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
Dear ones,
Where might I get or mirror a dump of Commons media files?
> It seems worth mentioning on the front page of
https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
> It looks like the compressed XML of the ~50M description pages is ~25GB.
> It looks like wiki-team set up a dump script that posted monthly dumps to
the internet archive; in 2013 it stopped include the month+year in the
title; in 2016 it stopped altogether.
https://archive.org/details/wikimediacommons
Hi,
We have an issue with the data missing in WCQS. We are investigating it
right now.
Regards,
Zbyszko
--
Zbyszko Papierski (He/Him)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi there!
We have a small update on the state of WCQS beta:
1) We added a way of using SDoC based prefixes. You can both use prefixes
like sdc: in queries and they will be used in results display. Note that at
this moment it is impossible to pin them to the query directly from GUI.
For more details see [1]. Also note that autocomplete for non-wikdata items
is still not working.
2) Data reload has been automated and will happen around 9AM UTC every
Tuesday - actual time of the update depends on previous, data munging
steps, which do not block the service. It takes now about 3-4h, during
which service is being taken down. There is a maintenance page up when that
happens. Like we mentioned before - this kind of data reload is temporary
and will be replaced when we go into production.
3) We want to focus next on tasks that will help us decide how to move the
service into production.
A reminder - if you find any bugs or issues, don't hesitate to drop as a
ticket on Phabricator with the tag wikidata-query-service.
Have fun!
Zbyszko
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T258625
--
Zbyszko Papierski (He/Him)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>