OrthodoxWiki:Media

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This article and its discussion page are for working out an approach to the use, categorization, or storage of Orthodox media content (i.e. audio and video files).

Sister-site Proposal

One idea would be to create an online repository of publically-available Orthodox Media on a sister site to OrthodoxWiki rather than on this site itself. Each project would have a different, but complementary focus.

This would include free media hosting, at least for compressed audio and video archives, as well as a comprehensive directory of other Orthodox files available on the internet, but that we are not able to include on our site because of copyright reasons.

As the project groes, bandwidth and hard drive space could become very expensive. Here, we could accept donations or work out some kind of sponsorship program.

Even if it was not a complete repository (containing all the media files), it could function very well as a registry, containing links to media files and basic metadata (categories, authors, distributors, formats, licenses, etc.). We could limit uploads to a certain size or license status. This approach would keep hard drive space and bandwidth requirements down considerably.

One model for us could be the Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org). MediWiki is under rapid development and should soon have more robust support for media files than it already has now.

OrthodoxWiki pages could link directly to files on the sister site, where appropriate, leading to a relatively seamless streaming experience. (How would this be done? How does WikimediaCommons do it?)

Thinking this over a little more, I think this would be a great direction to move. Not just great, but practical. Things are also moving so fast, so I'm sure there will be many more great tools coming in the future. Getting things together now would basically enable us to be strategically placed for the future -- to build a library and strong user base in anticipation of a time, very soon to come, when this stuff will become more fully integrated into people's homes and lives.

External Links and Project Discussions

Wikipedia

Wikimedia Commons

OurMedia and Drupal

This proposal also has similarities with http://ourmedia.org/, which is using Drupal (www.drupal.org) as a base. This would take a little more effort to cutomize for our needs and would probably have a higher maintenance requirement. It's an impressive project, however, and it might be possible to likewise integrate something into the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/ - used by Our Media).

Besides the links above, I would refer those who are interested in how such a thing could be set up to these discussions on Drupal.org:

Besides OurMedia, another media site using Drupal is http://www.cctvcambridge.org/.

Drupal might be a better development platform - or at least, it would make available some things that aren't yet possible on MediaWiki. Both are under extensive development and are be used by groups much bigger than we'll ever be.

I'd be willing to help with this kind of project, but I am pretty certain it would take more time and knowledge than I'd have to give it. We'd need a real developer to help get this up and running.

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