This is phase one of a plan to make uploaded media from WMF projects accessible for download in bulk. It, like many other things lately, is experimental and subject to breakage, change, etc.

First, a big thanks to Kevin Day from Your.org who offered us the space and worked with us many hours to sort out networking issues, try different NAS setups, and generally do what was needed to get this going.

Rsync url: ftpmirror.your.org::wikimedia-images/projectname/languagecode

For example:

rsync -a ftpmirror.yours.org::wikimedia-images/wikipedia/commons /my/dir

would get you all of commons including archived versions (no deleted images of course).

Folks who are trying to download media for a specific project should bear in mind that they will need the files not only from that project but also those which are hosted on commons and used on the local project. I'm looking into producing lists of those files for easy use by rsyncers.

I would suggest rather than everyone downloading a zillion copies of commons at once, that folks coordinate a little bit, or just get the pieces they need :-D

The data that is there now is probably about 15-20 days old. It will likely be a little while before I get the media rsync going on a regular basis, I'm juggling a lot of pieces right now.

Ariel

P.S. This is not an April fools joke, it's April 2 here already :-P