MyWiki:WikiProject Wiki Makes Video/About

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Background

Wikipedia has dominated Britannica and Encarta in recent years, but the two commercial encyclopedias still possess more high quality multimedia in video, interactive timelines and other audio/visual content. The crowd has excelled at building Wikipedia's text articles and adding photos in Wikimedia Commons. However, video would greatly enhance the usefulness of a whole range of articles but remains a weakness.

Wikipedia's video efforts have not kept pace with other advancements, and have not targeted strategic subject-areas.

The technical hurdle of video is actually a minor issue. Visual literacy and production quality are much more elusive.

Q: How do we increase community collaboration in the quantity and quality of video in Wikipedia articles?

Challenges

• Content
  • Visual literacy of the average Wikipedian (and member of the populace) is low. How do you train a crowd of contributors to shoot high quality video?
  • Creating a video style that is consistent, compelling across articles
  • Normalizing video and audio content, so that it can be used in any language/project
• Technical
  • Visual quality and minimum resolution guidelines
  • Formats accepted by Wikimedia community are unusual - free license, Ogg Theora and WebM formats not used by video pros in their workflow
  • Uploading to Commons is typically complex and intimidating
• Measurement
  • Complicated to determine which articles have video or not.
• Collaboration and Participation
  • Sharing of raw video clips is limited by unusual formats. Limits re-editing possibilities
  • Collaborative editing a challenge. Wiki Video has some software in early development.
  • Mobile app to shoot and upload to Commons in one step? Does it exist? Is it cross-platform?
• Legal issues
  • Human subjects in video, right of publicity. Should we require model release forms?
  • Trademark, logos and copyright in the video. How far should we push fair use in video?

Opportunities

• Internal
  • Build off successful Wiki Loves Monuments, perhaps Wikipedia Makes Video events?
  • Encourage "moving picture" videos. Are there a class of 5-15 second videos (essentially living photographs, such as those in Harry Potter) that would not require any editing, but would make certain articles come alive? The giraffe eating seemed like a good example of this.
• External
  • Mozilla video effort collaboration
  • Tap into schools of journalism, communications or film for student contributions
  • Partner with GLAM for existing footage or shooting new content
  • University of Southern California journalism students will be working with User:Fuzheado on this for a semester-long project (Jan-May 2013)