User blog:Sarah Manley/Licensed Video Swap

Have you ever watched a video online, thought it would be great for your wiki, added it and then come back the next day only to find that the video has been taken down due to copyright issues? This happens often with videos from sites like YouTube, where the content is not properly licensed. To offer you another solution, we’ve created Wikia Video, which contains 100% licensed and high quality videos for you to use on your community.

This week we’ve released another tool to make it easier for you to replace your non-licensed videos with our licensed videos&mdash;Licensed Video Swap (LVS). This is a new tool that allows admins to quickly swap videos from outside providers to the same (or very similar) video that exists on Wikia Video. How does this all work?
 * Visit Special:LicensedVideoSwap (also available in the admin dashboard) on the community you are an admin on and you will see a list of possible matches
 * From this page you can watch the original videos, the proposed match, as well as other possible matches. Make sure to watch the videos, because thumbnails may differ even if the content is the same.
 * If the match is good, simply click swap. This will create a redirect from the other file page to this new video (if the video title is different) or replace the original video file with the licensed one (if the video title is the same). It will also update the video everywhere it is located on your community.
 * If the match doesn’t work, just hit keep, and the suggestion will be removed from the Licensed Video Swap page. Your original video will be unaffected.

You’ll also notice:
 * The History page gives you a running list of videos you’ve swapped or kept so that if you want to reverse a previous decision, you can do that from here.
 * LVS will update with new matching suggestions as new content from Wikia Video arrives, so be sure to check back. Full details on how the LVS tool works can be found here.

This is just the start for this page, and we have a list of improvements in the works. Here’s a preview:
 * Notifications - we are working on notifying you via a badge on the admin dashboard icon when new swap suggestions are available.
 * Stats - you’ll see some basic stats at the top of the page which will give you information about how many videos have matches from Wikia Video and how many videos you’ve swapped and kept

Got questions or requests? Please feel free to post them below!