Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Explainer Videos

Wiki Loves Explainer Videos is a project to produce and promote explainer videos which provide quick and simple access to any topic and can be integrated into Wikipedia articles.

Explainer videos

An "explainer video" is a short video which provides an introduction to or a summary of a topic. Examples of explainer videos include the following:

What's Inside of Blood? by Khan Academy
Autism spectrum disorder by Osmosis
How Wikipedia contributes to free knowledge by simpleshow

You may have seen the one or the other explainer video posted in the body of some Wikipedia articles. Such videos are designed to complement the text (and images) of an article. This is especially useful to site visitors that require an easy-to-understand and quick access to the topic of the article, which explainer videos can provide. In November 2016, articles which contained explainer videos included these:

Make your own explainer video

General video guidance

Already today, anyone with video production skills is free to create video content for Wikipedia. For guidance within the Wikipedia community, visit

Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Makes Video

For converting the video files for Wikimedia Commons (webm) you can use the videoconvert from wmftools. (you have to be logged in on Wikimedia Commons)

mysimpleshow.com pilot project

Wiki loves Explainer Videos Mysimpleshow Pilot Project Info

simpleshow is an organization which produces explainer videos. The company has launched a free online tool at mysimpleshow.com which enables anyone to create explainer videos based on a storyline template, user created text, and automated visualization support. The result is an explainer video ready for use in the respective Wikipedia article.

The goal of this project is to provide Wikipedians with a simple to use tool in an attempt to promote high-quality video content in Wikipedia articles. In order to get started and evaluate process and tool needs, the project has created 50 videos in a half-automated process about randomly chosen Wikipedia articles, which are now available for editing.

The workflow looks as follows:

An initial video draft is provided on the youtube (access only the link provided in the list below and on the discussion page of the respective article along with short instructions and login credentials needed to edit the video - so you don't have to create your own account on mysimpleshow).
Everyone is invited to edit the video, finalize it, and publish the video file to Wikicommons and / or embed it to the respective Wikipedia article.

In order to see the list of the Wikipedia articles and the first video drafts please follow the link: Wikipedia_mysimpleshow_beta_test

Here are some sample videos created with the tool and based on Wikipedia articles: