[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

Thu Nov 10 01:06:48 UTC 2005

I think most of your concerns should be directed to wikitech-l, rather 
than being injected into other discussions.

As for the availability of the DVD, it has been available _for a price_, 
and not easily accessible. This effectively prohibits and group projects 
from moving for which require the use of the images.

Also, several people are excited by this and want to know when it will 
be online, believing that it will finally allow projects such as 
Wikisource's 1911EB to take off, so it's not accurate to say that there 
is no hurry. It seems that most people, myself included, didn't even 
know that these were available anywhere. In any case, they were _never_ 
easily available, or freely available.

Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Tim Starling wrote:
>
>  
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>>When Brian came on to IRC and asked us "What is the best way to 
>>upload 30,000 images requiring 6 GB to commons?" the reaction 
>>from Brion and I was a groan. The hardware requirements for 
>>commons are rapidly increasing, and uploading and storing such 
>>content in MediaWiki is inefficient and non-portable.
>>    
>>
>
>While I can understand your reaction, I think we should fix our 
>systems so they can handle these volumes without having to create 
>new exceptions.  The existence of Wikisource could be questioned, 
>since there are already other projects (such as Project Gutenberg 
>and Distributed Proofreaders) that do this kind of work.  But if 
>Wikisource is to exist, it should be capable of handling large 
>volumes (terabytes) of digitized text (and scanned images).  It 
>cannot be that every new book requires a new project, because 
>Wikisource is unable to handle its size.  Encyclopaedia Britannica 
>might be bigger than anything that is currently in Wikisource, but 
>just wait til someone suggests we digitize the Spanish 
>"Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada" (70 fat volumes, 1908-1930), 
>which makes EB look tiny.
>
>Andreas Grosz' scans of EB1911 have been available on DVD for more 
>than two years, so I see no immediate hurry for us to host it.  
>As far as I know, PGDP is doing a good work proofreading it, and 
>we could benefit from waiting for them to finish more of the work.
>
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>>If we had them in a separate directory on a separate domain,
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>Or if MediaWiki could handle separate directories on the same 
>domain...
>
>The recent donation (and import) of 10,000 art images from 
>Directmedia GmbH to Wikimedia Commons put the system to its 
>limits.  What if the next donation consists of a million images?  
>Or a million audio recordings?  Dump them in a directory, supply 
>an index description in XML, and let MediaWiki use the data where 
>it is, instead of trying to stuff it into the MySQL database 
>through the wiki upload form.
>
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>>Wikisource has suffered so far due to a lack of specialised 
>>software.  This kind of initiative could see it become more 
>>usable generally.
>>    
>>
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>Or the specialization could be added to MediaWiki, so anybody 
>could benefit from it, not just Wikisource.
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