Skip to main content

Video On Wikipedia

This week at SXSW (South by Southwest Conferences & Festivals), the Open Video Alliance presented a new campaign and portal for video on Wikipedia. The project is called "Let's get video on Wikipedia" and available at http://www.videoonwikipedia.org. The goal is to make it easier and more understandable how to upload video for usage in Wikipedia and is made possible by the Open Video Alliance, the Wikimedia Foundation, Kaltura, Miro and Mozilla Drumbeat. (Blog and press releases: Open Video Alliance, Miro, Wikimedia Foundation)

In some ways this project resembles a bit Wikiportrait, a project to help people upload their own portrait photo for usage in Wikipedia articles. Video On Wikipedia tells you what steps you need to take in order to create and upload a video for usage on Wikipedia. It also attempts to explain why uploading video for Wikipedia is different from uploading to most other places, a good bit of evangelism for Free and Open formats for information.

It helps people use the latest upload and display tools that have been developed by Michael Dale as part of the effort to improve video for Wikipedia. Not only that, but it also has a portal, that presents the latest uploads, editor's pick and most watched videos. The player of the portal uses the new HTML5 player that I recently blogged about, and you can comment on videos.

This is a great new development and hopefully it will continue to be developed and improved upon. The image on the left shows the welcome page of Video On Wikipedia and the image to the right the portal for recent uploads etc.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

kAMDReceiveMessageError

We kept running into a kAMDReceiveMessageError in our company, when trying to install adHoc iPhone apps with the iPhone Configuration Utility for Windows. Everything was fine if people tried to install using Windows iTunes. After much time it was tracked to the addition of UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities to the Info.plist. For some very strange reason it seems that the Windows ICU doesn't like that property at all and fails to install any app that carries it. Not sure if this will affect AppStore submission, iTunes handles it and so does the Mac version of ICU it seems, but it is at the very least mildly annoying that testers can't install our application using Windows ICU.

HTML 5 video player for mediawiki now with fullscreen support

Michael Dale has been working hard on a new media player for the mediawiki projects. This media player is based on the HTML 5 <video> tag . You can compare it to the demo players of Youtube and Vimeo and DailyMotion . It should support Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3, Opera 10.5 and if you install the Xiph QuickTime components it works with Safari 4 for the Mac. If your browser doesn't support HTML5, the player will use the JAVA cortado player , like it does in the old version of the Ogg player. Recently both Apple and Firefox introduced Fullscreen support for the <video> tag in their development versions of the browsers, and these features can now be used with the new player for Wikimedia. The controls automatically show and hide, and you can even add and display subtitles with it. How do I test it ? It is rather easy, you go to this example video . If you want to enable it for all videos, you need to be registered on Wikimedia Commons or the English Wikipedia . You ...

5 years of Article message boxes

Do you recognize these boxes ? Most likely you do. These are the very recognizable "amboxes", which is a short for " Article message boxes ". They are often visible at the top of articles in English Wikipedia and one of the most recognizable elements of those articles. Today I noticed that these boxes are now just over 5 years (and a month) old. They were first introduced to the general public starting from September 2007 . Their features are in short; a single consistent design, color coded for severity and purpose, dynamic but consistent in width (stackable), IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 compatible and a consistent parameter setup for its content. And that is a big deal, because I still remember what it looked like before when it had none of that. There were dozens of templates with different widths, different colors, different spacing and they all had different parameters. [I've been trying to find an image from back then, but I haven't been able to find one....