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
Dear ones,
Where might I get or mirror a dump of Commons media files?
> It seems worth mentioning on the front page of
https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
> It looks like the compressed XML of the ~50M description pages is ~25GB.
> It looks like wiki-team set up a dump script that posted monthly dumps to
the internet archive; in 2013 it stopped include the month+year in the
title; in 2016 it stopped altogether.
https://archive.org/details/wikimediacommons
(I've also posted this text on the main Commons Village Pump)
Greetings,
The Structured Data team has released licensing filters for
Special:MediaSearch [0]. When looking for files you can now narrow or
expand your choices by deciding what free license permissions you would
like to work with, or use to share with particular reuse parameters.
* All licenses
* Use with attribution
* Use with attribution and same license
* No restrictions
* Other
Please give it a try, and leave feedback on the feature or anything else
about the new search in general [1] to let the team know how you like it or
how it can be further improved.
Additionally, there is a quick survey available on the MediaSearch project
page [2] about search preference. The survey is available to logged-in and
anonymous users, but is only available to be taken once–it should disappear
after filling it out. However, the survey is cookie-based so it will
reappear again if you use another browser. Anonymized survey results will
be published on-wiki soon after the survey closes. The survey is hosted
on-wiki, and the privacy statement [3] is available.
The Structured Data team looks forward to what people think about the new
feature for MediaSearch, and their preferences for search in general. This
information will help to continue to improve the experience of trying to
find the media that is being curated here. Thanks for your time, I'll be
posting some short followup reminders about the survey over the next few
weeks.
0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch
1.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Structured_data/Media_search
2.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Media_search#Med…
3.
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Performance_Perception_Survey_Privacy…
--
Keegan Peterzell (he/him)
Technical Collaboration Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation