When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.
And I 100% align with your 90's prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn't forget that we lost some things too.
- The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because - The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available - Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it)
Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll.
A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.
You're right that the editing workflow for raw video is a challenge, but I expect that support for editable animations, interactive simulation, etc. will also be added at some point. It requires some infrastructure for editing securely sandboxed code in-wiki, which is in the works anyway for the upcoming project Wikifunctions.
For the unaware, Commons, a repository of media files, is but one of many Wikimedia "projects" (including Wikipedia). It's mostly used for images, but also hosts video, audio (including MIDI), 3D models (only STLs), and PDFs.Aside: considering what the Foundation seems to like doing, I'm surprised they don't do more to promote the "other" projects, especially to Wikipedia contributors—Wikipedia editors (even split by language) vastly outnumber those of the other projects, including Commons and Wikidata, which are multilingual.
Commons' request system connects those who recognize needed edits but cannot make them with those who check the requests pages and are able to. There's the Graphics Lab[0] for edits to existing uploads, and File requests[1] for new uploads that are needed. Judging by the archives, they seem quite underutilized, though that might only be a sign of how few Commons contributors there are. Probably also has to do with the offloading of requests to local pages in many languages of Wikipedia.[2]
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphic_Lab
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_requests
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5324355
There's an interesting variation in the nature of barriers to being able to edit. Hardware and bandwidth cost money, but skills cost only time and software can be free. I'd say the Graphics Lab does decently in "teaching how to fish" through tutorials and lists of FOSS software. This contrasts with file requests, where there's no equivalent, because the most common reason that someone can't take a photo of something is that there physically aren't any instances of it nearby.
This kind of barrier to contribution really isn't specific to media; analogously, not everyone has access to the same resources for researching edits to Wikipedia. Wikimedia's also trying to address that: everyone with >10 monthly edits in any project has free access to the databases participating in The Wikipedia Library.[3] Most are relatively specialized, however (IIRC, JSTOR is the most generally useful of the lot).
The danger was it made me want to pause all the time in case I missed something interesting, but by putting the user in control of what they get info on, you could avoid that.
X-Ray still exists, but the only way I've ever seen it used is to tell you what the background music is, and the names of all the actors in a scene. But even then, it is often incomplete.
I remember the cable companies promising this when everything went "digital."
I also remember when the movie studios promised us one of the big advantages of DVDs over VHS was that we could watch the scenes of a movie from any angle?
Yeah, that never happened.
Suspect the angles thing was the same. Sounded cool but no one wanted it (or to pay extra for it).
I want to say it was google play, but not completely sure.
This reminds me of Microsoft Encarta.
Sent this to my dad, and can't wait to talk this weekend. When I was a kid we would tinker around with watches in the basement but, alas, I had different interests and never really got around to truly understanding these mechanisms. I don't really know web development beyond setting up basic pages, but how the CAD was integrated into this is wonderful and I'd love to see more posts going through things like human joints or ICE, or maybe weapons ... other things where we kind of intuitively grasp how they work, but don't know the details. This entire blog seems to do a lot of that. So cool.
So impressive.
Put a reminder on your calendar.
[1] https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1484013009219375105...