Original thread from March starts here: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/59684
As I noted back then, this is a drastic policy change that needs a lot wider discussion, including on the wikis, than just wikitech-l. On 12 December 2012 18:38, Michael Dale <md...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > * No one is proposing turning "off" webm, an ideological commitment to > support free access with free platforms in royalty free formats, does not > necessarily require you exclude derivation to proprietary formats. This proposal is not about anything other than enhancing the shiny for owners of iOS devlces. While the devices are indisputable really lovely to use, this particular (shrinking) userbase does not constitute a group in any way lacking in access to anything we do, on any other device they own (and they do own other devices). The only reason you can't view anything other than H.264 on iOS devices is because Apple want to promote a given severely proprietary format on their locked-down devices. This is not a reason for Wikimedia to break principle. Mozilla is not an argument. Mozilla doing the wrong thing for directly commercial reasons is not any sort of argument for us to. It's only pressure from users that will get the companies to use unlocked formats. > * We could ingest h.264 making letting the commons store source material in > its originally source captured format. This is important for years down the > road we have the highest quality possible. Ingestion is an *entirely* separate issue, as I pointed out last time around - it is erroneous to conflate it with output. (We should be ingesting absolutely anything we can.) > * Chicken and egg, for companies like apple to care about wikimedia webm > only support, wikimedia would need lots of video, as long as we don't > support h.264 our platform discourages wide use video on articles. This claim makes no sense unless you are conflating ingestion and output. We need more video on Wikimedia from every source we can (including, per that other thread, the cheap Android mobile phones of people in Africa), but that has *nothing* to do with whether we output H.264 for the benefit of those who have chosen to use locked-down iOS devices. - d. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
