Hi folks,
I am happy to announce that we have just released a first round of improvements to Media Viewer, based on community feedback.
The goal for these improvements is to make Media Viewer easier to use by readers and casual editors, our primary target users for this tool.
To that end, we created a new 'minimal design’, with these features:
* "More Details” button: a more prominent link to the File: page
* separate icons for “Download" and "Share or Embed" features
* an easier way to enlarge images by clicking on them
* a simpler metadata panel with fewer items
* faster image load with thumbnail pre-rendering
These features are now live on Wikimedia Commons and sister projects (1), and will be deployed on all Wikipedias this Thursday by 20:00 UTC.
Next, we plan to work on these other improvements:
* an easier way to disable Media Viewer for personal use
* a caption or description right below the image
Learn more about these features on the Media Viewer Improvements page (2). They are based on findings from our recent community consultation (3) and ongoing user research (4). For more information, visit the Help FAQ page (5).
Please let us know what you think of these new features on the Media Viewer talk page (6).
We would like to thank all the community members who suggested these improvements. Our research suggests that they offer a better user experience, that is both clearer and simpler -- and that clarifies the relationship between Media Viewer and the File: description page.
We will send another update in October, once the next round of improvements has been released.
Onward!
Fabrice and the Multimedia Team
(1) Pictures of the Day on Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_day#mediaviewer/F…
(2) Improvements page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Improvements
(3) Community suggestions:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product)/Media_Viewer…
(4) User Research:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_Viewer_Research_Round_2_(August_2014)
(5) Help page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Multimedia/Media_Viewer
(6) Talk page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#Media_Vie…
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Hi all
As you may know, the Wiki Loves Monuments competition closes tonight, and over the next couple of weeks we need to decide on the winning entries.
In the UK, we expect to have around 7000 entries, from which we need to select the 500 best for formal judging by the jury.
We’re seeking volunteers to help out with the pre-screening process, which we have to complete within the next two to three weeks.
Can you help us, please?
To help, you’ll need the following:
1. A minimum of few hours free between now and 14th October
2. A good level of ability to distinguish high-quality photography from lower quality (guidelines will be provided)
3. A fast broadband connection for downloading to your local computer several hundred high-resolution images (we’ll tell you how to do it)
4. Suitable software (eg Adobe Lightroom or some other photo-review software) for reviewing the images at full screen size.
You don’t need to be based in the UK to help.
If you can help, please get in touch now! Either reply directly to this posting, or send an email to Michael {{at}} maggs . name
Many thanks
Michael
_______________
Michael Maggs
WLM UK organiser
Hi all,
I was going thru my mail when I found this which I think is useful.
It's called the Inktober Initiative by Jake Parker, mainly for those
interested in sketching. While I am not sure how this can work out in the
Wiki World, I think it may help us in getting some quality as well as good
illustrations on to the Commons for specific topics.
Here is the link to it:
http://mrjakeparker.com/inktober
--
Regards,
Srikanth Ramakrishnan,
What goes around, may not necessarily come around, it may simply bounce
back.
Ab tak Chappan!
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rsrikanth05/Project_56
Please sign this petition for Volvo buses in Coimbatore:
https://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/the-transport-minister-tamil-nadu-in…
Hello all,
We have a central storage location for files like photos, videos and
sounds: Commons. But it seems there is no central storage space for KML
script files. Those files are used for templates on various Wikipedias to
show a route of a subject on Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc.
The files are used in this template on en-wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Attached_KML
Coding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Attached_KML/New_Jersey_Route_34
But also in templates in other Wikipedias. The same as with photos, a
central location for these files is needed to prevent every Wikipedia have
the same KML file. It seems logic to me to have a central location for this.
Can we use Commons for this?
Romaine
Thanks to everyone who took time to contribute here!
Let me try to sum up, from my understanding. For metadata information
about an image, using the imageinfo/extmetadata API is sensible for
the moment. We're aware and followed the talks on the structured data
project during Wikimania, and we're quite keen to see the results of
that when and if it starts being useful.
For thumbnails, there's no way to know if a thumbnail size has already
been rendered or not, but given that the MediaViewer has a default
list of widths that correspond to popular screen size resolutions[1],
it's a fair bet that for instance 640x and 800x would work, except for
situations when the image file is smaller than the requested thumbnail
size.
It's possible to use Special:Redirect or thumb.php to get the
thumbnail/URL, but both are actually PHP scripts that need running. So
while perhaps not ideal, it seems to make the most sense here to
generate the thumbnail URLs ourselves and hit the web server directly.
Sincerely,
Jonas
[1] https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FMultimediaViewer/e7…
On 4 September 2014 21:47, Derk-Jan Hartman <hartman.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Correct, better not rely on thumb.php, the servers will just generate
> the thumb if it is not yet present on the canonical address yet, that
> Special:Redirect can point you at.
>
> Also, almost all this info can be retrieved in one go from the api.php
> of course:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=File:30C3_Common…
>
> Lists almost all the info of the latest revision of the file.
>
> DJ
>
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Daniel Schwen <daniel(a)schwen.de> wrote:
>> I was told thumb.php is evil (for lack of caching).
>> I'm using special:redirect with the width=640 parameter.
>> Daniel
>>
>> On Sep 4, 2014 5:49 AM, "Jean-Frédéric" <jeanfrederic.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>> > The first three we can get from pretty much either API, or extract
>>>>> > directly from
>>>>> > a dump file. The latter is eluding us though, for two reasons. One is
>>>>> > that a
>>>>> > file, like 30C3_Commons_Machinery_2.jpg, is actually in the /b/ba/
>>>>> > directory -
>>>>> > but where this /b/ba/ comes from (a hash?) is unclear to us now, and
>>>>> > it's not
>>>>> > something we find in the dumps - though we can get it from one of the
>>>>> > APIs.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes, /b/ba ist based on the first two digits of the MD5 hash of the
>>>> title:
>>>>
>>>> md5( "30C3_Commons_Machinery_2.jpg" ) -> ba253c78d894a80788940a3ca765debb
>>>>
>>>> But this is "arcane knowledge" which nobody should really rely on. The
>>>> canonical
>>>> way would be to use
>>>>
>>>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Redirect/file/30C3_Commons_Machi…
>>>>
>>>> Which generates a redirect to
>>>>
>>>> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/30C3_Commons_Machinery_…
>>>>
>>>> To get a thumbnail, you can directly manipulate that URL, by inserting
>>>> "thumb/"
>>>> and the desired size in the correct location (maybe Special:Redirect can
>>>> do that
>>>> for you, but I do not know how):
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/30C3_Commons_Mach…
>>>
>>>
>>> If I am not mistaken you can use thumb.php to get the needed thumb?
>>> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/thumb.php?f=Example.jpg&width=100>
>>>
>>> (That’s what I used in my CommonsDownloader [1])
>>>
>>> [1]
>>> <https://github.com/Commonists/CommonsDownloader/blob/master/commonsdownload…>
>>>
>>> Hope that helps,
>>> --
>>> Jean-Frédéric
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Commons-l mailing list
>>> Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Multimedia mailing list
>> Multimedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Multimedia mailing list
> Multimedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia
Erik Moeller, 06/09/2014 08:44:
> - The multimedia dev team has spent a fair bit of time doing some
> initial UploadWizard refactoring and code cleanup. We've also
> contracted Neil Kandalgaonkar, the original UploadWizard developer
> (who left WMF a while ago), to help out a bit and provide some history
> on the project.
>
> - In addition, the dev team has focused a fair bit on improved
> instrumentation (measurement of user actions, success/failures), both
> for Media Viewer and Upload Wizard.
It was a very nice surprise to see NeilK again, indeed.
As for the UploadWizard plans, there wasn't a single comment from the
community in the last several months, so I left some at
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload_Wizard_feedback#WMF_plans…>
and I hope/pray more Commons users will bother to add theirs.
Nemo
Thanks to everyone who participated in the recent Media Viewer Consultation!
Our multimedia team appreciates the many constructive suggestions to improve the viewing experience for readers and casual editors on Wikimedia projects. We reviewed about 130 community suggestions and prioritized a number of important development tasks for the next release of this feature. Those prioritized tasks have now been added to the improvements list on the consultation page. (1)
We have already started development of the most critical improvements: 'must-have’ features that this consultation helped identify and that have been validated through user testing — see research findings (2) and design prototype (3). We plan to complete all these 'must have' improvements by the end of October and will deploy them incrementally, starting this week. For more details, see our improvement plan (4) and development tasks for the next 6 weeks (5).
As we release these improvements, we will post regular updates on the Media Viewer talk page (6). We invite you to review these improvements and share your feedback.
The foundation is also launching a file metadata cleanup drive (7) to add machine-readable attributions and licenses on files lack them. This will lay the groundwork for the structured data partnership (8) with the Wikidata team, to enable better search and re-use of media in our projects. We encourage everyone to join these efforts.
This community consultation was very productive for us and we look forward to more collaborations in the future.
Thanks again to all our gracious contributors. We consider ourselves lucky to have so many great community partners.
Onward!
Fabrice
(1) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product)/Media_Viewer…
(2) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_Viewer_Research_Round_2_(August_2014)
(3) http://multimedia-alpha.wmflabs.org/wiki/Rapa_Nui_National_Park#mediaviewer…
(4) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Improvements
(5) http://ur1.ca/h7w5s
(6) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(7) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive
(8) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Hi all,
ten years ago this Sunday, Wikimedia Commons went online. We've sent out
the below press release to draw some attention to this occasion, and also
published a separate blog post by Lila which goes a bit more into the
project's history (such as the very first photograph uploaded to Commons):
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/05/celebrating-the-10th-anniversary-of-w…
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tilman Bayer <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 4:54 PM
Subject: [PRESS RELEASE] Wikimedia Commons celebrates its 10th anniversary
To: press-release <press-release(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
(This press release is also available online here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Commons_celeb…
)
Wikimedia Commons celebrates its 10th anniversary
- *22 million+ images make Wikimedia Commons world’s largest freely
licensed educational media repository.*
(San Francisco, USA) September 5, 2014 -- This Sunday marks the 10th
anniversary of Wikimedia Commons
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>. Its creation was officially
announced on September 7, 2004.
More than 22 million media files have been uploaded by the Wikimedia
volunteer community over the decade since Commons came into being. The
Wikimedia Foundation is extremely grateful to have a dedicated community of
creators and institutions who continue to share their images and other
media so that the project has flourished and will continue to thrive.
Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Lila Tretikov said: “Many people
don’t know that the incredible, freely-licensed images that illustrate
Wikipedia are curated and maintained by the volunteer community of
Wikimedia Commons editors. Wikimedia Commons is the visual engine of the
Wikimedia projects, and we look forward to its next decade of
contributions, collaboration, and sharing.”
In the past ten years, creators have contributed to Commons in a variety of
ways, including the annual Wiki Loves Monuments contest, which is currently
inviting submissions through the end of September. The Guinness Book of
World Records named Wiki Loves Monuments the largest photo contest in the
world, and it has inspired more 900,000 image uploads since 2010.
On this occasion we also celebrate the partnerships with dozens of cultural
institutions (GLAM) from around the world that have donated portions of
their collections. Their contributions have allowed Wikimedia Commons to
become a vital resource for educational and historical content, and ensured
the increasing depth and richness of the illustrations for articles on
Wikipedia.
The Foundation recognizes the vibrant Wikimedia Commons community, which is
responsible for increasing the availability of freely licensed images and
information to the public. The Commons community takes its role as a
guardian of the rights of creators extremely seriously, working diligently
to confirm authorship and licensing status of the media uploaded to
Commons. This work is reflected in the low number of DMCA takedown requests
received by the Wikimedia Foundation every year.
Erik Moeller, then a volunteer Wikimedian, first proposed the Commons in
March 2004 as a common repository for the images that Wikipedians had begun
uploading to illustrate the free online encyclopedia’s growing collection
of articles. Today, Moeller is the Wikimedia Foundation’s Deputy Director
and VP of Engineering, and Commons is the world’s largest repository of
freely licensed educational media on the internet.
“The Wikimedia Commons community is the reason these freely-licensed images
exist for everyone to enjoy." said Moeller. “Our next steps are to prepare
Wikimedia Commons for the future, including support for rich, structured
metadata; a massively improved user experience for uploading media; better
tools for editing media content through the web; and better support for
video. The first decade was just the beginning.”
The Foundation is thrilled to be celebrating these and many more
achievements of the project’s first decade.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
https://wikimediafoundation.orghttps://blog.wikimedia.org/
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix,
Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation
receive 413 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most
popular web property world-wide (comScore, July 2014). Available in 287
languages, Wikipedia contains more than 32 million articles contributed by
a global volunteer community of roughly 80,000 people. Based in San
Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3)
charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Wikimedia Foundation Press Contact:
Communications, Wikimedia Foundation
+1 415-839-6885 ext 6633kmaher[image: @]wikimedia.org
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
