[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

[Robert Scott Horning]

Bryan Tong Minh wrote:

>Big files can be uploaded through Eloquence. It is somewhere on the
>Commons-l mail list.
>
>Bryan
>
So, does this mean that uploading and storage of very large files (> 100 
MB) is an accepted practice and something done routinely on Commons? 
 That was the whole point of starting this thread was to see if this was 
being done and if it was something the WMF wanted to get invovled with. 
 Basically, I didn't want to get somebody very, very new to Wikimedia 
projects going with a whole lot of effort doing the conversion and more, 
as well as trying to upload the files without checking.

I seem to recall some discussions on Meta that discouraged this sort of 
media content, especially given the bandwidth and storage costs (there 
are costs for simply having content sitting on a disk available for 
download).  While fiscal costs related to keeping or deleting a page are 
trivial, in this situation these files are far from that.  I'm sure you 
could do some specific accounting to determine what it would cost for 
the WMF to host just as storage on a hard drive about 1GB of data, 
together with serving 1TB of data as bandwidth (assuming that this 1GB 
file is downloaded at least 1000 times.... a rather conservative notion 
given crawling engines alone not to mention interested Wikimedia users). 
 Assuming this is multiple DVDs and several hours of video, it could be 
substantially more than even this rather modest amount.  Using a 
commercial ISP this would amount to several hundreds of dollars over the 
course of a year for these files alone.

Owing to Anthere's general epistle (it was somewhat long) to the 
Wikimedia community, noting especially the comments that the WMF is 
operating on a shoestring budget, I thought it reasonable to ask this 
question.  This is also a preceedent setting situation that is likely to 
be copied in the future as well, multiplying the issue several times over.

That all this certainly fits within the "mission" of Wikimedia projects 
means that it is also something that should be strongly considered, but 
I thought it also reasonable to vet the issues first.

The technical issues over how to actually accomplish this are in 
comparison very trivial, and I can muddle through and figure that out. 
 It is nice to know that Erik would be the best contact to get this 
accomplished, however in a technical sense.  Thanks for that bit of info.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning