Yann Forget wrote:
That completely defeats the point. Anyone can keep a copy locally, but 1. the file isn't available publicly, 2. nobody really knows where it is available (Google won't say X has a copy), 3. if the local storage is damaged, the file is lost.
So I am asking the WMF to have a place to keep such files publicly.
It's kind of amusing to read a discussion about preserving historical documents where the author's name includes the word "forget." :-)
The problem here is a lot more social than technical. We already have two places that users can upload and manage files: commons.wikimedia.org and meta.wikimedia.org. There's no technical reason that either of these places can't be used, as far as I know. The issue is that some people on these wikis insist that all content be completely free.
Depending on the size of the files you want to store and how much you care about presentation, metadata, etc., there are some more obscure places we could stick the files basically indefinitely. We could put them in a Git repository on gerrit.wikimedia.org or maybe github.com, we could stick them in Phabricator at phabricator.wikimedia.org, we could put them on wikimediafoundation.org, we could put them in a user directory on people.wikimedia.org, we could stick them on a server like dumps.wikimedia.org or wikitech.wikimedia.org. Hell, we could even find an obscure Wiktionary or Wikiquote project with reasonable local admins and just stash the files away there. We have plenty of servers and tools at our disposal. If you create a Phabricator Maniphest task with a list of your hard and soft requirements, particularly the amount of storage space you expect to need, we can probably find you a place to stick these files away from the people so intent on deleting them.
MZMcBride