[WikiEN-l] Great article!

Sun Feb 20 12:59:57 UTC 2005

Sj-

>Thanks for lightening the mood... though I feel compelled to point out
>that our multimedia and "hey, cool!" offerings still pale in
>comparison to those of Encarta and BO.
>  
>
Only if by multimedia you mean videos and "flashy interactive stuff". 
The Wikimedia Commons is already 14 gigabytes large and growing rapidly. 
This, according to my count, currently includes about 40,000 GIF, JPG 
and PNG images and over 3,000 .ogg sound files. The data I have for 
Encarta says that it has 20,000 pictures and 1,000 sounds. Furthermore, 
many of our images are very high resolution, whereas Britannica and 
Encarta compress things down to screen res. True, a lot of that stuff is 
not linked from anywhere else, though on the other hand, all the wikis 
have their own local repositories in addition to that.

We suck at videos, though. Part of the problem is that once we increase 
the file size limit on Commons, people will upload all the stuff that is 
on archive.org and similar free archives. That may well be our long term 
goal (*cough* world domination *cough*), but in the short term we should 
probably have a policy like "Don't upload very large files if they are 
easily availabe from an existing, free resource".

As for interactive content - we need native SVG support in at least one 
major browser before this becomes feasible, unless we want to use 
something like Flash, where the only decent implementation is non-free.

Regards,

Erik