On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 1:59 PM Michael Snow via Wikimedia-l < [email protected]> wrote:
> What we most need is to simplify, to make it easier for volunteers to > steer in the direction we would like them to go. Then they can self-select > according to what meets their interests. I believe the success of Wikidata > so far - "success" in the sense that its potential aligns more with "early > Wikipedia" than "early Wikiversity" - is in large part because it provides > a vast new space for curation, and has been integrated in a way that makes > it easy for those interested to go and participate, while it is > simultaneously easy to ignore for those who are less interested. > I think this gets at the heart of it: early Wikipedia was a vast space for curation — with an implicit curation scope of 'anything you've ever read'. Since then, there's been a generational shift in how people learn about the topics they care about, and how people share what they know for a public audience. Now there's a wide-open curation space for video. On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 10:44 AM Alex Stinson via Wikimedia-l < [email protected]> wrote: > *Interfaces are cheap, informed curators are expensive* > [...] > Sage's tool is a perfect example of this: perfect for a small market of > users, unlikely to be a "headline" Wikimedia tactic for getting in front of > users, because Youtube and AI search interfaces already do this exact thing. > I think the market for a video curation space — especially one that is part of a continuum with our encyclopedia, putting reliable knowledge sources in context and in conversation with each other, moving ever closer to solid core of shared knowledge — is not small. YouTube (and other video platforms) are missing exactly this kind of curation space. They are built around serving you new content, and keeping the creators on the content grind, not curating the best of what's already there. If I want to learn about a topic, I don't want every video that matches my search. I want the best videos — selected by someone who has watched a lot more videos about that topic than I have, from the most reliable knowers about the topic. If there's something inconsistent or incorrect, or if it represents a particular perspective that isn't widely accepted, I want to see context from someone who curated it in the same way a Wikipedia editor curates the text sources that go into a Wikipedia article. I think the audience for video curation is — to oversimplify a bit — my kids' whole generation. My kids don't made videos, but for the topics they're interested in, they would do a lot better at curating videos than I would... and it would cover a whole lot of knowledge that isn't part of the traditional text ecosystem. So far https://wikiplus.video/ is a Wiki Education side project; we're excited about it, but not quite sure where we want to go with it. But it's already scratching an itch for me personally — I start there instead of Wikipedia when I want to read about something. I'm still first-and-foremost text-oriented, but I keep being surprised at just how much great shared knowledge there is in niche YouTube videos about (some aspect of) an encyclopedic topic. -Sage Wiki Education
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