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
[To all Wikimedia projects, minus mailing lists with an active
discussion already.]
On August 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees may decide a
rename to "Wikipedia Foundation" and various other things.
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/Boar…>
Following a community meeting, a proposed open letter was written:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_open_letter_on_renaming>
«We ask the Wikimedia Foundation to pause or stop its current movement
renaming activities, due to persistent shortcomings in the current
rebranding process. Future work should be restarted only in a way that
ensures equitable decision-making.»
(Sorry for the crossposting. When replying, be mindful of cc. Do
consider forwarding to language-specific discussion venues with a short
translated introduction, or translate the pages on Meta.)
Cheers,
Federico aka Nemo