[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

Wed Jan 3 03:35:05 UTC 2007

On 1/2/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 1/3/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If Internet archive is paying substantially less for bandwidth than we
> > do, then we're doing something wrong.
>
> It's possible that we are doing something wrong. We should find out.
> ;-) But aside from whatever they are paying, they have other sources
> of funding than we do.

Still, it seems very premature to shape our decisions around bandwidth
concerns which do not yet exist. How much traffic are we talking
about? If we don't know, how could the internet archive fairly accept
it?

> The strength of wiki is not the power to raise enough funds to host
> large files. In fact, we're still pretty bad at fundraising.

We are bad in terms of viewership vs income. In absolute terms, I
think we're not doing so bad.. How many internet/technology projects
can you name that bring in $1M USD/yr with pretty much only website
panhandling?  There are a lot of low hanging fruit, and I have
confidence for us in the future.

> The
> strength of wiki is to collaborate, to _edit_ content and derive new
> works. The strength of the Internet Archive is to _preserve_ and make
> available existing works. If we want both our non-profits to evolve
> towards their natural strengths, it seems logical to me to try to
> figure out ways for us to do less hosting and more collaborating.
> In the case of pictures, hosting them makes collaboration a lot easier
> when they get changed and overwritten. We need to generate thumbnails,
> and be sure that they get served quickly when we need them. To start
> with, we don't necessarily need to be able to stream videos in real
> time (especially the really big ones), so they are a lot more suitable
> for being offloaded to others.

What makes you think video is different?

We have far less video, so we do see less video collaboration.. but we
do see video collaboration. Of course, if we prematurely shut of
collaboration by forcing video content to a non-collaborative medium
(which the internet archive is) we will of course never see the volume
and value of what we have missed.

Regarding the importance of downsampling for live streaming: Have you
missed google video and youtube? Real time streaming *does* matter if
we care about information accessibility.. And the technology to do it
(using purely Free Software tools) exists today.

I firmly believe that without realtime streaming there is no bandwidth
problem... the amounts of access will be just too low.

> We're also not talking about offloading something we're already doing.
> We do not, to my knowledge, presently host any video file above 100
> MB.

We do, however, host many hundreds of files much larger than that..
Some totaling hundreds of gigabytes. (download.wikimedia.org). I
believe our own backups would be a better candidate for internet
archive offloading than our video content.

>There is an existing non-profit which hosts thousands such files,
> many of them falling within the scope of content we typically cover.
> Should we mirror all those files, just to prove that we can? I don't
> think so. Should we expand our scope to cover such files? Only if we
> cannot collaborate.

Last I checked, many of the videos that we'd consider hosting which
that have would not fit our copyright guidelines.  A lot of the full
length movies for example, are only free in the sense that the movie
itself was not renewed. The music, plot, and other elements are still
copyrighted. Internet archive gets away with this because who wants to
sue a library? We could too, but we've explicitly rejected material
which can only be distributed by the good graces or inattentiveness of
their copyright holders.