Greetings!
Here’s our weekly update on what our multimedia team is working on. We hope you find this
report helpful.
1. Media Viewer Releases
Today, we just enabled Media Viewer (1) by default on Wikimedia Commons. Next week, we
will release the tool on the English, German, Italian and Russian Wikipedias, as well as
WikiSources in all languages; if all goes well, we plan to roll out on all wikis the
following week, as outlined in our release plan (2). Overall response has been largely
favorable, as reported before (3). Please share your feedback on the discussion page (4).
2. Last week’s sprint
Last week, we worked mostly on Media Viewer and Tech Debt (GWToolset and Image Scaler
issues), as outlined in our meeting notepad (5). On the Media Viewer front, we fixed a
number of bugs, upgraded our metrics with a global image view dashboard (6), investigated
then ruled out a simple zoom link, and estimated the server load of Media Viewer when
deployed to all wikis (7). On the Technical Debt front, we fixed bugs for the GW Toolset,
and added a throttle to prevent it from processing too many images at once; we also
investigated root causes of the recent Image Scaler outage, identifying a few promising
solutions to work on next.
3. This week’s sprint
This week, we’re planning to split our time evenly between Media Viewer, Tech Debt and
Upload Wizard work, as shown in our current sprint board (8). For Media Viewer, we’ll make
it easier to discover metadata and add more tooltips to address community requests, as
well as run more tests in different browsers like IE9. For Tech Debt, we’ll start
generating reference thumbnails to save CPU time on image scalers, as well as lower the
frequency of GWToolset jobs. For Upload Wizard, we’re starting to collect usage data on
key steps in the upload workflow, as part of a funnel analysis that will tell us where
people drop off most often; we’re also analyzing the feedback and bugs backlog, to
identify major pain points -- and generating first design ideas to address them; lastly,
we’re getting UploadWizard ready for jQuery 1.9, so we can get more familiar with the
current code base.
4. Next steps
Through the middle of June, we plan to gradually spend more time on Upload Wizard, once
Media Viewer has been successfully deployed, as shown in our current cycle board (9). In
coming weeks, we will host a number of community discussions to prioritize key issues and
review possible solutions together. Based on this feedback, we aim to implement some of
the most promising solutions through the end of the summer.
5. Thanks
We’re very grateful to all the community and team members who keep guiding our progress at
each step of the way. We couldn’t do this work without you -- and consider ourselves lucky
to have such great partners. Today, we would like to give special thanks to Aaron Arcos, a
former Google employee who volunteered for 5 months with our team, and was a wonderful
coach and collaborator: he helped us focus on quality, refine our agile development
process and get serious about unit testing, as described in the exit video he put
together, with interviews from our team (10).
We look forward to more great collaborations with you all. :)
Be well,
Fabrice - for the Multimedia Team
(1) About Media Viewer:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(2) Large Wiki Releases:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan#Large_W…
(3) Survey Report:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey/Results_-_05-…
(4) Media Viewer page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(5) Multimedia Sprint Notes:
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/multimedia-weekly-meeting-2014-05-14
(6) Global Image View Dashboard:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/graphs/mmv_image_views_global
(7) Global Server Load Estimate:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Metrics/Estimations
(8) Current Sprint:
http://ur1.ca/gtyrp
(9) Current Cycle Board:
http://ur1.ca/h7w5s
(10) Volunteering at Wikipedia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxW8TMMA05k
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)