[Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki as a media repository

[Jason Young]

One of our MediaWiki installs is for faculty to collaboratively build  
content, tagged with additional dublin-core (or whatever that IEEE  
metadata standard is, I forget which) metadata, gone through a bit of  
peer analysis and review, and be exported out to a more "public" web  
site.

One of the things that those that are shepherding this use have been  
needing is to do media uploads (as opposed to just images) - so that  
they can collaboratively view/evaluate the media for future export.    
Mainly flash files and mpeg4 movies.   Some of which could be  
50-100MB, maybe even more.  The total number of these flash/movie  
files will probably stay under a few hundred for the next year, year  
and a half.

Because MediaWiki comes "out of the box" supporting only image  
extensions, and because the default upload file size on most PHP  
installations is so low, I've avoided letting them use Mediawiki for  
this.   I did open up the extensions, but never really let files >  
4MB be uploaded.    In earlier 1.5.x MediaWiki releases, the Gallery  
of New Files would often blow up, as MediaWiki ran out of memory (I  
assume) trying render thumbnails for the PDF, flash, (and powerpoint  
sadly, but that's another story) files.     That has abated, due to  
increases in PHP memory available to that mediawiki site, and maybe  
even fixed by later 1.5.x releases, I haven't gone through all the  
change notes.

But, despite that, I need to do something quick, and we'ved managed  
to get older faculty, some of who can be pretty obstinate about  
learning new technologies, working in a wiki.   They are beginning to  
understand the wiki way (even if they insist on subverting it a bit  
with this validation/peer review process before things are deemed  
"public"), use the history, use metadata, etc.   I like the idea of  
opening up the limits a bit on the mediawiki install so they can  
upload their multi-tens-of-megabytes media, because we have the  
history, categories, other metadata right there in a somewhat familar  
interface.

All this is a rambly introduction to a question of:

Are others using MediaWiki as a media repository of sorts?  What  
kinds of things do I need to watch out for?  What are some of the  
best practices/settings/etc. for this?    Thoughts from my fellow MW  
admins

Thanks,
Jason
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Jason Young --  Systems Engineer, eXtension
  http://about.extension.org/wiki/Jason_Young
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