Tuesday, October 27, 2009

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

Today, the 25th of October is the "World day for Audiovisual Heritage". This UNESCO event is about the material generated by radio, television and movies. They have dominated much of the communication in the previous century. and will continue to do so.

On a daylike this, it is appropriate to reflect on what our role has been in the previous year and, what is likely to happen in the next.

In the last year the Wikimedia Foundation invested a lot of effort in making our MediaWiki platform ready for video. The result will be that next year many articles will gain videos. In the last year the upload limit was increased to 100Mb, hopefully this limit will be raised again.

I reported on the availability of the Polygoon newreels in a previous blog. The first examples are now in Commons and they will certainly find their way on the Dutch Wikipedia. They may become relevant for other Wikipedias when we support subtitling.

In a weeks time there will be a meeting in Paris, where we will define what issues we want to address to improve our support for audiovisual content. Given that Commons is intended to be a repository for such material and given our interest in historic material, I hope that next year we will report on the things we have achieved.
Thanks,
GerardM

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