Wikipedia to Add Video Support in the Coming Months

Wikipedia will, apparently, add video capabilities to its site within a couple of months, aiming to enhance its functionality. Wikipedia is the seventh largest website in the world and shows up in the top results for most searches. Three sources for the videos will be initially available and the site will use open standards for video support, according to Technology Review.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, has partnered with open-source video solutions provider Kaltura to grant the technical know-how. The partnership was announced more than a year ago, but started taking shape just recently.

“The vision of this project is to enable the Wikipedia community to further enhance and enrich Wikipedia articles with rich-media content. The technology behind this project is a form of video-wiki software that is integrated into the Mediawiki platform as an extension, allowing users to add collaborative video players that enable all users to add and edit images, sounds, diagrams, animations and movies in the same manner as they do today with text,” the Wikimedia Foundation stated, following the initial announcement.

After the new capabilities will be enabled, an “Add Media” button will be available, which would make it easy to add videos, initially only from three sources, through an intuitive interface. The three sources will be the Internet Archive, which currently houses 200,000 videos, Wikimedia Commons, a site associated with the Wikimedia Foundation, and Metavid, a site hosting Congressional speeches and hearings.

Editing tools for the video will be available on the site, the only requirement being that the videos use open-source formats. The Wikimedia foundation hopes that Wikipedia's size may be a driving force both for open technologies and also for convincing copyright holders to release content under public domain licenses.