To follow up on our earlier update on Media Viewer, I’m happy to report that we just deployed a range of new features today, based on community feedback.
1. New features
These features are now live on English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia and other Media Viewer sites:
• View original file: A prominent button to open the original image in your browser (#630)
• Show Commons link to logged out users: now all users can quickly access the file description page (#429)
• Scroll down for more info: Use either up or down arrows to open the metadata panel below the image (#697)
Try them out with these sample images (1) and let us know what you think using the built-in feedback tool in Media Viewer — or in this discussion page (2). You can find these new buttons at the lower right corner of the Media Viewer tool. All three features address frequent community requests — especially the ‘View original file’ button, which lets you use your browser to zoom in, or download images for re-use.
2. Next features
We're now working on these next features, to address other community requests:
• Instant Opt-out (#703) (*)
• Opt-out for anons (#704) (*)
• View different image sizes (#664)
• Add tooltips to Media Viewer (#546)
• Make it easier to find image information (#706)
• Disable MediaViewer for certain images (#511)
• Show attribution credits in download tool (#598)
The first two opt-out features asterisked above (*) can now be tested on
MediaWiki.org, on this demo page (3) — open the metadata panel and scroll down to the bottom, then click ‘Disable Media Viewer’. To learn more about these features, click on the relevant cards on
the current sprint wall of our planning site. (4)
We aim to deploy these next features on
MediaWiki.org by next Thursday, then to all other sites the following week. To accelerate deployment, we may back-port the most important improvements to all Media Viewer sites next week, if they test well on production.
3. Next releases
We are preparing to deploy Media Viewer on all wikis next Thursday, June 19, if all goes well with the testing of these new features. We’ll keep you posted as the release date approaches.
4. Metrics
We are now logging about 24 million global image views per day for Media Viewer, doubling overall traffic since last week. The most active sites are the English Wikipedia (10M views/day), the German Wikipedia (3M views/day) and the Spanish Wikipedia (2M views/day), as shown on our global image view dashboard (5). Global network performance has remained stable, at about 2.5 seconds per image served for 90% of our users (~4 seconds for the 95th percentile) (6).
5. Surveys
We continue to see favorable global feedback across all surveys:
• about 60% of 13,891 global respondents find the tool useful, on average.
• approval breakdown by language: French 71%, Spanish 78%, Dutch 60%, Portuguese 81%, Hungarian 63%, English 29%, German 26%.
• approval rates have stabilized for all languages that have used the tool for over a month (excluding English and German).
• English and German approval rates are lower than other languages, partly because Media Viewer was only launched one week ago on their sites.
• English daily approval rates have increased from 23% a day after launch — up to 35% a week after launch.
We expect approval rates on Enwiki and Dewiki to keep increasing over time, as new features get rolled out based on community feedback. For comparison purposes, approvals on the Hungarian Wikipedia started at 42% and grew to 63% in just a few weeks, once we addressed the most important community issues. To learn more, visit the survey results page (7).
Please let us know if you have any questions. We’ll keep you posted on the next major developments.
Thanks to everyone who gave us constructive feedback in recent days: we really appreciate your guidance and look further to improving Media Viewer further in coming days, with your help. :)
Fabrice - for the Multimedia Team
(1) Sample Images on English Wikipedia:
(2) Media Viewer Discussion:
(4) Current Sprint Wall:
(5) Global Image Views:
(6) Global Network Performance:
