This week the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to introduce a series of short videos that were produced in Summer of 2010 that highlight our users: the volunteer contributors from around the world who help make projects like Wikipedia a reality.

(The clips will be posted on this YouTube channel, and also as CCBYSA files on the Wikimedia Commons)

These videos were produced with two key outcomes in mind: to inform the general public about the people and inspiration behind our movement, and also to energize and inspire new Wikipedia editors to engage bravely in contributing to Wikipedia.  The latter focus is particularly important for the Foundation’s current Public Policy initiative outreach, but we’re hopeful they will inspire other new editors around the world.

Altogether we will be launching four videos, and today’s video ‘Username’ is a short clip that introduces some of the 35 Wikipedia editors that were interviewed during the annual Wikimania conference last summer in Gdansk Poland.  We’ll launch the rest of the clips through this week, hosting them on video sharing sites and of course on the Wikimedia Commons.  The clips are all CCBYSA 3.0, including the great background music by Matthew Carey.

The clips were created for the Wikimedia Foundation by a team that’s been working with the Foundation over the past year. They were directed by Jelly Helm, produced by Noah Stanik, shot by DP Reed Harkness, and edited by Sarah Marcus. The Germany-based film production crew Living Colour was an essential partner in bringing everything together at the shoot in Gdansk, Poland, and Fenton Communications, who have been supporting the Foundation over the past year, were our agency partners in pulling this project together. We also owe the organizers of 2010′s Wikimania conference a great deal of thanks for helping us sort out the production on the ground and for letting us borrow participants for short interviews.

And of course our great thanks go to each of the 35 Wikipedins who took the time to open up and share their views and philosophies about our movement. The Foundation is incredibly fortunate to be able to meet so many Wikimedia volunteers, and it’s a great pleasure to be able to share some of the passion and energy we see every day.

Enjoy, and stay tuned for more!

Jay & Frank / Communications & Public Outreach

How can we recruit even more people to make Wikipedia a richer, deeper learning resource? For one thing, by making it easier to contribute (see our previous announcement). But, we also have to make our readers aware that their help is welcome, and ease them into taking the first steps to improving or creating an article. So, we’re funding the development of a slate of outreach resources such as brochures and videos that help people to get started, some of which target specific audiences like teachers and students.

Our partners are 27 regional Wikimedia chapter organizations, and anyone else who wants to help. Here are two recent examples.

Wikimedia Italia has funded the production of a 7 minute introductory video, “La Wikiguida di Wikipedia”. You can watch it on YouTube (with subtitles) below, or view or download the video in Ogg Theora format. It’s now linked to on every page of the Italian Wikipedia. The video was produced by Christian Biasco, and more videos are planned to be produced later this year.

If you don’t speak Italian, you may be interested in Howcast’s lovely introduction to creating a Wikipedia article, embedded below:

Produced with guidance from Swedish Wikipedia volunteer Lennart Guldbrandsson, it’s a fun and comprehensive intro, and uses Howcast’s powerful “how-to player” to guide viewers through the instructions. Howcast San Francisco, by the way, now resides in the offices previously used by the Wikimedia Foundation, so perhaps they were inspired by forgotten wiki paraphernalia. ;-)

The Wikimedia Foundation didn’t plan or commission these videos, but we’re very happy and grateful that they were made – we believe instructional video resources will be essential as we scale our efforts to recruit new editors. A big thank you to Wikimedia Italia and Howcast for leading by example. Moving forward, we are seeking opportunities to assist and encourage our chapters and individual volunteers in creating these types of outreach resources.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Today, our friends at the Open Video Alliance launched an important advocacy project (see their announcement), called “Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia“. The project aims to motivate more people to take and upload relevant educational video content to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.

Video can play an important role in an encyclopedia and in other learning resources. Whether it’s clips of animals, speeches, interviews, excerpts from important films, explanatory animations, footage of historical events, or even collaboratively created documentaries exploring complex topics — video can enrich our learning experience. There are about 4,500 video files in our media repository today, a tiny number. We don’t expect that Wikipedia will turn into “Wikitube” anytime soon, but we do hope that thousands more relevant educational videos will find their way into articles in our projects.

The Wikimedia Foundation also believes that two things need to change for video on the web: it needs to break out of the Flash container used for most video on the web so that developers can build smarter and richer applications, and it needs to be shared in a free format so that anyone can shoot and broadcast video without paying fees. That’s why we use an open video standard for all our videos. The “Let’s get video on Wikipedia how-to” provides simple instructions to convert video into a free and open format and upload it. And, of course, all video content on Wikimedia Commons can be re-used by anyone for any purpose: we’re open all the way.

The campaign is being co-organized by Mozilla Drumbeat, Wikimedia New York City, and the Participatory Culture Foundation, makers of the open source Miro video player and downloader.  It’s also a trial-by-fire for some of the new video technology we’ve been working on in partnership with Kaltura. In short, it’s a demonstration of the power of building alliances. If you’re a video maker or a web developer, we hope that you’ll join us in supporting open standards and free educational video content.

Wikipedia volunteer TheDJ provides some further under-the-hood information in his blog summary.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

I would like to announce that some of the new media features are now available in gadget form on Wikimedia Commons and the English Wikipedia. These include a new ogg player, the add media wizard, and firefogg upload support. I hope having these components in gadget form will enable some more testing and feedback :)

Getting Started to enable these components you must turn on the mwEmbed gadget. You can turn it on by visiting your preferences page. Once you enable the gadget you should shift reload to ensure you have a fresh copy of the JavaScript. (note you will need to enable the gadget for each wiki you want to test (ie both for wikimedia commons and Wikipedia). Once enabled you can check out the following features: (more…)

Yesterday’s tech talks from Wikimania are online at our temporary video file staging location (Ogg Theora format). They should appear on Commons soon. :)

Update: Some of the movies have encoding problems; reencoded versions should be reposted within a couple days. Sorry!

Some of the things I learned about new projects and scaling issues.

BTW, I think we can settle that Ruby applications don’t have to be slow. Far from it.

[vimeo 5749262 600 450]

Follow me on Twitter @hcatlin or @WikimediaMobile

Congralutations are in order for our friends and comrades-in-arms at Mozilla: they’ve released version 3.5 of their open-source Firefox browser today.

Aside from major improvements to speed and memory usage, one of the updates that has got us most excited at Wikimedia is the support for HTML 5′s native <video> and <audio> elements.

What does this mean? Well in short, it means that Firefox 3.5 is the best browser to run video and audio clips from Wikimedia Commons on!

A few months more down the line, we’ll start being able to integrate support for our inline video sequencer, which’ll make it easy to extract snippets of a longer video and combine them — entirely using open-source, non-patent-encumbered web standards. This makes heavy use of the new HTML 5 multimedia support; while at first editing will be limited to Firefox 3.5 users, other browsers are continuing to improve and adopt the same support.

We’re excited to release ‘Inside Wikimedia‘ -  our first video showcasing the people, projects, and the environment of the Wikimedia Foundation.  It’s short, but you can get a sense of who is behind the Foundation and what exactly we do on a day to day basis.  All of this video was shot on-location in our San Francisco offices.

Of course it’s a CC-BY-SA 3.0 work (with free music from Jamendo!), so feel free to remix and distribute far and wide.  The video is available in the formats below, and is hosted on Wikimedia Commons and on the Internet Archive.  We’re working on localized versions with alternate language subtitles as well.  Appreciate any comments or feedback.

Via…

Internet Archive (Quicktime, highres, 1GB) (MPEG4, 9MB) (OGG, 9MB)
Wikimedia Commons (OGG, 9MB) (OGG, 106MB)
Vimeo, and YouTube

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Mozilla has awarded a grant of $100,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies. Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards. Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats. All audio and video in Wikipedia is stored in these formats. Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla has blogged about this great news, as has Chris Blizzard, Director of Evangelism for Mozilla.

Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets. Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation.

The $100,000 grant will be used to support the work of long-time contributors to the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codebase and related tools, such as libraries for network seeking. The improvements will be made over a 6 month period.

Erik Möller,
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Video tutorials are often more beginner-friendly than text based online help pages. Wikimedia is therefore producing a number of videos demonstrating the basics of Wikipedia editing and increasing the public understanding of Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

On 19 November 2008 the shooting of the very first Wikipedia video tutorials took place. They will deal with two very basic questions:

* How do I edit Wikipedia?
* Why does Wikipedia work even though anyone can edit it?

To give you a look behind the scenes we produced a short 3 minute making-of video that can be watched online:

* on Wikimedia Commons (11.7 MB, better quality)
* on Wikimedia Commons (6.2 MB, lower quality)

and also

* on Vimeo
* on blip.tv
* on YouTube

Currently, the two video tutorials are in the process of post-production (assembling the film, adding visual effects etc.) and we hope that they will be online soon.  We’re also working on a portal space where the tutorials will be hosted for the long-term, and of course you’ll be able to find them here on the Wikimedia blog.

Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach