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."
Hahaha. Typical. (Score:2, Insightful)
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!"
Re:Wikipedia=new on-line data repository (Score:3, Insightful)
And it'll get speedy-deleted on grounds of notability, original research, etc - and you won't have a video anymore.
Re:Hahaha. Typical. (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Youtube? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because:
Re:Youtube? (Score:5, Insightful)
And youtube may withdraw them or restrict their audience at any time.
Re:I can only imagine how bad the edit wars will b (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt it, due to copyrights. The expiration on copyright is so long that they'd have little to legally archive.
Wikipedia = The Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
legitimate need? (Score:3, Insightful)
"legitimate need to upload a two-hour video of good quality"
Who gets to define legitimate?
Typo (Score:3, Insightful)
I forsee a new job at Wikipedia... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I can only imagine how bad the edit wars will b (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I can only imagine how bad the edit wars will b (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wikipedia = The Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
I sincerely hope it's not the last place you go. The "facts" you get from wikipedia won't teach you much. (Unless you are a psycholgist studying how power can warp some people on the internet, or an accountant studying Jimbo Wales creative expense accounting. (I noticed after their last scrounge for cash, there was a big thank you from Jimmy Wales banner -- now, that was ironically funny)).
Here's a test. Pick a subject that you are expert in, or even have a good passing knowledge of -- any subject, pick a few even. Go to the wikipedia page on that topic, and you will find inconsistencies, inaccuracies, conjecture, missing information and sometimes downright lies.
Now, tell me what you think you are learning? If any page on a subject you know about is flawed, what possible merit is a page on a subject you don't know about? All you will learn is flawed info.
Re:legitimate need? (Score:4, Insightful)
The same people who determine whether a given paragraph legitimately deserves to remain in a Wikipedia article: the community of volunteer contributors.
For better or worse, the people deciding what videos should be kept and which should be deleted will be those who are involved and passionate about Wikipedia. If you think Wikipedia is doing overall a good job so far, then presumably you expect them to make good decisions about what videos are worthwhile. If you think Wikipedia is overall doing a poor job, then presumably you expect them to make poor and/or capricious choices with respect to video.
Too much of a burden on Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Too much of a burden on Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why that's outside the scope of Wikipedia. A video of the disaster could fall under "historically accurate [depiction] of what happened."
I agree that lectures would be a bad idea, but some full-length videos are very informative and useful for research purposes.
Re:A chance for .ogg to shine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wikipedia = The Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the key. I agree with the previous poster; Wikipedia is a great place to start your online research. But of course I never quote the Wikipedia article itself (except for minor things like atomic weights and other easily-verifiable data). A well-written Wikipedia article is a speedy link to a collection of journals, newspaper articles, and primary sources.
Conversely, of course, a poorly-written Wikipedia article is a speedy link to a collection of 'authoritative' blogs, home pages and fringe websites.
Wikipedia is a great research tool for anyone who knows how to perform research.
Who will pay for this ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ?
Wikipedia Search = Sucky (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Wikipedia = The Internet (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia Search = Sucky (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia = The Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
I've found Wikipedia to be very accurate on topics in mathematics, physics, basic chemisry, and other 'nerdy but not controversial' topics (especially as a general reference for formulas, constants, and methods). When I've examined articles on topics about which I'm especially familiar I've found that writing quality and organization are pretty good indicators of accuracy. I assume that applies broadly.
That's not the point, though. You're absolutely right that wikipedia shouldn't be the final source for anything critically important (with few exceptions). But it is good enough for most casual (entertainment) tasks, and even many professional ones, assuming you work with hard sciences.
Re:Too much of a burden on Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
Videos can be especially helpful when used to describe motions and processes. Things like engine cycles, swarming behavior, and traffic patterns would be good subjects for videos.
Re:Youtube? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, presumably the article probably means Wikimedia Commons [wikimedia.org] 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 [wikimedia.org].
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.
Re:Wikipedia=new on-line data repository (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] on the English Wikipedia, 250 [wikimedia.org] 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 [wikimedia.org] -- still stored, but only restorable by someone with shell access [wikimedia.org]. 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 [wikimedia.org]. 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.