After a 5-year beta period, Wikipedia finally moves into the video era with an HTML5 player
With more than half-a-billion monthly visitors, Wikipedia needs little introduction. — But while the not-for-profit is renowned for its crowdsourced, text and image-based online encyclopedia …
Context & Ripple Effects
The move closes a long loop: the HTML5 video format had been percolating through the browser world since at least 2010, and Wikipedia spent five years running its player in beta before promoting it for its audience of more than half a billion monthly visitors. The pickup was unusually broad for a Wikimedia infrastructure change — the Wikimedia blog announcement traveled through VentureBeat, GigaOM, AllThingsD, SocialTimes and Softpedia within days.
The timing matters against the site's own internal arc: reporting earlier in 2012 documented that Wikipedia's editor count peaked in 2007 and has fallen ever since, that administrator promotions have thinned, and that the collaborative encyclopedia is 'nearing completion' in a sense — a strategic problem for a project built on growth.
First-order effects
- Wikipedia's hundreds of thousands of articles can now carry native video without plugins, giving the tens of thousands of volunteers who write and maintain the site a new media type to add, caption, and curate.
- Wikimedia takes on the hosting, transcoding, and bandwidth burden of serving video to over half a billion monthly visitors on a donation-funded budget — a real cost commitment for a nonprofit.
Second-order effects
- With text coverage maturing and editors declining since the 2007 peak, video becomes a fresh contribution surface that could recruit contributors who never would have written prose — directly addressing the contributor-pipeline problem documented in July 2012.
- Other crowdsourced and reference platforms face pressure to match rich-media support, since a text-and-images encyclopedia now looks dated next to one that plays video natively.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, open-knowledge projects evolve from static text repositories into multimedia archives, redefining what 'an article' is and stretching governance models built for editable text toward editable media.
- A completed-feeling encyclopedia forces Wikimedia-style organizations to compete on format and experience rather than raw article count — a shift from growth-by-expansion to growth-by-deepening.
The trend: As crowdsourced text repositories approach saturation, open-knowledge platforms are extending into native rich media to sustain both relevance and contributor recruitment.