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
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 5:43 PM
Subject: List of clients which try to guess MediaWiki thumbnail URLs
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
The current format of MediaWiki thumbnail URLs is very ad hoc: it depends
on the media handler, the contents of the file, and a dozen different
configuration settings. As a consequence, it is impossible to guess what a
thumbnail URL will be, given the filename and the desired size; clients
have to request it from the AP and waste hundreds of valuable milliseconds,
or use complicated logic to guess it and accept that sometimes they will
end up with the wrong result.
There is an ongoing discussion about rethinking the URL format so that it
can be used as a proper API. [1] As part of that, I would like to make a
list of clients which try to guess thumbnail URLs on their own, instead of
fetching them from the API - these clients will need to be updated if we
change the URL format. If you know of any, please add them to T153498 [2],
and preferably some information on what they do. Clients can include mobile
apps, user scripts, bots, whatever you can think of.
Thanks!
[1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T66214
[2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T153498
Hi all,
We're excited to announce that we've rolled out several updates and
bugfixes for the Commons Android app[1] over the past couple of months.
Some of the major ones include:
- Automatic addition of geocoding template if uploaded image is geotagged
- Category suggestions based on the title entered for the image
- New, more detailed tutorial to educate new contributors on what types of
images should or should not be uploaded (special thanks to Pine for sharing
his Commons educational script which was used as the basis for this)
- Check for whether or not the file already exists on Commons, to prevent
upload of duplicates
Additionally, the kind folks at translatewiki.net are helping us set up a
translation project for our app, so hopefully localization should improve
in the near future.
Thank you all for your support and encouragement thus far! Feedback, bug
reports, and suggestions are always welcome on our GitHub page[2]. :)
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.free.nrw.commons
[2]: https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/issues/
--
Regards,
Josephine