Wikipedia to Add Video Options to Articles

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 08:06 AM PDT

Wikipedia is a great knowledge base, containing tons of text and lots of photos, but it’s lacking when it comes to videos, which are, well, quite scarce. This is all going to change in a couple of months, as Wikipedia has big plans for video; both in the sense of having more videos on the site, and letting contributors edit and annotate the actual videos.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, this should happen within two or three 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 reorganizing Wikipedia’s video collection – similar to what is now done with Wikipedia’s articles.

Where will the videos come from? Wikipedia has a plan. 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.

However, once this initiative takes place, Wikipedia hopes that its users and editors will be more keen on uploading videos to Wikimedia. There is a catch, however: the videos added to Wikipedia’s database will have to be based on open-source formats. Since Wikipedia offers great exposure and traffic to everyone, this will surely motivate more people to use or convert their videos to these formats, and more open source is always a good thing.