Article by George Norman

On 22 Jun 2009

The Wikimedia Foundation has recently announced that it will add video support to Wikipedia, its free, multilingual encyclopedia project. At the current moment in time Wikipedia’s functionality is limited to images and text content and does not extend to video footage. But in a few months’ time this will all change as Wikipedia plans to add video to its text and image offering.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, Wikipedia editors will see a new button labeled “Add media” in the next two or three months. What this button does is allow the editor to search for videos and select certain portions of that video to become part of the Wikipedia article. The editor does not have to convert or edit the video, meaning that anyone will be able to seamlessly use this feature.


Initially the editor will be granted access to videos from three repositories of copyright-free video footage: the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons and Metavid. But In the future Wikipedia will allow users to search the whole web for videos; Wikipedia also plans to extend this functionality and implement tools to edit and reorganize videos within the web page. Just like you are now capable of trimming and moving text content around, so will you be able to play around with video content.

“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. That may just be the holy grail,” commented Executive Producer with Intelligent Television, Peter Kaufman.

Initially the Wikimedia Foundation will be able to add only copyright-free video content to Wikipedia. But the hope is that in the future, content-holders that want to use Wikipedia to get more exposure will allow their video footage to be posted on the encyclopedia web page.



Tags: Wikipedia, Video

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