The power of Wikipedia, illustrated & narrated by Jon Udell

Jon Udell has created a screencast -- narrated screen-capture animation -- which engagingly demonstrates the evolution of a Wikipedia article, revealing a lot about the power of Wikipedia collaboration (and incidentally, the power of screencasting for both demos and didactery).

While I usually find the timing of videos and multimedia presentations excruciatingly sluggish, Jon moves through his points at a brisk pace that had me wanting to back up and take a closer look at a few points. Enter via Jon's weblog entry: (You'll want Shockwave installed and your volume up.)

Jon Udell: Heavy metal umlaut: the movie

This screencast could help a lot of people "get" Wikipedia in ways that a unguided visit or plain written/spoken explanation might not provide.

(It also makes me ponder the potential for Wikipedia or the Internet Archive to offer rapid animations of page histories directly in the browser, via DHTML/Javascript. Say, controlled in real-time by a draggable slider timeline.)

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, screencast, screencasting, waybackmachine, dhtml, javascript

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