Wikipedia needs no introduction. The world’s largest online encyclopedia, has launched a new project which enables it’s registered users to post videos. Wikipedia’s video upload project, carried out in cooperation with open-source video start-up Kaltura and the Google search engine, which was originally launched in 2008. But it was delayed due to numerous technical problems. Wikipedia’s video upload project make use of new HTML5 player to play the videos, is a result of a combined effort between Wikipedia, Google and Kaltura.
Wikipedia has a large number of text-based articles until now. It receives 25 million unique daily visitors to its English section alone, but currently hosts only about 15,000 videos. For the last two years, to improve the video based references, several new software features have been developed to improve the handling of multimedia in Wikipedia in collaboration with Kaltura.
The videos were added by the older Ogg Theora player and can test with the new player, based on HTML5. For this users can use Firefogg a web-based Theora encoder. Visit firefogg.org select your video file then save it to disk. But the new features in Wikipedia are still in beta testing.
To enable the beta features;
- Visit Wikipedia:Multimedia beta page
- Login Wikipedia using your username and password
- Click the "Enable multimedia beta (mwEmbed) for all pages" button at top of this screen.
- From now on, when you edit articles you will have access to the Add Media Wizard
The new video player is a HTML5 video player. If you use the browsers Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera, video playback will be native. For Safari, you can download and install the Xiph QuickTime components. If your browser does not have integrated video playback, the old Cortado JAVA player is used. You can enable or disable the mwEmbed in the Gadgets tabs of your preferences page. MwEmbed is listed under "Enable multimedia beta support". Use the check box to enable or disable and then click Save.
To upload videos
Videos should be short, lightweight (under 100MB), carefully composed, and definitely encyclopedic. You can use the new Firefogg upload tool to upload videos. This tool makes it easier to upload video in the format that is required for Wikimedia and Wikipedia. It requires the use of the Firefox web browser. Visit the Firefogg help page on Wikimedia Commons for more information and instructions. Before creating the videos visit the proposed guidelines for video and the foundational rules of Wikipedia.
The whole process proceeds like this way;
- Shoot your video
- Convert your video to an open format(convert your video file to ".ogg Theora." )
- Turn on the video upload beta (create a Wikipedia account and/or log in)
- Add your video to an article on Wikipedia (go to the article and click edit. Then click the add video button and follow the instructions to upload your video to the Wikimedia Commons.)
If you need more help visit how to post a video to Wikipedia website. What is your opinion about this new feature? Is it really helps the Wikipedia users or is it only add spam videos to the site?
