Wikipedia Gears Up For Explosion In Digital Media

jbrodkin writes "Wikipedia is gearing up for an explosion in digital content with new servers and storage designed to handle larger photo and video uploads. Until early 2008, the user-generated encyclopedia's primary media file server had just 2TB of total space, which was not enough to hold growing amounts of video, audio and picture files, says CTO Brian Vibber. 'For a long time, we just did not have the capacity [to handle very large media files],' he says. Wikipedia has raised media storage from 2TB to 48TB and the limit on file uploads from 20MB to 100MB. Ultimately, Wikipedia wants to eliminate any practical size limits on uploads, potentially allowing users to post feature length, high-quality videos. 'The limits will get bigger and bigger to where it will be relatively easy for someone who has a legitimate need to upload a two-hour video of good quality,' Vibber says."

Comments

Re:Wikipedia Search = Sucky

[Simetrical]

There have been major improvements to search lately, thanks pretty much solely to the volunteer work of Robert Stojnic (rainman). You might want to try it out again. Still probably not quite up to Google levels in some ways, given the difference in budget of some billions of dollars versus ~$0, but it has better relevance than before and a lot more nice features now (e.g., "did you mean").

Re:Wikipedia Search = Much better

[Taxman415a]

It used to be really bad I agree, and so would everyone else. But it has recently gotten much better. It was just never seen as a high enough priority given the shoestring budgets and other fires that needed to be put out.

Now however it gives reasonable suggestions for misspellings and has better accuracy.