Hi,

We’re planning to make a change on May 9, 2011 [1]: We’ll replace the link in the Wikimedia Commons sidebar that currently points to Commons:Upload with a link to Special:UploadWizard (in all languages). If all goes well, we'll also invite Wikimedia wikis to begin changing their Commons upload links to Special:UploadWizard.

If you haven't tried the UploadWizard yet, go to

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard

to test it.

We’ve a made it easier to get back to the old form from Special:UploadWizard, and added an invitation to help with localization.

NOTE: We still need lots of additional translations, so if you can help with that, please do so on translatewiki.net.

Sign up for translatewiki: http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:FirstSteps

Translation group: http://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-uploa...

Current status: http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Multichill/stats

The quality, status and up-to-dateness of translations of the old upload form is very mixed. By switching all languages immediately to UploadWizard and working with translatewiki.net, we're hoping to accelerate the process of getting solid localizations across the board. We apologize for the short term inconvenience this may cause. [2]

The old upload process will remain indefinitely available. There’s no reason to remove it. This is purely a change to the default process we’re exposing to the world. We feel we’ve fixed all the obvious bugs that we know about (there are some annoying bugs that we do know about left, but they’re not showstoppers). The best way for us to find the remaining bugs is to have people actually use it as their first upload experience and to continue to receive and process feedback.

As a reminder, here’s what UploadWizard gets us: - Up to 10 files can be uploaded in one batch. We are hoping to expand this feature set to allow for parallel uploading, multi-file selection, and more. - Some metadata is automatically extracted and pre-filled. - You can see thumbnails before you’re completing your upload. - Error cases should be handled in a clear and understandable interface. - Less clutter due to systematic learning design as opposed to mixing instructions and process. - Much, much friendlier to new users as validated by our usability studies.

Major remaining gotchas:

- If your entire upload takes longer than 25 minutes, it fails. Very annoying, we know. Not entirely trivial to fix but we know how and we’ll get to it soon.

- Thumbnails for some file formats (video and audio, for instance) are not shown during the upload process. This should not affect the success of the actual upload.

- Right-to-left support is far from perfect and consistent. Suggestions for improvement are most welcome. If you speak an RTL language, please hammer the wizard and tell us is if it's a showstopper issue for you -- we don't think that's the case, but we need your input.

- There are a number of other known cases where uploads will stall and the user has no option to fix the problem. It happens much less often than it does with the old upload form, and we believe the most important bugs (e.g. title blacklist related failures) will be squashed as part of this release. There is a link to provide feedback right in the subtitle of the page – if you do have a problem, please report as much detail as possible!

How do we know the new process is much improved? Through qualitative studies of the upload interface. See the report on the multimedia usability project for details and videos:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_usability_project_report

We’re also continually user-testing the software through quick and cheap user-tests using usertesting.com -- we’ll share our first batch of test videos soon.

Please continue to add your thoughts & comments to the feedback page, and we’ll aim to respond in a speedy fashion.

I'm very excited about this change and I hope you are, too. :-) We've received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback regarding the UploadWizard experience, and while there are still lots of ways in which we can do better, we hope you'll agree that it's a huge step forward.

All best, Erik

== Notes ==

[1] We may choose to push the date forward a bit if we run into deployment issues.

[2] There's a subheader in the UploadWizard which takes you back to the old upload form. To ensure that at least the link to the old form is translated into your language (if you're an administrator or can find one), you can edit the following user interface message in your language (add "/language code" to the URL, e.g. "/pl" for Polish):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Mwe-upwiz-subhead-alt-upload