Videos on Wikipedia
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
A campaign sponsored by The Open Video Alliance is underway to get more videos on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the largest collaborative experiment in human history. It’s also one of the ten most-visited websites in the world. The English Wikipedia alone has more than 3.2 million articles. These articles were all created by the active community of Wikipedians. Anyone can edit an article, making Wikipedia a constantly growing and improving resource.
But a text article can only convey so much. Wouldn’t it be great if a Wikipedia entry could communicate the motion of a pirouette? Or the kinetic buzz of New York City’s Grand Central Terminal?
Right now, very few articles on Wikipedia have videos. It’s time to change that! Starting now, you can be among the first people experimenting with the possibilities of collaborative video. Your contributions will shape the future of Wikipedia, making it a rich and dynamic source of high-quality educational content. You will also help spread free sharing of knowledge on the web.
Plus, when you post a video to Wikipedia, you are also helping to promote open video. Wikipedia uses a 100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora. The articles are free to share and reuse, there’s no advertising, and the software that runs the site is free and open source.
Click here for a tutorial on how to post a video on Wikipedia, and here for Wikipedia’s proposed guidelines. Tools to make video collaborative are under development.
