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Wikipedia To Add Video
viyh writes "Wikipedia will be adding a video option within two or three months, according to the MIT Technology Review. '... a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a new button labeled "Add Media." Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video — initially from three repositories containing copyright-free material — and drag chosen portions into the article, without having to install any video-editing software or do any conversions herself. The results will appear as a clickable video clip embedded within the article.' They will be requiring all video to use open-source formats. This is in hopes of getting content providers to open up their material to gain wider exposure on the Wikipedia website. There is also an in-browser editor that removes a lot of the headache often associated with any kind of video editing. With the new Wikipedia system, 'people will be able to easily inject media into pages, in a way that wasn't possible before,' says Michael Dale, a software engineer from Kaltura, the company assisting with development of the tools."
"Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video"
So they only allow females to add videos!?!
Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video
...there are no girls on the internet.
I like wiki because it's such a clean, fast, text layout with nothing special. I don't see how this is going to improve things.
The "Porn" entry bring down the whole Wikipedia site in the first hour.
It amazes me that the company that "promotes" open source uses a proprietary or not fully open method (read Flash), to deliver video. What's going on?
I don't know/care about kaltura, but from TFA:
At least it will make this Wiki page a lot more interesting!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Well, presumably it will only be notable video that's allowed.
And presumably also, every band on Earth will have a sample of their video on every page they can get away with, as well as every company that now successfully uses Wikipedia to astroturf their products will get a nice demo video up too.
It seems that as each month passes wikipedia becomes less and less relevant, and less reputable. Wholly because of bad administrative decisions.
Title is somewhat misleading. Wikipedia has had video for years. For example scroll down at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_C8 or for direct to video http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Morris_C8_towing.ogv
It's always nice to see new tools in the toolbox. I just wonder what kind of edit wars we can look forward to seeing. Could they be like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Human_anus
now they're going to add video? Super swell idea there.
As a matter of fact, I was thinking just the other day The Internet Archive should add a peer-reviewed & maintained encyclopedia service...
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Strange, apparently a "person" can only be female.
I know, I know, if it said "he" no one would notice, but obviously this person was going out of their way to say "her", so why not just go with "they"? I know it's not grammatically correct (according to an English teacher I had) but at least it works, and it should be correct.
Anyway, it just annoys me when someone goes out of their way to try to end the male gender bias only to throw in female gender bias instead of making it gender neutral.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Isn't this exactly what Wikimedia Commons is for? Why would this go on Wikipedia?
Is Wikipedia trying to "reel in customers"? Since when?
Frankly, I *would* go FOSS in Wikipedia's case if it's sufficient, even if there were some proprietary format that was superior in some way. Good enough + free beats shiny but evil any day, and is more in line with Wikipedia's raison d'etre.
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down
Never gonna turn around and...desert you.
I know what video I will be uploading.
I have donated to Wikipedia a few times over the years. But I think I will stop if this video 'enhancement' takes off. I can think of no article I have ever read that would have been served better by video on the same page. Just reference a video from a source site. I thought Wikipedia was a non-profit organization running an lean crew of committed semi-volunteers, not a business looking to 'drive traffic' to their site.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
They already have video, they're just improving it.
Oftentimes Wikipedians engage in nasty edit wars
I'm looking forward to seeing video edit wars.
OutputLogic
Wikipedia practically has a monopoly on information content, even stronger than Microsoft has a monopoly on OS software.
What is called for here, by a large number of people, is for Wikipedia to use this monopoly for the benefit of a single video standard, with the aim of destroying opposing technologies because they are not open source.
Why should someone who does not see open-source as a natural ideological destination not see this as evil, abusive and hypocritical on a mass scale? Wasn't there a discussion here just days/weeks ago where it was demanded that YouTube also allow open-source formats? Why is it so important that YouTube allows open-source, yet another site should never use anything but open source, unless the consistent goal is "always maximise the use of open source and minimise the use of anything else"?
This is a great example of open source being an ideological battle setting out to destroy proporietary software. Although many often deny it (maybe they don't like awareness of the truth?), there's plenty of examples from the community.
Wikipedia is missing the media rich content found on every other software-based encyclopedia, like Encarta and Worldbook. Since such software is dying off because the things like Wikipedia are so packed full of free, up-to-date information, it seems like a natural extension for the free encyclopedia.
Sure, links to other websites are fine, but the archival of human knowledge found in Wikipedia is important too. Links get broken, external media disappears... I'm sure WP would much rather have their own content which they control, than rely on other sources that taint media with ads, that are inconsistent in formats etc...
When you see the kind of junk on YouTube, I know, its worrysome. I know there will be copyright issues, pornography etc... It will cost more money for sure... But it's time to make use of the rich feature set Internet brings to us and WP. It's an advantage WP has over printed textbooks and they should use such advantages IF they can handle it.
I guess that's the issue though: Even YouTube is having a hard time profiting from video hosting.
Speaking of YouTube -- and maybe this is a disastrous idea -- but what if Wikipedia relied on a service like YouTube? Obviously that's not going to work (advertising, comments, flash player etc...), but think about it: Hosting videos and filtering inappropriate stuff is what they are good at. Maybe with some negotiation and charitable good will on YouTube's part, there could be special provisions for Wikipedia. For example, YouTube could host user-uploaded video content for WP, but without all the commercial baggage (Read: charitable). However, if you followed the link, it would take you to YouTube to show the video in high-def or whatever... commercial free, no junk comments etc. It wouldn't be profitable for YouTube, but they'd have *more* useful content on their website thanks to WP, drawing more users and good will. Also, WP would benefit from the already established efficiency of YouTube.
Again though, that's kind of a crazy idea with a plethora of potential pit falls, but just brain storming. Yes, there would have to be many changes to accommodate these videos, WP would have to be pretty trusting of TY and finally YT would have to be in an awfully giving mood itself.
Personally, I'd much rather have WP host the material, but find a way to do so for far less than I'm imagining the real cost will be.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
This has already existed in a very unbiased way - http://www.wiki-surf.com/ links wiki articles to youtube videos.
unless the consistent goal is "always maximise the use of open source and minimise the use of anything else"?
That's indeed one of the goals of the Wikimedia foundation, it's in their charter. They are a 100% open source shop. After all, it's a "free encyclopedia", and the word "free" has many senses, all of which apply here.
You could copy all the wikipedia articles right now and suddenly start your own version. It would be bit like a fork. This is not a high barrier to entry. I would be more inclined to agree with it being a monopoly if all the material was under a stricter license.
This is also precisely why the idea of open source monopolies are a red herring. If IE was open source software, when MS stopped developing it it would have been forked.
This is a great example of open source being an ideological battle setting out to destroy proporietary software. Although many often deny it (maybe they don't like awareness of the truth?), there's plenty of examples from the community.
Be wary of RMS. While interesting, his views do not necessarily reflect he views of all the community. Do not forget that there are the BSD and LGPL licenses as well.
http://xkcd.com/145/
It is not that incorrect. Anyway, it is the type of linguistical hacking that I appreciate.
entropy happens
thank you
Man they should have a vote on this ....
I can really only foresee the current outcome as being detrimental to wiki ...
Maybe in the future IF they have suitable bandwidth and html5 is more widely implemented in browsers
(I hope IE will start to die faster when it becomes unbundled in the EU)
There's no need to overstate things. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse article would be enhanced with video (and it has had a video clip for a long time). [[Atomic bomb]]. [[Nirvana]]. The [[wing]] article, showing the vortices of air. It's easy to name a hundred articles that would benefit from a video clip right on the page, for the education of the reader.
Flash uses H.264, which is said to use half the bandwidth of Theora.
If you're claiming that it's true that H264 uses half the bandwidth of Theora then say so. If you don't know yourself but think the claim made by someone else is interesting then say who it is you mean. Just announcing that an unstated number of unidentified people in an undefined context have made some claim, is entirely unhelpful.
Well OK, but Britannica is still bette...... wait, what?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Describe to me the harm that would arise against the good of humanity if Microsoft and Apple through customer demand were forced to implement Ogg Vorbis and Theora support in their browsers.
When you're done, you can continue by describing the harm that was inflicted on humanity when Microsoft was forced to start producing a web browser for Windows so that people wouldn't use non-Microsoft software.
If you don't know yourself but think the claim made by someone else is interesting then say who it is you mean.
Slashdot has run a few stories over the past month about HTML 5's video element. Several people who have posted comments to these stories have found that Theora needs a bitrate that much higher than H.264 for the same level of quality.
I'd say current versions of Ogg Theora take 100-200% more bandwidth to deliver "good" quality as current versions of x264. Codecs converge at higher bitrates, and no doubt Theora is techically capable of good quality at a sufficiently higher bitrate. But it'll take a lot more bits to get there than other codcs. Theora's bitstream is based on VP3, which is over a decade old now, and we'd generally expect a refined vresion to come out as MPEG-4 part 2 efficiency (like Xvid/Divx without B-frames).
The past discussions were based on a relatively easy clip (Big Buck Bunny), and compared to YouTube encodes in H.264 Main Profile and H.263.
But if you compare what you could do at the same bitrate with a quality-tuned H.264 High Profile, H.264 can do a quite nice 640x360 at the bitrate Theora used for 400x224 AND with higher per-pixel quality. WMV with the current VC-1 implemenation also outperforms Theora (although not by as much as x264).
I made some samples (the .ogv files were made by Xiph, the others were encoded by me to similar specs):
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare
My video compression blog
I personally can't wait until User:Seedfeeder starts adding video to articles ;)
Don't go FOSS because it's FOSS. Go FOSS because it's superior.
Not all FOSS is superior.
If you value software freedom over functionality, free software is superior exactly because it's free software.
Flash has the best video streaming available
Embedded {H.264, .wmv, .avi}, played with mplayer? My "Flash experience" is Flash+Firefox, and that's pretty bollocks. On the other hand, mplayer handles every single piece of crap you throw at it.
PCs running Linux can be configured not to run executables stored in users' profiles: put /home on a separate partition and specify noexec mode in the /etc/fstab line for this partition. Windows XP and newer versions of Windows have a flexible Software Restriction Policy mechanism: allowable executables can be defined by paths (e.g. %SystemRoot% and %ProgramFiles% good), file name suffixes (e.g. *.msi and *.vbs bad), or even digital signatures.
With the advent of HTML5, flash is NOT the way to go.
tepples wrote:
a lot of people use a PC where they don't have administrative rights to install an HTML 5 viewer.
ion.simon.c recommended a portable version of MPlayer, but tepples mentioned noexec and its Windows counterpart. ion.simon.c wrote:
noexec doesn't prevent me from writing scripts and executing them.
The page I linked sort of implies that the administrator of a Windows machine can block execution of .pl, .py, .js, .vbs, .bat, and .cmd files outside the approved locations with a software restriction policy. And under Linux, the administrator is free to modify the interpreters not to execute any scripts outside the approved locations. But more importantly, a video codec written in Python probably isn't going to decode very efficiently.
And under Linux, the administrator is free to modify the interpreters not to execute any scripts outside the approved locations.
As in, like, building a custom rev of a particular interpreter? I *really* see that happening in the wild world of corporate IT. :)
The page I linked sort of implies that the administrator of a Windows machine...
Remind me again about what that has to do with passing the noexec option to mount?
But more importantly, a video codec written in Python probably isn't going to decode very efficiently.
a) We're only interested in the "DEC" part of CODEC. I bet that a Python-based MPEG4 decoder would be *at least* as efficient as a Flash-based one.
b) Have you forgotten about LISP, homeboy?
As in, like, building a custom rev of a particular interpreter?
I was using a custom rev of an interpreter as an example of a measure that could be taken against unauthorized software. There are others.
Remind me again about what that has to do with passing the noexec option to mount?
Likewise, I was using noexec as an example, intending to imply "or another analogous mechanism for implementing execution policy".
I bet that a Python-based MPEG4 decoder would be *at least* as efficient as a Flash-based one.
I fail to see how you arrived at this conclusion.
Have you forgotten about LISP, homeboy?
LISP is compiled (e.g. .el -> .elc in Emacs), and you don't have privileges to run the compiler. A LISP system that acts like Python, by automatically compiling the source code whose path is passed on the command line into bytecode whenever it is run, might be modified to read source code only from approved folders. If you compile it at home and bring in your own executables, then the execution policy established by the administrator of the computer that you use at work or school will stop you.