Turn on and manage community contributions

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 Transcriptions.
  3. From the top, select Community.
  4. Select Turn on.

Creator Studio Classic instructions

Turn community contributions on or off with one click by going directly to your account or follow the steps below. 

Note: Following these steps to turn community contributions on or off will apply the setting to all videos – any setting applied to individual videos will be reset. You can still turn it off for individual videos.

  1. Click on your profile picture and then Creator Studio.
  2. On the left, click Translations & Transcriptions and then Community Contributions.
  3. Click Turn on for all videos. If you can't see that option, click Settings Settings in the top right-hand corner, then click Turn on for all videos. You may need to choose a default language for your channel first.

To turn off this feature for all videos, click Settings Settings and then Turn off for all videos.

Turn on or off for a specific video
  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left 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 Transcriptions.
  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.

Creator Studio Classic instructions

  1. Go to your Video Manager.
  2. Next to the video for which you want to allow fan contributions, click Edit.
  3. Under the video, select the Advanced settings tab. 
  4. Under 'Community contributions', select Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions and subtitles/CC.
  5. Click Save changes.

To turn off this feature, untick the box next to Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions and subtitles/CC for the video for which you don't want to allow fans to contribute.

Turn on or off for a group of selected videos
  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left 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.

Creator Studio Classic instructions

  1. Go to your Video Manager.
  2. Tick the boxes next to the videos that you'd like to edit.
  3. At the top of the page, click Actions and then More actions and then Community contributions.
  4. Select Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions and subtitles/CC.
  5. Select Submit.
 
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.

Note: If you're in YouTube Studio beta, select Creator Studio Classic in the left-hand menu to follow these steps.
  1. In the top right-hand corner, click on your profile picture, then Creator Studio.
  2. In the left-hand panel, click Translations & Transcriptions and then Community Contributions.
  3. You can take the following actions: Manage and approve contributions in progress.

    To see submissions in progress, go to the In review tab and select Review next to the item that you want to manage.

    • Approve and publish submissions: At the top of the page, select Publish.
    • Edit submission: Make any corrections in the box below the submission. Select Exit to save to drafts or Publish to approve.
    • Report spam or abuse: Select Report.
    • Ask the community to make improvements: At the bottom of the page, select Needs more work.
    Remove or edit published content

    Go to the Published tab and select View next to the track that you want to manage.

    • Edit submissions: Select Edit. Make your edits and select Publish edits.
    • Delete submissions for subtitles/CC: Select Actions and then Delete.
    • 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 shows 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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