Wikipedia:Videos

This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:VID WP:VIDEO WP:VIDEOS

Wikipedia can use videos, as this is an online encyclopedia. It may seem unusual, as we are a text-oriented platform, but there's nothing strange in the sentence itself. Encyclopedias had been enriched with other media since their inception, and having images, maps, engravings and even multi-layered images that could be explored by the reader have been an indicator of the quality of the work. Encyclopedias didn't have videos, because printing videos is not possible, but adding multimedia has been an idea since it was technically possible. The Voyager Golden Record contains audio and images to make a literally universal explanation of who we are. A main factor of the success of Encarta over Encyclopædia Britannica in the 1990s was the inclusion of videos in the first CD-ROM, not the quality of the articles themselves^[1].

Videos can be instructive and can help the text, while they improve the content by adding a new layer of discovery. The Wikimedia Movement Strategy suggest we should innovate in free knowledge, and suggests the use of diverse modes of consumption and contribution to our projects (e.g. text, audio, visual, video, geospatial, etc.). However, following this recommendation is not always easy. Adding videos to articles is not a complex matter, but the overall process of video creation might be. Videos can't be easily changed, and quality is not always optimal. Our requirements for free content is also difficult for some videos, where music or images may be copyrighted. This page covers some of these issues. Videos are hosted on Wikimedia Commons which as of 2025 has over 340,000 video files.^[2] See the help page on videos on that project for further information on how to upload or import videos, how to add subtitles, and more examples.