Greetings!
Last week, the multimedia team had its first planning meeting for 2014-15 and we would like to share our proposed goals for the coming year (July 2014 to June 2015).
1. Goals
This year, we would like to focus on improving the contribution and editing workflows, while addressing our technical debt and fixing critical bugs. To that end, we aim to:
• engage more users to contribute media
• add more media content on our sites
• provide a smoother experience for all
• fix critical bugs to make things work better.
2. Users
Last year, we focused mostly on readers, with a focus on Media Viewer. This year, we propose to switch our focus to these users:
• contributors -- the people who upload media on our sites
• editors -- the people who add media on articles
Note that we aim to support both casual and experienced users within each group. We will initially focus on Commons users, then move on to serve more users on Wikipedia and other sites. Secondary user groups include admins, campaign organizers and developers.
3. Activities
This year, we propose to invest our time on these main activities:
• Structured Data: improve the way we store metadata — an important goal, because most other features depend on it.
• Critical Bugs: fix urgent bugs in our infrastructure -- and become more familiar with our entire code base, including:
- Image scalers, Core media handling, TimedMediaHandler, Media backend storage, Media Viewer, etc.
• Features: develop or improve user-facing projects, including:
- Upload Wizard -- our main user-facing project this year (includes Commons Upgrade and Modal Tool for other sites)
- Other Features -- Media Viewer 0.3, File Notifications, File Page, Kaltura Player Upgrade, Campaign Tools
4. Roadmap
We plan to spread out these activities throughout the coming year, as proposed in this rough timeline:
• Q1: metrics, upload wizard fixes, structured data planning, bug fixes
• Q2: structured data on Commons, new upload features, bug fixes
• Q3: more structured data, modal upload tools, media viewer, notifications, bug fixes
• Q4: insert media tools, A/V upgrade, file pages, more bug fixes
For a more detailed roadmap, visit this planning page for 2014-2015:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/2014-15_Goals
Note that these first milestones may be adjusted in coming weeks (and will be updated on a quarterly basis), based on prior quarter's results, as well as community and team discussions. To that end, we invite you to leave your feedback on this plan’s discussion page.
5. Upload Wizard
We have now started our first phase of planning and development on Upload Wizard, and have prepared a first task list and proposed timeline on this updated project page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard
In coming weeks, we will host focused community discussions about this Upload Wizard plan and its key features. We look forward to discussing some of the main challenges and solutions together. For now, please leave comments on that project’s discussion page.
Many thanks to all the community and team members who took the time to guide our work this year. We look forward to more great collaborations with you next year. :)
Regards as ever,
Fabrice - for the Multimedia Team
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Hi everyone,
To follow up on our earlier update on Media Viewer, I’m happy to report that we just deployed a range of new features today, based on community feedback.
1. New features
These features are now live on English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia and other Media Viewer sites:
• View original file: A prominent button to open the original image in your browser (#630)
• Show Commons link to logged out users: now all users can quickly access the file description page (#429)
• Scroll down for more info: Use either up or down arrows to open the metadata panel below the image (#697)
Try them out with these sample images (1) and let us know what you think using the built-in feedback tool in Media Viewer — or in this discussion page (2). You can find these new buttons at the lower right corner of the Media Viewer tool. All three features address frequent community requests — especially the ‘View original file’ button, which lets you use your browser to zoom in, or download images for re-use.
2. Next features
We're now working on these next features, to address other community requests:
• Instant Opt-out (#703) (*)
• Opt-out for anons (#704) (*)
• View different image sizes (#664)
• Add tooltips to Media Viewer (#546)
• Make it easier to find image information (#706)
• Disable MediaViewer for certain images (#511)
• Show attribution credits in download tool (#598)
The first two opt-out features asterisked above (*) can now be tested on MediaWiki.org, on this demo page (3) — open the metadata panel and scroll down to the bottom, then click ‘Disable Media Viewer’. To learn more about these features, click on the relevant cards on the current sprint wall of our planning site. (4)
We aim to deploy these next features on MediaWiki.org by next Thursday, then to all other sites the following week. To accelerate deployment, we may back-port the most important improvements to all Media Viewer sites next week, if they test well on production.
3. Next releases
We are preparing to deploy Media Viewer on all wikis next Thursday, June 19, if all goes well with the testing of these new features. We’ll keep you posted as the release date approaches.
4. Metrics
We are now logging about 24 million global image views per day for Media Viewer, doubling overall traffic since last week. The most active sites are the English Wikipedia (10M views/day), the German Wikipedia (3M views/day) and the Spanish Wikipedia (2M views/day), as shown on our global image view dashboard (5). Global network performance has remained stable, at about 2.5 seconds per image served for 90% of our users (~4 seconds for the 95th percentile) (6).
5. Surveys
We continue to see favorable global feedback across all surveys:
• about 60% of 13,891 global respondents find the tool useful, on average.
• approval breakdown by language: French 71%, Spanish 78%, Dutch 60%, Portuguese 81%, Hungarian 63%, English 29%, German 26%.
• approval rates have stabilized for all languages that have used the tool for over a month (excluding English and German).
• English and German approval rates are lower than other languages, partly because Media Viewer was only launched one week ago on their sites.
• English daily approval rates have increased from 23% a day after launch — up to 35% a week after launch.
We expect approval rates on Enwiki and Dewiki to keep increasing over time, as new features get rolled out based on community feedback. For comparison purposes, approvals on the Hungarian Wikipedia started at 42% and grew to 63% in just a few weeks, once we addressed the most important community issues. To learn more, visit the survey results page (7).
Please let us know if you have any questions. We’ll keep you posted on the next major developments.
Thanks to everyone who gave us constructive feedback in recent days: we really appreciate your guidance and look further to improving Media Viewer further in coming days, with your help. :)
Fabrice - for the Multimedia Team
(1) Sample Images on English Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_pictures#mediaviewer/File:…
(2) Media Viewer Discussion:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#New_featu…
(3) MediaWiki.org Test page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo
(4) Current Sprint Wall:
http://ur1.ca/hg4ws
(5) Global Image Views:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/graphs/mmv_image_views_global
(6) Global Network Performance:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv#overall_network_perfor…
(7) Survey Results
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Hi folks,
Thanks for all your helpful feedback about Media Viewer in recent days. We really appreciate your candid recommendations on our main discussion page (1), as well as on English and German Wikipedia pages — and survey comments confirm many of the issues you and other community members have raised.
The multimedia team is taking your feedback to heart, and we are sorry for any inconvenience caused by this tool. To respond quickly to the most frequent requests, we have now pushed back other projects to focus on Media Viewer for the next few weeks.
Here are some of the new features we are now developing for you, based on community suggestions.
1. Disable Media Viewer quickly:
* Instant Opt-in: A more prominent way for registered users to disable Media Viewer, without having to go to preferences. (#703)
* Opt-out for anons: An easy way for anonymous users to disable Media Viewer, using localstorage. (#704)
2. View images in larger/different sizes:
* View original file: A prominent button to open the original image in your browser, so you can zoom in to see its details, or download it for re-use. (#630)
* View different sizes: Prominent links to view images in different sizes from the Download panel, so you can open them in your browser. (#664)
3. Discover image information:
* Make it easier to find image information: Provide clear visual cues that more information is available, with links to open the metadata panel. (#706)
* Scrolling down to see more info: Use either up or down arrows to open the metadata panel below the image, to make it easier to find. (#697)
4. Edit / Learn more on Commons
* Show Commons link to logged out users: Show a prominent link to the Commons file page to all users, so they can learn more about this image. (#429)
5. Learn to use Media Viewer:
* Add tooltips to Media Viewer: Show more tooltips in Media Viewer, so that users can tell what each button will do. (#546)
You can view more details about these features on our planning site. (2)
We are working hard to get these changes completed by tomorrow, so we can test them before releasing them to production. If all goes well, we expect to deploy some of them to the English Wikipedia and other Media Viewer sites by Thursday evening. The rest of them will be deployed the following week.
Please let us know what you think on our main discussion page (1). Which of these features seem most useful to you? Are there other critical features that you think we should consider next?
Thanks again for all you’ve done already to make this a better product. We are grateful for all the constructive suggestions we’ve received for our community and look forward to improving Media Viewer together.
Onward!
Fabrice — for the Multimedia Team
(1) Media Viewer discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#New_featu…
(2) Media Viewer planning site:
http://ur1.ca/gtyrp
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Hello out there, Multimedia nation! Let's run down the highlights of this
week.
== Media Viewer release ==
We're continuing our release of Media Viewer. Last Tuesday, it went out
to English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia. The Thursday before that, it
went out to all Wikisources. There have been a lot of interesting results
from those releases - lots of feedback and helpful people :)
We're also tracking community feedback of negative nature - a lot of the
on-wiki communities are asking useful questions and working with us, but
some are unconvinced that the feature is ready for prime-time. Stand by,
as decisions aren't currently finalized on this front.
We will probably be stepping up our work on Media Viewer, at least on
a temporary basis, to keep ahead of community concerns.
== Annual planning, reviews ==
One of our big timesinks in the past few weeks has been the annual review
and planning process, which came to a head in the May/June border time
range. I think it's all sorted out, for the most part, now, so our dev
and product teams should be back at full strength.
== UploadWizard ==
We had a big ol' meeting about UploadWizard last Monday, wherein we discussed
what our plan was going to be for tackling improvements to it.
Basically, we intend to work heads-down on UploadWizard, for about 40% of
our time per week, until WLM is over. This plan is subject to change (see
above re: Media Viewer), but we'll try our best to push out a nice upgraded
wizard for the campaign folks in September.
I'll probably follow up some time in the future to talk more about this
as we come to a more solid plan, technically. The work leading up to WLM
will involve a lot of fixes to the codebase and even more bugfixes, so
the tech team needs to get together and hash out an attack vector.
== Other things ==
That SHA1 patch that we were talking about is still up in the air, and
wouldn't mind some more attention [0]. In general I'm going to try to
keep track of out-of-focus things (which are things the team isn't actively
scheduling in a week) on a MediaWiki.org page [1] so y'all (and we) can
keep track of them more easily.
== Anything else? ==
This has been a whirlwind of a week; if you have questions about other
stuff that I haven't touched on, let me know.
[0] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/127460
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Out_of_focus_stuff
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist
Hello,
The 1.23 release of MediaWiki deprecates
the ResourceLoaderGetStartupModules hook which TimedMediaHandler /
MwEmbedSupport depend on. See <
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63240> for details.
I'd like to accelerate the complete removal of this hook. It was created as
a special kludge for MwEmbedSupport, with the expectation that it would be
used only on pages which require the extension, and only until
MwEmbedSupport could be refactored to be in-line with other MediaWiki
extensions. Instead, MwEmbedSupport uses it to load five modules on every
single page: 'jquery.triggerQueueCallback', 'Spinner',
'jquery.loadingSpinner', 'jquery.mwEmbedUtil', and 'mw.MwEmbedSupport'. (A
sixth module, 'mw.MwEmbedSupport.style', is also added to every page, but
by different means.)
This has been the status quo for just under three years, now:
commit dc5c9fe9efa, which added "TODO look into loading this on-demand
instead of all pages", was merged in June 2011.
Could the multimedia team please make this a priority? I'd recommend using
the opportunity to fold MwEmbedSupport support into TimedMediaHandler.
MwEmbedSupport passes itself as a generic module-loading framework, but
three years in, TimedMediaHandler remains its single application.
The relevant bugs are:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55550https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58086https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42928https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58082
I can't imagine it's too much fun to wade into these problems, but we need
to fix this, finally. I would be happy to help.
Hi all,
after rolling out MediaViewer to the English and German Wikipedias, we have
gotten quite a few complaints; to understand how representative they are, I
have looked at the number of users who have opted out (there is a user
preference for that; it is linked from the MediaViewer interface, although
one of the recurring complaints is that it is still not trivial to find). I
would appreciate opinions on whether this is a good approach and whether I
did it the right way.
The queries I have run look like this:
select up_value, count(*) from user left join user_properties on user_id =
up_user and up_property = 'multimediaviewer-enable' where user_touched >
'20140604000000' and user_editcount > 10000 group by up_value;
for various edit count limits (the timestamp is the time of deployment on
enwiki plus a few hours).
So.
When I go to a web page, and I'm browsing it, and I want to read *more
content*, I accomplish this in one of four ways:
* Scroll down with my scroll wheel or trackpad
* Scroll down with page down
* Scroll down with the spacebar
* Scroll down with the down arrow key
All of these work in Media Viewer, except for the last. You have to use
the *up* arrow key to accomplish a scroll-down movement. This makes NO
SENSE.
Someone on the talk page has complained about this same thing [0] and
frankly that's enough reason for me to make more noise about it again.
Can we *please* rejoin the entire rest of the web in not screwing with
native browser scrolling controls, and letting people just scroll normally?
Do people actually like the up-arrow control for expanding the metadata
panel? Other comments about scrolling?
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#Can.27t_c…
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist
Gerco:
On May 16th we lower the sampling rate of media viewer events as the event
rate was ~170 events per second. It looks like as of a week and a half ago
we are again at that rate.
Please see:
https://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=month&z=xlarge&c=Miscellan…
This means that Media Viewer is generating about 15 million rows a day on
EL database, a data flow that seems quite high for our capacity to analyze
it.
Is this a mistake? Should sampling rates be lowered again?
So you know, right now media viewer is sampling more than twice as much the
rest of the teams at the foundation together. If every team sampled at this
ratio the system will go down. Now, at this time, event logging is not at
risk of going down but the replication is affected.
Thanks,
Nuria
