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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."
Wikipedia, as a nonprofit, is no different from any other dumbass venture-backed company.
"Hey we just collected $6MM, and we're heading into Great Depression II. What should we do?"
"Why don't we spend all of it as quickly as we can, then beg for more in a few months?"
"Genius! Give that man a raise!"
And it'll get speedy-deleted on grounds of notability, original research, etc - and you won't have a video anymore.
Hey, if I had 6 million million dollars, I wouldn't hesitate to blow a few thousand on hard drives either.
But, seriously: if you become irrelevant, it doesn't matter how financially smart you are, you can say bye-bye.
Because:
And youtube may withdraw them or restrict their audience at any time.
Infuriate left and right
I doubt it, due to copyrights. The expiration on copyright is so long that they'd have little to legally archive.
Developers: We can use your help.
Seriously, half the pages I view on a daily basis these days are wikipedia pages. Any time I want to learn about something, it's the first place I go.
MABASPLOOM!
"legitimate need to upload a two-hour video of good quality"
Who gets to define legitimate?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unlike my name, Vibber's is spelled BriOn.
...video editor
Am I going to the Wikipedia page on France, and watching a video, complete with caption in *My* language, of France - like a mini-documentary or travel brochure or promo? Who produces that? Who edits it? Is there a standard narrator? Can we get that guy with the cool voice that does Frontline to do them all? Will they have any standards in how they are produced? How they are credited?
There is a fundamental and critical difference between Youtube, which is a Bazaar, and Wikipedia, which is a Cathedral - to brazenly steal Eric Raymond's title.
A video on say France is the authoritative video on the subject. Unlike say a picture, which may be used or copied with permission that may show a city or a map, videos require much more work. Will Oliver Stone get to do the video for George W Bush? Will it be like the BMW series with Clive Owen, having a bunch of guest directors? Can we have Marty Scorsese do the video for New York City?
Multimedia is cool, but it opens up alot of problems.
Their main problem is going to be making sure that none of the stuff people upload violates any copyright and conforms to their free/non-free usage guidelines. There are only so many user-generated videos that could find a place in an encyclopedia, so I assume most of what they'll see will be ripped from other places.
They spend enormous amounts of time "patrolling" uploaded images, placing them on special categories for later review and so on. And the processes in place don't help, either. The last time I tried the upload page for an image from the Cassini mission I was pretty much blown away how complicated it is to figure out how to tag a file to avoid having it be deleted on sight, even though the use permissions from the copyright owner were pretty clear.
If the Wikipedia bureaucracy is bad now, just wait for the Video Upload Patrol Group to form up. Oh the humanity.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
We already have archive.org for anything out of copyright, or freely redistributable. There are even full length features available.
My question is how exactly is a 2 hour movie going to fit in with the mission of Wikipedia. They're intended to be an encyclopedia, not a movie download service. It would make sense to link to clips of films in the article on John Williams or Spike Lee or whoever, but all you need is a clip, not the whole film.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is out of scope for Wikipedia. It sounds like this should be an entirely separate project. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias should not have video:
I don't mean that because traditional encyclopedias did not have video, but because it doesn't fit with the type of content that an encyclopedia presents. It is similar to how newspapers should not have video. Wikipedia is not a teaching tool. It is not meant to provide functional examples. It is a starting point: a dictionary-style explanatory description.
An entry on the Hindenburg does not need a video of the Hindenburg disaster. It needs technical specifications, historically accurate statements of what happened, and a link to a museum who DOES house the video.
An entry on Calculus needs a historic description and a mathematical overview. Not a 2-hour lecture.
Now --- that doesn't mean that a video repository is not a good project. I think that would be awesome. Youtube kinda has that, but it has garbage thrown in. But maybe Wikipedia is not the place for it.
Except that theora isn't all that good. Yes it is free but the quality isn't as good as many other codecs out there. I wish that Dirac would get more attention as a codec.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If they increase the storage, it means that the traffic will explode.
Who will pay for the bandwidth ?
This year, it was 6 millions of dollars, but with videos, at least 10 times this amount will be needed.
Does this mean that ads will appear ?
Any time I want to learn about something, it's the first place I go.
It's the second place I go, because the Wikipedia Search "feature" sucks unless you know exactly what you're looking for. If only Wikipedia would either fix their broken "search" or simply integrate Google search into it?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
First, presumably the article probably means Wikimedia Commons rather than Wikipedia itself. That said, one of Wikipedia's biggest goals is to have all media content as open and accessible as possible. They accept only free, open, and unencumbered file formats.
YouTube is pretty much the exact opposite of Wikipedia. That is, you cannot download the content for your own use or to redistribute it, there is no open source software that can easily view YouTube content, there is no intelligent discussion of said content (only "omfg americas r soooo dumb"), and nobody except YouTube employees are allowed to express an opinion on whether or not the content is suitable for deletion. And finally, there is no certification that the content being viewed is in the public domain or is being used within the bounds of fair use.
Does anything on Wikipedia ever really get deleted? I thought the Mods and Admins had full access to deleted pages.
Yep, that's generally true. Anyone who can delete things can also undelete things, and there are lots of people who can do both: over 1600 on the English Wikipedia, 250 on the Wikimedia Commons -- any administrator. Hypothetically a sysop would be able to use Wikipedia as a private file store this way, since views of deleted content aren't logged, but that's probably not worth it. :)
If you upload something that even the admins shouldn't see, generally an "OMG lawsuit" kind of thing like personal information, you can get your revision oversighted -- still stored, but only restorable by someone with shell access. This doesn't currently work for uploads, though, as far as I know.
Actually, though, deletion of files was permanent for a long time, until a couple of years ago. This created a fun doomsday scenario where a rogue or compromised sysop account could run a script to delete all images on Wikipedia unrecoverably. I don't think backups were kept then either, so they'd have to be manually gotten back from mirrors and things like that. Fun stuff. Part of the new hardware setup uses ZFS snapshots to back up the files now, from what I've been told, although I haven't worked with that directly.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin