Wikis at Work: The Digital Tipping Point
This post is the first in a new series of “Wikis at Work,” in which I will highlight the real-world usage of wikis for community-building and project management websites.
The Digital Tipping Point is a documentary film project run by Christian Einfeldt. He is investigating the Tipping Point phenomenon (per Malcolm Gladwell) in the context of the ongoing shift from proprietary software and operating systems to open source software and operating systems.
The project makes heavy use of MediaWiki for online collaboration, including transcription, translation, video editing, and more. It is, to my knowledge, the first film made from a wiki.
Christian’s been working on this project for a few years now, putting in a lot of hours and much travel along the way. His hard work and spirit are the kind of traits that really make the open source community the success it is today.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the really nice comments! Mediawiki has been really really helpful for us! In order for us to be able to make our 290 hours of footage available for documentary film makers to use, we need to have a word-for-word transcript of every word spoken in all 290 hour hours. That is a tremendous amount of work. Only an open source project could handle something of that size on the kind of (non-existent) budget that we have. From the beginning, it was my heart’s desire to give others high quality video that they could use to make videos of any length to tell stores about how Free Open Source Software (FOSS) has made their lives better. In order for story tellers to use that video, they need to know exactly what was said down to the second. Our video lives on line at http:archive.org/details/digitaltippingpoint , and anyone in the world can use our video for any purpose consistent with a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license. And we have 11 languages. There is no way that we could pay enough people to create that large a database, so we needed a wiki so that anyone in the community could watch our video and then write up a transcript for our modular 4.5 minute video segments, or even a whole interview if they felt up to it. I am very grateful to the Mediawiki developers for making such a wonderful tool available to us.
Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:56 pm
[…] This is the second in my series “Wikis at Work.” (See the first, about Christian Einfeldt’s Digital Tipping Point Project, here.) […]