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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."
The Wiki project represents the best and worst that's in us. I wonder if people will start trying to archive classic shows on there like they do on youtube. :)
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Why don't they instead just allow linking to youtube videos without the WP nazis removing them? Sure they can upgrade storage size, but if they start storing videos everyone wants to see, then you're looking at youtube-sized bandwidth bills (or lack thereof) ensuing. It makes more sense to me, at least. [citation needed]
Do you have a large video but don't want to consume your desktop hard drive with it? Just write an article about it and post it all to Wikipedia.
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!"
BitTorrent doesn't work well with unpopular information.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
No, just a rumour. Google never sponsored anything about Wikimedia other than the occasional party at the annual conference. Yahoo!, on the other hand, has been hosting a Wikipedia data room within their data centre in Seoul since 2004/5-ish. Just goes to show how inaccurate these Interweb thingies are. :-)
...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.
Sounds pretty dumb to me. Media should be at Wikimedia commons, not in Wikipedia proper.
Maybe that's what he means, but I didn't RTFA.
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!
These developments offer a chance for the open source .ogg/theora format to shine.
While folks at Illiminable have done a good job of providing a codec to play .ogg files within Windows Media Player, I hope this can be available by default.
That is, you attempt to play an .ogg/theora file and the system provides a opportunity to download and install/setup the plugin by default on systems without the ability to play .ogg/theora files.
I eagerly await the update to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_positions
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Instead of just wading through a billion "OMG Kid FAILS at Suzuki ghost-ride in front of hott!!!" videos mismarked as news, people can actually get to the most representative and informative feeds on emerging issues. Like a public newsroom.
That doesn't prevent there from being a rather significant pool of classic media. Take the old Superman cartoons as an example. They all fell into public domain long before they could be grandfathered back into existence. Thus just about anyone who wants to host them, edit them, use them in a new work, or otherwise make use of those old films is able to do so. Also, some of those films are likely to be new works that are gifted into the Creative Commons in the same way the Wikipedia article text is. Think of a shark in its natural environment, a tour of a famous building, or even a re-enactment of a historical battle.
There's even work that's been done to show how Wikipedia might use the HTML5 tag if and when it becomes widely deployed. (See this page for a dev version of Opera and 2 example Wikipedia pages that support & fallback content.) Despite the seeming incongruity of allowing videos inside Wikipedia pages, the demos shown is actually quite natural.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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 ?
We already have archive.org for anything out of copyright, or freely redistributable.
Not for long - The Internet Watch Foundation have just blocked archive.org to all UK population.
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.
It's been 18 months since Wikipedia provided bulk downloads of image data. That may not be a priority for most people, but offering everything for download is essential for an open project in my opinion. Add all new images of a month to YYYYMM.tar and offer that as a torrent.
Why the focus on 'movies'? There are many situations in which an article about a particular subject could be improved through the use of a high-quality, feature-length educational video. Wouldn't the article for the Amen Break be more interesting if this video appeared on the page, right there in the sidebar? To borrow your example, you wouldn't have a Spike Lee film, but a documentary about him, fleshing out the details in the article and offering insight that text alone can't provide. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture must be worth millions.
Of course, you open up a whole can of worms in the editing battle side of things. Tug-of-wars over text has proved bad enough, let alone people arguing over weasel words and unsupported claims in a thirty minute documentary.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Long bought and paid for bribed long...
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.
I don't see a role for Wikipedia in this. Archive.org already accepts video uploads of useful archival material, so that's covered. Wikipedia has enough trouble finding redistributable still images for articles. Who's going to create useful video for Wikipedia that isn't original research or a copyright violation?