What we learned creating a series of Wikipedia video tutorials

I am a big fan of writing 550-word blog posts, but fewer and fewer people these days are fans of reading them. (Short) video is increasingly dominant.

In 2024, Wikimedia Ukraine created a series of eight video tutorials on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Each 3-7 minute video resulted from a collaborative effort involving scriptwriting, professional recording, and expert editing.

The tutorials, available in Ukrainian, cover topics such as an introduction to Wikidata, Wikipedia’s notability guidelines, and whether you can trust Wikipedia. We published them on Wikimedia Commons and YouTube.

As we plan to develop more videos, here are three key lessons and reflections on our process so far.

1. Preparing a short video tutorial is difficult but rewarding

We’ve been organizing webinars for the past four years, with recordings freely available afterwards. But let’s be realistic – few people will have the time and attention span to watch a 60-minute video on a topic they want to learn.

Summarizing a complex topic like Wikidata into a concise 5-minute video requires careful phrasing and focus. How do you include all important aspects, while not overloading viewers with too much detail? 

Interestingly, an AI chatbot like ChatGPT is helpful in writing an outline and breaking down a big topic into a series of smaller steps. 

We hope that the tutorials will be helpful for many viewers. But developing them has also been a useful experience for the creators. Thanks to this exercise, we’ve become better at helping and mentoring newcomers – and learned a lot ourselves. The best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.

2. Other communities have already done a lot of work that can inspire, if not be reused

Video tutorials are a popular genre in the Wikimedia movement. The Commons category includes hundreds of files from the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Estonia, Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey, and many more organizations and individual volunteers.

It’s hardly possible to reuse them “as is” because of language and context differences. (And, frankly, many of them are outdated by now). But there are a lot of interesting video projects that have been a source of inspiration – for example, “A Wiki Minute” series from the Wikimedia Foundation.

3. This work is a long-term investment, not a chase for views

Some video tutorials we’ve developed have garnered a lot of views – for example, the video on creating a Wikipedia article published a few years ago has received close to 10,000 views on YouTube. 

That said, we’ve decided not to prioritize chasing views by tools like clickbait titles or paid social media promotion. Tutorials are a long-term investment that will serve people who look up a certain topic on Wikipedia or Google. It’s also a good tool for event organizers who will be able to rely on instructional videos during training sessions rather than developing material from scratch. 

Plus, when I get a question about Wikipedia from someone, it’s easier to send a link to a video rather than rewrite an explanation for the hundredth time 🙂 

More information & read also: 

• All video tutorials (in Ukrainian)
• What we learned holding a series of webinars on disinformation for the Ukrainian community