Comment by gman83

4 years ago

Couldn't the Wikimedia Foundation raise some money to produce these kinds of videos? I wonder why they don't.

3 comments

gman83

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skyfaller  4 years ago

I think one problem is that it's difficult to make videos easy for anyone to edit, the way a wiki text page is.

- The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because - The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available - Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it)

Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll.

A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.

  • zozbot234  4 years ago

    You can already put instructional videos on Wikiversity.

    You're right that the editing workflow for raw video is a challenge, but I expect that support for editable animations, interactive simulation, etc. will also be added at some point. It requires some infrastructure for editing securely sandboxed code in-wiki, which is in the works anyway for the upcoming project Wikifunctions.

  • mgdlbp  4 years ago

    There's Wikimedia Commons! It even (somewhat) addresses this particular issue by having a system for requesting specialized media-related edits—video editing, photo retouching, SVG editing, mapmaking, etc.

    For the unaware, Commons, a repository of media files, is but one of many Wikimedia "projects" (including Wikipedia). It's mostly used for images, but also hosts video, audio (including MIDI), 3D models (only STLs), and PDFs.Aside: considering what the Foundation seems to like doing, I'm surprised they don't do more to promote the "other" projects, especially to Wikipedia contributors—Wikipedia editors (even split by language) vastly outnumber those of the other projects, including Commons and Wikidata, which are multilingual.

    Commons' request system connects those who recognize needed edits but cannot make them with those who check the requests pages and are able to. There's the Graphics Lab[0] for edits to existing uploads, and File requests[1] for new uploads that are needed. Judging by the archives, they seem quite underutilized, though that might only be a sign of how few Commons contributors there are. Probably also has to do with the offloading of requests to local pages in many languages of Wikipedia.[2]

    [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphic_Lab

    [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_requests

    [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5324355

    There's an interesting variation in the nature of barriers to being able to edit. Hardware and bandwidth cost money, but skills cost only time and software can be free. I'd say the Graphics Lab does decently in "teaching how to fish" through tutorials and lists of FOSS software. This contrasts with file requests, where there's no equivalent, because the most common reason that someone can't take a photo of something is that there physically aren't any instances of it nearby.

    This kind of barrier to contribution really isn't specific to media; analogously, not everyone has access to the same resources for researching edits to Wikipedia. Wikimedia's also trying to address that: everyone with >10 monthly edits in any project has free access to the databases participating in The Wikipedia Library.[3] Most are relatively specialized, however (IIRC, JSTOR is the most generally useful of the lot).

    [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library