Wikitube

Random idea

Embed relevant youtube videos to Wikipedia articles. Main video should occupy the width of the entire article, sans the TOC, and be right under the title.

Use the wiki page to store the video information in an encoded format, for example use the relevant links section to link to the youtube video, and define the relevant position in the video as part of the link URL.

Additional videos, or videos related to specific sections in the article could be easily created by modifying the the title attribute of the link.

Since it’s on Wikipedia, the selection of the appropriate youtube videos will be done by the editors, much like the selection of what texts goes in, and what images or other media might be related.

But youtube videos are not “free to use” as the images and other media on Wikipedia!

Yes, and yet I think this kind of usage can benefit all the sides, even if it does sway away from Wikipedia’s guidelines.

Wikipedia benefits mostly because the users are getting incredible value, and that’s what wikipedia is all about. Finding the relevant videos isn't always easy now that the mighty Google is drowning in data and keyword search loses its effectiveness.

Youtube and it’s video creators are obviously benefiting from this symbiosis by gaining more views and to relevant content, hence more advertising revenues.

But… in case that wikipedia does not approve of this new change, and no embedding of youtube video like that would be allowed, it can still be managed with a simple browser extension that embeds the youtube videos it finds in the relevant links section.

Update

After receiving quite a few comments both here and on a reddit /r/wikipedia threadwith people either supporting the idea or completely bashing it for overlooking the wikipedia guidelines, I decided to update the article with the relevant comments.

Basically, the most commented issue is that this idea is violating the wikipedia guidelines, which I expected for embedding, but quite surprised that it’s also frowned upon to add links to youtube from wikipedia.

It would be a violation of Wikimedia’s privacy policy, since serving up the videos for each article would in practice hand over Wikipedia’s viewership information to Google/YouTube. YouTube tends to use Flash and other non-free file formats/software. Wikipedia sticks to software that can be used in a completely FOSS environment. In fact, they don’t even use server-side software that’s not FOSS, IIRC. — nihiltres

When it comes to embedding, okay, I get it. Although I highly disagree with the idea, I still think it will benefit the users, but I understand why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Also, per WP:VIDEOLINK, “Linking to such [user-submitted video] sites is often discouraged due to misuse”. YouTube links get removed from Wikipedia articles all the time. — interiot

But the fact that you can’t link to youtube videos, it’s a whole other thing. Wikipedia should be a source of information across the web, relevant information that the users and editors find useful to describe whatever it is that the article tries to describe, and youtube videos are often very relevant to the subject.

This is sad that wikipedia chooses to go the binary road, either it’s completely free or it’s not going to be even linked from wikipedia. For me, I would expect a full section of links at the end of the article linking to relevant material, free or otherwise.

And sometimes, by the way, there are some links that link to non-free material, such as research papers and similar. Why linking to textual non-free material is considered okay, but to other formats is not okay? Remember that I’m discussing just the links now, not embedding a player (which can be done with a 3rd party plugin).

And Wikipedia already has embedded videos… See for example the article on the Eiffel Tower. Obviously only videos that are relevant and freely licensed. — thedboy

This is an excellent example in my opinion on why videos are very useful to wikipedia articles. Too sad that there are so very little examples of videos being embedded in articles.

A subsequent comment by nihiltres again points out that would could be done is actually porting some youtube video to open-source formats which wikipedia accepts.

And more to the point, if the YouTubers agree, YouTube content can easily be ported to Wikipedia. I asked nicely, and one YouTuber kindly uploaded his video, a ~5s clip showing potassium burning in water, that now improves the potassium article. — nihiltres

Last but not least, a comment mentioned that there is a extension for chrome that does almost exactly what I described, sans the relevant video picked up from the links in the article itself.

I have WikiTube installed as an extension on Chrome. It honestly has changed the way I use Wikipedia. I highly recommend it. — TuckerTheCat

I assume it just uses the youtube search function (I haven’t tried it just yet) to find the relevant videos — but this is exactly what I was trying to avoid since a lot of the times the videos that do show up are either irrelevant or talk about a larger subject.

To summarize this article and the comments I got in the past couple of days on it, most of the people have a hard time with the player itself (Flash, usually), some bandwidth issues for users with low bandwidth and mobile users, and of course the guidelines which are very strict on the subject.

While my main proposal does contain embedding the video, I think what I should have emphasized is the links in the article rather than the embedding ability (which I originally noted that will probably have to be done using a 3rd party plugin).

For me a wikipedia article should be able to contain any relevant links as long as they are relevant, and users could easily decide if they should use the link when it comes to royalties or bandwidth issues. Not linking to a relevant piece of information, in my opinion, limits the articles for no reason.