The Wikidata project was kicked off around a year ago by the German chapter of Wikimedia, which is still steering its gradual development. For Wikipedia, the advantage is simple and powerful — if there’s a central, machine-readable source for facts, such as the population of a city, then any update to that data can be instantly reflected across all the articles in which the facts are included.

To posit a morbid example: a singer may have dozens or even hundreds of language versions of her Wikipedia entry and, if she were to die, the addition of a date of death to the Wikidata database would immediately propagate across all those versions, with no need to manually update each one (yes, I can also see how this might go horribly wrong).

Indeed, Wikidata is now being used as a common data source for all 286 Wikipedia language versions. Here’s the under-development “item” page for Russia, if you want to see what Wikidata looks like in practise.

But the really interesting thing with Wikidata is that it’s not just for Wikipedia – although it’s worth remembering that its API is still under development, the database can be used by anyone as it is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Here’s how Wikidata project director Denny Vrandečić put it in a statement:

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it, whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”

There are already some pretty cool (if bare-bones) examples of what people can do with Wikidata. One is GeniaWiki, which is trying to map the family relationships between famous people (the first and so far only example is that of the Bach family), while a Tree of Life project is trying to put together a viable, Wikidata-based “taxonomy of all life”.

It’s worth noting that the initial funding for Wikidata’s development has come from Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Ultimately, Wikidata is precisely the sort of venture that is needed to feed the nascent semantic web and AI movement.

It’s far from the only venture in this space – I’d also recommend keeping a close eye on Google’s Knowledge Graph, which powers Google Now, and Wolfram|Alpha, which partly powers Siri – but all these (often intertwined) projects are essentially trying to do the same thing: to turn facts into something that machines can understand.

And that, in conjunction with advances in natural language processing and machine learning, will ultimately help us converse with machines. These are the building blocks of artificial intelligence and the future of search, and Wikidata’s very permissive license should act as an open invitation to anyone dabbling in this space.

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So why did it take Wikipedia so long to get videos on its site? It faced a number of unique challenges: First of all, Wikipedia doesn’t rely on outside hosting for any of its media, which means that it needs a robust video hosting infrastructure.

But the site’s commitment to open codecs and standards has also slowed down its adoption of video. Wikimedia originally only used Ogg Theora-encoded videos, which significantly limited its reach. The video codec was open source, but had limited support. The open sourcing of WebM through Google in 2010 offered a more widely supported alternative: Firefox, Chrome and Opera all are capable of natively playing WebM-encoded video content, and mobile devices are starting to embrace WebM as well.

The final challenge may be more of a cultural nature, and we will have to wait and see whether a new video player will really be able to address it. Wikipedia has been largely text-based, with a complex collaborative editing process and a large community that helps to maintain the site. Video on the other hand is much harder to edit in the way users can edit a text entry on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation wants to use collaborative video editing tools developed by Kaltura to help bridge that gap. From the announcement blog post for the new video player:

“On the internet, video is a static medium: it rarely changes once uploaded. In contrast, the success of Wikipedia relies on numerous volunteers constantly editing and improving each other’s contributions. Appropriate tools will hopefully reduce this dissonance, like Kaltura’s sequencer, which empowers users to remix videos directly online. Successfully translating its radically collaborative nature to multimedia content will be critical to Wikipedia’s transition into the age of video.”

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Among the websites and services that went dark on Wednesday to protest the anti-piracy bills that are currently making their way through Congress, one of the more controversial is Wikipedia. A number of critics — including some regular contributors to the “open source” encyclopedia — say the site shouldn’t be taking an advocacy position on such an issue, since it’s supposed to represent a neutral point of view. But if anything, it could be argued that the internal process that led to that decision is actually a great illustration of how Wikipedia functions.

Among those criticizing the encyclopedia for its day-long blackout (which the Wall Street Journal said will affect more than 10 million users) was tech blogger Paul Carr, writing for the new site PandoDaily. In his post, Carr argued Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was right when he said blacking out a global business to protest a U.S. law is “foolish,” and Wikipedia was making a grave mistake by taking such a position, especially since the site just spent months trying to raise money from users to pay its bills:

[T]o shutter Wikipedia — a crowd-funded international encyclopedia — in protest of a single national issue is even worse. It’s idiotic, it’s selfish and it sets a horrible, horrible precedent.

Does Wikipedia have a duty to remain online?

Carr contends because Wikipedia is funded by its members and users, it owes the world “the courtesy of staying live, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” But his main point seems to be the same one other critics have made: Taking a position against a law like SOPA or PIPA (the former is the House version of the anti-piracy bill and the latter is the Senate version) is fundamentally at odds with Wikipedia’s stated goal of remaining neutral. This goal is spelled out in the site’s guidelines, which enforce what is known as the NPOV or “neutral point of view” in articles.

One editor for the site agreed, saying the blackout (which only affects the English portion of the site, and doesn’t affect the mobile version at all) put Wikipedia on “slippery slope,” which could force it to consider protests for all kinds of public issues. “Before we know it, we’re blacked out because we want to save the whales,” Robert Lawton told the Associated Press. Other users and contributors said they were concerned by taking a position on a specific issue, Wikipedia might call into question its neutral position on other things.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales, however, has said the two things are completely separate, and just because the articles themselves are supposed to be neutral on a particular issue doesn’t mean the Wikipedia community as a whole shouldn’t be able to make its opinions known about issues that affect the openness of the Internet:

@hakantee The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened!—
Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 17, 2012

The Wikipedia founder also pointed out it was not his decision to shut down the encyclopedia for a day, although much of the mainstream media coverage made it sound as though he had unilaterally made that choice. “This was a consensus decision of the community not mine alone,” he said in response to one critic on Twitter. In a note to the public, Sue Gardner — the executive director of Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation that administers the crowdsourced encyclopedia — also discussed the internal process that arrived at the decision, noting it was proposed by several administrators of the site, then voted on by members, the same way other choices are.

Wikipedia’s process was democratic, as it should be

After the site asked contributors and users for their thoughts about what action Wikipedia should take, more than 1,800 people responded and proposed a number of different approaches, including a global blackout and a blackout just for U.S. users (similar to Google, which blacked out its logo for U.S. IP addresses only). According to the protest’s chief proponents — who were identified only by Wikipedia handles such as User:Nuclear Warfare and User:Risker – the vote for a global blackout won by a slim majority of 55 percent. Advocates of that decision said since the legislation could affect global sites and services, protesting it should also be global.

Blogger and Cato Institute scholar Timothy Lee argued on Twitter that criticizing the Wikipedia decision (which SOPA’s congressional sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), also did — calling it “a publicity stunt”) shows a lack of understanding about how the user-generated encyclopedia works. While it is tempting to think of the site as a service like Twitter or Facebook, where a group of individuals control the company that offers the service and can take whatever action they wish, Wikipedia is run by a community. There are repeated criticisms about the “cabal” that governs the community, or about the influence Jimmy Wales has over it, but the principle it operates on is not in doubt.

As Megan Garber notes at The Atlantic, the discussion and debate around the decision is a fascinating glimpse into how this sprawling and somewhat anarchic global community of info-nerds functions. It may not be pretty, and it may not always work, but the SOPA and PIPA protest doesn’t highlight any of that — if anything, it does the exact opposite.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Klobetime and

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The HTML5 Media Library uses a fallback mechanism to play media through a Java application in browsers that don’t natively support HTML5 video. Kaltura plans to extend the library to also support analytics and monetization — two very important features that have so far prevented many sites from fully adopting HTML5. YouTube, for example, has been toying with HTML5 in recent months, enabling users to watch a subset of the site’s content without Flash after opting into a special TestTube trial. However, videos with ads are always shown in Flash. Sites like YouTube could at least in theory completely ditch Flash if HTML5 video was embraced by advertisers.

The unveiling of HTML5Video.org comes only one day after the launch of another site promoting HTML5 video to end users. Videoonwikipedia.org, which was launched yesterday by the Participatory Culture Foundation with support from Kaltura and others also involved with HTML5Video.org, wants to get users to contribute more video to Wikipedia. HTML5Video.org, on the other hand, seems much more geared toward professionals, offering business headlines as well as a link to a forum hosted by Kaltura’s open source video developer community at Kaltura.org.

Speaking of which: HTML5Video.org is heavily branded by and geared towards the solutions available from Kaltura. One has to wonder whether this will help or hurt their effort to gather support for an open format that just this week received support from industry heavyweights like Microsoft.

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The main idea behind the site is obviously to enrich Wikipedia, which currently doesn’t feature many articles with videos, but the Participatory Culture Foundation also sees this as a chance to showcase HTML5 video and the open video codec Ogg Theora. “Wikipedia is the most popular site in the world that posts video exclusively in open formats,” the organization’s co-founder Nicholas Reville wrote in a blog post, adding: “By encouraging more people to post videos in Wikipedia articles, we can bring theora video played in html5 to a very large audience.”

The new site offers its users a quick and very basic step-by-step guide for posting videos on Wikipedia, which includes converting them to Ogg Theora, signing up for a Wikipedia account and enabling video upload capabilities on the site.

The Participatory Culture Foundation aims to simplify the encoding and converting issues with a new and as of yet unannounced tool dubbed the Miro Video Converter. Users of the converter can simply select Theora as the output format of choice, drop a video file onto the application and wait for the file in question to be converted.

Video on Wikipedia has been a long time coming, with the Wikimedia Foundation announcing plans to embrace video in early 2008. However, the site’s strong commitment to open formats has somewhat slowed down the adoption process, as it took a while until browsers capable of playing Flash-free video via HTML5 became available.

However, part of the delay apparently has also to do with internal issues, as representatives from Wikimedia and its technology partner Kaltura told me earlier this year. Kaltura’s VP of Business and Community Development Shay David said back then that Wikipedia editors took a while to get comfortable with video. “People needed to understand that video is an important aspect of Wikipedia,” he told me, adding: “That needed some time.”

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Part of the reason why Wikimedia has to deal with a huge influx of data is that volunteers are increasingly uploading videos, and content partnerships with museums and archives have brought in hundreds of hours of additional footage. Wikimedia announced two years ago already that it was getting ready to include more of this content into Wikipedia. Little of this has materialized so far, but now it finally seems like video on Wikipedia is actually going to happen soon. So how is the free encyclopedia going to use moving images, and why has this taken so long?

Wikimedia announced a partnership with open source video platform provider Kaltura to get Wikipedia fit for video in early 2008.  However, two years later, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any video clips on the site. I got in touch with both Kaltura and Wikimedia in recent days to figure out what happened. Both partners told me that they’re still very much in the process of making video on Wikipedia happen. It’s just that this process has been taking a little longer.

Much of the delay has to to with a mixture of technical and licensing issues. “We don’t work with proprietary video systems,” explained Wikimedia’s Head of Communications Jay Walsh when I talked to him this week. It was clear early on that Wikimedia wouldn’t use Flash or any other proprietary technology for video, which is why HTML5, with its capability to play video straight in your browser, was the obvious choice. However, the implementation wasn’t just a question of plug-ins, but also of codecs. Wikimedia decided to use the license-free, open source codec Ogg Theora, which didn’t natively play back in most browsers two years ago. In fact, even Firefox only started to support Ogg video playback with version 3.5, which was released last summer.

Wikipedia’s collective structure has been another reason for the delay. The site is ruled by consensus, and its tens of thousands of volunteers need to be on board with any major changes, which is one of the reasons why Wikipedia’s basic look and functionality have remained the same over the years. Walsh assured me that “Wikipedians are thrilled” about the possibilities of including video on their site, but Kaltura VP of Business and Community Development Shay David said that this hasn’t always been the case. “People needed to understand that video is an important aspect of Wikipedia,” he told me, adding: “That needed some time.”

Finally, Wikimedia also needed to figure out how to actually make the transition towards video work. “We are not Flickr, we are not YouTube,” cautioned Walsh. “We need to grow intelligently.” The organization needed to figure out how to encourage collaboration in the video space without becoming a repository for everyone’s vacation videos, and at the same time improve the usability of its video hosting. Part of this has been to come up with new uploading tools that make it easier to submit and tag media. The gathering of meta-data is especially important to make video work across Wikipedia’s various international editions as well as Wikimedia’s other sites. “It needs a lot of information attached to it,” said Walsh.

Kaltura’s video playback and editing tools are another important part of the puzzle. The company has developed an HTML5 video player that can be embedded into third-part websites. It will be substituted with a Java-based player for browsers that don’t support HTML5 yet. Kaltura has also developed encoding and uploading tools as well as a web-based video editing suite that will eventually make it possible for Wikipedia users to edit clips on Wikipedia in very much the same way they now can edit the site’s articles.

Walsh told me that we’ll finally see at least some of this functionality through a wider roll-out of video on Wikipedia within the next three to six months — provided, of course, that Wikimedia’s servers can handle it.

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