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
Hi everyone!
Next Monday and Tuesday, we have one more GLAM & Culture office hours by
the WMF GLAM team. These ones will be about Structured Data on Commons.
There will be a meeting on *Monday, 26 April, 3.30 pm - 4.30 pm UTC*,
followed by another on *Tuesday, 27 April, 11.00 am - 12.00 pm UTC*.
On the first day, Carly Bogen, the Foundation's Program Manager for
Structured Data, will talk about the new Media Search, Image
Recommendations, and provide updates on the Structured Data Across
Wikimedia project. Jennie Choi, General Manager of Collection Information
for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will also present her process of batch
uploading Structured Data on Commons.
On the second day, John Sampson Tiberius Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence
at UNESCO, and Alicia Fagerving, Developer at Wikimedia Sverige (WMSE),
will share Wikimedia Sweden's plans with Structured Data, GLAM content, and
Wiki Loves Monuments.
Find the Zoom links to both meetings here
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_GLAM_team/Office_Hours>
.
Best,
Giovanna Fontenelle (she/her)
Program Officer; GLAM and Culture
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>