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
I’d like to see the Commons backups available in the AMZN S3 cloud, even if it is only as “requester pays”. Frankly, my experience is that getting data from the Internet Archive is so slow that I wonder if they are on the Moon.
My infovore framework
http://github.com/paulhoule/infovore
is specifically designed to make Hadoop applications easy to run in your own cluster on in a cluster provisioned automatically in Amazon EMR. In particular, an application can be packaged in the S3 cloud and run by somebody with little Hadoop or AWS experience. This makes handling “big data” much more accessible than it ever has been.
AMZN has had a policy of offering free S3 storage for public data sets – I’d like to see them take this program to the next level with data sets of this nature.
From: Gerard Meijssen
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 4:38 PM
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] [wikiteam-discuss:699] "Tarballs" of all 2004-2012 Commons files now available at archive.org
Hoi,
Geni, sorry but there is a difference of their being a backup within the WMF of Commons and there being a dataset of Commons at the IA that is not current. People can do all the analysis they want on the old data and it will not make any difference. It will not make the data that is currently in Commons any more accessible.
We have been told repeatedly that the data at the WMF is secure. Beyond that the data is like knowing what the maximum is the insurance policy will pay. You know it will be not enough. It is however very much a hypothetical question. How to make Commons usable is an here and now issue.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 14 October 2013 22:22, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 14 October 2013 13:59, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
While I do agree that it is good to have the data in many places and, the Internet Archive on its own moves it to several places as well. Many of us have seen the IA servers at the Library of Alexandria.
While it is ok to find a use for the data at the IA, I would like us to concentrate first and foremost on how we can make better use of the media that is in Commons itself. How we can open it up to more use. Make Commons more accessable.
And you need to stop right there. As in don't express a further opinion until you realise how wrong you are. You can't do any analysis on data that is lost. And non backed up data is just data that doesn't know that it is lost yet.
--
geni
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Hi folks,
We'd like to give you a heads-up about the upcoming release of Notifications (1) on Wikimedia Commons in coming weeks.
This software tool will inform users about new activity that affects them on Commons, in a unified way: for example, it will let you know when you have new talk page messages, edit reverts, thanks, mentions or links -- and is designed to augment (rather than replace) the watchlist. The Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team developed this tool (code-named 'Echo') earlier this year, to help users contribute more productively to MediaWiki projects.
Notifications were first released on the English Wikipedia in April 2013, and have now been successfully deployed on dozens of other wikis in different languages, including the Dutch, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese Wikipedias, to name but a few. Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and regions. Users are responding particularly well to social features such as Mentions and Thanks, which enable them to communicate more effectively than before. Learn more in our recent blog post (2).
We're now getting ready to bring Notifications to Wikimedia Commons and other sister sites, and are aiming for an October 22 deployment for our first release. This release will include some basic features shared by all other sites. Our multimedia team is also considering developing a few special notifications for Commons (e.g.: 'Your file was used in an article'), and we will start a community discussion about these ideas after our first release.
Please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this new tool in this Village Pump thread:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Notifications_on_Co…
Thanks, and stay tuned for more.
Fabrice
(1) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)
(2) http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedia…
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Commons mobile app updates are in staging now...
Wikimedia Commons for Android 1.0beta12 should appear in Google Play within
a few hours. It can also be installed directly from
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/android/wikimedia-commons-1.0beta12.apk
Android version includes various smaller bug fixes, and now displays
license info for previously-uploaded photos.
Wikimedia Commons for iOS 1.0.9 has been released to registered beta
testers; if nothing explodes we'll push to Apple for review Thursday or
Friday.
iOS version includes support for iOS 7 visual style, many many many UI
improvements and bug fixes, and is generally just awesome! Users can also
now select from CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC-BY 3.0, or CC-Zero license options instead
of being always forced to CC-BY-SA 3.0.
-- brion