[WikiEN-l] Vidipedia, the video encyclopedia anyone can edit

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/20/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> Video is much more potentially editable than static images.  Consider
> a 5 minute mini-documentary on [[Hurricane Katrina]], slide-show
> style, with narration taken straight from the text of the Wikipedia
> article and images taken from commons to match the narration.  There
> is a *lot* of potential for cooperative editing there, basically as
> much or more than the text of a Wikipedia article.

The ill-fated mediawiki video extension stuff demonstrated at
Wikimania was eventually supposed to support wiki-based video editing
by allowing you build cut-sheets on a wikipage.

So you'd build a tag which described a new video as a set of clips
from other videos.

This would enable collaborative 'editing' of the type you describe,
though it would need some interface bits to be user friendly.

I'll grant that it's editing and that it's very useful.. but it isn't
and can never be the sort of rich editing that we see for text that I
was talking about.

> The idea is probably ahead of its time, though, because AFAIK there
> aren't any free (even as in beer) software tools to make such video
> editing easy, let alone collaborative.

There exist no tools, free or otherwise to do what you want. But
building one to do collaborative cut sheets wouldn't be hard at all...
most of the parts of building one already exist.

(Your right about the licensing stuff being a challenge.. but that
should be no shocker, is an amazing pain for people making commercial
movies and TV, whole books have been written on how to make a
documentary without getting sued over random copyright problems.  So
it's not something that we'll have solved instantly either, even in
the free content world.)