We’d like to give you a quick update on Media Viewer and get your feedback on next steps, as we get ready to release it more widely.

We have been making good progress with beta version v0.2 of Media Viewer (1), with a focus on a better user interface, faster image load, more file info and attributions -- as well as improved 'Use this file' tools (e.g.: share, embed, download).

In coming weeks, we plan to release this version v0.2 gradually out of beta, starting with limited tests on a few pilot sites at the end of this quarter. Based on pilot test results, we plan a wider release of Media Viewer v0.2 next quarter. We’d appreciate your comments on our proposed release plan (2). Is there anything we could do to improve it? Anything missing? Note that this version only supports the most widely used image file formats — other media types such such as audio, video or PDF slides will be supported in future releases.

We would be grateful if you could help us test the latest beta version, by following our simple testing tips (3). Note the latest features can be found on our beta site, but it is very slow. For better performance, you can test last week’s features on MediaWiki.org. We release every Thursday on MediaWiki.org, then Monday on Commons and sister sites, then the following Thursday on all wikis.

After you’ve tried the latest version, we would love to hear your feedback on our Media Viewer discussion page (4), so we can address the most critical issues before wider deployment. Note that we still have a lot of work to do, so we may not be able to address all your suggestions right away.

We are now approaching a few pilot sites to test Media Viewer by default at the end of March. Would you recommend pilot sites that you think would be open to experimenting with this feature early? We are looking for small sites with tech-savvy communities that are open to new features. So far, we’ve reached out to French, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, Swedish and Vietnamese community members who expressed interest in this project. Anyone else we should be contacting? (e.g. non-Wikipedia site)

Are there any key features you think are needed before we turn on Media Viewer by default for all users? For example, do you think we need to offer an opt-out preference for people who don't want this feature? (We’re not sure this preference is needed, because you can already shift-click or control-click to bypass Media Viewer and open files directly on Commons — but we would like to hear what you and others think.) Anything else that you consider a must-have feature for wider deployment?

We are grateful to all the community members who helped create this tool. This product was developed in discussions held throughout 2013 (5) — and we then received invaluable feedback (6) from some of the 12,000+ beta testers who enabled Media Viewer around the world since November. The suggestions they kindly gave us have helped improve this tool and many of them are now being implemented, as part of our current release plan (7).

We really appreciate your wonderful contributions and look forward to our next steps together — so we can all bring a better multimedia experience to our users!

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin

Product Manager, Multimedia

Wikimedia Foundation

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin

Product Manager

Wikimedia Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)