This past weekend, at the SXSW conference, a new initiative was launched to "get video on Wikipedia", http://videoonwikipedia.org/
That sounds like a great idea.
(I wasn't there, but I was told.)
But among the first videos to be uploaded since the announcement are two that show some construction equipment and both break my browser every time I try to watch them. How can this be possible with a fully updated Mozilla Firefox 3.5.8 on Ubuntu Linux?
I suppose something went wrong in the OGG encoding, but still, browsers should not be fooled by this, and/or Wikimedia Commons needs to make sure videos are correctly encoded so they can be safely watched.
I have asked that these two broken videos be removed, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:6hpPowerTrowel.ogv http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13hpBoren.ogv
We discussed for a long time why OpenOffice documents can't be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons because the ZIP encoding wasn't safe and could explode in the face of the user. Well, maybe OGG isn't safe either?
Should we just ban video all together?