Wikimedia to Produce Online Video Tutorials

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Look behind the scenesVideo tutorials are often more beginner-friendly than text based online help pages. Wikimedia is therefore producing a number of videos demonstrating the basics of Wikipedia editing and increasing the public understanding of Wikipedia and Wikimedia.
On 19 November 2008 the shooting of the very first Wikipedia video tutorials took place. They will deal with two very basic questions:
* How do I edit Wikipedia?
* Why does Wikipedia work even though anyone can edit it?
To give you a look behind the scenes we produced a short 3 minute making-of video that can be watched online:
* on Wikimedia Commons (11.7 MB, better quality)
* on Wikimedia Commons (6.2 MB, lower quality)
and also
* on Vimeo
* on blip.tv
* on YouTube
Currently, the two video tutorials are in the process of post-production (assembling the film, adding visual effects etc.) and we hope that they will be online soon.  We’re also working on a portal space where the tutorials will be hosted for the long-term, and of course you’ll be able to find them here on the Wikimedia blog.
Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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#221

I personally believe screencasts can be very effective tutorials, if well made, even better than actually watching someone do the stuff in a computer. By watching this video, it seemed to be a lot focused on the lady and what she was saying, rather than what she did in the screen. I hope the end result is more balanced. In any case, I’m looking forward to see this when finished 🙂

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#222

How does this cost ?
A complementary idea would be to expand the usage of “Recordmydesktop” in the wikipedia help pages. Wikigraphists, we already made 0$US video tutorials using this free software [[:en:Recordmydesktop]] (i.e. the video : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:GL_tuto-animation01.ogg ).
Why not grant the Graphic labs a scolarship for this work ? send them better microphones may be interesting for the foundation.

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#223

Nice idea!
Any plans on localizing that?
I mean yes, we can make subtitles, or even re-read text. But what about screenshots/screenvidoes in that video, will it be possible to change for other language wikipedias, so we have “completly localized” versions of that casts?

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#224

The videos include brief screencast components, but the key purpose of these videos is not to explain, in detail, the “how” of editing, but to create a personal invitation for the kind of demographic that would never actively seek out screencasts. We believe that the “human touch” is very important to get people started, especially those who aren’t yet fully comfortable with the online medium. More in-depth how-to screencasts are a separate part of Frank’s work, and Yug’s suggestion to work with existing screencast authors in the community in order to create more of them is excellent. Big thanks to… Read more »

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#225

Hi, Thank you very much for the feedback. I’ve just posted some more background information about what we are planning on the Foundation’s mailinglist: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-December/048225.html @Yug: I like your screencast. Would you be interested to join a group of people who work on a manual / online help page about how to produce screencasts for Wikipedia? My goal is to enable volunteers to create such screencast videos on their own. If so, please write me an email via frank [at] wikimedia [dot] org (en français, si tu veux) Please let me know if you have further questions or ideas for… Read more »

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#226

I would like to first thank the german wikimedia for financing this great video production: Danke schoen liebe Wikimedia Deutschland.
I have some questions though:
How much would this production cost and would you release the post production files to Wikimedia or as CC-BY?
Is there a wikiproject for creating tutorials?
Thank you
Diaa

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