ReadWriteWeb

Although Wikipedia has long been viewed with suspicion by many educators, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working hard to forge alliances with academia, to build a better reputation, but also to elicit strong content contribution for the collaborative online encyclopedia.

At the beginning of the school year, we wrote about Wikimedia's Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program that introduced students to editing Wikipedia pages as part of their public policy college coursework. As its the end of the school year now, the Wikimedia Foundation has just published some of the results from its first year of the initiative.

In a Beet.tv interview posted yesterday, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller gave a few clues as to the Foundation's train of thought when it comes to video editing and distribution.

In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too?

On July 16, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland will welcome a handful of Wikimedia Foundation's staff and volunteers. Some of the nation's top health, science, and medical minds will take a one day course on the mechanics and formatting of Wikipedia. Said Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, "With the broad range of experts from the National Institutes of Health, we see a great opportunity for increasing the quality of all health-related information on Wikipedia."

The Ford Foundation has just granted $300,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to support Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's repository for free, sharable multimedia files.

The grant will fund a study of barriers to entry for users and contributors new to Wikimedia Commons. The project team will also identify best practices from similar media-sharing sites. The team will design and implement a simpler workflow for uploading, licensing, and describing media.

Wikipedia, the free web-based encyclopedia used worldwide, will be adding video to their online repository in a matter of months. When the new system launches, you'll find a new button labeled "Add Media" on Wikipedia articles. Upon clicking this, you'll be prompted to search through three online repositories for relevant videos which can be added to the article. You can even select particular portions of the video instead of embedding the entire clip.

Late last year, an $890,000 grant was awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit behind Wikipedia). It was dedicated solely to a new Usability Initiative for improvements to MediaWiki.

Now, the first designs and prototypes have been made public.

Though only a fraction of what's in store, the work done so far is showing real promise not just for Wikipedia's future, but for MediaWiki in all instances. In a down economy, a new-and-improved MediaWiki could likely compete with more expensive and cumbersome enterprise collaboration solutions.