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
WikiVoyage has a small but clever extension to do quicker lookup of
pages in additional content namespaces if no namespace prefix is
provided. So if we used this for Commons, and configured "Category:"
as an extra lookup namespace, you could type "Low quality chemical
diagrams" and it'd pull up the category of that name immediately
without the full-text search being loaded. This appears to basically
be another solution to
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11380
The drawback is that it doesn't play nice with autocompletion and
other API consumers yet. Ideally I suspect you'd want autcompletion to
do lookup in multiple namespaces as well, and provide subtle namespace
hinting (as oposed to prefixing) in the dropdown, like so (where
CATEGORY would be in a smaller font).
[ Low ]
Low quality chemical diagrams CATEGORY
Lower Saxony
Thoughts? Would this be a useful improvement for Commons in
particular, even without autocompletion? I suspect it could help
reduce some of the category/gallery pain.
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Mono went and placed a request for Central Notice with the dates of next
year POTY[1], but there is no place in commons who supports his claimed
dates. Shouldn't we be worried more about creating the galleries and other
things before we talk about CentralNotice?
And since we talking about this, why we don't start creating the galleries
now, so we can start POTY in late January or Early February?
[1]:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=CentralNotice/Calendar&diff=45…
_____
*Béria Lima*
*Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter
livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a
construir esse sonho. <http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos>*