Wikipedia is to launch video editing and embedding support within articles in the next three months.

The new feature will allow users to select copyright-free video from one of three sources, including the Internet Archive, and perform simple editing before embedding it into an article.

This would allow historic political speeches, archive footage and documentaries to be placed in articles, as long as the video is in an open-source format and free of copyright restrictions.

Eventually the service will allow video from other sources to be added, as well as subsequent editing and reorganising of clips, as is already possible with text on the site.

One other source of video will be the Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of videos and images run by Wikimedia, the umbrella organisation that controls Wikipedia.

The video feature is to be partly funded by the Mozilla Foundation, the organisation behind the Firefox browser.

“It is sad and unfortunate that the public broadcasters are not the ones leading this movement,” said Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, speaking to Technology Review. “The mission should be to do whatever they can do to maximise distribution, and I’m not seeing that right now.”

ANI