But interactivity is not only about embedding video: we currently must leave each project to Toolforge for supporting editing tools, to Humanwiki to read biases, to OAuth to participate in polls or some editathons, or to MediawikiStats + WMFCloud to even see mapped or plotted the simplest statistics of each article or user contributions! Not to mention the struggles to keep “attractive” main pages of our hundreds of projects. Mobile browsers open them as mobile versions, and most become an unreadable disaster. Who will be still willing to read a minoritized language content like the Kurdish Wikiquote (just an example) if there are no templates that can support thriving communities to show decent main pages after the 2010s social desktop-to-phone transition? That's also interactivity, and that fight we already heavily lost it since a decade ago. No wonder that another thread brings up Google not indexing Wikisource properly... It is somehow part of the same problem.

Technical teams have been around 15 years externalizing an interface ecosystem to not confront that what needs to be improved and reintegrated is Mediawiki itself. The result is a labyrinth for the newcomers and a vast ocean of pending updates and bugs. Video failures are among the symptoms of such software externalization.

El divendres, 26 de gener 2024 a les 08:53, Jan Ainali <jan@aina.li> va escriure:

Den fre 26 jan. 2024 kl 04:10 skrev Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com>:

Brion wrote:
> 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.

Yes, this is essential. Can be via a separate videowiki in the short term (or NCcommons) if the WM Commons community is united in opposition.

I disagree. Using non-open tools in our workflows is a poison that should be resisted by any means possible.

Instead, we should create an app (or integrate in the Commons app), the possibility to record video natively in a free and open format.
Yes, it would be a big task, but it would show that we mean what we say when we talk about the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge and would be of great benefit not only to our movement, but to the society in general.

/Jan