Commons-l January 2011

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

9 participants
7 discussions

Video skills and equipment
by Lars Aronsson 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

I just tried to watch some presentation videos from Wikimania. Some had very weak sound, some had no sound in the first minutes, some only played the first minute and then stopped. I don't think the Wikimania videos are unique in having such problems. Video is new to Commons, and the expert contributors are more familiar with still images. How can we learn to make better videos? Are there some good instructions? Perhaps a free instruction video (Wikibooks, but a video instead of a book) on how to produce good videos is what we need. In fact, the English Wikibooks has a title on "Video Production", http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video_Production but it doesn't have a clear focus (pun not intended). It starts out with discussing satellite TV and has long sections on file formats in different operating systems. There is a help page on Commons for converting video to the Ogg Theora format, but that is only the last step in a long chain. Given that video is new, how can we find and rate videos, nominate "good/featured videos", and give advice on how to improve quality? Is the Commons village pump enough for this? Commons has a separate graphics village pump. Do we also need a separate video village pump? Current digital video cameras use hard disks or memory cards, instead of tape cassettes. Many new models cost less than 300 euro (or dollars), some as little as 120 euro (memory card perhaps not included). Some have a special "Youtube mode", and I guess that kind of usage is what drives the price down. What models are good, and what should one watch out for? We can find free still photos on Flickr and copy them to Commons. Is there somewhere we can find free videos and copy them? Yes, at the Internet Archive. Somewhere else? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Call for help to negociate Presidency of Argentina partnership
by Teofilo 26 Jan '11

26 Jan '11

Our previous agreement with the Presidency of Argentina has entered a grey zone where we don't know exactly what we are allowed to do with their media. So this agreement needs a new negociation for renewal or the best termination terms. Could anyone help ? We need someone with a good knowledge of Wikimedia Commons licencing policies We need someone with access to OTRS so that he/she can read the former E-mail agreement. We need a lawyer or someone with experience of conducting successful negociations. For more details, see : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#Template:CC-AR-Pre…

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InDesign/Scribus conversion needed
by Erik Moeller 21 Jan '11

21 Jan '11

Hi folks, as you may be aware, Peter Kaufman et al. recently created a "Video for Wikipedia" brochure for cultural and educational institutions: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Videowikipedia_v1.pdf For purposes of localization and adaptation, it would be great to have a source in a free format. Unfortunately it was made in InDesign. If there are any volunteers who can handle a conversion to Scribus, that would be great. The sources are here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:Video_for_Wikipedia.zip Any help would be most welcome. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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File licensing information support
by Bryan Tong Minh 21 Jan '11

21 Jan '11

Hello, As you may have noticed, Roan, Krinkle and me have started to more tightly integrate image licensing within MediaWiki. Our aim is to create a system where it should be easy to obtain the basic copyright information of an image in a machine readable format, as well as querying images with a certain copyright state (all images copyrighted by User:XY, all images licensed CC-BY-SA, etc) At this moment we only intend to store author and license information, but nothing stops us from expanding this in the future. We have put some information in a not so structured way at mw.org [1]. There are some issues open on the talk page [2]. Input is of course welcome, both here or preferably at the talk page. Bryan [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Files_and_licenses_concept [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Files_and_licenses_concept

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US gov't awards $2B in edu. grants with CC-BY outputs
by Erik Moeller 20 Jan '11

20 Jan '11

This may turn out to be a huge win for free culture if it's administered well. Many of the resulting resources may turn out to be useful for Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikimedia Commons. I'm especially pleased that they avoided adding non-commercial use restrictions. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26100 -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Chrome drops H.264 - to go Theora and VP8
by David Gerard 11 Jan '11

11 Jan '11

http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html Chromium will support only Theora and VP8, Chrome to follow. Same as Firefox 4. (How close are we to allowing VP8 on WMF? I understand Greg Maxwell, as one of those actually working on making the VP8 code drop usable, had some qualms about the code at the time.) - d.

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What do you like of the various Flickr upload tools
by Bryan Tong Minh 04 Jan '11

04 Jan '11

Hi all, As most of you probably know, I wrote Flickr upload bot back in May 2007 because there was a lot demand for uploading free images from Flickr to Commons. And apparently people find it useful, since as of September 2010, over 80k images have been uploaded via this bot. In addition over 50k images have been uploaded via a similar bot by Magnus Manske. Unfortunately as you may know, every other day those tools break (mine more than Magnus'). Both have an annoying authentication mechanism, which requires you to do extra stuff to be able to upload (either post a token to a file page, or use TUSC). Both problems would be solved if there was a MediaWiki extension to handle this task. I eventually plan to write a MediaWiki extension that does such a thing and get it enabled on Commons. Therefore, I need to know what you like and dislike about those tools, so that I can take this feedback into account when writing this extension. Don't expect to see something in the short term though, but I hope that in the mid-long term we will have such an extension on Commons. -- Bryan

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Commons-l January 2011