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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?
- 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?
- 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)
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