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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."
Agreed. This will also make Wikipedia's bandwidth cost skyrocket, and if I remember correctly they're on a lean budget.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
It's far worse than images. At least with an image, you can tell immediately that something's wrong. One wonders how long a video modified in the style of Tyler Durden might persist.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Google has never provided servers or bandwidth to wikipedia. Yahoo provided some servers at one point. Since wikipedia doesn't carry ads google has little incentive to suppot it
In practice bandwidth demands will likely be limited by how hard it is to produce encyclopedic videos and harder still to produce ones people want to watch.
Don't go FOSS because it's FOSS. Go FOSS because it's superior.
Not all FOSS is superior. I trust they'll use the best video streaming for the job, with priority placed on being open source.
Flash has the best video streaming available at the moment, and the best compatibility. Hard to beat that for a website trying to reel in customers.
I'm all for driving Flash out of existence, since Macromedia/Adobe should have never been allowed to acquire the near monopoly on web video they have. Adobe has also been a horrible steward of their responsibility especially when its come to Flash player support for devices like smart phones.
But the flip side is you might recall back to what video was like before Flash. Every freaking web site you went to had a different video standard, video player, and you were usually forced to launch a video player which either wasn't integrated in the browser or was integrated badly. Flash only succeeded because it fixed a completely broken thing on the web where Apple, Real and Microsoft in particular were trying to acquire their own monopolies on web video.
For this to succeed Wikipedia needs to compel a new video player standard other than Flash and proprietary codecs like H.264, and insure near universal availability of the solution they create as an integrated browser component, either built in to the browser or as a plugin.
I'm kind of curious if HTML/5 is going to be able to achieve that lofty goal across all the warring browser factions in the world, especially IE and Microsoft. Not sure JavaFX counts as open. What other standard is their other than HTML/5.
You also have the little problem that all existing video is going to have to be transcoded if you reject H.264, VP6, MPEG, WMV, AVI and Flash H.263 as acceptable formats. It sure isn't going to be easy to add video to Wikipedia if Joe and Jane user have to transcode the video to add it, or is Wikipedia going to automatically transcode video as they get it to their open standard.
@de_machina
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.
Note that this problem already exists with sound samples that are allowed on Wikipedia. And I'm not aware of it being a problem.