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 Wikimedia Commons folks!
Metadata Games (MG) is a FOSS project that we've been working on at
Tiltfactor Lab at Dartmouth College. It's a bit of an experimental
project using online games to help with the collection of metadata for
images in various collections (libraries, archives, etc...).
There's a bit of basic information up on the Tiltfactor website about
the background and main goals of the project:
http://www.tiltfactor.org/metadata-games
And (because talk is cheap :-), source code is up on Gitorious here:
http://gitorious.org/metadatagames
If you promise not to explode our server too much, you can point your
browser over to http://metadatagames.com and see a version of the
software in action. Right now that's pointing to a test install with
some pictures from Dartmouth's archives. We have some great
black-and-white images from old Winter Carnivals, as well as some more
modern color photographs from around the campus. We're mostly done
collecting data with that particular test, so feel free to play around
with the images and games we have up there.
The MG system currently has a couple of different games for single and
multi-player tagging of images. In the next couple of months we're
hoping to add support for more media types (including audio and video)
as well as making some big improvements to the backend of the system
so that we can scale-up for big installs.
We're currently collaborating with a couple of different groups
including the Rauner Library here at Dartmouth, and we're eager to see
more groups benefit from tagging media with MG. Sam Klein pinged me
about working with Wikimedia, and we'd definitely be excited to
collaborate on improvements or expansions to the current system. The
simplest way to use MG would just be to funnel images from Commons
through the system, and then export and use the highest-ranked tags. I
haven't been very active in the Wikimedia community for the last few
years, so I'm not quite up to date on all of the projects percolating
out there, but there might also be some more creative ways in which
the MG system could be employed :-)
Cheers,
Robinson Tryon
(User:Womble on various wikimedia sites)
Hi everyone,
I'm using the "Use this file on the web" feature of Wikimedia Commons -
I truly love that feature. But just recently I discovered that it seems
to be broken for me. For example for the Commons entry
File:Real-time_MRI_-_Thorax.ogv [0] it does not seem to work anymore if
I embed the URL provided by the embed feature [1]. All I get is a
loading circle animation. Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong? It
worked fine a few days ago.
Thanks in advance,
Sebastian
[0] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Real-time_MRI_-_Thorax.ogv
[1]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AReal-time_MRI_-_Thorax.ogv?withJS=…
Where is the onwiki discussion about this? I could find '[1]'
Or a wikipedia page that describes the copyright status of imagery of DSOs?
John Vandenberg.
sent from Galaxy Note
On Sep 15, 2012 1:25 PM, "とある白い猫" <to.aru.shiroi.neko(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am not seeking legal advice. I am asking the pursuit of the issue. I am
> not a US citizen so I do not have a congress person to contact. The laws
> governing copyright can be amended to address the issue of deep space
> objects (DSO). I do not expect a result next week, I merely want the issue
> to enter into an agenda of some sort. If the Foundation is going to take
> the lead, this probably would only be possible through a board decision. In
> such a case I want to work with people to come up with such a draft
> proposal to the board.
>
> I realize this is an unusual request but there seems to be a lack of
> clarity on this issue[1]. Argument is that copyright can be an issue since
> not every organization observing or assisting NASA's observations are
> PD-USgov compatible. We may be forced to permanently delete all deep space
> objects as a result.
>
> I'd like to provide a short technical explanation why copyright of deep
> space objects or DSOs (objects outside of the solar system) are
> meaningless. For ordinary photographs copyright is determined by factors
> such as lighting, perspective, exposure and other such settings that
> creates a different image of the same object. You can distinguish the
> difference between a daylight photo and an evening photo.
>
> With deep space objects however, even the stellar parallax[2] has a very
> small value. The closest object outside of the solar system is 4.24 light
> years (268,136 AU's) away. The semi-major axis of earth is about 1AUs. The
> difference in perspective is like looking at a 2cm (width of a nickel) wide
> object 5.3km (3.29 miles) away and the perspective difference is switching
> left eye to the right eye. We lack scientific instruments to even detect a
> stellar parallax for objects much further. In other words our perspective
> of the nearest star and beyond is more or less constant and the objects
> themselves look the same for hundreds of years.
>
> So any photo of a deep space object I or someone else takes from the
> solar system will look identical regardless of when and where on earth I
> take it within multiple lifetimes. I think this can bring legal precedent
> for us to either disregard any copyright claim or at least pursue lawmakers
> in congress to amend the copyright law to make an exception in the law.
> People who worked with congress such as Neil Degrasse Tyson could be
> consulted to this end. Also international treaties[3] can be consulted to
> this end as copyrighting photos of deep space objects could be interpreted
> as an unfair exploitation of resources.
>
> I realize this reads like something out of Star Trek but this is growing
> to be quite a problem as we see more and more weird copyright claims even
> when dealing with NASA which traditionally had a PD-USgov mentality. NASA
> regularly contracts its more recent projects and to be fair we do not know
> how NASA contracts these projects which could potentially lead
> to legitimate copyright claims in the future.
>
>
> [1]:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Potential_deletion_o…
>
> [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax
>
> [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law#International_treaties
>
> -- とある白い猫 (To Aru Shiroi Neko)
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> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
No uploading possible from Friday Oct 5 at 11am UTC, to 2pm UTC.
Bryan
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ariel T. Glenn <ariel(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 2:19 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Media infrastructure maintenance (uploads
disabled) Friday Oct 5, 11 am UTC
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
We're going to swap out ms7, the current media server fallback, for a
netapp. We'll start this on Friday Oct 5 at 11am UTC, to conclude at
2pm UTC or earlier. This will entail turning off uploads to all
projects during the switchover. It is possible that
ExtensionDistributor and captchas will be affected during this time as
well; other services should be fine.
Ariel
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