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Proposal:Multimedia File Formats Standards to maximise bandwith efficiency

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



Summary

Most of the old images uploaded on Wikipedia were uncompressed large sized, due to bandwidth constraints and other financial cost associated with them I propose establishing of Wikipedia Standards for Multimedia Files.

Proposal

File format can be chosen or preferred after community discussion for various multimedia files, image files can be compressed further in either Jpg or Jpeg or other compression intensive format to maximize the bandwidth use, many old files are still pretty large.

A bot could probably be written to do this, and if a compress bot was running across commons etc we could continue to allow inefficiently compressed formats to be loaded.

As an Example, I would like to mention an image featured on Wikipedia's main page on 28 Oct. 2009, its a .Jpg image file totalling over 32 MB. Since its on the main page it could be assumed that its seen by quite a few users, some might view the entire file, at 32 Mb it would be an extremely inefficient use of the bandwidth to display a single image. the compression standards and format preference are non-uniform for most pictures like these. it should be easy for user to upload pictures in multiple sizes and forms but managing or converting them to efficient formats should be handled by Wikipedia.

Motivation

It would limit the bandwidth cost for the Project overall since multimedia files are the bulk of the size of Wikipedia.


People with slow connection speeds would find our sites much easier to use.

Key Questions

  1. What format and attributes would be considered the Wikipedia standards, a community discussion could settle the exact particulars of the standards. Older images can be converted according to the standard and all future upload would have to follow them as well.
  2. Not allowing certain formats to be uploaded would not be user friendly, better to allow them and then have a bot compress them.

Potential Costs

Since the bulk of the effort is community oriented, none foreseeable. it should however generate high cost savings on the bandwidth bill.

References

Featured Image for 28 Oct.[[1]]


Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Multimedia File Formats Standards to maximise bandwith efficiency.

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