Videos from Youtube struggle to get hits. Many creators are placing great work on Youtube, in the hope that their work will be noticed. These videos are struggling to get seen; yet the same content on Wikipedia is getting thousands to hundreds of thousands of video views.
A few caveats: Wikipedia statisitics don’t tell us much about the interaction of users with video, such as the length of a ‘view’; and they probably include people whose attempt to watch a video did not work, because Wikipedia’s purist open standards “Web Matroska” videos don’t play on iPhones and iPads.
Nevertheless, here are some of the statistics for the first brave adventurers who were kind enough to take the plunge and release their videos under a Creative Commons licence, so they could be added to Wikipedia. These are total views; currently Latin videos are being seen around 300,000 times a month on Wikipedia, and over 10,000 times a month on Vicipaedia.
|Cicero Speech against Catalina (Cicero)||335,641||11,574|
|Catullus 16 (Poetry of Catullus)||218,858||1463|
|Carthago (Ancient Carthage)||192,173||1300|
|Limes (Limes, Hadrian’s Wall)||171,889||2100|
|Urbs Hierosolyma (Jerusalem)||145,510||2700|
|Carpe Diem (Carpe Diem)||96,247||2470|
|Catullus 2a and 2b (Poetry of Catullus)||90,601||124|
|Catullus 5 (Poetry of Catullus)||70,991||417|
|Catullus 13 (Poetry of Catullus)||54,356||440|
|Viae Romanae (Roman roads)||52,459||970|
|Vita Romae (History of Rome)||41,854||605|
|Catullus 101 (Catullus 101)||11,711||507|
|Ninfa (Garden of Ninfa)||11,595||560|
|Baden Baden (Pellicula Mensis, Martii 2022)||10,500||1100|
|Catullus 21 (Poetry of Catullus)||7826||142|
|Catullus 38 (Poetry of Catullus)||7784||176|
The lesson seems to be that if you want people to see your videos, then Wikipedia is a much better bet than Youtube, if it is the right topic. Videos of Roman roads, Cicero, Jerusalem and Catullus are getting a lot of views on Wikipedia, as they are on very popular pages, and are seen by a large, English speaking audience. That audience is clearly interested and curious to listen to the Latin they find.
Vicipaedia now also has a Pellicula Mensis, hosted on their front page, which is getting around 10,000 views a month. While other videos on other pages may get less views, they are of course reaching a Latin-using audience who can see and hear first hand from other people speaking Latin.
This raises two obvious questions: why then, are so few people contributing video to Wikipedia; and what do people need to do to get more, very popular Latin language content onto Wikipedia?
On the first, people do not think about Wikipedia for video; or at least have not. I think this will change over time. However there is a different mindset required for Wikipedia; care and attention is needed to ensure you do not violate copyright, are truthful and accurate, and so on.
You get the idea. There are many very famous Latin texts that are well known, culturally important, and will be listened to by audiences on Wikipedia and Wicipaedia. Many already exist on Youtube, and could easily be relicenced by their authors and added. If you are a creator, why not give it a go?