Commons:Deletion requests/Files of User:OsmoseIt

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  • Add {{delete|reason=Fill in reason for deletion here!|subpage=Files of User:OsmoseIt|year=2024|month=December|day=11}} to the description page of each file.
  • Notify the uploader(s) with {{subst:idw||Files of User:OsmoseIt|plural}} ~~~~
  • Add {{Commons:Deletion requests/Files of User:OsmoseIt}} at the end of today's log.
This deletion discussion is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive. You can read the deletion policy or ask a question at the Village pump. If the circumstances surrounding this file have changed in a notable manner, you may re-nominate this file or ask for it to be undeleted.

Files of User:OsmoseIt

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These videos were all uploaded by User:OsmoseIt. I believe they should be deleted because they are being used as a free advertising/marketing tool for (http://www.osmosis.org/plans), which is a for-profit education software company. Specifically, each video begins with a logo and link to visit their main website. These videos should be modified to remove the advertisement at the beginning and/or deleted altogether. This would be akin to H&R Block uploading an informational video on the wiki tax brackets page with their logo and website at the beginning, and is against the spirit and rules of wikipedia. Chrisbospher (talk) 20:39, 1 January 2016 (UTC) User:Chrisbospher[reply]

  • Thanks for your feedback User:Chrisbospher. Let me consult my team and see what we can do. I'd like to let you know of a few things that may ease your concerns while I work with my team. The videos being created are part of a non-profit branch of Osmosis currently being set up. We're currently applying for our tax-exemption status. All content Osmosis makes under this non-profit arm (which includes these videos) is available to everyone, regardless of whether you pay for or even visit the Osmosis service. Anyways, let me discuss this with my team and see if we can come up with a solution we're all pleased with.OsmoseIt (talk) 21:26, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for responding. Regardless of tax-exemption vs not, linking www.osmosis.org at the beginning of each video when that leads directly to a paid subscription service is a violation of the ethos of wikipedia. Khan Academy doesn't cost $200/year. If your aim is truly non-profit with these videos, then moving the logo to the end and not linking to the website should be fine. After all, with this license, attribution isn't really what you're after so much as helping contribute educational materials. There's no reason you need to write "www.osmosis.org" when you can just say "Osmosis." Having the website link there exists for the goal of driving traffic - which is not what wikipedia is meant for.--Chrisbospher
  • Good points Chrisbospher. Initially, I completely missed the logo though. In the two videos I checked (neontal hepatitis and pneumonia) the logo only pops up for 2 seconds and has no promotional voice-over. After that point, there is no logoed header or indication of authorship. I actually like the brief note regarding authorship; saves me the effort of checking the source. (Thanks to you for looking into the authorship and business model behind this video.) This particular style of video cannot easily be modified, so the authorship will remain fairly 'constant' over time. Why not allow 2 seconds of attribution? This video is not the ideal format for a community edited wiki, but it is a heck of a lot better than no video. We need to get more dynamic elements into wiki. The safe choice seems to be chopping the 2 seconds of attribution/promotion and keeping the video.--Lucas559 (talk) 21:34, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I am not opposed to attribution, but the way in which this is done is very commercial. Also, I am highly skeptical of this company since they claimed, falsely, that they are a medical spin-off of Khan Academy despite existing for 3 years and only recently recruiting a member of Khan Academy to join their team. This indicates to me that there are ulterior motives and that this initiative to create videos might be a cynical play at a high-traffic marketing opportunity. I think the videos as is should be removed. If they were to return, they should chop off the attribution at the beginning and stick maybe just a company name or the individual author names and contributors at the end. If the goal is truly non-profit, then attribution shouldn't matter. What really queued me in was that there is no logical reason to link "www.osmosis.org" other than to drive traffic to that site - which offers expensive paid subscription services. There definitely could be a viable solution to this that is less commercial, in my opinion. I can't shake the analogy of something like a wiki page on the history of pizza with a video created by Pizza Hut with "www.pizzahut.com" at the beginning. If that doesn't sound like something wikipedia should support, then neither should these videos in their current form. --Chrisbospher
Thanks for your support User:Lucas559. User:Chrisbospher perhaps I can clear up some confusion. We are not a spin-off of Khan Academy. Could you point me to where you saw that we were? If that's written anywhere then that is indeed a mistake and I'll fix it, but to my knowledge we've never claimed to be a KA spin-off. In September 2015, the Khan Academy Medicine faculty was terminated from the organization since KA was no longer interested in creating medical content. Since then, the two KA Medicine employees at Khan Academy (which was the entire medical faculty, Rishi was one, and I'm Kyle, the other) have joined Osmosis. We've also brought along two of our contractors with us to Osmosis. Our goal, is to continue the work we were doing at KA which is to make really good medical education content available for free, to anyone. Am I right in understanding your concern is around the branding of the video itself rather than whether the Osmosis company is a for-profit or a non-profit? I'll assume that's true for now unless you say otherwise. Here's the background behind our decision to include the URL in the first 2 seconds of the video. We want attribution for the significant amount of work it takes to make these videos, and if the attribution is built right into the video itself then it can easily be shared around under the CC-BY-SA license without anyone having to do anything. The idea of this 2 second attribution in the video is common in the internet video industry. We did the same with all our KA Medicine videos. So that's why the logo is there. Now the reason we present the logo as a URL is because if we just said "Osmosis", well then you'd think of the scientific concept and not realize it was an attribution. So that's why we made it a URL. It was a design choice to easily tell users they were looking at the name of the people who made the video. That's all. I don't think your analogy of Pizza Hut or H & R is completely parallel to Osmosis. I see your concern but I don't think it's exactly the situation you're describing. Anyways, like I said, I'm talking to my team and we're deciding on what the best course of action is. This will likely take several days as it is the winter holidays, so I do ask that you bare with us.OsmoseIt (talk) 23:00, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the response. I respectfully disagree with your assertions. Firstly, as you may of just found, in the Project Medicine it clearly said that you guys "formed osmosis" after splitting from Khan Academy. This implies an endorsement or affiliation that was not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Videos (check the edit history). If I hadn't pointed this out, others would have been led to believe this piece of misinformation. The labelling of Osmosis as an "organization" is misleading when it was stated above that it still exists as a for-profit company and there is no non-profit division currently in existence. Secondly, the analogy with Pizza Hut applies directly. Pizza Hut, like Osmosis, is a for-profit company which in my hypothetical example was creating information videos with their website linked at the front. If you navigate to www.osmosis.org you are not taken to a non-profit site of free videos, but are led directly to "Start 1 Month Trial" and linked to "Plans & Pricing." Perhaps you should create a different website and/or URL. The comment about users thinking that Osmosis is the scientific concept and not the website is a problem with company branding and doesn't exempt you from wiki community standards. Now that I've had time to read the blog and learn more about this company, it's very clear that the founding team is creating a profitable business (that's fine for them) and are using free videos on wikipedia as a way to funnel more users into the service. It's a clever play in the name of education. I still think these videos should be deleted and/or modified to remove funnelling wikipedia readers into an expensive for-profit service. --Chrisbospher

Chrisbospher, can you tell me exactly which policy you believe this two-second logo and URL are violating? It's definitely not an advertisement (since that would have to be about the organization itself). I think you have perhaps misunderstood Commons' rules and purpose. There are many videos that begin with logos or identifiers for the source. There's no policy against that. We have plenty of self-identifying links to the authors' paywalled, subscription, or otherwise expensive services; there's no policy against that, either. There's also no policy that treats for-profit and non-profit organizations differently. Commons takes educational materials from all types of organizations, without caring about their motivation. We should keep all of these and stop wasting time discussing this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:04, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, WhatamIdoing. I believe it violates the advertising policy and using wikipedia as a mode of generating website traffic. Osmosis is a for-profit company who is embarking on a large campaign of creating videos on dozens of wikipedia pages for the explicit purpose of generating more interest in their subscriptions. Furthermore, if you read above you'll see that they are attempting to hide what they are by claiming they are an organization (even registering a .org domain) when it's a company just like Kaplan. Another point of obfuscation is that they attempted to use the goodwill from the Khan Academy name to claim they are an offshoot, when this was not the case (and has since been edited by the poster when I pointed it out). The question here is: Do we want wikipedia to become a way for companies to compete for high-traffic wiki pages? The Pizza Hut analogy I mentioned above probably wouldn't stay posted, neither would an information video on the SAT posted by Princeton Review, or an MCAT wiki overview posted by Kaplan. Now, if Osmosis happened to have several of these videos and then open-sourced them on Wikipedia, that might be a different story than what their official claim is, which is to produce videos specifically to post on wikipedia. Since every video begins with a URL to their paid subscription service, clearly their goal is not to contribute to general education but to leverage wikipedia as a marketing platform. What is particularly worrisome is that if you follow the linked URL, you aren't even taken to a place where you can easily watch the rest of their produced videos - you are only funnelled into an advertisement. In this case, replacing the URL with only the logo or placing that at the end of the video makes more sense. We should be okay with keeping the videos eventually if they are modified to function less as funnels to their paid website and more as general education. Chrisbospher ([[User talk:Chrisbospher|
  1. Properly crediting the name of the authors/producers at the start of a video is not "advertising" according to Commons. Therefore, this is not a policy violation.
  2. We don't actually care what their motivations are or what happens to their website. It's just irrelevant. Uneducational garbage gets deleted, even if your motivations are pure; good education materials get kept, even if your motivations are corrupt. Only the product matters.
  3. Your guess about their business strategy has the advantage of being cynical; my guess at their strategy has the advantage of knowing that editors at the English Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine have been begging these particular people to release their medicine-related videos under a Commons-compatible license for years. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:50, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
My guess has the advantage of being more familiar with Osmosis, since they have not been producing medical videos for years and the new employees have been around for a few months at the most. Additionally, I have the advantage of knowing that many of the "medical content editors" at Osmosis are convinced by the CEO to work for free as if they are contributing to general med education, only to have their work directly be put behind a paywall that is sold to students and institutions. (Could you imagine if Wikipedia put paywalls behind content that was created for free?). Not only that, but when I was a member I saw many copyrighted images behind the paywall, so it's hard to know what to think about their approach. It's quite the bait-and-switch if you've ever heard of it, and is highly unethical. In terms of your purported "begging," Khan Academy vs. begging Osmosis is also a completely different story. In your "we don't care" link, it brings up that links that go directly to selling things should be restricted, which this is the case. The URL doesn't lead to a place to easily find or consume additional videos, so it's purely a marketing URL. I think the real cynic here is Osmosis, which is taking advantage of the goodwill of open sourced education and then twisting it into a personal profit. If they change their corporation to a non-profit I'll eat my hat. Until then, I'm not a fan of this facade.--Chrisbospher
  • The Khan offshoot claim was a misunderstanding by me, this new group at Osmosis includes two prior employees from Khan. To clarify I have no relationship with Osmosis so it is not "they" who have made the claim.
  • The first time you edited my comments are here [1] I warned you here at 23:25 [2] and yet you did it again at 23:52 [3]
  • Refs to The Lancet funnel traffic to The Lancet's website.

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:49, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I edited your comment not because I was disregarding your request, but because the content of what you wrote was inaccurate. You referred to Osmosis as an "organization" when it is a "corporation." The ".org" is a misnomer, because it's the URL and not the status of how it is registered as an entity. Additionally, I visited www.osmosis.org which is purportedly the source and could not find any links to additional videos. Therefore the external link doesn't seem to be a source at all. If the external link actually led to more videos, then it might be a different story.--Chrisbospher
All corporations are organizations. A non-profit organization is usually incorporated, too. The only legal difference between a non-profit and a for-profit organization is what happens with the profits in the end (assuming there are any). You have only changed a perfectly accurate comment into another equally accurate comment. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:23, 5 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Keep Merely mentioning the creating organisation and its website is not spam; it's fundamentally no different from saying "Video by Chrisbospher, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Chrisbospher". Maybe it's against the spirit and rules of wikipedia, but did you know that we're not Wikipedia? Educational videos merely with attribution are definitely within our scope, and if there's no problem with a video aside from it being in violation of one Wikipedia's standards, we're not going to delete it: what I saw of these videos is quite useful as basic explanations, and I can easily imagine them getting used by people not affiliated with any Wikimedia Foundation wikis. Point out an additional problem with all of the videos, and maybe they'll be deleted, or point out additional problems with specific videos, and maybe those ones will be deleted, but merely including attribution at the start of a video is not enough for deletion from Commons. Nyttend (talk) 13:53, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I understand your comment about now being part of wikipedia, but these videos are being inserted directly into wikipedia pages. Are you saying that rather than delete requests for wikimedia I should be editing those wikipedia pages directly to remove them? Browsing wikimedia for educational materials makes sense, but where the line seems to be drawn is when you start habitually making your presence a part of every medical wikipedia page to direct that traffic. Chrisbospher
Can you explain to us your relationship to the issue in question Chris? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:23, 5 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
OsmoseIt, I think we can probably keep these if, and only if, you promptly change the source and author lines. I think it is very clear that these are not the "own work" of one person as you claimed in the file descriptions. .     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 12:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
(Jameslwoodward) Done. Thanks for the suggestion.OsmoseIt (talk) 16:38, 8 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Keep—The fact that a file needs improvement is not grounds for a deletion. These videos are excellent and are being used on Wikipedia as we speak. You haven't quoted any policy as to why they should be deleted. CFCF (talk) 15:31, 10 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
CFCF, the fact that the source and author were not correct is grounds for deletion. See Commons:Licensing#License_information which is very explicit and, as you will see, says that the source and author information must be provided..     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 12:45, 20 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, although strictly speaking not a deletion matter. The files suffer from vast over-categorization. They probably should have only one category each or perhaps two. Please read the policy and then go thought them and make appropriate removals.
Also, Category:Videos from Osmosis must be a user category, but I have taken care of that, see Commons:User-specific galleries, templates and categories policy.
Note to closing Admin -- Please don't close this until the cats are fixed, or it likely will never happen. .     Jim . . . . (Jameslwoodward) (talk to me) 12:44, 20 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kept: as per discussion. Categories fixed. --P 1 9 9  ✉ 16:54, 20 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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