Multimedia on the web is dominated by closed formats, encumbered by patents owned by large companies. This means that any advanced technology to create video and audio is subject to licensing fees, and innovators face threats of patent lawsuits. Even multi-billion dollar companies are at risk: one court ruling, which was later overturned, ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion for alleged MP3 related patent infringements. How can we bridge the digital divide and bring rich content to people all over the planet when patent threats loom over key technologies?

The Wikimedia Foundation only hosts videos and audio files that are available in open formats, most notably the open source standards Ogg Vorbis (audio) and Ogg Theora (video) developed by the non-profit Xiph.Org Foundation. These standards are unencumbered by patents and can be used by anyone freely to build any kind of video or audio technology. As such, they provide a secure baseline for innovation.

The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox web browser, agrees. We’re very happy to share the message below, posted by Wikimedian and long-time free software supporter Greg Maxwell on the Foundation-l mailing list.  Some background about Ogg, Theora, Vorbis, and free software in general can be found on Wikipedia. You can also view some samples of Ogg Theora videos on the Wikimedia Commons.

(thanks also to the WM UK Chapter’s David Gerard for keeping us posted on the development)

[Foundation-l] Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2
Gregory Maxwell
Wed Jul 30 22:27:15 UTC 2008

“Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and
audio in its next release that includes support for the video element
tag.” [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492]

This is an announcement that Mozilla will be supporting the WhatWG
HTML5 multimedia tags as well as including Xiph’s unencumbered media
codecs as part of Firefox.

The WHATWG HTML5 <video/> and <audio/> tags allow supporting browsers
to naively display multimedia content just as they display still
images: without the need for plugins or extensions and with full
integration. Mozilla’s commitment to including a set of reasonably
performing and unencumbered codecs as a baseline means that web
developers and users have an opportunity to have multimedia that Just
Works without licensing obligations adding friction to the free flow
of knowledge. Together the native multimedia support and the baseline
inclusion of unencumbered multimedia codecs are an essential step
forward in preserving the open and unrestricted qualities of the web
which are so important to our mission.

The Wikimedia projects have long had a strong commitment to free media
formats, and Wikimedia Commons is probably the largest repository of
videos in Ogg Theora on the web. But our commitment has, at times,
been a costly one: As an early adopter of free media technology we’ve
suffered from more than our share of complications and incompatibilities.
After years of effort driving adoption and our own work improving the
state of the art for free media formats we’re now seeing the beginnings
of a true mainstream adoption which will allow these multimedia formats
to be truly costless for producers and consumers of knowledge. I know
from my own involvement that Wikimedia’s adherence to free formats has
been essential in moving things this far, and everyone who has worked
on multimedia within the Wikimedia projects should be proud of our
collective contribution here.

This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups
developing and promoting these free codecs — particularly Xiph.org,
spreadopenmedia.org, and the FSF’s PlayOGG campaign. The W3C’s policy
of only accepting royalty-free technology has played an essential
role by not allowing encumbered codecs as part of the standard, but
there has been a stalemate in the adoption of a useful, royalty free
baseline codec set. Because of this, I’d like to personally extend
thanks to the Mozilla Foundation for joining our leadership in this
important area of web standards. Without their help Web Video would
have no hope of escaping the environment of incompatible, proprietary,
“de facto standards” with their related costs.

The Wikimedia projects have had integrated video playback support
for some time now via the OggHandler extension. OggHandler supports a
multitude of playback methods (such as a Java player using Cortado, and
the VLC browser extension) in an effort to get unencumbered multimedia
format support working for as many people as possible. OggHandler has
been a great success, already working for a vast majority of readers, but
the native support in a popular browser will make OggHandler even better
(smoother performance, zero install or an easy upgrade to FireFox, etc).

The new <video/> tag in Firefox has been supported as a playback method
in OggHandler since day zero so the new Firefox builds will automatically
use their native playback ability on the Wikimedia sites.

The code for native support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis
was checked into the Mozilla mainline last night and is
already available in nightly builds marked 3.1a2pre or later
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ - be sure to grab versions marked 3.1a2, not 3.1a1!].
The support is new and pretty raw: There are obvious outstanding issues
with things like timing and audio access on some platforms (such as many
GNU/Linux distros). Once the known bugs are fixed I’ll be soliciting
Wikimedians to check for bugs in both our own player code as well as
the Firefox test releases.

Now would be a good time to start building up some material on commons
to showcase this support for Firefox’s official release. Although
we’ve had video on our projects for a long time it’s still largely a
new and unexplored territory for us. There are many opportunities to
make important contributions and to have a lot of fun.

–Greg Maxwell

I am pleased to welcome Tomasz Finc as a new full-time software developer. Tomasz will start officially next week on August 4 in our San Francisco office.

Tomasz is a systems and software engineer with more than 7 years of experience. He joins us from Amazon.com, where he administered and supported the Amazon.com A9 search engine, optimized production performance, developed automation tools, implemented C/C++ changes in the core search engine code, trained new hires, and fulfilled other duties. Tomasz is fluent speaker of both Polish and English.

Tomasz will report to me (Brion) and will work on general MediaWiki development, code review, systems and administration tools, and optimization. He will also initially help to support the San Francisco office.

I am delighted that Tomasz is joining our team; please join me in welcoming him to the Wikimedia Foundation staff.

brion vibber
Chief Technology Officer

Wikipedia was founded on radically open collaboration. Pick any article you know something about, and the “edit this page” link at the top allows you to make an instant change.

By editing a Wikipedia article, you get instant access to the “guts” of the page. Whether you’re just changing some text, adding a reference, or inserting an image: Wikipedia is open to new contributions at any time.

Instead of moderating edits when they are made, the wiki model has always been to systematically review changes as they come in:

This gives writers the instant gratification to see their changes published, while - hopefully - leading to high quality articles over time as more and more people review and improve a page.

In addition to the constant mutual peer review, there are countless Wikipedia processes used to identify articles of the highest quality, articles with various problems, or articles that should be deleted. (The Wikipedia Signpost, a community newsletter, has just published an interesting history of the featured article candidacy process.)

New processes and technologies for quality assurance are developed and tested all the time. But few are as long-awaited and potentially game changing as FlaggedRevs.

The FlaggedRevs Extension

The German Wikipedia is currently trialing a new extension (what’s an extension?) to our software, called “FlaggedRevs“. The extension, which has been under development for more than a year, is a very powerful set of tools for reviewing, labeling and selecting changes made in a wiki. We believe that FlaggedRevs represents a milestone in the development of wiki technology. To our knowledge, there is no other tool available today that provides comparable functionality.

So what, exactly, does it do?

In a nutshell, FlaggedRevs (short for “flagged revisions”) can be used to give a defined group of authors the ability to attach quality labels (flags) to individual versions (revisions) of articles. It can also be used to determine which version of an article should be shown to a reader visiting the wiki: the most recent one, or the highest quality version available?

These two features are not necessarily linked. In the most basic use scenario imaginable, FlaggedRevs can simply be used to patrol a wiki for malicious changes (”vandalism“). When a change has been found not to be malicious, a trusted user can label it as such. This has two key advantages compared to the current patrolling model:

In addition, both human and non-human readers can select “known good” versions of Wikipedia articles which do not include malicious changes. Whether you’re a teacher printing Wikipedia articles for the classroom, a student using them for research, or a publisher creating a DVD copy, you can pick the articles which have been checked for basic vandalism by trusted editors, instead of simply choosing the most recent version.

As a user of the German Wikipedia, you will notice that some articles have the following icon in the top right corner:

This icon indicates that the version you are looking at hasn’t been checked for vandalism yet. (If an older version that has been checked is available, this is indicated below the icon.)

The End of Immediacy?

While this configuration is simple enough, it should be noted that until about a couple of weeks ago, the German Wikipedia was using a different setup in which any change by a user without the permission to review changes for vandalism (which includes all unregistered users and relatively new ones) had to be reviewed before becoming the default version shown to readers. In other words, if you were not in the group with permission to review edits, your own changes did not become the “live version” until someone else looked at them.

This was a controversial change, as some users felt it significantly reduced the incentive for new contributors to start editing Wikipedia. So far, there has been limited analysis of the data collected during this experiment, which lasted from May until July 2008, and we hope to analyze the effects in greater detail over the coming weeks. (Some real-time statistics are available, thanks to André Karwath.)

Should changes to Wikipedia by new and unregistered users be reviewed before becoming the default shown to readers? There might be a middle ground solution: On most articles, changes would continue to be applied immediately, under the assumption that the benefit of radically open collaboration is greater than the risk. But, on a subset of pages, changes by unregistered and new users would have to be reviewed before becoming visible. This subset could consist of articles which are frequently the target of vandalism, such as the biography of the US President, but it could also include those pages which have reached a very high standard of quality as determined by the Wikipedia community. In other words, when the drawbacks of radical openness outweigh the risks, editing would be throttled.

This would, in fact, represent an opening up of Wikipedia rather than a closing down, as many of the affected pages are currently “semi-protected”, meaning that they cannot be edited at all by new and unregistered users due to the perceived risks of malicious edits. Being able to make changes that do not immediately become visible is surely preferable to not being able to make changes at all.

What’s next?

The Wikimedia Foundation has authorized all Wikimedia project communities to conduct experiments with FlaggedRevs through a process of self-organization. The process by which a Wikimedia community (e.g. the French Wikipedia, the Russian Wikibooks, etc.) can request the FlaggedRevs extension to be enabled is open and transparent. As the process unfolds, we will try to support the communities by collecting data about the use of the extension. Depending on our findings, we may eventually make a simple configuration of FlaggedRevs the default for all wikis.

There are other potential future uses of FlaggedRevs:

The development of this technology represents the commitment of the international Wikimedia community to achieving the highest possible standards of quality in all our projects. In particular, the German Wikipedia community and the German chapter have been leaders and pioneers in this process. Philipp Birken from the German chapter gave a compelling presentation at the recent Wikimania on this very topic.

We welcome your feedback in making this technology more useful. An English demo version is set up in the Wikimedia Labs.

Erik Möller, Deputy Director

As many of you may know, Wikimedia is working with Kaltura, Inc. to explore collaborative video editing in the Wikimedia projects. I’m very happy to announce that Kaltura has decided to support the further development of a 100% open source video editing solution integrated into MediaWiki. To this end, Kaltura is sponsoring Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project, to work in the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco beginning in early August.

Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki, with a rich user interface built entirely on open standards like Ogg Theora. Michael’s work priorities will be coordinated between Kaltura and WMF. I am hoping that we can make incremental improvements to Wikimedia’s video capabilities that will start to become visible to users soon.

Michael Dale is currently a Research Associate at the University of California Santa Cruz and the lead developer for the MetaVid project. MetaVid is a community archive project for public domain US legislative footage. The MetaVidWiki software (which runs the archive) is a free software extension to MediaWiki that enables community engagement with audio/visual media assets and associative temporal metadata. Michael has been involved free & open media adoption on the web in collaboration with the xiph.org and annodex organizations.

Please join me in welcoming Michael!

РErik M̦ller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Haisan Station, the three millionth image, uploaded by Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

It’s always a pleasure watching when projects of the Wikimedia Foundation reach milestones.  Three of Wikimedia’s projects have now achieved new and wonderful numbers.

The Hungarian Wikipedia, celebrated 5 years on 8 July 2008 with its 100,000 article, Erdődi Simon, an entry about a Catholic Bishop in the medieval times.  This makes the Hungarian project the 21st Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles.

The Japanese Wikipedia has also achieved a remarkable milestone by being host to 500,000 articles, on June 25, 2008, with one of the following articles: フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford)ã€â€Žå›½éš›ãƒãƒ£ãƒ¬ãƒ³ã‚¸ãƒ‡ãƒ¼ (International Challenge Day)ã€â€Žã‚¦ã‚¨ã‚¹ãƒˆãƒãƒ¼ã‚¸ãƒ‹ã‚¢ã®æ°´é‹ (West Virginia Waterways)ã€å—阿蘇鉄é“MT-2000形気動車 (Motorized Rail MT-2000), articles which were created at the same moment the project achieved the milestone.  This adds Japanese to the list of 5 Wikipedias with over half a million articles (the other four are English, German, French and Polish).

I’m especially pleased to announce that Wikimedia Commons has uploaded 3 million files, as of July 16, 2008.  The three-millionth file is a photo of a subway station in Taipei, uploaded by Singapore Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, especially interesting as the millionth file uploaded in November 2006 was also a Wikimedian in Singapore, Terence Ong.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator

What a week it’s been in Alexandria.  Yesterday Wikimania 2008 officially wrapped up after 84 speaking events, as well as lightening talks and poster sessions.  The organizers handled up to 650 registered participants (with an excellent presence from the local Egyptian community), as well as a broad range of local and international media.

You can find pictures from the event on WIkimedia Commons and on the Wikimania site - though expect more to appear as participants complete their travel and get the real uploading underway.

This year Wikinews also released some stories on-the-spot , and as in previous years the Wikipedia Weekly crew were live podcasting from the depths of the conference center (see the Wikimania 2008 main page for the recent list).

But that’s not all.  The webcast team from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has uploaded (and offered for live webstream) select videos from the conference, including the opening and closing ceremonies.

I’ll post more as we find it - but for now here’s your chance to get a glimpse of the event if you weren’t able to make it to Alexandria.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Among the many major activities and goings-on at this year’s Wikimania was a decision from our Board of Trustees about new appointments to the WMF Board.

In a press release sent out yesterday, Jan-Bart De Vreede, Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees announced that fellow Board member Michael Snow will assume the role of Chair of the Board of Trustees.  Long-standing Board member Florence Devouard stepped down as Board Chair, however we are very pleased to announce that she will assume a seat on the Wikimedia Advisory Board.

The Board also took the opportunity to formally welcome new Board member Ting Chen, who was elected by the Wikimedia community during the recent Board seat election.

Welcome Ting Chen, and congratulations Michael!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Earlier today we sent the following note about a new staff member for the Foundation to our staff and public mailing lists.  I’m happy to share it here as well.

It is with great pleasure that I announce Sara Crouse as Head of Partnerships and Foundation Relations with the Wikimedia Foundation. As some of you know, Sara has been working with us for several months in the fundraising area on a contract basis. When Sara came to us, we were developing our fundraising strategy and determining how to staff ourselves to that end.  In this new role Sara will be working closely with the fundraising and programming team to explore new opportunities and to support our ongoing work with foundations and other organizations.

We are pleased that she is able to become a permanent member of the team now that our strategy has been developed.

Sara has several years of fundraising experience. She spent the last 5 years in various positions with Cambridge in America;, the most recent as Associate Director of Research. In that role, she identified and
researched donor prospects, worked on cultivation strategy and worked with volunteer leadership and supporters to advance Major Gifts efforts.

Prior to Cambridge in America, Sara worked for RKO PIctures and TransPerfect Translations. Sara also managed special events for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

She holds an M.A. from NYU and a B.A from Georgetown University.

Please join me in welcoming Sara to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Veronique Kessler
Chief Financial and Operating Officer

Yesterday we issued a slightly more detailed press release about next week’s Wikimania conference in Alexandria.  We discuss a few more details and provide some further quotes and schedule details.

And on that note, next week we hope to be blogging fairly regularly about activities taking place in this beautiful Egyptian city.  Many of the Foundation staff will be working at the conference on the ground, joining the hundreds of volunteers and enthusiasts at the New Library.

Jay Walsh
Head of Communications

Kaltura, who Wikimedia has been working with over the last few months on the exploration of open-source, collaborative video editing on Wikimedia projects, have developed a Wikimania video wiki leading up to this year’s conference in Alexandria. Kaltura is also a generous benefactor of Wikimania this year, providing financial support to make the event possible.

They’re inviting project volunteers and enthusiasts (whether attending or not) to try their hand at collaborative video uploading/editing/improving.  Share your video from your travel to Egypt - or if you can’t make it, why not edit in your comments or questions for participants?

Invitation from Lisa Bennet, Director of Public Relations and Marketing, Kaltura

—

Hi Everyone,

As Wikimania is right around the corner, we’ve added a new great way to share information about the event. I would like to invite you to the Wikimania Video Site where you can create collaborative videos. The site already has some videos where people can add their expectations for the event or share why they can’t join us this year, and there will be computer stations at Wikimania for attendees to add videos and pictures in real-time from Alexandria. Hopefully, it will be a great resource for people that could not be there in person to see the highlights, and for the attendees to document the event.

Check it out at: http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Wikimania_Video_Site

The site is hosted on the Kaltura devwiki and uses the collaborative video technology from Kaltura, which the Foundation partnered with late last year to explore adding videos to Wikipedia and other projects.

You’re invited to share your experiences from Wikimania, play with the technology, and provide your feedback.