[Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

Wed Jul 17 05:09:18 UTC 2013

Hi Tomasz & everyone else,

I think it's appropriate I respond to this issue, since it was the video
that I directed that was used in the campaign last year that you talk about.

So last year at Wikimania in Washington D.C. (July 2012) my team conducted
a series of interviews with around 100 Wikipedians which resulted in a
series of videos being produced:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Impact_Of_Wikipedia.webm
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Impact_of_Wikipedia
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Thank_You_All

Once I took a breath after all the video production was done at Wikimania,
I started to evaluate what our options were for where this video could go.

On the fundraising team we had used banners to host still images (.jpgs) in
the past. We wanted to make a video we could put into banners but in July
2012 there was no open source HTML5 video player built into mediawiki.
.Webm was not deployed on commons and I was told that Wikimedia did not
have the technical capabilities to host video on that scale.

Nevertheless I insisted and wanted to use open source video. I thought it
was crazy that every other site on the internet could do this and we
couldn't. Basically I asked everyone I could find at WMF who had anything
to do with open source video (a little bit abruptly) 'Pretty please with
sugar on top can we make open-source video work for Wikimedia?'

Rob Lanphier told me that (the technical elements of this were over my
head) we were painfully close to having .webm done, and it was going to be
a bunch of details for his team to fix.

I got in touch with Michael Dale and told him that if Kaltura could make
.webm a reality, the fundraiser would be his first 'customer' - when I say
that all I meant was that the fundraiser would be the first to use the
video format on a mass scale.

In November 2012, the new player was deployed:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/08/introducing-wikipedias-new-html5-video-player/

My thanks to everyone who made it happen - we actually had a player that
would work on many (but not all) devices and it had the added benefit of
open source closed captions, which I had never seen anywhere else. It was
awesome, but the reality of it was that WMF just didn't have enough servers
or bandwidth to support video on that scale - even if it was open source.
Everyone in the engineering department who I spoke to agreed that it was
impossible. I had to speak to the legal department about embedding a video
from a third party (if that was even possible). I was told that if we were
to have a link from a third party, on each and every video we would have to
provide this disclaimer:

This video is hosted by YouTube.com subject to its Terms of
Use<http://www.youtube.com/t/terms>
 and Privacy Policy <http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/>. If
you prefer,view on Wikimedia
Commons<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Thank_You/Dumisani_Ndubane>
.

I disliked this workaround because it was inelegant and counter to the open
source philosophy of Wikimedia, *but it would function*. It would play the
video on a large scale to millions of potential viewers and if users didn't
want to use Youtube.com a link to the video on Commons would be under each
and every video.

When the banner went live in late December

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_ThankYou_5pillars&forceBannerDisplay=true

, it was great that it worked. I thought maybe this might spark
conversations about open source video within the Wikimedia community and
(to be really honest Tomasz) I was expecting to see this thread start the
moment that the banners went live, because I think it is something that the
community should concern itself with. Video production is something that
every smartphone owner now has in their pocket. Think about where that will
be in ten years.

Even if it's a site that could mine data, I disagree that just providing
links is a bad thing. How many links at the bottom of Wikipedia articles
provide links to all kinds of sites that mine data? Those pages don't link
to the policies of those sites, they just show an external link. To be
fair, Yes it's a prominent, big button that we linked to Youtube.com and
the disclaimer link to commons is small text. I'm a visual person and I
like to avoid text if I have a big flashy button to click instead.

In my view, this whole argument would provide reason to:
1.) Only use a third party video option sparingly, as-needed until there
are better open-source video options to use.
2.) Put more resources into open source video.

As for the licensing options on YouTube -- There are only 2 licensing
options that YouTube provides and nevertheless people have used that video
in creative ways:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEbfGP43bjI

I'm also aware that the German chapter produced a very nice video last year
as well that links from Vimeo.com that displays on their homepage:

http://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Hauptseite
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AUnterst%C3%BCtzen_Sie_Wikipedia.ogv

I am unaware of any debates that the German community may have had about
this issue, but I imagine that in all likelihood their decisions followed
similar trains of thought.

I hope this explains something - please do let me know if there is anything
that needs clarification. And thanks for bringing this up, I think it's
important.

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 9:44 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz at twkozlowski.net
> wrote:

> Hi,
> it came to my attention very recently that a link to a YouTube video has
> been included in our fundraising banners[1] last year, enabling people by
> default to watch a video about Wikipedia loaded through a YouTube <iframe
> /> element.
>
> There's been a small discussion about this on IRC, and I've been asked to
> seek the opinion of the wider community on this matter, which I hope to
> achieve by starting a thread on this list.
>
> I wonder how the solution used in the banners reflects on our values,
> especially since we prefer to use a proprietary service over our own
> Wikimedia Commons, and effectively invite our users to expose their data
> (such as their IP address) to an external website (because no one's going
> to read the small information about YouTube privacy policy).
>
> I am told that there are technical limitations behind the decision to
> prefer YouTube over Commons, but I'm not really convinced about that; I
> generally think that we should not include links to websites that can track
> our users in our banners, and YouTube (as well as websites that use Google
> Analytics for statistical purposes) definitely falls under that definition.
>
> [On an unrelated note, it might be worth pointing out that the video on
> YouTube is listed as CC-BY and as CC-BY-SA on Commons, which introduces
> confusion and might lead to creation of derivative works that are released
> without the ShareAlike clause, which - I believe - it's not what the author
> of the video was after.]
>
> == References ==
> * [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_**
> ThankYou_5pillars&**forceBannerDisplay=true<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_ThankYou_5pillars&forceBannerDisplay=true>
>
>           Tomasz
>
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-- 

*Victor Grigas*
Storyteller <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knv6D6Thi0>
Wikimedia Foundation
vgrigas at wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839-6885 x 6773
https://donate.wikimedia.org/