[New thread for the discussions started by brion, Ivan, James and others on becoming video-friendly and building a community of video editors and curators. Was "Re: We need more interactive content."]
James Heilman wrote:
With VideoWiki we have been able to create some higher quality content with a partner at MyUpchar. The text was written by us, the individual short animations were done by them, and then the tool combines it all together with text to speech. Hope to get the tool working again soon:
A nice example of a) creating a space explicitly to develop new tools and encourage one another in using them; b) trialing a workflow that can be automated at need.
Text-to-speech and animation tools have also advanced tremendously since that was produced; this is also becoming an important channel for more mainstream media (I see the spammers taking over mainstream social media with it as well, in how-tos, education, news, sports, and leisure).
SJ
It is not difficult to do something that is already happening. By referring to encyclopedic videos I am talking about multimedia that can enrich existing content. I understand your point, it's a bit like what happened with the project of reading recorded Wikipedia articles that after years seem obsolete.
What I am referring to is all that multimedia material that is visual, that can be made into video to complement articles. The process you mention is complicated, but not impossible, in fact, there are many of us editors who have all those skills already implemented in the projects.
> By not having a Youtube 2.0 we are avoiding a Wikipedia 2.0 with pure encyclopaedic videos. I see a false dilemma there.
brion wrote:
My recommendations for Wikimedia Foundation on this subject:
1) Overturn the requirement to avoid handling h.264 files on Wikimedia servers or accept them from users or serve them to users. Allow importing h.264 uploads and creating h.264 transcodes for playback compatibility.
2) Create an interactive media team with at least two engineers, a designer, and a project manager
3) Give this team a remit to rebuild *and maintain in an ongoing fashion* the existing TimedMediaHandler, Graphs, Score, 3D, etc extensions
4) Integrate those tools cleanly with mobile apps and social media embedding tools managed by other teams