[Wikipedia-l] Distributing fonts

Wed Oct 6 14:27:08 UTC 2004

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 10:47:19 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I see merit in both positions.  By taking a stand for OGG over MP3, we
> are inconveniencing people in the name of free content.  We have an
> obligation to minimize that inconvenience, and this might be in part
> be resolved by hosting some GPL software and very user-friendly
> instructions for installing it.  We can decide on a case by case basis.
> 
> A lot of GPL software is hosted on nerdy websites that would simply
> frighten inexperienced users.  When that's the case, it would be nice
> if we used our public communication skills to help out.

This is one of the things I was trying to work on with the ideas I was
putting on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia  I'm going to
have a go at drafting my suggested Help: page now, complete with the
links to various means of listening to  ogg vorbis files. (And now I
think, perhaps some instructions, too) Note that most of these are
plugins for whatever media player you already have, not a whole new
piece of software.

But perhaps it *would* be nice to have a "wiki-player" that just read
in an ogg, and played it, and nothing else, for people who don't have
a media player at all. It could actually be considered, in a vague
kind of way, to be part of the site software: if playing oggs is part
of using the wiki, then an ogg player is part of the interface.

Of course, what would be *really* nice, would be if we could *embed*
the player, but that might be a bit awkward.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]