MIT Solve

Solution overview

Our Solution

VideoWiki

Tagline

Making Wikipedia more accessible for people with low literacy by allowing communities to create short wiki-based videos in local languages.

Pitch us on your solution

Context:
India has 500+ million internet users, second only to China. Since 2016, India has seen a data revolution as it has the lowest 4G data costs around the world, due to the entry of “Reliance Jio” in the market. This has allowed many Indians to “join the internet”.

Problem:
However, 1 in every 4 Indian (330 million Indians) lacks the ability to read and comprehend text; therefore are unable to access Wikipedia, a predominantly text-based encyclopedia. Globally, 780 million people suffer the same issue.

Solution:
To increase the access to Wikipedia (reliable information) to such new users, VideoWiki has built a collaborative video editing software that allows the wiki community to build “neutral”, “reliable”, and “verifiable” videos wiki-style.

Impact:
With the help of VideoWiki, Wikipedia, the 5th most visited website on the world, can now be made accessible in low-literacy developing countries such as India.

Film your elevator pitch

What is the problem you are solving?

PROBLEM STATEMENT - DISCRIMINATION IN ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE

Even though Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website on the planet, there is a lack of access to Wikipedia in non-English languages and developing countries due to low literacy.

Total Potential Impact –780 Million people (Locally: 330 Million) are unable to access neutral information.

Wikipedia, one of the most successful non-profits of our time, has shown that a community-driven model can can create neutral encyclopedic content in the digital age. However, the community collaboration in Wikipedia has been restricted to text.

Q) Why there isn't wiki-community collaboration in building videos?

Reason: Technical challenges

(a) Collaborative Video Editing – Editing a text file is simple (as easy as using Google Docs). However, collaboratively editing a video file is complex, because it requires a high learning curve, and

(b) Updating published videos - Wikipedia is continuously updated as knowledge is never static. However, video files once published cannot be updated easily. For Eg: YouTube allows you to create a new video when new information comes out but does not allow you to materially modify the existing video itself.

Therefore, even after 18 years, less than 0.1 percent of the Wikipedia articles contains videos.

Who are you serving?

Venky was my building’s watchman. I once went to complain about the increasing mosquitoes near our building as this is a serious issue - increasing mosquitoes may lead to fatal diseases such as Dengue. He laughed and asked me not to worry. He said “Dengue is not fatal, it can be cured at home itself.” I asked him where he gets his information from. He said "YouTube." He clicked on the speech button on YouTube and said “डेंगू“(Hindi)

The first 2 search results (with an aggregate of 1 Million Views) talk about how Dengue can be cured at home itself by “alternative medicines”. I was shocked.

I told him to check the Hindi Wikipedia page on Dengue to see the dangers of dengue. However, he told me and I quote “If I knew how to read, I would not have been a watchman”.

I realized that for people like Venky (people with low literacy) - access to neutral information is impossible.

How VideoWiki impacts Venky?

Now, when Venky goes to Wikipedia, he can access neutral medical information on Dengue in video format in his local language (Hindi).

What is your solution?

We want to make neutral information (Wikipedia) available to Venky and 330 million Indians who do not know how to read by making neutral information available in a format which is consumable to them (videos in local languages).

What VideoWiki doesn't do?:
We don't create or edit videos.

What VideoWiki does?:
We have built a tech-based solution (a collaborative video editor software) to enables citizens and wiki-community to create and edit videos collaboratively.

Therefore, we use the power of the community to create neutral informational videos in local languages and make Wikipedia more accessible.

Website:
https://videowiki.wmflabs.org/en

Scale:
Since the marginal cost of translating our video is 0, our video can be made available not only in Indian languages, but all global languages.

For Example: Dengue Video in Estonian, Arabic, Bahasa (Indonesia).

Our Vision:

“We see a world where anyone can freely access the sum of all human knowledge, irrespective of their language or literacy level.”

Select only the most relevant.

Support communities in designing and determining solutions around critical services
Create or advance equitable and inclusive economic growth

Where is your solution team headquartered?

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Our solution's stage of development:

Prototype

More about your solution

Select one of the below:

New technology

Describe what makes your solution innovative.

2 major innovation of VideoWiki:

(1) Collaborative Video Editing Software (previously considered impossible to build)
(2) Marginal Cost of Translating a Video - $0

(1) Collaborative Video Editing Software:

Building a collaborative video editor was the biggest technical barrier for adding videos to Wikipedia. The biggest innovation what VideoWiki Software does to a video is that - it makes the video "Modular" (breaks down into smaller "slides")

Previous attempt was made by Mozilla to build a collaborative video editor called Mozilla Popcorn Maker; however, it is now defunct as it to was too complex for users to understand (because it had fancy time-lines,etc). To the contrary, VideoWiki's simplistic drag and drop user interface allows anyone to edit any part of the video without having any prior video editing experience.

(2) Marginal Cost of Translating a Video - $0

VideoWiki’s enables the same video to be accessible in multiple languages by adding a “wiki” layer to “translation”. This allows the marginal cost of translating a video to another language to be $0, allowing us to create a video across all languages.

Describe the core technology that your solution utilizes.

(1) New Technology - VideoWiki Software - An open-source web-based collaborative video editor developed by the founders using the MERN Stack.

(2) VideoWiki uses Wikipedia script as its text script.

(3) VideoWiki uses Amazon Polly as its TTS engine.

(4) To translate an image from one language to another - the users use SVG Translate Tool

Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:

Artificial Intelligence
Behavioral Design
Social Networks

Why do you expect your solution to address the problem?

Problem: People with low literacy levels do not have access to neutral information to their queries in a format that is easy for them to understand.

Solution: By making neutral information (Wikipedia) available in video format (format of choice for Indians) in their local language (easy to understand) for FREE via Wikipedia and YouTube (distribution platforms), VideoWiki makes knowledge more accessible to our target population (people with low literacy levels) who were until now excluded from accessing the sum of all human knowledge (Wikipedia).

Select the key characteristics of the population your solution serves.

Rural Residents
Peri-Urban Residents
Low-Income

In which countries do you currently operate?

Bangladesh
India
Indonesia

In which countries will you be operating within the next year?

Bangladesh
India
Indonesia

How many people are you currently serving with your solution? How many will you be serving in one year? How about in five years?

Current - NA (We are presently not measuring impact numbers as we are closely working with the wiki-community to customize the software to achieve product-market fit)

1 year Target - Hindi Language - 10 Million People
5 Year Target - Major Indian languages + Major Global
Languages - 100 Million People

What are your goals within the next year and within the next five years?

1 year goals:

(1) Move to an “All Wikipedia” user interface which will enable us to achieve product-market fit.

(2) Launch VideoWiki in Indian languages (main focus the top 4 - Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Bengali)

(3) Launch VideoWiki in a global language - Arabic (as we have a lot of interest from the Arabic wiki community), and learn from launching videos in global languages.

(4) Build VideoWiki Stack - Allowing users to build wiki-based videos in any language, leveraging the decentralized wiki-community.

5 year goals:

(1) Increase the video content on Wikipedia article from 0.1% to 20%)
(2) Impact 100 Million People
(3) Become a "sister project" of Wikipedia.

What are the barriers that currently exist for you to accomplish your goals for the next year and for the next five years?

(1) Customer - Decentralized community - There isn't 1 Wikipedia. There are 200 different language Wikipedia and each has a different community. Therefore, to expand into each language - we will have to partner up with 200 different communities.

(2) Technology - Bandwidth Cost - As we are dealing with videos, during the "Scaling" stage where we will have millions of concurrent users - bandwidth cost will be the biggest cost.

How are you planning to overcome these barriers?

(1) Decentralized Community -Presently, we are a proposed sister project. However, once we officially become a sister project of Wikipedia, the acceptance from other communities will be much easier to obtain.

(2) Bandwidth Cost - Since 2019, WMF is taking care of the bandwidth costs for VideoWiki; therefore there are no short-term issues in scaling. In the long run, we will have to look for alternative monetizing strategy such as a Freemium model where we will be monetizing the videos on YouTube while not running an ads on the same videos published on Wikipedia.

If your solution has a website, provide a link here:

https://videowiki.wmflabs.org/en

If your solution proposes an app that is available, provide a link to your app online or in an app store here:

https://videowiki.wmflabs.org/hi

If you have additional video, provide a YouTube or Vimeo link to your video here:

—

About your team

Select an option below:

Nonprofit

If you selected Other for the organization question, please explain here.

NA

How many people work on your solution team?

https://github.com/hassanamin9...

Total - 3 (Founders - Full Time; Dr James - Part Time)

Team behind VideoWiki:

1. Pratik Shetty - CEO - 3x Social Entrepreneur - INDIA

Previously led Keep India Clean, a decentralized non-profit, which had a presence in 20+ cities across India.

LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pr...

2. Hassan Amin - CTO - Full Stack Developer - EGYPT

Built VideoWiki Software from scratch.

Github Profile - https://github.com/hassanamin9...

3. Dr. James Heilman - Head of Marketing – Wikimedia Community Outreach - CANADA

Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikipedia Page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

For how many years have you been working on your solution?

1.5 years

Why are you and your team best-placed to deliver this solution?

Solution: VideoWiki is a tech based non-profit that will leverage a decentralized wiki-community for content creation.

Team Composition:

We have a

(1) A social entrepreneur who previously led a national level decentralized non-profit.

(2) A full-stack developer

(3) A Wiki community leader who is the Board of Directors at the non-profit that runs Wikipedia.

Therefore, we believe we have a strong sets of complementary skills that is required to make VideoWiki a success.

With what organizations are you currently partnering, if any? How are you working with them?

(1) Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) - the non-profit that runs Wikipedia.

We are working with Wikipedia to build a collaborative video editor for them.

How are we working for them?

Since we have a strong support from the wiki-community and our technology has been validated:

(a) We have received funding from WMF to build VideoWiki

(b) More importantly, the hosting costs (the biggest cost factor during scaling) of VideoWiki is borne by WMF.

(2) wiki-community - We are closely working with the wiki-community to iterate our product to achieve product-market fit.

Your business model & funding

Partnership potential

Why are you applying to Solve?

(1) Peer learning - Being a part of MIT Solve’s community is the most important reason for us to apply as connecting with like-minded change makers and learning from the cohortis priceless.

(2) Mentoring and Guidance
Being first time founders, finding the right mentors and network is a difficult task. We strongly believe we can find this support and guidance at MIT Solve.

(3) Exposure and Connections

Solve is one of the biggest opportunities for us to share our vision beyond our own country, India. If we become Solvers, we will be able to inspire people to make Wikipedia more accessible across the globe. Therefore, MIT Solve will allow us to spread the awareness of VideoWiki.

What types of connections and partnerships would be most catalytic for your solution?

Distribution
Talent or board members
Monitoring and evaluation
Media and speaking opportunities

If you selected Other, please explain here.

NA

With what organizations would you like to partner, and how would you like to partner with them?

Mozilla Foundation - Champions of free web - We believe Mozilla will be a strategic funding as well as technical partner of VideoWiki in the near future.

If you would like to apply for the AI Innovations Prize, describe how you and your team will utilize the prize to advance your solution. If you are not already using AI in your solution, explain why it is necessary for your solution to be successful and how you plan to incorporate it.

(1) We want to expand open source Neural Net based Text-to-Speech engines in the major Indian languages.

(2) Presently, we can translate only ".svg files" from one language to another. However, we want to use OCR technology (Tesseract) to recognize the text in any image format, allowing users to translate any image file in any language

For example:
Human leg bone in English - Translated into Tamil and Telegu

If you would like to apply for the GM Prize on Community-Driven Innovation, describe how you and your team will utilize the prize to advance your solution.

VideoWiki enables people with low literacy (under-privileged community members) access to the "sum of all human knowledge" (Wikipedia) in a format that is consumable to them - that is - (a) in Video format (b) In their local language.

Without VideoWiki, such people presently do not have access to reliable neutral information as they lack the ability to read.

If you would like to apply for the Innovation for Women Prize, describe how you and your team will utilize the prize to advance your solution.

NA

If you would like to apply for the Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion, describe how you and your team will utilize the prize to advance your solution.

NA