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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 1/2/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Of course video files hosted there for Wikimedia would have to be made
> available in Ogg Theora. Building this bridge would be a good starting
> point for opening the discussion about proprietary vs. free formats in
> other contexts, and collaborating on making free formats more
> widespread.

So long as you're aware of the issues involved, I'm sure we'll have
success in our endeavors.

> > If the simple hosting some large
> > static files is outside of out domain of expertise
>
> As far as I can tell, it's not a matter of expertise, but of cost.

If Internet archive is paying substantially less for bandwidth than we
do, then we're doing something wrong.

> The
> cost of hosting this single file would be negligible, but if, by doing
> so, we expand our criteria of inclusion to cover similar video
> lectures and educational materials, we need to carefully consider if
> we want to do so alone.

The same argument could be equally applied to our hosting of images.
Image account for something on the order of 40% of our bandwidth usage
today. I do not see why we should consider offloading moving images to
another organization when we're not doing the same with still images.

> I do believe we need to start collaborating
> with other organizations, especially in the fields of education and
> archiving, even if they do not follow a blueprint of our ideology --
> after all, no good missionary preaches only to the converted.

Absolutely. We should collaborate. But we shouldn't shy away from
something that is a core part of our mission. Are we not sure yet if
converting a lecture from text to video takes it out of our realm?