However, Brion and Erik have been known to have a pretty strong opinion on that, and I believe Danese and a large part of the WMF tech staff are in the same place.
A few relevant links for a historical perspective:
- "We should permit Flash video playback" thread on foundation-l in 2007
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/2220/
- "Software policy draft" thread on foundation-l in 2007
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/19547/
- The actual draft:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Draft_Statement_of_Principles_Regar...
There is nothing in that, or in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy which suggests that we can't use Flash for microphone audio upload, is there? Are people aware of http://haxe.org/doc/intro and http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ ? The bulk of Flash is no longer proprietary. I know there are patent issues around some flash video formats, but at this point I have little confidence that any of the major browser authors will provide HTML microphone upload in the next five years. Is there any reason to believe otherwise?
Casey Brown wrote:
Another, somewhat more recent one: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/October_3-5,_2008#Open_Standards...
"The board asked Sue to have Mike Godwin revise the draft policy to a version that would make it clear that only free formats are permissible."
Did that ever happen? (Or did anything useful ever come about of it?)
Clearly not, so I am asking Sue and Mike directly by adding them as addressees.
I have been working on microphone audio upload since before the previous decade: http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload -- I have also offered to donate some nice ActionScript microphone upload code to the Foundation which compiles with Haxe if the builder is willing to do such things as replace the Speex vocodec constant with the equivalent integer. It doesn't run under gnash yet, but I believe it will soon. (I don't think there would be consensus for dropping Wikimedia support for closed-source browsers, as a related matter.)
In return, I have asked the Foundation to spend $2,500 on a contract with Yaron Koren to enable GIFT -- http://microformats.org/wiki/gift -- in the Quiz extension. That would be particularly useful if the efforts to ask the Open University to re-license the several thousand hours of courseware which they currently publish under cc-by-nc-sa, to cc-by-sa or cc-by succeed. I have asked multiple parties, including Board members and the UK Chapter to work on that simultaneously. I believe at least two of them are working on that effort. In any case, GIFT is far more compact and more wikitext-like than the existing Quiz extension to Mediawiki which is bulky and suffers from lack of use in more than 90 assessments on Wikiversity, for example, while GIFT assessments can be produced from the assessments in any Moodle course using Moodle's export function.
However, even though Wayne Mackintosh of the 25,000 teacher-strong WikiEducator and OER Foundation wrote to Erik back on March 28, saying they were "very supportive" of the GIFT compatibility project, Erik has so far hesitated, saying that he wants to see additional support from the community.
So please, if you think GIFT assessment support and/or Flash microphone audio upload is a good idea (and I would repeat that the Spanish Wiktonary still has no audio pronunciation for "hola" even though the English Wiktionary does) then please let Erik know. Thank you!
Sincerely, James Salsman