On 8/24/06, Michael R. Irwin michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:
[heavily snipped]
I will do some further research. Eventually this expensive animation I have will be used effectively for some purpose!
Thanks for working on this Michael (and thanks to Rob and Robert for input). I agree that video/animation will be key to creating good educational content, so, the more we can do in providing for this need the better.
I met the guy who's been developing video integration for MediaWiki at Wikimania - you can see some background to what he's doing at: http://metavid.ucsc.edu/ - it's a drag and drop tool for editing video clips from the US senate, as well as an inline player for OggVorbis in MediaWiki. I'm not sure how far away his work is to integrating it fully into the codebase, but I seem to think he'll be working on this soon. (And, in general, I agree with Rob that code development will be something we'll need to keep in mind as we move along.)
But, as for the sentence I've just snipped, I think this is a wonderful potential for learning about something that's *really practical*, and is a great example of what i would see being useful to all wikimedia participants. That's what I've meant in the past when I say that we can be especially relevant to the whole of Wikimedia (and not be seen as a leech project, taking away contributors from wherever they've been working in the past). If we can use our experiences in finding out the things we need to know, document them well in a way that would help someone else learn what we just did, and make all of this readily available, we would be serving a very useful role - not just in general - but also specifically for our most likely immediate participants - Wikimedians.
So, essentially, all I'm saying (in along-winded kind of way) is that anything you find out about this would be great to feedback to the project as a whole.
Cheers, Cormac