[Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia.org (that's with an "m" as in multimedia)

Sat Mar 22 12:45:03 UTC 2003

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> On Friday 21 March 2003 10:51 am Axel wrote:
> 
>>That is a noble project, and if you stick to public domain or GFDL
>>pictures, it will be much nobler still. Please familiarize yourself
>>with the wealth of image resources listed under
>>     
>>   http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources
>>
>>I think Jimbo's suggestion of a free photo resource site is great. It
>>could work pretty much like the GIMP photo archive
>>
>>   http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/
>>
>>with a wiki-edited set of keywords for each photo, except it should
>>allow uploading of course, and needs to keep track of the license (or
>>lack thereof) and origin of each photo. Initially, we could seed the
>>database with all the photos from the public domain sources. Could be a
>>bit resource hungry though.
>>
>>Axel
> 
> 
> This is a most excellent idea. In addition to being a home to the Foundation, 
> Wikimedia.org could also be the central repository of all types of resource 
> media files (images, sounds, videos, GIS-based maps, maybe even indexed 
> read-only source text documents ...) that could be used by all Wikipedia 
> languages, Wiktionary, "WikiTextbooks", "WikiFiction" and whatever else we 
> think-up. This project could be covered by the GNU-FDL by default, but IMO 
> the GNU-FDL is poorly suited for media files... 

I think images, sounds and videos will do just fine. :-)

I especially like the words "central repository". As far as I'm 
concerned, we'll have a wikipedia-wide user management sooner or later. 
I'd imagine a "central" site for managing data that is used by all the 
different wikipedias (including wiktionary, meta, and so on). It could be
* The central user management.
* A place to manage language links
* A place to manage the different translations of the user interface
* The central media storage, where we'd store the *images*, with a 
description, that can be linked from every wikipedia (which can in turn 
have a description in its own language). This would greatly reduce the 
need for uploading every image in every language.
* Maybe the seat of the "Wikipedia foundation" as well.

Magnus