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Wikipedia will add community-edited video
Wikipedia is planning a media update.
Today, MIT’s Technology Review shared that the go-to reference source plans, not only to allow its editors to add video, but to allow folks who add video a variety of editing tools.
Within two to three months, a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a new button labeled "Add Media." Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video–initially from three repositories containing copyright-free material–and drag chosen portions into the article, without having to install any video-editing software or do any conversions herself. The results will appear as a clickable video clip embedded within the article.
The idea is to use the wisdom of the community to edit media, just as the community contributed to edit text. Initially, video will be drawn from the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Metavid, a repository of Congressional speeches and hearings
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The Technology Review article quotes executive producer, Peter Kaufman who believes this project will have major impact:
"To have people be able to go in and annotate your video, edit your video, and improve upon it–in the same way people have been doing to your text posts–is pretty outstanding, and will create an audio-visual representation of our world that will rapidly become as definitive and collaborative as Wikipedia is in the textual world," says Peter Kaufman, executive producer at Intelligent Television, a documentary production company in New York City that works with cultural and educational institutions, helping them bring their works online. "That may just be the holy grail."
The effort, funded in part by Mozilla, requires that updated video be open-source, and the partners hope that the new potential for mass exposure will inspire more content holders and creators to put their content into public domain.
I imagine the potential for our student producers to share local stories with contributors adding alternate perspective. Or global video discussion of current issues. Or researchers engaged in discussions of findings. Of course, some of this could be rather messy. We’ll have to wait a bit and see.
If you want a sneak peek, Wikimedia’s WikiEducator offers a sandbox page where people can participate in the Beta, play around contributing video, and edit with the new tools.
Also see the related piece in The ReadWriteWeb.
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About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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