p2pnet news view | P2P | Movies:- Meet WikiTube, partly funded by the Mozilla Foundation.

Soon, anyway.

The Wikipedia, “is close to launching an editable online video encyclopedia to enhance the current textual one,” says Technology Review, going on »»»

The hope is to revolutionize the popular reference site and goad content providers–from public broadcasters to the music industry–into allowing more video to enter the public domain.

Within two to three months, a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a new button labeled “Add Media.” Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video–initially from three repositories containing copyright-free material–and drag chosen portions into the article, without having to install any video-editing software or do any conversions herself. The results will appear as a clickable video clip embedded within the article.

Later, Wikipedia plans to offer ways for users to search the entire Web for importable videos, and plans to provide tools to edit, add to, and reorganize the clips within the Wikipedia website, just as is now done with text.

For starters, the video repository will be the Internet Archive, which already holds nearly 200,000 videos, and Wikimedia Commons, a database of more than four million media files, including videos, says the story, adding the third source, Metavid, is a repository of Congressional speeches and hearings, complete with closed-captioning text with a handy tagging system so users can search for words or phrases and find the right section of a speech to import.

Kaltura is helping develop the tools needed to simplify video importing, says Technology Review, quoting Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, as saying he hopes the effort will help promote wider access to vast stores of historical material, political speeches, interviews, documentaries,” and anything else that could figure into Wikipedia”.

“It is sad and unfortunate that the public broadcasters are not the ones leading this movement,” he says, adding, “The mission should be to do whatever they can do to maximize distribution, and I’m not seeing that right now.”

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Technology Review – Wikipedia Gets Ready for a Video Upgrade, June 19, 2009

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Movies, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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