Wikipedia Gears Up For Explosion In Digital Media 141
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."
Re:One word (Score:3, Informative)
BitTorrent doesn't work well with unpopular information.
Re:Whatever happened with google sponsorship? (Score:2, Informative)
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. :-)
Commons? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Wikipedia=new on-line data repository (Score:1, Informative)
Does anything on Wikipedia ever really get deleted?
Perhaps not. [dbatley.com]
Re:I can only imagine how bad the edit wars will b (Score:2, Informative)
We already have archive.org for anything out of copyright, or freely redistributable.
Not for long - The Internet Watch Foundation [wikimedia.org] have just blocked archive.org [theregister.co.uk] to all UK population.
Re:Wikipedia Search = Sucky (Score:3, Informative)
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:legitimate need? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, most of these uploads should go to the Wikimedia Commons [wikimedia.org], not Wikipedia proper. Files uploaded to Commons can be used on any Wikimedia site, including any language of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. Files uploaded to the English Wikipedia can only be used on the English Wikipedia. The Commons admins [wikimedia.org] are largely a different group of people from the English Wikipedia admins [wikipedia.org], although there's some overlap. Adminship is given out on a per-project basis; only a few dozen stewards [wikimedia.org] have any privileges across projects.
Re:Too much of a burden on Wikipedia (Score:2, Informative)
Wikipedia is not the only Wikimedia Foundation project [wikimedia.org]. In particular, the scope of the Wikimedia Commons [wikimedia.org] is "to provide a media file repository . . . that makes available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content to all . . .". All the projects are run from the same servers, and share the same upload servers in particular -- notice how all uploaded images are at upload.wikimedia.org, no matter what the project is. The technical upgrades are of most value to Commons, which has long had trouble accepting in-scope content like high-quality, free educational videos because they're over the file size.
Re:Wikipedia Search = Much better (Score:4, Informative)
Now however it gives reasonable suggestions for misspellings and has better accuracy.