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

[Erik Moeller]

On 1/3/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> If Internet archive is paying substantially less for bandwidth than we
> do, then we're doing something wrong.

It's possible that we are doing something wrong. We should find out.
;-) But aside from whatever they are paying, they have other sources
of funding than we do.

> 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.

The strength of wiki is not the power to raise enough funds to host
large files. In fact, we're still pretty bad at fundraising. The
strength of wiki is to collaborate, to _edit_ content and derive new
works. The strength of the Internet Archive is to _preserve_ and make
available existing works. If we want both our non-profits to evolve
towards their natural strengths, it seems logical to me to try to
figure out ways for us to do less hosting and more collaborating.

In the case of pictures, hosting them makes collaboration a lot easier
when they get changed and overwritten. We need to generate thumbnails,
and be sure that they get served quickly when we need them. To start
with, we don't necessarily need to be able to stream videos in real
time (especially the really big ones), so they are a lot more suitable
for being offloaded to others.

We're also not talking about offloading something we're already doing.
We do not, to my knowledge, presently host any video file above 100
MB. There is an existing non-profit which hosts thousands such files,
many of them falling within the scope of content we typically cover.
Should we mirror all those files, just to prove that we can? I don't
think so. Should we expand our scope to cover such files? Only if we
cannot collaborate.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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