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

[Tilman Bayer]

I'd like to hijack this thread a bit to advertise
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:YouTube_files , for cases
when one sees a freely licensed video on YouTube that ought to be on
Commons too. With WebM available both  on YouTube (as one of several
download formats, for many videos) and on Commons (as upload format),
the transfer has become a lot easier, eliminating the time-consuming
conversion with ffmpeg2theora etc. And since earlier this year, the
chunked upload option on Commons allows uploading files beyond the
earlier 100MB limit (up to 500 MB currently).

It's admittedly offtopic here,  as in this case the video was
available both on Commons and on YT from the beginning, as Tomasz and
Victor have said. But for example I have noticed that some chapters
are uploading event videos to YT or Vimeo only, and it's also useful
for Google Hangout recordings, like those of the monthly metrics &
activities meetings.

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 7:44 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
>
>           Tomasz
>
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-- 
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB