Commons-l March 2010

commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

29 participants
14 discussions

Video skills and equipment
by Lars Aronsson 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

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

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The change in the interface is coming
by Naoko Komura 05 Apr '10

05 Apr '10

Hello. The usability beta has been tried out by over 570,000 users across all Wikimedia projects and roughly 80% of those beta users continue using it [1]. As for Commons, about 7,500 users tried out the beta as of end of February and 86% of users are still using it. The usability team is planning to roll out the current beta interface including the new toolbar as the default interface in April and May; please refer to these blogs for more details.[2][3] As the acceptance rate of the beta by Commons users is relatively high, we would like to make the switch for Commons at first in the second week of April. In order to facilitate the transition and to avoid critical issues, we would like to ask as many of you as possible to try Beta before that date, so that most issues are discovered and fixed before we go default. You can opt-in via the 'Try Beta' link at the top of your interface. We appreciate that Commons heavily relies on custom user scripts and site-specific JavaScript; Our changes are not especially related to multimedia usability, but we need your help to make sure the most used tools are compatible with the new interface. If you encounter issues using the beta, please share your feedback on the dedicated page [4]. Many thanks in advance. Naoko Komura and the User Experience Programs Team Wikimedia Foundation [1] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beta_Feedback_Survey [2] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/25/wikimedia-gets-ready-for-some-big-chan… [3] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/the-change-in-interface-is-coming/ [4] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Usability_issues_and_ideas -- Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Photography platforms, case study: Flickr and astronomy
by Neil Kandalgaonkar 22 Mar '10

22 Mar '10

People interested in the future of Commons as a platform should take a look at what's been happening with Flickr and astronomy photos. 1) The Royal Observatory ran a contest for "Astronomy Photographer of the Year" on Flickr. This was a really sophisticated website that used Flickr as a backend. 2) The Blind Astrometry Server is a bot that automatically figures out where astronomical images are in the sky, and tags them appropriately. In both cases, the Flickr staff weren't even aware these things were going on, for quite a while. Anyway, I was reminded of all this today since someone sent me a link to the Royal Observatory's retrospective on the whole thing: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/romeo/romeo.html And here's two blog posts I wrote for Flickr some time ago: http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/02/18/found-in-space/ http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/03/20/tags-in-space/ In my view there isn't anything that Flickr is doing which Commons couldn't be doing. And as much as I have faith in the Flickr team, I have doubts about whether Yahoo is the right place, long term, for the world to be relying on for such resources. -- Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>

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not Djakota, IIP :-)
by Daniel Schwen 20 Mar '10

20 Mar '10

Hey, inspired by the Djakota postig I whipped up a little wrapper around IIP [1] and VIPS [2]. It is basically the same think as Djakota, but as a compiled fast-cgi program (rather than Java). A couple of examples: http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/iip/wip.php?f=LC-39_Observation_gantry_pano.… http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/iip/wip.php?f=Chicago.jpg http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/iip/wip.php?f=Seattle_7.jpg The examples use a flash viewer, but you can append &flash=no to the urls to get a Javascript viewer. It should work to replace the names with arbitrary images on commons, but new images will have to be processed into a pyramidal tiled tiff image (with jpg compression) first. That takes time, about a minute. After that the image is cached and the viewer appears immediately. Be warned, there is no visual feedback that anything is happening while the image is processed. So be patient and try a reload after waiting a minute or so. I'll write a gadget to integrate this into commons (the gadget will only appear on images with a certain minimum size). Best, Dschwen [1] http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS

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UK rights - headsup
by Gnangarra 19 Mar '10

19 Mar '10

http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=873803 This may become or present both benefits and problems to Commons in relation to copyright on photographs from the UK. Be nice if some UK people or legal people monitor and get an idea of possible issues in relation to permissions as this evolves -- GN. http://gnangarra.redbubble.com/

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sitenotice
by Huib Laurens 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

Hi, I'm wondering why we have a green sitenotice about earning money by helping Commons. I have my interface on Dutch and I get a big ugly thing that have no use for me. Could it be possible that it will only show it to people with English interface? I don't think it will have much use when you show it to Dutch people... Because most people in the U.S Will have English interface. Huib -- "The soldiers graves are great preachers of peace...." http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Abigor

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Broken videos
by Lars Aronsson 17 Mar '10

17 Mar '10

This past weekend, at the SXSW conference, a new initiative was launched to "get video on Wikipedia", http://videoonwikipedia.org/ That sounds like a great idea. (I wasn't there, but I was told.) But among the first videos to be uploaded since the announcement are two that show some construction equipment and both break my browser every time I try to watch them. How can this be possible with a fully updated Mozilla Firefox 3.5.8 on Ubuntu Linux? I suppose something went wrong in the OGG encoding, but still, browsers should not be fooled by this, and/or Wikimedia Commons needs to make sure videos are correctly encoded so they can be safely watched. I have asked that these two broken videos be removed, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:6hpPowerTrowel.ogv http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13hpBoren.ogv We discussed for a long time why OpenOffice documents can't be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons because the ZIP encoding wasn't safe and could explode in the face of the user. Well, maybe OGG isn't safe either? Should we just ban video all together? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Djatoka
by Gerard Meijssen 15 Mar '10

15 Mar '10

Hoi, I blogged about the 15 meter Indonesian story cloth that has been restored and patched into a single 992.4 MB file by Durova. Using the MediaWiki software, it is unmanageably big. There are many image files that are too big to handle. Djatoka is open source software that allows us to manage files that are a tad too big. http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/03/indonesian-story-cloth-there-fo… http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/search/label/Djatoka Thanks, GerardM

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Academic research about community and Wikipedia
by Jessica Roberts 11 Mar '10

11 Mar '10

Hello all, I am working on a research project related to the idea of community and the extent to which Wikipedia constitutes a community, or may contain a community (in the group of editors, the WikiCommons or some other group). I would like to interview people who consider themselves part of a Wikipedia-related community, people who participate in Wikipedia but do NOT consider it a community, people who consider Wikipedia a community but see themselves as outside that community, or anyone at all who would like to talk about their experiences interacting with others in Wikipedia. Those who are interested in talking to me about this can contact me at jessyrob(a)gmail.com. Jessica -- Jessica Roberts Ph.D. Student University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism

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Digitising large, fragile old maps?
by David Gerard 11 Mar '10

11 Mar '10

This is an "Ask Slashdot" on how to digitise large, fragile old maps that are too fragile to just put on a scanner: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/03/10/2041245/Digitizing-and-Geocoding-Old… Anyone want to go there and help? How would you approach this problem? Say you've gotten your hands on a serious ancient map collection and want to scan them and put them on Commons before they turn into dust. - d.

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Commons-l March 2010