Open Video Alliance Launches “Video on Wikipedia” Campaign

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Today, our friends at the Open Video Alliance launched an important advocacy project (see their announcement), called “Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia“. The project aims to motivate more people to take and upload relevant educational video content to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.
Video can play an important role in an encyclopedia and in other learning resources. Whether it’s clips of animals, speeches, interviews, excerpts from important films, explanatory animations, footage of historical events, or even collaboratively created documentaries exploring complex topics — video can enrich our learning experience. There are about 4,500 video files in our media repository today, a tiny number. We don’t expect that Wikipedia will turn into “Wikitube” anytime soon, but we do hope that thousands more relevant educational videos will find their way into articles in our projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation also believes that two things need to change for video on the web: it needs to break out of the Flash container used for most video on the web so that developers can build smarter and richer applications, and it needs to be shared in a free format so that anyone can shoot and broadcast video without paying fees. That’s why we use an open video standard for all our videos. The “Let’s get video on Wikipedia how-to” provides simple instructions to convert video into a free and open format and upload it. And, of course, all video content on Wikimedia Commons can be re-used by anyone for any purpose: we’re open all the way.
The campaign is being co-organized by Mozilla Drumbeat, Wikimedia New York City, and the Participatory Culture Foundation, makers of the open source Miro video player and downloader.  It’s also a trial-by-fire for some of the new video technology we’ve been working on in partnership with Kaltura. In short, it’s a demonstration of the power of building alliances. If you’re a video maker or a web developer, we hope that you’ll join us in supporting open standards and free educational video content.
Wikipedia volunteer TheDJ provides some further under-the-hood information in his blog summary.
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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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Shouldn’t the campaign include images? Some people love to make images in their spare time. Also nature enthusiasts have large repositories of self-taken photos which they like to show off. Sometimes teachers also make their own diagrams which could be uploaded. These people would willingly upload stuff like this, as they’ll feel that their work will finally get noticed by somebody.

Hi Manish,
this particular campaign is focused on video, but there are plenty of activities in the Wikimedia universe focused on image donations. Speaking of enthusiasts, just a few days ago we received an image donation pledge from Robert Lavinsky, PhD for 29,000 pictures of minerals:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Robert_Lavinsky
See my recent blog post on Enriching Wikimedia Commons for a summary of some other recent projects:
http://diff.wikimedia.org/2010/01/27/enriching-wikimedia-commons-a-virtuous-circle/
And, check out the activities around our multimedia usability project:
http://diff.wikimedia.org/2010/01/26/multimedia-usability-project-underway/

Wikipedia Commons has already been very successful in getting people to upload images – including reproductions of art works, photographs of nature, architecture and anything else you can think of and diagrams.
There is also a thriving project there converting diagrams to SVG vector graphics – making the diagrams much more easily adapted or edited by anyone who wants to reuse them (provided they agree to share their changes).
Video is the next step. Once they sort out subtitle editing online this will be a very cool addition.

[…] Wikimedia Foundation har ett projekt som går ut på att göra Wikipedia enklare. Det här med uppladdning av bilder är en av de saker som det projektet har testat nubörjare på. Nu har de och Wikimedia Foundations tekniker, anställda på ett par likasinnade organisationer, samt frivilliga runt om på jorden, skapat grejer som tar det här ett par steg längre. Det ska till och med bli enklare att ladda upp filmer på Commons. […]

I created a WikiProject on the English Wikipedia to coordinate with the Open Video Alliance’s project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Lights_Camera_Wiki

[…] [Approfondimenti: Wikimedia blog, ReadWriteWeb] […]

[…] Culture Foundation (makers of the Miro video platform)[1], and Wikimedia New York. Erik Möller welcomed the initiative on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, […]

[…] Both sites serve as community and industry resources and have been launched as part of a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation believes that two things need to change for video on the web: video needs […]