Grants:Project/Rapid/Pratik/VideoWiki/Report

Report accepted
This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2018-19 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Pratik/VideoWiki.
  • You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
  • You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.


Goals

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Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

Yes, we met our original project goals. We are more than happy with the progress.

(a) From being an external project, we have now integrated closely with Wikimedia Commons, becoming a tool where users can create videos by simply dragging and dropping images/videos from Wikimedia Commons onto Wikipedia text.

(b) We successfully moved to the WMF Cloud infrastructure.

While conducting surveys from new editors on VideoWiki, we realized that there a lot of features (such as "multiple images on each slide". "Export Video") which VideoWiki still needs to work on before concentrating completely on expanding VideoWiki into different languages. Therefore, we focused our time and energy on the features requested by users instead of the static to-do list at the start of the VideoWiki development.

Outcome

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Please report on your original project targets.


Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
Number of major features in pipeline completed: 3 Major features 6 major features built instead of 3. 6 big features built are: (1) Integrated VideoWiki with Commons, (2) Built a new VideoWiki home page with articles that contains only Commons media content (3) Export Video that allows users to export a VideoWiki article into video that can be uploaded directly to Commons. (4) Optimizing VideoWiki's front end to load VideoWiki's home page from 15 seconds to 3 seconds. (5) Auto-update Button for users to update a VideoWiki article on real-time basis. (6) Building VideoWiki stack in Hindi, French and Spanish.
Number of languages available in: 4 Videowiki is available in 4 languages We have made VideoWiki is available in the following 4 languages: English, Hindi, French and Spanish.

The original 4 languages proposed was:English, Dutch, German,and Spanish.


Learning

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Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

  • What worked well?
  • What did not work so well?
  • What would you do differently next time?


-- What worked well?

(a) From our user research, we learnt a new use-case for VideoWiki - "documenting wiki-based talks". A lot of wiki-based events occur over the world. However, the presentations/talks are not well documented. Some people share a long YouTube video of the entire event, some share the PPT/PDF in Commons; however, this does not bring absolute clarity due to several reason. The YouTube video might focus on the speaker and not the PPT when required, the user might be interested only in a particular segment of the video but has to scrub through the entire video to find the relevant part, the PPT/PDF shared in Commons only gives a high level overview of what the speaker said and cannot be a replacement of attending the event live. By building a Videowiki article out of it, one can create one-stop platform for explaining any topic as a VideoWiki article is a mixture of text, audio and video.

Refer VideoWiki based Tutorial on Inkscape at Wikigraphists 2018 Workshop here

(b) We were able to develop tons of minor features such as listed in the "Software Development Charges (Detailed Analysis Table)"

(c) We built 6 major features, going beyond our target of creating 3 major features. The 6 features are listed in the "Software Development Charges (Detailed Analysis Table)".

(d) Our average hosting cost was $175. We bought it down to $75 dollars. The savings in hosting cost was used for software development.


-- What did not work well?

(a) Having a static road-map without the input of the users was erroneous. We learnt that building VideoWiki in different languages was too early as there are considerably more features to be built. Therefore, even though we laid the technology to build VideoWiki in different languages, such as English, Hindi, French, and Spanish. We will be focusing only making VideoWiki complete before expanding into more languages.

-- What would you do differently next time?

Since we are at the early stage of development of VideoWiki, it is not advisable to have a pre-defined set of features that we need to build in a chronological order. If I had the opportunity to re-do the grant, I would say our outcomes to be "general software development" and list out the probable features which we will be building, This would give us the correct flexibility that is required in the start-up stage.

Finances

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Grant funds spent

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Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

High-Level Overview

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A visualization of VideoWiki's expenditure
Sr. No. Expenditure Head Cost (USD) Cost (%)
A AWS Hosting Charges $419.86 21%
B Software Development Charges $1,579.88 79%
Total $2,000 100%


Detailed Analysis

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(A) AWS Hosting Charges - Detailed Analysis
Sr. No. Month AWS Hosting Cost Invoice Attachment

(sent via email)

1 September $77.23 A1
2 October $74.83 A2
3 November $71.24 A3
4 December $76.37 A4
5 January $60.19 A5
6 February (forecast - Actual Bill to be

received on 3 March 2019)

$60.00 NA
Total AWS Hosting Cost $419.86 Excel Sheet
(B) Software Development Charges - Detailed Analysis
Sr. No. Feature Description No. of hours spent Total Cost Invoice Attachment

(sent via email)

1 Wikimedia Log in OAuth 1 hours $205.5 B-1
2 Setup contribution environment 1 hours
3 Fix videowiki Article name errors ("/" in their title) 1 hours
4 Detect "Meta wiki" scripts 0.5 hours
5 Add videos tab on the right side of the Editor 1 hours
6 Use Wikimedia Commons API to load images, gifs and videos

instead of Bing API.

2 hours
7 Allow users to upload to a VideoWiki slide and in turn the file gets uploaded to Commons

via Upload Wizard (MAJOR FEATURE)

5 hours
8 Verifiability - For every media content (image/gif/video) on  VideoWiki, there will be a

corresponding link to the Wikimedia Commons

1 hours
9 Fix our Share button - Share Image (Preview) + Icon fix + Share button should have a copy link option 3.5 hours $359.63
B-2
10 Remove Slack channel + "Add Support VideoWiki on Meta" near "Learn more" hyperlink instead

of "Join Us" hyperlink

1 hours
11 Front End - Notifications 2 hours
12 Front-End Optimizations - Cleanup Front-end for faster loading (MAJOR FEATURE) 6 hours
13 Minor Fixes 1 hours
14 Bug Fixes 4 hours
15 Auto-update article Button (MAJOR FEATURE) 5 hours $102.75 B-3
16 Export Video Major Feature (MAJOR FEATURE) 20 hours $513.75 B-4
17 Moving to WMF Cloud 5 hours
18 Multi-language support. (MAJOR FEATURE) 8 hours $308.25 B-5
19 Global Auth system 3 hours
20 Videowiki database Backuper on S3 3 hours
21 Auto Download Export Video 1.5 hours
22 Subtitles change to .ass format (as against .srt) for reference custom number and font

(Bank Charges for this transaction borne by Pratik Shetty)

4.5 hours $90.00 B-6
Total No. of Hours/Cost 80 hours $1,579.88
Excel Sheet

Remaining funds

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Do you have any remaining grant funds?

No, the savings which we obtained in the hosting cost was used for software development.

Note: If the actual February AWS Hosting Bill comes greater than estimated $60, I will bear the hosting cost personally. On the other hand, if actual bill comes less than the estimated $60, then the savings will be used in the 2nd Rapid Grant for off-seting the AWS Costs in March.

Anything else

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Anything else you want to share about your project?

The new VideoWiki which exclusively uses Wikimedia Commons content is live on https://videowiki.wmflabs.org/en/. Anyone, including you, can edit a VideoWiki article even without logging in. So play around with it and please feel free to give your valuable inputs.

Thank you for providing this opportunity. If you have any doubts or questions, please get in touch at pratik.shetty[at]tlrfindia.com