Hello,
There are some amazing and educational videos in MIT's OpenCourseWare collection, and it's been on my mind for a while that none of them are on Wikipedia, even though the copyright holders (the profs) often would love for them to be.
Over the past weeks, I've been working with Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Ben Moskowitz (OVA), and some of MIT's OpenCourseWare team to identify a few videos that could be split up into useful sections to illustrate math and science articles on Wikipedia.
You can see a few examples from Prof. Walter Lewin's physics courses here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion
OCW is interested in running a small project, with clips from ~100 course videos, to figure out how we can make this work on a larger scale, and what the interest and response will be. If this is successful, we could add thousands of great clips to commons. (Professors own the rights to their videos, and the default (c) on OCW is CC-NC, so each prof must explicitly release their videos under CC-SA before they can be used in articles.)
Working on this project - my first work with video for awhile - raised a few questions, below.
OCW wants a failproof way to instruct people to set up their browsers so that our media player works. Of the MIT staff who tried it, 3 of 10 had problems until they installed another browser or fiddled around.(!)
Q1: Is there a page that says "choose your OS below, follow the link to download the lates browser version, and the player will work" ?
Q2: Do we have data on the % of our visitors for whom the video-player doesn't work properly? (to answer the question I got twice today: "will all readers actually be able to use these videos?")
Q3: Do we have historical stats on the # of media files in Commons by filetype or mediatype?
I am looking for a Boston-local ambassador who can work with Peter (whose staff offered to do the clip-selection and transcoding for this pilot) and the university (which will reach out to a few more professors to find interest) to step through the process a few times, from choosing suitable clips and important science articles needing illustration, through to sending a permissions email to OTRS.
Q4: can we start offering transcoding automatically, for people who upload non-ogg formats? Dailymotion seems to do this flawlessly, perhaps we can learn from their toolchain.
Q5: why is the link to the permissions email still so hard to find? Is there a new snazzy upload form that people can be pointed to that lets uploaders say: - "this file is by FOO who releases it under license L" ... - "send an email to FOO through this form, reminding them to confirm the license release"
Q6: do we still have that 100MB file size limit? can we change this to 500MB?
Q7: people often need access to raw high-res media: for restoration, manipulating full-size animation frames, or editing HD video. these can be a few GB in size. Is there any plan to set up a quarantine/scratch space where these files can be uploaded and shared?
Thanks for any pointers and answers, including to relevant threads that I may have missed,
Sam.
2011/2/10 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
OCW wants a failproof way to instruct people to set up their browsers so that our media player works. Of the MIT staff who tried it, 3 of 10 had problems until they installed another browser or fiddled around.(!)
Use Flash video. *ducks*
The state of open video support is still pretty sad. As great as Google's embrace of WebM will be in the long run, right now it means fragmented support for two different open formats. Firefox plays Theora out of the box (although there are still some ugly bugs that won't be fixed until FF4), Chrome has nominal support for Theora but for me it's been broken for a long time, and I've heard the same from others. IE is IE, they're just starting to support that crazy SVG thing in IE9. For video, they're betting on proprietary H264 for now - no surprises there.
There's hope that Adobe will support WebM in Flash which would give us wide WebM platform coverage. But, we don't even support WebM uploads yet, let alone transcoding. The only full-time resource we have working on this stuff is Michael Dale -- we've been lobbying Google to help with MediaWiki support, we'll see whether that comes to something.
The best you can do for now is recommend people install Firefox (you may want to use the beta for the best experience).
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2011/2/10 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
OCW wants a failproof way to instruct people to set up their browsers so that our media player works.
Use Flash video. *ducks*
This comment did come up :) The OCW staff were sympathetic and appreciated the fact that Wikipedia is a visible proponent of the need for a free toolchain. But they want to convince professors who may be on the fence about releasing their videos under a free license comfortable with it. Profs who appreciate these subtletie won't be on the fence.
The best you can do for now is recommend people install Firefox (you may want to use the beta for the best experience).
OK. That addresses the first Q; I will recommend profs be pointed here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/
I hope to have more progress/uploads in time for the Free Culture gathering next weekend.
At some point a table like this one specifically for compatibility with our player would be useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Table
< Q3: Do we have historical stats on the # of media files in Commons by filetype or mediatype?
Or current stats? Hans Westerhof at the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision joined for the meeting (he is visiting Cambridge for a month) and said that the 1000 news clips they've uploaded made up 10% of the video on Commons at the time. I wonder if that's still the case.
< Q5: why is the link to the permissions email still so hard to find?
I am inclined to point people to special:uploadwizard, another fine beta, even though it elides this part of the permissions process, and to encourage them to categorize uploads with a simple memorable tag.
It would be useful to be able to generate an upload URL that has a set of categories already included as an argument, so that everyone using that URL would have those tags applied to uploaded media.
< Q6: do we still have that 100MB file size limit? can we change this to 500MB?
Should this be asked on wikitech instead?
Sam.
Greetings,
Le vendredi 11 février 2011 à 20:24 -0500, Samuel Klein a écrit :
< Q3: Do we have historical stats on the # of media files in Commons by filetype or mediatype?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:MIME_type_statistics
I guess we have "historical" stats in the history (starting in November 2008). I agree we should track these stats (and their temporal evolution) somewhere.
I am inclined to point people to special:uploadwizard, another fine beta, even though it elides this part of the permissions process, and to encourage them to categorize uploads with a simple memorable tag.
The Upload wizard is currently suffering from critical bugs that are the reason why it's no longer advertized from the upload form. Neil Kandalgaonkar and Ryan Kaldari are currently working to resolve these bugs.
When these problems are solved, I guess the next step will be to continue to develop planned features for the UploadWizard.
The original specifications included a process to facilitate the handling of permissions, using auto-generated e-mails; I don't know if this feature is still planned.
< Q6: do we still have that 100MB file size limit? can we change this to 500MB?
When we're talking about files this big, the problem, as I understand it, isn't really the size limit, but the fact that the bigger the file, the more likely the upload is to fail because of network flakiness or something.
If I remember correctly, Michael Dale has been working on a feature that splits big files into small chunks, to minimize this risk, but it's not enabled yet.
Hello Guillaume,
On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 4:09 AM, Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org wrote:
< Q3: Do we have historical stats on the # of media files in Commons by filetype or mediatype?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:MIME_type_statistics
Nice. It looks like large tiffs, ogg video, djvu files and large jpegs are growing steadily. And those 1000 Dutch video clips make up ~12% of the current total.
I am inclined to point people to special:uploadwizard, another fine
The Upload wizard is currently suffering from critical bugs
Ok. (I think it's great... but will send people to the old form until it's done)
< Q6: do we still have that 100MB file size limit? can we change this to 500MB?
When we're talking about files this big, the problem, as I understand it, isn't really the size limit, but the fact that the bigger the file, the more likely the upload is to fail because of network flakiness
Finding a way to share/copy batches of larger files to Commons might go hand-in-hand with discussions about a quarantine/working space not intended for use directly on the projects:
In the case of OCW, we may have access to a few dozen full-length lectures, on the order of 200M each, which need to be cut up into useful clips. In the case of museum-quality images, or images being restored, there might be ultra-high-res images available in an archive, which need to be converted to a web-suitable resolution. In the case of the Paley animation stills, I believe the original archival png's from her film were rejected on upload as being too high-resolution.
SJ
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