Turn on and manage community contributions

Community contributions going away soon
Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels after 28 September 2020. Community contributions allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles and title/descriptions to videos. This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse so we're removing them to focus on other creator tools. You can still use your own captions, automatic captions and third-party tools and services. You have until September 28, 2020 to publish your community contributions before they're removed. 

Your community of viewers can help you to reach a larger audience by adding title, description, subtitles and closed captions to your videos. Once you have some language captions for a video, your community can submit translations to help you reach a global audience.

When content is submitted, you can manage it by reviewing, editing, publishing, flagging or rejecting it. Your community can also review the content, and it will automatically be published when it receives enough reviews.

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Turn community contributions for videos on or off

Before your community can submit titles, descriptions, closed captions or subtitles, you need to turn on community contributions. You can turn on community contributions for selected videos or make it the default setting for all videos on your channel. Learn how fans contribute and review this content for your videos.

Note: If you have community captions turned on, you'll have to manually review them before they're published.

Turn on contributions for all videos

Follow these steps to turn on community contributions for all videos. Note that this change will reset any settings applied to individual videos. 

  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left-hand menu, select Subtitles.
  3. From the top, select Community.
  4. Select Turn on.
Turn on or off for a specific video
  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left-hand menu, select Videos.
  3. Click the title or thumbnail of the video that you'd like to edit.
  4. From the left-hand menu, select Subtitles.
  5. If you haven't already, set the language for your video.
  6. Select the Community Contributions box and choose between On for this video and Off for this video.
Turn on or off for a group of selected videos
  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left-hand menu, select Videos.
  3. Tick the boxes next to the videos that you'd like to edit.
  4. Select Edit, then Community contributions.
  5. Choose whether you'd like them to be On or Off, then select Update videos.
 
Once you've turned on community contributions, make sure to let your viewers know that they can help with reviewing and translating videos.

Manage community contributions

Once transcriptions or translations have been submitted, the content goes through a review process. YouTube moderates these submissions for spam and inappropriate content, while taking input from you and your community.

Once enough contributions have been added, the community will be asked to help review them. After review, you can publish contributions to show on your videos.

Make sure that you carefully review, edit, flag or reject content before publishing. You can also edit or delete content that's been published.

  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left-hand menu, select Subtitles.
  3. Select the Community tab.
  4. You can take the following actions:

Manage and approve contributions in progress

To see submissions in progress, click 'In Review' for a language beneath the Subtitles column.

  • Approve and publish submissions: At the top of the page, select Publish.
  • Edit submission: Click on the text and make any corrections. Changes will be saved automatically when you click outside of the caption that you edited. Select Publish to approve.
  • Report spam or abuse: Select Report.
  • Ask the community to make improvements: At the top of the page, select Needs more work.
Remove or edit published content

To see published content, click 'Published' for a language beneath the Subtitles column.

  • Edit submissions:  Click on the text and make any corrections. Changes will be saved automatically when you click outside of the caption that you edited. Select Publish to approve.
  • Delete submissions for subtitles/CC: Click the X to the right of the submission
  • Delete submissions for title and description: Find your video in your Video Manager. Select Edit and then Info & settings and then Translations and select Delete  next to the language in question.
Tip: If the translations are in a language that you don't know, check the Google translation. This translates the community-added translation back to the original language.

Give credit to contributors

When you allow community contributions on your channel or video(s), we automatically publish the top contributors in the video's description. Contributors can only get credit if they have a YouTube channel and haven't already opted out of credits.

  • The main five contributors per language are shown, ranked by their contribution to the published version.
  • The contributor list is shown in translated versions of the video description (if applicable).

You can also see the list of contributors under the Subtitles & CC tab next to the version that they added to.

Note that currently only contributors to subtitles/CCs can be credited in this way.

Note: Make sure that you check the quality of community contributions before they're published on your video. Learn how to manage spam on community contributions.
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