I found this great screencast by Jon Udell on del.icio.us. It is all about the evolution of a page on wikipedia. John describes the process here but I've included a heavily edited version below ...
Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Making of the Movie
by Jon Udell
02/07/2005
When Wikipedia's page on the heavy metal umlaut made the rounds of the blogosphere recently, I decided to make a documentary screencast that would illustrate and narrate Wikipedia's editorial process. The Wikipedia screencast clearly belongs in the feature category: it tells the story of the life of a Wikipedia page, and traces several of its evolutionary motifs.
When I visited Wikipedia's heavy metal umlaut page and began stepping through its change log, it was clear that the sequence of revisions was intrinsically interesting. If you go to the beginning and step forward through the revisions, you can watch the history of the page unfold.
The ability to scroll forward and backward along the document's timeline is, arguably, the coolest aspect of my Wikipedia screencast. The subject of this particular screencast lent itself particularly well to this treatment. This method works nicely when you're both editor and narrator. It won't help much, though, when the sound track is a conversation that's been recorded live, as is typical of the demo/discussion genre. Still, even in those cases, it may be useful to re-record the original capture in order to add a layer of narration underneath--or between segments of--the demo/discussion.
Why This Matters
Screencasting is a cool way to tell stories about software, and that's reason enough to care about it. But when the focus shifts from the software itself to our software-mediated social and political and economic lives, the true significance of the medium becomes clear.
Jon Udell is lead analyst for the InfoWorld Test Center.
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