Following a previous blog posting I made on search engines and Wikia Search in particular, it's interesting that Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that operates Wikipedia among other free-content projects continues to strengthen its platform with a partnership with Sun Microsystems to build an open source Web infrastructure.
With this, Wikimedia wants to better host the growing volume of rich media and video content. And, the collaborative development and testing of new content for Wikipedia should be better supported with this platform, the company said.
The benefits boil down to a “better and faster user experience,” according to Wikimedia. Good long-term investment on Wikimedia’s part considering the platform is all about provisioning users and allowing them to collaborate en masse. The technology from Sun will be the open source MySQL database and Sun Open Storage infrastructure, which should allow users easy access to Wikimedia’s data and for users to upload files up to 100MB faster. For a platform that touts openness and user-generated content, it’s a good move to invest in better user interaction.