Does wikipedia like videos within articles?

From my experience the Pointer video was removed a couple of times from the german wikipedia article related to that topic and then also brought back to the article. So it seems like there isn’t any consensus within the community yet about having videos. Interestingly enough I was asked by some wikipedians to submit my video for a video competition they are doing. So the goal of this competition is to have more content creators like me to upload their material to commons and include it into Wikipedia articles. This effort seems to be founded by money which was donated by the users. There seems to be a similar project in the english wikipedia. So well at least money is flowing towards the direction of creating more video content. 
Even though these seem to be strong arguments I have the feeling that not the entire Wikipedia community supports this movement – or one could call it strategic move. 1 year ago without knowing about these kind of efforts I have tried to include some of the web science videos to wikipedia articles. For example I included the following video:

to the corresponding wikipedia article it was removed with a statement of saying this would be video SPAM which in my opinion is a little bit of an overreaction.
A summary of the discussion can be taken from my slides of my talk at the german open educational resources conference:

If you are interested you can find the entire discussion at the discussion page of the ethernet frame article

Problems for creating video Content for Commons:

Obviously there is a problem about the copyright. So for example I have pointed out in the past that creating a screencast during lecture on a Windows machine means committing a copyright violation since the the start button and the windows interface by Microsoft EULA are protected by copyright. Also in former discussions at #OER13de we agreed that it is hard to collaboratively edit videos (sorry link in german language) because the software often is not free and wikimedia commons does not support uploading the source files of the videos anyway.

Conclusion

It is not clear if video content will survive in Wikipedia even though some strategic movement is put into that idea. The people who are against this have pretty decent arguments and I also say that it is really hard to have a tool for collaboratively editing video files. If one does not have such tools even access to the source files of the videos would make it hard for people to work on this together. So I am curious to see what the competitions will bring and how the discussions on movies will evolve over time.
At least in wikiversity we are able to use our videos for teaching as we anticipated and I am pretty sure this space won’t be affected by the ongoing discussion.

• A click and point experience for teachers to create classes
• On page discussion for students which supports the standard discussion system in Mediawiki
• a nice modern navigation which adapts to users while interacting with the page

For me with this system our videos, quizes and scripts content shines in a much brighter light than it did before. For the first time I have fun consuming our the content of the MOOC.
For me this was an important step towards my goal of freeing educational content. Not only that our MOOC is completely OER we now also create core infrastructure for any teacher to create more classes that are OER. If you consider doing such a class feel free to drop be a message and receive free support. You could also start reading the documentation of the MOOC-Interface or see the slides(: 

I am looking forward to hear back from you.

I understand that the following article is written in a very personal way. But this thing seems to me so unjust that it is just unbelievable. So this is my sad story of me trying to bring free educational resources to the world and having Microsoft indirectly not allowing me to do so  The following article is dedicated to Aaron Swartz:

Background:

• I fought hard to be able to create a massive open online course on web science.
• I compared platforms to host the MOOC and brought up good strong and valid arguments for our university to allow me to go for an open variant instead of the proprietary way.
• I am even supervising my student Sebastian Schlicht to implement a lot of features on Wikiversity to create a better user experience for content creators and learners.
• Wikimedia Germany asked me to write a guest article about the first real OER MOOC and I got a talk accepted at OERde14 where we present a way for others to easily follow our path in creating open educational resources on wikiversity.
• Related to similar problems I have been co-organizing an open access conference at oxford and helping to set up related work.

Copyright is f*** up on this planet.

We have been creating almost all of our so far 69 produced videos by ourselves. The videos which which we did not produce ourselves have been published under a creative commons by licence by the copyright owners. In one case I even called a professor in the united states and asked him to change the licence of his videos on Youtube such that we could reuse them within the Wikimedia commons ecosystem which he did (:
So you might think everything is alright. The guys paid attention to proper licences if they used material by others and for the rest they created everything themselves. Unfortunately this is not true.
For some of our Flipped classroom sessions we created hangouts on air with screen casts of our Smartbord. Currently our university only supportes the smartboard software SMARTNotebook on Microsoft Windows. Creating a Screencast on a Microsoft operating system is critical since there is the Microsoft Start button visible and also the user interface of SMARTNotebook. At least the microsoft interfaces are protected under copyright and I belief similar constraints will hold for SMARTNotebook. This has the consequence that we cannot put a creative commons licence to these materials. Consequently we must not host the materials on Wikimedia Commons as wikimedia commons supports only free content.
What we can do now is to move the videos to Wikiversity which allows material with a fair use licence. Ok great I can still host my course but parts of it are not free anymore. Don’t be afraid you don’t have to pay, like you have to at other sites. But you loose a lot of your freedom. You cannot remix, correct, translate, […] the videos. In particular I am not even sure if I am legally allowed to publish the videos under the terms of Fair Use. I am not an American citizen and my university clearly is a German institution. The Fair Use law is an United States law. Ok we are hosting the materials on an American Website but will this be sufficient? Last time I had a similar law problem and asked the law consultants from our university the only answer I received was: “Better take the material down. You don’t want to end up in a law fight”. Ok so not only we have absurd laws influenced from money making industries, we are also scared of the industries.
On the other side being forced to move to Fair Use licence will allow me to include a lot of creative commons materials where the NC tag is placed to the licence. Not that I now don’t want to do any open educational resources. But the quality of the MOOC also suffered from not being able to include CC-NC material. 

Think about this again:

We as a university – and in the very end as a society, since the university is payed by tax money – pay high licence fees to Microsoft in order to be allowed to use their crappy Software. We are then forced by the administration that if we want to use modern technology like smartboards we have to use Microsoft Software. We pay high wages for professors, me and technical staff to create an free and open online course. And now Microsoft – which I did not even choose to use  but was forced to use by our university which is just following the the majority vote of computer users – is telling me that I cannot publish the content I  created under the license that I want.
You might say: Hey guy calm down. What’s the problem? The course is still online and nothing has changed. But that is the problem that everything has changed. We don’t pay attention to the subtleties as a society and wonder why we are having unjust laws.

Conclusions:

We need to think about our law. It is us who makes them anyway! Regional laws are conflicting with the idea of a global network (Fair Use for example). Many ideas of copyright are just not suitable to a tech driven world in which sharing, citing and giving attribution and fame to people who create something has been fundamentally changed. These laws like the ones mentioned are just outdated an ridiculous. Also other laws like https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren (sorry for a link to German wikipedia. I might translate the article at some point in time) fall into this category.

• Response times for requests are usually less than 10 milliseconds (+network i/o e.g. TCP round trips coming from HTTP)
• The Graphity News Stream Server is a free open source software (GPLv3) and hosted in the metalcon git repository. (Please also use the bug tracker there to submit bugs and feature requests)
• It is running two Graphity algorithms: One is read optimized and the other one is write optimized, if you expect your application to have more write than read requests.
• The server comes with an REST API which makes it easy to hang in the server in whatever application you have.
• The server’s response also follows the activitystrea.ms format so out of the box there are a large amount of clients available to render the response of the server.
• The server ships together with unit tests and extensive documentation especially of the news stream server protocol (NSSP) which specifies how to talk to the server. The server can currently handle about 100 write requests in medium size (about a million nodes) networks. I do not recommend to use this server if you expect your user base to grow beyond 10 Mio. users (though we are working to get the server scaling) This is mostly due to the fact that our data base right now won’t really scale beyond one machine and some internal stuff has to be handled synchronized.

Koding.com is currently thinking to implement Graphity like algorithms to power their activity streams. It was for Richard from their team who pointed out in a very fruitfull discussion how to avoid the neo4j limit of 2^15 = 32768 relationship types by using an overlay network. So his ideas of an overlay network have been implemented in the read optimized graphity algorithm. Big thanks to him!
Now I am relly excited to see what kind of applications you will build when using Graphity.

If you’ll use graphity

Please tell me if you start using Graphity, that would be awesome to know and I will most certainly include you to a list of testimonials.
By they way if you want to help spreading the server (which is also good for you since more developer using it means higher chance to get newer versions) you can vote up my answer in stack overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202198/whats-the-best-manner-of-implementing-a-social-activity-stream/13171306#13171306

How to get started

its darn simple!

1. You clone the git repository or get hold of the souce code.
2. then switch to the repo and type sudo ./install.sh
3. copy the war file to your tomcat webapps folder (if you don’t know how to setup tomcat and maven which are needed we have a detailed setup guide)
4. and you’re done more configuration details are in our README.md!
5. look in the newswidget folder to find a simple html / java script client which can interact with the server.

Get involved

There are plenty ways to get involved:

• Fork the server
• commit some bug report
• Fix a bug
• Subscribe to the mailing list.

Furhter links:

• git repository
• originial graphity blogpost
• graphity paper
• Stack overflow discussion on social activity streams (for voting thanks!)
• issue tracker