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
Dear Wikimedians,
We are happy to announce that the 2019 Picture of the Year competition is now open.
The Commons Picture of the Year is a competition that was first run in 2006. It aims to identify the best freely licensed images from those that during the year have been awarded Featured picture status. This is the fourteenth edition of POTY.
Wikimedia users are invited to vote for their favorite images featured on Commons (FP) during the year 2019, to produce a single Picture of the Year.
Hundreds of images that have been rated Featured Pictures by the international Wikimedia Commons community. From professional animal and plant shots to breathtaking panoramas and historically relevant images, Commons features pictures of all flavors.
For your convenience, we have sorted the images into topic categories.
Two rounds of voting will be held:
* In the first round, you can vote for as many images as you like. The first round category winners and the top ten overall will then make it to the final.
* In the final round, when a limited number of images are left, you must decide on the one image that you want to become the Picture of the Year.
To vote, you must be an established Wikimedia user with more than 75 edits before January 1, 2020.
To see the candidate images just go to the POTY 2019 page on Wikimedia
Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:POTY/2019/VOTE
Round 1 begins on 8 March 2020, 15:00 and ends on 22 March 2020, 23:59:59 [UTC]
Round 2 begins on 5 April 2020, 15:00 and ends on 19 April 2020, 23:59:59 [UTC]
Thanks,
POTY 2019 committee
THIS MAIL AS HTML/PDF: https://tools.wmflabs.org/commons-poty/2019/webhtml/R1announcement.html