User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Videos on Wikia/@comment-188432-20120928011149/@comment-188432-20120928195026

So is there a way to make the video title at the bottom of the frame optional? It's really not desirable in all cases, especially at 250px. If you've got it embedded at 500px+, as with the Hobbit thing above, I can see where it would be helpful. The text expands to fit the box width, you can read what all it says, and it seems visually "balance" versus the rest of the frame (it's a lower tenth, not a lower third).

As to your second point, the white box is there in the RVM because I've intentionally blanked MediaWiki:RelatedVideosGlobalList while waiting to see what happens on 3 October.

I've also removed the message because it's just not true on our wiki. As discussed via email with you, tardis:Category:Videos does not, in fact, contain videos. It's merely a holding area while we determine if the video meets the standards of our local video policy. Thus this feature of the RVM is incompatible with our local goals. I for one vote to turn off this newly-added "feature". Local videos should not be forced into housing their videos in a category called "Videos" — as this new white box suggests.

I think this is an attempt to have something like the "see more photos" thing that happens if you scroll through enough times on the Latest Photos module. The problem is that Wikia's merger of the Video and File namespaces gave you no real way to distinguish between videos and images. You can't have a Special:NewVideos in the way that you have Special:NewFiles. So that only leaves a category as a way to tag things.

And as toeholds go, that one is gonna send ya plummeting into the ravine. People who care about organising videos aren't gonna keep their videos in a category as broadly-named as "Videos". If this idea takes off, and you get enough partners, music wikis, for one, are gonna be goin' crazy with this thing. Can you imagine w:c:lyrics keeping all their video in one folder? That would be madness. They're going to want to do Category:Arrested Development videos, Category:Adele videos, Category:P!nk videos and so on. And we at tardis would ultimately want to go with category:trailers, category:documentary snippets, category:prequel videos, category:scenes from Doctor Who, category:scenes from Torchwood

Over time, people are going to start filing videos in a more logical fashion than just "videos". So, in the medium term, Engineering really needs to come up with some other way of tagging things.

Back when we spoke about the Video --> File namespace merger, I suggested that Videos should be autoprefixed with "Video", such that they became "double-barrelled", like. This would at least give you an API hook to exploit, because then you could create a report that would look for the prefix "File:Video". Then you could link from the RVM to that report, and the whole "see more videos" message would make much more sense.