Wikimedia Commons adds Universal Subtitles

Wikimedia Commons, a sibling project to Wikipedia, just began integration and testing of Universal Subtitles. We’re very encouraged by this and hope that Universal Subtitles may someday help people caption and translate videos on Wikipedia itself.

Michael Dale, an open video hacker and longtime Wikimedian that has been leading the integration, writes on the Wikimedia Technical Blog:

For the past 6 months the Participatory Culture Foundation has been hard at work on their latest open web video mission to make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that’s free and open. Part of the Mozilla Drum Beat campaign for a better web, Universal Subtitles is a tool and platform to help bring an open solution to subtitling web video. Commons has supported timed text via the mwEmbed gadget for some time, but up until today it has been very difficult to create the initial subtitle track. I have been watching the development of the universal subtitles efforts, and while at the subtitle summit and open video conference we were finally able to hack on bringing the Universal Subtitles widget to Wikimedia Commons.

Today, I am happy to share our first pass at integrating our open subtitle efforts. Please keep in mind this integration is still very early on in development, but the basic milestone of being able to use the tool on commons to create and sync up subtitle tracks is an important first step. Even without helpful tools in place, the Wikimedia community has been creating subtitles and translations. We hope this new subtitle edit tools will broaden the number of participants and enable the Wikimedia community to set a new standard for high quality multilingual accessibility in online video content.

If you have a moment, feel free to check out the widget and provide some feedback. If you are looking for a video to subtitle, check out the recently created needs subtitling category.