Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Tomasz W. Kozlowski 

Victor Grigas wrote:

> This was because much of the material surrounding the video was
> written in English, and there was a lot of it, so translation would
> have been slow, expensive and prone to error.

That's what community translations are perfect for; they are free (in 
terms of licence) and gratis (in terms of WMF costs), and if properly 
managed might be quick in creation and might not contain too many errors 
(just require a peer review before publishing).


> We learned that YouTube does not count views from embedded videos on
> external sites. (The actual view count for that video is more like
> around half a million views.)

My Wikipedia nature tells me to ask you for a source that can back up 
these claims; both for the number of views and the fact that YouTube 
does not count views from videos embedded in  elements. I'd 
personally be very suprised if they didn't; lots and lots of websites 
include their videos that way, and not counting views would result in 
serious miscalculations that would go into tens (or perhaps hundreds) of 
millions.


  Tomasz

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Tomasz W. Kozlowski 

Bence Damokos wrote:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1714329?hl=en  "Note that just 
active views will be counted and that it won’t include views from videos 
set to autoplay." 


The video that was included in the banners was not set to autoplay, so I 
can hardly see your point.


  Tomasz

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Victor Grigas 


On Jul 17, 2013, at 8:48 AM, "Tomasz W. Kozlowski"  
wrote:

> Victor Grigas wrote:
> 
> > This was because much of the material surrounding the video was
> > written in English, and there was a lot of it, so translation would
> > have been slow, expensive and prone to error.
> 
> That's what community translations are perfect for; they are free (in terms 
> of licence) and gratis (in terms of WMF costs), and if properly managed might 
> be quick in creation and might not contain too many errors (just require a 
> peer review before publishing).
> 
> > We learned that YouTube does not count views from embedded videos on
> > external sites. (The actual view count for that video is more like
> > around half a million views.)
> 
> My Wikipedia nature tells me to ask you for a source that can back up these 
> claims; both for the number of views and the fact that YouTube does not count 
> views from videos embedded in  elements. I'd personally be very 
> suprised if they didn't; lots and lots of websites include their videos that 
> way, and not counting views would result in serious miscalculations that 
> would go into tens (or perhaps hundreds) of millions.
> 

http://m.techcrunch.com/2008/07/18/does-google-know-how-to-count-some-youtube-views-dont-seem-to-register/

>  Tomasz
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Bence Damokos 
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:48 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski  wrote:

> Victor Grigas wrote:
>
> > This was because much of the material surrounding the video was
> > written in English, and there was a lot of it, so translation would
> > have been slow, expensive and prone to error.
>
> That's what community translations are perfect for; they are free (in
> terms of licence) and gratis (in terms of WMF costs), and if properly
> managed might be quick in creation and might not contain too many errors
> (just require a peer review before publishing).
>
>
> > We learned that YouTube does not count views from embedded videos on
> > external sites. (The actual view count for that video is more like
> > around half a million views.)
>
> My Wikipedia nature tells me to ask you for a source that can back up
> these claims; both for the number of views and the fact that YouTube does
> not count views from videos embedded in  elements. I'd personally
> be very suprised if they didn't; lots and lots of websites include their
> videos that way, and not counting views would result in serious
> miscalculations that would go into tens (or perhaps hundreds) of millions.


https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1714329?hl=en  "Note that just
active views will be counted and that it won’t include views from videos
set to autoplay."

Best regards,
Bence

>
>
>   Tomasz
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Victor Grigas 


On Jul 17, 2013, at 6:50 AM, Bence Damokos  wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski > wrote:
> 
>> However, as you correctly write, that banner only served those millions of
>> our viewers a cached image that was uploaded to donate.wm.org (so it was
>> cached the usual way) and /only/ if they had clicked the play button were
>> they served the full video. I'm no specialist when it comes to server
>> loads, but if YouTube does not lie to me, that particular video was viewed
>> only 78,000 times, which does not seem that much.
> 
> As far as I understand, YouTube does not count views when the video is
> played automatically (as happened in the banner when a person clicked on
> the placeholder image), so the actual view count is probably quite higher.
> (Don't know if  Wikimedia servers would have been able to handle it at the
> time.)
> 

This requires an explanation- so this particular banner was live for (If memory 
serves) three or four days in 5 mostly English-speaking countries only. This 
was because much of the material surrounding the video was written in English, 
and there was a lot of it, so translation would have been slow, expensive and 
prone to error.

Also, auto play of video was something totally out of the question, even if it 
was from commons. We didn't want users to load a Wikipedia page to have video 
(and audio) start playing without them clicking it. I wouldn't want that myself.

So, we did not have a video that auto-played, but none of us knew at the time 
that the view counter on YouTube would be inaccurate. We learned that YouTube 
does not count views from embedded videos on external sites. (The actual view 
count for that video is more like around half a million views.) 


> Best regards,
> Bence
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Bence Damokos 
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski  wrote:

> However, as you correctly write, that banner only served those millions of
> our viewers a cached image that was uploaded to donate.wm.org (so it was
> cached the usual way) and /only/ if they had clicked the play button were
> they served the full video. I'm no specialist when it comes to server
> loads, but if YouTube does not lie to me, that particular video was viewed
> only 78,000 times, which does not seem that much.
>

As far as I understand, YouTube does not count views when the video is
played automatically (as happened in the banner when a person clicked on
the placeholder image), so the actual view count is probably quite higher.
(Don't know if  Wikimedia servers would have been able to handle it at the
time.)

Best regards,
Bence
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Ziko van Dijk 
Dear Victor,

Thank you for the great explanation. I myself have often experienced
problems with the videos on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, especially on a
mobile device. So if youtube makes it (realistically) possible that people
can our videos, I am fine with that. You pointed out rightly that Wikipedia
articles have external links too, although the analogy may not fit 100%.

Sometimes discussions about FLOSS reminds me of some Esperanto speakers who
prefer it if communication does not happen at all, if in the wrong language
(such as English)...

Kind regards
Ziko






Ziko van Dijk
voorzitter / president Wikimedia Nederland
deputy chair Wikimedia Chapters Association Council

Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
http://wikimedia.nl



2013/7/17 K. Peachey 

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 5:10 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
>  wrote:
> > The fundraising team is very careful about making banners that the
> editors
> > don't notice. Trying to check how the banners are doing is like playing
> hide
> > and seek, and only a true masochist would do so given how invasive they
> are.
> > It's better to try and forget they exist.
>
> Yes, I will just forget about that big bright yellow/orangy banner
> whenever I view wikipedia at the place I volunteer.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Bjoern Hoehrmann 
* Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote:
>it came to my attention very recently that a link to a YouTube video has 
>been included in our fundraising banners[1] last year, enabling people 
>by default to watch a video about Wikipedia loaded through a YouTube 
> element.

>I am told that there are technical limitations behind the decision to 
>prefer YouTube over Commons, but I'm not really convinced about that; I 
>generally think that we should not include links to websites that can 
>track our users in our banners, and YouTube (as well as websites that 
>use Google Analytics for statistical purposes) definitely falls under 
>that definition.

There is a huge difference between a  link and an  to a third
party site. The third party would receive information in the  case
only if someone clicks the link to go to the third party site, while the
 would usually cause information to be sent without action.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ 

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread K. Peachey 
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 5:10 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
 wrote:
> The fundraising team is very careful about making banners that the editors
> don't notice. Trying to check how the banners are doing is like playing hide
> and seek, and only a true masochist would do so given how invasive they are.
> It's better to try and forget they exist.

Yes, I will just forget about that big bright yellow/orangy banner
whenever I view wikipedia at the place I volunteer.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Steven Walling 
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Victor Grigas wrote:

> In my view, this whole argument would provide reason to:
> 1.) Only use a third party video option sparingly, as-needed until there
> are better open-source video options to use.
> 2.) Put more resources into open source video.
>

On a positive note, it seems like progress on #2 is hopefully around the
corner, with the new Multimedia team being staffed.[1]

1.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/08/breaking-through-walls-of-text-richer-wikimedia-experience/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Tilman Bayer 
I'd like to hijack this thread a bit to advertise
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:YouTube_files , for cases
when one sees a freely licensed video on YouTube that ought to be on
Commons too. With WebM available both  on YouTube (as one of several
download formats, for many videos) and on Commons (as upload format),
the transfer has become a lot easier, eliminating the time-consuming
conversion with ffmpeg2theora etc. And since earlier this year, the
chunked upload option on Commons allows uploading files beyond the
earlier 100MB limit (up to 500 MB currently).

It's admittedly offtopic here,  as in this case the video was
available both on Commons and on YT from the beginning, as Tomasz and
Victor have said. But for example I have noticed that some chapters
are uploading event videos to YT or Vimeo only, and it's also useful
for Google Hangout recordings, like those of the monthly metrics &
activities meetings.

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski
 wrote:
> Hi,
> it came to my attention very recently that a link to a YouTube video has
> been included in our fundraising banners[1] last year, enabling people by
> default to watch a video about Wikipedia loaded through a YouTube 
> element.
>
> There's been a small discussion about this on IRC, and I've been asked to
> seek the opinion of the wider community on this matter, which I hope to
> achieve by starting a thread on this list.
>
> I wonder how the solution used in the banners reflects on our values,
> especially since we prefer to use a proprietary service over our own
> Wikimedia Commons, and effectively invite our users to expose their data
> (such as their IP address) to an external website (because no one's going to
> read the small information about YouTube privacy policy).
>
> I am told that there are technical limitations behind the decision to prefer
> YouTube over Commons, but I'm not really convinced about that; I generally
> think that we should not include links to websites that can track our users
> in our banners, and YouTube (as well as websites that use Google Analytics
> for statistical purposes) definitely falls under that definition.
>
> [On an unrelated note, it might be worth pointing out that the video on
> YouTube is listed as CC-BY and as CC-BY-SA on Commons, which introduces
> confusion and might lead to creation of derivative works that are released
> without the ShareAlike clause, which - I believe - it's not what the author
> of the video was after.]
>
> == References ==
> * [1]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_ThankYou_5pillars&forceBannerDisplay=true
>
>   Tomasz
>
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-- 
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-17 Thread Federico Leva (Nemo) 

Victor Grigas, 17/07/2013 07:09:

 I was expecting to see this thread start the
moment that the banners went live, because I think it is something that the
community should concern itself with. [...]


The fundraising team is very careful about making banners that the 
editors don't notice. Trying to check how the banners are doing is like 
playing hide and seek, and only a true masochist would do so given how 
invasive they are. It's better to try and forget they exist.


Moreover, (technical implementations of) videos are really the least of 
concerns about banners the community may have. The inclusion of videos 
in banners (hopefully not auto-playing, but who knows) is something 
quite hateful; let's hope that the thumbnails will be small enough and 
that the additional invasiveness of videos will be compensated by a 
reduction in size of banners so that they take less than 90 % of the screen.


Ryan Lane, 17/07/2013 08:33:
> Threads indicate that we had enough bandwidth and ops was interested in
> seeing the load associated with this. I thought we had some issues with
> varnish or squid, but searching my email indicates that we had video 
issues

> when moving upload.wm.o to varnish (which was much later). At the time in
> question we likely would have been able to handle the load. [...]

Let's remember that the day is not far when Gertie the dinosaur brought 
the servers down: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gertie_On_Tour.ogg
The issue was that the single hard disk where the file was stored had to 
serve it to every single viewer and one article where it was included 
received (IIRC) millions of views from a doodle.
That said, I don't know if the fundraising videos were before or after 
the new cache system, and I agree that most of the technical concerns 
are now obsoleted by recent improvements (yay!). The issue should be 
reassessed.


Nemo

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Ryan Lane 
A few clarifications inline.

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Victor Grigas wrote:

> On the fundraising team we had used banners to host still images (.jpgs) in
> the past. We wanted to make a video we could put into banners but in July
> 2012 there was no open source HTML5 video player built into mediawiki.
> .Webm was not deployed on commons and I was told that Wikimedia did not
> have the technical capabilities to host video on that scale.
>
>
TimedMediaHandler had been deployed around this time, a while before the
blog post was written. I had looked through the threads related to the
banners to confirm this.


> Nevertheless I insisted and wanted to use open source video. I thought it
> was crazy that every other site on the internet could do this and we
> couldn't. Basically I asked everyone I could find at WMF who had anything
> to do with open source video (a little bit abruptly) 'Pretty please with
> sugar on top can we make open-source video work for Wikimedia?'
>
> Rob Lanphier told me that (the technical elements of this were over my
> head) we were painfully close to having .webm done, and it was going to be
> a bunch of details for his team to fix.
>
> I got in touch with Michael Dale and told him that if Kaltura could make
> .webm a reality, the fundraiser would be his first 'customer' - when I say
> that all I meant was that the fundraiser would be the first to use the
> video format on a mass scale.
>
>
Replace webm with h264. The threads all mentioned that the video formats we
support wouldn't work for mobile, and we'd need to look at adding h264
support to TimedMediaHandler. h264 is a proprietary format and it would
have been necessary for that to go through legal and some other hoops.

The end-result is the same, though. It was impossible to provide an open
format to all users. It was likely easier to send people to youtube than to
deal with the issues around h264.


> In November 2012, the new player was deployed:
>
>
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/08/introducing-wikipedias-new-html5-video-player/
>
> My thanks to everyone who made it happen - we actually had a player that
> would work on many (but not all) devices and it had the added benefit of
> open source closed captions, which I had never seen anywhere else. It was
> awesome, but the reality of it was that WMF just didn't have enough servers
> or bandwidth to support video on that scale - even if it was open source.
> Everyone in the engineering department who I spoke to agreed that it was
> impossible. I had to speak to the legal department about embedding a video
> from a third party (if that was even possible). I was told that if we were
> to have a link from a third party, on each and every video we would have to
> provide this disclaimer:
>
>
Threads indicate that we had enough bandwidth and ops was interested in
seeing the load associated with this. I thought we had some issues with
varnish or squid, but searching my email indicates that we had video issues
when moving upload.wm.o to varnish (which was much later). At the time in
question we likely would have been able to handle the load.


> This video is hosted by YouTube.com subject to its Terms of
> Use
>  and Privacy Policy . If
> you prefer,view on Wikimedia
> Commons
> .
>
> I disliked this workaround because it was inelegant and counter to the open
> source philosophy of Wikimedia, *but it would function*. It would play the
> video on a large scale to millions of potential viewers and if users didn't
> want to use Youtube.com a link to the video on Commons would be under each
> and every video.
>
> When the banner went live in late December
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_ThankYou_5pillars&forceBannerDisplay=true
>
> , it was great that it worked. I thought maybe this might spark
> conversations about open source video within the Wikimedia community and
> (to be really honest Tomasz) I was expecting to see this thread start the
> moment that the banners went live, because I think it is something that the
> community should concern itself with. Video production is something that
> every smartphone owner now has in their pocket. Think about where that will
> be in ten years.
>
> Even if it's a site that could mine data, I disagree that just providing
> links is a bad thing. How many links at the bottom of Wikipedia articles
> provide links to all kinds of sites that mine data? Those pages don't link
> to the policies of those sites, they just show an external link. To be
> fair, Yes it's a prominent, big button that we linked to Youtube.com and
> the disclaimer link to commons is small text. I'm a visual person and I
> like to avoid text if I have a big flashy button to click instead.
>
> In my view, this whole argument would provide reason to:
> 1.) Only use a third party video option spa

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Tomasz W. Kozlowski 

Oliver Keyes wrote:
I would disagree that the scale does not match. I'm not sure how many 
people the fundraising banners reach, but I imagine it's a subset of 
"people who use wikipedia". Almost /all/ of our external links are going 
to be linking to somewhere with a non-compliant privacy policy.


I'm not sure about fundraising banners, but I know for a fact that the 
Wiki Loves Monuments campaign last September, which used fairly 
unintrisive banners as compared to the fundraising ones and was only 
visible in 35 countries (including some big countries, but not all of 
them) received around 200,000 pageviews /every single day/, and this 
number does not reflect on all countries since some of them used Google 
Analytics which I don't have any statistics about.


Fundraising banners, which are much more intrusive and are visible on a 
higher percentage of page loads certainly have a wider reach than that, 
and directing people to a page that infringes their privacy (even if 
just a small percentage of them actually click on the video play button) 
still is just evil, especially as there ways to avoid that.


I agree that most of our external links probably link to pages with 
non-compliant privacy policies, but (1) they are not visible on top of 
your browser window and (2) this isn't anything that the WMF can control 
anyway.


  Tomasz

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Oliver Keyes 
I would disagree that the scale does not match. I'm not sure how many
people the fundraising banners reach, but I imagine it's a subset of
"people who use wikipedia". Almost /all/ of our external links are going to
be linking to somewhere with a non-compliant privacy policy.


On 17 July 2013 06:52, Tomasz W. Kozlowski  wrote:

> Hi Victor,
> thanks for your e-mail, I does indeed provide a lot of valuable background
> information!
>
> I'm being told that the technical limitations I mentioned in my opening
> e-mail are somehow related to Squid and Varnish (the caching software we
> use) and our infrastructure being unable to serve videos at this scale.
>
> However, as you correctly write, that banner only served those millions of
> our viewers a cached image that was uploaded to donate.wm.org (so it was
> cached the usual way) and /only/ if they had clicked the play button were
> they served the full video. I'm no specialist when it comes to server
> loads, but if YouTube does not lie to me, that particular video was viewed
> only 78,000 times, which does not seem that much.
>
> The solution that was used was indeed inelegant and contrary to our free
> culture (not the open source crap) values; effectively, people were
> directed to use a proprietary service which (1) infringes their privacy,
> (2) does not even allow to correctly licence the video. (I wonder if the
> author of the remix is aware that their work should be released under
> CC-BY-SA.)
>
> I can't speak about others, but I block fundraising banners by default and
> did not see that until Steven W. mentioned it to me at the 2013/14 WMF
> budget discussion page on Meta.
>
> Providing links to websites that hurt our readers' and users' privacy
> directly from banners which are visible to tens of millions of them /is an
> evil thing/ and cannot be compared to including links inside Wikipedia
> articles; the scales just don't match. This includes linking to websites
> that use Google Analytics to track their visits as well as websites such as
> YouTube which use different techniques to achieve this goal (and perhaps
> some others as well).
>
> Giving users a very visible 'play' button and adding a short sentence
> about privacy is not that far from that; nobody's going to read it, and
> even if they do, they might not be exactly aware of what those long
> documents written in complicated legalese mean.
>
> I believe that in addition to the two options you mentioned, there is also
> a third way: not to include any videos unless we are capable of using our
> own resources, ie. serving people content governed by our own privacy
> policy and served by our own machines.
>
> (I see that Philippe sent another e-mail in the meantime; let me just
> mention that /not/ autoplaying videos on page load is no achievement;
> /playing/ them, on the other hand, is a good reason for painful death and
> reincarnation as a demon. Also, uploading videos to Commons without
> actually using them and preferring a proprietary service is in no way
> better.)
>
>Tomasz
>
>
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-- 
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Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Tomasz W. Kozlowski 

Hi Victor,
thanks for your e-mail, I does indeed provide a lot of valuable 
background information!


I'm being told that the technical limitations I mentioned in my opening 
e-mail are somehow related to Squid and Varnish (the caching software we 
use) and our infrastructure being unable to serve videos at this scale.


However, as you correctly write, that banner only served those millions 
of our viewers a cached image that was uploaded to donate.wm.org (so it 
was cached the usual way) and /only/ if they had clicked the play button 
were they served the full video. I'm no specialist when it comes to 
server loads, but if YouTube does not lie to me, that particular video 
was viewed only 78,000 times, which does not seem that much.


The solution that was used was indeed inelegant and contrary to our free 
culture (not the open source crap) values; effectively, people were 
directed to use a proprietary service which (1) infringes their privacy, 
(2) does not even allow to correctly licence the video. (I wonder if the 
author of the remix is aware that their work should be released under 
CC-BY-SA.)


I can't speak about others, but I block fundraising banners by default 
and did not see that until Steven W. mentioned it to me at the 2013/14 
WMF budget discussion page on Meta.


Providing links to websites that hurt our readers' and users' privacy 
directly from banners which are visible to tens of millions of them /is 
an evil thing/ and cannot be compared to including links inside 
Wikipedia articles; the scales just don't match. This includes linking 
to websites that use Google Analytics to track their visits as well as 
websites such as YouTube which use different techniques to achieve this 
goal (and perhaps some others as well).


Giving users a very visible 'play' button and adding a short sentence 
about privacy is not that far from that; nobody's going to read it, and 
even if they do, they might not be exactly aware of what those long 
documents written in complicated legalese mean.


I believe that in addition to the two options you mentioned, there is 
also a third way: not to include any videos unless we are capable of 
using our own resources, ie. serving people content governed by our own 
privacy policy and served by our own machines.


(I see that Philippe sent another e-mail in the meantime; let me just 
mention that /not/ autoplaying videos on page load is no achievement; 
/playing/ them, on the other hand, is a good reason for painful death 
and reincarnation as a demon. Also, uploading videos to Commons without 
actually using them and preferring a proprietary service is in no way 
better.)


   Tomasz

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Philippe Beaudette 
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Victor Grigas wrote:

> My thanks to everyone who made it happen - we actually had a player that
> would work on many (but not all) devices and it had the added benefit of
> open source closed captions, which I had never seen anywhere else. It was
> awesome, but the reality of it was that WMF just didn't have enough servers
> or bandwidth to support video on that scale - even if it was open source.
> Everyone in the engineering department who I spoke to agreed that it was
> impossible. I had to speak to the legal department about embedding a video
> from a third party (if that was even possible). I was told that if we were
> to have a link from a third party, on each and every video we would have to
> provide this disclaimer:
>


The other bit that Victor didn't mention (and I was in the room for these
meetings too) is that the links that were used were Youtube's "privacy
enhanced" mode links.  They don't actually store any user data unless the
user plays the video (and ours weren't set to play by default) - you had to
choose to play them, presumably after you read the disclaimer that Victor
mentions.  There was certainly informed consent there - I may be
misremembering, but I believe all the videos were also hosted on commons as
well, so that one could search and watch them there instead.  Victor could
confirm that, though.

pb


*Philippe Beaudette * \\  Director, Community Advocacy \\ Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc.
 T : 1-415-839-6885 x6643 |  phili...@wikimedia.org  |  :
@Philippewiki
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Victor Grigas 
Hi Tomasz & everyone else,

I think it's appropriate I respond to this issue, since it was the video
that I directed that was used in the campaign last year that you talk about.

So last year at Wikimania in Washington D.C. (July 2012) my team conducted
a series of interviews with around 100 Wikipedians which resulted in a
series of videos being produced:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Impact_Of_Wikipedia.webm
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Impact_of_Wikipedia
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Thank_You_All

Once I took a breath after all the video production was done at Wikimania,
I started to evaluate what our options were for where this video could go.

On the fundraising team we had used banners to host still images (.jpgs) in
the past. We wanted to make a video we could put into banners but in July
2012 there was no open source HTML5 video player built into mediawiki.
.Webm was not deployed on commons and I was told that Wikimedia did not
have the technical capabilities to host video on that scale.

Nevertheless I insisted and wanted to use open source video. I thought it
was crazy that every other site on the internet could do this and we
couldn't. Basically I asked everyone I could find at WMF who had anything
to do with open source video (a little bit abruptly) 'Pretty please with
sugar on top can we make open-source video work for Wikimedia?'

Rob Lanphier told me that (the technical elements of this were over my
head) we were painfully close to having .webm done, and it was going to be
a bunch of details for his team to fix.

I got in touch with Michael Dale and told him that if Kaltura could make
.webm a reality, the fundraiser would be his first 'customer' - when I say
that all I meant was that the fundraiser would be the first to use the
video format on a mass scale.

In November 2012, the new player was deployed:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/08/introducing-wikipedias-new-html5-video-player/

My thanks to everyone who made it happen - we actually had a player that
would work on many (but not all) devices and it had the added benefit of
open source closed captions, which I had never seen anywhere else. It was
awesome, but the reality of it was that WMF just didn't have enough servers
or bandwidth to support video on that scale - even if it was open source.
Everyone in the engineering department who I spoke to agreed that it was
impossible. I had to speak to the legal department about embedding a video
from a third party (if that was even possible). I was told that if we were
to have a link from a third party, on each and every video we would have to
provide this disclaimer:

This video is hosted by YouTube.com subject to its Terms of
Use
 and Privacy Policy . If
you prefer,view on Wikimedia
Commons
.

I disliked this workaround because it was inelegant and counter to the open
source philosophy of Wikimedia, *but it would function*. It would play the
video on a large scale to millions of potential viewers and if users didn't
want to use Youtube.com a link to the video on Commons would be under each
and every video.

When the banner went live in late December

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_ThankYou_5pillars&forceBannerDisplay=true

, it was great that it worked. I thought maybe this might spark
conversations about open source video within the Wikimedia community and
(to be really honest Tomasz) I was expecting to see this thread start the
moment that the banners went live, because I think it is something that the
community should concern itself with. Video production is something that
every smartphone owner now has in their pocket. Think about where that will
be in ten years.

Even if it's a site that could mine data, I disagree that just providing
links is a bad thing. How many links at the bottom of Wikipedia articles
provide links to all kinds of sites that mine data? Those pages don't link
to the policies of those sites, they just show an external link. To be
fair, Yes it's a prominent, big button that we linked to Youtube.com and
the disclaimer link to commons is small text. I'm a visual person and I
like to avoid text if I have a big flashy button to click instead.

In my view, this whole argument would provide reason to:
1.) Only use a third party video option sparingly, as-needed until there
are better open-source video options to use.
2.) Put more resources into open source video.

As for the licensing options on YouTube -- There are only 2 licensing
options that YouTube provides and nevertheless people have used that video
in creative ways:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEbfGP43bjI

I'm also aware that the German chapter produced a very nice video last year
as well that links from Vimeo.com that displays on their homepage:

http://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Hauptseite
http://commons.wi

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Oliver Keyes 
On 17 July 2013 04:12, Fajro  wrote:

>
> Youtube does not need free advertising on Wikipedia.
>
>
To be frank,[1] youtube has twice our annual unique visitors every /month/.
I would agree: they don't need advertising.

[1] my apologies to Frank - I'll be Oliver from hereonin

-- 
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread James Alexander 
>
> Also, why the Wikimedia shop uses Shopify.com instead of the many FOSS
> alternatives?
> http://shop.wikimedia.org/
>
>
>
I have transitioned away from the shop (it's now moving to the fundraising
team) so the future of that is in their hands but I can say that the
biggest thing was that the FOSS alternatives required more resources then
we were able to give at the time and the decision was made that getting it
up and running made a lot more sense then not doing anything for now. There
are a couple very powerful FOSS options for stores that I would love to see
us move to eventually (and would offer us more then we are getting now to
be honest) but they will require some investments of time/money/staff
resources that we need to decide are worth it and that question is not easy.

James


James Alexander
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Fajro 
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 11:44 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski
 wrote:
> (such as their IP address) to an external website (because no one's going to
> read the small information about YouTube privacy policy).

Except for the good people of tosdr.org:

http://tosdr.org/#youtube
http://tosdr.org/blog/suzanne-youtube.html


> I am told that there are technical limitations behind the decision to prefer
> YouTube over Commons, but I'm not really convinced about that; I generally
> think that we should not include links to websites that can track our users
> in our banners, and YouTube (as well as websites that use Google Analytics
> for statistical purposes) definitely falls under that definition.

+1
Youtube does not need free advertising on Wikipedia.

Also, why the Wikimedia shop uses Shopify.com instead of the many FOSS
alternatives?
http://shop.wikimedia.org/


--
Fajro

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

2013-07-16 Thread Oliver Keyes 
From what I understand the technical limitations are actually real; mostly
they operate around throwing the number of donors (or potential donors) we
get at the video.

(Having said that, I'm neither opsen nor fundraising, and will promptly
cram it. But: to the best of my knowledge there is a lot of reasoned
thinking behind the decision)


On 17 July 2013 03:44, Tomasz W. Kozlowski  wrote:

> Hi,
> it came to my attention very recently that a link to a YouTube video has
> been included in our fundraising banners[1] last year, enabling people by
> default to watch a video about Wikipedia loaded through a YouTube  /> element.
>
> There's been a small discussion about this on IRC, and I've been asked to
> seek the opinion of the wider community on this matter, which I hope to
> achieve by starting a thread on this list.
>
> I wonder how the solution used in the banners reflects on our values,
> especially since we prefer to use a proprietary service over our own
> Wikimedia Commons, and effectively invite our users to expose their data
> (such as their IP address) to an external website (because no one's going
> to read the small information about YouTube privacy policy).
>
> I am told that there are technical limitations behind the decision to
> prefer YouTube over Commons, but I'm not really convinced about that; I
> generally think that we should not include links to websites that can track
> our users in our banners, and YouTube (as well as websites that use Google
> Analytics for statistical purposes) definitely falls under that definition.
>
> [On an unrelated note, it might be worth pointing out that the video on
> YouTube is listed as CC-BY and as CC-BY-SA on Commons, which introduces
> confusion and might lead to creation of derivative works that are released
> without the ShareAlike clause, which - I believe - it's not what the author
> of the video was after.]
>
> == References ==
> * [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_**
> ThankYou_5pillars&**forceBannerDisplay=true
>
>   Tomasz
>
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-- 
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Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
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