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
Question regarding shorter copyright terms for some items in one
country. Replies should probably go to wikimedia-l as well.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hrafn Malmquist <hrafn.malmquist(a)gmail.com>
Date: 29 July 2013 13:54
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Iceland: Country specific copyright issue
regarding artistic photographs
To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
49th Article of the Icelandic Copyright Act states (
http://eng.menntamalaraduneyti.is/media/MRN-pdf/he-Copyright-Act.pdf) :
*Article 49*
*The reproduction of photographs, which do not enjoy the protection of this
Act for works of art as provided for in *
*the second paragraph of Article 1, is prohibited without the consent of
the photographer or the party who has *
*acquired his rights. [Furthermore, the publication of such photographs
without the permission of the rightholder *
*shall be prohibited.]1) If such a photograph is presented to the public on
a commercial basis or for profit the *
*photographer, or the subsequent holder of his rights, shall be entitled to
remuneration. The protection of a *
*photograph in accordance with this paragraph shall apply until [50
years]2) have elapsed from the end of the year *
*in which it was taken.*
*The provisions of Chapter II of this Act shall also apply as appropriate
to the photographs referred to in the first *
*paragraph.*
The second paragraph of the first article referenced provided copyright for
artistic work. It is therefore my understanding that the 49th article is
intended to cover non-artistic photographs.
That begs the question as to how Icelandic courts define artistic
photographs. In a ruling from November 27. 2008 Reykjavík District Court
found that photographs taken at a public place using a mobile of the movie
director Quentin Tarantino were not artistic. (
http://www.domstolar.is/domaleit/nanar/?ID=E200802042&Domur=2&type=1&Serial…
)
*It is therefore my contention that non-artistic photographs taken before
January 1. 1963 are in the public domain.*
*
*
I have sought the advice of a lawyer specialising in copyright and he
agrees with this estimate.
I want to put this to the test by taking photographs taken by Ólafur K.
Magnússon (1926-1997) a photographer for the newspaper Morgunblaðið taken
at riots on March 30th 1949 when the Icelandic parliament voted for Iceland
to be a founding member of NATO. See:
http://www.mbl.is/mm/frettir/myndasyrpa.html?cat_id=4;album=634
It is obviously a central issue whether a photograph is artistic or not.
Should the photos be considered artistic the copyright does not expire
until (1997+70=2067).
I have sent a query to Morgunblaðið, which still holds the photographs, and
the man who takes care of the photographic archive did not agree that the
photos are non-artistic (I suspect this is his personal opinion).
There is little history of contending the 49. article, I believe the
example cited above is the only one (When I contacted the curator of the
Reykjavík Photographic Museum she had not heard of the 49th article).
So, do I upload to Commons? the Icelandic Wikipedia with a caveat ("This
photo is reproduced under the assumption that the 49th article of the
Copyright Act of 1972 applies")? Both?
Best, Hrafn Malmquist
_______________________________________________
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Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
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I don't remember why this list was split out, but are you sure those
multimedia discussions can't just happen on Commons-l, merging the
subscribers list of this ML to it? They've always had a lot of overlap.
Nemo
Fabrice Florin, 23/07/2013 18:35:
> Hello Wikivideo subscribers,
>
> As some of you may have heard, we are forming a new Multimedia team at
> the Wikimedia Foundation, to enable easier viewing , contribution,
> curation, discovery and publishing of multimedia content to Wikimedia
> projects. You can read more about this program and our first plans on
> this project hub:
>
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
>
> To support this program, we plan to set up a new Multimedia list in
> coming days, to discuss key issues and new features related to images,
> sound and video on our sites.
>
> At the recommendation of WMF's platform engineering director Rob
> Lanphier, we propose to shut down this Wikivideo list (which has
> apparently been dormant for months), and move its subscriber list over
> to the new Multimedia list, with your permission.
>
> What do you think? Any questions or comments about this proposal to
> transfer the subscriber list from Wikivideo to multimedia?
>
> If we don't hear any objections by the end of the week (July 30), we
> propose to subscribe you to that list by the end of this month.
>
> If there are objections, we can remove those names at the time we make
> the transfer. Alternatively, we could ask everyone to resubscribe to the
> new list, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary work for the 90
> subscribers to this Wikivideo list.
>
> To be clear, this proposed change means that any posts about video
> issues which we would have made to the old Wikivideo list will now be
> made on this new multimedia list. So you would be missing out on useful
> information about video if you do not subscribe to the new multimedia list.
>
> Also note that the multimedia list will also include useful information
> on a variety of related topics, from improvements to the upload wizard
> to the creation of new media viewers and other tools.
> Thanks in advance for your feedback. We look forward to some interesting
> discussions between community members and WMF product teams on this
> important initiative.
>
> Best regards,
>
>
>
> Fabrice Florin
> Product Manager, Multimedia
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
>
> @fabriceflorin
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikivideo-l mailing list
> Wikivideo-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikivideo-l
>
Dear all,
DPLA* is planning the first annual DPLAFest, in Boston this October 24-25.
It would be great to have groups in attendance from Wikisource,
Wikidata, and Commons. There are already some collaboration underway
on Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Digital_Public_Library_of_America
If groups from each project would be interested in organizing a tent
or sessions at the festival, space (both physical and on the agenda)
could be provided. This is a good opportunity to connect with the
heads of GLAM institutions, and the more technical curators and
archivists (who should be recruited to the generative side :-)
Sam.
* The Digital Public Library of America - a digital platform for
sharing digital collections, and metadata about physical collections,
of all sizes. Started in America, aiming to contribute to shared
standards for similar work everywhere in the world. Focused on
free-software toolchains, CC-0 metadata, and data APIs.
For anyone using Campaigns for non WLM things.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 3:34 AM
Subject: Upgrade to UploadCampaigns
To: Wiki Loves Monuments Photograph Competition
<wikilovesmonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello!
As part of upcoming work to be done to support use of UploadCampaigns
from Mobile, I've spent time rewriting the underlying infrastructure
for UploadCampaigns. This has no changes for people who use
UploadWizard to just ''upload'' images, but plenty of changes for
people who administer and maintain campaigns. The most important
changes are:
* Campaigns are maintained by creating and modifying pages in a new
Campaign: namespace. Special:UploadCampaign and
Special:UploadCampaigns have been removed.
* Pages in the Campaign: namespace have all the ''features'' of normal
pages, and so have page history (solving [[bugzilla:30645]]), a talk
page, can be watched/moved/deleted/undeleted, etc.
* Full wikitext support in most fields - header/thanks labels (fixing
[[bugzilla:39910]]) and in the field labels (solving
[[bugzilla:39911]]). This should make customizations and
internationalization simpler.
* Arbitrary number of custom fields where the user can enter text
while uploading, and such text is included in the uploaded image's
description, are now supported (previously you were restricted to two
fields)
* As a negative, the GUI interface for configuring campaigns is now
gone (temporarily). Currently the Campaign configuration is stored as
[[:en:JSON|JSON]], which is edited by hand. There exists minimal
validation so that corrupt data is not saved. A point and click
interface would eventually be added at some point in the future.
[[mw:Extension:UploadWizard/Campaigns|Documentation]] for the current
JSON format exists.
This change is currently live on the
[http://commons.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ commonsbeta] site, and can
be tested there. This is on schedule to be rolled out to Commons on
Monday, July 22 - unless large unforeseen bugs arise.
Thanks to MarkTraceur, Odder and Brion for their help in getting this done!
Special note for WLM: Since WLM is the biggest (almost only) user of
campaigns right now, I'll be spending time to make sure that all the
WLM campaigns work without issue.
--
Yuvi Panda T
Mobile Team, Wikimedia Foundation
http://yuvi.in/blog
--
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog
For your information. See also the thread on VP
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: resizing big images will get faster next week
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 16:59:04 -0700
From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>
Organization: Wikimedia Foundation
To: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects
<wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
CC: qa(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Thursday July 18th, we're going to deploy something new on the sites:
VipsScaler - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VipsScaler .
Upside: Resizing big images will be faster and more reliable, leading to
fewer errors -- no matter whether you get a different size by clicking
on a link like "Other resolutions: 320 в 239 pixels" or hand-editing the
filename to
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Thompson-Pond-200…
. Also, right now, there is an "area limit"- we don't thumbnail
images bigger than
50 MP. The area limit will
go away; that should be nice for Wiki Loves Monuments! (There will
still be a filesize limit, of bytes).
Downside: We'll see slight changes in visual quality, and a few images
might break. We've already tested this ourselves, but we'd love more
testing ahead of time to check for bugs so we can fix them early next week.
There's a test page at https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:VipsTest
that you can use to test this and find bugs before we roll this out on
Thursday the 18th. I'm about to notify Commons on-wiki, but I'd
especially welcome more help liaising with Commons on this.
Thanks to volunteer Bryan Tong Minh who wrote most of the code, and to
WMF's Greg Grossmeier, Jan Gerber, and Tim Starling for working on this!
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
Today, the British Library announced the Picturing Canada project to
mark Canada Day (1st July). Those of you who were at GLAM-Wiki in
April may remember this collection: it's a digitisation of the
Canadian Copyright Collection, 1895-1924, covering photographs
deposited for copyright registration in Canada during this period.
There's currently about 2,000 photographs, many of which are
composites of multiple images stuck together; all are available as
full-resolution TIFFs and JPEGs.
There's more files still trickling up - including some interesting
aerial photographs, panoramas, and a collection of official
photographs from WWI - but almost all of the "general" images are now
online, and we're now just adding the oddities. Including the official
photographs, this will total around 4,000 works. Please do take a look
- there's some marvellous material in there.
WMF: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/01/picturing-canada/ (in
English and French; translation by Benoit Rochon)
BL: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/americas/2013/07/happy-canada-day.html
Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picturing_Canada
Thanks to Wikimedia UK and the Eccles Centre for American Studies for
funding this, and to Phil Hatfield at the British Library for
championing the collection!
Andrew.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
