Hello everyone,
Glad to be back at work, after a wonderful vacation in Bali! (6)
I wanted to give you all a quick update on our upcoming Media Viewer release, so we can prepare together for this long-awaited deployment.
1. First Pilots
We are planning to enable Media Viewer by default for these first pilot sites, on these dates:
April 17 - Catalan, Hungarian, Korean, English Wikivoyage (confirmed)
April 24 - Confirmed: Hebrew, Thai - Proposed: Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese
Many thanks to all the community champions who are helping us introduce this tool in these first pilot sites. Note that the pilot list is still being finalized. If you are interested in being a pilot site, please contact us.
2. Pilot Goals
During these first pilots, we will study the impact of Media Viewer on these two fronts:
Community: how are editors responding? what are readers saying in the survey? is the overall feedback favorable?
Performance: how fast do images load? any slowdowns during peak hours? is the overall performance acceptable?
3. Full Release
Based on these pilot results, we plan wider releases on larger wikis in the following weeks, with a goal to deploy to all wikis in May. 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. (1)
4. Final features
We are focusing on these final features for this release:
Opt-out preference (done)
Prominent links to the file page (done)
Leave feedback / user survey (done)
Use this file (share/download/embed)
Show images in Media Viewer on shared links
IE 9-11 support Improved Media Viewer metrics
Image load performance metrics
For more info, see our Release Wall on Mingle. (2)
You can also track our progress with usability testing (3), which so far is looking very positive.
5. How you can help
To prepare for a smooth release of Media Viewer, we invite community champions for each site to consider the following launch tasks:
* Translations
* Local test page
* Local discussion page
* Local announcements
* Feedback updates
For more tips on how to help launch Media Viewer on your site, check these Launch Tips. (4)
6. Join our next IRC Chat
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). (5)
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
(1) Media Viewer Release Plan:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
(2) Current Release Wall:
http://ur1.ca/guqwk
(3) Usability Testing:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Usability_testing
(4) Launch Tips:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan#Launch_Tips
(5) Next IRC Chat:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
(6) Best of Bali photos on Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fabola/sets/72157643604358084/
(subset coming soon to Commons)
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)