Grants:Project/Rapid/Pratik/VideoWiki

VideoWiki (also known as Wiki Video) (https://www.videowiki.org/) is a free multi-media encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is a proposed sister site which aims to visualize the sum of all human knowledge. The official discussion for proposing VideoWiki as a sister project can be found at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Video

VideoWiki is created by me (Pratik Shetty). The hosting cost for approximately one year and all the software development expenses of VideoWiki are currently borne from my personal funds.

Project Goal

The goal for the next software development phase of VideoWiki includes:

Working closely with the Wikimedia Commons team to integrate Commons APIs into VideoWiki.
Making VideoWiki available in 4 different languages namely English, Dutch, Spanish and German.
Integrating the feedback received from the Community at Wikimania 2018, Cape Town.
Conducting surveys / user studies with the new editors on VideoWiki to understand the challenges they face while creating / editing articles, especially for languages other than English.

Project Plan

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. Be sure to answer the following questions:

1. What are the features that VideoWiki intends to develop using this grant?

VideoWiki cracks all the technical challenges of building a collaborative multi-media encyclopedia by providing features such as "collaborative editing", "auto-updation of articles", "interactive videos", etc etc. To further develop VideoWiki and make it in par with WMF standards, the following key features will be built:

Using Wikimedia Commons API - Using Wikimedia Commons API to fetch images/gifs/videos instead of Bing Image API. This ensures all content in VideoWiki is open and free to use.
Talk pages - Since VideoWiki allows users to add content(images/gifs/videos) to an article, building a talk page for users will allow for better co-ordination of the users.
Multi-lingual Encyclopedia - VideoWiki is currently available in English. By the end of this grant, The goal is to make VideoWiki available in 4 different languages.

2. Where is VideoWiki currently hosted at and what is the current hosting cost?

VideoWiki is currently hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The average AWS hosting cost of the previous 3 months (May,June and July) is $175.

3. Who will be developing the VideoWiki software?

Hassan Amin is the lead software developer of VideoWiki. He will be developing the above-mentioned features. All payments to the developer will be contracted via UpWork (the largest software freelance site) and all payment invoices will be maintained.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets as applicable:

Number of major features in pipeline completed: 3 Major features
Number of languages available in: 4
Number of new editors: 10
Number of of articles created or improved: 50

Resources

What resources do you have? Include in-kind donations or additional funding.

We already have a software developer who has been working on VideoWiki since the past 6 months. Therefore, there is no need to hire another developer.

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount.

AWS Costs - $175 per month x 6 months = $1050
Software Development Costs - $20 per hour x 42.5 hours = $850
Contingency Cost = $100
Total Expenditure = $2000

Note 1: After development, we intend to move to WMF tool labs/servers.

Note 2: I have taken a very conservative number of hours for completion of the required features. The actual number of hours spent by the developer will definitely be more.

Endorsements

Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!

Strong endorsement Multimedia content was the second most frequent request during the 2015 community consultation on strategy. The community is hesitant to allow video currently as it is hard to collaboratively edit. Pratik's proposal solves this issue and allows us to move forwards with video. Would be good to move hosting of this to Cloud-VPS which would cut down on expenses and make further integration easier. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:25, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Strong endorsement This is certainly a very impressive project! In it is current state, though it is far from adoption, this grant might help the project to reach another level and help us all understand if at all it is possible what a crowdsource video editing might look like for Wikipedia in the future, what would be some challenges and possible approaches. Srishti Sethi (talk) 03:03, 6 August 2018 (UTC)
Strong endorsement I got to know about this project at Wikimania 2018. The way this project solves the challenge posed by the fact "knowledge is not static" is inspiring. This project reinvents the wheel and introduces flexibility in updating the information present in Videos. I would be interested to contribute to the VideoWiki's code to make an article's content available across languages on VideoWiki. It is important to make VideoWiki available in different regional languages and not only English. Fz-29 (talk 18:18, 6 August 2018 (UTC)
Strong endorsement I met Pratik at Wikimania 2018. His idea is unique and impressive. Full support! Wassan.anmol (talk) 19:53, 7 August 2018 (UTC)
Strong endorsement VideoWiki stood out to me at the Hackathon Demo at Wikimania 2018. VideoWiki is moving in the right direction by integrating Commons instead of Bing as their default content provider. Being a Commons developer, I would love to help VideoWiki out in integrating Commons. I see an exponential increase in Commons media content once the community realizes that they can visualize Wikipedia via VideoWiki's platform. Maskaravivek (talk) 05:37, 7 August 2018 (UTC)
Support The applicant has already put in a lot of effort and personal funds to develop this. I'm sure that this grant will help him to substantially boost his on-going work. Adoption as a sister project is something that'll need a broader discussion, however, at initial stages, this can be a good option to be hosted on WMF tool labs as a tool that can be used by users to create videos from articles by pulling relevant images from Wikimedia Commons, and later hosting the same videos on Commons. As the article gets updated, so does revisions of the respective video file. Development of this will open more and more options to consider about how Wikimedia projects can be integrated with or presented in a multimedia format. KCVelaga (talk) 13:57, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
Support I have talked with this user on wiki, in offline communication, at Wikimania 2018, and heard their presentation at that Wikimania. They have developed a viable working Wikimedia presentation tool. Their tool works now and irrespective of its further development they are bringing new ideas to the Wikimedia community. This project is interesting in itself and also interesting for the conversation which its participants have and interesting for how it inspires Wiki community participants to consider new models for Wiki publishing. The budget here is modest and it covers maintenance costs of an already working project prototype into which this new user has invested 100s of hours. This is the biggest community project the Wikimedia movement has to introduce the idea of tying new video technology in to the presentation of Wikimedia content. The future trend is for more online video and we need this project now to encourage more conversation on how to keep Wiki up to date with technology. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:12, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
Strong endorsement I attended Pratik's presentation at the Wikiproject Med session in Cape Town Wikimania 2018. This is fascinating! Speaking from the perspective of a secondary education teacher, I know how impatient students are with reading long texts, and how they enjoy spending hours watching videos on YouTube (mostly nonsense). VideoWiki would be an ideal way to introduce them to valuable content in the format of their preference. Multimedia content is - whether we like it or not - the way of the future, and I would really like to see this project take off. Moreover the budget is very reasonable. Wishing the best of luck and eager to see the next steps! Saintfevrier (talk) 07:53, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
VideoWiki has a lot of scope. My personal opinion is to have a tool at wmflabs and anyone who wants to create a multimedia article can access that tool and all the multimedia articles can then be stored at Wikimedia Commons, if needed under a separate namespace. Satdeep Gill (talk) 03:21, 14 August 2018 (UTC)
Strong endorsement Video wiki has a lot of scope in various departments of education, knowledge and encyclopedic content. My opinion is that this project must be adapted to WMF and start a new wikiproject where people can create videos based on wikipedia article in various langauge. I met Pratik at wikimania 2018 and amazed about this project. This grant must be a starting point for a great journey of a fantastic project. -- Ranjithsiji (talk) 15:52, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
Strong endorsement - I had not noticed this grant application earlier. Although the existing grant has already been funded I would still like to endorse it. The implications of the project are huge and more involvement from both the Wikimedia communities as well as Wikimedia Foundation are needed. There would be some licensing issues regarding images and videos that would need to be sorted out and suitable policy development would be needed for the same. Since the images need to be essentially of non-copyrighted variety, a better and effective interface to extract such images from Commons as well as other sites like Pixabay need to be developed and integrated. An active discussion is needed on potential features and updates for Videowiki. Diptanshu 💬 19:28, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
Belated endorsement - I think this might be especially important for language which are not so strong in the written forms and working on this would also need speech synthesis work outside of English. Shyamal (talk) 07:04, 30 October 2018 (UTC)