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Comment by asiachick | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if miss Encarta but it does point out that in some ways Wikipedia feels like a step backward. Sure, wikipedia has more topics but where's a video? Where's the interactive explanations? Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. I know some people like that but it feels like a missed opportunity and stagnation to me

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Wikipedia certainly does have animations and videos. Here's a list of literally every article with a video, there are over 5,000 of them at least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_containing_v...

For comparison, Encarta had "over 300 videos".

And while it's not interactive, there are definitely animations on Wikipedia to help understand concepts, like the top of the article on pi shows a circle unrolling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

As for truly interactive explanations... I'm not sure there's really any kind of technological standard for that right now that people could collaboratively edit. At least not in the way JPEG and SVG are available to everyone. Do you have any suggestions?

There actually are two methods of interactivity on Wikipedia right now, the Graph extension [0] and Kartographer. [1] With the first you can create charts, timelines, and histograms, based on Vega. With the second, you can add points on maps (with images), have shapes, and outlines, from OpenStreetMap. Unfortunately, both aren't used as much as they should because most are comfortable using other tools and baking things into PNGs, and these weren't advertised that heavily.

[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Kartographer

That's really interesting! I had no idea, I've never actually come across an interactive graph in the wild on Wikipedia.

But when I think "interactivity", I think of things especially in articles about physics, math, or sciences generally -- pulling on a spring to show oscillation, showing how the angles of a triangle add up to 180°, a real-time dynamic water cycle, etc.

I'm assuming Vega can't do stuff like that? Is there any tool that can?

I personally dont think vega has worked out that well. Its too low level to be used by wikipedians effectively but its too high level to make effective abstractions over. I think its a good first attempt but we really need a v2 interactivity plan.

Also if you havent read, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik/I_Dream_of_Conten... is an interesting essay by the guy who used to be working on the graph stuff at wikipedia.

I also forgot to mention interactive 3D models in STL format. [0]

There's also a user who has done amazing work [1] with SVG files, but these mainly only work if you view the original file, as MediaWiki generates a static PNG thumbnail for SVG files (silly, but maybe was needed at some point for proper support).

[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:3D

[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee/svg

Oh wow! An even better page of theirs is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee/Dynamic_SVG_for_Wi...

This is a great example of just basic animation:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Circulat...

My crazy idea on the subject is to use existing lua support in wikipedia, transpile to js, and give it a <canvas>.

Another idea that is thrown around sometimes is using scripted svgs in an iframe sandbox

>a 25yr old website

Yeah, that's a feature. I like that. No bloated JS framework taking 10 seconds to load, no obnoxious whitespace, minimal changes to the desktop experience when they implemented mobile. I admit they're a little slow to implement quality-of-life things (the hover-over preview being one of them). I also think link rot is a real problem too. Even though it's not necessarily their domain, I think Wikipedia should attempt to do something.

There is efforts to auto replace dead links with links to internet archive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:InternetArchiveBot

Yes!

We have been doing that for several years... nearly 13 million links fixed so far!

I worked at MS in the Multimedia group working on things like sound-card and CD-ROM drivers, "MMSDK" tools, etc., and the venerable (lol) Radio Shack VIS, which had a version if Encarta. FWIR, most of the animations used Marcromind Director -- I remember working on the code that loaded these files to optimize it for CD-ROM loading, because the code would just seek all over the place rather than load into RAM and access from there.

That's way more effort than writing some text. That kind of content doesn't make itself for free.

This. If we get tools that enables simple creation of video/interactive assets then Wikipedia will get those more. As a life long graphics geek and programmer, currently the content creation ecosystem is not really on "bicycle" level - more like unicycle while juggling chainsaws - although it's getting better. I mean I've done graphics stuff all my life, and would be quite lost how to "do a quick animation" in something closer to 15 minutes than 15 hours or 15 days.

I think we have Adobe to thank for stagnation in creator tools. There are smaller, harder to find companies doing pieces of the work (i.e. Photopea for Photoshop) and lots of video editing apps that have grown up around Instagram and TikTok. Blender is great for 3d modeling and more.

http://wickeditor.com open source Flash replacement for 2020

But they get millions of dollars in donations every year.

of which about $0 goes to actual content creators.

They don't pay people to create content directly but in their most recent annual report they state that 32% of their expenses are supporting the community.

> The Wikimedia projects exist thanks to volunteer communities around the world that create and maintain them. We strengthen these communities through grants, programs, events, trainings, partnerships, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2019-annu...

mneh... these expenses include things like the disastrous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo... and other similar projects which the existing community was not consulted on and have tenuous effects on actually attracting and retaining contributors.

They don't spend money paying people to create content. Volunteers create that content for free.

Is there a charity dedicated to making short CC0 instructive videos of fundamental concepts? That seems like a worthwhile cause.

Also, lot of Wikipedia articles are geared towards experts. Sometimes I'll go there looking to learn what something is and give up because understanding the article would require familiarity the parent domain.

On the other hand, the fact that I can often times pull up a comp-sci related wikipedia article and learn enough to implement that algorithm I need is really useful. I think in an ideal world, regular and simple Wikipedia would be more integrated, with some way to easily switch between them, and overall better editing for the simple version.

That's one reason I like that they've added the pop-up 'windows' into the internally-linked articles. They often lead to simpler material, or help define terms that otherwise go over my head. But yeah, many sci-tech articles are far from accessible to the 'intelligent layman'.

> Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website.

This is a feature. I don't want a 2020 HTML5 bloated wikipedia just to read some text.

Also why McMaster Carr is a fantastic e-commerce site. It’s perfect for its purpose.

Not all shops should be like it, not all websites should be like Wikipedia. But it’s hard to find better sites for their purposes.

Wikipedia only accepts freely-licensed content (for example, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA; it must allow commercial use). People who are creating professional-quality video are not giving it away for free. Video takes a non-trivial amount of effort to script, record, create imagery for, and edit. That's on top of obtaining equipment like a camera, mic, computer for editing, etc. Sure everyone has a smartphone these days, but I think you were implying more than shaky badly-framed vertical video. If you'd like to see more videos on Wikipedia, the best place to start is by contributing yourself. I've done the same for photographs of local things in my area.

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