Metacafe became the first video site to open its metadata for community contributions and editing. Metacafe’s more than 34 million unique monthly viewers can now add and improve the tags, titles, descriptions and more for any of the millions of videos on the site. This feature, called Wikicafe, is central to Metacafe’s campaign to eliminate tag abuse and improve video search and recommendations. The additional benefit to this mechanism is that this may help to make the in-video advertisements contextually more accurate and Metacafe would therefore be able to charge higher ad rates.

“A video with incomplete or inaccurate metadata is like a book without a cover – you don’t know what it’s about, which shelf it belongs on, or who’s most likely to enjoy it,” said Eyal Hertzog, founder and chief creative officer for Metacafe. “Simply put, we live by the mantra ‘it’s the metadata, stupid!’.” Below is a chart of Metacafe’s traffic for the past 12 months.

Wikicafe enables people to share their knowledge about and passions for particular topics by adding details about the content of a video. For example, a music buff can add information about the band featured on a video’s soundtrack. A dog lover can tag a video with the correct name of the breed it features. An experienced world traveler can add background about the location in which a video is set. With such contributions, members of the Metacafe community are helping build a rich database of video information that makes it easier for them and others to find and discover videos they like.

Additionally, Wikicafe enables people who are annoyed by misleading tags or thumbnails or hate misspellings in titles or descriptions to make corrections right on the video page. Video metadata can also be translated into one of six languages currently supported by Wikicafe: Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish. Clicking “Edit Video Details” on any Metacafe video page opens Wikicafe and enables viewers to make and save changes that are immediately updated on the site and visible to Metacafe’s large and growing audience.

“When I come to Metacafe, I want to watch great videos – not be bombarded with messages about someone’s get-rich-quick scheme that has nothing to do with the content of the videos,” said Eric Mercon, a long-time Metacafe viewer who’s been beta testing the new feature. “Wikicafe lets me eliminate that junk and improve the overall experience. I enjoy editing video information and like being part of the solution to a problem that is plaguing many sites.”