Wikipedia has dominated Britannica and Encarta in recent years, but the two commercial encyclopedias still possess more high quality multimedia in video, interactive timelines and other audio/visual content. The crowd has excelled at building Wikipedia's text articles and adding photos in Wikimedia Commons. However, video would greatly enhance the usefulness of a whole range of articles but remains a weakness.
Wikipedia's video efforts have not kept pace with other advancements, and have not targeted strategic subject-areas.
The technical hurdle of video is actually a minor issue. Visual literacy and production quality are much more elusive.
Q: How do we increase community collaboration in the quantity and quality of video in Wikipedia articles?
Challenges
Content
Visual literacy of the average Wikipedian (and member of the populace) is low. How do you train a crowd of contributors to shoot high quality video?
Creating a video style that is consistent, compelling across articles
Normalizing video and audio content, so that it can be used in any language/project
Technical
Visual quality and minimum resolution guidelines
Formats accepted by Wikimedia community are unusual - free license, Ogg Theora and WebM formats not used by video pros in their workflow
Uploading to Commons is typically complex and intimidating
Measurement
Complicated to determine which articles have video or not.
Collaboration and Participation
Sharing of raw video clips is limited by unusual formats. Limits re-editing possibilities
Mobile app to shoot and upload to Commons in one step? Does it exist? Is it cross-platform?
Legal issues
Human subjects in video, right of publicity. Should we require model release forms?
Trademark, logos and copyright in the video. How far should we push fair use in video?
Opportunities
Internal
Build off successful Wiki Loves Monuments, perhaps Wikipedia Makes Video events?
Encourage "moving picture" videos. Are there a class of 5-15 second videos (essentially living photographs, such as those in Harry Potter) that would not require any editing, but would make certain articles come alive? The giraffe eating seemed like a good example of this.
External
Mozilla video effort collaboration
Tap into schools of journalism, communications or film for student contributions
Partner with GLAM for existing footage or shooting new content
University of Southern California journalism students will be working with User:Fuzheado on this for a semester-long project (Jan-May 2013)