On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 5:28 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video click here" and install the viewer. You just then need to get some video into some mainstream articles. Wikipedia then has just single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the slippery slope to widespread adoption.
Do we have any evidence to support this?
To the more general question of "Does this approach work for anyone?", absolutely yes: Thats how flash was adopted. Sites said 'click-here'. People clicked. Some time later, massive adoption... An over simplification, but basically correct. Flash adoption happened without any major OS or browser vendors shipping flash support. It may be, however, that the above only works for youtube and strong-bad, and not Wikipedia.
We do have some direct. evidence, however. Back when the video player was something I ran off the toolserver there were complete access logs which allowed me to track how often the player worked for people and get a little bit of information on why it failed. I do not have the logs anymore, but I believe that I found something like 1/3rd of the IPs that did not support Java came back later with Java installed. (It helped that the player had a link to SUN's java download site). This measurement is not particularly good for a multitude of reasons and may not apply now (the current player does not have good links to help people install support), so I wouldn't suggest to giving it much weight, but it does demonstrate that objective data on this can be collected.
Considering the prior-probability ('it worked for flash'), I think it would be prudent to follow mboverload's assumption until data is collected that indicates otherwise. It's necessary to collect the data in any case since the same data can be used to help maximize the effect (it's why I was bothering to consider it myself back then: at the time no one was really advocating that we use flash, I needed to know in order to make the player work for more people)