Wikipedia to Add Videos

Most of you will have used Wikipedia at some point – and generally the information is correct.

As a resource it is actually quite handy as it contains easy-to-get-at text and pics, but it’s lacking when it comes to videos.

This is all going to change in a couple of months, as Wikipedia has plans for video – This means having more videos on the site, and letting contributors edit and annotate the actual videos.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, this should happen in a coupla months.

Wikipedia editors will get a new option, ‘Add Media’, which will let them search for videos, and insert portions of the video (via a simple drag and drop interface) into the article. Further plans include annotating the actual videos, and editing as well as reorganising Wikipedia’s video collection – just like what happens to Wikipedia’s articles already.

So, where are all these vids coming from then?

First, there’s the Metavid, a repository of Congressional speeches and hearings; Internet Archive and its 200,000 videos, and Wikimedia Commons, which is currently mostly holding photos but has a collection of video files as well.

That’s just for starters!

Once this is up and running Wikipedia is hoping that users and editors will be more keen on uploading videos to Wikimedia.

There is a just a little, tinsy-winsy stumbling block though – all the videos added to Wikipedia’s database will have to be based on open-source formats.

That shouldn’t be a huge problem as Wikipedia gets so much traffic it would probably be worth a little bit of fiddling to use or convert videos to those formats – besides, more open source is always a good thing in my book 🙂