User:VGrigas (WMF)/Edit2015

#Edit2015, final cut. Thank you everyone who contributed to making this happen! Here are links for YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter

THANK YOU EVERYONE! Above is the final video, please feel free to share it! VGrigas (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Below is archived material

Hello!

This page functions as a brainstorming space for the #Edit2015 Wikipedia Year-in-Review video. Click here to jump to the section where you can add your ideas.

Above is #Edit2014, the first Wikipedia Year-in-Review video. You can collaborate to make #Edit2015 here.

Let's Collaborate

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation published our first ever video year-in-review which covered some of the major news events of 2014 through the lens of Wikipedia. I talked about the process of making the video here. This year, we're opening up the idea development and pre-production process of making a video for 2015 to everyone. This is an opportunity for you to help shape the narrative of the events of 2015.

Last year's video was largely made by myself and another video editor over about 8 weeks at the end of 2014. I spent the first half of my 8 weeks researching news and view and edit counts of Wikipedia pages and then searching for media to illustrate those events. After I had that media, it was a matter of taste to place them in a video editing timeline. Fortunately when we published it, the press and the general population on the internet liked it too. I really didn't know if it would work or not -- but I think it did. All things considered, I think that #Edit2014 was a good start, and I'm happy with the final result, but I'd like to improve a few things for #Edit2015.

Here's the plan

Citizenfour (trailer above) won an Oscar for best documentary feature.

Open Collaboration - I'm opening up the whole idea-development and pre-production process (research, scriptwriting, brainstorming, finding media, etc.) for making #Edit2015 to on-wiki collaboration. This itself would be an experiment. Fortunately, we have #Edit2014 as a guide to show that a final product can be done. Making #Edit2014 taught me that year-in-review videos cover international news events through a brand (in this case Wikipedia) by telling each news story in about 5 seconds and then cutting to the next one. You multiply that by maybe 20 stories and then your video is already 2 minutes long if you include credits, logos and titles. If you watch other year-in-review videos (like Google Zeitgeist Year In Search) you'll see how each will spend 5 seconds on a topic and then jump to the next.

First drafts of #Edit2014 were half global news and half wiki-world news. I wanted to showcase as many Wikimedia tools, events and projects as possible. What I found was that since this is for a wide audience, and it's only a few short minutes long, we only have a chance to communicate one or two new ideas (for an ordinary person who uses the internet) and unfortunately, most people (for this internet audience) have heard of Wikipedia, but probably not other Wikimedia projects so we had to be very selective about what was showcased. In this case, it was a chance to talk about the edit button and Wiki Loves Monuments briefly. Then we have to get back to those global shared news events that the public may have experienced. Aspects like 'going down the rabbit hole' clicking link after link was something that ordinary people were familiar with, so this is something that we used to bridge stories.

The idea-development and pre-production process does not require any fancy video equipment at all - just a wiki page and an internet connection. I used post-it notes on my wall to organize my ideas. I think that we (the Wikimedia crowd) can be very good at story development and collaboration. I have here in my staff namespace a page where I've been collecting imagery and ideas (please feel free to organize this), and I'd like to allow anyone to use this space as a place to collaborate on this project (if we decide to host it elsewhere we can make it redirect).

An idea I had for this year is to somehow showcase the talk pages about Wikipedia articles, to show how we arrive at consensus and neutral-point-of-view, Finding the right article(s) and talk page quotes to use to illustrate that would be key. Last year, we showcased the edit button using the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. For that, we see closeups of 'citation needed' and 'disputed-discuss' then we cut to the different languages of that article. Imagine if you saw a tiny fraction of the behind-the scenes talk about an article like that and how it aims for objectivity?

Rules - These are some basic criteria I made to guide what content got into #Edit2014, I think they can be reused this year:

Has the event made it to the international press or wide regional press?
Does the event have corresponding view or edit counts?
Do we have cc imagery for the event (on commons or elsewhere)?
Was there a special circumstance about this event per Wikimedia projects?
Does this illustrate some aspect of Wikimedia that the public should know?
Is the media beautiful?
Does the Wikimedia Foundation legal team approve of the media?
Do we have some media and news from every major region of the world?

As for production and post-production - Continuity, music, audio mixing, et cetera are all things that should ideally be online and in a collaborative manner but currently there is no system in place to collaborate on those things using Wikimedia projects. I'd love to develop that system, but I don't think that it is practical for this year. I'd also like to aim to make the video as close to 2 minutes in length as possible.

Schedule - So the logical publication date for #Edit2015 is December 15th -- this is because that's when many people in the press who would republish and spread the video on social media are still at work, publishing stories, and this is an easy story for them to publish before they go on vacation at the end of December. Getting this in the press gets more eyeballs on the video. That means that actual video editing should be well on its way in October and November. This is my current schedule (for now):

Brainstorm and pre-production: now - October 1st
Production (assemble the footage): October 1st - November 15th
Post-Production (lock all the details): November 15th - December 1st
Distribution (captions and translations, thumbnails, text copy, uploading, and any last-minute edits): December 1st - December 15th

Internationalism - My biggest problem with #Edit2014 was that so much of it was in English. I know that while we tried to cover as many regions as possible and use as many languages as possible, if you are a non-English speaker you'd probably have to watch it with the captions on (and then it moves so fast, that you lose the interplay of the images and the text because your eyes are stuck reading text on the bottom of the screen). I think that opening up the development and pre-production phase would flatten out the perspective quite a bit, or at least help to point out flaws and suggest other ideas. We shouldn't have to rely on captions to make it universally understandable. And since we'll be jumping from one story to the next in 5 seconds, it's entirely ok to express a story in any local language, because even if the viewer doesn't understand the language that they are seeing on screen, they know that the next language is coming in 5 seconds, and that there may be 'universal' communication media like video, imagery or numbers that are associated with the text that they can understand.

Media Content - There are a few sources for freely-licensed imagery that we can use for #Edit 2015: Still imagery, Video imagery, Wikimedia project pages, Audio, and imagery we make ourselves. I'd love it if we could somehow have more audio/video content for #Edit2015. I looked for freely-licensed video and .gifs on Wikimedia Commons, Vimeo, Internet Archive and YouTube and I know there are many more I could have used. The first few versions of #Edit2014 incorporated more video than the final cut did, but much was cut out because it was too busy or complicated to communicate an idea quickly. Sometimes a still frame of a Wikipedia article or a still photo might communicate the idea more neutrally or succinctly than portions of freely-licensed videos could.

For every still image you see in #Edit2014, there's probably 10 more that didn't make the final cut. It took a lot of research to find appropriate and compelling imagery. Here are a few videos I went so far as to migrate to commons while I was looking for material that might work for #Edit2014 -- hopefully you can see how a still frame of a Wikipedia article or a still photo might communicate the idea more neutrally or succinctly than portions of these freely-licensed videos could:

There is a shot of a Ukrainian flag here from 0:35-0:39, but the flag is small in the frame, and the trees in the foreground are somewhat distracting. There's something written on the flag too that could be distracting.
This focused this protest too much on a conflict instead of free speech. I thought that having some still images of the protests themselves might work better.
This video needed more context to understand what it was, it was a small incident of a much larger story and the aspect ratio and darkness were visually difficult.
So this looked great, and NASA released it in 2014, but it depicts 2006.

Here are a few images that did make the final cut:

Unfortunately, there was no better free media to illustrate the Mars Orbiter Mission, so this rendering was used.
This clearly explained a Russian Olympic victory, and suggested that Russia was the winner of most medals of the 2014 Olympics, which it was.
This 2.5D image was created by a volunteer, using an entry from Wiki Loves Monuments.
This image clearly explained the German World Cup victory.
This image only needed to be flipped to make the 'UKRAINE' readable. It also explained a major event succinctly, other images of crowds were very busy.

I'm very optimistic that this will be a fruitful initiative. I can't wait to see all the usernames of everyone who contributes. Please share this link with your friends. Let's collaborate and tell the story of Wikipedia and 2015 together.

Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation Storyteller and Video Producer

Criteria

These are some basic criteria I made to guide what content got into #Edit2014, I think they can be reused this year:

Has the event made it to the international press or wide regional press?
Does the event have corresponding view or edit counts?
Do we have cc imagery for the event (on commons or elsewhere)?
Was there a special circumstance about this event per Wikimedia projects?
Does this illustrate some aspect of Wikimedia that the public should know?
Is the media beautiful?
Does the Wikimedia Foundation legal team approve of the media?
Do we have some media and news from every major region of the world?

Format

Between 1-4 minutes (ideally close to 90 seconds)
As multi-lingual as possible
Representative of world news events
Demonstrates unique experience of using Wikipedia (rabbitholes of knowledge)
Must hold viewer's attention

Analysis of other videos

Most year-in-review videos cover about 15 to 20 topics, as micro-stories, a few short video clips or still images to tell a story and then its on to the next short set of clips or still images.

This years' video

Maybe tell more with talk pages, or history pages?

Possible Images, Topics, Etc.

PLEASE FILL THIS IN!

January

Lithuania Adopts Euro
Je Suis Charlie
Wikimedia France launches Wikicheese, a crowdfunded project to provide high-quality illustrations for articles linked to cheese