Hi guys,
We would appreciate your advice on the Opt-out Feature for Media Viewer.
Our goal is to enable Media Viewer by default on all wikis when it the tool is ready.
But as recommended by many in our onwiki and IRC discussions, we would also like to
provide a way for users to disable Media Viewer on a given site, so they can opt-out from
this feature if I don't want it.
To that end, we are considering these different options:
A. 'Enabled' user preference
Provide a preference checkbox with Media Viewer enabled by default (e.g.: 'Show images
in Media Viewer'). To disable MV, users can uncheck this preference.
• Pros: preferable from a UX point of view, indicates this is our recommended option,
more user-friendy than JS gadget option below
• Cons: this approach has caused problems before, users may not want this option to be
selected for them, adds to preference bloat issue
B. 'Disable' user preference
Provide a preference checkbox where Media Viewer can be disabled (e.g.: 'Disable Media
Viewer'). To re-enable MV, users can uncheck that preference.
• Pros: addresses user concerns about pre-selection, more user-friendy than JS gadget
option below
• Cons: unclear what Media Viewer is, confusing because you have to uncheck the
preference to re-enable Media Viewer, adds to preference bloat issue
C. Javascript gadget or script
Provide a site-wide gadget (or personal JS script) that would let users disable Media
Viewer.
• Pros: no preference bloat, no cache fragmentation, can simply ride on #263 and provide
example JS code.
• Cons: not user-friendly (the gadget has to be installed manually), the bootstrap script
would still get loaded.
Notes
• If we implement a user preference, the recommended location would be in the
'Appearances' section, under 'Files'.
• We should also let power users know that they can easily use Ctrl-click or Shift-click
to bypass Media Viewer and access images the same way they used to before this feature was
introduced. So even with Media Viewer enabled, there are shortcuts you can use to go
directly to Commons if you like.
We would appreciate your advice on which of the options above would be most helpful for
the majority of our users (not just power users).
Please respond via email on this list — or add your comments on this discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#Feedback_…
Next week, we will ask your advice about other high-priority features for Media Viewer.
Thank you — and have a wonderful weekend!
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)