Greetings!
I’m happy to announce that we just enabled Media Viewer by default on nine more pilot sites: Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Slovak, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
1. Overview
We’re releasing Media Viewer gradually, a few wikis at a time, to test it carefully before deploying to the next batch of sites. So far, the tool has been well received on our first pilot sites: Catalan, Hungarian and Korean Wikipedias, as well as on English Wikivoyage, as outlined below. Next Thursday, we plan to deploy to some of our first large wikis: Dutch, French, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish Wikipedias. Learn more about this release plan here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
2. Metrics
We’re now logging about 336,000 image views per day on a global basis, as shown on this graph:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv
About half of these views are coming from the Hungarian Wikipedia, and the rest from Wikimedia Commons, English Wikipedia and other pilots. More metrics dashboards are available for selected sites on this page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Metrics
3. Performance
We are now tracking image load performance globally, and fist results suggest that images take over a second to load on average (50th percentile), but can take up to 5 seconds when looking at worst case for most users (90th percentile), as shown in this graph:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/graphs/mmv_performance_image_global
We’re also encouraged by early comparisons of the time it takes to open an image with Media Viewer versus on a Commons File, the current default: the mean load times for these two methods seem to be very close, on the order of 2-3 seconds on a cold cache, as shown in this preliminary graph:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv#media_viewer_vs_file_p…
4. Surveys
We are now running surveys in multiple languages, to validate whether or not this feature is useful to readers and editors alike. Overall response so far is generally favorable. Here are the current results:
* English Survey: 64% find the tool useful, 12% don’t find it useful, 24% are not sure (50)
* Hungarian Survey: 47% find the tool useful, 47% don’t find it useful, 5% are not sure (268)
* Catalan Survey: 62% find the tool useful, 15% don’t find it useful, 23% are not sure (13)
We’re also starting new surveys in French, German and Portuguese. You can find links to live results and comments from all these surveys here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey#Results
5. Usability
For the past few months, we have been running a series of usability studies, with positive results. Testers are typically able to complete most common tasks successfully, and they have helped us find new ways to improve the user experience for areas they found confusing.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Usability_testing
6. Your feedback
How can we improve Media Viewer? Are there any critical issues that should be addressed for this first release? Please let us know what you think of this tool — and join other users from around the world on this discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
We’d also be grateful if you could take this quick survey, to let us know how Media Viewer works for you. It only takes a minute and means a lot to us:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/media-viewer-1?c=email
Many thanks to all the team and community members who made this launch possible!
Enjoy,
Fabrice — for the Multimedia Team
P.S.: New improvements take about 2 weeks to get deployed to all wikis. If you would like to test the latest version of Media Viewer, follow the test tips on this demo page on MediaWiki.org:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Thanks again to those who created Echo. It is being used widely in my circles and I get lots of useful notices these days.
* I would like to suggest making more of the notices send email by default, especially thanks notifications.
* I heard another user suggest sending a notification when a file that someone uploads to Commons is added to a Wikipedia article. I think that is a great idea. Can this be done?
* I would like to ask about the thanks system on Meta. I started to use the Echo thanks system to thank who are answering questions on the Annual Plan talk page, including some of you on this list, and I ran into some differences from English Wikipedia. On Meta I am asked for the revision ID of the edit for the thanks notification, and after thanking a user the "thank" link for an edit doesn't change to "thanked". Will Meta thanks notifications be upgraded in the future to function like ENWP's does?
Pine
Here's a recent article from The Economist. Some of the reader comments about the article were interesting, especially considering the population that is likely to be reading and commenting about an article in The Economist.
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21597959-popular-online-encyclo…
Pine
Hi folks,
We’d love to hear what you think of Media Viewer, our new multimedia browser, as we get ready to release it more widely in coming weeks.
Is Media Viewer useful to you? What do you like most? least? How can we improve this tool? Are there any critical improvements we should consider before launch?
Here are three ways you can share your feedback about this new viewing experience:
1. Join our IRC chat
We’re hosting a live IRC chat in a few hours, this Wed. Apr. 9 at 18:00 UTC on #wikimedia-office.
All are welcome! Drop by to meet the team, share your comments, ask questions about this release, or make suggestions for improvement.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
2. Discuss this tool
Meet other beta users from around the world on our Media Viewer discussion page. Here, we talk about new features, bugs and ideas with our community.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
3. Take a quick survey
Can you tell us how Media Viewer works for you? It only takes a minute and means a lot to us.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/media-viewer-1?c=email
Hope to hear from you on one of these channels. Your feedback will help us improve the tool and launch it more smoothly.
Speak to you soon,
Fabrice — for the Multimedia Team
P.S.: If you haven’t tried Media Viewer yet, visit this test page on MediaWiki.org:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
An editor wrote this on Jimbo's talk page. I hope you will appreciate this as much as I do.
"Because you don't hear it enough"
"I love it here. I love Wikipedia. It's got its problems - lots of them. It has its issues. It's not perfect. But that, in its way, is the point. It's not a complete encyclopedia, it's an encyclopedia that you, and I, and everyone else on the planet (and maybe people not on it) are welcome to edit, as long as we're trying to make it a better encyclopedia. It is flawed, but that is the essence of humanity's works. So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for making this magical, wonderful, flawed, human endeavor. - Jorgath (talk) (contribs) 19:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)"
Greetings!
I am happy to let you know that we have just launched Media Viewer 0.2 on our first pilot site, MediaWiki.org, where it is now enabled by default for all users (previously, it was only available as a Beta Feature).
Media Viewer aims to improve the multimedia viewing experience on Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites, to display images in larger size and with less clutter — as well as invite more people to use our images.
We invite you to try out this new tool today, which you can do on this test page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo
Please let us know what you think on this discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
You can learn more about this new feature here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
After this first pilot, we plan to enable Media Viewer by default for these next pilot sites:
• April 17 - Confirmed: Catalan, Hungarian, Korean, English Wikivoyage
• April 24 - Proposed: Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Slovak, Vietnamese
Based on these first pilot results, we plan wider releases on larger wikis in the following weeks, with a goal to deploy to all wikis next month. Our release schedule will be based on new findings at each stage of deployment. If this product performs well and meets user needs, we may accelerate the deployment pace -- or we may slow it down for some sites, as needed.
More details are available on our updated Release Plan:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
To discuss this release and review the final product together, we invite you to join our next IRC chat, on Wed. Apr. 9 at 18:00 UTC (11am PT). We also invite you to try out the tool on your own wikis, where it is available for early testing as a Beta Feature in your user preferences, as described above.
Please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this release. And many thanks to all the community members who helped create this feature with us in recent months!
We look forward to bringing a richer multimedia experience to your community very soon.
Regards as ever,
Fabrice
on behalf of the Multimedia Team
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
I just created my first article in a long time on enwp. And after just a
few minutes I got a notfication that it had been reviewed (Yay!). That is a
very positive message, and I then realized it is not enabled on svwp.
Is there a reason for holding back on that or is it just a slip?
*Best regards,Jan Ainali*