What's the reason for "ideally" animated GIFs instead of videos?

@Aklapper, GIF is more lightweight, this helps easier sharing and embedding. Maybe we can produce 2 versions; a video and a GIF, and use as found relevant. Lets see!

Do you have suggestions?

@Moushira, this task is assigned to you since last December. Do you plan to work on it during this quarter, or the next one?

Hi @MelodyKramer , before your role was filled by you :) we were discussing that this task could be something interesting to think about.

(Here are some examples: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/GIFs .)

hi @Qgil - this sounds good.

Let's talk about it in our intro meeting in two weeks. I added it to the agenda - I'd love to get a sense of what topics you'd like to cover. I'd also like to chat with @Moushira about vision, content, and prioritization of potential stories (how many, what timeline, how to find out about new features, etc.) after that meeting.

Mel

One more question: how are we socializing these stories once they're created? i.e. what are the current methods for alerting the community to changes, and then how does the community find out if they miss the initial push (and come to the site, let's say, three weeks from now?)

@MelodyKramer your questions should be answered at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration_Guideline/Milestone_communication#Proposals -- which is a recommendation being reviewed during the upcoming quarter.

I will mark this task as a blocker of T144625: First review of the Technical Collaboration Guidance by Foundation Product teams and most active technical volunteers, so we can take this proposal as input for that recommendation.

This task welcomes an owner. @Moushira and @Keegan are the obvious candidates.

After speaking with @Moushira and @Keegan, both think that producing videos describing new features is a responsibility more for WMF-Communications than for Community-Relations-Support. What do you think? And how to push this task forward (or out)?

In T121710#2756634, @Qgil wrote:

After speaking with @Moushira and @Keegan, both think that producing videos describing new features is a responsibility more for WMF-Communications than for Community-Relations-Support. What do you think? And how to push this task forward (or out)?

I'm not on the Comms team any more, but I would 100% agree that this is something more suited to that team than the CLs. I imagine @jeffelder, the most obvious person to be interested in this, is probably more easily reachable by email.

What about having some resources to do those GIFs/videos? I bed anyone would like to be able to do that:

• as a CL writing user documentation I may need to create a GIFs to illustrate a precise behavior
• as a CL dealing with communities I may need to create a GIFs to facilitate the understanding of a feature
• as a community member, I may need to have short dynamic illustration that will help newbies.

Comms have certainly some resources about that, but I would prefer to give a way for anyone to do these videos.

In T121710#2763387, @Trizek-WMF wrote:

What about having some resources to do those GIFs/videos? I bed anyone would like to be able to do that:

• as a CL writing user documentation I may need to create a GIFs to illustrate a precise behavior
• as a CL dealing with communities I may need to create a GIFs to facilitate the understanding of a feature
• as a community member, I may need to have short dynamic illustration that will help newbies.

Comms have certainly some resources about that, but I would prefer to give a way for anyone to do these videos.

Good points! I still think it's within Comms' remit to create some "best practices" or tutorials for this.

Well, true, actually a gif screencast can be done by anyone, starting with the own dev team. Since there is no audio, producing something decent shouldn't be complicated. A bit of guidance and documentation would make things even easier.

An example that I just came across with, that illustrates well the point:

I have no idea of how to do such a GIF.
Have suggested tools (that work for everyone, all OSs) and how-to would be great!

I've always used Licecap, which is a free/open source program that allows anyone to create images from screenshots:

http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

It's what I used when I wrote a tutorial for using git/github at my old gig. (Scroll down to see the gifs.)

I'm happy to write up a how-to. Where would be the best spot to put it?

In T121710#2768650, @MelodyKramer wrote:

I've always used Licecap, which is a free/open source program that allows anyone to create images from screenshots:

http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

It's what I used when I wrote a tutorial for using git/github at my old gig. (Scroll down to see the gifs.)

I'm happy to write up a how-to. Where would be the best spot to put it?

Wonderful!

I would said on a sub-page of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:PD_help, the project which gathers people who write documentation.

Pau told me he uses Giphy to create short animated illustrations: https://itunes.apple.com/es/app/giphy-capture-the-gif-maker/id668208984?l=en&mt=12 ,Only available on Mac for the moment.

Other possible solutions:

• Recordmydesktop (which makes videos but I don't know about GIFs)
• ScreenToGif