Wikimedia Foundation
From wikien-l message by Sheldon Rampton:
- I think we should go further still and shoot for the ultimate goal of creating "Wikimedia." That's media with an "m." It would use Wiki-style rules to enable public participation in the creation and editing of all kinds of media: encyclopedias and other reference works, current news, books, fiction, music, video etc. Like current broadcast media, it would have differentiated "channels" and "programs," each with self-selecting audiences. Unlike current media, however, the audience would also be actively involved in creating its own programming, instead of merely passively watching it.
(Note: the "wikimedia.org" domain name has been purchased by mav in waiting for a Wikipedia/Wikimedia non-profit to come into existence to own it.)
Random thoughts on what Wikimedia might mean
The Wiki[pm]edia family presently encompasses Wikipedia, the encyclopedia, and Wiktionary, the dictionary. (Wiktionary is still young, and not yet internationalised.)
A repository of source texts as primary reference material is something that's been discussed at length but not implemented (Project Sourceberg).
Suggestions for something more news-oriented are fairly frequent (Wikews etc).
More multimedialike, integration of maps has been suggested (Wikipediatlas).
The world of audio and video can touch most of these and more; currently it is possible to upload media files to the wikis and link them from articles, but it's unwieldy, not very wikilike, and there's no infrastructure for streaming media beyond 'hope your media player will play as it downloads from http'.
How to make audio and video wikilike?
Hmm, good question.
Technical issues
Distribution and bandwidth
Bandwidth, bandwidth, and more bandwidth! Wikipedia as it is is eating several gigabytes per day (could be reduced with compression...); extensive video and audio could increase that quite a bit.
Strange thought: what about using Freenet as a distribution channel for multimedia content? This could help protect against spikes and slashdotting; frequently requested material would get spread throughout the network and cached. Would this be practicable, or would a system of http mirrors be better?
The obvious disadvantage of freenet is that it requires users to download and install a separate package to get at stuff. (Web<->freenet gateways as distributed mirrors?)