Board Thread:Consensus track/@comment-4814368-20130620230020/@comment-3523404-20130622040134

The usage of video media in articles is incredibly controversial. Our currently policy prohibits it for a variety of reasons. At the time, this was the admin consensus on the issue. We have to override the general ambivalence of the community at large due to extreme inter-user conflicts. Essentially, we had tons of editors trying to promote their personal YouTube channels by adding tons of their videos to articles and removing the videos of others. We tried to create our own community-drive channel for videos that would be uploaded to articles, but nobody was interested in doing that. Again, because as we suspected, editors only cared about their own personal channels which gain ad-sense revenue. If the topic were to undergo a vote, I would strongly reject any proposal to permit any type of video in wiki articles that was not extensively critiqued, monitored, and controlled by a group of elected reviewers (not necessarily all admins, but including at least one). At the time, our wiki have millions of page views daily, so it was a gold-mine for advertising. Things have slowed down quite a lot here since. I still think it will become a huge issue that disrupts the natural process of the wiki and will place a heavy burden on the (already too small) administration team. My question is: why is ti so important to add it? We don't really need it per se. Anything that could be illustrated by a video could also be conveyed through text and screenshots. Videos make the pages load slower and don't always work for each user. There's also the obvious copyright problems, and we become liable for anything said by the cinematographer in the videos themselves.