Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/Uploading a video

A related type of contribution that's actually even more needed is videos, because even though there are about 100 million items on Commons, there's only about a quarter of a million videos. Relatively very few videos. So many, many things are not yet covered, not yet documented in video form. And it can be really trivial things. For example, I'm not sure we have a video demonstrating the various ways one could tie shoelaces. Maybe we do; I haven't checked. I just thought of this example, but I'm giving you this example as a point of the kind of trivial things that maybe haven't been captured in video yet. Or different kinds of dances, different kinds of ways of preparing typical dishes of food. How do you make the dough for this kind of dish, etc., have not been captured in video yet.

So if that sounds interesting to you, you can use a camera, a phone, whatever device. You can take video and upload it to Commons because chances are whatever it is hasn't been uploaded to Commons yet. The only wrinkle here is that the format that your device will produce -- MP4 or MOV are the likely ones -- is not supported by Commons. You cannot just upload an MP4 file to Commons, because of some patent related technicalities that we won't go into. You can upload your video once you have converted it to a file format that is not limited by patent law, and that format is WebM.

That's a new modern file format that is used and supported by all the browsers and all the devices in terms of playing it. But the recording programs don't produce it, on most phones. So if you have an MP4 file or an MOV file that you want to contribute to Commons, you cannot upload it directly to Commons, but you can upload it using a free Wikimedia tool that is linked here at the bottom of the slide. It's a tool called "Video2Commons" and in order to use it, you have to log in. After you log in, it asks you for permission to upload files on your behalf. You can give it that permission; this is a trusted tool. And you can see here that I'm already in the process of uploading a couple of files to Commons. But you can click on Add Task and select your file from your device and click next and it will start converting it.

That may take a while -- half an hour, an hour, or more -- depending on the length of the file. But at the end of the conversion, you'll be able to click one more time, and that will contribute the file to Commons. Of course, you will also fill in all the details like the date and the author and the license, etc. But you will only need to upload the file once. So instead of uploading it to Commons, you will upload it to the tool. And then once the tool is done converting, the tool itself will push it onto Commons. You won't have to download the converted file and then re-upload it to Commons, so that's good. And you can upload quite large files. Like I said, up to four gigabytes, per file.

So, that's just a little technicality in terms of how you can contribute video, but because there's so little video, I really encourage you to consider taking videos of anything you can. If you live in a neighborhood or a village or next to some notable building, literally taking a five second video or a ten second video of a pan, you know, like a half circle of what you see around you, is useful because probably Wikipedia doesn't have such a video about your town or village or monument. So it's really easy to find relevant video that you can take and contribute. And I encourage you to do that. Of course, I realize bandwidth is expensive in Africa, so do this only if you have access to relatively cheap or unlimited bandwidth.