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
Hi Wikimedians,
Greetings from the Wiki Loves Butterfly team.
As you might know, for the last 6 years, we have been documenting butterfly
taxons endemic to eastern and north-eastern part of India through the Wiki
Loves Butterfly project. Our aim has been to increase the amount of free
license materials along with enrichment of related content on different
Wikimedia sites. Our project was previously supported by 4 Rapid Grants and
currently the fifth phase is running under the Project Grants.
Since the beginning of the project in 2016, we have gained a considerable
amount of expertise, maturity and confidence to successfully plan and
execute field-documentations and expand our area of activity in remote deep
forests of north-east India. We are now applying for the Wikimedia
Community Fund so that we can expand our activities in our next phase to
bring more quantity and quality to the topic.
You can find our fund proposal here -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund/At…
Regards,
Ananya
Project Lead, Wiki Loves Butterfly team
Hi everyone,
Tomorrow is the launch of the Wikimedia sound logo
<https://soundlogo.wikimedia.org/> contest and we couldn’t be more excited.
We'll be in session soon and accepting submissions.
On behalf of the organizing team and community liaisons, we are grateful to
Commons community members and others who participated in the different
phases of this project – from an initial concept exploration to a contest
proposal – providing us with valuable guidance to help shape an open, global
contest <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Sound_Logo>. With
so much expertise in international photography contests and visual logo
searches in the movement, we are curious to learn how sound and audio
production will play out for us, in harmony with our values.
This is just a heads up and a thank you note. More information to come.
We'd love to welcome scores of submissions from around the world, so please
help the contest call vibrate through your networks. And of course, submit
one yourself. There are free and open source tools
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Sound_Logo/Sound_collaborati…>
that can help us capture sound and create that unique sound logo for our
movement. And you don't have to be pitch perfect, we'll be having an audio
production drop-in clinic
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Sound_Logo#Music_Production_…>
with our expert partner MassiveMusic on 29 September @ 15:00 UTC. We'd love
to hear from you.
Ok, I think I have included enough sound-related puns in this email.
Wishing you all well and once again, a heartfelt thank you.
On behalf of the sound logo team,
Mehrdad
*Mehrdad Pourzaki*
Lead Movement Communications Specialist
wikimediafoundation.org
Hello all!
We had an incident over this weekend where the updater to Wikimedia Commons
Query Service (WCQS) was broken for about a day and a half [1]. The root
cause seems to be MediaInfo on Commons allowing entities to share statement
IDs. This should be invalid and would cause the WCQS Updater to crash. A
work around is in place and updates have been backfilled.
Thanks for your patience!
Guillaume
[1]
https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000489/wikidata-query-service?orgId=1&vi…
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T317530
--
*Guillaume Lederrey* (he/him)
Engineering Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>