[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Radio

Sun Apr 27 17:29:11 UTC 2008

As one of the Wikinews contributors has pointed out, this is starting to
come together and look like something achievable. With that in mind, I have
been advised to move the discussion over to meta and perhaps make it a
little less of a Wikinews project and more of a Wikimedia project.

It is my intention to do so over the coming week, but I would gratefully
welcome advice from people on this list as to how to put together a proposal
that will get a favourable reception. We're talking about using a lot of
non-MediaWiki software for this, but the packages suggested all have the
needed scalability. The technical hurdles to overcome do not seem
impossible, I just wish I could get a half hour of Brion's time to help make
a start on software specifications.

So, with some momentum on this at the moment can we get everyone who ever
wanted to hear themselves on the radio on-board?

Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian McNeil [mailto:brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org] 
Sent: 25 April 2008 18:20
To: 'birgitte_sb at yahoo.com'; 'Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List'
Subject: RE: [Foundation-l] Wimimedia Radio WAS:RE: Legal
positionofaudiorecordings of GFDLcontent?

Thanks for the suggestion! At the moment I've been trying to get other
people thinking about the content side while I go play at 'herding cats' to
get the technical side designed, if not developed.

It looks like we run Icecast as the stream server (which supports relays
just like the MediaWiki/Squid relationship), we feed content into that from
another FLOSS package called Liquidsoap. And - the good part - the Savonet
community that maintains Liquidsoap thinks this is a very interesting idea
and developing software to run their package from playlists in a wiki would
simply be commonsense. One of them is currently knocking together a
prototype to do this, and I believe he can do so, among the other FLOSS
oddjobs he does is packaging MW with Debian.

Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Birgitte SB
Sent: 25 April 2008 15:11
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wimimedia Radio WAS:RE: Legal
positionofaudiorecordings of GFDLcontent?

It you need more content; all the recordings at LibriVox.org are public
domain.  I believe they considered a copy-left license but because of the
difficulties outlined in the beginning of this thread they went public
domain.  So you might want to contact them on their thoughts about
licenssing as well.

Birgitte SB

--- On Thu, 4/24/08, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:

> From: Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wimimedia Radio WAS:RE: Legal position
ofaudiorecordings of GFDLcontent?
> To: "'Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List'"
<foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Thursday, April 24, 2008, 11:56 AM
> In trying to lay out an eight-hour schedule, I'm trying
> to lay out a
> framework to work within and a goal to aim for. This
> doesn't preclude doing
> podcasts right now, in fact doing them would be eminently
> sensible. You've
> just got to do them with an eye to a future where you can
> download them from
> a WMF server, catch them on our Internet radio service, or
> any other number
> of ways of getting at the content. You need to work to a
> more strict
> timescale and be able to swap in and out different
> intro/outro pieces for
> the context the material is presented in.
> 
> So, on one track we work on all these, "please be less
> ambitious" sides of
> the argument. People do their podcasts and recordings as
> they would, but
> perhaps with reference to time constraints that might apply
> in a radio
> environment. Where building a library of timeless material
> is feasible, it
> gets done.
> 
> Then there's the technical side of this. It certainly
> isn't going to happen
> overnight, a lot of "glue" software would need
> written to keep to a seamless
> schedule. With some of the things I see in WMF press
> releases we'd really be
> looking to run a lot of software that currently has no
> connection whatsoever
> with MediaWiki. To oversimplify to the point that a
> developer would wake in
> a cold sweat, we need an extension; one that can feed data
> out of a wiki and
> into a content generator that interfaces with a broadcast
> server. From some
> poking around that'd be Icecast and Liquidsoap. The MW
> extension would need
> to control Liquidsoap; send queries and accept responses
> from it as to what
> to play next.
> 
> To state the obvious, the majority of the development time
> on something like
> this is going to have to come out of the community. Brion
> and his merry men
> are probably up to their asses in alligators trying to make
> sure SUL and
> Flagged Revisions go off smoothly. What I think is the good
> news is that
> when we do get them to look at this FLOSS stack for radio,
> it certainly
> appears to have been set up with the WMF in mind. It has a
> version that
> reminds me of squid proxies, and it looks like you could
> almost run this
> cache system as close as the last mile and have ISPs with
> their own server
> providing the stream and their main line kept free for
> other stuff.
> 
> When the technology is in place, we start streaming.
> I'll be honest, if it's
> all Commons music to start with I don't care.
> Obviously, I want to see
> Wikinews doing the top of the hour headlines at this point,
> but the
> relevance of that is only going to increase as we bring in
> other projects
> and expand the content. The beta should see the "how
> to do audio" lessons
> from Wikiversity broadcast throughout a segment; stick in
> the Wikipedia
> podcasts on a Sunday with a Wednesday repeat... You've
> a radio station. If
> we can get to that point I think we've a project that
> will just grow
> naturally.
> 
> 
> Brian McNeil
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf
> Of David Gerard
> Sent: 24 April 2008 11:06
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wimimedia Radio WAS:RE: Legal
> position
> ofaudiorecordings of GFDLcontent?
> 
> On 24/04/2008, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > I think it's an admirable idea, and suggest you
> start small and grow
> bigger.
> > No need for 8 hours off the bat, when there are zero
> hours now. As the
> > longest running regularly published audio product in
> the Wikipedia
> universe,
> > believe me when I say it is quite an undertaking.
> 
> 
> Yeah. Anyone who's done public radio knows what a
> commitment a weekly
> radio show is.
> 
> 
> - d.
> 
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