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by bawolff 441 days ago
I'm somewhat active in spaces discussing more multimedia in wikimedia.

Usually these discussions stall out because once it gets down to details, nobody agrees on what multimedia/interactivity is actually wanted. Everyone thinks it would be "cool", but when it comes to specifics, nobody really knows. There is a lack of shared vision on what good multimedia in articles look like (beyond what currently exists in terms of puctures and videos). I think it is very much a cultural and vision problem, not a technical problem.

> Wikipedia's budget is about $170 million (based on quick search). I don't think their software has any major updates

That would be pretty untrue. I guess it depends on what you mean by "major", but plenty of commits are happening. Its all open source, you can see the commit log at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/status:merged+-is:wip (Whether or not the changes have a good vision or are meeting needs, is an entirely different question people can debate about). Regardless we have come a long way from https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage

> And needlessly spend money on conventions.

Contributors are largely volunteers, having major contributors meet and share stories once or twice a year provides a lot of value. Its important not to go overboard, but i think its really important for the smooth operation of wikipedia to have conventions every now and then.

2 comments

I think it was the first version of Encarta, it had a time-lapse video of bread molding. I thought that was an excellent video and obviously added substantially to the article about mold.

There is a definite need for more video content in some articles.

I'd point out that the top of the article on decomposition does have a reverse time lapse video of mold on strawberries https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Decomposition&old...

I agree though that more of this type of thing would be great.

In my view prime examples for Multimedia would be 3D models to explore the human body, with ability to show/hide organs etc. on 2D representations some of the aspects are hard to grasp.

But such a thing has major technical complications and somehow falls out of the "Wiki" idea where anybody can edit and improve ...