Dear James, Thanks for this amazing tool. I have been looking at data in the last two days because I couldn't believe the good results the Basque project Ikusgela is having (https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari:Hezkuntza/Ikusgela). Until now, we didn't know if the inclusion of these videos in Wikipedia was successful, and we relied on YouTube statistics to give our funding institutions some numbers. However, these numbers change completely our idea: we have more viewers (expressed as people who clicks on play" in Wikipedia than in YouTube.
Furthermore, as we are including videos in the Main page (https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azala#Ikusgela), and the Main page is the most viewed page in every Wikipedia, we are seeing more views on some videos than reads in the relevant article. This video on WWI is an example: 4,178 views on wiki (https://mvc.toolforge.org/index.php?category=History+videos+by+Ikusgela×pan=&rangestart=2026-01-01&rangeend=2026-09-07&limit=500&videoplays=on) vs 2,394 views of the article (https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?start=2026-01-01&end=2026-09-09&project=eu.wikipedia.org&pages=Lehen_Mundu_Gerra). So, our question was: are people watching videos at Wikipedia? And it seems that the answer is not only YES, but deeper: if we add videos to relevant places in our ecosystem, notably the main page, people will watch those videos. Or, at least, they will click on play. And the more we have, the better. Thanks again for the tool, this will change wildly how we are presenting results this year. Best, Galder ________________________________ From: Adam Sobieski <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 12:00 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List <[email protected]>; Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <[email protected]> Cc: James Heilman <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Video within Wikipedia James Heilman, All, Hello. That is good news about video within Wikipedia. If it hasn't been already explored, I would like to share an idea for "WikiVTT" features where end-users could collaboratively author and edit documents to be processed into various kinds of WebVTT tracks (e.g., timed-text cues, timed-JSON metadata cues, JS-interoperable event sequences, and more). Best regards, Adam Sobieski [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/VideoWiki [2] https://w3c.github.io/webvtt/ ________________________________ From: James Heilman via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2026 10:56 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List <[email protected]>; Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <[email protected]> Cc: James Heilman <[email protected]> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Video within Wikipedia Hey All There has been the question, "will people watch videos on Wikipedia?" After many many years of work we are finally able to answer that question: 1) This video on Polio made with VideoWiki<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:En.Video-Polio.webm> and which is in the lead of the EN WP article on the same subject, had its "play button" hit 3,619 times<https://mvc.toolforge.org/index.php?category=Videowiki×pan=now-90&rangestart=2026-06-10&rangeend=2026-09-07&limit=500&videoplays=on> over the last 3 months. 2) The English Wikipedia article on Polio during that time received 144,389 pageviews<https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?start=2026-06-10&end=2026-09-07&project=en.wikipedia.org&pages=Polio>. This means for this prominently placed video our readers play it about 2.5% of the time. Unfortunately we are unable to determine how much of the video was watched. Hopefully that will come in the future. Best -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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