On Sat, 27 Jan 2024 at 05:07, Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:
> ? Many creators say they are glad to relicense their existing fantastic work, but don't have time/will to overcome the current obstacles to such reuse that they have to [personally] overcome for each video. So we only get bulk contributions, through a third-party who is familiar with the wikis, once in a while... a modest homegrown example: depthsofwiki has a range of great short videos that are partly educational and mainly inspiring to delve into the wikis and learn things. I suspect none of them are on Commons despite obvious relevance to the movement for outreach, illustration, and the like.
I suspect we are dealing with Stated vs. Revealed Preferences. Saying
no to wikipedia has more of a social cost than talking about technical
issues. Converting to something wikipedia will accept is fairly
straightforward. Handbrake has a GUI and pops up in creator workflows
as a convient way to compress B-roll. Uploading presents more of a
challange than most areas but that would be because we care more about
copyright than most so probably unavoidable,
A bigger issue with a random YouTuber or other individual video creator re-licensing their work is that *very* often, their "own work" is not purely "own work"; rather, they use non-free music as background, incorporate clips or memes in their video, etc., making the video potentially *unacceptable* on Commons, even if the author of the full video represents that they are willing to license their work under a free license.
This is a sticky issue, because there is no easy fix, technological or otherwise, for clearing those copyright concerns. If a video creator has their contributions wait in some review limbo for weeks (or months), and then has, say, four out of five of them rejected on copyright grounds, they would be overwhelmingly unlikely to keep contributing.
(I'm just bringing up this issue that doesn't seem to have been mentioned as a factor. I do agree and wholeheartedly support the need to accept more formats and take on the burden of determining whether videos are usable (what SJ above called "a stickier ingenstion process"); even if it won't attract hordes of YouTubers to contribute, it could allow those of us already involved with and interested in free knowledge/culture to contribute more easily and frequently, and that itself could be transformative, in terms of the presence of video content on the wikis compared to status quo.)
A.
(in my volunteer capacity)