On YouTube, there are plenty of OpenRefine videos of many different sorts. I sense that there is an opportunity here to act as a curator of all this useful content. I propose that we start an official YouTube account with the main purpose of creating different kinds of playlists. These playlists could be like tutorials for beginners, videos that spotlight different features, language-based playlists, playlists that focus on reconciliation and upload to specific services (like Wikidata) and many more. There really is no limit, and each video could be placed in several playlists, if relevant.
While the account can have several trusted users with rights to organize the playlists, we could also have a thread here on the forum where people can suggest new videos to add and different ways of organizing the playlists.
To tie this to the official documentation, in the future when we have some playlists of high quality, these could be linked as some sort of “Further reading” from the relevant sections.
Just to note, I would rather see this content on a free and open source service rather than on YouTube, but the reality is that there is already an abundance of videos on YouTube, and it is a well-used service that many use to learn new skills. So, this would focus on the opportunity to curating what is already there rather than make this the platform for the project to release videos (although this might be a better place to post videos like “weekly updates” than, for instance, Wikimedia Commons).
Rather than have a YouTube play list I wonder if we should consider having a list of all sorts of user made resources - such as IIIF do with the curators of awesome approach GitHub - IIIF/awesome-iiif: Awesome IIIF-related resources
This would save having an official YT account, and mean we could draw on a wider range of resources (written tutorials etc.)
This doesn’t necessarily need to be an either/or approach, but having a YT account that is managing a playlist means basically a small number of people taking responsibility (as we can’t just share the YT login publicly) whereas something like the IIIF approach allows for anyone who can do a PR to contribute (same as the official documentation and of course source code)
I was not thinking about one playlist, but many different ones. Perhaps one for all in English, one for those in Swedish, and so on. It could also be topical, for example, I imagine there are quite a lot of Wikidata related content that could make a specific playlist.
YouTube has a permission-based system, so we wouldn't share these details with anyone, but assign all willing and trusted persons with rights to handle playlists through their personal accounts.
The upside on doing it on YouTube is discoverability in their system. If anyone watches a video that is part of a playlist, they are likely to get more suggestions from that playlist. This could, of course, not happen if the playlist is hosted on another site.
But yes, these two ideas are not exclusive, so if you want to do your idea, please don't let this idea stop you.
For the record, I currently reshare new video tutorials on the OpenRefine Twitter account.
I think both the playlist and the webpage makes sense as they serve different purpose.
The playlist will let us promote good video tutorial within YouTube and guide users in learning about OpenRefine on YouTube to discover more relevant content.
The page, can help guide users from outside to good content about OpenRefine. I started to curate them on the website here External resources | OpenRefine. I recognize this list may be out of date and can also support non-english video and tutorial.