Hi Marcus, Thank you very much for your question. The first two Guided tours will initially be available in English (the language we produced the videos) and in German (as Wikimedia Deutschland paid the production costs). The footage will be published under a share-alike licence and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. This will assure that everyone can produce a version in his own language by using the voice-over technique. Currently, Michael Dale is working on adding video-related functionality to MediaWiki. Amongst other things he is developing a solution for subtitling as part of the metavidWiki extension. Example: http://metavid.org/w/extensions/MetavidWiki/skins/mv_embed/example_usage/sa… The great thing about this subtitling solution is that the transcripts can be collaboratively written using the wiki engine. The second example lets you choose between two languages (click on "Select Text Layers"). Up to now, the metavidWiki extension already supports the concept of a multitude of text layers differentiating in language. Thanks again. Multilingualism is a challenge and I'm very happy you raised the issue. Frank NB. This mail address is used for public mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will get lost. 2008/12/19 Marcus Buck <me(a)marcusbuck.org>rg>:

2008/12/19 Marcus Buck <me(a)marcusbuck.org>rg>: I will ask Michael Dale for more information. For the moment you'll find a nicer implementation at http://metavid.org/wiki/Stream:House_proceeding_06-09-08_01/0:01:38/0:10:00 However, as the footage will be published under a CC-by-SA licence and everyone will be able to produce a voice-over (or whatever seems to be suitable) in his own language. Our main goal is to reach out to a larger audience. I travelled a lot during the last few years, gave Wikipedia lectures and organized workshops. And people always asked me the same questions about Wikipedia. Thus, it seemed to be obvious to make this more scalable. What do we want to achieve with the two first Guided tours? * Guided tour #1: Show people how easy it is to edit Wikipedia / encourage them to click on the edit button: My experience so far: you can't imagine how many people don't know that everyone can edit Wikipedia. You give a lecture, everybody knows Wikipedia, and suddenly someone asks: "but what happens when I click on the edit button?" Every Wikipedian knows that uploading pictures on commons is much too complicated - but obviously clicking the edit button is almost the same big step. That was what astonished me most. Wikipedians tend to live in *their Wiki world*. They tend to forget about the problems of the "normal" user. To encourage these users to click the magic button and to become contributors - that's what we want to achieve with the first video. * Guided tour #2: Give answers to one the most often heard questions / build trust When I started to give Wikipedia lectures and workshops some years ago I had around thirty presentation slides on my notebook. After a short while I recognized: that's what makes people get tired. From that time on I open my lectures with two slides explaining the very basic concept behind Wikipedia and then encourage the audience to ask questions. And I can tell you: people have a *lot* of questions about Wikipedia. But one question is always the first one: "Why does Wikipedia work even though anyone can edit it?" Wikipedians would answer: Don't you know watchlists? And those Wikipedians forget: no, people don't know watchlists. The "watch this page" button is only available for registered users (perhaps we may want to change this in the future: unregistered users could be directed to a page explaining what a watchlist is and how useful this is - and encourage people to get a user account). Thus, to explain some of basic software features related to quality control (watchlists, recent changes) and to build trust - that's what we want to achieve with the second video. One of our big goals is to encourage and to broaden participation. To hit our target we need to create a personal invitation. That's why the first two videos will be Guided tours. The key purpose of these videos is not to explain, in detail, the "how" of editing. More in-depth how-to video tutorials are a separate part of my work and I invite everyone in the community who has experiences in creating screencasts to get in contact with me. Theresa is Canadian. Wikipedia is an international project and our video tutorials should reflect that. Therefore, Theresa is one of many faces we will use to represent us, "the first of several." The next faces will perhaps come from India or from Russia. And I tell you, we had thousands of questions to answer. Should she wear earrings or not, what color should the table be, which browser should she use, and so forth. And I'm pretty sure not everyone will be happy with every little detail. Cheers Frank NB. This mail address is used for public mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will get lost.

2008/12/23 Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk(a)googlemail.com>om>: :-) No, it was just to give you an impression you how it _could_ look like. Yes, that's perfectly true. For some of our target groups this is certainly a bigger obstacle than the wiki markup. Again, I agree. Our first step should be to figure out which of these very basic questions we should answer. I'm sure that will have a high impact. We should at least think about ways to make the how-to screencast tutorials as comprehensible as possible. Would you personally be interested to join the screencast team? Your participation is highly welcome! She's living in Berlin ;-) Thank you for your helpful comments which I appreciate as always. Frank