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It's kind of amusing to read a discussion about preserving historical
documents where the author's name includes the word "forget."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