Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Considering 2030: Future technology trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement (July 2017)

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Fix[edit]

@Kbrown (WMF), Quiddity (WMF), and Base: There is a problem with the translation tags in the first paragraph of Near term: What’s next for mobile access? section: the second part is missing from the translation tool. I've tried to fix it but I'm not sure I did it correctly and it doesn't seem to have worked for now. --Niccolò "Jaqen" Caranti (WMF) (talk) 08:51, 18 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for spotting this Niccolò Caranti (WMF)!! It looks to me like your fix actually did correct the problem; it was simply that since you aren't a translation admin and couldn't "mark for translation" the whole page (which updates the version of the text to use in translation), your fix didn't propagate. I have now marked the page for translation - can you take a look and confirm that the error you were experiencing is now gone? Thank you! Kbrown (WMF) (talk) 12:15, 18 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Now it works, thank you Kbrown (WMF)! --Niccolò "Jaqen" Caranti (WMF) (talk) 14:00, 18 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Video, audio, photos, streams.[edit]

The most obvious tech trend is an old one: sharing text continues to decline rapidly as a share of all shared knowledge. And WM and even MediaWiki, despite the intentionally post-text name, has only gradually embraced new media types.

Streams, video, audio, and photos all have their own vertical sharing ecosystems that have grown from success to success. Mediawiki has implemented very limited support for this; Wikimedia has allowed even less of that support to be available to users of the Projects. This was a problem ten years ago; it is an end-of-life problem now.

I wonder why this didn't make an explicit appearance here; I suppose an illness already affecting you is harder to notice than the incremental cold that you just caught. At any rate,

  • There are already enormous databases of freely-available audio, video, and streamed content
  • The Internet Archive, YouTube, DailyMotion and Flickr have made at least some efforts to make their freely-licensed materials easy to find
  • Format conversion is a red-herring problem that many partners, including the I.Archive, have offered to handle on their servers
  • In general, if a major, obvious format-trend is being held up by constraints of current Projects we should just set up an additional sandbox project where all of that material can be worked with and on.

But at the end of the day,

  1. If there's no way for me to share my videos + streams, spreadsheets, 3D-printing models, OpenOffice or PDF documents on WM sites, even I have to go elsewhere to share and archive that work.
  2. If there's no way to embed media thumbnails and streams from off-wiki, then this means I'll also discuss and iterate on that work on other sites.
  3. If there's no crisply defined way to rapidly gain acceptance for a new file format, communities of practice that spring up around each new format will already have their own spaces to share their work, long before they have the option to share on WM projects [along with negative experiences trying to work with wikimedians].
    This has both technical and social solutions; each can independently solve the problem, and even better together.

–SJ talk  15:11, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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