Guillaume Paumier wrote:
I don't think there is an official Board resolution about the use of
proprietary technologies on Wikimedia projects. However, Brion and Erik
have been known to have a pretty strong opinion on that, and I believe
Danese and a large part of the WMF tech staff are in the same place.
A few relevant links for a historical perspective:
* We should permit Flash video playback thread on foundation-l in 2007
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/2220/
* Software policy draft thread on foundation-l in 2007
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/19547/
* The actual draft:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Draft_Statement_of_Principles_Regarding_Software_Use
There is nothing in that, or in
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy which suggests that
we can't use Flash for microphone audio upload, is there? Are people
aware of http://haxe.org/doc/intro and
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ ? The bulk of Flash is no longer
proprietary. I know there are patent issues around some flash video
formats, but at this point I have little confidence that any of the
major browser authors will provide HTML microphone upload in the next
five years. Is there any reason to believe otherwise?
Casey Brown wrote:
Another, somewhat more recent one:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/October_3-5,_2008#Open_Standards_.2F_Free_File_Formats
The board asked Sue to have Mike Godwin revise the draft policy to a
version that would make it clear that only free formats are
permissible.
Did that ever happen? (Or did anything useful ever come about of it?)
Clearly not, so I am asking Sue and Mike directly by adding them as addressees.
I have been working on microphone audio upload since before the
previous decade: http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload -- I have also
offered to donate some nice ActionScript microphone upload code to the
Foundation which compiles with Haxe if the builder is willing to do
such things as replace the Speex vocodec constant with the equivalent
integer. It doesn't run under gnash yet, but I believe it will soon.
(I don't think there would be consensus for dropping Wikimedia support
for closed-source browsers, as a related matter.)
In return, I have asked the Foundation to spend $2,500 on a contract
with Yaron Koren to enable GIFT -- http://microformats.org/wiki/gift
-- in the Quiz extension. That would be particularly useful if the
efforts to ask the Open University to re-license the several thousand
hours of courseware which they currently publish under cc-by-nc-sa, to
cc-by-sa or cc-by succeed. I have asked multiple parties, including
Board members and the UK Chapter to work on that simultaneously. I
believe at least two of them are working on that effort. In any case,
GIFT is far more compact and more wikitext-like than the existing Quiz
extension to Mediawiki which is bulky and suffers from lack of use in
more than 90 assessments on Wikiversity, for example, while GIFT
assessments can be produced from the assessments in any Moodle course
using Moodle's export function.
However, even though Wayne Mackintosh of the 25,000 teacher-strong
WikiEducator and OER Foundation wrote to Erik back on March 28, saying
they were very supportive of the GIFT compatibility project, Erik
has so far hesitated, saying that he wants to see additional support
from the community.
So please, if you think GIFT assessment support and/or Flash
microphone audio upload is a good idea (and I would repeat that the
Spanish Wiktonary still has no audio pronunciation for hola even
though the English Wiktionary does) then please let Erik know. Thank
you!
Sincerely,
James Salsman
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