Let me preface this by saying that I was going to ask Tim in private, but Angela told me that this would be a better place. In the next couple days, I'm going to be rewriting the English wikipedia's sound FAQ, and there's a couple things I want to grouse about.
First, for those of you who have never heard of it, the Mutopia project is to songs what Project Gutenberg is to text. The offer lots of public domain midis that are great additions to the project. In the past, I've converted them the hard way (tying the sound card of one computer to the sound card of another). I'd record it into wav, encode it as ogg, and then upload it.
Here's where my requests come in:
(1) The 2 megabyte upload limit - I discovered through trial and error that uploads are capped at 2 megabytes. For full-length songs, this is way, way too small. A 3-4 minutes song in ogg format at average quality is about 5 megs. I have to set my encoder to its lowest settings (0 or 1 out of 10) to get it under 2 megs.
Angela has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource, not on Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.
(2) Someone was nice enough to recommend an open source (GPL) program that does midi->ogg conversion much more easily. However, it is a *NIGHTMARE* to get installed. All of the english hosts are 404 (I had to use the internet archive) - I hope you speak Nihongo. To get it working under windows you have to download the patches - 19(!) rar files worth.
I want the sound FAQ to refer to it, but I pity the poor person who has to go through what I did to get it working. The easiest solution would be simply to zip up the working version I have here and let Wikipedia host it.
I'd like these issues address in the near future so I can start rewriting the FAQ.
--Mark
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
(2) Someone was nice enough to recommend an open source (GPL) program that does midi->ogg conversion much more easily.
What for? MIDI files are nice and compact; OGG would be a lossy conversion that vastly increases storage requirements and download time and makes it more difficult to modify the files.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
(1) The 2 megabyte upload limit - I discovered through trial and error that uploads are capped at 2 megabytes. For full-length songs, this is way, way too small. A 3-4 minutes song in ogg format at average quality is about 5 megs. I have to set my encoder to its lowest settings (0 or 1 out of 10) to get it under 2 megs. Angela has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource, not on Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.
I'd like to add to this comment. I have what is increasingly a fairly ordinary 5 megapixel digital camera. I took a ton of photos in Europe of famous things. The size of the photos varies to a degree, but most are 1.8-2.2 Megabytes. About half of them, therefore, can't be uploaded unless I reduce the quality.
There are some reasons to limit upload size, particularly if bandwidth skyrockets, etc. But 2 Mb is now too small, and I would support a discussion of moving it to a higher number. I would say that for the bulk of photos that people would upload, 3 Mb is more than enough.
For songs, it sounds like 5Mb would be adequate, if barely.
I want the sound FAQ to refer to it, but I pity the poor person who has to go through what I did to get it working. The easiest solution would be simply to zip up the working version I have here and let Wikipedia host it.
If it is free software, and not encumbered by patents (why are all the English sites 404) then we can host it. If there are patent issues applicable to the U.S. only, then I'm sure some wikipedian will volunteer a stable place.
--Jimbo
On Wednesday 21 July 2004 22:52, Mark Pellegrini wrote:
First, for those of you who have never heard of it, the Mutopia project is to songs what Project Gutenberg is to text. The offer lots of public domain midis that are great additions to the project. In the past, I've converted them the hard way (tying the sound card of one computer to the sound card of another). I'd record it into wav, encode it as ogg, and then upload it.
Why not uploading the midi as well?
(1) The 2 megabyte upload limit - I discovered through trial and error that uploads are capped at 2 megabytes. For full-length songs, this is way, way too small. A 3-4 minutes song in ogg format at average quality is about 5 megs. I have to set my encoder to its lowest settings (0 or 1 out of 10) to get it under 2 megs.
Angela has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource, not on Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.
If Wikipedia has full length texts of, say, national anthems, why wouldn't it have full-length recordings of them, too?
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Wednesday 21 July 2004 22:52, Mark Pellegrini wrote:
First, for those of you who have never heard of it, the Mutopia project is to songs what Project Gutenberg is to text. The offer lots of public domain midis that are great additions to the project.
Why not uploading the midi as well?
Angela has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource, not on Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.
If Wikipedia has full length texts of, say, national anthems, why wouldn't it have full-length recordings of them, too?
I have no particular objection to having an archive of this sort in Wikisource. One still has to be mindful of copyright issues. I am not aware of anyone trying to enforce copyrights on the words and musical score of a national anthem. Recordings add another dimension in that performance rights may involve additional copyrights. Copyright issues are a big concern at Wikisource, and the onus should be on the person contributing something to justify his claims that he has the right to upload something. Verifying this for someone else can be a difficult job.
I have visited some general national anthem sites, and it seems that someone just plugged in the notes on the score into a computer program. The musical quality is just bloody awful. Whatever is done, I sincerely hope that it sounds better than some of these excuses for music. :-)
Ec
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
(1) The 2 megabyte upload limit - I discovered through trial and error that uploads are capped at 2 megabytes. For full-length songs, this is way, way too small. A 3-4 minutes song in ogg format at average quality is about 5 megs. I have to set my encoder to its lowest settings (0 or 1 out of 10) to get it under 2 megs.
Angela has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource, not on Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.
I've raised the limit site-wide to 5 MB. This was just a simple change to php.ini. Maybe it's possible to have different limits for different projects, but I didn't think it was worth the mucking around.
-- Tim Starling
Le Thursday 22 July 2004 14:37, Timwi a écrit :
Tim Starling wrote:
I've raised the limit site-wide to 5 MB.
Why do we need a technically enforced upload limit at all? Why can't we leave the decision on whether to keep a large file or not to the respective wiki community?
It is necessary for security raisons, at least, otherwise you will see people trying a DoS in uploading complete cdroms.
Yann
Yann Forget wrote:
Le Thursday 22 July 2004 14:37, Timwi a écrit :
Tim Starling wrote:
I've raised the limit site-wide to 5 MB.
Why do we need a technically enforced upload limit at all? Why can't we leave the decision on whether to keep a large file or not to the respective wiki community?
It is necessary for security raisons, at least, otherwise you will see people trying a DoS in uploading complete cdroms.
Firstly, uploading such files would be cumbersome and take ages, and deleting them again is easy as pie (and easy on the servers, too).
Secondly, nothing is stopping people from already doing that. Regardless of whether PHP accepts the upload or not due to the limit, people can already send gigabytes worth of data to the server. I doubt the server cuts off the connection at 2 MB already, because (a) the way I understand it the request is received in its entirety before it is passed to PHP at all, and (b) such behaviour would make the server non-HTTP-compliant.
Timwi
Am Thu, 22 Jul 2004 13:37:34 +0100 hat Timwi timwi@gmx.net geschrieben:
Tim Starling wrote:
I've raised the limit site-wide to 5 MB.
Why do we need a technically enforced upload limit at all? Why can't we leave the decision on whether to keep a large file or not to the respective wiki community?
Because there's a lot of idiots hanging 'round. If they find out they'll find it fun to tease the community with DVD-uploads or so.
Like spraying and graffiti.
--manfred
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
tic@tictric.net wrote:
Am Thu, 22 Jul 2004 13:37:34 +0100 hat Timwi timwi@gmx.net geschrieben:
Why do we need a technically enforced upload limit at all? Why can't we leave the decision on whether to keep a large file or not to the respective wiki community?
Because there's a lot of idiots hanging 'round. If they find out they'll find it fun to tease the community with DVD-uploads or so.
So? Deleting these files is ridiculously easy.
Timwi
Why do we need a technically enforced upload limit at all? Why can't we leave the decision on whether to keep a large file or not to the respective wiki community?
Because there's a lot of idiots hanging 'round. If they find out they'll find it fun to tease the community with DVD-uploads or so.
So? Deleting these files is ridiculously easy.
Timwi
You're right, shure. But it still has to be done and this gonna annoy somebody, somwhere. Well, ya can run a shellscript once a day and delete files bigger than a certain size. Just whatch out for iso images :-)
--tictric
tic@tictric.net wrote:
So? Deleting these files is ridiculously easy.
You're right, shure. But it still has to be done and this gonna annoy somebody, somwhere.
We are not currently disallowing users to create articles with offensive content, even though it might annoy somebody, somewhere.
The Wiki way is not to use technical means to disallow something, but community means.
In other words, the "correct" way to handle large files would be to have a Special page to list the largest files by their size. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of the Special pages can already do this. Then all we need to do is to get some volunteers to patrol this list to see if there are any ridiculously large files that don't belong on Wikipedia.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
The Wiki way is not to use technical means to disallow something, but community means.
In other words, the "correct" way to handle large files would be to have a Special page to list the largest files by their size. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of the Special pages can already do this. Then all we need to do is to get some volunteers to patrol this list to see if there are any ridiculously large files that don't belong on Wikipedia.
Files are uploaded to the /tmp directory on the apache in question. If the file is of the wrong extension or over the recommended maximum of 150KB, a form is displayed asking the user if they really want to upload it. There are two buttons, "save file" and "re-upload". Clicking "re-upload" deletes the file from /tmp. Clicking "save file" moves it to NFS and registers it in the database. Doing neither leaves the file sitting on the local hard drive until the machine is restarted, or until someone manually cleans it off. Currently some of the apaches have only 10 GB free, and in the past they have occasionally run out completely. Now it's true that an attacker could write a script to upload 2000 5MB files and thereby fill up the hard drive, but that requires more technical knowledge than putting one's movie collection into a huge zip file and clicking "upload".
-- Tim Starling
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org