On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 6:06 PM, James Forrester
<
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 22 June 2015 at 16:25, Samuel Klein
<meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Where in this new process could someone hook in a
widget that catches
attempts to upload proprietary formats, and sends the file behind the
scenes to Internet Archive for transcoding?
Ha. Well, that's an awkward policy question (and so my responsibility)
wrapped inside a technical one (and so Mark's). :-)
I'm sure that such a hook could already be written for UploadWizard,
though ideally it'd be done properly with a type handler; the transcoding
effort, however, would mean that we would not store the original, so
there'd need to be a challenging community discussion about whether
retaining the original was important. It'd also be a pretty fragile system
compared to doing the transcoding ourselves, without significant moral,
ethical or legal gains as far as I can see, so I'd need to be convinced
that it was worth spending so much effort on. But "inside it somewhere"
isn't a great answer, I'm afraid.
That discussion already happened, see
Commons:Project_scope#Must_be_an_allowable_free_file_format
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope#Must_be_an_allowable_free_file_format>
and
Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video> -
there are strong objections to storing or transcoding originals files which
have a proprietary format, at least in the current legal and policy
landscape.