Wikiexperiments

I would like to announce that this year’s implementation of the Wikiexperiments project has started today with the first round of filming chemistry experiments. This project aims to record high-quality videos of systematically selected experiments for the purposes of illustrating important scientific concepts and phenomena in various sciences.

Since the start of the project in September 2015, a total of 153 experiments in multiple fields of chemistry, physics and biology have been produced, which are used across articles on more than 60 language editions of Wikipedia, as well as in educational materials on Wikibooks. All videos of the experiments are voiceless and contain English depictions in order to ease the translation into other languages and encourage adding subtitles.

If you have ideas on how this project can be improved, including new scientific areas in which experiments can be produced or new methods to use the videos on the Wikimedia projects, you are welcome to join the discussion and share your thoughts.

7 Likes

This all sounds very exciting, @Kiril_Simeonovski! Can you share more about how other Wikipedia language communities translate, disseminate, and use the contents produced in their project?

1 Like

We provide English descriptions of the videos documenting the experiments so that members of other language communities can easily translate them into their languages. So far, apart from the default Macedonian and English descriptions, some videos have got Romanian and Chinese translations (see this example).

When it comes to the use of the videos to better illustrate Wikipedia articles, there was a public call to all communities affiliated with Wikimedia CEE in the first year of the project which resulted in many videos being added to articles in different languages. This trend has continued without significant efforts in the years to come as many language communities have become familiar with this project and its ultimate goal.

2 Likes