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
Hello all,
Hereby I like to announce the project Wiki Loves Art in Belgium.
In November we had a meeting with a museum and we noticed that they were
very enthusiastic about Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but they experienced it as
difficult and maybe dangerous to open up their collection. This relatively
closed attitude appears to be not unique, but often occurring among Belgian
cultural institutions, compared with other countries, as we understood from
various organisations in the open knowledge sector.
Therefore we have thought about how to work together with cultural
institutions and we came up with Wiki Loves Art. This project has been
organised earlier in various countries, and in 2009 also in the
Netherlands. A Dutch team is currently working on organising Wiki Loves Art
in 2016 again, and that gave us the inspiration to start with the
organisation in Belgium as well.
Wiki Loves Art is a photo contest in what participants visit the museums,
galleries, archives and libraries which have determined a part of their
collection to be photographed and published under a free license. Wiki
Loves Art gives participating photographers often a unique possibility to
take photos in a cultural institution and/or to visit an organisation
behind the scenes. This has resulted in other Wiki Loves Art projects in
many photos that are widely used on various Wikipedias. For cultural
institutions this project gives the opportunity to collaborate with
Wikipedia/Wikimedia in a save way, without having opening the doors of
their entire collections, and show a part of their collection with
relatively little costs.
In an organisational point of view the project is intended to make the
Belgiumgap less wide and the availability will increase the coverage of
Belgian art on Wikipedia. In comparison with other countries, relatively
less articles have been written about subjects in Belgium in the various
language versions of Wikipedia. This project tries to stimulate to fill
this gap and that Belgian art and more is better visible and described on
Wikipedia.
Wiki Loves Art is a project under the flag of Wikimedia Belgium, but is a
joint project in what we work together with several organisations with a
long-term expertise in working with cultural institutions and/or open
knowledge projects. Together with them we had last week a meeting and
agreed on how we want to organise Wiki Loves Art in Belgium.
We need to start in time as the project is very labour intensive with much
time spend on communication with the various cultural institutions. The
Dutch team has therefore highly recommended to hire someone for one or two
days a week during the project to be able to manage all the communication
and organisational needs. We are also going to set up a website, print
flyers and leaflets, and after the contest we organise a jury to judge the
photos and organise a prize giving ceremony.
Therefore we created a grant request at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/WM_BE/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016
If there are any suggestions or feedback, please let us know.
The project will be brought in at the General Assembly coming Saturday.
If you are interested in volunteering as part of the organisational team,
let us know!
The project page can be found at
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016
Kind regards,
Romaine
Dear all,
thanks for all your help with answering questions and giving feedback
over the last couple of months. I'm happy to say that we're finally at
a stage where we've hashed 22,452,638 images from Wikimedia Commons
and launched Elog.io in public beta: http://elog.io/
Elog.io is an open API as well as browser plugins, that can query and
get information about images using a perceptual hash that's easy and
quick to calculate in a browser.
What the browser extensions allow you to do is match an image you find
"in the wild" against Wikimedia Commons. If it can be matched against
an image from Commons, it'll show you the title, author, and license,
and give you links back to Wikimedia, the license, and a quick and
handy "Copy as HTML" to copy the image and attribution as a HTML
snippet for pasting into Word, LibreOffice, Wordpress, etc.
Our API provides lookup functions to find information using a URL (the
Commons' page name URL) or using the perceptual hash. You get
information back as JSON in W3C Media Annotations format. of course,
the information you get back is no better than the one provided by the
Commons API, so if you already have a page name URL, you may as well
query it directly, and rely on our API only for searching by
perceptual hashes.
The algorithm we use for calculating perceptual hashes, which you'll
need to query our API, is at http://blockhash.io/
Sincerely,
Jonas
Hi all
I’m looking for feedback and endorsement for my Wikimedia Foundation PEG
grant to be Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/MrjohnCummings/UNESCO_Wikimedian…>.
I’d very much appreciate if you would have a look, I want to include as
many different projects and languages as possible and connect editors in
each country with local UNESCO partners which could benefit activities like
Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth. The most relevant goal to
Wikimedia Commons is:
*2. Make content from the archives of UNESCO and its partners available on
Wikimedia projects:* This project will facilitate the *upload of 30,000
images, audio files, videos, data and other content* to Wikimedia projects
from UNESCO archives
<http://photobank.unesco.org/exec/index.htm?lang=en>(24,000
images), UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)
<http://www.uis.unesco.org/Pages/default.aspx> and other sources including *10
organisations changing their content license to be Wikimedia compatible*, a
completed pilot project is outlined in the Goal section.
I ran a pilot project that resulted in the images found in the Wikimedia
Commons category Images from the archive of UNESCO
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_archive_of_UNES…>,
here are a few examples:
-
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Soda_volcano,_Oromia,_Ethiopia.jpg>
The Soda volcano, Oromia, Ethiopia.
-
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rubbles_of_the_cathedral_after_the_ear…>
Rubble of the cathedral after the earthquake that hit the Capital Port
au Prince just before 5 pm on 12 January 2010.
-
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Young_monk,_wearing_a_special_costume,…>
Young monk, wearing a special costume, July-August 1991, Sikkim, India.
-
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sabha,6,_getting_ready_to_walk_to_scho…>
Sabha, 6, getting ready to walk to school from her house on the borders
eastern Gaza strip, where she and her family are still living in tents.
-
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mohana_fishermen_hunters_use_lures_fro…>
Not far from Mohenjo-Daro (or Mohenjodaro) - These Mohana
fishermen/hunters use lures from real birds to catch more birds. They will
either eat them or sell them. Mohenjodaro, Pakistan.
-
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Priest_of_rock-Hewn_Churches_of_Lalibe…>
Priest of rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela, a high place of Ethiopian
Christianity, still today a place of pilmigrage and devotion.
If you think this is a worthwhile project please click this link
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/MrjohnCummings/UNESCO_Wikimedian…>
and
then click the endorse button.
Many thanks
John
--
*John Cummings - **Wikimedia UK volunteer*
tweet @mrjohnc
Wikimedia UK is a Charitable Company registered in England and Wales.
Registered Company No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513.
Registered Office: 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street,
London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom.
Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The
Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
Wikipedia, amongst other projects).
Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control
over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.
Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990.
Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk
Hi folks,
I am happy to announce that I will be joining the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications team as Movement Communications Manager for a period of six months.
I have really enjoyed my work as product manager at WMF in the past 3 years, leading the development of new tools like Notifications, Thanks, Beta Features, Media Viewer and other multimedia products [1].
One of the lessons I learned during that time is that 'better communications' are really important to make our movement more effective. I also think that growing a 'culture of kindness' is key if we want to engage a broader community [2]. I hope to support both of these goals in my new role.
Starting this week, I will be working with the communications team on the Wikimedia blog and general WMF/movement communications. My focus for the blog will include improving contributor workflow for community members and WMF staff, and providing editorial guidance for contributors. I will also act as the main contact point for authors submitting new blog posts, and shepherd the publication process. Within movement communications, I will work to improve the availability, distribution, and timeliness of communications from the WMF to the broader community. I will also manage a range of movement communications tasks previously handled by Tilman Bayer, who is transitioning to the WMF Product team as Senior Analyst.
Going forward, senior engineer Gilles Dubuc will lead the multimedia team and take on some of my responsibilities as product owner, until a new product manager is assigned to that team. Please contact him directly with any questions related to our multimedia work.
I’d like to thank all my colleagues on the multimedia and product teams -- as well as our many community champions -- for being such wonderful collaborators over the past few years. I am proud of what we accomplished together, and I hope that the features we created can help many more people share knowledge productively in years to come. Special thanks to Erik Moeller for his thoughtful guidance throughout the past three years -- and for making this transition possible.
I'm delighted to take on this new assignment, and look forward to more collaborations with you all in the coming year.
Onward!
Fabrice Florin
Movement Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
[1] Fabrice's user page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)>
[2] 'A Culture of Kindness' blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/23/a-culture-of-kindness/ <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/23/a-culture-of-kindness/>
Is this the same Mr. David Gerard who in 2009 apologised for misusing his Checkuser privileges to spy and publish headers of list emails to his private blog ?
IAC has never been on foundation-l
Wikipediocracy is a forum run by paid editor Gregory Kohser who has also hacked the Commons Admin a/c of "Russavia", like Thekohser earlier did WP-Admin:Cool3's a/c.
