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_Wi... (3) Survey Report: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey/Results_-_05-0... (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
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Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation